The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Only one merchant, Robert Bostock of Liverpool, it seems, ever threatened to punish a captain should he mistreat the enslaved. In 1791, after the abolitionist movement had grown throughout England and around the Atlantic, Bostock wrote to Captain James Fryer of the Bess, “It’s my particular desire that you take care to use your slaves with the greatest Humanity and not beat them up [on] any acc’t nor suffer your Officers or People to use them ill in the smallest degree as if proof can be made of yr using the Slaves ill or causing them to be ill used by yr Officers etc. you then in that case forfeit your privilege & Commissions.” This was a serious threat, as income from commission and privilege represented the lion’s share of the captain’s pay. Yet there is no evidence that Bostock or any other merchant ever punished a captain for mistreatment of the enslaved.26

  The merchant’s greatest fear, by far, was mortality, which could come via accident, mutiny, or insurrection, but most commonly with the outbreak of disease. This chronic danger affected sailors and slaves as well as officers and even the captain himself. The Bristol owners of the snow Africa wrote to Captain George Merrick in 1774, “In case of your Mortality which [we] hope God will prevent your Chief Mate Mr. John Matthews is to take the Command of our Ship & follow these our Orders & Instructions and so on in sucession.” In the years 1801-7, about one in seven captains died on the voyage, which meant that merchants had to prepare a chain of command with one and sometimes two mates ready to take over. The very fragility of power aboard the ship may have increased its ruthlessness.27

  It was widely known that West Africa was a “graveyard for sailors,” hence merchants commented frequently on the need to provide for their health. They advised that sailors be kept sober, as intemperance in the tropics was believed to contribute to premature death. They also requested that the sailors be given proper care, “especially if sick and out of Order,” and that they not be abused or overworked in the hot climate. Some merchants understood that the mortalities of sailors and slaves might be related: “We recommend to you the care of your White People for when your Crew is healthy they will be able to take care of the Negroes.”28

  The health of the enslaved mattered even more. Thomas Starke put it clearly when he wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, “the whole benefitt of the Voyage lyes in your care in Preserving negroes lives.” Two American merchants, Joseph and Joshua Grafton, made the same point in 1785: “on the health of the slaves, almost your whole voyage depends.” One group of merchants went so far as to tell the captain to be sure to keep sheep and goats on board in order to make “Mutton broth,” which was to be fed to sick slaves, by hand, by the sailors. Over time, merchants grew increasingly conscious that longer stays on the coast often resulted in more deaths. Robert Bostock wrote to Captain Samuel Gamble in 1790 that short stays and passages rarely met with much mortality. Some merchants even advised their captains to leave the coast before the ship was fully slaved in order to reduce mortality: as a group of Bristol investors wrote in 1774, “when you are half slaved don’t stay long if there is a possibility of getting off as the risque of Sickness & Mortality there become great.”29

  Try as they might to manage the details of their voyages, merchants knew that everything depended on the judgment and discretion of the captain. As Joseph and Joshua Grafton wrote in 1785, “we submit the conducting of the voyage to your good judgment and prudent management, not doubting of your best endeavours to serve our interest in all cases.” This was necessary partly because maritime “custom,” which gave the captain great authority at sea, shaped the agreement and partly because the African trade was unpredictable and transacted far away from European and American ports. The most elaborate trading plans might crash on the rocks of new and unanticipated developments. Merchant Morice, for example, had for years sent slave ships to trade in Whydah. But Captain Snelgrave wrote to say that the king of Dahomey had overrun and vanquished the previous traders in April 1727. What now? Or Snelgrave might write that he had suffered a mutiny at the hands of the crew or a bloody insurrection by the enslaved. What now? The captain would decide.30

  “The Guinea Outfit”

  Sea surgeon Thomas Boulton published The Sailor’s Farewell; Or, the Guinea Outfit, a Comedy in Three Acts in 1768. He likely wrote from personal experience, as he would soon sail on the slave ship Delight, which departed Liverpool for Cape Mount in July 1769. Whatever may have seemed humorous about the endeavor in 1768 was no longer so in December 1769, when Boulton sat in the maintop of his ship and watched as slaves below rose up in fierce insurrection, killing nine of his shipmates. Thanks to the intervention of Captain Thomas Fisher of the Squirrel, Boulton survived to write a letter about the event, which was published in the Newport Mercury on July 9, 1770. His account was literally a “history from the top down.”31

  The Sailor’s Farewell was a different sort of history from above, as Boulton explored, from an officer’s perspective, how captains and mates gathered a crew for a slaving voyage. What Boulton did not discuss adequately is how the captain recruited his officers, especially his first mate, maybe a second mate and a surgeon (like Boulton himself), before all others. The small officer corps would be crucial, literally a social base, for the captain’s power on board the ship. He sought for these posts experienced men who knew and respected the traditions of the sea in general, the ways of the slave trade in particular. He wanted people he could trust, often hiring those who had sailed with him previously and performed their work well. Loyalty was so important among the officers that he would sometimes enlist family members. These officers, once hired, might also assist him in the difficult task of signing on a crew. It is likely that Boulton himself took part in recruitment and that this experience was the basis of his play. In his comedy he captured essential truths about recruiting for a deadly trade.

  The play begins with Captain Sharp, “Master of Vessel lying in the [Mersey] River,” and Will Whiff, his mate, looking for a crew. Eight days has the snow been in the river, the captain fumed, “and not a man to be got.” Whiff gives good news. He has been out recruiting since 5:00 A.M. and has found two stout fellows and maybe a third. He has a landlady, Mrs. Cobweb, taking care of three drunk sailors at his expense. The captain approves, saying it was a good day’s work, but adds that he will have to “put fresh baits to your hooks, and have a second cast.” He concludes with a little advice: “Shew a tar the bottle, glass, and salt water, and he immediately becomes amphibious.” Grog, the “liquor of life and the soul of a sailor,” was critical to manning slave ships.

  Boulton depicts both the voluntary and the coercive sides of getting a crew, and, not surprisingly (for an officer), he puts both in the best possible light. He describes how captain and mate persuade the sailors to come aboard. The officers meet with them in the public house, they cajole them, they drink grog and sing with them. They play up their seafaring backgrounds. Whiff declares that he was “brought up to the sea” and was “always a seaman’s friend.” The only reason the vessel has not sailed already is that he and the captain cannot find humane enough officers: “No, no, my mates shall both of them be men that have humanity in them.” There will be no “cane officers” (he refers to the boatswain’s rattan) for his “brother sailors.” Captain Sharp says, “I was brought up a sailor,” and adds that he is a leveler, a plain dealer, no friend of hierarchy or privilege: “I’m none of your Mr. or your Captain; call me Jack Sharp, and a seaman, and dam’me if I want any other name—I’m the same thing sea or a shore.” They are full of promises. Their vessel? It is “as fine a snow as ever swam the seas.” They are bound to the “healthiest part of the coast,” on a short voyage with good wages. Captain and mate even court the wives of the sailors, promising good treatment and safe returns for their men. One of them, Moll, notes with knowing irony, “Aye, if all the Guinea Captains were of as sweet a temper, they would not want [lack] men to go with them.”

  Captain and mate prey on the naive and the dim-witted. When the clownish Bob Bluff
asks, “what sort of place is this Guiney?” Whiff answers that it is a place of gold and no work, much like the traditional utopia, the Land of Cokaygne—“no, no, nothing to do there, but to lay your head on the knee of a delicate soft wench, while she plays with your hair; and when we’ve got as much money as we want, away we go to Jamaica, and get mahogany to make chests to hold our money in; while rivers of rum, hills of sugar, and clusters of limes, makes drinks for emperors—who wouldn’t go to Guiney.” The promise of money and African women was part of the sell, and indeed most slave ships took a few landsmen, out of work and fresh from the countryside, who had no experience at sea and perhaps no knowledge of Guinea.

  Boulton describes the coercive side of recruitment when two drunken sailors and friends, Peter Pipe and Joe Chissel, find themselves in prison, put there by their landlady, to whom they owe money. Neither has been to Africa, but they know that the only way to get out of jail is to sign on with a Guinea captain like Jack Sharp, who will pay their debts. Pipe declares himself ready to go. He vows to sober up in Africa, get as “dry as a stockfish.” Chissel hesitates, thinking that a slaver would be worse than prison. He tells the story of poor Will Wedge, who called his slave captain a rascal and got his left eye gouged out for it. Soon Captain Sharp shows up, offering to bail them out. The scene is left unresolved, but they appear ready to accept the deal. In short order the crew is gathered aboard the snow and pushes off for Africa.

  Two real sailors, Silas Told and William Butterworth, insisted that captains were not “the same thing sea or a shore.” While recruiting in port, they were charming and accommodating. On his first slaving voyage, Told went aboard the Loyal George, captained by Timothy Tucker: “a greater villain, I firmly believe, never existed, although at home he assumed the character and temper of a saint.” Butterworth had a similar experience with Captain Jenkin Evans of the Hudibras. He was “all condescension, politeness, and civility” while recruiting on shore, but once aboard the ship he turned “morose, peevish, and tyrannical.” He was the “consummate hypocrite.” The captain would change dramatically as he built a hell of his own.32

  Bully

  For several months before finally procuring his crew, some of whom came aboard at the last minute, sober or drunk, by hook or by crook, the captain worked diligently to prepare for sailing with one of the merchant-shipowners, who acted as the “ship’s husband” on behalf of the full group of investors. The ship itself usually required repairs, which meant that the captain had to deal with a small army of craftsmen, from the shipwright to caulkers, joiners, blacksmiths, masons, glaziers, to mast, block, and rope makers, to sailmakers and riggers, boatbuilders, coopers, painters, and upholsterers. At the end of the day, he had to be sure that everything had been done properly. Then came the provisioners—butchers with their beef, bakers with their biscuit, brewers with their beer. Water was critical. The captain made sure that the surgeon had his medical instruments and supplies and that the gunner had the necessary pistols, muskets, and small cannon to overawe the enslaved. He saw to the hardware of bondage: manacles, shackles, neck rings, and chains, as well as the cat-o’-nine-tails, the speculum oris, and the thumbscrews, essential elements among the cargo being hoisted aboard and stored in the hold. The captain also had to set up accounts for each member of the crew, to note advance pay, to allocate a portion of wages to a wife or family member, and to keep track of items sailors would buy during the course of the voyage. Meanwhile the mates and crew readied the sails, rigging, tackle, and anchor, making all shipshape and ready for sailing. By the time the vessel put to sea, the captain would be in full control of all aspects of the ship—its technology, cargo, food and water supply—as well as its microeconomy and its social system. The world of the ship was his.33

  As soon as the voyage began, the captain asserted his power over the ship’s work routines and the people who performed them. He delegated authority to his officers, who oversaw the ship’s various labor processes, but no one doubted who was in control. He also arranged and occupied the inner sanctum of power—the captain’s cabin. Here he slept, ate his higher-quality and specially prepared food—usually with the surgeon and mates—planned the voyage, and kept his various accounts: his log, the ledger to track food and water consumed and replaced during the voyage, credit and debt with various traders, cargo bought and sold. No one entered the cabin without permission, and only the other officers could even approach it. The cabin would also be the place where the captain asserted his power over the bodies of enslaved women on board as he routinely took “wives” or “favorites” and forced them to stay in his chambers and provide for his sexual pleasure. Aboard the Charleston, for example, in 1795, the captain and indeed all the officers took three to four “wives” each and sold them for a “good price” once they reached the New World. What happened in the captain’s cabin was always a bit of a mystery to the crew, and this was by design. Most captains cultivated what would later be called “command isolation.” Too much familiarity with the crew or the enslaved would only diminish authority. Distance, formality, and severity of carriage would enhance it.34

  Indeed establishing his authority was an urgent necessity for the captain. This was partly a matter of maritime tradition and partly a matter of experience and knowledge. Any captain who knew well the craft of sailing a ship would command respect, and this would have been enhanced had the captain sailed to the African coast previously. Other aspects of control consisted of the wage contract the sailor had signed, which promised obedience. Failure to comply would result in loss of wages and/or punishment, either by the captain or at the hands of the state. The captain’s power aboard any deep-sea sailing ship in the eighteenth century was personal, violent, and arbitrary. He knew his sailors well, and he ruled a small social world. But Guinea ships and their captains were different, as everyone understood. Because the slave ship would be full of roiling, explosive social tensions, captains often went to extreme lengths to assert their power from the beginning. For the crew this process often began soon after they lost sight of land.

  Many slave-ship captains adopted a domineering style of shipboard leadership that can be summed up in a word: “bully.” They swaggered, they blustered, they hectored, they bullied. One of the best examples of the type was the legendary Thomas “Bully” Roberts, who captained nine voyages out of Liverpool between 1750 and 1768. According to “Dicky Sam,” a Liverpool writer who used documents and local folklore to write a history in 1884 of his city’s slave trade, Roberts was a “born bully.” It was “part of his nature.” But whatever he may have been at birth and by nature, he was made more brutal by the slave trade, all of whose captains were “fearless, bold, and hard-hearted.” The nineteenth century would come up with the word “bucko” to describe this kind of style. A bucko captain or mate was a hard-driving man who always went far beyond the usual requirements of shipboard discipline. This, too, was by design. 35

  One of the chief ways the captain established his power was by bullying the crew either in whole or, more commonly, in part. Some captains decided early in the voyage for a raw display of power: they ordered all men (except the officers) to come on deck with their sea chests. They then smashed, staved, and burned the chests, usually on the pretense of looking for a stolen item but more usefully to make a symbolic assertion of control over all aspects of the sailors’ lives.36 Captains would also choose a marginal member of the crew for bullying, using that person as a medium to intimidate the crew as a whole. This was usually a ship’s boy, a cook, or a black sailor.37 If bullying sometimes led to murder (or suicide), it also led on occasion to the brutal murder of the captain in return, as, for example, Captain John Connor, who was slain by his crew in 1788. His conduct had been marked by continuous “barbarous severity.”38

  Even when an individual was not singled out for bullying, violent discipline was usually the order of the day on Guinea ships. The most important “instrument of correction” was the cat-o’-nine-tails, which easily beca
me an instrument of torture. Sea surgeon Alexander Falconbridge described it as “a handle or stem, made of a rope three inches and a half in circumference, and about eighteen inches in length, at one of which are fastened nine branches, or tails, composed of log-line, with three or more knots upon each branch.” The cat was employed during the course of daily work and social routine, for minor infractions and indiscipline, and in moments of spectacular punishment, on both sailors and slaves. (Some captains were reluctant to whip sailors in view of the slaves, while others did it deliberately, indeed occasionally ordered a slave to lash a sailor.) Some officers grew so attached to the cat that they slept with it. The purpose of the nine tails and the three knots on each (some had wire interwoven) was to lacerate the skin of the victim. But the cat was not the only tool of discipline. The ship was full of items that could be used by a captain or mate as a weapon at any moment: fishgigs, knives, forks, belaying pins, marlinespikes, and pump bolts. Captains also did not hesitate to clap mutinous seamen into irons and in extreme cases even to lock them into iron collars, usually reserved for the most rebellious slaves. The captain used an entire technology of terror to control the crew.39

  Some captains asserted a different kind of power when they put the crew to what they called “short allowance” on the way to the African coast or during the Middle Passage. The rationale for this was that adverse sailing conditions might lengthen the voyage, provisions might be hard to replace, and it was therefore necessary to conserve. Or a captain might simply announce that he had not hired the men to “fatten them up.” Sailors resented this bitterly, thinking that the captain pinched their provisions to save on costs and hence to pad profits for himself and the owners. Food for sailors was not high in quality to begin with, and of course it deteriorated over the course of the voyage. Beef in brine melted away, and biscuit became so infested with vermin that it moved by itself. Water was a special source of conflict, especially when the vessel was in the tropics. Numerous slave-ship captains used a bizarre custom to limit its consumption. In the maintop they put a barrel of water and a gun barrel, which was the designated drinking instrument. Sailors were forced to climb all the way up to take a single drink.40