The Path to the Ship
“CROW! MIND YOUR EYE!” ordered Liverpool merchant William Aspinall as he sent his one-eyed captain, Hugh Crow, off to Bonny to buy a big shipload of slaves in July 1798. Crow had already made five voyages to Africa and would go on to a long and successful career as a slave-ship captain, making five more voyages and one of the last before the trade was abolished in 1807. Crow left a memoir of his life in the slave trade, which was published posthumously by friends in 1830. In it he explained how he got from his birthplace to the captain’s cabin of a Guineaman.4
Crow was born in 1765 in Ramsey, on the north coast of the Isle of Man, located in the Irish Sea about eighty miles northwest of Liverpool, well within the booming port city’s gravitational pull. He was, from his youth, blind in his “starboard eye,” yet nonetheless early on he wanted to go to sea. His father was a respectable craftsman who worked along the waterfront. “Being brought up in a sea-port town,” he explained, “I naturally imbibed an inclination for a sea-faring life.”
Apprenticed by his father to a boatbuilder in Whitehaven, Crow worked for two years and got a little education before he took his first voyage, at age seventeen, in the coal trade. He soon ranged far and wide, sailing over the next four years to Ireland, Barbados, Jamaica, Charleston, Newfoundland, and Norway, among other places. He experienced seasickness, backbreaking work at the pump, a hurricane, mistreatment at the hands of his fellow sailors, a near drowning (saved by his fellow sailors), and a mutiny (along with his fellow sailors) against a drunken, incompetent captain. After five voyages Crow had completed his apprenticeship and was now an able seaman. He kept his one eye peeled for the main chance. He studied navigation, bought a quadrant, and began to move up the maritime hierarchy.
From the start he had a “prejudice” against the slave trade, or so he claimed, but he was eventually enticed by an offer to go as chief mate aboard the Prince to the Gold Coast in October 1790. He made four more voyages to Africa as a mate, following which Aspinall offered him his first command. After sixteen years at sea, half of them in the slave trade, the thirty-three-year-old Crow took the helm of the Mary, a three-hundred-ton ship.5
The captain Aspinall hired in 1798 was fairly typical in his origins, if not in the number of his eyes or his ability to survive in a deadly line of work. Most, like Crow, became captains of Guineamen after making numerous small decisions rather than a single big one. They grew up along the waterfront, were “bred to the sea,” got aboard a slaver one way or another (perhaps not by choice), survived a first voyage, slowly progressed up the ship’s working ladder, acquired experience, built a reputation among captains and merchants, and finally achieved command of their own vessel. The historian Stephen Behrendt has found that 80 percent of the captains of British slavers, sailing mostly out of Liverpool and Bristol, between 1785 and 1807, came from commercial backgrounds. A few had fathers who were merchants, usually of modest means. Some, like John Newton, descended from ship captains, others from slave-ship captains, as in the Noble and Lace families in Liverpool and the D’Wolfs in Rhode Island. But most were, like Crow, the sons of waterfront artisans of one kind or another. Family connections often guided the way to the captain’s cabin, but only after considerable experience at sea. On average, the first command of a slaver came at age thirty in Liverpool and thirty-one in Bristol. The path to the ship was similar among captains in the Rhode Island slave trade, although American masters were less likely to specialize in it. The historian Jay Coughtry found that captains made an average of only 2.2 African voyages, but within this group fifty captains made 5 voyages or more each. A writer who knew several families involved in the British trade observed that “such is the dangerous nature of the Slave Trade, that the generality of the Captains of the vessels employed in it think themselves fortunate in escaping with life and health after four voyages.” And “fortunate” is precisely the right word, because a captain who survived four voyages or more would likely have made a small fortune, far beyond what most men of his original station in life could expect to achieve. It was a risky but lucrative line of work, freely chosen.6
Merchant Capital
The captain got his command from a merchant or group of merchants who owned the ship and financed the voyage. Once hired, he was an employee and business agent, responsible for substantial property in a trade that was complex, risky, potentially disastrous, and soon to be distant from the eyes and hence control of the investors. The reality was summed up by the Liverpool merchant David Tuohy, who wrote to Captain Henry Moore of the Blayds in 1782: you “have a large Capital under you,” he explained, and it “behoves you to be very circumspect in all your proceedings, & very attentive to the minutest part of yr Conduct.” Some slave ships and their cargoes were worth as much as £10,000 to £12,000, which would be roughly $1.6 to $2 million in today’s currency. The captain’s power depended first and foremost on a connection to capitalists.7
What captains offered in return was experience, essentially of two kinds. The more general was experience at sea, a personal knowledge of navigation and things maritime, and a personal history of commanding sailors and ships. More specific was experience of the slave trade itself. The former was necessary, the latter was not, although it was highly desirable, because what merchants themselves knew about the trade was variable. A few merchants, like David Tuohy, had served as slave-ship captains and had accumulated capital to move into the ranks of investors. They knew exactly what happened on these ships, and they brought a wealth of practical knowledge to their business. Most slave-trading merchants, however, had never sailed on a Guineaman, never been to Africa, never experienced the Middle Passage. They knew the potentials and the risks of the slave trade, and they knew something of the Atlantic markets they were entering, but many of them would not likely have had a clear sense of what actually happened aboard a slave ship. Newport merchants Jacob Rivera and Aaron Lopez declared their inexperience to Captain William English in 1772: “we have no opinion of the Windward Coast trade.” Much of what needed to be known about the slave trade could be learned only through experience. The merchant Thomas Leyland wrote to Captain Charles Watt, veteran of five slaving voyages, “We trust your long experience in the Congo.” Most slave-ship owners wanted a captain at the helm who was experienced and trustworthy, a “good husband” to the merchant’s property.8
Merchants wrote revealing letters of instruction to the ship captains they employed. They spelled out how the captain was to proceed—when and where he was to sail and how he was to conduct business as the delegated agent of the merchant. These letters varied considerably, partly because of regionally specific ways of doing business and partly because of the different experiences and temperaments of the merchants who wrote them and the captains who received them. Merchants who had been slave-ship captains often wrote lengthy, elaborate letters, as did merchants who instructed a captain with limited experience. Merchants who had employed a captain in the past and trusted both his knowledge and behavior wrote shorter letters. What stands out over the long run is the similarity of the letters, which suggests a broad continuity in the way the slave trade was organized and its business conducted.9
The letters often summarized the general working knowledge of the slave trade and usually expressed the deepest fears of investors. They reiterated three things in particular that could “prove the utter Ruine & destruction of your Voyage”—namely, accidents, mutiny and insurrection by sailors and slaves, and most of all runaway mortality. Thomas Leyland warned Captain Caesar Lawson of the Enterprize in 1803 to beware “Insurrection, Mutiny, and Fire.” Like other merchants he also worried about the “great mortality among both Blacks and Europeans” in the slave trade.10
Most letters specified an outward passage from an originating port—say, Bristol, England, or Bristol, Rhode Island—to one or more locations in Africa, a Middle Passage to a West Indian or North American port, and a homeward passage. Occasionally the merchant would specify an African
or European trader from whom the captain was to buy slaves, the king of Barra or old man Plunkett of the Royal African Company. Sometimes the merchant provided the names of agents who would handle the sale of the “cargo” in Jamaica or Virginia. Contingencies were built into the understanding, as the captain had to be able to respond to shifting markets on both sides of the Atlantic. Much would be left, as one merchant wrote, to “your prudence and Discretion to do as you shall see Occassion.”11
Traders to Africa dealt in a variety of commodities. They instructed captains to exchange textiles, metalwares (knives, hoes, brass pans), guns, and other manufactured items for ivory or “teeth,” partly because, as one merchant put it, “there’s no Mortality to be feard.” A few wanted gold (especially earlier in the eighteenth century), camwood (for its dye), beeswax, palm oil, or malaguetta pepper. One captain was told to trade for various items, including “curiosities.” But of course the main object of purchase throughout the eighteenth century was human beings.12
Most merchants instructed their captains to buy young people, and those who did not mention this specifically would have assumed it as a given. Humphry Morice wanted those between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, two males for every female, which was typical. Thomas Leyland wanted mostly males, but in a different calculus—one-half “Prime Men Negroes from 15 to 25 yrs old,” three-eighths boys “10 to 15,” and one-eighth women “10 to 18”—all to be “well made, full chested, vigorous and without bodily imperfection.” James Laroche, on the other hand, preferred girls between the ages of ten and fourteen, “very black and handsome.” An official of the South Sea Company made a chilling request in 1717 for “all Virgins.” Strong, healthy young people were most likely to survive the stay on the coast and also to “bear the passage.” Conversely, merchants sometimes told captains to avoid “old Men or fallen-breasted Women” and anyone with physical defects such as hernia or lameness.13
Instructions specified wages for officers but not for sailors, who all signed straightforward contracts, usually negotiated by the captain. Payment to mates, the doctor, and the captain himself were more complex, as they involved not only wages but commissions and perquisites. A detailed example of such arrangements appeared in a letter of instruction written by a group of merchants to Captain Thomas Baker of the snow Africa in 1776. Baker would get £5 per month plus a commission of the value of 4 slaves per 100 delivered and sold, at the average value of sale. He would also get 7 “privilege” slaves, to be bought with the merchants’ capital and sold at his own benefit at the going market rate. The other officers were paid, in addition to their wages (usually about £4 per month), as follows: the chief mate, Mr. William Rendall, got 2 “privilege” slaves; the second mate, Mr. Peter Birch, got 1 “privilege” slave; and Dr. Thomas Stephens got 1 “privilege” slave plus “head money,” one shilling for every African delivered alive in Tobago. This last was an “inducement to him to take care of them to the place of Sale.”14 As it happened, Baker’s vessel was shipwrecked before taking slaves aboard, but if his voyage had gone as planned, he would have made £5 per month for twelve months, the equivalent of the value of 10 slaves (on 250 slaves, at £28 each), and another 7 slaves at the same value. He therefore would have made about £536 on the voyage, or the equivalent, in today’s currency, of $100,000. The common sailor on the same ship would have made £24, or $4,500. On a larger ship (and likely a longer voyage), the captain would have made as much as £750 to £1,000, as did Robert Bostock in 1774 (£774) or Richard Chadwick (£993), earlier in 1754.15 Captain James Penny lost fourteen sailors and 134 slaves on a voyage of 1783-84 but still made £1,940, or more than $342,000 today.16
Clearly, “privilege” and “adventure” (shipping a slave purchased with one’s own money freight-free) resulted in vastly higher earnings and set the officers apart from the common sailors, which was, after all, the point.17 The wage agreement tied the interest of the captain (and the top officers) to the voyage and hence to the investing merchant or, in other words, gave them all, especially the captain, a material stake in the voyage. By making the commander a risk-sharing partner, merchants imposed the hard discipline of self-interest. As Mathew Strong explained to Captain Richard Smyth in 1771, “it suits as much your interest as ours to bring a good & healthy cargo.”18
The next big issue was the management of the voyage—how to maintain the ship and its social order. Here merchants gave general instructions about keeping the ship clean, repaired, and functional (“take care of your Vessells Bottom”), stocking the vessel with the proper provisions, and caring for and disciplining the sailors and slaves. Merchants also routinely commanded a captain to cooperate with other captains (those in their own employ) while on the coast of Africa and to write with an update at every opportunity.19
A few shipowners tried to micromanage the voyage. One was the Liverpool merchant James Clemens, who had made three voyages to Angola in the 1750s and had many self-certain opinions about how things should be done. He wrote detailed instructions to Captain William Speers, himself an experienced captain, as he prepared to take the Ranger to Angola and then Barbados in 1767. Clemens required that the ship be “cleaned” and “sweetened” a particular way so that the lower deck would be dry and therefore healthier for the enslaved. He had strong views on fresh air and ventilation, explaining to Speers not only why he must not position the boat and the yawl near the gratings lest they obstruct the airflow, but how to use a “topmast Steering Sail” to funnel wind down into the men’s room below. Clemens wanted the slaves washed in the evenings; they were “to rub each other with a piece of Cloth every Morning that will promote Circulation & prevent Swellings.” He wanted them fed a certain way, for Angola slaves were “accustomed to very little food in their own Country” and must therefore not be overfed. He wanted “a few White people under Arms constantly” to prevent insurrection, not only because an uprising would be dangerous but because if the men should try and fail, “they pine afterwards and are never Easie.” Some would fall into melancholy and waste away, so much better to prevent a rising in the first place. Clemens also indicated that the crew should get a little brandy and tobacco now and then to “attach them (if prudently served out) both to you and the Ship.” He warned Speers against having open fire near the casks of combustible brandy: “don’t suffer any Lights to be carried into the Hould to draw off Brandy on any pretence whatever.” After saying all this and more, he generously agreed to leave the rest to Speers’s discretion.20
Merchants feared accidents of all kinds, especially shipwreck, but in their instructions they concentrated on what they considered to be the preventable ones. In a wooden ship, fire was especially dangerous. “Of all things,” wrote Thomas Leyland, “be carefull of Fire, an idea of the consequences attending which is horrible in the extreme.” Lit candles had to be used with care. David Tuohy wrote, “You’l be carefull of your Powder & Brandy as many fatal Accidents happen with both.” Slave ships were known to blow up, accidentally or by the design of rebellious captives.21
The resistance waged by both sailors and slaves was a second big worry. Sailors were known to embezzle, desert, and mutiny. Captains were urged to keep a careful watch on the cargo, especially rum and brandy, to be sure that sailors did not help themselves to it. They also had to be careful in the assignment of tasks, as James Clemens made clear: “suffer no Mutinous, or troublesome drunken people to go in the Boats a Slaving.” The fear was twofold. If sailors deserted with the longboat or the yawl, the captain lost not only labor but a vessel that was crucial to the slaving process. The final concern was outright mutiny, the capture of the vessel by the crew, which happened numerous times over the eighteenth century and was a potential worry to any merchant.22
Merchants feared suicide and especially insurrection among the enslaved. Isaac Hobhouse and his co-owners advised in 1725 that the enslaved must be constrained by netting and chains, “fearing their rising or leaping Overboard.” Humphry Morice told Captain Jeremiah Pearce i
n 1730 that “it is adviseable for you to be provided for the Worst that can attend you during the Course of your intended voyage and perticularly to be allways upon your Guard and defence against the Insurrection of your Negroes.” Owners constantly urged vigilance and the consistent, visible use of armed sentries. An unnamed New England owner wrote to Captain William Ellery in 1759, “As you have guns and men, I doubt not you’ll make a good use of them if required.” 23
Maintaining proper discipline was the crux of the whole enterprise. Merchants assumed that the captain would govern the crew and the enslaved in an appropriate manner and that this would include exemplary violence, which was an established part of maritime life. They also knew that the violence could easily become cruelty and that it could lead to catastrophic results if it sparked reactions such as mutiny by sailors or insurrection by slaves. Merchants therefore tried to draw a line between order and abuse or, as Hugh Crow put it, severity and cruelty, encouraging the former and forbidding the latter. Humphry Morice routinely told his captains, “Be carefull of and kind to your Negroes and let them be well used by your officers & Seamen.”24
The treatment of the slaves was a ticklish matter, and merchant after merchant described the awkward balance they hoped for: treat the slaves kindly, but not too kindly. Act with “as much lenity as safety will admit.” Another added, “During the Purchase and Middle Passage you will no doubt see the Propriety of treating the Slaves with every Attention and indulgence that Humanity requires and Safety will permit.” This clause was as close as the owners ever came to admitting that terror was essential to running a slave ship. The instruction admitted many interpretations.25
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