The Slave Ship (4 page)

Yet the man survived. His hands were secured “to prevent any further attempt,” but all the efforts came to naught against the will of the nameless man. Trotter later explained that “he still however adhered to his resolution, refused all sustenance, and died in about a week or ten days afterwards of mere want of food.” The captain of the ship had also been informed of the situation. Captain Clement Noble said the man “stormed and made a great noise, worked with his hands, and threw himself about in an extraordinary manner, and shewed every sign of being mad.”

When Thomas Trotter told the man’s story in 1790 to a parliamentary committee investigating the slave trade, it set off a flurry of questions and indeed something of a debate. Members of Parliament with proslavery sentiments sided with Captain Noble and tried to discredit Trotter, denying that willful suicidal resistance could be the moral of the story, while antislavery MPs supported Trotter and attacked Noble. An MP asked Trotter, “Do you suppose that the man who attempted to cut his throat with his nails was insane?” Of this Trotter had no doubt: he answered, “By no means insane; I believe a degree of delirium might [have] come on before he perished, but at the time when he came on board, I believe that he was perfectly in his senses.” The man’s decision to use his own fingernails to rip open his throat was an entirely rational response to landing on a slave ship. And now the most powerful people in the world were debating the meaning of his resistance.

When the young woman came aboard the Liverpool slave ship the
Hudibras
in Old Calabar in 1785, she instantly captured everyone’s attention. She had beauty, grace, and charisma: “Sprightliness was in her every gesture, and good nature beamed in her eyes.” When the African musicians and instruments came out on the main deck twice a day for “dancing,” the exercising of the enslaved, she “appeared to great advantage, as she bounded over the quarter-deck, to the rude strains of African melody,” observed a smitten sailor named William Butterworth. She was the best dancer and the best singer on the ship. “Ever lively! ever gay!” seemed to sum up her aura, even under the extreme pressure of enslavement and exile.
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Other sailors joined Butterworth in admiration, and indeed so did Captain Jenkin Evans, who selected this young woman and one other as his “favourites,” to whom he therefore “showed greater favours than the rest,” likely as small recompense for coerced sexual services. Slave-ship sailors like Butterworth usually detested the captain’s favorites, as they were required to be snitches. But for the nimble singer and dancer, the sailors had the highest esteem. She was “universally respected by the ship’s company.”

Captain Evans gave her the name Sarah. He chose a biblical name, linking the enslaved woman, who was likely an Igbo speaker, to a princess, the beautiful wife of Abraham. Perhaps the captain hoped that she would share other traits with the biblical Sarah, who remained submissive and obedient to her husband during a long journey to Canaan.

Soon the enslaved men on the
Hudibras
erupted in insurrection. The goal was to “massacre the ship’s company, and take possession of the vessel.” The rising was suppressed, bloody punishments dispensed. Afterward Captain Evans and other officers suspected that Sarah and her mother (who was also on board) were somehow involved, even though the women had not joined the men in the actual revolt. When questioned closely, with violence looming, they denied having any knowledge, but “fear, or guilt, was strongly marked in their countenances.” Later that night, as male and female captives angrily shouted recriminations around the ship in the aftermath of defeat, it became clear that both Sarah and her mother not only knew about the plot, they had indeed been involved in it. Sarah had likely used her privileged position as a favorite, and her great freedom of movement that this entailed, to help with planning and perhaps even to pass tools to the men, allowing them to hack off their shackles and manacles.

Sarah survived the Middle Passage and whatever punishment she may have gotten for her involvement in the insurrection. She was sold at Grenada, with almost three hundred others, in 1787. She was allowed to stay on the vessel longer than most, probably with the special permission of Captain Evans. When she went ashore, she carried African traditions of dance, song, and resistance with her.
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Samuel Robinson was about thirteen years old when he boarded the
Lady Neilson
in 1801, to sail with his uncle, Captain Alexander Cowan, and a motley crew of thirty-five from Liverpool to the Gold Coast, to Demerara. The stout Scottish lad made a second voyage with his uncle, in the
Crescent,
to the Gold Coast and Jamaica in 1802. He kept journals of his voyages and used them when he decided, in the 1860s, to write a memoir. His declared purpose was to counter the abolitionist propaganda of his times. He admitted that the slave trade was wrong, even indefensible, but he had heard “so many gross mis-statements respecting West Indian slavery, and the horrors of the ‘Middle Passage,’ ” he wanted “to disabuse the minds of well-meaning people, who may have seen only one side of this question.” By the time he finished the account of his life, he could boast, “I am the only man alive who served an apprenticeship to the slave trade.”
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Robinson grew up in Garlieston, a coastal village of southwest Scotland, where he heard an older local boy spin yarns about a voyage to the West Indies. Robinson was spellbound. He described his path to the slave ship: “an irresistible desire for a seafaring life so completely carried me away, that it became a matter of perfect indifference to me where the ship went, if not to the bottom, provided I was aboard her—or in what trade engaged, if not a pirate.” Since any ship would do, his uncle’s involvement in the slave trade closed the deal.

Robinson’s experience aboard the slaver seems to have been typical for a ship’s boy. He got seasick, he got laughed at and picked on by the old salts, he got into fights with the other boys. One day when sent up to the tops, he found himself “swinging sixty or seventy feet one way by the roll of the ship, and again as far again in an opposite direction.” At that moment, he recalled, “I certainly thought myself far from home.” He was terrified by the sharks that circled the slave ship, and when the
Lady Neilson
arrived at the Rio Sestos near Sierra Leone, he stood amazed by the sight of a large fleet of canoes manned by naked African men: “I gazed on this wonderful spectacle in a state of perfect bewilderment. It was a scene worth coming all the way to look upon.” When the enslaved were brought on board his vessel, he seems to have shown little interest, even in the boys his own age. One of his most significant encounters was with drunken and tyrannical Captain John Ward of the slaver
Expedition,
on which Robinson was forced to work his homeward passage after his ship was condemned in Demerara. One day Ward thought the boy was not working hard enough, or moving fast enough, so he decided to “freshen his way” by lashing him with a two-inch rope. To escape his wrath, Robinson jumped from the mizzen shrouds to the main deck and severely injured his ankle, which in the long term proved his undoing as a sailor.

When Robinson looked back on his original motivations to go to sea, he reflected, “The ocean paradise which loomed so brightly in my imagination, now appears considerably shorn of its beams.” He cited the “brutal tyranny” of the officers (including his uncle), the “beggarly” quality of food and water, and the isolation from “moral or religious training or good example.” Having gone to sea as a buirdly boy, he asked, at the end of his second slaving voyage, “What am I now? A poor sallow skeleton, needing a staff to enable me to crawl along the street; my hopes of following the profession of my choice blasted in the bud, and my future prospects dark indeed.”

Bartholomew Roberts was a young Welshman who sailed as second mate aboard the
Princess,
a 140-ton Guineaman, as a slave ship was called, out of London for Sierra Leone. He had apparently worked in the slave trade for a while. He knew navigation, as the mates of slavers had to be ready to assume command in the not-uncommon event of the captain’s death. The
Princess
was captured in June 1719 by Howell Davis and a rowdy gang of pirates, who asked Roberts and his mates on the prize vessel if any of them wished to join “the brotherhood.” Roberts hesitated at first, knowing that the British government had in recent years left the corpses of executed pirates dangling at the entrance of one Atlantic port city after another. But soon he decided that he would indeed sail under the black flag.
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It was a fateful decision. When Davis was killed by Portuguese slave traders not long afterward, “Black Bart,” as he would be called, was elected captain of his ship and soon became the most successful sea robber of his age. He commanded a small flotilla of ships and several hundred men who captured more than four hundred merchant vessels over three years, the peak of “the golden age of piracy.” Roberts was widely known and just as widely feared. Naval officers on patrol spotted him and sailed in the opposite direction. Royal officials fortified their coasts against the man they called “the great pirate Roberts.” He acted the part by strolling the decks of his ship dressed as a dandy, in a lush damask waistcoat, a red feather in his hat, and a golden toothpick in his mouth. His motto as a pirate was “A Merry Life and Short One.”

Roberts terrorized the African coast, sending the traders there “into a panick.” He so despised the brutal ways of slave-trading captains that he and his crew enacted a bloody ritual called the “distribution of justice,” dispensing a fearful lashing to any captured captain whose sailors complained of his usage. Indeed Roberts gave some of these drubbings himself. Slave-trading merchants responded to this threat to their profits by persuading Parliament to intensify naval patrols on the coast of West Africa. HMS
Swallow
found and engaged Roberts in February 1722. Roberts stayed upon deck to lead the battle and encourage his men but took a fatal volley of grapeshot in the throat. His mates honored a long-standing pledge and dumped his still-armed body overboard. The naval vessel defeated the pirates, captured the survivors, and took them to the slave-trading fortress at Cape Coast Castle, where they were tried and hanged en masse. Captain Challoner Ogle then distributed corpses up and down the African coast so local slave traders could hang them up as a message to sailors. Ogle made it a special point to visit the king of Whydah, who had promised him fifty-six pounds of gold dust “if he should secure that rascal
Roberts,
who had long infested his coast.”

Nicholas Owen was a real-life Robinson Crusoe, a picaresque Irish sailor who went to sea after his spendthrift father had squandered the family fortune. He crossed the Atlantic five times, three times on slavers, twice with calamitous ends. One voyage culminated in mutiny when Owen and four of his mates, tired of “sevare usage” by their captain, seized what Owen called “that liberty which every Europain is intitle to.” Near Cape Mount south of Sierra Leone, the sailors made an armed escape and lived for months on the run, subsisting on wild rice, oysters, and the hospitality of the indigenous people. The second disaster came a year or so later, when other Africans proved not so friendly, cutting off Owen’s ship in revenge for a recent kidnapping by a Dutch slave ship. His ship plundered and he taken prisoner, Owen lost everything—four years’ wages, all in gold, and trade goods he had planned to sell to augment his pay. The natives knew their captives to be English rather than Dutch and therefore spared their lives. They eventually released them to a Mr. Hall, a local white slave trader, for whom Owen went to work. Soon Owen set up on his own, settling into the ruins of a small slave-trading fortress on York Island in the Sherbro River and working as a middleman, connecting local African groups to European traders.
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Owen began to keep a journal in order to “lay open to the world the many dangers of a seafareing life.” He was his own best example. He had suffered natural dangers while he lived and worked “upon that angery element.” This he could tolerate, because the sea had “no respect to persons”—it could kill a prince as easily as a common jack-tar. The deeper problem was that “a saylor that has no other means to satisfy the nececereys of this life then sailing the sais [seas] for wages.” He depended entirely on money for subsistence. Owen made the point through comparison: “I look upon him to be more miserable then a poor farmer who lives upon his labour, who can rest at night upon a bed of straw in obscurity, then a saylor who comforts himself in the main top by blowing of his fingers in a frostey night.” He railed against “scrapeing the world for money, the uneversal god of mankind, untill death overtakes us.”

Owen sought to escape wage slavery by becoming a petty slave trader. He could have gone back to sea, even back to live “among Cristians and my native people.” He decided instead to live among what he called “a barbarous people that nous [knows] neither God or a good quality in man.” And he acknowledged that it was a choice: “Some people may think it strange that we should stay so long among people of the above charetar, when we have so many opertuniteys of going of[f] the coast home.” He worried that if he went home, tongues would wag and he would be called “the Mallato [mulatto] just come from Guinea.” So he opted instead for what he himself saw as an idle, indolent life at the edge of empire, subordinating others to the ruthless rule of the “uneversal god of mankind.” The choice resulted in failure, as Owen well understood and his miserable journal makes clear. He died of a fever in 1759, penniless and alone. He had long been “much inclin’d to melloncholy.”

Captain William Snelgrave was gathering a cargo of Africans on the “Slave Coast” of Benin to transport to Antigua when, to his surprise, he was invited by the king of Ardra (also called Allada) to visit. This presented a dilemma. On the one hand, Snelgrave dared not refuse if he wanted to curry favor for future supplies of slaves. But, on the other hand, he considered the king and his people to be “fierce brutish Cannibals.” The captain resolved the dilemma by deciding to visit and to take with him a guard of ten sailors “well armed with Musquets and Pistols, which those savage People I knew were much afraid of.”
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