The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  If the diminutive eleven-ton sloop Clarkson found represented one end of the spectrum and the massive Parr the other, what were the most typical vessels in terms of design and size? Slave traders in Britain and America most commonly employed the sloop, schooner, brig, brigantine, snow, bark, and ship (which was both a specific type and a generic label for all vessels). Guineamen tended to be middling in size and carrying capacity: they were smaller than ships employed in the East and West Indies trades, about the same size as those that sailed to the Mediterranean, and larger than the craft involved in Northern European and coastal commerce. Like vessels in almost all trades in the eighteenth century they tended to increase in size over time, although this trend was more apparent in Bristol, London, and especially Liverpool than in the New World. American slave-ship merchants and captains preferred smaller vessels, especially sloops and schooners, which required smaller crews and carried smaller cargoes of enslaved Africans, who could be gathered more quickly on shorter stays on the African coast. British merchants preferred somewhat larger vessels, which required more logistical coordination but also promised greater profits while sharing some of the advantages of the smaller American vessels. Vessels built for one port might not work for others, as Liverpool slave-trade merchants made clear in 1774 when they said of the American slaver the Deborah, “though she was constructed in the usual manner for the Trade from Rhode Island to Africa,” presumably to carry rum, “she would by no means suit for the Trade from Liverpool. ”41

  The smallest vessel Clarkson saw was a sloop, which was not uncommon in the slave trade, especially out of American ports. The sloop usually ranged from 25 to 75 tons, had a single mast, fore-and-aft rigging, and a mainsail attached “to the mast on its foremost edge, and to a long boom below; by which it is occasionally shifted to either quarter.” It was fast in the water and easily maneuvered, with shallow draft and light displacement. It required a modest crew of five to ten. An example of this kind of vessel appeared in the Newport Mercury (Rhode Island) on January 7, 1765. Offered for sale was “a SLOOP of about 50 Tons, compleatly fitted for a Guineaman, with all her Tackle. Likewise a few Negro Boys.”42 Captain William Shearer provided a more detailed description after his sloop the Nancy was seized by a mutinous crew on the river Gambia in April 1753. Built in Connecticut only nine months earlier and measuring 70 tons, the Nancy was square-sterned and deep-waisted, had six air ports cut into each side, carried four small cannon, and was steered by a wheel. Most of the exterior had been painted black. The stern was yellow, matching the curtains in the cabin and a small frieze nearby. Another frieze was painted the color of pearl, while the area around the ports and the roundhouse were streaked with vermilion. Captain Shearer added that the vessel “has no Register or Custom House Papers relating to the Cargo,” perhaps because the crew had destroyed them. His final comment was that the Nancy “is an exceeding good going Vessel, and sails extremely well both upon a Wind and large.” 43

  Two-masted vessels were common in the slave trade. The schooner, which emerged from American shipyards in the early eighteenth century, was exemplified by the Betsey, sold at public auction at Crafts North Wharf, Charleston, South Carolina, in 1796. It was described as “a good double decked vessel, well calculated for a Guineaman, about 90 tons burthen, and may be sent to sea immediately, being in good order.” The brigantine, or brig, and the snow (snauw), which had the same hull form but different rigging, were especially popular in the slave trade, largely because of their intermediate size. They ranged from 30 to 150 tons, with the average slaver running to about 100 tons. Vessels of this size often had more actual deck and aerial space per ton than larger ones, as pointed out by Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick, M.D., in 1797.44

  According to William Falconer, the compiler of one of the greatest maritime dictionaries of the eighteenth century, the ship was “the first rank of vessels which are navigated on the ocean.” It was the largest of the vessels employed in the slave trade, combining good speed and spacious carrying capacity. It had three masts, each of which carried a lower mast, a topmast, and likely a topgallant mast. As a man-of-war, the ship was something of a “moveable fortress or citadel,” carrying batteries of cannon and possessing huge destructive power. As a merchant ship, it was more variable in size, ranging from 100 tons up to a few at 500 tons or more, like the Parr, and capable of carrying seven hundred to eight hundred slaves. The average slave ship was the size of the first one Clarkson had seen, 200 tons like the Fly. Not far from typical was the Eliza, which was to be sold at public auction at the Carolina Coffee House in Charleston on May 7, 1800. Lying at Goyer’s wharf, with “all her appurtenances,” for any prospective buyer to see was the copper-bottomed ship of 230 tons, “fitted for carrying 12 guns, a remarkable fast sailer, well adapted for the West India or African trade, exceedingly well sound in stores, and may be sent to sea at an easy expense.” 45

  As the slave trade grew and changed over the years, the Guineaman evolved. Most slavers were typical sailing ships of their time, and most of them were not built specifically for the trade. Vessels of many sizes and types remained involved in the trade for the full duration of the period from 1700 to 1808, but a more specialized slaving vessel did emerge, especially from the shipyards of Liverpool, after 1750. It was larger and had more special features: air ports, copper bottoms, more room between decks. The ship underwent further modification in the late 1780s, as a result of pressures created by the abolitionist movement and the passage of reform legislation in Parliament to improve the health and treatment of both sailors and slaves. The slave ship, as Malachy Postlethwayt, Joseph Manesty, Abraham Fox, and Thomas Clarkson all from their varying vantage points knew, was one of the most important technologies of the day.

  John Riland: A Slave Ship Described, 1801

  John Riland read the letter from his father with rising horror. The year was 1801, and it was time for the young man to return to the family plantation in Jamaica after his studies at Christ Church, Oxford. His father gave him precise instructions: he would journey from Oxford to Liverpool, where he would take a berth as a passenger aboard a slave ship. From there he would sail to the Windward Coast of Africa, observe the purchase and loading of a “living cargo” of slaves, and travel with them across the Atlantic to Port Royal, Jamaica. Young Riland had been exposed to antislavery ideas and now had serious misgivings about the commerce in human flesh; he had, he noted, no desire to be “imprisoned in a floating lazar-house, with a crowd of diseased and wretched slaves.” He took comfort from a classmate’s comment that recent abolitionist accounts of the Middle Passage and the slave ship had been “villainously exaggerated.”46

  It so happened that the senior Riland, like the son, had begun to entertain doubts about slavery. His Christian conscience apparently told him that the young man who would inherit the family estate should see firsthand what the slave trade was all about. The dutiful son did as the patriarch commanded. He went to Liverpool and sailed as a privileged passenger with a “Captain Y——” aboard his ship, the Liberty. Riland used the experience to write one of the most detailed accounts of a slave ship ever penned.47

  When Riland stepped aboard the vessel he would take to Africa and across the Atlantic, the captain apparently knew that he was no friend of the slave trade. The man in charge of the wooden world was determined, therefore, to present the ship and its practices in the best possible light. He tried, wrote Riland, to “soften the revolting circumstances which he saw would develop themselves on our landing [in Africa]; during also our stay on the coast, and in our subsequent voyage to Jamaica.” He referred to the purchase of more than two hundred captives, the close crowding, the inevitable sickness and death. The captain also undertook to educate his young passenger. He sat with him night after night in the captain’s cabin (where Riland slept and ate), conversing with him by the dim light of swaying lamps, explaining patiently how “the children of Ham” benefited by being sent to American plantations such as the one the senior Rilan
d owned.

  Soon after the captain had secured his “living cargo” on the African coast, he informed Riland that now he would see that “a slave-ship was a very different thing from what it had been represented.” He referred to the abolitionist propaganda that had changed public opinion in England and abroad. Against all that he would show his passenger “the slaves rejoicing in their happy state.” To illustrate the point, he approached the enslaved women on board and said a few words, “to which they replied with three cheers and a loud laugh.” He then went forward on the main deck and “spoke the same words to the men, who made the same reply.” Turning triumphantly to Riland, the captain said, “Now, are you not convinced that Mr. Wilberforce has conceived very improperly of slave-ships?” He referred to the parliamentary leader who had trumpeted the horrors of slave transportation. Riland was not convinced. But he was intrigued, and he was eager to learn whether the captain might be telling the truth. He therefore observed closely “the economy of this slave ship.”48

  In describing a medium-size vessel, apparently a bark or ship of approximately 140 tons, Riland began with the lower deck, the quarters where 240 enslaved people (170 males, 70 females) were incarcerated for sixteen hours a day and sometimes longer. Riland saw the vessel’s dungeonlike qualities. The men, shackled together two by two at the wrists and ankles and roughly 140 in number, were stowed immediately below the main deck in an apartment that extended from the mainmast all the way forward. The distance between the lower deck and the beams above was four and a half feet, so most men would not have been able to stand up straight. Riland did not mention platforms, which were routinely built on the lower deck of slavers, from the edge of the ship inward about six feet, to increase the number of slaves to be carried. The vessel was probably stowed to its maximum number of slaves according to the Dolben Act of 1788, which permitted slave ships to carry five slaves per three tons of carrying capacity.

  On the main deck above, a large wooden grating covered the entrance to the men’s quarters, the open latticework designed to permit a “sufficiency of air” to enter. For the same purpose, two or three small scuttles, holes for admitting air, had been cut in the side of the vessel, although these were not always open. At the rear of the apartment was a “very strong bulk-head,” constructed by the ship’s carpenter in a way that would not obstruct the circulation of air through the lower deck. Still, Riland considered ventilation to be poor down below, which meant that men were subjected to a “most impure and stifling atmosphere.” Worse, they had too little room: the space allotted was “far too small, either for comfort or health.” Riland saw that the men, when brought up from below, looked “quite livid and ghastly as well as gloomy and dejected.” Having been kept in darkness for many hours on end, they would emerge each morning blinking hard against the sunlight.49

  The midsection of the lower deck, from near the mainmast back to the mizzenmast, was the women’s apartment, for the Liberty, unlike most slavers, did not have a separate area for boys. To separate the men and women, therefore, a space of about ten feet was left between the men’s and women’s quarters as a passageway for the crew to get into the hold, where they stowed trading goods, naval stores, and provisions (food and water, probably in oversize “Guinea casks”). Fore and aft, the women’s room was enclosed by sturdy bulkheads. The women, most of whom were not in irons, had more room and freedom of movement than the men, as only about forty-five of them slept here. The grating lay, boxlike, about three feet above the main deck and “admitted a good deal of air,” thought Riland. Those down below might have begged to differ. 50

  Two additional apartments were created beneath the quarterdeck, which was raised about seven feet above the main deck and extended to the stern of the vessel. The aftermost of these was the cabin, where hung the cots of the captain and Riland himself. But even these two most privileged people shared their sleeping space as every night twenty-five little African girls gathered to sleep beneath them. The captain warned his cabinmate that “the smell would be unpleasant for a few days,” but reassured him that “when we got into the trade winds it would no longer be perceived.” Riland’s gentlemanly sensibilities apparently never recovered, for he later wrote, “During the night I hung over a crowd of slaves huddled together on the floor, whose stench at times was almost beyond endurance.”

  The situation was similar in the other, adjacent room, which opened up onto the main deck. Here slept the surgeon and first mate, who also shared the space: beneath them each night lay twenty-nine boys. Other spaces on the main deck were reserved for the sick, especially those with dysentery, who were “kept separate from the others.” Sick men were placed in the longboat, which had a tarpaulin thrown over it as an awning; sick women went under the half deck. Very little room was left for the sailors, who hung their hammocks under the longboat, near the sick, hoping that the awning would protect them from the elements, especially nightly dews on the African coast.

  Riland emphasized another feature that was literally central to the social organization of the main deck—the barricado, a strong wooden barrier ten feet high that bisected the ship near the mainmast and extended about two feet over each side of the vessel. This structure, built to turn any vessel into a slaver, separated the bonded men from the women and served as a defensive barrier behind which the crew could retreat (to the women’s side) in moments of slave insurrection, but it was also a military installation of sorts from which the crew guarded and controlled the enslaved people on board. Built into the barricade, noted Riland, was a small door, through which might pass only one person at a time, slowly. Whenever the men slaves were on the main deck, two armed sentinels protected the door while “four more were placed, with loaded blunderbusses in their hands, on top of the barricade, above the head of the slaves: and two cannons, loaded with small shot, were pointed toward the main-deck through holes cut in the barricade to receive them.” The threat of insurrection was ever present. The captain assured a nervous Riland that he “kept such a guard on the slaves as would baffle all their efforts, should they attempt to rise.” They had already tried once while on the coast of Africa and failed. When the slaves were brought above, the main deck became a closely guarded prison yard.

  Riland noted the ship’s longboat, where the sick men slaves were isolated, but he did not explain its significance to the ship and its business. This strong vessel, up to thirty feet in length, with a mast and often a swivel cannon, could be sailed or rowed and was capable of carrying a sizable burden. It could even be used to tow the ship when becalmed. Slavers also usually carried a second small craft called a yawl, which had a sail but was more commonly rowed by four to six sailors. These two vessels were critical to a slave ship, as almost all trading on the African coast was done at anchor, requiring an endless traffic back and forth to the shore, carrying manufactured goods in one direction and the enslaved in the other (in African canoes as well). Both boats usually had shallow hulls for easy beaching and for stability when carrying valuable cargo.51

  Other features of the slave ship, on which Riland did not remark, were nonetheless important. The gun room, usually near the captain’s cabin (as far away as possible from the apartment of the enslaved men), would have been presided over by the vessel’s gunner and closely guarded. Special large iron or copper boilers would have been part of the cook’s domain in the galley, so he could prepare food for some 270 people, both the enslaved and the crew. Netting, a fencelike assemblage of ropes, would be stretched by the crew around the ship to prevent slaves from jumping overboard.52

  Because slave ships like the Liberty spent long periods of time on the coast of Africa gathering their human cargoes, they usually had another special feature, that is, copper-sheathed hulls, to protect them against boring tropical worms, or molluscs, a prime example of which was Teredo navalis, the shipworm. By 1800, copper sheathing was common, even though it was a relatively recent technical development. Early in the eighteenth century, the hulls of vessels bound to
tropical waters were sheathed, usually with an extra layer of deal board, about half an inch in thickness, tacked to the hull (as Manesty had ordered). Beginning in 1761, the British Royal Navy, which patrolled regularly in the tropics, experimented in copper sheathing, with success. Within a few years, slavers were being sheathed, although experimentation continued, and by the 1780s the practice had become common, especially on larger vessels.53 The 350-ton Triumph, formerly a slaver called the Nelly, was built in Liverpool and announced for sale by auction in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1809 as “coppered to the bends” and “copper fastened.”54 In the last quarter century of the slave trade, from 1783 to 1808, one of the features most commonly emphasized in the sale of any given slave ship was its copper bottom.55

  By the time the Liberty sailed in 1801, some of the larger slave ships used windsails to enhance ventilation and improve the health of the enslaved belowdecks. The windsail was a funnel tube, made of canvas and open at the top, hooped at various descending sections, and attached to the hatches to “convey a stream of fresh air downward into the lower apartments of a ship.” The windsail had been devised for use on men-of-war, to preserve the health of the sailors, and had now been applied to the slave trade, although inconsistently. One observer noted a few years earlier that only one in twenty slavers had windsails, and the Liberty was almost certainly among the vast majority without.56