White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (38 page)

In England, the first batch of eighty felons brought from Newgate climbed aboard the
Justitia
in August 1776. A year later, Campbell was commissioned to operate a second hulk at Woolwich and later a third there, the
Censor
. He would also be contracted to operate hulks in Plymouth and Portsmouth. The press would label them ‘Campbell’s academies of crime’.

People were in turn fascinated, horrified and frightened by the floating prisons. At first, the
Justitia
was a tourist attraction.

Crowds flocked to Woolwich to watch the prisoners labouring on the foreshore. Most prison inmates of the time were described as raucous and intimidating; not so the convicts from the hulks.

The
Scots Magazine
ran a story depicting the men as ‘miserable wretches’, utterly cowed. ‘So far from being permitted to speak to anyone, they hardly dare speak to one another.’ The men wore fetters on each leg that were tied to the waist or throat. They laboured silently from dawn till dusk.

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Londoners brought up on the comforting refrain from ‘Rule Britannia’ that ‘Britons never, never, never will be slaves’ now saw Englishmen in chains, used as slaves. As the historian Dan Byrnes puts it
:
‘The English were invited to watch at home what their transports did in the colonies.’2 The sight was a jolt. The
London
Magazine
called the sight of an Englishman ‘transformed into a galley slave’ humiliating.

What sightseers were witnessing was the mirror of what had been happening to blacks and whites sold by British merchants to toil in American plantations for 170 years – until Campbell built a wall to block the view.

Campbell would have preferred to hide the fact that the hulks were death traps. But just two months after the first convicts came aboard the
Justitia
, John Howard came calling. He depicted the prisoners as half-clothed, cold and badly underfed and called the conditions alarming. Convicts couldn’t use the hammocks provided because of the weight of their chains.

John Howard’s findings prompted a Parliamentary inquiry. This revealed that in the first eighteen months, out of a total of 632

convicts deposited on the hulks, 176 died. The mortality rate was even higher subsequently. In the winter of 1778–9, convicts on the
Censor
and
Justitia
were dying at a rate of more than twenty a month.

The sight and smell of the hulks were daily reminders of the crisis.

‘Hulk after hulk, hung with bedding, clothes, weed and rotting rigging, lined the river like a floating shantytown.’3 Although portholes on the shore side of each hulk were blocked, as were the hatches, the stink is said to have carried a hundred yards.

Pressure to do something was coming from all sides. ‘All our gaols are overglutted,’ declared Edmund Burke. ‘Half the British navy converted into
Justitia
galleys would scarce suffice to contain all our English penitents.’4

By January 1783, matters were desperate. A frightening memorandum was sent to Lord North containing a warning from the keepers of London’s gaols. Unless overcrowding was tackled,

‘the consequences may be fatal not only for the persons confined but also to the people of the town’. A subsequent memorandum 274

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records that their Lordships [the government] agreed it was ‘highly important’ to resolve the problem of ‘the great number of convicts in Newgate’ and ‘settle question of transportation to America’.5

A few months later, Lord North’s secret plot was hatched. It coincided dangerously with the delicate last stages of the peace talks in Versailles between Britain and the United States and her European allies. North secured the services of an ambitious risk taker, the London merchant George Moore. Moore was willing to take a first shipment of nearly 150 convicts and try to sell them in America for a government payment of £500. Much later in the game, Moore would ask for twice the price but in the early stages he was convinced that he was on to a good thing. His plan was to pass off the convicts as innocents migrating as indentured servants.

Moore’s contact in America was an influential Baltimore merchant, George Salmon, who had previously imported Irish convicts into Maryland. Salmon was bullish about the prospects.

‘I don’t know any thing would bring more money here,’ he wrote,

‘than a parcel [of] servants or convicts which was formerly a good business.’6

The two merchants planned an elaborate subterfuge, with false trails, switched destinations, changed courses and the renaming of the ship. As well as the £500, they were to keep whatever profits came from selling the convicts as servants.

What they proposed was not illegal. No ban on convicts had yet been imposed in Maryland. Salmon and Moore assumed they could sell quite a number of convicts before any ban could be imposed.

Salmon was also confident of buying off other influential men in Maryland. He would distribute ‘porter and cheese’ among friends in the assembly.

The King’s go-ahead for the plan was essential. It turned out to be a formality. George III had not forgiven Americans for their ‘treason’ in taking up arms against him. When Lord North approached him with details of the plot, the King appears almost to have salivated with glee at the idea of scoring over his former subjects. George wrote to Lord North, ‘Undoubtedly the Americans cannot expect nor ever will receive any favour from me, 275

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but permitting them to obtain men unworthy to remain in this Island I shall certainly consent to.’7

Moore’s ship, the
George
, was to take the initial shipment. Her name was changed to the
Swift
. The captain, Thomas Pamp, was told that in the event of being challenged he was to say that the
Swift
was taking the convicts to Nova Scotia. Events moved quickly.

Eighty-seven male and female convicts from Newgate Prison were the first to be loaded on board. In choosing them, George Moore would have made sure they were skilled craftsmen, since they always fetched a good price.

They were a mixed bunch. Charles Thomas had been convicted of stealing one wooden tub, valued at a penny, and twelve pounds’

weight of butter, valued at five shillings. Charles Keeling was a former midshipman who admitted stealing a sword. Christopher Trusty was convicted of highway robbery after being caught red-handed holding up a coach. Jane Warwickshall was a widow who had been promised leniency for helping constables find some property stolen by her son. In the event, she was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. Her son and his partner in crime each got seven.8

The
Swift
made her way downstream to pick up fifty-six more convicts from Campbell’s hulk the
Censor.
But things were already going wrong. A London merchant whose sympathies were with the Americans got wind of a scheme to ship convicts. He alerted John Jay, leader of the American peace delegation in Paris. It was to take Jay many weeks to get the news to Baltimore. In the meantime, the
Swift
could have reached America and unloaded her convicts with the American authorities none the wiser. But the voyage was beset with mishaps.9

Captain Pamp made the mistake of allowing the convicts to learn that that if they were not sold in America, they would be sold in Africa. The morning after hearing the news, the convicts mutinied. A group of six somehow slipped their chains. Led by the highwayman Christopher Trusty and the former midshipman Charles Keeling, they stormed the captain’s cabin, where the firearms were kept. With Trusty brandishing a sword over Captain Pamp’s head, the convicts took command of the vessel and released 276

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the rest of the prisoners. It was a frightening experience, and not just for the crew. Some of the convicts accosted Jane Warwickshall and it seems that only the intervention of Charles Keeling saved her from being raped and then the captain being robbed. Keeling grabbed a blunderbuss and threatened to use it on his fellow convicts.10

The
Swift
was now between Rye and Dungeness. She carried two longboats and the convicts fought between themselves to get a place on them. Several ended up in the sea and drowned.

Forty-eight eventually squeezed aboard the boats, leaving about a hundred still on the
Swift.
Among those who got away were Trusty, who knocked down two or three others to get himself a place, and Charles Keeling. Those left behind found the rum supply and got progressively drunk as they waited for the longboats to return to take them off. The weather now played a hand, for the convicts were persuaded that the wind was so heavy that the ship’s survival depended on the crew locked below being allowed back on deck to sail her. The convicts agreed and some of the crew were released.

They took the first chance to turn the tables and regained control of the
Swift
from their drunken captors. Next morning, with the convicts now safely locked below again, Pamp hailed a passing frigate and she escorted them into Portsmouth.

A manhunt for the forty-eight escapees was set in motion, stretching all the way from the south coast to London. Every constable and magistrate in Kent, Sussex and the metropolis was alerted. According to some reports, much of Kent was now terrorised by the escapers. In fact, half were quickly recaptured, some after ferocious resistance. The rest vanished.

Two weeks after the mutiny, twenty-four recaptured men, chained to each other, went on trial in the Old Bailey’s Justice Hall on the capital charge of ‘returning from transportation’. Captain Pamp sent his first mate, Thomas Bradbury, to give evidence while he prepared the
Swift
to resume her mission with ninety convicts still aboard.

The court case nearly blew the plot out of the water. Charles Keeling claimed from the dock that the
Swift
’s real destination was America. He said that the mutiny had been sparked by the 277

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threat that they would be dumped in Africa if the American plan went wrong. Bradbury, the mate, denied knowledge of any plan to land in American territory. Sticking to the script laid down by the men behind the plot, he insisted that Nova Scotia in Canada was the destination. Naturally, his word was accepted before that of a convict and the hearing moved on. The moment of danger was past.

All twenty-four escapees were found guilty but only six of them were hanged at Tyburn. Of the others, seventeen had their death sentences commuted to transportation for life and one to transportation for fourteen years. Among those who escaped death was Charles Keeling. His life was saved by testimony regarding his behaviour in preventing a rape. Not so fortunate was Christopher Trusty. He was hanged.11

The following month, the
Swift
sailed again, carrying about a hundred convicts. News of her departure was reported in the
Maryland Gazette
, putting her destination as Nova Scotia. The plot was evidently holding and on Christmas Eve the
Swift
and her convicts sailed unhindered into Baltimore. Briefly, everything continued to go to plan. Would-be buyers went on board to inspect the merchandise and accepted – or chose to accept – the convicts as free-willers. They appear to have paid sky-high prices, £35 a head according to one report; nearly twice that according to another.12

Presumably the buyers included those who knew exactly what was going on but were happy to turn a blind eye. The trade in white flesh seemed to have resumed as if there had never been a war.

Most Marylanders remained blissfully unaware that convicts were again being dumped on them. This is evident from a gloating piece in the
Maryland Gazette
in January 1784, which built upon the paper’s earlier report that the
Swift
was shipping convicts to Nova Scotia. The Canadian province was earmarked as a refuge for Americans loyal to King George and the
Gazette
rejoiced over them sharing a future with convicts. It wrote of ‘respectable loyalists . . .

being obliged to herd with the overflowings of Newgate’.

Enthused by his first sales, George Salmon wrote to his partner in England, George Moore, telling him to send more convicts.

However, winter suddenly descended on Baltimore and everything 278

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stopped. Arctic conditions iced in the
Swift
. Then the news leaked out that the
Swift
’s so-called servants were in fact convicts. There was uproar. Angry buyers and indignant patriots blockaded the
Swift
so no one could get on or off her. According to one of the convicts, a horse thief called George Townsend, some buyers dumped the men they’d purchased in the woods, presumably to freeze to death. Sixty convicts were stuck on board the ice-bound ship, more and more going down with fever, others threatening to escape.13 Salmon now faced losing money, and he contemplated dumping the convicts in the woods. In February, he wrote to Moore:

I thought several times it would be almost as good to let the villains go on shore and so have done without them . . . If I find I cannot sell them for some price or another I shall turn them adrift.

After five freezing weeks, a sharp local agent managed to smuggle George Townsend off the
Swift
and find a gullible buyer, a Quaker. The agent, who probably paid less than £20

for Townsend, asked ninety guineas and got sixty. When the Quaker realised Townsend was a convict, he put him on board an England-bound vessel, though, as a returned transport, he would be sentenced to hang.

Outrage at the British ‘move’ to dump convicts spread and in March Salmon instructed Moore not to send a second shipment.14

But his letter arrived too late. Moore had dispatched another convict ship called the
Mercury
in March 1784, with 179 men and women. This time he took care to guard against mutiny. Special barriers were erected on deck to hold back any mutineers – but the precautions were not sufficient. As the
Mercury
cleared the English Channel, she was taken over by her convicts. The ship was in convict hands for six days before she was recaptured. The resulting delay was fatal. By the time she arrived off the American coast, every port in the USA seems to have been alerted. None would admit her. The
Mercury
eventually deposited some very sick convicts in Belize.