One by one, the captives were “compressive stow’d” in the floating dungeon, immersed in the “putrid smell” and “deadly gloom” of the lower deck. Finally the ship “hoists the sail full, and quits the wasted shore.”
Middle Passage
Stanfield and the other survivors from the
Eagle
now boarded the
True Blue,
bound for Jamaica, their lower deck packed with “shackled sufferers.” Hence began the notorious Middle Passage, which the sailor-poet strove to describe in its “true colours.” The ship over the next several weeks became an even more macabre chamber of horrors. Stanfield introduced his account by saying, “This horrid portion of the voyage was but one continued scene of barbarity, unremitting labour, mortality, and disease. Flogging, as in the outward passage, was a principal amusement in this.”
25
Captain Wilson was sick during the Middle Passage, but this seemed to Stanfield only to increase his tyranny. In his weakened state, the monarch of the wooden world made the crew carry him around bodily, all the while keeping “trade knives” close at hand to throw at people who incurred his displeasure. One after another member of the crew was cut down. The new second mate died not long after the captain had knocked him to the deck and severely gashed his head. The cook earned the captain’s wrath by burning some dinner meat and was soon “beaten most violently with the spit.” He crawled away and died within a day or two.
Seamen were also forced to work when sick, sometimes with fatal consequences. The boatswain, who was ill and unable to stand, was propped up on one of the mess-tubs from the lower deck and made to steer the vessel, which, in truth, he was too weak to do. He soon died, and his “body was, as usual, thrown overboard, without any covering but the shirt.” The next day “his corps was discovered floating alongside, and kept close to us for some hours—it was a horrid spectacle, and seemed to give us an idea of the body of a victim calling out to heaven for vengeance on our barbarity!” Another sick sailor crawled out of his hammock and collapsed on the gratings. Describing what he found the following morning, Stanfield wrote, “I shudder at the bare recollection.” The man “was still alive, but covered with blood—the hogs has picked his toes to the bones, and his body was otherwise mangled by them in a manner too shocking to relate.”
Most of the manglings were man-made, and indeed the captain seemed to take a special delight in observing them. Because of his debility, he ordered anyone to be flogged tied to his bedpost so he could see the victims face-to-face, “enjoying their agonizing screams, while their flesh was lacerated without mercy: this was a frequent and a favourite mode of punishment.” The captain’s violence now had a broader object, the crew and the enslaved, who in Stanfield’s view were trapped in the same system of terror.
Pallid
or
black
—the
free
or
fetter’d
band,
Fall undistinguish’d by his ruffian hand.
Nor age’s awe, nor sex’s softness charm;
Nor law, nor feeling, stop his blood-steep’d arm.
This was true for both sailors and slaves: “Flogging, that favourite exercise, was in continual use with the poor Negroes as well as the seamen.” It operated without regard to race, age, gender, law, or humanity.
Like many sailors, Stanfield thought that the slaves were in certain respects better off than the crew. At least the captain had an economic incentive to feed them and keep them alive during the Middle Passage. He wrote, “The slaves, with regard to attention paid to their health and diet, claim, from the purpose of the voyage, a condition superior to the seamen.” But he was quick to qualify the statement: “when the capricious and irascible passions of their general tyrant were once set afloat, I never could see any difference in the cruelty of their treatment.” He also argued against the standard proslavery refrain that “interest” would cause the captain to treat the “cargo” well. The “internal passions, that seem to be nourished in the very vitals of this employ, bid defiance to every power of controul.” The Demon Cruelty routinely battered and bested rational concerns.
The ship was now full of its “sad freight.” Stanfield offered a powerful view of the enslaved jammed belowdecks at night:
Pack’d in close misery, the reeking crowd,
Sweltering in chains, pollute the hot abode.
In painful rows with studious art comprest,
Smoking they lie, and breathe the humid pest:
Moisten’d with gore, on the hard platform ground,
The bare-rub’d joint soon bursts the painful bound;
Sinks in the obdurate plank with racking force,
And ploughs,—dire talk, its agonizing course!
Stanfield was conscious of the sounds of the slave ship—the “long groan,” “strain of anguish,” cries, death songs, “shrieks of woe and howlings of despair!” All in this instance were heard in the midnight hour. Sickness was a big part of the experience. Breathing “infected air” amid “green contagion,” the fevered lie “strew’d o’er the filthy deck.” Stanfield followed abolitionist surgeon Alexander Falconbridge in saying that the slave ship was “like a slaughterhouse. Blood, filth, misery, and disease.”
Stanfield noted individual responses among the enslaved to this grim reality, which ranged from sad defeat to fiery indignation:
Look at yon wretch (a melancholy case!)
Grief in his eye, despair upon his face;
His fellow—see—from orbs of blood-shot ire
On his pale tyrants dart the indignant fire!
Stanfield chronicled another horror of the Middle Passage, the opening, in the morning, of the grates and the emergence of the enslaved from sixteen hours of darkness belowdecks. Stanfield imagined the aperture as a “noisome cave,” even a monster’s mouth: from belowdecks the “rank maw, belched up in morbid steam, / The hot mist thickens in a side-long beam.” In “fetter’d pairs” the “drooping crowd” emerged. He described two men in particular who were “close united by the fest’ring chain.” They had to be lifted up from below. One had died overnight; one was still living. Once unshackled, the dead man would be “to the sea consign’d”; the corpse the “briny monsters seize with savage force.” Sharks, Stanfield understood, were part of the ship’s terror.
The daily routine began, and “a joyless meal the tyrant-whites prepare.” For those who refused to eat, “stripe follows stripe, in boundless, brutal rage.” The pain of the whip caused some to faint. For those who were lashed and still refused to eat, the dreaded
speculum oris
was brought on deck:
Then: See the vile engines in the hateful cause
Are plied relentless in the straining jaws
The wrenching instruments with barbarous force
Shew the detested food th’ unwilling course.
Two women, who were among “the finest slaves on the ship,” watched the violence and took rebellious action. They poignantly folded themselves in each other’s arms and “plunged over the poop of the vessel into the sea.” As they drowned, the other women “cried out in a most affecting manner, and many of them were preparing to follow their companions.” They were locked belowdecks immediately to prevent mass suicide.
Stanfield recalled a night when the slaves on the lower deck were already “packed together to a degree of pain” and then required to make room for another boatload of captives brought on board. This resulted in “much noise” as the quarters grew even more cramped. In the women’s room, one of the new captives threw over one of the mess-tubs. The next morning she was tied to the captain’s bedpost, “with her face close to his,” and ordered to be whipped. When the “unwilling executioner” (whether a sailor or slave, Stanfield does not say) took pity on the woman and did not whip her as hard as the captain commanded, he in turn was tied up and given a “violent lashing.” Soon after, the flogging of the woman resumed. Stanfield, who had inherited the medicine chest after the death of the doctor even though he was not qualified for the practice, dressed her wounds.
Finally, Stanfield mentioned, but refused to describe, what must have been the rape of a small girl by the captain. He made reference only to something “practised by the captain on an unfortunate female slave, of the age of eight or nine.” Although he could not bring himself to name the crime—“I cannot express it in any words”—he nonetheless insisted that it was “too atrocious and bloody to be passed over in silence.” He considered the act to be an example of the daily “barbarity and despotism” of the slave trade.
As the dark ship plowed the waves toward the plantations of the Caribbean, the sailors continued to weaken and die, which required yet another recomposition of the ship’s working order. Stanfield explained, “As the crew fell off, an accumulated weight of labour pressed upon the few survivors—and, towards the end of the middle passage, all idea of keeping the slaves in chains was given up.” The captain ordered many of the enslaved men unchained, brought up on deck, and taught how to work the ship, because “there was not strength enough left among the white men, to pull a single rope with effect.” The enslaved “pulled and hawled” the ropes and sails as directed from the deck by the debilitated sailors. The slave ship was thus brought to its destination by people who would soon be sold there.
One Dreadful Shriek
When the ship reached its New World destination, it underwent yet another transformation, this one associated with a practice called the “scramble,” by which the enslaved were sold on board the vessel. The main deck was enclosed and darkened, tentlike, by the hanging of canvas sails and tarred curtains all around: “Now o’er the gloomy ship, in villain guise, / The shrouding canvas drawn, shuts out the skies.” The enslaved had been cleaned up—shaved, oiled, sores disguised—and were now arrayed on deck but apparently did not understand what was to happen next. They were in the dark, both literally and figuratively, arranged in rows, trembling, “dumb and almost lifeless.” Once the signal had been given, prospective buyers rushed aboard in a mad, disorderly way, throwing cords—the transatlantic chain—around the slaves they wished to purchase:
With cords now furnish’d, and the impious chain,
And all the hangman-garniture of pain,
Rush the dread fiends, and with impetuous sway,
Fasten rapacious on the shudd’ring prey.
The enslaved were terrified, as indeed they were meant to be, during this second sale aboard the ship. Shrieks pierced the skies, and tears flowed from “wounded eyes.” Several of the panicked slaves found openings in the canvas enclosure and threw themselves into the water, and another died of fright:
Struck with dismay, see yonder fainting heap!
Yon rushing group plunge headlong in the deep!
(With the fierce blast extinct the vital fires)
Yon falling maid, shrieks—shivers—and expires.
The next stage was the dispersion of the ship’s enslaved population, as the newly purchased were crowded into small boats and carried away one load after another. Stanfield was conscious that this was yet one more moment of rupture, this time of the bonds that had been formed among the enslaved on the ship, during the stay on the coast and the Middle Passage. As the cords tightened and pulled them away, the enslaved tried to hold fast to their family members, friends, and comrades, without success. The tumult of screaming and crying did not weaken, it only grew louder:
One dreadful shriek assaults th’ affrighted sky,
As to their friends the parted victims cry.
With imprecating screams of horror wild,
The frantick mother calls her sever’d child.
One universal tumult raves around;
From boat to ship responds the frantick sound.
The enslaved were once again “separated from their connexions,” their shipmates. The slaving voyage ends amid the “frantick sound” of “horror wild.”
26
Real Enlightenment
James Field Stanfield’s account of the slave trade was in many ways more detailed, more gruesome, and, in a word, more dramatic, than anything that had yet appeared in print by May 1788. His eye for the “horrid scene”—the fiery eyes of the man in chains brought up from the lower deck, the sick mate’s long hair clotted in filth—gave his accounts evocative power. A critic at the
Monthly Review
noted that in
The Guinea Voyage
Stanfield “dwells on every minute circumstance in this tale of cruelty, and obliges us to witness every pang of complicated misery!” Such was Stanfield’s dramatic strategy, to make the slave ship and its people and their sufferings real.
27
Stanfield presented the ship itself, the material setting of the drama, in a variety of ways, depending on its function at a given moment of the voyage and from whose perspective it was observed. It was at first a thing of beauty, then a “vast machine” to its workers, and finally a “floating dungeon” to sailors and especially the enslaved. Almost everyone was a captive in one way or another and subject to an institutionalized system of terror and death. The transatlantic chain encompassed all, whether the path to the slave ship originated in a walk with a constable from the Liverpool jail or a coffle march with raiders from the interior of Africa. But of course the ship was worst for the enslaved, for whom it appeared as a collection of “instruments of woe”—shackles, manacles, neck rings, locks, chains, the cat-o’-nine tails, the
speculum oris.
The lower deck was a “floating cave,” the hatchway a belching, monstrous mouth. The carceral slave ship ate people alive.
The characters in Stanfield’s drama included the “merciful” slave merchant, whose avarice produced rapacity, destruction, and murder.
Indeed the killing was planned, as he calculated how many would go on the “dead list” in order to make his profits. Next came the “humane” Guinea captain, the keeper of the floating dungeon. A torturer, rapist, and killer, he was variously barbarous, tyrannical, fiendish, despotic, and at the deepest level demonic. He possessed the “dark pow’r / Of savage rigour.” The ship’s officers, potentially noble and brave, were agents of violence on the one hand, and victims of violence on the other. They died without care or comfort. Stanfield generously considered some of them the “unwilling instruments” of barbarity and cruelty.