The Slave Ship (6 page)

And yet the one surviving document Norris wrote that was not intended for publication tells a different, rather less-idyllic story. Norris kept a captain’s log for his voyage in the
Unity
from Liverpool to Whydah, to Jamaica, and back to Liverpool between 1769 and 1771. A week after weighing anchor at Whydah and setting sail to cross the Atlantic, Norris noted that “the Slaves made an Insurrection, which was soon quelled with ye Loss [of] two Women.” Two weeks later the enslaved rose again, the women once more in the lead and therefore singled out for special punishment: Norris “gave ye women concerned 24 lashes each.” Three days later they made a third effort after several “got off their Handcuffs,” but Norris and crew soon managed to get them back into their irons. And the following morning they tried for a fourth time: “the Slaves attempted to force up ye Gratings in the Night, with a design to murder ye whites or drown themselves.” He added that they “confessed their intentions and that ye women as well as ye men were determin’d if disapointed of cutting off ye whites, to jump over board but in case of being prevented by their Irons were resolved as their last attempt to burn the ship.” So great was their determination that in the event of failure they planned a mass suicide by drowning or self-incineration. “Their obstinacy,” wrote Norris, “put me under ye Necessity of shooting ye Ringleader.” But even this did not end the matter. A man Norris called “No. 3” and a woman he called “No. 4,” both of whom had been on the ship a long time, continued to resist and died in fits of madness. “They had frequently attempted to drown themselves, since their Views were disapointed in ye Insurrection.”

On board Humphry Morice’s ship the
Katherine,
the enslaved died of many causes, noted Captain John Dagge in 1727-28. A man and a woman jumped overboard and drowned, one on the African coast, one during the Middle Passage. A woman perished of “Palsey and lost the use of Limbs.” A man expired “Sullen and Mallancholy,” another “Sullen (and a Foole).” “Sullen” usually meant that the cat-o’-nine-tails did not work on the person so described. Others died suddenly, with a fever, with “Swelling and Pains in his Limbs,” with lethargy and flux, with dropsy, with consumption. One grew emaciated (“Meager”) and passed away. Another nineteen died, mostly of dysentery. One boy managed to “Run away wh[en] the Doihmes Came.” Perhaps the Dahomeys were his own group.
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All of these nameless people, plus the extraordinary number of 678 delivered alive by Captain Dagge to Antigua, belonged to Humphry Morice, scion of a leading merchant family in London, Member of Parliament, friend and close associate of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, and governor (first officer) of the Bank of England. He was involved at the highest level of global trade, finance capital, and the economy of the British Empire. He owned a sumptuous family estate in the Cornish countryside and a magnificent home in London. Servants attended the gentleman’s every wish. Through marriage he had forged strategic connections to other powerful merchant families. He was a member of the ruling class.

Morice was, moreover, one of the free traders who led the attack against the chartered monopoly of the Royal African Company in the early years of the eighteenth century. He was the employer of slave-trade captain William Snelgrave. He was the main influence in persuading Parliament to dispatch HMS
Swallow,
which defeated the pirate Bartholomew Roberts on the coast of Africa in February 1722. Morice traded to Europe (especially Holland), Russia, the West Indies, and North America, but the heart of his trading empire lay in Africa. He was London’s leading slave trader in the early eighteenth century.

The
Katherine
was one of a small fleet of slave ships owned by Morice and named for his wife and daughters. (One wonders how wife Katherine or daughter Sarah felt in knowing, if they knew, that the enslaved aboard the ships named for them had the letter
K
or
S
branded on their buttocks.) Morice’s ships represented almost 10 percent of London’s slave-trading capacity at a time when the city owned almost as many Guineamen as Bristol and more than Liverpool. They made sixty-two voyages, carried between £6,000 and £12,000 worth of well-sorted cargo to Africa, and transported almost twenty thousand people to New World plantations. This number does not include the many his captains sold for gold to Portuguese ships on the African coast. Gold, Morice liked to say, did not suffer mortality in the Middle Passage.

Morice was an engaged merchant and shipowner. He made it his business to learn the details of the trade, which he expressed in careful instructions to his team of captains. He explained how trading practices varied from one African port to the next. He knew that staying on the coast too long gathering a cargo risked higher mortality, so he worked out cooperative practices among his ships to evacuate the slaves quickly. He instructed his captains to buy slaves between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, two males to a female, “Good & healthy, and not blind Lame or Blemished.” He no doubt followed the advice of his Jamaican factors about the “Defects to be carefully avoided”:

 
He also explained how the slaves should be fed, how their food should be prepared. He demanded that both sailors and slaves be treated well. He put surgeons and limes (to combat scurvy) on his vessels before it was a common practice to do either. He told his captains to be sure to “get your negroes shaved and made clean to look well and strike a good impression on the Planters and buyers.”

It is impossible to know precisely how much of Morice’s great wealth in estate, land, ships, stocks, and funds derived from the slave trade, although it is possible to know that whatever the profits, he thought them inadequate to sustain his style of life. He took to defrauding the Bank of England (of approximately £29,000 total; almost $7.5 million in 2007 currency) by making up false bills of foreign exchange and to mismanaging funds of which he was trustee. When Morice died in disgrace on November 16, 1731, he was in a far different situation from those who died aboard the
Katherine
or any of his other ships. But the death of this fabled slave trader was horrible in its own way. People whispered, “ ’Tis supposed he took Poyson.”

In April 1769, Henry Laurens, one of early America’s wealthiest merchants, wrote to Captain Hinson Todd, who was seeking a cargo in Jamaica to carry to Charleston, South Carolina. Laurens was an experienced slave trader and he was worried that Todd was not. He therefore cautioned that if the Jamaica merchant “should Ship Negroes on board your Sloop, be very careful to guard against insurrection. Never put your Life in their power a moment. For a moment is sufficient to deprive you of it & make way for the destruction of all your Men & yet you may treat such Negroes with great Humanity.” It was an odd but revealing statement. Laurens instructed the captain to treat with “great humanity” the very people who would, given a split-second chance, annihilate him and his entire crew. Such were the contradictions Laurens faced, and not he alone. He knew the brutal realities of the slave trade and the resistance it always engendered, and yet he tried to put a human face on the situation. Perhaps he feared that he had scared the captain, who might then overreact and damage his dangerous but valuable property.
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Laurens had by this time already built a fortune through booming Atlantic commerce, the slave trade in particular. In 1749, at the youthful age of twenty-five, he had formed a mercantile partnership, Austin & Laurens, which expanded to include a new partner, George Appleby, ten years later. More than half of the slaves imported into the American colonies/United States came through Charleston, which served as a distribution point for the entire lower South. His firm played a leading part, and Laurens himself grew knowledgeable about the various African ethnicities who arrived aboard the slave ships. He expressed a strong preference for Gambian and Gold Coast peoples as plantation workers and a decided distaste for Igbo and Angolans.
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Like Humphry Morice a generation earlier, Laurens organized the importation of about sixty cargoes of slaves. Unlike Morice, who was usually a sole owner and investor in his voyages, Laurens spread the risk by pooling money through partnerships. He wrote, “The Africa Trade is more liable to such Accidents than any other we know of, so it highly concerns such as become adventurers in that branch to fortify themselves against every disappointment that the trade is incident to.” The trade was hazardous, as he cautioned Captain Todd, but it was also lucrative, “gainful,” or, as he once put it, “the most profitable.” By 1760, Laurens was one of the richest merchants not only in South Carolina but throughout the American colonies.

Laurens made a conscious decision to withdraw much of his business from the slave trade around 1763, although he remained involved by taking numerous slave cargoes on consignment, as suggested by his letter to Captain Todd. He had lost both a partner and a wealthy backer, which may have limited his ability to hedge the risk. Or perhaps the wealthy merchant simply no longer wished to be an “adventurer.” In any case he turned his attention—and his slave-trade profits—to becoming a planter, a land speculator, and a politician. He accumulated vast tracts of land and over time he acquired six plantations. Two, Broughton Island and New Hope, were in Georgia, and four were in South Carolina: Wambaw, Wrights Savannah, Mount Tacitus, and Mepkin. The last of these, his main residence, was 3,143 acres, on which several hundred slaves produced rice and other commodities for export, which were then shipped thirty miles down the Cooper River to Charleston and from there pumped into the Atlantic economy.

Laurens turned his economic power into political power. He was elected to office seventeen times, serving in the South Carolina assembly and the Continental Congress, ascending after a short time to the presidency of the latter. He helped to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, which gave the American colonies their independence, and he was selected to represent South Carolina in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (although he declined to serve). This man who had counseled Captain Todd never to put his life under the power of enslaved Africans owed his wealth, standing, and genteel life to his own decision to keep hundreds, indeed thousands, of lives under his own power, as a planter and a slave-trade merchant.

Sharks began to follow slave ships when they reached the Guinea coast. From Senegambia along the Windward, Gold, and Slave coasts, to Kongo and Angola, sailors spotted them when their vessels were anchored or moving slowly, and most clearly in a dead calm.
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What attracted the sharks (as well as other fish) was the human waste, offal, and rubbish that was continually thrown overboard. Like a “greedy robber,” the shark “attends the ships, in expectation of what may drop over-board. A man, who unfortunately falls into the sea at such a time, is sure to perish, without mercy.” Young Samuel Robinson recalled the chill of the voracious predator: “The very sight of him slowly moving round the ship, with his black fin two feet above the water, his broad snout and small eyes, and the altogether villainous look of the fellow, make one shiver, even when at a safe distance.” Sharks were especially dangerous when trade was carried on in boats and canoes, in high surf, between the slavers anchored offshore and the trading forts or villages on land. They swarmed around the smaller craft, occasionally lunging out of the water to bite an oar in half, hoping all the while, as one nervous trader noted, “to see the Bottom of our Canoe turn’d upwards.” Sharks were known as the “dread of sailors.”
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Sharks became an even greater dread as members of the crew began to die. Captains sometimes made efforts to bury deceased sailors ashore, as, for example, in Bonny, where corpses were interred in shallow graves on a sandy point about a quarter mile from the main trading town. But when the tidal river rose, the current sometimes washed the sand away from the bodies, causing a noxious stench and inviting hungry sharks. On most stretches of the coast, slavers had no burial rights, which resulted in what Silas Told saw happen to the cadaver of a former comrade in the harbor of São Tomé around 1735: “the first [shark] seized one of his hindquarters, and wrenched it off at the first shake; a second attacked the hind-quarter, and took that away likewise; when a third furiously attacked the remainder of the body, and greedily devoured the whole thereof.” Crews tried to outsmart the sharks by sewing a dead sailor into his hammock or an old canvas sail and enclosing a cannonball to pull the body to the bottom, hopefully uneaten. This strategy often failed, as a sea surgeon noted: “I have seen [sharks] frequently seize a Corpse, as soon as it was committed to the Sea; tearing and devouring that, and the Hammock that shrouded it, without suffering it once to sink, tho’ a great Weight of Ballast in it.”
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If the shark was the dread of sailors, it was the outright terror of the enslaved. No effort was made to protect or bury the bodies of African captives who died on the slave ships. One commentator after another reiterated what Alexander Falconbridge said of Bonny, where sharks swarmed “in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes as they are thrown overboard.”
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The Dutch merchant Willem Bosman described a feeding frenzy in which four or five sharks consumed a body without leaving a trace. Late-arriving sharks would attack the others with blows so furious as to “make the sea around to tremble.” The destruction of corpses by sharks was a public spectacle and part of the degradation of enslavement.
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