The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Riland also noted the chains used to bind the men slaves aboard the Liberty, and here he touched upon another essential part of a prison ship: the hardware of bondage. These would have included manacles and shackles, neck irons, chains of various kinds, and perhaps a branding iron. Many slave ships carried thumbscrews, a medieval instrument of torture in which the thumbs of a rebellious slave would be inserted into a viselike contraption and slowly crushed, sometimes to force a confession. A sale on board the slave ship John announced by the Connecticut Centinel on August 2, 1804, featured “300 pair of well made Shackles” and “150 Iron Collars together with a number of Ring-Bolts Chains &c. In suitable order for the confinement of slaves.”57

  These distinctive characteristics made Guineamen easy to identify after a catastrophe, when, for example, a brig without masts was “driven ashore upon a reef ” in Grand Caicos in the Bahama Islands in 1790. It was known to be “an old Guineaman, from the number of handcuffs found in her.”58 A few years later, in 1800, Captain Dalton of the Mary-Ann found another ghost ship on the coast of Florida. It was a large vessel lying on its side, without sails, full of water, with no crew members in sight. It turned out to be the Greyhound, of Port-land, Maine, recognizable to the captain as a slaver “by the gratings fore and aft.” John Riland suffered no such disaster, but he was well aware that he had boarded a peculiar sort of machine. Its capacity to incarcerate and transport African bodies had helped to bring into existence a new Atlantic world of labor, plantations, trade, empire, and capitalism.59

  CHAPTER 3

  African Paths to the Middle Passage

  In late 1794, about a hundred miles up the Rio Pongas from the Windward Coast, two bands of hunters from rival Gola and Ibau kingdoms ventured into disputed territory in pursuit of game. An Ibau man speared the animal, or so one of his countrymen later insisted, but the Gola claimed the prize as rightfully their own. A fray ensued, in which a Gola man was killed and several Ibau severely wounded. The Gola took flight, and the Ibau brought the game home in triumph. But soon the outraged king of Gola raised an army and invaded the nearest Ibau lands, destroying a couple of villages and taking prisoners whom he promptly sold as slaves. Dizzy with success, he pressed on to his enemy’s capital, Quappa, hoping to subjugate the entire kingdom. After several furious battles and at last a tactical miscalculation that allowed his warriors to be trapped, the king retreated and escaped but lost seven hundred of his best fighters to the Ibau. Once the captives were safely bound and confined, the king of the Ibau sent word down the rivers to the coast that he wished to trade with the “Sea Countries.” He found a taker when the slave ship Charleston arrived on the coast. Captain James Connolly sent Joseph Hawkins with an African guide through the dense forest to purchase one hundred Gola warriors and march them to the coast.1

  Meanwhile the “greatest warriors” of the Gola lay naked in their place of confinement, “bound indiscriminately together by the hands and legs, the cords being fastened to the ground by stakes.” When Hawkins arrived, he was instructed by the king of the Ibau to select the ones he wanted. A troop of Ibau warriors would drive the coffle to the sea. They secured the prisoners to poles in rows, four feet apart, each with a wicker bandage around the neck, elbows pinioned back. As they commenced their march to the waterside, the countenances of the Gola prisoners turned to “sullen melancholy.” They stopped, turned around, and looked back, their “eyes flowing with tears.”2

  After an uneventful six-day march, the coffle came to the river’s edge and to a momentous transition—from land to water, from African to European ownership, from one technology of control to another. Waiting for them with iron manacles and shackles were the sailors of the Charleston, who had come upriver in a small shallop, then rowed two boats to the riverbank to take the prisoners. The prisoners’ prospects for escape seemed to be at an end, all hopes dashed. The captives began to wail. The “change from the cordage to iron fetters,” wrote Hawkins, “rent their hopes and hearts together.”

  As the Gola were moved from the boats to the shallop, two of them jumped overboard. One was captured by a sailor in a small boat astern, the other hit over the head with an oar. The rest, four of them unfettered on deck and others locked below, “set up a scream.” Those free on the main deck tried to throw two of the sailors overboard, but the scream alerted the rest of the crew, who rushed on deck with guns and bayonets. Meanwhile five of the slaves in irons had managed to get loose and were struggling mightily to free the others. Those locked below reached up through the gratings, grabbing the legs of the sailors, encouraging their companions, and “shouting whenever those above did any thing that appeared likely to overcome one or [the] other of us.” Eventually the sailors prevailed, with considerable bloodshed on both sides. One of the enslaved was killed, and nine were wounded. The rest were locked in double irons. Five sailors plus Hawkins (who lost a little finger) were injured, none of them mortally. The slaves were soon loaded from the shallop onto the Charleston, where they joined four hundred others, all bound for South Carolina. Little could the Gola warriors have known that a conflict over hunting rights could land them five thousand miles away, in Charleston, South Carolina. Now they had a different war to fight.3

  For the Gola captives, like millions of others, enslavement began in the interior of Africa with separation from family, land, and place. Most people who ended up on slave ships were enslaved by force, against their wills, most commonly in one or another kind of “war,” in capture, or through judicial punishments in their society of origin, as a sentence for a crime committed. A long Middle Passage thus contained two stages, as the case of the Gola reveals: the first was in Africa, a march on land and often travel by internal waterway (by shallop in this instance, but more commonly canoe) to the coast and the slave ship. Slave traders called this a “path,” a reliable route for the movement of labor power out of Africa into the global economy. The second stage took place on the slaving vessel, in an oceanic Middle Passage from an African port to an American one. Together they connected expropriation on one side of the Atlantic to exploitation on the other. Paths and experiences varied from region to region in Africa, depending on the kinds of societies from which both slaves and slave traders came. Who the enslaved were, where they came from, and how they got to the slave ship would shape not only how they would respond once they got there but how those who ran the slave ships would attempt to control them. For almost all captives, save a few who might return as sailors, the passage out of Africa would be permanent. When the enslaved reached the ship, they reached the point of no return.4

  The Slave Trade in Africa

  In 1700, West and West-Central Africa had a population of about 25 million people, who lived in a complex range of kin-ordered and tributary societies along four thousand miles of coastline that stretched from Senegambia to Angola. The smallest were stateless, many more were of modest size but possessed some degree of internal stratification, and a few were big, class-based states that controlled extensive territory, lucrative trade, and mass armies. The last type frequently

  dominated the others, forcing them to pay tribute and to defer in matters of commerce and war, while allowing them to retain local autonomy and control of land and labor.5

  Slavery was an ancient and widely accepted institution throughout the larger societies of the region, usually reserved for war captives and criminals. Slave trading had gone on for centuries. From the seventh century to the nineteenth, more than nine million souls were carried northward in the trans-Saharan trade organized by Arab merchants in North Africa and their Islamic allies. These slaves were traded in highly developed commercial markets. In many areas, when European slave traders arrived on the coast, they simply entered preexisting circuits of exchange and did not immediately alter them.6

  Yet as the historian Walter Rodney has pointed out, slaveholding and class differentiation developed most rapidly in those areas of West Africa where the Atlantic trade was most intensive. Partly this was becaus
e slave-ship captains wanted to deal with ruling groups and strong leaders, people who could command labor resources and deliver the “goods,” and partly because wealth and powerful technologies (especially guns) accrued to these same people during the course of the trade. Smaller, more egalitarian societies could and did in some regions engage in the slave trade, but they were more likely to sell agricultural products for provisions. Larger groups who purchased guns and gunpowder often grew into stronger, centralized, militaristic states (Asante, Dahomey, Oyo, the Niger city-states, and Kongo, for example), using their firearms to subdue their neighbors, which of course produced the next coffle of slaves to be traded for the next crate of muskets. In the areas where slave trading was most extensive, a new division of labor grew up around slave catching, maintenance, and transport. Merchants became powerful as a class, controlling customs, taxes, prices, and the flow of captives. The number of slaves held and the importance of slavery as an institution in African societies expanded with the Atlantic slave trade.7

  By the eighteenth century, the Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French, and English all had their spheres of influence and preferred ports of trade, but it was usually not in the interest of African merchants to let any European nation have a monopoly, even though they did make deals with different national groups from time to time. The trade on the African coast therefore remained relatively open and competitive, as British traders learned after the American Revolution when African merchants at Anomabu declared their right to continue to trade with the newly independent Americans. The trade also featured ebbs and flows—increases after major internal wars, decreases after a region’s supply of slaves had been exhausted by intensive trading.8

  The slave trade varied by region and trading partner, with two basic arrangements: in the “fort trade,” ship captains bought slaves from other Europeans who resided in places like Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast (presently Ghana); in the “boat trade,” carried out in the many areas where there were no forts, business was often conducted on the main deck of the slave ship after canoes, longboats, and yawls had ferried cargo to and from shore. This commerce was sometimes called the “black trade” because it was controlled largely by African merchants, some as representatives of big trading states, others on behalf of middling or even smaller groups, from region to region. Sometimes the two types of trade existed side by side.

  Senegambia

  The man the Malinke traders brought aboard was tall, five feet ten inches, and thin, in his late twenties, his head and beard close-shaved like a prisoner of war. Captain Stephen Pike of the Arabella bought him, but apparently without looking at his hands—to see if they were hard and rough, accustomed to labor. As it happened, they were not. The man’s name was Hyuba, Boon Salumena, Boon Hibrahema, or “Job, son of Solomon, son of Abraham.”9 He was a “Mohametan,” or Muslim, and moreover the son of the highest priest, or imam, of the town of Boonda near the Senegal River, in the kingdom of Futa Jallon. He had been captured while slave-trading himself, trying to sell “two Negroes,” no doubt “pagans,” to get money to buy paper for himself and his literate coreligionists. Once purchased, he somehow managed to explain his plight to Captain Pike, who offered to let his father redeem him, but the family residence was far away, and the ship soon departed. In Maryland he attracted the attention of a sympathetic attorney, who was impressed by his learning (he had memorized the Koran by age fifteen) and by his lofty social station: “we could perceive he was no common slave.” He was sent to England, where a group of gentlemen contributed by subscription and bought his freedom. He became a cause célèbre; he met the king, the queen, and the Duke of Montague, among others. Less than three years after he first boarded the Arabella, the Royal African Company repatriated the African elite to James Fort on the Gambia, where he immediately bought a slave woman and two horses. When he returned to Boonda and his family, he was greeted by “raptures” and “floods of tears.” He found that his father had died and one of his wives had taken up with another man, but all five of his children were alive and well. The Royal African Company had hoped that he would promote their interests once he had returned home. He did not disappoint them.10

  As the part of West Africa closest to Europe, Job Ben Solomon’s native Senegambia was the region where Atlantic slave trading had the longest history. Stretching from the Senegal River, southwest around Cape Verde, back southeast to the Gambia River, and farther south to the Casamance River, Senegambia featured, over a stretch of three hundred miles, three major hydrographic systems that linked the interior to the coast. Along the coast resided four main Wolof groups, including the Jolof (Solomon’s), who controlled commerce between coast and interior. Most of the rulers of these groups were Muslim, but many commoners were not, at least until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Farther inland were the Mande-speaking Malinke, also Muslim; beyond them, in the middle of the Senegal River basin, were the Fulbe (Muslim pastoralists); and, in the upper part of the river, the Serrakole. In the interior were the Bambara, who had been unified in the late seventeenth century by the warlord Kaladian Kulubali and transformed into a society of warrior-cultivators. In the

  south-central part of the region were the Sereer and, farther south, various Malinke groups. Interspersed throughout, and especially along the coast, were small communal societies such as the Balante and, off the coast, the Bijagos Islanders.11

  Islam had begun to spread through Senegambia in the ninth century and by the eighteenth century was a defining, although still-contested, reality of the region. With the expansion of the aristocratic, militaristic, horse-riding Malinke, many members of the smaller cultural groups were taken and sold to the slavers. Bijago men were known to commit suicide on capture. Jihad against non-Islamic groups (and merely nominal Islamic leaders) erupted in the 1720s and lasted through the 1740s, flaring up again in the 1780s and 1790s. As a result of the Futa Jallon jihad, slave exports spiked in both periods, although the process of enslavement remained uneven over time and space. Fula cattle herdsmen, for example, revolted against Susu rulers in the 1720s and managed to gain control of some land for themselves. Resistance to enslavement was fierce and would be carried onto the slave ships.

  Other commoners gradually converted to Islam, not least to save themselves from being enslaved, especially in the area around the Gambia River. Meanwhile Islam continued to spread by commerce as Dyula merchants, classic mobile middlemen, traded, converted, and formed new settlements. The enslaved came from three catchment areas: the coast, the upper Senegal and Gambia River valleys, and the region around the middle and upper Niger. They were mostly cultivators and herdsmen, speakers of the related languages of the West Atlantic group. In Senegambia more than anywhere else in Guinea, Islamic/Saharan and European/Atlantic forces met, clashed, and cooperated, ultimately transforming the region. Over the course of the eighteenth century, about four hundred thousand enslaved people in this region were sold to the slave ships and sent to the New World, about half of them in British and American ships. Job Ben Solomon was, at the time of his enslavement, one of just two persons ever known to reverse the Middle Passage and return home. 12

  Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast

  During the 1750s, Henry Tucker was one of the “big men” of the Sierra Leone coast—big in wealth, power, status, and physical stature. “He’s a fat man and fair spoken,” said petty white trader Nicholas Owen of his boss. Tucker was part of a multigenerational coastal trading clan that began with Peter Tucker, a Royal African Company agent on York Island in the 1680s, and his African wife. The bicultural mulatto merchant Henry had traveled to Spain, Portugal, and England. He lived “after the English style,” furnishing his home with pewter plates and silverware. His wardrobe was colorful. He had acquired a vast fortune in the slave trade and built around himself an entire town, in which he lived with six or seven wives, many children, and many more slaves and laborers (“grumettoes”). Everyone, it seemed, owed him money, which meant that he c
ould sell most anyone into slavery for debt at any time. He was therefore “esteem’d and feared by all who has the misfortune to be in his power.” Owen added that Tucker “bears the charectar of a fair trader among the Europeans, but to the contrary among the blacks.” Captain John Newton considered him the only honest trader on the Windward Coast. Tucker brought endless numbers of slaves on board the ships, where he was wined and dined by the captains. By the mid- 1750s, his riches set him “above the Kings” of the region. 13

  Tucker’s region, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, was sometimes called the Upper Guinea Coast, although specific subregions were sometimes denominated the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast, and the Malaguetta Coast. The area stretched from the Casamance River, along a zone of rain forest and very few good harbors, to the port of Assini at the edge of the Gold Coast, encompassing by today’s map Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast. In the eighteenth century, trade in this region was rather more varied than in other parts of the Guinea coast, involving slaves but also kola nuts, beeswax, camwood, gold, malaguetta peppers, and high-quality ivory. Slave-ship captains spent much time here buying rice as victuals for the Middle Passage.

  The human geography of the region was one of the most complex of West Africa, as there existed few sizable states and a broad mosaic of ministates and cultural groups, some of which were converting to Islam but most of which were not. A majority of people lived in small-scale, egalitarian, communal villages and worked as farmers, fishermen, and hunters. Women seemed to have special power in certain areas and even took part in secret societies such as the Sande and Bundu. Political decentralization allowed traders like Henry Tucker to establish themselves along the coast, to organize production and exchange into the hinterland, and to accumulate wealth and power.