The Slave Ship (48 page)

Opponents and supporters of the slave trade waged a furious debate between the years 1788 and 1792, in which slave ships in general and the
Brooks
in particular played central parts. Clarkson’s work among the sailors made possible a new circulation of proletarian experience, a conversion of one kind of experience and knowledge into others. He linked the slave-trade seamen to members of Parliament who were conducting an investigation of the human commerce, and then to a metropolitan reading public hungry for information about dreadful things that for the most part happened beyond the shores of their own experience. By publicizing seamen’s stories, Clarkson allowed them to appear in new oral and printed forms, in speeches (William Wilberforce), lectures (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), poems (Robert Southey, Hannah More), sermons (Joseph Priestley), illustrations (Isaac Cruikshank), testimony, statistical tables, articles, pamphlets, and books, around the Atlantic. The image and reality of the slave ship, like almost all aspects of Clarkson’s research, were disseminated far and wide. The
Brooks
was reproduced and circulated in thousands of copies to Paris, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston, and to Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, where newspapers reported the availability for purchase of a “Number of elegant and afflicting Copperplate Representations of the Sufferings of our Fellow-Men in a Slave-Ship.” The
Brooks
became a central image of the age, hanging in public places during petition drives and in homes and taverns around the Atlantic.
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William Wilberforce coined a memorable phrase when he observed of the slave ship, “So much misery condensed in so little room is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived.” These words signaled a strategic choice of topic and the task at hand. Abolitionist after abolitionist hammered away at the horrors of the slave ship—the beatings, the casual cruelty, the tyranny of the captain, the sickness and mortality, in short, all of the themes identified by Clarkson during his time among the sailors. If the slave trade had long survived because it was carried on far beyond the metropolis, its opponents now determined to bring home its stinking, brutal reality in ways that could not be avoided.
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Those trying to fend off the attack, for example the official delegates from the city of Liverpool who testified in the parliamentary hearings, bravely presented the slave ship as a safe, modern, hygienic technology. Robert Norris, formerly captain and now merchant in the trade, explained to the Privy Council and the parliamentary committee that the enslaved had clean quarters (treated with frankincense and lime); good food; much music, singing, and dancing; and even luxuries: tobacco, brandy, and, for the women, beads. The captives slept on “clean boards,” which were more wholesome than on “Beds or Hammacks.” Captain Norris had even given up his mattress for the bare board himself! Close stowing was not a problem, because the enslaved “lay there as close to each other, by Choice.” They actually preferred to “crowd together.” Above their heads were “spacious Gratings,” and “a Row of Air Ports [were] all round the Sides of the Ship, to admit a free Circulation of fresh Air.” Norris thus did the best job he could defending the slave ship, but his descriptions, placed against the gruesome evidence produced by abolitionist witnesses, sounded absurd, inviting Wilberforce to offer ridicule of his own in his famous speech of May 12, 1789: what with the perfumed chambers, fine food, and onboard amusements, Norris spoke as if “the whole were really a scene of pleasure and dissipation.” Were these Africans really “rejoicing at their captivity”?
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The proponents of the trade were losing the debate about the slave ship, and they knew it. This was indicated in two basic ways—first, by how quickly they adopted some of the language of their antagonists, speaking in the idiom of “humanity.” The purchase of slaves was actually a humanitarian act because the unbought would routinely be slaughtered by their savage African captors. English slavers were saving lives! An even more telling sign was strategic retreat. Facing damning, endlessly reiterated evidence of the horrors of the slave ship, pro-slave-trade representatives agreed that there were “abuses” and embraced the cause of regulation in an effort to fend off total abolition. They then quickly fell back on their long-preferred economic argument: human commerce might have its regrettable aspects, but the slave trade and indeed the entire complex of slavery in the anglophone Atlantic strongly supported the national and imperial economic interests of Great Britain. The Africa trade was essential to commerce, industry, and employment, explained merchants, manufacturers, and workers from Liverpool, Bristol, London, and Manchester in their petitions. To dismantle the trade—or, more worrying to many, to turn it over to archrival France—was unthinkable. Throughout the debate the most effective way for supporters of the slave trade to deal with the abolitionist attack on the slave ship was to change the subject.
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The image of the slave ship in general and the
Brooks
in particular figured significantly in parliamentary debate. Sir William Dolben, a moderate MP who represented Oxford University, went aboard a slave ship at anchor in the Thames, and it changed his life. Suddenly able to imagine the fate of the “poor unhappy wretches” who were crammed together, he led a campaign to reduce the crowding of slave ships. When the normally eloquent Charles James Fox addressed the House of Commons in April 1791, he grew speechless in the face of the Middle Passage, so he referred his fellow MPs “to the printed section of the slave-ship; where the eye might see what the tongue must fall short in describing.” Not long afterward Lord Windham likewise struggled to express the sufferings caused by the trade: “The section of the slave-ship, however, made up the deficiency of language, and did away [with] all necessity of argument, on this subject.”
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The
Brooks
also made an impact in revolutionary Paris, where Clarkson spent six months in 1789 organizing on behalf of the cause, disseminating the image at every opportunity. He reported that after seeing the slave ship, the bishop of Chartres declared that now “there was nothing so barbarous which might not readily be believed” about the slave trade. When the archbishop of Aix first saw it, he “was so struck with horror, that he could scarcely speak.” Count Mirabeau, the great orator of the French Revolution, was captivated by the image and immediately summoned a woodworking artisan to make a model, with “little wooden men and women, which were painted black to represent the slaves stowed in their proper places.” He kept the three-foot miniature in his dining room and planned to use it in a speech against the slave trade in the National Assembly. When King Louis XVI asked the director-general and minister of state Jacques Necker
to bring him materials so that he might learn about the suddenly controversial commerce in human flesh, the adviser brought Clarkson’s essay
The Impolicy of the Slave Trade
and “specimens of the manufactures of the Africans” but decided against taking the plan of the slave ship. He “thought it would affect His Majesty too much, as he was then indisposed.”
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During the broader public debate, radical abolitionists were not content merely to expose the sufferings of enslaved Africans; they detailed individual and collective acts of rebellion against the conditions they encountered on the slave ships. They defended the right of slaves to rise up in insurrection and recover their stolen “liberty.” Clarkson went so far as to defend the Haitian Revolution, claiming that the self-emancipated slaves there were “endeavouring to vindicate for themselves the unalterable Rights of Man.” The prospect and reality of insurrection also appeared in the text that accompanied the image of the
Brooks:
the Plymouth, Philadelphia, and New York broadsides each mentioned it once, the London version twice. Abolitionists transformed their visual propaganda to include an image of slave insurrection at sea. An illustration entitled “Representation of an Insurrection on board a Slave-Ship,” which appeared in Carl Bernard Wadstrom’s
An Essay on Colonization, particularly applied to the Western coast of Africa . . . in Two Parts
(London, 1794) and showed a crew firing from behind a barricado on rebellious slaves, was subsequently added to the sectional view of the
Brooks
.
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The role of the
Brooks
in the debate expanded when a new drama involving the ship took national center stage at Westminster in 1790. Parliamentary hearings featured Dr. Thomas Trotter and Captain Clement Noble, who had sailed together on the
Brooks
in 1783-84. The doctor was a young man who had been a surgeon in the Royal Navy, was demobilized after the American War, and signed aboard the slaver. He was horrified by the experience and now opposed the trade.
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The captain had made nine voyages to Africa, two as mate, seven as captain, four of the latter on the
Brooks
before the plan and sections of his ship was published. He had prospered and become a shipowner and merchant. He was a staunch defender of the trade.
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As if to provide verbal embellishment of the print of the
Brooks,
Trotter explained to the committee that conditions belowdecks were abysmal. The enslaved were packed by the chief mate every morning and “locked spoonways, according to the technical phrase.” Anyone out of place would be driven to his or her designated spot by the violence of the cat. The result was a mass of humanity packed so tightly that Trotter, who went below daily, could not “walk amongst them without treading upon them.” Moreover, the claustrophobic confinement caused the enslaved to gasp for breath and live in “dread of suffocation.” Some, he believed, died of asphyxiation. Trotter also noted the “dancing” that took place on the
Brooks.
Those confined in irons “were ordered to stand up, and make what motion they could.” Those who resisted “were compelled to it by the lash of the cat,” but many continued to resist and “refused to do it, even with this mode of punishment in a severe degree.”
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The line of questioning continued with Captain Noble. When asked how much space each slave had, no doubt by someone who had seen the diagram of the
Brooks,
Noble answered, “I do not know the space; I never measured it, or made any calculation of what room they had; they had always plenty of room to lay down in, and had they three times as much room they would all lay jammed up close together; they always do that before the room is half full.” Conditions on the lower deck were good, he testified, and of course he would know, because he, unlike some captains, went down there frequently. He admitted that some of the slaves were dejected when they first came aboard, “but they in general soon mend of that, and are in general in very good spirits during the time they are on board the ships.” In contrast to Trotter, he added that the men slaves were “very fond of dancing.” A few proved sulky, and they might have to be “persuaded to dance” by the mate. If persuasion failed, “they let them do as they please.”
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On the matter of authority, Trotter stated that the sailors were, like the African captives, oppressed by a tyrant “whose character was perfectly congenial to the trade.” Trotter once heard Captain Noble bragging to a group of captains about a punishment he devised for a sailor on a previous voyage. The captain was transporting on his own account (as private trade) a dozen small, exotic African birds to be sold in the West Indies. They died, and he suspected a mutinous black seaman from Philadelphia of having killed them. He ordered the man to be lashed and then chained for twelve days to one of the masts, during which time all he was given to eat each day was one of the tiny dead birds (which were, in size, between a sparrow and a thrush). Noble told this parable of power with “a degree of triumph and satisfaction that would have disgraced an Indian scalper.” When he finished, his fellow captains cheered—they “applauded his invention for the novelty of the punishment.” Trotter was appalled by this “wanton piece of barbarity.” He added that several sailors on his own voyage were “unmercifully flogged” and that Noble’s ill usage almost provoked a mutiny.
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Captain Noble responded by presenting himself as a reasonable and humane man, someone who ran a happy ship. He treated his sailors and slaves well and consequently suffered minimal mortality. On the voyage with Trotter, he lost only three sailors—one to smallpox, one to drowning, one to a “natural death.” He lost fifty-eight slaves, suggesting as a possible cause only that Dr. Trotter was “very inattentive to his duty” and “spent a great deal too much time in dress.” (Was Trotter a dandy?) Noble claimed that no slave of his had ever died because of “correction.” He recalled disciplining a seaman “for abusing the Slaves, and being very insolent to myself—I believe it was the only time that any of the seamen were flogged that voyage.” Indeed he was such a good and kind master that his seamen always wanted to sail with him again after they had completed a voyage. “I hardly ever knew an instance to the contrary,” he stated confidently.
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