The Slave Ship (51 page)

As W. E. B. DuBois noted, the slave trade was the “most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history”—“the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell,” a place of torment and suffering. It was certainly so for the murdered, masked woman and for her Coromantee shipmates, who, with the millions, were torn from their native land, transported across the Atlantic, and forced to work, to produce wealth, in “Eldorado,” for others. DuBois referred, of course, to the entire experience of slavery, but he knew that the slave ship was a special circle of the inferno. So did captains like James D’Wolf and Richard Jackson, who turned their ships into floating hells and used terror to control everyone aboard, sailors and slaves, or “white slaves” and “black slaves,” as one captain called them: there was not, in his view, “a shade of difference between them, save in their respective complexions.” The instruments in the task were masks, chairs, and tackle, the cat-o’-nine-tails, thumbscrews, the
speculum oris,
cutlasses, pistols, swivel guns, and sharks. The ship itself was in many respects a diabolical machine, one big tool of torture.
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The drama, however, was larger than what happened on the ship, as DuBois—and D’Wolf—knew well. The slave ship was a linchpin of a rapidly growing Atlantic system of capital and labor. It linked workers free, unfree, and everywhere in between, in capitalist and noncapitalist societies on several continents. The voyage of the slaver originated in the ports of Britain and America, where merchants pooled their money, built or bought a vessel, and set a transnational train of people and events in motion. These included, in their home ports, investors, bankers, clerks, and insurance underwriters. Government officials, from customs officers to the Board of Trade to legislatures, played regulating roles small and large. In assembling the ship’s various and expensive cargo to be traded on the coast of Africa, merchant-capitalists mobilized the energies of manufacturers and workers in Britain, America, Europe, the Caribbean, and India to produce textiles, metalwares, guns, rum, and other items. In building the ship, the merchant-capitalist called upon the shipwright and a small army of artisans, from wood-workers to sailmakers. Strong-backed dockworkers helped to load the cargo into the hold of the vessel, and of course a captain and crew would sail it around the Atlantic.

On the coast of Africa, the captain worked as the representative of merchant capital, conducting business with other merchants, some of them European, who ran the forts and factories, more of them African, who controlled the trade and mobilized their own officials, fee takers, and regulators, local and state, according to region. Like their British and American counterparts, African merchants coordinated workers of various kinds in their own spheres of influence: direct producers of “nonslave” commodities; captors of “slaves”—armies, raiders, and kidnappers (distinguished by the scale of their slave-capturing operations); and finally canoe-men and other workers on the waterfront, who cooperated directly with the slave-ship captains and sailors in getting the merchandise, human and otherwise, aboard the ship. A significant number of Africans would become sailors on the slavers, for shorter or longer periods of time.

After the slave ship completed the Middle Passage and arrived in an American port, the original British and American merchant-capitalists now used a new set of contacts to make the sale, and realize the profits, of the human cargo. Receiving merchants, under the oversight of colonial officials, took charge of transactions, connecting the slave-ship captain and crew, through local dockworkers black and white, to the labor-hungry planters who bought the captives. After the sale, slave-produced commodities from local plantations would often (ideally) be purchased by the captain and loaded onto the ship as a cargo for the homeward passage. Through these far-flung connections, merchants used the slave ship to create and coordinate a primary circuit of Atlantic capitalism, which was as lucrative for some as it was terror-filled and deadly for others.

The slave ship had not only delivered millions of people to slavery, it had prepared them for it. Literal preparations included readying the bodies for sale by the crew: shaving and cutting the hair of the men, using caustics to hide sores, dying gray hair black, and rubbing down torsos with palm oil. Preparations also included subjection to the discipline of enslavement. Captives experienced the “white master” and his unchecked power and terror, as well as that of his “overseers,” the mate, boatswain, or sailor. They experienced the use of violence to hold together a social order in which they outnumbered their captors by ten to one or more. They ate communally and lived in extreme barracklike circumstances. They did not yet work in the backbreaking, soul-killing ways of the plantation, but labor many of them did, from domestic toil to forced sex work, from pumping the ship to setting the sails. It must also be noted that in preparing the captives for slavery, the experience of the slave ship also helped to prepare them to resist slavery. They developed new methods of survival and mutual aid—novel means of communication and solidarities among a multiethnic mass. They gathered new knowledge, of the ship, of the “white men,” of one another as shipmates. Perhaps most important, the ship witnessed the beginnings of a culture of resistance, the subversive practices of negotiation and insurrection.

As John Cranston testified before the Rhode Island grand jury, many of his “brother tars,” the very people who had helped to build the fortunes of Captain D’Wolf and his class, found themselves in a different situation after slaving voyages. Those called “wharfingers,” “scowbankers,” and “beach horners”—sick, broken-down seamen all, forced by captains off the slave ships—haunted the docks and harbors of almost all American ports, from the Chesapeake to Charleston, to Kingston, Jamaica, and Bridgetown, Barbados. They had no work, because no one would hire them for fear of infection. They had no money, because they had been bilked of their wages. They had no food and shelter, because they had no money. They drifted around the waterfront, sleeping under the balconies of houses, under the cranes used to hoist cargo in and out of the ships, in the odd unlocked shed, inside empty sugar casks—anywhere they could find to protect themselves from the elements.

They were nightmarish in appearance. Some had the bruises, blotches, and bloody gums of scurvy. Some had burning ulcers caused by Guinea worms, which grew up to four feet long and festered beneath the skin of the lower legs and feet. Some had the shakes and sweats of malaria. Some had grotesquely swollen limbs and rotting toes. Some were blind, victims of a parasite (
Onchocerca volvulus
) spread by blackflies in fast-flowing West African rivers. Some had a starved and beaten appearance, courtesy of their captain. They had “cadaverous looks,” and indeed many were near death. The more able ones “begg[ed] a mouthful of victuals from other seamen.” One well-traveled sea captain called them “the most miserable objects I ever met with in any country in my life.” These “refuse” sailors of the slave trade depended on charity. Healthier “brother sailors” brought them food and tried to care for them, but their own means were limited.
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There was another source, perhaps unexpected, of assistance. An officer in the Royal Navy, a Mr. Thompson, noted that some of these pathetic sailors died, but “upon others the negroes have taken compassion, and carried them into their huts, where he has often seen them so ill, as to be almost at the point of death.” Other observers in other places noticed the same pattern. “Some of them,” explained Mr. James, “are taken in by the negroe women, out of compassion, and are healed in time.” Seaman Henry Ellison noted that the wharfingers had trouble finding a place to stay dry, “except that a negro was now and then kind enough to take them into his hut.” The people who took them in would have known exactly who they were, recognizing the specifically West African maladies from which they suffered, and perhaps how to treat them. Some likely knew the sailors personally.
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The compassion did not end with the giving of food, shelter, and nursing. It extended into the afterlife. When the sailors died—“in the greatest misery, of hunger and disease”—they were “buried out of charity, by the same people,” said Mr. James. In Kingston, Ellison had seen “negroes carrying their dead bodies to Spring Path to be interred.” Another naval officer, Ninian Jeffreys, who was “attending a negro holiday at Spring Path, which is the cemetery of the negroes, has often seen the bodies of these wharfingers brought there, and interred in an adjoining spot.”
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What was the meaning of this compassion and charity? Is it possible that those who had survived the slave ship as prisoners knew precisely how horrible the experience had been for everyone aboard and that, moved by such knowledge, they could show sympathy and pity to those who had been their prison guards? Might the term “shipmate” have been generous and bighearted enough to allow the oppressed to show humanity to the very people who had presided over their enslavement aboard the slave ship?
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To conclude, again, on a personal note. I chose to end this book with the account of Captain James D’Wolf, seaman John Cranston, and the masked African woman, name unknown, for three reasons. First, the story features the three central actors in the “most magnificent drama.” It is, moreover, appropriate that the book should end where it began, with the travails of an African woman whose name is unknown to us. Second, it sums up the reality of terror aboard the slave ship and at the same time suggests the gathering forces that would bring it to an end. Third, it calls attention to a fact that requires emphasis: the dramas that played out on the decks of a slave ship were made possible, one might even say structured, by the capital and power of people far from the ship. The dramas involving captains, sailors, and African captives aboard the slave ship were part of a much larger drama, the rise and movement of capitalism around the world.

James D’Wolf is unusual in that he got his hands dirty—perhaps bloody would be a better way to put it—in the trade itself. The hands that threw the masked woman overboard would count profits at the merchant’s table and in the end help to craft legislation in the United States Senate. D’Wolf was certainly unusual, though not unique, in this regard, as the people who benefited most from the slave ship were usually distant from its torment, suffering, stench, and death, both physically and psychologically. Merchants, government officials, and ruling classes more broadly reaped the enormous benefits of the slave ship and the system it served. D’Wolf would soon join them, apparently making only one more slaving voyage (to evade the authorities after the murder), then moving up the economic ladder from captain to the more genteel status of slave-trade merchant. Most merchants, like Humphry Morice and Henry Laurens, insulated themselves from the human consequences of their investments, thinking of the slave ship in abstract and useful ways, reducing all to columns of numbers in ledger books and statements of profit and loss.

Like growing numbers of people around the world, I am convinced that the time has come for a different accounting. What do the descendants of D’Wolf, Morice, and Laurens—their families, their class, their government, and the societies they helped to construct—owe to the descendants of the enslaved people they delivered into bondage? It is a complex question, but justice demands that it be posed—and answered, if the legacy of slavery is ever to be overcome. There can be no reconciliation without justice.

It is not a new question. Slave-trade Captain Hugh Crow noted in his memoir, published in the aftermath of abolition, that opportunities existed “to make some reparation to Africa for the wrongs which England may have inflicted upon her.” He had in mind philanthropy and what would be called “legitimate trade” to Africa—that is, trade in “commodities” other than human beings. He did not include the people whom he and other captains had transported to the Americas. But even the slave-ship captain admitted that something had to be done to redress a monstrous historical injustice. This applies of course not only to the slave trade but to the entire experience of slavery.
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Britain and the United States have made significant progress over the past generation in acknowledging that the slave trade and slavery were important parts of their history. This has come about primarily because various peoples’ movements for racial and class justice arose on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s and 1970s, demanding new histories and new debates about their meaning. Scholars, teachers, journalists, museum professionals, and others took inspiration from these movements and recovered large parts of the African and African-American past, creating new knowledge and public awareness. Still, I would suggest that neither country has yet come to grips with the darker and more violent side of this history, which is perhaps one reason the darkness and violence continue in the present. Violence and terror were central to the very formation of the Atlantic economy and its multiple labor systems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even the best histories of the slave trade and slavery have tended to minimize, one might even say sanitize, the violence and terror that lay at the heart of their subjects.
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Most histories of the Middle Passage and the slave trade more broadly have concentrated on one aspect of their subject. Following the lead of eighteenth-century abolitionists, but distrusting their propaganda and sensationalism, many historians have focused on the mortality of the Middle Passage, which has come to stand for the horrors of the slave trade. Hence precisely how many people were transported and how many of them died along the way have been key issues to be studied and debated—rightly so, in my view, but the approach is limited. One of the main purposes of this book has been to broaden the conspectus by treating death as one aspect of terror and to insist that the latter, as a profoundly human drama enacted on one vessel after another, was the defining feature of the slave ship’s hell. How many people died can be answered through abstract, indeed bloodless, statistics; how a few created terror and how the many experienced terror—and how they in turn resisted it—cannot.