The Slave Ship (35 page)

At some point in the afternoon, bread and sometimes a pipe of tobacco and a dram of brandy would be offered to the men and women. On some ships the women and girls would be given beads with which to make ornaments. The afternoon meal, served around four o’clock, usually consisted of European victuals—horsebeans and peas, with salt meat or fish. Many a cook made “dab-a-dab,” a concoction of rice, a little salt meat, pepper, and palm oil. At the end of the day, somewhere between 4:00 and 6:00 P.M., the men were taken and locked below. Women and children usually got to stay on deck longer, until they, too, were taken to their dark apartments for the next twelve to fourteen hours.
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“Dancing” and feeding revealed a larger truth about the slave ship: the officers reserved for themselves the primary means of violence. Only the captain and the surgeon, recalled Isaac Wilson, were allowed to chastise the slaves aboard his ship. Others agreed. Alexander Falconbridge said that only the captain, chief mate, and surgeon (himself) were permitted to use the cat-o’-nine-tails. Common sailors rarely wielded the cat, and then usually only in two situations: when they went below and in the brutal aftermath of a failed insurrection.
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The final phase of a sailor’s work consisted of preparing the enslaved for sale as the ship neared its port of delivery. This, as Emma Christopher has emphasized, was a kind of production in which the sailor transformed the African captive into a commodity for sale. It entailed taking the constraints off the wrists and ankles of the men about ten days before arrival, in order to let the chafing heal. It also included careful cleaning, shaving the men (beard and sometimes head), and using a lunar caustic to hide sores. Gray hair would be picked out or dyed black. Finally, sailors would rub down the African bodies with palm oil. The whole process was one of value creation and enhancement. Thanks to the sailor’s labor, a shipload of expensive commodities would soon be available for sale.
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The Liverpool writer “Dicky Sam” described the violent reality of the slave ship this way: “the captain bullies the men, the men torture the slaves, the slaves’ hearts are breaking with despair.” The statement expresses an important truth. Violence cascaded downward, from captain and officers to sailors to the enslaved. Sailors, often beaten and abused themselves, took out their plight on the even more abject and powerless captives under their supervision and control. How this happened on any given ship would depend to a large extent on the captain, who had enormous latitude to run the ship as he wished. Even though captains and officers were the prime agents of disciplinary violence, sailors occupied the front line of social war on the ship. This must be emphasized, because James Field Stanfield, in his dramatic rendering of the slaving voyage, tended to blur the line between sailors and slaves.
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The least documented type of violence on the slave ship was probably the most pervasive—the rough, sometimes cruel treatment of daily life. Dr. Ecroyde Claxton, surgeon on the
Young Hero,
noted that Captain Molineux treated the enslaved well but the sailors did not. On one occasion, when a group of sick slaves were brought on deck and covered with a sail, it was soon smeared “with blood and mucus, which involuntarily issued from them.” The sailors, who had to clean the sail, flew into a rage and beat them “inhumanly.” This made the sick slaves so fearful that they thereafter “crept to the tub, and there sat straining and straining.” This, the physician noted, produced “prolapsus ani, which it was entirely impossible to cure.” This was one of thousands of instances of everyday terror.
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The greatest explosion of violence from a ship’s crew followed a failed slave insurrection. Ringleaders would be gruesomely punished by captains and mates on the main deck, in full view of all the enslaved. When the officers tired themselves by repeated lashing, they passed the cat to sailors, who continued the flaying. On other occasions sailors were known to torment defeated rebels by pricking their skin with the points of the cutlasses. In a few cases, the sailors’ work included actual execution, by horrific means. Sailors thus not only maintained captivity, they viciously punished those who tried to escape it.

Another extremity of violence enacted by the crew, showing that “work” sometimes included outright murder, was illustrated aboard the
Zong
in 1781. Captain Luke Collingwood sailed with his crew of seventeen and a “cargo” of 470 tight-packed slaves from West Africa to Jamaica. The ship soon grew sickly: sixty Africans and seven members of the crew perished. Fearful of “a broken voyage,” Collingwood called the crew together and told them that “if the slaves died a natural death, it would be the loss of the owners of the ship;
but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters
” who had insured the voyage. Some members of the crew, including mate James Kelsal, objected, but Collingwood prevailed, and that evening the crew threw 54 slaves, hands bound, overboard. They threw another 42 over the side two days later, and 26 more soon after. Ten of the enslaved watched the hideous spectacle and jumped overboard of their own volition, committing suicide and bringing the number of deaths to 132. Collingwood later pretended a lack of water was the cause of his action, but neither crew nor captives had been put to short allowance, and indeed the ship still had 420 gallons when it docked. The case was tried in court when the insurer refused to pay the claim and the owners sued in response. The trial publicized the cruelty of the slave trade and proved to be a turning point as abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano and Granville Sharp built a nascent popular movement. It was perhaps the most spectacular atrocity in the four-hundred-year history of the slave trade. It depended on sailors accepting the orders to throw the living overboard.
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One of the most important aspects of violence visited by the crew upon the enslaved was addressed by the Reverend John Newton in his pamphlet
Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade,
published in London, 1788. He painted a chilling picture:

 
Then he stopped, declaring, “This is not a subject for declamation,” even though the “enormities” of what happened on slave ships were, at the time, “little known
here.
” Perhaps he and other abolitionists considered it too delicate a subject for public discussion, or perhaps they shied away because it conflicted with their desire to make the British sailor a victim of the slave trade and an object of popular sympathy. It would not do to depict him as a “white savage,” a sexual predator, a serial rapist. Yet that is what some slave-trade sailors were. It is entirely possible that some men signed on to slaving voyages in the first place precisely because they wanted unrestricted access to the bodies of African women. Thomas Boulton implied as much when he had the recruiting mate in
The Sailor’s Farewell, or the Guinea Outfit
speak to a potential sailor of the “soft African wench” who awaited him if he signed on. What would a real sailor think as he joined a Rhode Island slave ship named the
Free Love,
Captain Wanton?
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Slave-trade merchants did the best they could to downplay the matter, stressing that “good order” aboard the ship meant no abuse of the female slaves by the crew. A member of the investigating parliamentary committee asked Robert Norris, “Is there any Care taken to prevent any Intercourse between White Men and the Black Women?” Norris responded crisply, in captainlike fashion, “Orders are generally issued for that Purpose by the Commanding Officer.” A questioner who was apparently more sympathetic to the slave trade may have considered this too weak a response, so he followed up to make sure everyone knew that sexual abuse would not be tolerated. He wondered, “If a British Sailor should offer Violence to a Negro Woman, would he not be severely punished by the Captain?” Norris answered, “He would be sharply reproved certainly.” John Knox added that it was usually a matter of contract that any sailor proved guilty of “vice” while on the voyage would lose one month’s pay.
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The “good order” described by the merchants was not unknown, but according to Newton (whose knowledge of the slave trade was based in an earlier era), it was relatively uncommon. Speaking of the crew, he wrote, “On shipboard they may be restrained, and in some ships they are; but such restraint is far from being general.” It all depended on the captain, who had the power to protect the women slaves if he chose to do so. Newton knew several commanders who maintained what he considered proper discipline, but these were probably a minority: “In some ships, perhaps in the most, the license in this particular was almost unlimited.” Anyone who did his work and did it properly “might, in other respects, do what they pleased.” The Reverend William Leigh added that Guinea voyages often exhibited “promiscuous intercourse” and wild “scenes of debauchery.” Questions of morality, both ministers lamented, were never posed.
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Questions of class aboard the ship were posed. Most observers of slave-shipboard life agreed that officers had unlimited access to slave women but that common sailors did not. Alexander Falconbridge wrote that “on board some ships, the common sailors are allowed to have intercourse with such of the black women whose consent they can procure.” The officers, on the other hand, “are permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure, and sometimes are guilty of such brutal excesses as disgrace human nature.” Reverend Leigh agreed: “the Captain and Officers still indulge their desires unrestrained, and the common sailors are allowed to take for the voyage any female Negro whose consent they can obtain.” Neither writer paused to consider what “consent” could have meant in a situation where women had no protection, no rights, and were, in Newton’s words, “abandoned, without restraint, to the lawless will of the first comer.”

And yet sketchy evidence suggests that some African women formed relationships with sailors that involved some degree of consent. This may have been a woman’s way to make the best of a bad situation, that is, to make a strategic alliance with one man as a protection against other predators. The higher up the ship’s hierarchy the protector, the better and more reliable the protection would be. When a sailor did pair off with a woman, he apparently gave her access to his provisions, which saved the merchant and captain money. Leigh suggested that some of these unions resulted in tragic scenes when the ship arrived in the American port and the time came for the sale of the enslaved. He said that “Negroe women, when being separated by sale from the sailors who cohabited with them,” sometimes tried “destroying themselves, and sometimes jumping overboard, on the attempt to force them from the ship.”
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There is no reason to think that the process described by John Newton—the hardening of the captain’s heart—would apply less to sailors, and indeed it may have applied more, because sailors were in intimate daily contact with the enslaved, sharing close quarters for anywhere between two and ten months on a voyage. Several ship captains spoke of the need to restrain their sailors, to intervene against a socialization process over which they themselves presided. William Snelgrave was sure that the desperate insurrections of the enslaved were caused by “the Sailors ill usage of these poor People, when on board the Ships wherein they are transported to our Plantations.” Captain John Samuel Smith of the Royal Navy testified in 1791 that he had trouble impressing slave-trade sailors for the king’s service because they were so sick and ulcerated as to pose a risk of infection to the other men aboard his vessel. But the two he was able to press “turned out to be such cruel inhuman fellows, that we were under the necessity of dismissing them from the ship, although good seamen.”
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Along the coast of West Africa, common sailors encountered a barrier reef of an unusual kind. It was pathogenic, made of microbes, and it made the area a “White Man’s Grave.” Half of all Europeans who journeyed to West Africa in the eighteenth century, most of them seamen, died within a year. The primary causes of the high mortality were “fevers,” malaria and yellow fever, both mosquito-borne, and both reproducible within the slave ship itself, as the insects bred in the stagnant bilgewater that collected in the hull. Other causes of death were dysentery, smallpox, accidents, murder, and occasionally scurvy. The prevalence of disease (and the absence of immunity), coupled with difficult working and living conditions (fatiguing work, poor food, and harsh discipline), meant that the crew aboard the slave ships often died in even greater proportions than did the enslaved, although of different causes, within a different chronological pattern during the voyage (more while on the coast and early in the voyage), and with variations according to African region: the Gold Coast was comparatively healthy, the Bights of Benin and Biafra deadly. In surveying crew mortality for 350 Bristol and Liverpool slavers between 1784 and 1790, a House of Commons committee found that 21.6 percent of the sailors died, a figure that was in keeping with Thomas Clarkson’s estimates at the time and is consistent with modern research. Roughly twenty thousand British slave-trade seamen died between 1780 and 1807. For sailors as for African captives, living for several months aboard a slave ship was in itself a struggle for life.
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