The Slave Ship (46 page)

Then came an explanation that the current abolition campaign concerned the slave trade only, not the emancipation of the slaves, as some had falsely alleged, which would injure “private property.” On the contrary, the ending of the slave trade would result in better treatment for the slaves already in possession: “Thus then the value of private property will not only suffer no diminution, but will be very comfortably inhanced by the abolition of the Trade.”

A penultimate short paragraph rebuts an argument put forward by supporters of the trade “that the suppression of it will destroy a great nursery for seamen, and annihilate a very considerable source of commercial profit.” Thomas Clarkson’s research had recently demonstrated that the slave trade was not a “nursery” for seamen but rather a graveyard. Moreover, the precarious and uncertain nature of the trade made it a dangerous, sometimes ruinous, investment for merchants.

The text concluded with a call to activism. It noted the current parliamentary investigation of the slave trade and called on citizens “to stand forward” and provide relevant information to “throw the necessary lights on the subject,” presumably into the dark lower deck of the
Brooks
and other slave ships. It closed by noting the power and agency of an incipient social movement: “people would do well to consider, that it does not often fall to the lot of individuals, to have an opportunity of performing so important a moral and religious duty, as that of endeavouring to put an end to a practice, which may, without exaggeration, be stiled one of the greatest evils at this day existing upon the earth.” The Plymouth committee resolved that “1500 plates, representing the mode of stowing slaves on board the African traders, with remarks on it, be struck off and distributed gratis.”
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The earliest versions of the
Brooks
produced in Philadelphia and New York followed the Plymouth model in image and text. The first of these was published by Mathew Carey in
American Museum
in May 1789 and subsequently in a print run of twenty-five hundred copies as a broadside. Carey repositioned both image and text, putting the
Brooks
at the top of an oblong page, placing the original headline above the image and “Remarks on the Slave Trade” below it. He shrank the size of the whole to roughly thirteen by sixteen inches (thirty-three by forty centimeters), probably because it was published in a magazine. The New York printer Samuel Wood combined the Philadelphia text and the Plymouth layout. His version was larger than Carey’s at roughly nineteen by twenty-four inches (forty-eight by sixty centimeters), though smaller than the original from Plymouth.
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The American printers made three major changes to the text, two by subtraction, one by addition, which distinguished—and radicalized—their variants of the broadside. First, Carey removed the kneeling slave and cut in its entirety the paragraph explaining how the campaign against the slave trade did not imply the emancipation of the slaves and how it would not damage but rather enhance private property. He then added a new paragraph at the beginning of the text to make clear that this was the work of the “Pennsylvania society for promoting the ABOLITION of slavery.” The broadside would now be used to attack slavery itself.

The new paragraph also sought to strengthen the viewer’s identification with the “unhappy Africans” aboard the
Brooks:
“Here is presented to our view, one of the most horrid spectacles—a number of
human creatures, packed, side by side, almost like herrings in a barrel, and reduced nearly to the state of being buried alive, with just air enough to preserve a degree of life sufficient to make them sensible of all the horrors of their situation.” Transoceanic travel was rough enough, as Carey himself would have known from his forced migration from Ireland to Philadelphia in 1784, but these “forlorn wretches” in the picture suffered something vastly worse, cramped, as they were, in close quarters, unable to sit up or turn over, and suffering from seasickness and disease. Of the image of the ship, Carey wrote, “we do not recollect to have met with a more striking illustration of the barbarity of the slave trade.”
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The
Brooks
, London edition

In
The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament
(1808), Thomas Clarkson wrote of the image of the
Brooks
, “The committee at Plymouth had been the first to suggest the idea; but that in London had now improved it.” The improvement took the form of dramatic change and expansion—of both image and text—in a broadside now entitled, more concisely, “Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship,” which would eventually evolve into the more famous “Description of a Slave Ship.” All alterations made in London reflected a deeper and more practical understanding of how slave ships looked and worked, which is to say that they reflected the knowledge of Clarkson himself, who likely oversaw the drawings and certainly wrote the new text. He demonstrated a more empirical and scientific approach to the
Brooks
in all respects. The declared goal was to be objective—that is, to present “facts” about a slave ship that could not be disputed “by those concerned in it.”
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The single view of the lower deck of the
Brooks
in the Plymouth illustration was now replaced by seven views—a side sectional (or “longitudinal”) view of the entire vessel; two top-down views of the lower deck, one showing the arrangement of bodies on the deck planks and another on the platforms two and a half feet higher; two similar views of the half deck toward the stern of the vessel; and two transverse views showing the vertical configuration of decks and platforms. The amount of text below the images doubled, from two columns of twelve hundred words to four columns of twenty-four hundred words. The broadside as a whole remained large—roughly twenty by thirty inches (fifty by seventy-one centimeters)—and the views of the ship took up more space, about two-thirds of the whole. The
Brooks
now contained 482 men, women, boys, and girls, as allowed by the Dolben Act. Each one was carefully stowed in the appropriate apartment.
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The new images of the
Brooks
were shaped by a specific moment and process of transformation. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shipbuilding in England was moving from craft to modern industry. The shipwright’s art and mystery were being interrogated and “improved” by those who followed the new laws of science. The London committee’s plan and sections of the
Brooks
were, as the cultural critic Marcus Wood has pointed out, rendered in the “enlightened” style. They were drawn in a way associated, for example, with the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, which was formed around the same time to organize international cooperation, for the public good, on the new science of shipbuilding.
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The empirical and scientific approach was also evident in the expanded text, the first half of which concerned the practical question of stowing human bodies aboard the
Brooks.
Captain Parrey’s report on the ship was conveyed in precise detail: the text included his twenty-five measurements of length, breadth, and height on the seven sectional views; tonnage (297 nominal, 320 measured); number of seamen recently employed (45); number of slaves recently carried (609), broken down by category: men (351), women (127), boys (90), girls (41). The amount of space for an individual of each category is specified, followed by a calculation of how many people can be stowed in each specific part of the vessel, comparing hypothetical to actual numbers. Then follows a detailed discussion of deck height and “headroom,” in which it is shown that beams (carlings) and the platforms themselves reduced vertical space to two feet six inches, too little to allow an adult to sit up. It is emphasized that the diagram presents a bare minimum of crowding, as it features only 482 slaves rather than the 609 the
Brooks
actually carried, and it does not allow space in each apartment for the “poopoo tubs” or the “stanchions to support the platforms and decks.” It also allowed more space per slave than had been allowed in practice, according to the observations of both Parrey and various Liverpool delegates who testified before the House of Commons. It was therefore a graphic understatement.
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The second half of the London text moves from the social organization of shipboard space (and away from an explicit discussion of the
Brooks
) to the experience of the enslaved aboard the ship, encouraging direct identification with the sufferings of “our fellow-creatures,” whose bodies were bruised and skins rubbed raw by the friction of chains and bare boards with the rolling of the ship. Brief description is given to the routines of daily life aboard the ship (feeding, “airing,” and “dancing”) and to sickness and death. Mortality is discussed using both statistics and the eyewitness testimony of Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, who vividly describes the horrors of life belowdecks, especially during outbreaks of sickness that made ships’ decks look like a “slaughterhouse.” “It is not in the power of the human imagination,” explained Falconbridge, “to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting.”
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The final column turned to conditions for the sailors. They had no room for their bedding on the overcrowded slavers; they suffered from the effluvia wafting up from belowdecks; and they grew sick and died in great numbers, thereby making the slave trade not a nursery but “constantly and regularly a grave for our seamen.” The London text, like those reproduced in Philadelphia and New York, cut out the paragraph about the protection of “private property,” but it retained the final sentence urging viewers of the broadside to take action to abolish the evil slave trade.
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In June 1787, less than a month after the London abolition committee had been formed, Clarkson and his fellow members found themselves in a bind. They had resolved to abolish the slave trade, but they did not know much about it. Clarkson had written an M.A. thesis on slavery at Cambridge, but its sources were limited and it was not enough to educate either the public or members of Parliament, whose already-rumored hearings “could not proceed without evidence.” The committee resolved on June 12 that Clarkson should go to Bristol, Liverpool, and elsewhere to “collect Information on the Subject of the Slave Trade.”
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Clarkson devised a strategy for gathering evidence. He would act the part of historian, a social historian at that. He would go to the merchants’ halls and the customs houses of Bristol and Liverpool, where he would immerse himself in historical records such as ship muster rolls, from which he would compute mortality rates. He would gather the names of twenty thousand sailors to see what became of them. He would collect documents such as articles of agreement, wage contracts both printed and unprinted, through which to explore the conditions of seafaring employment. Most important, he would search the waterfront for people to interview. He took an approach based on oral history, which would, unexpectedly, become a history from below.

Clarkson began his tour of the ports on June 25, 1787; he journeyed first to Bristol. He suffered a moment of despair on entering the city, when he suddenly realized what he was up against. He feared the power of the wealthy, self-interested people he knew he would have to challenge. He anticipated persecution as he attempted to gather evidence. He even dared to wonder “whether I should ever get out of it alive.” Some of his fellow activists in London must have wondered the same thing, for over the next few weeks they wrote their friends in Bristol to ask whether Clarkson was still among the living.
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