The sailor, according to Stanfield, was the almost stereotypical jolly jack-tar—heedless, thoughtless, often drunken, but also truthful, hardworking, and virtuous. The crew, many of them having been forced from landed dungeon to floating dungeon, were less responsible than those above them for the horrors of the slave trade, but they were certainly complicit as prison guards, as wielders of the cruel “instruments of woe,” and ultimately as “white men.” Wagering that the reading public would sympathize with the sailor, protector of the realm and a symbol of British pride, Stanfield joined Clarkson and other abolitionists in playing a racial and national trump card.
Stanfield depicted Africans in a variety of ways. Black slave traders such as the Joe-men were pictured straightforwardly as ruthless predators, like their white counterparts. The Fante, who worked aboard the ship and were no less central to the slave trade, were strong and courageous, perhaps ennobled by the dignity of seafaring labor as opposed to body snatching. Based on his experience in Benin, Stanfield depicted free Africans as full of “friendship, tranquility, primitive independence.” Abyeda was a “happy maid” until captured. Such people lived more or less as “noble savages” in an Edenic state until European barbarians intruded, destroyed, and enslaved. The “fetter’d crowd,” taken aboard the ship, appeared primarily as victims, with an occasional act of resistance. Belowdecks they did nothing but suffer. On the main deck, other possibilities appeared, as for example when the collective power of the enslaved women reared its head on several occasions. At the point of sale in Jamaica, everyone was wretched, terrified, and lifeless.
Stanfield says nothing to suggest that he actually got to know any of the African people on his voyage (unless perhaps Abyeda), nor does it appear that he tried to free anyone. He apparently considered himself powerless in the “floating dungeon,” at the time and in retrospect. He might have shown compassion to various individuals, as for example when he dressed the wounds of the slave woman lashed by Captain Wilson. He certainly showed compassion after he left the ship, suggesting that while he experienced revulsion at his experience in the slave trade, it took a social movement to agitate and activate him in purposeful opposition. He also resisted the vulgar racist stereotypes of the day and wrote about the slave trade with an antiracializing rhetoric. All people were, for instance, “of one blood.”
In the end, Stanfield appealed to the immediate, visceral experience of the slave ship, over and against abstract knowledge about the slave trade, as decisive to abolition, and indeed he helped to make it so. He explained, “One
real
view—one MINUTE absolutely spent in the slave rooms on the middle passage, would do more for the cause of humanity, than the pen of a
Robertson,
or the whole collective eloquence of the British senate.” Real enlightenment began not with a Scottish philosopher or a member of Parliament, but rather in the meeting of a sailor and a slave amid the “instruments of woe” on board the “vast machine,” the slave ship.
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CHAPTER 6
John Newton and the Peaceful Kingdom
The eighteenth-century sea captain was a figure of almost unlimited power, as John Newton wrote to his wife, Mary, early in his first voyage as master of a slaver:
My condition when abroad, and even in Guinea, might be envied by multitudes who stay at home. I am as absolute in my small dominions (life and death excepted) as any potentate in Europe. If I say to one, Come, he comes; if to another, Go, he flies. If I order one person to do something, perhaps three or four will be ambitious for a share in the service. Not a man in the ship must eat his dinner till I please to give him leave; nay, nobody dares to say it is 12 or 8 o’clock, in my hearing, till I think it is proper to say so first. There is a mighty business of attendance when I leave the ship, and strict watch kept while I am absent, lest I should return unawares, and not be received in due form. And should I stay out till midnight, (which for that reason, I never do without necessity) nobody must presume to shut their eyes, till they have had the honour of seeing me again. I would have you judge from my manner of relating these ceremonials, that I do not value them highly for their own sake; but they are old established customs, and necessary to be kept up; for, without a strict discipline, the common sailors would be unmanageable.
In the sovereign space of the ship, captains commanded labor, subsistence, even the reckoning of time. The captain of a slaver wielded the greatest power of all, for he had to manage not only dozens of common sailors but hundreds of captive Africans.
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John Newton has long been the best-known captain in the history of the African slave trade. He made four voyages, one as mate and three as captain, between 1748 and 1754, but his fame derives from his subsequent career, in which he became an active, visible minister of evangelical bent in the Church of England, wrote numerous hymns, most famously “Amazing Grace,” and finally toward the end of his life publicly rejected his own past and embraced the cause of abolition. He wrote a vivid pamphlet about the horrors of the trade in 1788, entitled
Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade,
and he testified in similar fashion before committees of the House of Commons in 1789 and 1790. He declared himself a sinner who had seen the error of his ways.
2
Newton left a uniquely rich documentary record of his involvement in the slave trade, as a sailor, as a “slave” himself, as a mate, and finally as a captain. He was a prolific writer. Like most masters he kept logs of his voyages, detailing the daily business of work, winds, and weather, but he went further. He was an avid correspondent: he wrote 127 letters to Mary during his slaving travels and a series of letters to the Anglican divine David Jennings. He also kept a spiritual diary during the last two voyages. Later, as an introspective Christian minister, he reflected on his life to draw from it the proper moral lessons—in 1763, when he penned a series of letters in spiritual autobiography, and in the late 1780s, when he joined the rising abolitionist movement. Newton may have written more from the decks of a slave ship—and more about what transpired on the decks of a slave ship—than has any other captain in the almost four centuries of the trade.
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John Newton wielded absolute power in his wooden world, in his management of the daily routines of the slave ship and in his control over the likes of Olaudah Equiano and James Field Stanfield. He would assert “strict discipline” over both sailors and slaves, who would in turn resist. He would respond in various ways, often with violence, to maintain and reassert his control. His power and position were such that what appeared to Equiano as terror, and to Stanfield as horror, appeared to the captain as good order. By recording his hopes and fears, his contemplations and actions, and his many social relationships in careful, introspective detail, Newton provides unparalleled insight into the life of a slave-ship captain.
From Rebel Sailor to Christian Captain
John Newton was in many ways fated to be a ship captain. His father was a captain (in the Mediterranean trade), and he carried a shipboard demeanor into domestic life, as his son recalled: “he always observed an air of distance and severity of carriage, which overawed and discouraged my spirit.” The elder Newton groomed his son for command at sea from an early age. Young Newton was, in the eighteenth-century phrase, “bred to the sea”—that is, placed aboard a ship at the age of eleven as an apprentice so he could learn the work, acquire the experience, and rise through the ranks. He made several voyages between 1736 and 1742 and was in 1743 impressed aboard HMS
Harwich,
whereupon his father got the lad of eighteen a preferment to midshipman. Now a member of the Royal Navy, he gained the patronage of a captain and seemed to be on his way up in the maritime world.
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But young Newton proved rather wild and refractory, and his path to the captain’s cabin would be a crooked one. Having lived and worked at sea, he was, he later recalled, “exposed to the company and ill example of the common sailors,” whose oppositional values and practices he soon imbibed. He became a freethinker, a libertine, and a rebel. Looking back on this period, Newton recalled his egalitarian and antiauthoritarian impulses: “I was once so proud that I acknowledged no superior.”
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So when he was sent ashore by his captain, in a boatload of sailors to prevent their desertion, Newton himself deserted, but not for long. He was quickly captured, jailed for two days, sent back aboard the ship, kept in irons, “then publicly stripped and whipped.” He was also busted back from midshipman to common seaman. “I was now in my turn brought down to a level with the lowest, and exposed to the insults of all,” he wrote. (He was reviled because he had borne his midshipman’s authority rather too haughtily.) His spurned and now-vindictive naval captain planned to place the turbulent sailor aboard an East India ship for a five-year voyage. When he learned of this, Newton first contemplated suicide but decided instead to murder the captain. “I actually formed designs against his life,” Newton confessed later.
The captain’s life might have been saved by the chance appearance of a slave ship on the horizon. The master of the slaver apparently had some mutinous men on board and wanted, as was common, to put them on board the man-of-war in exchange for a few naval sailors. Newton enthusiastically volunteered for the exchange to escape the threatened East India voyage. The naval captain let him go and probably thought good riddance. Newton thus got into the slave trade by a combination of his own rebelliousness and an accidental meeting of ships at sea.
It so happened that the slave-ship captain knew Newton’s father, but neither this connection nor the fresh start caused Newton to change his ways: “I had a little of that unlucky wit, which can do little more than multiply troubles and enemies of its possessor; and, upon some imagined affront, I made a song, in which I ridiculed his [the captain’s] ship, his designs, and his person, and soon taught it to the whole ship’s company.” The captain would not have been amused as Newton and his brother tars ridiculed him in song, but no matter, as he soon died. What did matter was that the chief mate who ascended to command liked Newton no better and promptly threatened to put him back aboard a man-of-war at the first opportunity. Horrified by the thought, Newton took again to his fast feet and deserted the ship, with nothing more than the clothes on his back. He got ashore on Plantain Island at the mouth of the Sherbro River on the coast of Sierra Leone.
Newton went to work for a local white trader, who acted as a middleman between African merchants and the slave ships. Newton then got into trouble with his new boss and found himself mistreated and abused. He made a bad situation worse by falling afoul of the trader’s black wife, who essentially got him enslaved. He was chained, starved, beaten, and mocked. His almost-naked body was blistered by the tropical sun, but this did not keep him from studying Euclid and “drawing diagrams with a long stick upon the sand.” Over the course of an endless year, he survived on raw roots and on food given to him “by strangers; nay, even by the slaves in the chain, who have secretly brought me victuals (for they durst not be seen to do it) from their own slender pittance.” Would he remember this kindness? He later quoted chapter 16 of the book of Ezekiel to describe himself as “an outcast lying in my blood.” His treatment, he wrote, “broke my constitution and my spirits.” Newton considered himself a “slave,” someone “depressed to the lowest degree of human wretchedness.”
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Newton eventually escaped this trader and went to work for another at Kittam. His situation improved, and indeed he became happy, primarily by adapting to African culture. He explained the transformation this way:
There is a significant phrase frequently used in those parts, That such a white man is grown black. It does not intend an alteration of complexion, but disposition. I have known several, who, settling in Africa after the age of thirty or forty, have, at that time of life, been gradually assimilated to the tempers, customs, and ceremonies, of the natives, so far as to prefer that country to England: they have even become dupes to all the pretended charms, necromancies, amulets, and divinations of the blinded negroes, and put more trust in such things than the wiser sort among the natives. A part of this spirit of infatuation was growing upon me, (in time perhaps I might have yielded to the whole); I entered into closer engagements with the inhabitants; and should have lived and died a wretch among them, if the Lord had not watched over me for good.
Newton’s “closer engagements” probably means that he took an African “wife,” maybe more than one. But the situation was transitory. The white man who had grown black soon reverted.
After he went to work for yet a third slave merchant, he one day in February 1747 encountered a vessel called the
Greyhound,
whose captain came ashore and asked a startling question: had anyone at this trading post seen a man named John Newton? The captain, it turned out, was yet another friend of Newton’s ubiquitous father. Perhaps in fear of the distant, severe patriarch, Newton did not want to return to Liverpool, but the captain would not be denied. He devised a stratagem, announcing that Newton had just inherited money and must return to England to claim it. This Newton was willing to do, but once aboard the ship he fell back into his oppositional ways, delighting in mischief, inventing new oaths, ridiculing “gospel-history,” and glorying in “impiety and profaneness.” The captain took to calling him Jonah, the source of all problems on the voyage.
During the homeward passage, Newton “was awaked from a sound sleep by the force of a violent sea, which broke on board us.” Wet and astonished, he heard the cry from above that the ship was sinking. As Newton scrambled up to the main deck, one of his shipmates was swept overboard. The sea had torn away the upper timbers on one side, allowing torrents of water to gush in. The force of the waves splintered casks and carried livestock over the side. Newton and several other crewmen took to the pump, while others bailed with buckets and pails and stuffed their clothes and bedding as plugs into the weeping seams of the ship. Fortunately, the vessel had only a light cargo, beeswax and wood, both lighter than water, but at the moment this seemed no saving grace. Newton pumped furiously and tried to inspire his mates, but discouragement rose with the water in the hold. After several hours Newton went to the captain and said, “If this will not do, the Lord have mercy upon us.” He surprised himself with these words and went back to the pump, where everyone now secured himself with ropes to keep from being washed away. After nine hours of backbreaking work, Newton collapsed into his bed, “uncertain, and almost indifferent, whether I should rise again.” He slowly began to pray; the moment of his religious conversion was at hand. The winds and waves finally abated, and Newton considered his survival to be “an immediate and almost miraculous interposition of Divine Power.” The remaining crew got ashore in Ireland and eventually back to Liverpool, where Newton arrived with no money, no friends, and no prospect of employment, but with a new faith and a resolution never to return to Africa.
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