The Slave Ship (42 page)

On John Riland’s ship the
Liberty
in 1801, several of the enslaved rejected their food. The officer on watch first swore he would throw them overboard if they did not eat; then he threatened them with the cat, which seemed to work, or so he thought: “The slaves then made a show of eating, by putting a little rice into their mouths; but whenever the officer’s back was turned they threw it into the sea.” Seaman James Morley also saw slaves pretend to eat, holding food in their mouths “till they have been almost strangled.” The officers would damn them “for being sulky Black b——.” They would try to force them to eat, using the cat, the thumbscrews, a “bolus knife” or a stick (to open the mouth), or a
speculum oris
or a “horn” to force food down obstinate throats.
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Anyone who resisted food posed a direct challenge to the captain’s powers, as the example might spread, with disastrous results. This was made chillingly clear by seaman Isaac Parker when he testified before the House of Commons committee investigating the slave trade in 1791. Aboard the
Black Joke
in 1765, a small child, whose mother was also on board, “took sulk, and would not eat,” refusing both the breast and standard fare of rice mixed with palm oil. Captain Thomas Marshall flogged the child with the cat as enslaved men looked on through the crevices of the barricado: they made “a great murmuring” in protest. Still the child refused to eat, and day after day the captain wielded the cat but also tied a mango log, eighteen to twenty inches long and twelve to thirteen pounds in weight, around its neck by a string. “The last time he took the child up and flogged it,” explained Parker, he “let it drop out of his hands” to the deck, saying, “Damn you. . . . I will make you eat, or I will be the death of you.” In less than an hour, the child died. In a final act of cruelty, the captain commanded the child’s mother to throw the small corpse overboard. When she refused, he beat her. Eventually she complied, and afterward, “She seemed very sorry, and cried for several hours.” Even the smallest rebel, a nine-month-old child who refused to eat, could not be tolerated aboard the
Black Joke.
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What captains like Marshall feared, the contagion of resistance, was illustrated in a case that came before the High Court of Admiralty in 1730. James Kettle, captain of the
City of London
(owned by the South Sea Company), charged that seaman Edward Fentiman was too violent in his carriage toward the enslaved. He had beaten an unnamed slave woman, after which all the others—and there were 377 on board—refused to take sustenance. This in turn earned Fentiman a beating from Kettle, who explained to the court that what had happened here was one instance of a larger problem: it is “the nature & disposition of Negroes & so frequently happens on board of Merchant Ships that when any one of them have been beat or abused for the whole Company of them on Board to resent it & grow Sullen and refuse to eat and many of them thereby to pine away and die.”
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Dr. T. Aubrey reinforced Captain Kettle’s point and raised it to a higher level of generalization. In his vade mecum for slave-trade surgeons, he explained that the violent mistreatment of the enslaved often resulted in their refusal to eat. Once they stop, “then they lose their Appetites, and perhaps fall sick, partly thro’ fasting, and partly with Grief to see themselves so treated.” More tellingly still, once they had taken their resistance to heart, “all the Surgeon’s Art will never keep them alive; they will never eat any thing by fair Means, or foul, because they choose rather to dye, than be ill treated.” He referred, of course, to the various violent means used to make people eat. These would be resisted, in his view, and would in the end be useless against the will to refuse all sustenance. Like Kettle, Aubrey made it clear that the hunger strike was a tactic employed in the struggle that raged aboard every slave ship.
⁴⁵

The hunger strike aboard the
Loyal George,
as recalled by Silas Told, led directly to an insurrection and, once that failed, to mass suicide. The process of resistance also worked the other way, as hunger strikes often followed failed insurrections. After the captives rose aboard the
Ferrers Galley
in 1721, “near eighty” were killed or drowned. Most of those who survived, wrote Captain William Snelgrave, “grew so sullen, that several of them were starved to death, obstinately refusing to take any Sustenance.” After an uprising on an unnamed vessel in the Bonny River in 1781, three of the wounded leaders “came to the resolution of starving themselves to death.” They were threatened, then beaten, but “no terrors were effectual, for they never tasted any sustenance after their resolution, and they died in consequence of it.” Likewise aboard the
Wasp
in 1783, when two insurrections took place. Following the first, in which the women captives seized the captain and tried to throw him overboard, twelve died of wounds and the refusal to eat. Following the second, even bigger explosion, fifty-five Africans died of “bruises, swallowing salt water, chagrins at disappointment, and abstinence.”
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Perhaps an even more dramatic form of resistance than self-starvation was jumping overboard. Some jumped in the hope of escape when docked in an African port, while others chose drowning over starvation as a means to terminate the life of a body meant to slave away on New World plantations. This kind of resistance was widely practiced and just as widely feared by the organizers of the trade. Merchants warned captains about it in their instructions, formal and informal. Captains in turn made sure their ships had nettings all around. They also had the male captives chained to a ringbolt whenever they were on the main deck, and at the same time they made sure that vigilant watches were always kept. When the enslaved did manage to get over-board, captains urgently dispatched emergency rescue parties, in boats, to catch and bring them back aboard.

African women had greater freedom of movement on the ship than men did, so they played a prominent role in this kind of resistance. In 1714 four women, one of them “big with child,” jumped overboard as the
Florida
departed Old Calabar. As a man on board noted, they “shew’d us how well they could swim, & gave us ye slip.” The crew immediately went after them but caught only the pregnant one, because she “could not shift so well as the rest.” In Anomabu on the Gold Coast in 1732, Captain James Hogg discovered in the middle of the night that six women had jumped overboard and afterward was sure that only a brisk effort from the crew prevented the rest from following. Such escapes were dangerous, even for expert swimmers, as many of the enslaved from coastal regions happened to be. Anyone retaken in the water—and most who jumped overboard were—could expect severe punishment, in some cases death (as a deterrent to others), once back aboard the ship. Even if the fugitives got to shore, chances were that their African captors would catch them and return them to the slaver. Finally, many of the waterways near shore where people jumped overboard were shark-infested. Captain Hugh Crow recalled two Igbo women who went over the side of one of his vessels, only to be torn apart immediately by sharks.
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Some captives went overboard spontaneously, in response to a specific event, rather than in a calculated bid for freedom. In 1786 a gang of six, “enraged or terrified” at seeing the corpse of their deceased countryman cut open by a ship’s doctor for anatomical analysis, “plunged into the sea, and were instantly drowned.” A couple of years before, another forty or fifty jumped into the sea during a scramble, a deliberately terrifying manner of selling slaves on the ship’s deck in Jamaica. One hundred men jumped off the
Prince of Orange
after they had been released from chains upon the docking of the vessel at St. Kitts in 1737. Thirty-three refused assistance from the sailors and drowned. They were “resolv’d to die, and sunk directly down.” The cause of the mass action, according to Captain Japhet Bird, was that one of the countrymen of the enslaved came aboard and “jokingly” told them they would be blinded and eaten by the white men.
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One of the most illuminating aspects of these suicidal escapes was the joy expressed by people once they had gotten into the water. Seaman Isaac Wilson recalled a captive who jumped into the sea and “went down as if exulting that he got away.” Another African man, who knew that the nettings had been loosened to empty the lower deck’s necessary tubs, got free of a group of sailors and “darted himself through the hole overboard.” When the sailors went after him, and almost caught him, the man dived down and popped up again some distance away, eluding his would-be captors. All the while, recalled the ship’s surgeon, he “made signs which it is impossible for me to describe in words, expressive of the happiness he had in escaping from us.” Finally he went down again, “and we saw him no more.” After a bloody insurrection had been suppressed aboard the
Nassau
in 1742, the captain ordered all injured slaves on deck: everyone whose wounds made recovery doubtful was “to jump into the sea,” which many of them did, going to their deaths with “seeming chearfulness,” according to the person who had been the cabin boy on the voyage. The same thing happened aboard the infamous
Zong
. As Captain Luke Collingwood ordered 122 sick captives thrown overboard, another 10 jumped of their own accord.
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Hunger strikes and jumping overboard were not the only means of self-destruction. Some sick people refused medicine because “they want to die.” Two women found ways to strangle themselves to death aboard the
Elizabeth
in 1788-89. Others cut their own throats, with hard-edged tools, sharp objects, or their own fingernails. A sailor named Thompson noted that he “has known all the slaves [locked belowdecks] unanimously [to] rush to leeward in a gale of wind, on purpose to upset the ship, choosing to drown themselves, than to continue in their situation, or go into foreign slavery.”
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The least common but most spectacular mass suicides involved blowing up the entire ship. In January 1773 the enslaved men belowdecks aboard the
New Britannia,
using tools slipped to them by the more mobile boys, cut through the bulkheads and got into the gun room, where they found weapons and used them to battle the crew for more than an hour, with significant loss of life on both sides. When they saw that defeat at the hands of the crew was inevitable, “they set fire to the magazine, and blowed the vessel up,” killing almost everyone on board, as many as three hundred altogether. When Captain James Charles learned in October 1785 that Gambian captives had successfully captured a Dutch slaver (and killed the captain and crew), he resolved to go after the vessel, not least because the insurgents, if defeated, might become his property. Following a chase of three hours and an indecisive engagement, a party of his own crew volunteered to board the freedpeople’s craft under fire. Ten men and an officer went aboard and, after a smart contest on deck, “drove the mutinous slaves into the hold.” As the battle continued, someone apparently blew the vessel up “with a dreadful explosion, and every soul on board perished.” Part of the wreckage fell upon the deck of Captain Charles’s vessel, the
Africa
.
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Even though suicides run like a bloodred thread through the documentation of the slave trade, it is difficult to be sure how common they were. One measure, for a limited time period, may be found in the journals that slave-ship surgeons were required to keep in the aftermath of the Dolben Act, or Slave Carrying Bill, of 1788. For the period from 1788 to 1797, physicians for eighty-six vessels recorded in their journals the cause of death for all the Africans under their charge, and in these suicide looms rather large. Twenty-five surgeons recorded what appeared to be one or another kind of self-destruction: eight ships had one or more person jump overboard; three others listed captives “missing” (no doubt overboard) after an insurrection; three others experienced nonspecific forms of suicide; and another twelve gave causes such as “lost,” “drowned,” “sulkiness,” and “abortion.” Almost one-third of the vessels in the sample witnessed a suicide, and even this is likely a serious understatement, as surgeons had vested interests not to report suicides in this era of charged debate about the inhumanity of slave ships.
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Another reason to reduce or conceal the number of suicides was the ruling of an English court, Judge Mansfield presiding, in Trinity Term 1785: insurance companies would be required to pay for insured slaves who died in an insurrection but would not be required to pay for those who died of chagrin, abstinence, or despair. More specifically, “all who died by leaping into the sea were not to be paid for.”
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Hundreds of bodies packed together belowdecks were a potent source of energy, as could be seen in material emanation anytime a slave ship sailed through cool, rainy weather. On these occasions steam billowed up from the mass of hot bodies on the lower deck, through the gratings, and onto the main deck where the crew worked. Aboard the slave ship
Nightingale
in the late 1760s, seaman Henry Ellison saw “steam coming through the gratings like a furnace.” Not infrequently the human furnace down below exploded—into full insurrection. The peculiar war that was the slave trade would now be waged openly on the ship.
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Yet insurrection aboard a slave ship did not happen as a spontaneous natural process. It was, rather, the result of calculated human effort—careful communication, detailed planning, precise execution. Every insurrection, regardless of its success, was a remarkable achievement, as the slave ship itself was organized in almost all respects to prevent it. Merchants, captains, officers, and crew thought about it, worried about it, took practical action against it. Each and all assumed that the enslaved would rise up in a fury and destroy them if given half a chance. For those who ran the slave ship, an insurrection was without a doubt their greatest nightmare. It could extinguish profits and lives in an explosive flash.