36
Interview of Mr. Janverin,
Substance,
249.
37
Testimony of Arnold,
HCSP,
69:126; Testimony of Claxton,
HCSP,
82:36.
38
Snelgrave,
A New Account,
introduction;
Three Years Adventures,
131-32; Testimony of Robert Heatley, 1789,
HCSP,
69:123.
39
Riland,
Memoirs of a West-India Planter,
58-59; Thomas Clarkson to Comte de Mirabeau, November 8, 1789, ff. 1-2, Papers of Thomas Clarkson, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. See also Falconbridge,
An Account of the Slave Trade,
30; Testimony of Falconbridge, 1790,
HCSP,
72:307; Testimony of Ellison,
HCSP,
73:376; Testimony of James Towne, 1791,
HCSP,
82:22; Testimony of Claxton,
HCSP,
82:36.
40
Testimony of David Henderson, 1789,
HCSP,
69:139 ; Testimony of Arnold,
HCSP,
69:127.
41
Antonio T. Bly, “Crossing the Lake of Fire: Slave Resistance During the Middle Passage, 1720-1842,”
Journal of Negro History
83 (1998), 178-86; Richard Rathbone, “Resistance to Enslavement in West Africa,” in
De la traite a l’esclavage: actes du colloque international sur la traite des noirs,
ed. Serge Daget (Nantes, 1988), 173-84.
42
Riland,
Memoirs of a West-India Planter,
52; Testimony of James Morley, 1790,
HCSP,
73:160-61.
43
Testimony of Isaac Parker, 1790,
HCSP,
73:124-25, 130;
TSTD,
#91135.
44
Edward Fentiman v. James Kettle
(1730), HCA 24/136;
TSTD,
#76618. For other evidence that the enslaved would stop eating if they were mistreated, see Testimony of James Towne, 1791,
HCSP,
82:21. For an instance in which the enslaved resorted to a collective—and successful—hunger strike in support of a mistreated African translator aboard their ship, see “The Deposition of John Dawson, Mate of the Snow
Rainbow,
” 1758, in Donnan IV, 371-72.
45
Aubrey,
The Sea-Surgeon,
128. For another judgment that violence did not work against the will of the enslaved, see Interview of Janverin,
Substance,
249.
46
Snelgrave,
A New Account,
190; “Anecdote IX” (author unnamed), in
Substance,
315-16;
Jones v. Small,
Law Report, the
Times,
July 1, 1785.
47
“Voyage to Guinea,” Add. Ms. 39946, f. 8 (
TSTD,
#75489);
Memoirs of Crow,
44; James Hogg to Humphry Morice, March 6, 1732, Humphry Morice Papers, Bank of England Archives, London.
48
Connecticut Journal,
February 2, 1786; Testimony of Falconbridge, 1790,
HCSP,
72:307-8; “Extract from a Letter on Board the Prince of Orange,” April 7, 1737,
Boston News-Letter,
September 15, 1737.
49
Testimony of Isaac Wilson, 1790,
HCSP,
72:281; Testimony of Claxton,
HCSP,
82:35-36;
Pennsylvania Gazette,
May 21, 1788 (article by Gandy, but not identified as such). Clarkson retold his story in a letter to Mirabeau, December 9, 1789, Papers of Clarkson, Huntington Library. On the
Zong,
see Granville Sharp to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, London, July 2, 1783, “Documents Related to the Case of the
Zong
of 1783,” Manuscripts Department, REC/19, f. 96, NMM.
50
Testimony of Wilson and Falconbridge, both in
HCSP,
72:279, 300; Log of the Brig
Ranger,
Captain John Corran, Master, 1789-1790, 387 MD 56, LRO; [John Wells], “Journal of a Voyage to the Coast of Guinea, 1802,” Add. Ms. 3,871, f. 15, Cambridge University Library; Testimony of Mr. Thompson,
Substance,
207.
51
Extract of a letter to Mr. Thomas Gatherer, in Lombard Street; dated Fort-James, River Gambia, April 12, 1773,
Newport Mercury,
December 27, 1773;
Independent Journal,
April 29, 1786. For an example of a similar explosion on a French slave ship, see
Newport Mercury,
March 3, 1792. For other examples of mass suicides after failed insurrections, see
Newport Mercury,
November 25, 1765;
Connecticut Journal,
January 1, 1768; “The Log of the
Unity
, 1769-1771,” Earle Family Papers, D/EARLE/1/4, MMM;
Providence Gazette; and Country Journal,
September 10, 1791.
52
See citations in note 25 above.
53
For the legal ruling, see
Jones v. Small,
Law Report, the
Times,
July 1, 1785. Like other forms of resistance, the action of jumping overboard circulated from the Atlantic back to the metropolis, where various writers immortalized the decision of death before dishonorable slavery in poetry. A well-known abolitionist poem, “The Negroe’s Complaint,” jointly but anonymously written by Liverpool patricians William Roscoe and Dr. James Currie, said of African protagonist Maratan, “Tomorrow the white-man in vain / Shall proudly account me his slave! / My shackles, I plunge in the main—/ And rush to the realms of the brave.” See Dr. James Currie to Admiral Sir Graham Moore, 16 March 1788, 920 CUR 106, Papers of Dr. James Currie, LRO. The poem was originally published in the
World
and was later republished in the United States. See the
Federal Gazette, and Philadelphia Evening Post,
April 8, 1790. The same conceit appears in Roscoe’s
The Wrongs of Africa
(London, 1788). See James G. Basker,
Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660
-
1810
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).
54
Testimony of Ellison,
HCSP,
73:374. The classic article on this subject is Lorenzo Greene, “Mutiny on the Slave Ships,”
Phylon
5 (1944), 346-54. See also the valuable work by Eric Robert Taylor,
If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).
55
Testimony of Arnold,
HCSP,
69:130. Snelgrave (
A New Account,
167) was surprised to learn that a mere twenty men had made an insurrection aboard the
Eagle Galley
in 1704. Indeed the number was sometimes smaller. The rebels also wagered wrong in some instances, as others did not join them once the insurrection was under way.
56
The
Times,
July 1, 1785; “Log of the
Unity,
” Earle Family Papers, D/EARLE/1/4;
Connecticut Journal,
February 2,1786; Testimony of Robert Hume, 1799,
HLSP,
3:110; Testimony of Trotter,
HCSP,
73:87; Atkins,
A Voyage to Guinea,
72-73. For boys, see Extract of a letter to Mr. Thomas Gatherer, April 12, 1773,
Newport Mercury,
December 27, 1773. See also Uya, “The Middle Passage and Personality Change,” 91.
57
Three Years Adventures,
96; Snelgrave,
A New Account,
77; Testimony of Fountain,
HCSP,
68:273; Thornton,
Warfare in Atlantic Africa,
140.
58
Pennsylvania Gazette,
May 16, 1754. For other instances in which the enslaved used European weapons in the course of insurrection, see Lieutenant Governor Thomas Handasyd to the Board of Trade and Plantations, from Jamaica, October 5, 1703, Donnan II, 4;
Boston News-Letter,
May 6, 1731 (also
Boston Gazette,
April 26, 1731);
Bath Journal,
December 18, 1749;
Boston Gazette,
October 4, 1756;
Pennsylvania Gazette,
May 31, 1764;
New London Gazette,
December 18, 1772;
Newport Mercury,
December 27, 1773; William Fairfield to Rebecca Fairfield, Cayenne, April 23, 1789, Donnan III: 83;
Providence Gazette; and Country Journal,
September 10, 1791;
Massachusetts Spy: Or, the Worcester Gazette,
April 4, 1798;
Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser,
July 30, 1800;
Newburyport Herald,
March 22, 1808. Inikori estimates that 150,000 to 200,000 guns were imported per year into West Africa between 1750 and 1807, while Richards puts the number at 283,000 to 394,000. See Inikori, “The Import of Firearms into West Africa 1750-1807,” 348, and Richards, “The Import of Firearms into West Africa in the Eighteenth Century,” 43-44.
59
Smith,
A New Voyage to Guinea,
28. On the Coromantee, see Trotter,
Observations on the Scurvy,
23; Falconbridge,
An Account of the Slave Trade,
70. See also Snelgrave,
A
New Account,
168-69, 177-78. On the Ibibio, see
Memoirs of Crow,
98-99, 200-1. David Richardson has suggested that the enslaved from the Senegambian region (along with those from Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast) were the most rebellious, with Gold Coast captives not far behind. See his “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,”
William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd ser., 58 (2001), 76-77.
60
Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal,
March 24, 1753.
61
Smallwood,
Saltwater Slavery,
123.
62
Newburyport Herald,
December 4, 1801.
63
Boston Post Boy,
August 13, 1750.
64
Pennsylvania Gazette
, November 9, 1732; Atkins,
A Voyage to Guinea,
175-76; see also
Three Years Adventures,
103.
65
Boston News-Letter,
September 18, 1729;
TSTD,
#77058;
Bath Journal
, December 18, 1749;
TSTD,
#90233.
66
American Mercury,
January 31, 1785.
67
Testimony of Ellison,
HCSP,
73:375; Snelgrave,
A New Account,
167, 173; “Anecdote I” (author unnamed), in
Substance,
311; Testimony of Arnold,
HCSP,
69:134.
68
Testimony of Towne, 1791,
HCSP,
82:21; Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts,” 82-90.
69
Boston News-Letter,
September 9, 1731; Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts,” 74-75.
70
Thomas Clarkson,
An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly The African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, which was honoured with the First Prize in the University of Cambridge for the Year 1785, with Additions
(London, 1786; rpt. Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969), 88-89.
71
Newburyport Herald,
December 4, 1801; Clarkson to Mirabeau, December 9, 1789, ff. 1-2, Papers of Clarkson, Huntington Library.
72
Piersen, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs,” 147-59.
73
“Anonymous Account,” Add. Ms. 59777B, ff. 40-41v; Testimony of John Douglas, 1791,
HCSP,
82:125; Michael Mullin,
Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and British Caribbean, 1736
-
1831
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 66-69; Smallwood,
Saltwater Slavery,
147. See also the interesting observations by Elisabeth Isichei in “Transformations: Enslavement and the Middle Passage in African American Memory,” in her
Voices of the Poor in Africa
(Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 77-85.
74
“Voyage to Guinea,” Add. Ms. 39946, ff. 9-10; Testimony of Millar,
HCSP,
73:394; Hawkins,
A History of a Voyage to the Coast of Africa,
108; Clarkson,
An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species,
143-44. For other references to the belief, see the
Times,
February 2, 1790; Atkins,
A Voyage to Guinea,
175-76.
75
“Anonymous Account,” Add. Ms. 59777B, ff. 40-41v.
76
Testimony of Claxton, 1791,
HCSP,
82:35; Snelgrave,
A New Account,
183-84;
Memoirs of Crow,
26. Snelgrave added that neither the man who was executed nor any of the other Coromantee (from the Gold Coast) believed in the return after death but that “many I had on board from other Countries had that Opinion.”
77
Clarkson to Mirabeau, December 9, 1789, f. 1, Papers of Clarkson, Huntington Library.
78
Thornton,
Africa and Africans,
195.
79
Three Years Adventures,
80-82; Testimony of William James,
HCSP,
69:49; Testimony of Wilson,
HCSP,
72:281-82; Testimony of Arnold,
HCSP,
69, 50, 137-38; Testimony of Trotter,
HCSP,
73:97, 99-100. For a case of a woman who exited a slave ship and found her husband, from whom she had been torn two years earlier, see the
Sun,
November 18, 1805.
80
Matthews,
A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone,
153; Interview of Bowen,
Substance,
230. Note John Thornton’s comment about the widespread West African cultural skill in incorporating “foreigners”:
Africa and Africans,
218.
81
Winterbottom,
An Account of the Native Africans,
1:212;
Three Years Adventures,
126. Winterbottom also relayed a story from a friend in Jamaica who met an African man who was going home late one evening, “carrying a box upon his head.” In it was “the heart of a
ship-mate,
which he was carrying to an estate a few miles off, where a number of the friends of the deceased lived, in order that they might
cry
over it. He said he had already cried over the body the night before in committing it to the ground, and now he meant to join his friends, who were more remote, in the same ceremony” (1:212-13). See also Uya, “The Middle Passage and Personality Change,” 93. I would like to thank my colleagues Jerome Branche and Shelome Gooden for valuable discussion of this theme.