The Slave Ship (32 page)

When Captain Richard Jackson muttered, on setting off, that he had a hell of his own aboard the
Brownlow,
he cast himself as the devil. Many on board his ship would come to see him that way, including his chief mate, John Newton, who by the time he recounted his memories of Jackson had reinvented himself as a saint. Yet in talking about his floating hell, Jackson conveyed something of great significance about himself and slave-ship captains in general, including Newton. Their power in some inescapable measure depended on inflicting cruelty and suffering as a means of human control; it depended, in a word, on terror. This is why hell, as a place of deliberately imposed torment, was such a good and useful analogy and in the end why abolitionists found it so easy to demonize the slave-ship captain in their propaganda. Not all masters of Guineamen were devils, but almost each and every one had the devil in him. This was not a flaw of individual personality or character. It was a requirement of the job and the larger economic system it served.
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Newton came to understand this toward the end of his life. He had been aboard many slavers, as sailor, mate, captain, and visitor, learning the lore and watching the practices of numerous captains. He insisted that there were “a few honest and humane men” in the trade. He had known “several commanders of African ships who were prudent, respectable men, and who maintained a proper discipline and regularity in their vessels; but there were too many of a different character.” Among the “too many,” including Jackson, cruelty came to be the defining feature of the captain’s power, and this was reflected in the broader culture of slave-ship captains.
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Newton saw the cruelty in all its colors—mostly purples, blues, and reds. Captains accused sick seamen of being lazy, then lashed them, after which they died. Captains entertained themselves by tormenting sailors during the monotonous hours of a long voyage: “the chief study and amusement of their leisure seems to be, how to make the sailors, at least such of them as they take a dislike to, as miserable as they can.” For the enslaved, of course, the terror was much more pervasive. Captains unleashed sexual terror on women captives. For men the terror was equally great, although different in its methods. Newton saw “unmerciful whippings, continued till the poor creatures have not had power to groan under their misery, and hardly a sign of life has remained.” He saw the enslaved agonizing for hours and indeed days in thumbscrews. He knew one captain who “studied, with no small attention, how to make death as excruciating as possible.”

Newton could not bring himself to convey the full story of terror on the slave ship to the readers of his pamphlet
Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade
nor to the select committee of the House of Commons before whom he testified. But he did tell all in a private letter to the abolitionist Richard Phillips in July 1788. He made it clear that he was talking about a captain he had sailed with, who would have been Richard Jackson, hell-master aboard the
Brownlow
in 1748-49. Newton “frequently heard the details of his cruelties from his own mouth.” (Note the “frequently” and the implied pride.) After a failed insurrection, Jackson sentenced the rebellious slaves to die, then selected their mode of punishment. The first group 
he jointed; that is, he cut off, with an axe, first their feet, then their legs below the knee, then their thighs; in like manner their hands, then their arms below the elbow, and then at their shoulders, till their bodies remained only like the trunk of a tree when all the branches are lopped away; and, lastly, their heads. And, as he proceeded in his operation, he threw the reeking members and heads in the midst of the bulk of the trembling slaves, who were chained upon the main-deck.

 
The terror so far was insufficient, so Captain Jackson then punished the second group:

 
It is not clear whether Newton merely heard about these punishments or whether he saw and perhaps even participated in them. The memory sounds rather more vivid than would have been conveyed through a story. Indeed Newton might have been describing a specific event that took place aboard the
Brownlow,
where the slaves rose up in insurrection only to be suppressed and suffer what must have been savage punishments. Safety trumped humanity. If Newton was involved in these horrific practices—and the ship’s chief mate would have been involved, possibly as executioner—it would not have been the only time he conveniently confused what he did with what he claimed merely to know. In
Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade,
he wrote that he had “seen” the use of the thumbscrews, “a dreadful engine, which, if the screw be turned by an unrelenting hand, can give intolerable anguish.” This was, in a narrow and technical sense, the truth: Newton had “seen” the thumbscrews in operation
because he himself had used them
—on children, no less. Newton wrote to Mary that he was “absolute in my small dominions (life and death excepted).” But as Newton’s story of Captain Jackson made clear, having a hell of one’s own meant that matters of life and death were not excepted.

Newton developed a theory about why violence, cruelty, and terror were intrinsic to the slave trade. He explained that most, though not all, captains of Guineamen were brutal or, as he put it in a more Christian parlance, “hard hearted,” to a degree that would have been almost incomprehensible to anyone who had no experience of the trade. He wrote, “A savageness of spirit, not easily conceived, infuses itself (though, as I have observed, there are exceptions) into those who exercise power on board an African slave-ship, from the captain downwards. It is the spirit of the trade, which, like a pestilential air, is so generally infectious, that but few escape it.” Violence and suffering were so pervasive on the slaver that the “work” itself—meaning the discipline and control of the human “cargo”—tended directly to “efface moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel, against all impressions of sensibility.” The slave trade thus produced and reproduced, in both officers and crew, a callous, violent moral insensibility.

The most savage and insensible spirit of all belonged to the captain, the sovereign of the wooden world, the man “absolute in his command.” For those who were “bred up” to the trade, the gaining of knowledge and the hardening of the heart went together. Newton explained, “Many of the captains are brought up in the business; and pass through the several stages of apprentices, foremastmen, and mates, before they are masters, and gradually acquire a cruel disposition together with their knowledge of the trade.” Learning cruelty was intrinsic to learning the trade itself, as Captain Bowen realized when he tried to restrain the ferocious violence of a mate “regularly initiated at Liverpool” in the human commerce. Bowen pronounced the man “incurable,” got rid of him, and himself made that the one and only slaving voyage he ever captained. Newton, too, was part of a system of terror that applied to both sailors and slaves, one that not only practiced ruthless violence but glorified it.
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Newton’s understanding was echoed by numerous others involved in the trade. Of the officers on his own ship, seaman William Butterworth explained, “The Cyclops might have forged their case-hardened hearts.” Seaman Silas Told, who was “saved” from the slave trade by a Christian conversion in Boston in 1734, recognized that the captain’s cruelty and terror were not an individual matter but a systemic one. He said of himself with startling honesty, “I probably might (by promotion to the rank of captain) have proved as eminent a savage as the most notorious character among them.” William Leigh, writing as “Africanus” about the slave trade in 1787-88, made the same point. The “cruel conduct of a few individuals” as captains was not the issue. It was rather “the general cruelty of the system.” This was the ultimate meaning of Richard Jackson’s hell aboard the
Brownlow.
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CHAPTER 8

The Sailor’s Vast Machine

As they walked the streets of the Liverpool waterfront at five o’clock on a still-dark morning, 1775, the two men listened for a fiddle. One was the captain of a slave ship, the other likely its surgeon; they “were upon the look out for hands” to carry the slaver to Cape Mount, Africa, where they would pick up a human cargo and cross the Atlantic for American plantations. They soon heard the telltale sound, located the house it was coming from, and “naturally concluded that none but sailors at such a time & in that house could be awake.” They had found what they were looking for.
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It was not a good moment to be recruiting for the trade, and they knew it. Tensions were running high in Liverpool, as slave-trade merchants had slashed wages, and soon thousands of angry sailors would pour into the very streets they were walking. Still, they had to raise a crew, so they stepped nervously through the door and toward the scraping fiddle. There they found the landlady of the establishment, asleep, or passed out, or perhaps even knocked out, sitting on a chair “bareheaded, with her eyelids as black as coal, a large lump upon one corner of her forehead, & the remains of a couple of streams of blood from each nostril bedaub’d the underpart of her face.” Nearby was a man, her husband, they surmised, lying by an overturned table with empty drinking vessels, a tin quart and a pint bottle, strewn around. He, too, was in bad shape. His wig had been thrown behind the nearby chimney, his coat was off, his hand held a broken pipe, and his stockings were down about his ankles, revealing bruised shins. The ship’s officers steered clear of these two and pressed on toward the music, “if musick it might be called.” Climbing some stairs, they got to the top, “where a door half open invited us to look in.”
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They saw a blind fiddler and a single sailor, who was “skipping & capering round the room in his shirt & trousers.” The dancing tar did not immediately notice his visitors, but finally, in one of his “revolutions” around the room, he stopped, sized them up, and glowered. In salty language he asked what they wanted. The surgeon explained that “it would have been dangerous to speak out”—that is, to answer that they were recruiting for a slave ship—so they “modestly hinted to him” that they might want someone to work on a ship whose destination was left discreetly unstated.

The sailor replied “with a Volley of Oaths” and upbraided the visitors for their stupidity. They must know very little of sailors, he explained, “to think he would go to sea while he could keep a fiddler & dance all night & sleep as long in the day as he pleas’d.” No, he would not go to sea until economic necessity required him to do so, and he still had fifteen shillings in his pocket. He expected to spend that money soon: “that I believe will go today, But no matter for that!” He had dancing yet to do.

The captain and surgeon listened carefully and decided that these were “unanswerable reasons.” So they turned to leave. But the sailor called to them, “Hark ye Gentle[me]n.” He said, “that B——h below there with the black eyes has a design to shabb me off tomorrow”—by which he meant play a dirty trick to get rid of him, turn him over to the constable, who would slap him in jail for debt. She would then do as all Liverpool landlords and ladies did—sell him to an outward-bound Guineaman and collect his two or three months’ advance wages to pay off his debt. If the gentlemen would call again tomorrow, the sailor might, he said, “play the Jade a trick” and leave town before she could do her dirty work. The sailor then declared that he had “forgot to ask where you are bound” but waved it off, saying never mind.

Turning back to the order of the day, he bellowed, “Play up you old blind rascal.”

Here was jolly jack-tar in almost stereotypical form—a dancing, carousing, foul-mouthed “rolling stone,” unconcerned about tomorrow. But here, too, was a man of independent spirit who cherished the autonomy his full pockets could provide, and someone who had contempt for his so-called betters and would-be employers. Would he go to Africa? Perhaps; he left the possibility open. With a cosmopolitan fatalism, he implied that it did not matter where his shipboard labors might take him. His motivations in seeking a berth would be fundamentally economic. As a proletarian, he depended on the money wage. He would go back to sea when his pockets were empty.

This kind of encounter often took place in a context of war, of two distinct but related kinds. The first was war between nations, which was common in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Britain and her American colonies were at war, usually against France or Spain, over markets, commerce, and empire, for almost half the years between 1700 and 1807. When the slave-ship recruiters conversed with the dancing sailor in Liverpool in 1775, fighting had already begun in what would be the American War for Independence. Britain would undertake a massive mobilization of military labor.

This mobilization would intensify a second, older, and less-formal kind of war between classes, over maritime labor power, between royal officials, magistrates, merchants, captains, and officers on the one side, sailors on the other. The former group struggled to find seamen enough to man their ships of war, trade, and privateering, and not infrequently members of the group battled one another over the right to employ the seaman as they collectively battled the seaman himself. They resorted to violence and special allurements, to the press-gang and the crimp, as well as to higher wages and better working conditions. Within this war over his labor, the seaman fought for his own autonomy and interests.

Did the dancing sailor join the slave ship? The surgeon did not say. But it is clear that many thousands of men like him did. Year after year merchants and captains, one way or another, found workers enough to sail their dozens of ships to the west coast of Africa. In order to ship 3.5 million slaves to the New World, they hired crews that would have totaled 350,000 men. About 30 percent of these would have been officers and skilled workers, who had special inducements and who therefore made more repeat voyages than did common sailors. If each such person made three voyages, the core of skilled seafaring officers would have been roughly 35,000. If each common sailor (including apprentices and landmen) made one or two voyages (one and a half on average), the total involved would have been about 210,000.