The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  This mobilization would intensify a second, older, and less-formal kind of war between classes, over maritime labor power, between royal officials, magistrates, merchants, captains, and officers on the one side, sailors on the other. The former group struggled to find seamen enough to man their ships of war, trade, and privateering, and not infrequently members of the group battled one another over the right to employ the seaman as they collectively battled the seaman himself. They resorted to violence and special allurements, to the press-gang and the crimp, as well as to higher wages and better working conditions. Within this war over his labor, the seaman fought for his own autonomy and interests.

  Did the dancing sailor join the slave ship? The surgeon did not say. But it is clear that many thousands of men like him did. Year after year merchants and captains, one way or another, found workers enough to sail their dozens of ships to the west coast of Africa. In order to ship 3.5 million slaves to the New World, they hired crews that would have totaled 350,000 men. About 30 percent of these would have been officers and skilled workers, who had special inducements and who therefore made more repeat voyages than did common sailors. If each such person made three voyages, the core of skilled seafaring officers would have been roughly 35,000. If each common sailor (including apprentices and landmen) made one or two voyages (one and a half on average), the total involved would have been about 210,000.

  How did merchants and captains do it? How did they win the war for maritime labor, or at least win often enough to accomplish their economic objectives in the slave trade? How did they manage to find thousands of workers for a trade in which working conditions were harsh, wages were modest, food was poor, and the dangers of mortality (by accident, overzealous discipline, slave revolt, or disease) were great? This chapter explores the collective work and experience of sailors in the slave trade and thereby places the life and writing of sailor-poet James Field Stanfield in a broader context. It is a tale of war, money, class, violence, race, and death, all linked, for sailors, to a floating workplace, what Stanfield called the “vast machine.”3

  From Port to Ship

  Surveying the war over maritime labor, the surgeon’s conclusions about manning a slave ship echoed those of Stanfield. The “Toil of shipping People,” he thought, was “by far the most disagreeable [part] of a disagreeable voyage.” Seamen did not like the Guinea trade; they despised the long confinement and “bad usage” by their officers. Like the dancing man with fifteen shillings, most sailors would never “go to Sea with a Farthing in their pocket and nothing but necessity compels them at the last, especially to Guinea.” Only after they had spent their cash and piled up debt with a local landlady, and only after they found themselves in or facing jail would they agree to make a Guinea voyage, and then only “as the price of their liberty.” Even under these circumstances, sailors experienced “an exchange of confinement [rather] than a release from it, for they are hurried from the prison on board the ship where they remain without the least prospect of getting [on] shore untill the Ship arrives on the Coast and most frequently not untill the West Indies.” The pro-slave-trade surgeon and the anti-slave sailor agreed that service on a Guineaman was a prison stint.4

  Numerous sailors explained how they ended up on a slave ship. Among those who made a voluntary choice was William Butterworth, who as a boy saw a cousin dressed in a uniform of the Royal Navy and decided his future then and there: he would be a sailor. He ran away to Liverpool in 1786, met a crimp, then met an old salt who warned him against the slave trade. Butterworth could not contradict a word he said, so he asked, with invincible ignorance, if “others had risked their lives and fortune, therefore why might not I?” He signed on.5 William Richardson, a twenty-two-year-old veteran of twenty voyages in colliers (coal ships) from Shields to London, spied “a fine ship” on the Thames, fell in love with it, and joined up, not caring where it was bound.6 John Richardson was removed from his midshipman’s position in the Royal Navy because he had a habit of getting drunk, causing riots, and getting thrown in prison. He showed up on a slave ship, without a sea chest or clothing, and talked his way aboard.7

  Other seamen found themselves working on slave ships through no choice of their own. Silas Told was apprenticed to the sea at the age of fourteen. His master took him on three West India voyages and then consigned him to Captain Timothy Tucker of the Loyal George, bound for Guinea.8 Thomas Thompson once signed on to sail to the West Indies, only to be “fraudulently taken to Africa.”9 On another occasion the landlords “got hold of him” by debt and forced him, after imprisonment, to take a Guinea voyage with a violent captain he despised.10 Henry Ellison, who had made ten slaving voyages, thought some tars went into the slave trade voluntarily but that “by far the greater part of them go from necessity.” Some went from want, as they could find no other employ; some went because they fell into debt and wanted to escape jail. Ellison had known many such men and known them to be “fine seamen.”11

  Slave-trade seamen came from numerous social backgrounds, from orphanages and jails to respectable working-class and even middle-class families. But sailors as a whole were widely known as among the poorest occupational groups in Britain and America in the eighteenth century, so there were many more of the former group than the latter. Indeed John Newton described slave-trade seamen as “the refuse and dregs of the Nation,” refugees of the “prisons and glass houses.” He added that most “have generally been bred to it young” (like Told), but some were also “boys impatient of their parents or masters” (like Butterworth) and men “already ruin’d by some untimely vice” (like Richardson). 12 Hugh Crow largely agreed. The “white slaves” who served aboard his ships were essentially the “very dregs of the community”: some were jailbirds, a few were landsmen who learned a few sea phrases and signed on under false pretenses, and an even smaller number were the wasted sons of gentlemen.13 According to the slave-trade merchant James Penny, some of the landsmen who sailed on Liverpool ships were urban proletarians, “idle people from the manufacturing towns,” such as Manchester.14

  Advocates of the slave trade emphasized the significant number of landsmen who went on board slave ships. Some claimed that they made up half or more of each crew.15 Landsmen did turn up on the muster rolls of slave ships, but in modest numbers. William Seaton took only two when he sailed in the Swift in 1775. During a wartime voyage of 1780-81, when labor demand would have been at its peak and landsmen most desirable, the Hawk carried only three among its crew of forty-one.16 Those who began their work at sea as landsmen moved up the hierarchy voyage by voyage, becoming “half sailors,” “3/4 sailors,” both at lower pay, and finally full, able seamen.17

  James Field Stanfield underestimated the number of seamen who joined the slave ship by choice, which often operated in tandem with necessity or coercion. Crimps not only “sold” sailors to Guinea captains, they delivered them by consent, as in the case of William Butterworth.

  A landlord got Thomas Thompson thrown into jail, whereupon he “agreed” to go aboard a Guineaman. Choice would also be conditioned by necessity for a poor sailor who found a berth in a slave ship at forty shillings per month in peacetime, or sixty shillings and even seventy shillings per month in wartime, both of which were 20 to 25 percent higher than other trades. The same sailor also got a guaranteed food allowance (although of dubious quality) for the duration of the voyage. Many slave-trade merchants allowed sailors to allocate a portion of their pay to wives or mothers, who could collect it monthly in the home port. And even though it was usually forbidden, men who had a little money and signed on to a slaver had the prospect of private trade—carrying with them a few locally produced items such as knives or laced hats, which could then be traded for more valuable items (a parrot or a small piece of ivory) in Africa.18

  What the slave trade offered above all else was ready money—an advance of two or three months’ wages. This was the key to enticing sailors to join a trade they did not like. A common sailor could get £4 to �
�6 sterling (in 1760), which by today’s standards would have been between $1,000 and $1,500, a considerable sum of money for a poor person, especially if times were hard and he had a family to feed. Sometimes the money fed a wild, rakish binge with his mates. The collector of customs in Liverpool made this point before Parliament in 1788. Because sailors were a “thoughtless Set of Men” who cared for today, not tomorrow, advance pay, “before sailing, would carry the far greater Part of them [on] the most dangerous Voyage that was ever undertaken.” His stereotype notwithstanding, the collector expressed a fundamental truth. As proletarians with no other means of subsistence, sailors wanted and needed ready money, even when its price might be high.19

  The slave trade offered prospects for upward mobility, although these were limited, as historian Emma Christopher has emphasized. As in any trade, able and ambitious men might move up the ladder, especially when the people above were dying and falling off, which was common in the Guinea trade. Silas Told went three voyages as an apprentice and then jumped to gunner. Over ten voyages Henry Ellison moved up the ranks from apprentice, as he testified in 1790: “A gunner was the highest [position] that I ever had—I had not learning to be a mate.” He hit the wall that separated the poor from those who had acquired some education, which was essential to learning navigation and keeping books.20

  Slave-trade sailors were a “motley crew” from “all over the globe.” Many, perhaps a majority, were British in the broad sense—from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and from British colonies (or new nations) overseas—but the ships also included significant numbers of other Europeans, Africans, Asians (especially lascars), and others. The Bruce Grove had a crew of thirty-one that included four Swedes, a Portuguese, an East Indian (lascar), and the proverbial black cook. The portledge bill of an American vessel, the Tartar, lists a smaller crew of fourteen, but one no less motley, from the coastal United States (Massachusetts to South Carolina), Denmark, France, Prussia, Sicily, and Sweden. The cooper was a “freeman” from St. Domingue, the new revolutionary republic of Haiti, and the cook had been born in Rio Pongas on the Windward Coast of Africa, where the vessel was bound.21

  Like the cook of the Tartar, numerous men joined the slavers from along the African littoral, and many, such as the Fante and the Kru, had maritime backgrounds. Some were “grumettoes” who worked for short periods aboard the slave ships on the coast. Others made transatlantic voyages. The wage book of the Hawk, sailed by Captain John Smale and crew from Liverpool to the Gold Coast to the Cameroons River, to St. Lucia in 1780-81, listed Ackway, Lancelots Abey, Cudjoe, Quashey, Liverpool, and Joe Dick, all “fantyemen” who earned wages for the voyage. Four of them had been given wage advances in gold while on the African coast. Free sailors of African descent also joined the ships as their voyages began in European and American ports, not least because they had relatively few employment opportunities and seafaring was one of the most open and available. James Field Stanfield might not have understood the motives of such men, nor the lure of money to sailors poorer than himself, which in turn caused him to underestimate the role of choice, constrained though it was by necessity for so many.22

  The Culture of the Common Sailor

  Every sailor who went aboard a slave ship did so within a profound relationship of class. He had signed a contract, even if it meant drawing his best X on it, with a merchant and a captain, promising labor on the voyage for a money wage. For the next ten to fourteen months, he would experience the social life of the ship: he would sail to Africa and America and perform various kinds of labor along the way; he would live, eat, and sleep under a rigid hierarchy and harsh discipline. He would be a part of the miniature, class-riven society of the ship.23

  Yet each sailor did not come aboard the ship as an autonomous individual. He came, in most cases, as someone who was already a member of a strong and distinctive culture, as Samuel Robinson discovered during his two voyages as a boy aboard slave ships, between 1800 and 1804. Sailors, he learned, had their own way of talking (full of sea phrases and metaphors), their own way of walking (with a wide gait to keep balance on rolling decks), their own way of seeing and acting upon the world. All of it was based on their work, which was cooperative and dangerous. Seamen depended on one another for their lives, and their social attitudes and relations reflected this fundamental fact. Robinson noted that they formed “strong attachments to their mates and vessels.” Solidarity was the occupational order of the day, and indeed a favorite saying among sailors was “One and all.”

  Robinson also noted that sailors had a strong attachment to their work, as sailoring was the only life for a man of spirit. Cultural outsiders could and would be treated roughly. Sailors had little respect for landlubbers and notorious contempt for soldiers, with whom they brawled at the drop of a hat. The implications of this for Africans, especially those who came from inland societies, would be significant. On board the ship, apprentices, boys, and green hands were routinely pranked, cuffed around, sometimes even tormented. But over time these newcomers would be incorporated into the world of the deep-sea sailor, partly by learning the work and partly by ritual initiation and inclusion, as, for example, when newcomers were baptized by King Neptune on “crossing the line,” the Tropic of Cancer or the equator, on a first long-distance voyage. Emma Christopher has noted that sailors practiced “fictive kinship” to incorporate workingmen of many different national, cultural, and racial origins. The motley crew found unity in their work. They were “brother tars.”

  Learning to be a sailor meant learning to face danger without fear and to live with want. Physical and mental toughness were therefore central to the cultural outlook of sailors, as Robinson noted: “It was well known that seamen, as a class, are of a jovial, reckless temperament, disposed to look at everything on the bright side, unwilling to look for breakers a head, desirous to bear up unflinchingly under privations and fatigue which would dishearten and paralyze almost any other class of men, [and] what they consider comfort is only misery in disguise.” Shared peril and suffering bonded sailors together and gave rise to an ethic of mutual aid. Robinson found seamen to be “kind, openhearted and generous.” This was not merely a moral stand but a survival strategy, based on the assumption that an equal distribution of life’s risks helped everyone. Better to share what little one had, in the hope that someone else would share when you had nothing. Anything and everything for your brother tars. The corollary of this belief, Robinson noted, was, “The desire for wealth is deemed a meanness unworthy of any one except the lowest wretch.”

  Deeply embedded in this culture was an oppositional sensibility, which Robinson captured in a description of mealtime, when meat and bread were divided among the sailors aboard his ship. Rather than “expressing thankfulness,” as Robinson thought they should have done, “every one commences cursing his own eyes and limbs in particular, if ever he was on board such a bloody hooker in his life, and expressing a general wish that the ship, captain and owners, all and sundry, may be sent to a certain place which need not be named.” This set of attitudes would find expression over the course of the voyage in various forms of resistance: desertion, mutiny, and piracy. Against the concentrated power of the captain, common sailors would assert power of their own, from below. They also wielded power over those below them, who defined the limits of their occupational culture.

  Work on the Ship

  On the outward passage from a British or American port to West Africa, sailors by and large did what they did on most deep-sea vessels. They were organized into watches, starboard and larboard, the captain taking one, the chief mate the other on the smaller ships, the mates taking charge on the larger ones. Everyone would be on deck working all day, from 8:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., then four hours on and four hours off until the next morning. The mate or the boatswain would mark the changing of the watch by clanging the ship’s bell or blowing a whistle. The modest amount of time each sailor had off might easily be lost to a change in the weather, when all hands we
re called up to set sail and adjust the ship’s course. William Butterworth complained that he “never enjoyed a sound sleep during the entire voyage.”24

  Within each watch, groups of five or six seamen were organized into messes, to which food would be allocated by the mate on a weekly basis. According to a slave-trade merchant in 1729, “The usual Allowance given to Marriners on board of the Merchant Men on the Coast [of Africa] aforesd is Five Pounds of Bread a Week each Man, a piece of Beef weighing between Four and Five Pounds before it is salted between five men a Day with pease and flower the allowance being generally of Pease half a Pint& flour half a pound each day when allowed the same.” This allowance might be supplemented by fish if the sailors were skillful enough to catch them. Grog and sometimes brandy were also important parts of the customary weekly allowance, and they could be matters of sharp contention. Sometimes the captain would put the men to short allowance, reducing the amount of food and drink given to each mess, which inevitably brought curses, especially if the allowance in the captain’s cabin continued as before, which it always seemed to do.25

  The work to be done at this point in the voyage was the usual for a common seaman—to hand, reef, and steer—that is, to manage the sails (often aloft) by extending or reducing them as the situation required and to direct the ship’s movements by the helm (usually two hours per stint), all under the direction of the mate of the watch. Many captains swore there would be no idleness aboard their ships, so every working hour was filled, sometimes with scrubbing, or holystoning, the decks. Sailors also wove mats, thick webs of spun yarn or small ropes, used to protect the standing rigging from the friction of other ropes. They made sinnet, a braided cordage. When the vessel neared the African coast, sailors would go below, into the hold and the lower deck, to hoist and maneuver the trade goods for exchange.