By far the most common outcome of shipboard rebellion was defeat, which always featured torture, torment, and terror in its aftermath. Those who had played a leading role in the insurrection would be made examples to the rest. They would be variously flogged, pricked, cut, razored, stretched, broken, unlimbed, and beheaded, all according to the overheated imagination of the slave-ship captain. The war would continue through these savage punishments, the insurgents refusing to cry out when they were whipped or going to their deaths calmly, as the Coromantee notoriously did, despising “punishment, even death it self.” Sometimes the body parts of the defeated would be distributed among the remaining captives, throughout the ship, as a reminder of what happened to those who dared to rise up. It was proven again and again that the slave ship was a well-organized fortress for the control of human beings. It was, by design, extremely difficult for its prisoners to take it over and sail to freedom.
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The main cause of slave revolts was slavery. And indeed Africans themselves offered their own explanations aboard the ship that proved the observation true. Seaman James Towne, who knew the primary trading language of the Windward Coast “nearly as well as English,” conversed with the enslaved and learned their grievances. Asked by an MP in 1791 whether he had ever known them to attempt an insurrection on board a slave ship, he said that he had. He was then asked, “Did you ever inquire into the causes of such insurrections?” He replied, “I have. The reasons that were given me were, ‘What business had we to make Slaves of them, and carry them away from their own country? That they had wives and children, and wanted to be with them.’ ” Other considerations that made insurrection more likely on any given ship were, for some, proximity to shore (worries about navigation once the vessel was out to sea) and poor health or lax vigilance among the crew. The captives’ previous experience in Africa of warfare in the expansion of slaving operations would add to the likelihood of insurrection.
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The historian David Richardson has shown that insurrections aboard slave ships materially affected the conduct of the trade. They caused losses, raised shipping costs, and created disincentives for investors, as a writer in the
Boston News-Letter
recognized in 1731: “What with the Negroes rising, and other Disappointment, in the late Voyages thither [Gold Coast], have occasioned a great Reducement in our Merchants Gains.” Richardson estimates that as many as one in ten vessels experienced an insurrection, that the average number of deaths per insurrection was roughly twenty-five, and that, all told, one hundred thousand valuable captives died as a result. Insurrections also generated other economic effects (higher costs, lower demand) that “significantly reduced the shipments of slaves” to America—by a million over the full history of the slave trade, by six hundred thousand in the period from 1698 to 1807.
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Insurrections also affected the reading public, as newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic endlessly chronicled the bloody uprisings of the enslaved. Alongside and sometimes within this coverage, opponents of the slave trade also gave voice to the struggles from the lower deck, noting the “desperate resolution, and astonishing heroism” displayed by the enslaved. They often insisted that the prisoners were trying to recapture their “lost liberty,” their natural right. Moreover, when public debate about the slave trade exploded in Britain and the United States after 1787, abolitionists repeatedly used the resistance of the enslaved to disprove everything the slave-trading interest said about the decency of conditions and treatment aboard the ships. If slave ships were what merchants and captains said they were, why would anyone starve him- or herself to death, throw him- or herself over the side of the vessel, or rise up against long odds and suffer likely death in insurrection?
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Thomas Clarkson wrote of the “Scenes of the brightest Heroism [that] happen repeatedly in the Holds or on the Decks of the Slave-Vessels.” So great and noble were these acts that the “Authors of them often eclipse by the Splendour of their Actions the celebrated Character both of Greece and Rome.” He continued:
But how different is the Fate of the one and of the other. The Actions of the former are considered as so many Acts of Baseness, and are punished with Torture or with Death, while those of the latter have been honoured with publick Rewards. The Actions of the former again are industriously consigned to oblivion, that not a trace, if possible, may be found, while those of the latter have been industriously recorded as Examples for future Times.
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Clarkson was right about the heroism, the torture, the death, and about the endless glorification of the history of Greece and Rome, but he was wrong about the legacy of the rebels. The effect of insurrection was probably greatest upon the enslaved aboard the ship, and this despite their various degrees of participation in the project. Those who refused to accept slavery initiated a struggle that would go on for hundreds of years. As martyrs they would enter the folklore and long memory of those on the lower deck, the waterfront, and the slave plantation. The rebels would be remembered, and the struggle would continue.
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Going Home to Guinea
The experience of death, and the impulse to all forms of resistance, was linked to a broadly held West African spiritual belief. From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the time of abolition, most captives seem to have believed that in death they returned to their native land. This allowed them to “meet their fate with a fortitude and indifference truely their own.” The belief seems to have been especially prominent among peoples from the Bight of Biafra, but it was also present among those of Senegambia, the Windward Coast, and the Gold Coast. It persisted long after the Middle Passage. Among people of African descent in North America and the West Indies, funerals often featured rejoicing, even rapture, because the deceased was “going home to Guinea.”
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Early in the eighteenth century, an unnamed observer noted of those dying aboard his ship, “Their opinion is that when they dye, they go to their own country, which made some of them refuse to eat their victuals. Striving to pine themselves, as [the most ex]peditious way to return home.” A woman of Old Calabar who starved herself to death aboard a slaver in the 1760s said to other women captives the night before she died that “she was going to her friends.” Late in the century, Joseph Hawkins wrote that after death the Ibau “must return to their own country, and remain forever free of care or pain.” Abolitionists knew of the belief in the transmigration of souls, as explained by Thomas Clarkson: “It is an opinion, which the Africans universally entertain, that, as soon as death shall release them from the hands of their oppressors, they shall immediately be wafted back to their native plains, there to exist again, to enjoy the sight of their beloved countrymen, and to spend the whole of their new existence in scenes of tranquility and delight: and so powerfully does this notion operate upon them, as to drive them frequently to the horrid extremity of putting a period to their lives.” When someone died, the other Africans said that
“he has gone to his happy country.”
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A European observer who talked to various captives aboard his ship noted that among the majority this belief was “so gross as to allow them to inhabit the same country with the same bodies.” Some even thought they would go back to life just as it was before, even to inhabit their “old dwellings.” Others (denominated the “more intelligent” Africans) thought they would return to “a portion of this vast continent which alive they can never know.” In an “African paradise,” they would enjoy the joys and luxuries of life with none of its fears. The Islamic slaves on board the slave ship referred to the “law . . . which is to be the inheritance of all true Musselmen!” But they seemed to have a difference of opinion about who would accompany them into the afterlife, whether they would “carry their old wives along with them” or “blew eyed virgins.” According to the man who collected the lore, the anthropological foray led nowhere: “Their opinion of this matter however must be acknowledged to be so dark and unintelligible as scarce to deserve our attention.”
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Slave-trade merchants and ship captains begged to differ. They gave the belief a great deal of attention, in contemplation and action. They not only hooked up the nettings to prevent suicides and readied the implements of forced feeding, they also resorted to studied terror. Since many Africans believed that they would return to their native land in their own bodies, captains terrorized the dead body, and all who would look upon it, as a “preventative.” One captain brought all the enslaved onto the main deck to witness as the carpenter cut off the head of the first slave who died, throwing the body overboard and “intimating to them, that if they were determined to go back to their own country, they should go back without their heads.” He repeated the grisly ritual with each subsequent death. Captain William Snelgrave had the same idea. After decapitating a man who had been executed for leading an insurrection, he explained, “This last part was done to let our Negroes see that all who offended thus, should be served in the same manner, For many of the Blacks believe, that if they are put to death and not dismembred, they shall return again to their own Country, after they are thrown overboard.” Hugh Crow knew that the belief often led to “the utter annihilation of the culprit.” To the many roles played by the slave-ship captain in the burgeoning capitalist economy of the Atlantic must be added another: terrorist.
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The determination to “go home to Guinea” also suggests that the goal of an insurrection was not always the capture of the ship. The objective on many occasions was collective suicide, as Thomas Clarkson explained: the captives often “determine to rise upon the crew, hoping by those means to find that death which they have wished for, and indulging a Hope at the same time, that they shall find it at the Expence of some of the Lives of their Oppressors.” Given this objective, a much larger number of insurrections must be counted as successful from the point of view of those who made them. In death and spiritual return, insurgents reversed their expropriation, enslavement, and exile.
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The violence of expropriation and enslavement shattered the structures of kinship that had ordered the lives of almost all who had been forced aboard the slave ship. As deep, disruptive, and disorienting as this was, the enslaved did not suffer it passively. They did everything they could to preserve whatever may have survived of these kin relations, and, just as important, they set about building new ones, on the ship if not earlier, in the coffles, “slave-holes,” factories, and fortresses along their way to the ship. Olaudah Equiano developed new connections to his “countrymen,” a word that could refer to his fellow Igbo or to all the African people with whom he found himself sharing the ship. What anthropologists have called “fictive kinship” was actually an endlessly reproduced series of miniature mutual-aid societies that were formed on the lower deck of the slave ship. The kindred would call themselves “shipmates.”
The first point to be emphasized about kinship is that it was real and commonplace aboard the slave ship. Husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings, members of families both extended and nuclear found themselves on the same ships, as one observer after another pointed out. One of the primary means of enslavement in Africa made this likely. The “grand pillage” of entire villages, set afire in the middle of the night, meant that families, indeed clans and sometimes communities, were swept up by marauding enemy forces, carried to the coast, and often sold together as “prisoners of war.” As John Thornton has written, “An entire slave ship might be filled, not just with people possessing the same culture, but people who grew up together.”
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Kinfolk met regularly aboard the Guineamen. An Igbo man, an
embrenché
“styled of the higher class” (like Equiano’s father), encountered on the main deck of his vessel a woman of similar “countenance and color,” his sister. The two then “stood with silence and amazement,” looked at each other with the greatest affection, and “rushed into each other’s arms.” An “extremely clever and intelligent” fifteen-year-old girl was brought aboard another slaver only to find, three months later, that a “girl with similar features,” her eight-year-old sister, had been forced to join her. “They very soon embraced each other, and went below.” It happened repeatedly on slave ships that “relations are brought on board, such as Brothers and Sisters, Wives and Husbands, and these at Separate Times.” Brothers ate together, as did sisters. But because men and women were separated, it was not easy for all kin to maintain contact. Communication between husbands and wives, for example, “was carried betwixt them by the boys which ran about the decks.”
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Slowly, in ways surviving documents do not allow us to see in detail, the idiom of kinship broadened, from immediate family to messes, to workmates, to friends, to countrymen and -women, to the whole of the lower deck. Central to the process was the additive nature of many West African cultures, as explained by John Matthews: the people of Sierra Leone had an extraordinary “facility with which they form new connexions.” Captain James Bowen described the bonding process among the enslaved. On his ship there were among the Africans “many relations.” These were not, he made clear, traditional kin relations but something of more recent formation. These were people “who had discovered such an attachment to each other, as to have been inseparable, and to have partaken of the same food, and to have slept on the same plank during the voyage.” They had, in short, shared violence, terror, and difficult conditions, as well as resistance, community, and finally survival on the lower deck of the slave ship. They built “new connexions”: they were shipmates.
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