Another important aspect of the captain’s control of the internal economy lay in selling personal items such as “slops” (frocks, trousers, jackets, caps), knives, tobacco, brandy, and rum to the crew while at sea, usually at inflated prices. This, too, occasioned resentment among sailors, because high prices cut deeply into their wages. At the end of a long, dangerous voyage, some seamen had no pay owed to them, and a few made what they called a “Bristol voyage,” returning to the home port owing the captain more for items purchased at sea than he owed them in wages. This in turn created a kind of debt peonage, which gave the captain ready labor for the next slaving voyage.41
Trader
As soon as the slaver reached the coast of Africa, the captain became even more of a merchant, buying and selling cargo with both European and African traders on the African coast. Knowledge and experience were required for both the “fort trade” and the “boat trade” but were especially valuable in the latter and indeed in any direct trade with Africans. Slave-ship captains who had previously traded in a particular area and with specific individuals had a big advantage. Throughout the eighteenth century, captains could find interpreters on almost any part of the coast, and of course many African traders spoke pidgin or creole English. Yet a captain who knew one or more African languages had greater trading options. This gave an advantage to those who had been “bred up” in the slave trade and thereby learned African languages early in life. Hugh Crow started later but made numerous voyages, as sailor, mate, and captain, to the Bight of Biafra, and he prided himself on being able to speak Igbo. Crow’s ebullient personality seems to have made him something of a favorite among the traders he dealt with, or so he sought to suggest in his memoir.
Establishing authority within trading relations was no easy matter, and occasionally slave-ship captains resorted to the superior force of the fearsome gunned ship they commanded. In those areas where the Guineamen could anchor close to shore, a captain might fire a cannon or two toward the trading village to “encourage” the local merchants to bring more slaves to market or to offer them at lower prices. Seaman Henry Ellison testified before Parliament that in the 1760s he saw seven or eight slave-ship captains in concert fire “red hot shot” upon a trading town on the Gambia River, setting several houses aflame in an effort to get traders to lower prices. In June 1793 something similar happened in Cameroon, when Captain James McGauley fired a cannon at a black trader’s canoe, killing one and sending a message that the man was to sell slaves to no other ships until he, McGauley, had his full complement. Yet it must be emphasized that these were unusual cases. Most captains carefully cultivated their relationships with African traders, especially if they aspired to trade beyond a single voyage. Commerce depended largely on trust and consent.42
To inaugurate the trade, the captain ordered his sailors to hoist from belowdecks a varied and expensive cargo of manufactured goods, which would then be exchanged for a human cargo. As the main deck of the ship became a marketplace, the captain then assumed the role of “big man,” trading as equals with another “big man,” sometimes a local “king,” to whom he paid duties. To both the paramount political leader and to lesser traders, he also gave dashee or comey to encourage them to bring slaves to the ship. He served food and liquor and often invited some of the more important merchants to sleep aboard the vessel. A complex, drawn-out process of deal making followed, which would slowly fill the lower deck with enslaved people to be shipped to the Americas. The captain’s work as a business agent was described in astonishing detail in a document produced by William Jenkins of the Molly in 1759-60 during a voyage to Bonny.43
Jenkins first recorded the items his owners had stowed on board the ship before it left Bristol and which now appeared on the deck of the Molly for sale. The cargo consisted of firearms and ammunition, textiles, metals and metalwares, alcohol, and other manufactured goods such as caps and beads (arrangoes). The largest part of the cargo were muskets (six hundred), blunderbusses, flints, and gunpowder. Then, in order of decreasing value, an array of cloths, produced in England and India, such as nicanees, romauls, and chelloes; iron bars and copper rods, knives and iron pots; and a few miscellaneous items. Captain Jenkins also had on board “1885 Galls of Brandy in Casks” as well as bottles and numerous smaller casks called “caggs.”44
The most remarkable thing about the document Jenkins kept was his careful recording of his business dealings with African merchants, beginning with the king of Bonny, to whom he paid trading duties and fees for wood and water. Jenkins recorded the traders each and every one by name. He gave dashee to “Lord York,” “Black Tom,” “Cudjoe,” “Parlement Gentleman,” “Gallows,” and seventy-five others who clustered in two main networks, one associated with the king and another with the big merchant John Mendoss. But of the eighty who got dashee, fifty-eight never brought the Molly a single slave. One of the largest notations was, “The King of Bonny: Trust,” followed by a variety of items to be given in exchange for slaves on a future voyage. Jenkins clearly intended to build and sustain working relationships. 45
Most of the purchases were small as traders brought 1, 2, or 3 slaves on board at a time, as was typical on almost all areas of the Guinea coast. Only three sellers provided more than 20 altogether; another six brought more than 10, and these only a few at a time. The leading provider was Jemmy Sharp, who visited the ship seven times and sold 28 slaves. Of those who did bring slaves, twenty-four got dashee, while twenty-five did not. But the ones who received dashee produced 216 slaves, more than three-quarters of the 286 Jenkins would eventually purchase. Among those who sold slaves, all but fifteen came and sold more than once; altogether this group accounted for 267 slaves, 93.3 percent of the total. The Molly’s most frequent visitor was a man named Tillebo, who came aboard eleven times to sell slaves. All told, Captain Jenkins conducted 160 transactions to purchase slaves, which allowed him to “slave” his ship more quickly than usual, in only three months. He ended up with a cargo of 125 men, 114 women, 21 boys, and 26 girls. Clearly the contacts were worth the investment, as the captain had transacted his trade successfully. New challenges awaited the captain now that 286 restive African prisoners were aboard his ship.
Brother Captain
Slave-ship captains also established relations with one another, especially over the several months while they were buying slaves on the coast of Africa. Here, at various shipping points, they met repeatedly, taking turns to dine in twos or threes or more on their various ships or with African traders ashore, overcoming their command isolation and sharing useful knowledge and information. William Smith, a surveyor for the Royal African Company, noted that captains and officers of the slave ships in and around the Gambia River in 1726 were “visiting each other daily.” The same was true wherever the ships congregated. Even though they were competing with one another—to conduct their trade quickly and advantageously, to get a full cargo of slaves, and to sail expeditiously for the New World—they recognized and acted on their common interests.46
John Newton visited and communicated with other captains regularly, exchanging useful information of all kinds, about the state of trade, the availability and price of slaves, the news of danger and disaster. He asked one captain to take his mutinous sailors and rebellious slaves, another to lend his surgeon. He engaged in “raillery” with his peers, much of it apparently sexual banter. The others teased Newton for his slavish devotion to a single woman, his wife, Mary; he countered by saying that “some of them are mere slaves to a hundred,” some no doubt women they bought on the coast. Slave-ship captains resorted with familiar ease to the idiom of their industry.
Some of the information the captains exchanged could be a matter of life or death. They talked repeatedly of disasters—slave ships “cut off” by local Africans, bloody insurrections, seamen gone missing, explosions, and shipwrecks. Captain Street suggested the importance of such concourse when he reported from Rio Pongas on the Windward Coast in 1807: he listed thirteen sl
ave ships and when they would be “slaved” and leave the coast; he noted that their captains were having a hard time buying rice, which they needed to feed the slaves during their Middle Passages; he described how two vessels had been damaged by a countertide at a local slave-trading factory. He also noted an attempted murder and mutiny against Captain McBride aboard the Hind, the same ship’s high mortality, and a mass runaway of sailors from the Byam.47
Mostly the captains talked about business at their meetings—the availability and prices of slaves perhaps above all else, but also their relationships with black traders (who could be trusted and who could not) and what kinds of goods such traders were eager to buy. They might also share resources, lend skilled labor (a carpenter or a surgeon), supplies (medicines), food, or trade goods as long as such sharing would not damage the interests of the merchants and shipowners for whom they worked. Pride of place in these meetings would belong to the captain who knew the region best. Seaman William Butterworth described a custom in which the “oldest” captain in the gathered group (meaning the most experienced) would lead the vessels up the Calabar River to the canoe house to trade.48
Captains also compared notes on their officers, sailors, and slaves. Here the reputation of a rising officer might be enhanced or damaged, as all captains would take note of skilled and dependable men they might wish to hire, or others they would refuse to hire, on future voyages. They also talked, and often complained, about surgeons and their qualifications. They were quick to blame a surgeon who could not prevent mortality, and in a few instances serious conflicts developed between captains and their usually more educated and occasionally “enlightened” physicians.49
Conversations about sailors and slaves tended to concentrate on rebelliousness and health. The blacklisting of working seamen was an order of business in these meetings, and so, too, were decisions to remove mutinous sailors to nearby men-of-war when possible. Captains compared notes on punishments, offering encouragement to one another for torturing innovations. Conversations about African slaves were not dissimilar, although undoubtedly laced with more racist invective, about the various ethnic groups and their responses to being on the ship. There existed an unwritten rule of the fraternity of slave-ship captains on the coast: they would, regardless of nationality, come to one another’s assistance in dealing with their crews and especially their slaves, particularly in moments of rebellion.50
A collective of slave-ship captains sometimes acted as a sort of government on the coast of Africa. When an issue of concern to all slavers in a given area had to be addressed, someone called a council meeting to be attended by all nearby captains. Like naval officers who met to confer on battle strategy, the slave-ship captains deliberated and gave their collective judgment on the best course of action. They might decide the fate of the ringleader of a failed insurrection, as William Snelgrave asked a group of eight to do in 1721: their verdict was to gather all the ships close together, bring all slaves upon deck, hoist the malefactor into the air, then shoot him while elevated so everyone could see and thereby imbibe the lesson of terror. The slave in question argued with Snelgrave, convinced that he had too much economic value to be executed. He was wrong. Snelgrave and the other captains were determined to send the message that this is what would happen to any African who killed “a white Man.” Hugh Crow called a meeting of all the captains at Bonny to ask what should be done with a mate who was often drunk, fomenting mutiny among the crew, and causing the captain to fear for his life. Their verdict was to allow him to keep his cabin (because he was from a “respectable family in Liverpool”) but to remove him from duty.51
The captains also bragged much among themselves about their fraudulent trading practices—watered spirits, false heads in kegs of gunpowder, big pieces cut from the middle of a bolt of cloth, cheating in “number, weight, and measure, or quality of what they purchase, in every possible way.” Newton recalled that “the man who was most expert in committing frauds was reckoned the most handy and clever fellow in the business.” This was the art of the trade. The captains, in sum, showed camaraderie, a community of interest, a consciousness of kind. Their meetings represented a sort of propertied white man’s mutual-aid society.52
Jailer
The long, slow purchase of the enslaved was conducted within a “warlike peace” on the coast of West Africa. Slavers spent six months and more on the ship while the purchase was being completed and six to ten weeks aboard during the Middle Passage. A few captains tried to randomize their “cargo,” mixing peoples of different African cultures and languages to minimize their ability to communicate, cooperate, and resist, but this was difficult, costly, and in the end impractical. Given the competitiveness of the slave trade and the nature of its organization on the African side, captains had very little control over which slaves they could buy, so they took what they could get. During this long stretch of time, the captain and indeed every member of the crew assumed that the people brought on board were held against their will and that they would do anything possible to escape captivity. The captain’s power depended first and foremost on brute force.
The captain usually made initial contact with an enslaved person at the moment of inspection and purchase, whether in a fortress, in a factory, in a coastal village, or on the ship. At that time the captain and the doctor assessed that individual’s age, health, and working capacity, according to the criteria of his employer. He would also “read” that person’s “country marks,” ritual scars distinctive to each West African cultural group, and he would, based on experience, ascribe likely behaviors rooted in stereotypes—Igbos, the wisdom among captains went, were prone to suicide and must be watched; Coromantees were rebellious and must be chained; Angolas were passive and need not be chained. Related to this was an assessment of attitude—that is, each individual’s probability of cooperation with or resistance to the ship- board regime. If the captain decided to purchase a given person, he offered a combination of goods to the traders and haggled until they closed the deal. From that moment forward, the enslaved person, whether man, woman, boy, or girl, would be known to the captain as a number. The first purchased was Number 1, and so on, until the ship was fully “slaved” and ready to sail to the Americas.
Captains varied in their degree of involvement in the daily activities of the ship. After delegating authority, most seem to have remained somewhat aloof and remote, to be seen only at certain, limited times, usually pacing the quarterdeck. Some might go forward among the male slaves, but only occasionally and under heavy guard, and few seem to have gone below among the enslaved on the lower deck under any circumstances. Captain Francis Messervy of the Ferrers galley discovered why, the hard way, in 1721. According to fellow captain William Snelgrave, Messervy was guilty of “over-care, and too great Kindness to the Negroes on board his Ship,” helping, for example, to prepare and serve their food. Snelgrave wrote, “I could not forbear observing to him, ‘How imprudent it was in him to do so: For tho’ it was proper for a Commander sometimes to go forward, and observe how things were managed; yet he ought to take a proper time, and have a good many of his white People in Arms when he went; or else they having him so much in their Power, might incourage the Slaves to mutiny. ’” Messervy apparently disdained the advice, for soon, while walking among the men slaves at mealtime, they “laid hold on him, and beat out his Brains with the little Tubs, out of which they eat the boiled Rice.” They then exploded into a long-planned insurrection, during and after which eighty Africans were killed or died, by gunshot, by drowning (after they jumped overboard), or by hunger strike (refusing to eat after the initial slaughter). The moral of the story for Snelgrave was that captains must be circumspect about their involvement in the daily routines of the slaves, not least because the captives studied the ship’s hierarchy and would always strike first, given the opportunity, at the most powerful person aboard: “they always aim at the chief Person in the Ship, whom they soon distinguish by the respect shown him by the rest o
f the People.” It was never hard to figure out who was the big man on a slave ship.53
Every time a new group of slaves came on board, captain and crew would watch closely to see who among them might prove to be what they called “guardians” or “confidence slaves.”54 These were Africans the captain and officers felt they could trust and who might therefore be recruited to help maintain order on board the ship. Those who seemed well disposed to their captors, especially if they were people of some influence among their own countrymen and -women on board, might be offered a deal. “Guardians” might be chosen to “domineer over the rest.” Anyone who knew English could serve as a translator among his or her own countrypeople and perhaps others. Women might be offered jobs as cooks, maybe even the captain’s cook (which would probably imply other responsibilities). One African man found a job in the shipboard division of labor as a tailor. But most important would be those who would help to manage the enslaved, keep them in order. The captain (or the mate) might offer incentives to boys, who had the run of the ship, if they would spy on the men and inform of conspiracies.55
William Snelgrave explained how a slave might be used to help manage the ship. An older woman, who was apparently close to the king of Dahomey, perhaps even a wife, fell out of favor and was sentenced to death: she was, on his orders, thrown overboard from a canoe, hands tied, to the sharks. Somehow the woman survived the ordeal and was rescued unharmed by Snelgrave’s sailors and brought aboard the ship. Snelgrave feared that the king would take revenge if he learned that he had saved the woman, so he apparently kept her hidden. The “sensible” woman, conscious that her advanced age made her “useless” as a slave, felt grateful to Snelgrave for saving her life and did everything she could to assist him during the voyage. Because of her high social standing, she was well known to many of the other enslaved people on board. She used her influence to convince them that the “white People” were not as bad as they had been told; she consoled the captives, made them “easy in their Minds.” She had special influence, wrote Snelgrave, among the “female Negroes, who used always to be the most troublesome to us, on account of the noise and clamour they made.” They “were kept in such Order and Decorum by this Woman, that I had never the like in any Voyage before.” Snelgrave expressed his gratitude in return, finding the woman a “generous and good” master, Charles Dunbar of Antigua. A strategy of co-optation could help to keep order on the ship.56
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