The Slave Ship (21 page)

The voyage began normally enough, thought Stanfield: “the usage of the seamen is moderate, and their allowance of provisions sufficient: in short, the conduct of the Captain and officers appears like that which is the continual practice in every other employ.” Stanfield had sailed in several trades and could make the comparison. But he noticed a subtle change once the ship had sailed beyond the sight of land, to a place where “there is no moral possibility of desertion, or application for justice.” The captain and officers began to talk of flogging. No one was actually flogged, because, Stanfield believed, the old ship was leaky and might have to put in at Lisbon for repairs. This had a moderating effect on the officers.
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Once it became clear that repairs in port would not be necessary, and once the ship was well south of Lisbon, everything changed. The sailors were soon put to short allowance of food and water. “A quart of water in the torrid zone!” protested Stanfield, and this while eating salt provisions and performing heavy physical labor from morning to night. Sailors were reduced to licking droplets of their own sweat. When Stanfield discovered that dew collected atop the ship’s hen coops overnight, he sucked up the moisture every morning until others found his “delicious secret.” Some men were so thirsty they drank their entire daily portion of water as soon as they got it and remained in a state of “raging thirst” for the next twenty-four hours. All the while the captain had abundant wine, beer, and water.

One reason for the scarcity of water, Stanfield explained, was “the vessel’s being stowed so full of goods for the trade, that room for necessaries is made but a secondary consideration.” It was a classic case of profits over people. Every “corner and cranny [of the ship] is crammed with articles of traffic; to this consideration is bent every exertion of labour and ingenuity; and the healths and lives of the seamen, as of no value, have but little weight in the estimation.” What Stanfield called the “avaricious accumulation of cargo” also meant that the sailors had no room to sling their hammocks and bedding. They were forced to “lie rough,” on chests and cables. When they got to the tropics, they slept upon deck, exposed to “the malignity of the heavy and unwholesome dews.”

Then came the beatings, floggings, and torture. They began not far from the Canary Islands. Stanfield overheard the following “barbarous charge” given by the captain to the other officers: “You are now in a Guinea ship—no seaman, though you speak harshly, must dare to give you a saucy answer—
that
is out of the question; but if they LOOK to displease you, knock them down.” The violence soon “spread like a contagion.” Stanfield recounted one instance of cruelty practiced against the ship’s cooper, “a most harmless, hard-working, worthy creature.” He answered the mate in a humorous way and was knocked down for it. As he tried to crawl to the captain’s cabin to complain, he was knocked down a second, third, and fourth time, until “some of the sailors rushed between [him and the mate], and hurried him away.” The smallest error in work brought forth a lashing, and occasionally three sailors at once were bound together to the shrouds. After the floggings the officers sometimes literally added salt to the wound—they applied a briny solution called “pickle” to the deep, dark red furrows made by the cat-o’-nine tails, the infamous whip. The violence was inflicted without remorse and “without fear of being answerable for the abuse of authority.” As the voyage went on, Stanfield wrote, “the dark pow’r / Of savage rigour ripens ev’ry hour.”
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Arrival on the African coast signaled another set of transformations chronicled by Stanfield—in the ship, the crew, the captain, and the African societies with whom the trade was carried out. The ship itself was physically altered as the sailors “built house” on the main deck, constructing a thatched-roof awning from the stem of the ship to near the mainmast to protect all on board from the tropical sun and to provide security against escape of the ever-growing number of purchased slaves. Building house required the sailors to work in the water on the riverside, bare-chested and exposed to the burning sun, cutting wood and bamboo with which to make the awning: “They are immersed up to the waist in mud and slime; pestered by snakes, worms, and venomous reptiles; tormented by muskitoes, and a thousand assailing insects; their feet slip from under them at every stroke, and their relentless officers do not allow a moment’s intermission from the painful task.” Stanfield thought that this work contributed to the high mortality of the sailors, but so in his opinion did the awning itself, which, with the various bulkheads built belowdecks to separate the slaves, obstructed the proper circulation of air through the ship and damaged the health of everyone on board.
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The declining health of the sailors moved Stanfield’s captain to make another important change in the working order of the ship. On the Gold Coast, he hired Fante workers, who were “sturdy, animated, laborious, and full of courage”—and accustomed to both the climate and disease environment. “Many of this nation,” wrote Stanfield, “are reared from their childhood, in the European vessels that frequent the coast; they learn their languages, and are practiced in all the habits of seamanship; and more especially all that relate to the business of
slaving.
” This was common practice. Captains engaged Fante workers after entering into a written agreement with their king and the English governor at Cape Coast Castle or another factory. Stanfield believed that such arrangements were essential to the slave trade: “When the poor sailors fall off [sick], these hardy natives, who have every indulgence the captain can allow them, carry on the business with a vigour and activity, of which the British seamen from their ill usage and scanty fare are incapable.” A motley crew did the work of the ship from the moment it arrived on the African coast until it departed, and occasionally all the way across the Atlantic.

Once they got to the African coast, the biggest change, in Stanfield’s view, took place in the slave-ship captain. He put the matter this way: “It is unaccountable, but it is certainly true, that the moment a Guinea captain comes in sight of this shore, the Demon cruelty seems to fix his residence within him.” Stanfield made the same point in the poem, allegorically, as the Demon Cruelty dispatched a devil to the ship: “Fly, says the night-born chief, without delay, / To where yon vessel rides the wat’ry way.” Off he flies,

 
If the captain seemed barbarous on the outward passage, he was now positively demonic, his heart colonized by cruelty. Stanfield did not lack for concrete examples to illustrate the transformation. He spoke of a visitor aboard his own ship, a Guineaman captain who was legendary for his brutality: he flogged his own sailors for no good reason; he tormented his cabin boy; his “whole delight was in giving pain.”

Most of Stanfield’s pamphlet concerned the experience of the common sailor in the slave trade, but he did offer reflections on Africa, on the traders, and on the enslaved who came aboard the ship, and these thoughts he expanded considerably in his poem. His observations had a firm basis in experience, and not only aboard the ship, for Stanfield lived ashore at one of the slave-trading fortresses in Benin for eight months. His most basic conclusion sharply contradicted the then-prevalent proslavery propaganda about Africa and its peoples: “I never saw a happier race of people than those in the kingdom of BENIN.” These people were “seated in ease and luxury” and engaged in extensive manufacturing, especially of cloth. The slave trade excepted, everything in their society “bore the appearance of friendship, tranquility, and primitive independence.”
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Stanfield saw the slave trade as a destructive force, and indeed one of the most unusual features of his poem was his effort to understand it from an African perspective. Once the Guineaman arrived on the coast of Africa, the poet’s point of view shifted from the ship to the “primeval forests” and the Niger River, where the continent’s guardian empress surveyed the unfolding scene. Now that the enslaving chain had arrived from Liverpool, Stanfield asked,

 
Endless war, enslavement, forced migrations across the Atlantic, and fearful free migrations toward the interior had depopulated some areas of the West African coast, as Stanfield could see. The guardian empress watched as the slave traders poured in “savage swarms upon the blood-stain’d shore,” toting “all their store of chains.” The tables had been turned. The Europeans were now the savages, swarming ashore, chains in hand, to bind the peoples of Africa. This required Stanfield to recognize the dual role of the sailor—and presumably himself—who up to this point in the poem has been a victim of the slave trade but now must of necessity appear as a victimizer. He speaks frankly about “the miseries occasioned by European visitors.” He notes that “
Europe
’s pail sons direct the bar’brous prow, / And bring their stores and instruments of woe.” He identifies the “pallid robbers,” the “traffickers in human blood,” and the “tyrant-whites.” He mentions the “sad purchase”: the “wan traders pay
the price of blood
.” The sailor shares in the tyranny.

Soon “av’rice, busting ev’ry tender band, / Sweeps, like a deluge, thro’ the hapless land.” Traders white and black expropriate the Africans, rip them from their families and communities, and attach the telltale chains:

 
How did they come to wear the shackles? How did they get caught in the “accursed chain”? Stanfield was convinced that most of the enslaved who came aboard the ship had been kidnapped, taken by “fraud and violence.” They were not “prisoners of war” as advocates of the slave trade had always maintained. In Benin he “made continual inquiries but never heard of any wars.” The enslaved were conveyed to the ships by the likes of the “Joe-men,” led by King Badjeka, a nomadic, independent group of raiders who “pitched their temporary huts where they considered it to be most opportune for their depredations.” They bought no slaves, but they sold multitudes of them to the slavers. Of a man soon to be on board the slaver, the sailor-poet wrote, “The hind returning from his daily care, / Seiz’d in the thicket, feels the ruffian’s snare.”

In an effort to make real for readers the human consequences of the slave trade in Africa, Stanfield included in his poem a life story of an African woman named Abyeda—how she was “torn from all kindred ties” and marched to the ship. It is unknown whether she was real or fictitious or some combination of the two. In any case, by writing about her, Stanfield helped to identify and publicize an emerging theme within the abolitionist movement: the special mistreatments and sufferings of enslaved women aboard the ship.
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Abyeda has been captured and brought on the slaver when Stanfield recounts her life in idyllic terms. She is a beautiful and “happy maid,” in love with “youthful
Quam’no,
” who protected her from the “treach’rous Whites” who traded in slaves. On their long-planned wedding day, she was seized:

 
Quam’no tries to save her but is killed in the struggle. Devastated, Abyeda is carried aboard the ship, where she is chained to the mast and lashed (for what reason Stanfield does not say). As she groans with each stroke of the lash, the other women aboard the ship, her “sad associates,” join in sympathy, and in a variation on traditional African call-and-response, cry out in cadence. Soon, “o’er her wan face the deadly jaundice steals,” and the end finally comes: “Convulsive throbs expel the final breath, / And o’er the fatal close sits ghastly death.” Stanfield’s description suggests a real death, and maybe several, he had seen.
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Meanwhile, as the stay on the coast of Africa drags on, the miseries of the crew deepen. Having been off the ship for a time, Stanfield returned to find the second mate “lying on his back on the medicine-chest; his head hanging down over one end of it, his hair sweeping the deck, and clotted with the filth that was collected there.” He soon died, unnoticed. Matters were even more shocking on the poop deck, where several members of the ship’s crew were stretched out “in the last stage of their sickness, without comfort, without refreshment, without attendance. There they lay, straining their weak voices with the most lamentable cries for a little water, and not a soul to afford them the smallest relief.” Stanfield then “passed a night of misery with them,” after which he was convinced that another night would have meant his doom. One of these deaths may have belonged to his friend (“Russel”), who in the poem developed “sallow skin,” “putrid sores,” “palsied limbs,” and expired amid the “filth and blood.” Russel’s last words concern his beloved, Maria. His body was dumped into a “fluid grave,” “his honour’d corse in awful form dispos’d.”

Stanfield also attempted to capture what Equiano called the astonishment and terror felt by “each agitated guest” when he or she came aboard the huge, seemingly magical slave ship: