The Slave Ship (8 page)

Postlethwayt mounted his defense of what he politely called the “Africa Trade” because he knew that some people, even as early as the 1740s, had already turned against what they angrily denounced as the “slave trade”: “Many are prepossessed against this Trade, thinking it a
barbarous, inhuman
, and
unlawful Traffic for a Christian Country to trade in Blacks
.” But, like all slave traders, he had convinced himself that Africans would be better off “living in a civilized Christian Country” than among “Savages.” In any case, humanitarian concerns were trumped by national economic and military interest: the slave trade represented “an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation.” By promoting the Africa trade, Parliament would promote “
the Happiness and Prosperity of the Kingdom in General.
” Britain’s Atlantic system depended on the resources, labor, and wealth of Africa and America. In so saying he anticipated William Blake’s famous illustration half a century later,
Europe Supported by Africa & America.
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Postlethwayt’s view of a “triangular trade,” in which the ships proceeded from a European (or American) port with a cargo of manufactured goods to West Africa, where they traded for slaves, to America, where they traded for plantation produce such as sugar, tobacco, or rice, became the dominant way of viewing the slave trade for the next two and a half centuries. Recently scholars have discovered that the trade was not strictly triangular, because many slave ships could not get a return cargo in the West Indies or North America. Yet the notion of a triangular trade remains valuable, because it permits a visualization of the three essential corners and components of the trade—British or American capital and manufactures, West African labor power, and American commodities (sometimes raw materials).

By the time Postlethwayt wrote, around 4 million Africans had already been delivered by slave ships to ports of the western Atlantic. Like almost all other European maritime states, Britain played an important role in the early phases of the slave trade, chartering and subsidizing Postlethwayt’s own employer, the Royal African Company, a trading monopoly, in 1672. Slave trading was so expensive and demanded such a concentration of resources that private capital alone could not originally finance it. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, the so-called free traders finally triumphed over the regulated monopolies, but only after the state had helped to build the infrastructure for the trade. Indeed this is what moved Postlethwayt to petition for compensation and support in a deregulated age.
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British and American merchants took their chances in a trade that had high entry costs and enormous risks. In earlier days small investors, the middling sort, including artisans, might make money by buying a partial share or putting a little cargo in a Guinea ship, but by the eighteenth century the trade was firmly in the hands of merchants who had huge sums of capital and in most cases carefully acquired experience and knowledge of the trade. As John Lord Sheffield wrote in 1790, this meant that the trade was carried on by “men of capital, and transient adventurers will be discouraged from engaging in it.” Profits for these big merchants could be extraordinary, as much as 100 percent on investment if everything went right, but the losses could also be immense, because of the dangers of disease, insurrection, shipwreck, and capture
by enemy privateers. The average rate of profit for slave-trade investors in the eighteenth century was 9 to 10 percent, which was considerable but not excessive by the standards of the day. Postlethwayt had such profits and a larger imperial system in mind when he noted that Britain, and indeed all the maritime powers of Europe, was raising “a magnificent Superstructure of
American Commerce and Naval Power
on an
African Foundation
.”
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Liverpool merchant Joseph Manesty wanted two ships “for the Affrica trade,” and he knew just how he wanted them built. He wrote to John Bannister of Newport, Rhode Island, on August 2, 1745, to place a transatlantic order. It was a perilous moment for traders, as England was at war with both France and Spain, and indeed Manesty had only months before lost a new slave ship, the aptly named
Chance,
to a French privateer. Still the profits of the trade beckoned, and men like Manesty carried a surging Liverpool past London and Bristol as the leading slave-trading port in the British Atlantic.
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Manesty traded vigorously to West Africa between 1745 and 1758, as primary owner of at least nine vessels (and a minority owner of several others) and as the employer of Captain John Newton.
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He wrote to Bannister that “no trade [was] push’d with so much spirit as the Affrican and with great Reason”—high profits!—but added that “ships are so scarce here that none is to be had at any rate or I should have engaged one this spring.”
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Manesty’s first instruction was that his prison ships were to be built of “the best white Oak Timber.” The woodlands of New England were rich in high-quality, relatively rot-resistant white oak, and Manesty wanted to use it. He also demanded careful attention to the quality of the masts. He wrote five weeks later, “as both Ships are design’d for Guinea a great regard must be had to the goodness of their Masts on the whole.” A broken mast was not easily replaced on the coast of Africa and could spell ruin for a voyage.
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The vessels, Manesty wrote in fine detail, were to be “Square stern’d,” 58 feet in length, 22 feet in width, and 10 feet deep in the hold, with a height of “5 feet twixt Decks” for the incarceration of the enslaved. The main mast was to be 60 feet long, the main yard 44 feet, the main topmast 30 feet; “all the other Masts and Yards in proportion.” Vessels in the slave trade needed to be sturdy and durable, so Manesty insisted that both vessels be built with heavy “2½ and 3 Inch plank with good substantial bends or Whales” (wales, thick wooden joints bolted on the side of the vessel). He wanted the bulkheads to be a “Solid beam,” and he demanded that “the Gun Wall on the Main Deck [be] 14 Inches Solid.” The vessels would be well armed to defend themselves against privateers, although the number of cannon was not specified. In a postscript to the letter, Manesty added, “2 Gun Ports Stern.”
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Manesty requested that the hulls of the slavers be “middling,” that is, “sharp” enough for speed, to reduce the duration of the Middle Passage and hence mortality among the enslaved, and “full” enough for stability and carrying capacity, for armaments and the sometimes-bulky commodities to be carried to the African coast and from American plantations back to Europe. He wanted a full-bodied vessel that would not pitch a lot, to reduce the effects of excessive motion on the human cargo. He wanted the sides of the vessels flared “for the more commodious stowing [of] Negroes twixt Decks.” Another characteristic he desired was “rounding in the Top as the other Decks, for Messing [feeding] Negroes on lower deck laid fore and aft.” The ribs or timbers were to be “left high enough to Support Rails all round the Vessel,” probably in part to facilitate the addition of netting designed to prevent suicidal slaves from jumping overboard. Finally he wanted sheathing to protect against the worms that would bore through the hulls in Africa’s tropical waters. He ordered an extra lining of deal boards coated, as was standard, with tar and horsehair, to be tacked on while the vessels were still in the stocks. Vessels would later be sheathed in copper.
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Probably because of the war and the dangers of capture, Manesty wrote that he “wou’d have as little money laid out on the Vessels as possible.” He wanted “Plain sterns,” no quarter windows, and little or no work to be done by joiners in the captain’s cabin. He wanted everything done in a “frugal Suitable manner.” It is not known how much money Manesty paid for the vessels, but Elizabeth Donnan notes that in 1747 a Rhode Island vessel could be bought at £24 old tenor per ton.
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By 1752 the price had risen to £27 per ton for a sloop, £34 per ton for a “double decker.” Prices were about one-fifth less in Swansea, in nearby Massachusetts, where the vessel might have been built. Assuming that seven pounds old tenor equaled one pound sterling, and estimating that Manesty’s two-deck vessels were to be around a hundred tons carrying capacity, each would have cost a little over £500 (about $130,000 in 2007). Larger ships would run to £700 ($182,000) and some to well over £1,000 ($260,000), but ship costs were nonetheless modest in relation to the value of the cargoes to be shipped in them.
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Manesty realized that certain essential items for the vessel were available more cheaply in Liverpool, so he arranged to send over “Cordage, Sails, Anchors, Nails” as well as a trading cargo. By June he had already dispatched some of the materials—“Sheating Nails and single Spikes”—and he hoped that the carpenters who were working on the vessels might be willing “to take Goods on acco’t of these Vessels,” no doubt because wages in the American colonies were relatively high. Manesty knew that it would take the shipwright about a year to finish the vessels, which meant launchings in August 1746. He would send a master for the first vessel in April of that year, to oversee the finishing details and to sail the vessel to Africa as soon as it was ready. In his eagerness to trade for slaves, he added, “shou’d it happen that a Vessel of or near the Dimentions of one of these order’d can be immediately bought Cheap with you or of any other size suitable for Affrica I shou’d choose to do it and build only one if that can be done.”
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Manesty could have had his slave ships built in a variety of places, or he could simply have bought a vessel or two that were built for other trades and had them converted for slaving. This latter would have been the preferred solution for most merchants, as the vast majority of vessels employed in the slave trade had not been built specifically for it. The types detailed below—sloops, schooners, brigs, snows, and ships—were all more or less standardized by the 1720s. Hull form, sail, and rigging would change relatively little over the next hundred years, although sharper, faster ships came to be preferred in the early nineteenth century.
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Had Manesty ordered his vessels a few years earlier, he might have gone to London or Bristol, the dominant slaving ports of the early eighteenth century. But by the time he wrote to Bannister, Liverpool was eclipsing both in the slave trade and in the building of slave ships. As timber grew scarce, some merchants turned to shipbuilders in the American colonies, where prices were lower. Increasingly, the ships that went into the African trade were, as English merchants described them, “plantation-built.” They were constructed in New England, especially in Rhode Island and Massachusetts; in the upper South, Maryland and Virginia; and, after the 1760s, in the lower South, primarily South Carolina. Especially popular among slave-ship merchants was the Bermuda sloop, built with native red cedar that was light, strong, and rot-resistant. As the oak forests of northeastern America were slowly depleted over the course of the eighteenth century and the cost of bringing timber to the coast increased, a preferred source became southern pine, which meant that much of the wood for the slavers was hewn by slaves, many of whom had crossed the Atlantic on slave ships. Liverpool shipbuilders even imported pine from the slave-based colonies of Virginia and Carolina with which to build Guineamen in their own yards. This suggests one of the ways in which the slave trade helped to reproduce itself on an international scale. The ships brought the laborers and the laborers cut the wood to make more ships.
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The shipbuilders of Liverpool, soon to be the capital of the slave trade, began to custom-build slave ships around 1750. Shipbuilding had long been central to the commercial prosperity of the city, and as the city’s merchants invested more and more heavily in the trade to Africa, they ordered ships from local builders. In 1792 there were nine yards for the construction of ships, another three for boats. Most ships were built in “the pool,” the tidal inlet on the river Mersey. In the last two decades before abolition (1787-1808) Liverpool shipwrights built 469 vessels, on average 21 per year. (The shipbuilding firm that undoubtedly had the best—and, to merchants, most soothing—name was Humble and Hurry, named for shipwrights Michael Humble and William Hurry.) By the 1780s the abolitionist movement had managed to politicize shipbuilding in the slave trader’s strongest base. William Rathbone, a leading Quaker merchant, refused to sell timber to any yard that made slavers. Nonetheless slave ships continued to be launched at Liverpool right up to the moment of abolition, after which they had to be converted to other purposes.
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