The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Slave-trade merchants did the best they could to downplay the matter, stressing that “good order” aboard the ship meant no abuse of the female slaves by the crew. A member of the investigating parliamentary committee asked Robert Norris, “Is there any Care taken to prevent any Intercourse between White Men and the Black Women?” Norris responded crisply, in captainlike fashion, “Orders are generally issued for that Purpose by the Commanding Officer.” A questioner who was apparently more sympathetic to the slave trade may have considered this too weak a response, so he followed up to make sure everyone knew that sexual abuse would not be tolerated. He wondered, “If a British Sailor should offer Violence to a Negro Woman, would he not be severely punished by the Captain?” Norris answered, “He would be sharply reproved certainly.” John Knox added that it was usually a matter of contract that any sailor proved guilty of “vice” while on the voyage would lose one month’s pay.41

  The “good order” described by the merchants was not unknown, but according to Newton (whose knowledge of the slave trade was based in an earlier era), it was relatively uncommon. Speaking of the crew, he wrote, “On shipboard they may be restrained, and in some ships they are; but such restraint is far from being general.” It all depended on the captain, who had the power to protect the women slaves if he chose to do so. Newton knew several commanders who maintained what he considered proper discipline, but these were probably a minority: “In some ships, perhaps in the most, the license in this particular was almost unlimited.” Anyone who did his work and did it properly “might, in other respects, do what they pleased.” The Reverend William Leigh added that Guinea voyages often exhibited “promiscuous intercourse” and wild “scenes of debauchery.” Questions of morality, both ministers lamented, were never posed.42

  Questions of class aboard the ship were posed. Most observers of slave-shipboard life agreed that officers had unlimited access to slave women but that common sailors did not. Alexander Falconbridge wrote that “on board some ships, the common sailors are allowed to have intercourse with such of the black women whose consent they can procure.” The officers, on the other hand, “are permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure, and sometimes are guilty of such brutal excesses as disgrace human nature.” Reverend Leigh agreed: “the Captain and Officers still indulge their desires unrestrained, and the common sailors are allowed to take for the voyage any female Negro whose consent they can obtain.” Neither writer paused to consider what “consent” could have meant in a situation where women had no protection, no rights, and were, in Newton’s words, “abandoned, without restraint, to the lawless will of the first comer.”

  And yet sketchy evidence suggests that some African women formed relationships with sailors that involved some degree of consent. This may have been a woman’s way to make the best of a bad situation, that is, to make a strategic alliance with one man as a protection against other predators. The higher up the ship’s hierarchy the protector, the better and more reliable the protection would be. When a sailor did pair off with a woman, he apparently gave her access to his provisions, which saved the merchant and captain money. Leigh suggested that some of these unions resulted in tragic scenes when the ship arrived in the American port and the time came for the sale of the enslaved. He said that “Negroe women, when being separated by sale from the sailors who cohabited with them,” sometimes tried “destroying themselves, and sometimes jumping overboard, on the attempt to force them from the ship.”43

  There is no reason to think that the process described by John Newton—the hardening of the captain’s heart—would apply less to sailors, and indeed it may have applied more, because sailors were in intimate daily contact with the enslaved, sharing close quarters for anywhere between two and ten months on a voyage. Several ship captains spoke of the need to restrain their sailors, to intervene against a socialization process over which they themselves presided. William Snelgrave was sure that the desperate insurrections of the enslaved were caused by “the Sailors ill usage of these poor People, when on board the Ships wherein they are transported to our Plantations.” Captain John Samuel Smith of the Royal Navy testified in 1791 that he had trouble impressing slave-trade sailors for the king’s service because they were so sick and ulcerated as to pose a risk of infection to the other men aboard his vessel. But the two he was able to press “turned out to be such cruel inhuman fellows, that we were under the necessity of dismissing them from the ship, although good seamen.”44

  The Dead List

  Along the coast of West Africa, common sailors encountered a barrier reef of an unusual kind. It was pathogenic, made of microbes, and it made the area a “White Man’s Grave.” Half of all Europeans who journeyed to West Africa in the eighteenth century, most of them seamen, died within a year. The primary causes of the high mortality were “fevers,” malaria and yellow fever, both mosquito-borne, and both reproducible within the slave ship itself, as the insects bred in the stagnant bilgewater that collected in the hull. Other causes of death were dysentery, smallpox, accidents, murder, and occasionally scurvy. The prevalence of disease (and the absence of immunity), coupled with difficult working and living conditions (fatiguing work, poor food, and harsh discipline), meant that the crew aboard the slave ships often died in even greater proportions than did the enslaved, although of different causes, within a different chronological pattern during the voyage (more while on the coast and early in the voyage), and with variations according to African region: the Gold Coast was comparatively healthy, the Bights of Benin and Biafra deadly. In surveying crew mortality for 350 Bristol and Liverpool slavers between 1784 and 1790, a House of Commons committee found that 21.6 percent of the sailors died, a figure that was in keeping with Thomas Clarkson’s estimates at the time and is consistent with modern research. Roughly twenty thousand British slave-trade seamen died between 1780 and 1807. For sailors as for African captives, living for several months aboard a slave ship was in itself a struggle for life.45

  The history of the slave trade is full of horror stories of crew mortality, of ships so disabled by disease and death that voyages ended in failure if not outright catastrophe. One captain in 1721 referred to his sick sailors as “walking ghosts.” Later in the century, another noted in his journal the “squal’d immassiated appearance” of his sailors, who reminded him of the “resurrection of the Dead.” In many instances there was only death and no resurrection. Captain David Harrison brought news to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1770 from the river Gambia, where the “whole crew” of the brig Elizabeth had died, leaving a ghost ship at anchor. In 1796, Captain Cooke of Baltimore “lost all his hands, except a negro man and boy.” Sometimes entire seafaring families were devastated. When Josiah Bowen of Barrington, Rhode Island, died on the coast of Africa in 1801, the newspaper noted that his father had lost five sons at sea over the past five years.46 Observers were not referring to the enslaved alone when they called slave ships “floating” or “marine lazar-houses,” places filled with people suffering from all kinds of mortal diseases.47

  A macabre portrait of the wounded and the dead emerges from petitions by sailors or their families to the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol on behalf of men who had worked on company ships for five years or more. John Fielding got a “high scurvy,” which caused him to lose the toes on his left foot. Benjamin Williams contracted ulcers in his legs; the right one was amputated. William Victor had both of his legs broken when a tent frame (which he was erecting for the sale of slaves in Virginia) collapsed on him. John Smith and Cornelius Calahan “were seized with a Distemper in their Eyes then raging amongst the Slaves which has deprived them of their sight.” The maimed were the lucky ones. John Grenville died after falling from the main deck into the hold. Richard Ruth “was lost by the oversett of a canoe on the coast of Africa”; William Davis and six others apparently drowned when their longboat capsized. James Harding was poisoned by African traders, while George Hancock was killed by “a Rising of the Slaves.�
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  Conditions on the ships were so bad that sailors occasionally committed suicide, especially when they had been bullied by a captain or a mate. Captain Thomas Tucker abused cook John Bundy so badly, whipping and at one point stabbing him in the face, that the poor man’s life, wrote Silas Told, became “grievously burthensome to him.” When he hinted that he would throw himself overboard, his shipmates tried to dissuade him, but one morning at eight o’clock he “plunged himself into the sea.” Thomas Jillett, a fifteen-year-old boy aboard the Bruce Grove, declared after mistreatment by the ship’s mate that he “was weary of his life” and soon disappeared over the side. An Irish boy named Paddy did likewise aboard the Briton in 1762: threatened by the mate with a severe flogging for not boiling the teakettle in time, he jumped overboard and drowned.49

  The physical decline of the crew, which began on the coast of Africa and increased throughout the Middle Passage, created a literally fatal contradiction: crews sickened, weakened, and died just as ever-larger numbers of the enslaved were coming on board, leaving too few workers to sail the ship and guard against a slave insurrection. An observer aboard a slave ship wrote, “[We conceal] ye death of ye Sailours from ye Negros by throwing them overboard in ye night, lest it might give them a temptation to rise upon us, seeing us so much weaken’d by ye death of 8, & most of ye rest sick but my self, we being now but 12 in all, that were left.” Moreover, one of the advantages of the barricado was that the men slaves could not see over it and thereby count how many sailors were still alive, working on the other side.50

  When a sailor died, a simple burial ceremony might be held, as seamen were “plain dealers” who did not care for elaborate rituals. If on the coast of Africa, the captain usually made efforts to bury the body ashore (the slave-trading port of Bonny, for example, had a burial ground for sailors on the river). If at sea, the corpse was sewn up in a hammock or an old canvas sail and weighted down with a cannonball to sink it. But even this modest interment faced challenge, mostly from sharks, which were known to rip the dead body to pieces before it could sink. Many a sailor ended up not only in an unmarked grave but as “food for the fishes of the deep.” It was an ignominious end to life.51

  Such men left few traces. Common sailor George Glover’s life came to an end, cause unknown, aboard the Essex, commanded by Captain Peter Potter, on November 13, 1783. Potter arranged to take an inventory of his few worldly goods. According to sailors’ custom, these were sold “at the mast” to his shipmates, the proceeds to go to a widow or family member. Glover’s most valuable possession was his jacket, sold for thirteen shillings, sixpence. He had two pairs of trousers, one of which was “good for nothing.” Other items included two shirts (one check, one flannel), shoes, stockings, a pair of drawers, a pair of buckles, a bag, and a worthless hat. One of the shirts, the shoes, and the hat he had bought from the captain during the voyage at high prices. In the end, everything Glover owned aboard the ship was worth less than a pound and a half, and even this value is largely inflated because seamen always paid, to help the surviving family, considerably more than any given item was worth. Other common seamen who died left a little more than Glover, some a little less. One man left “1 parrot the Cooper has in his care.”52 When ships like the Essex returned to Liverpool, a “melancholy ceremony” was enacted. The family and friends of the original crew assembled on the dock where the vessel arrived to hear someone on board read out the “dead list.”53

  Mutiny and Desertion

  Off the Gold Coast in 1749, Captain Thomas Sanderson of the Antelope commanded his sailors to turn out on deck. A group of them refused. Those who still accepted his authority apparently answered a second command to secure the five men who remained below. They clapped Edward Suttle, Michael Simpson, John Turner, William Perkins, and Nicholas Barnes in irons. Sanderson wanted to get them off the ship, so he transferred them to another merchant vessel anchored nearby. Meanwhile three other members of the crew seized the longboat and deserted.54

  Captain Sanderson had a problem, and not only with mutiny. He had a significant number of captive slaves belowdecks, and he had now lost a third of his crew. He therefore brought the five mutinous ones back aboard, but again they refused to work, and this time they armed themselves with cutlasses to make sure he got the point. When Sanderson persisted, giving an order to weigh anchor, John Turner “threatned to knock down the first Man that should put a Handspike into the Windlass to heave up the Anchor.” At this point Sanderson appealed for help to another slave trader, Captain Holmes, who came aboard and reprimanded the crew. The mutineers threatened to heave him overboard. Sanderson now apparently felt that he could no longer count on the obedience of his own crew, so he appealed to a Dutch captain, who dispatched a group of his own sailors. They quelled the disturbance and put the mutineers once again in irons.

  Still short of hands, Sanderson released the men again, probably after securing a promise of obedience, which soon evaporated into the coastal mist. This time the sailors took up handspikes and demanded that Sanderson “surrender himself prisoner.” They captured the ship and turned the world upside down, locking Sanderson, the surgeon, and a few others in chains but assuring them that they would not be harmed. Later they put the captain and his supporters in a boat, with food, and sent them ashore. The vanquished were taken aboard the slave ship Speedwell by Captain Joseph Bellamy, who came to the aid of a fellow captain in distress. He immediately went in pursuit of the Antelope. Eventually the mutineers were retaken and found themselves fastened in irons a third time.

  After the recapture of his ship, Captain Sanderson went aboard and discovered many empty bottles and, more disturbingly, gunpowder at the ready (whether to defend or destroy the vessel, he did not say). He also found that containers of his valuable cargo, “India goods” (cotton fabrics), had been broken open by the crew and distributed “to the Women Slaves on board.” When someone asked the men in chains what they had planned to do with the ship, one of them, perhaps “Captain Turner,” as he was called, said that “some of the Crew were for carrying her to Brazil & Others for carrying the same to Eustatia & there to dispose of them.” He referred to the slaves belowdecks. The mutiny was only a limited liberation.

  The courtroom testimony of surgeon’s mate William Steele made clear the causes of the mutiny. First, several seamen thought Sanderson had violated custom, the main one being the sailors’ iron right to grog. Complaining that Sanderson made no “Allowance of strong Liquors which it was usual for Masters of other Ships on the Coast to do,” two seamen decided to take the matter into their own hands. They broke into a storage room, found the spirits to refresh their spirits, got drunk, and quarreled with Captain Sanderson. A second cause was “the uneasy & unsettled Life they lived on board the Ship by the Captain’s Behaviour to them,” which apparently included violence. When Sanderson announced that they would be sailing farther east down the Guinea coast, there was much “grumbling upon Deck.” The sailors “said the Captain had used them so ill in the former Part of the Voyage they thought it was very hard for them to be obliged to go windward for that they expected that if they did he would use them worse when he got [away] from among the Rest of the Ships,” meaning those trading in the area. His tyranny would increase in isolation. A third, more specific cause (or perhaps an illustration of the second) was a beating the captain gave the boatswain. When this happened, several members of the crew dared to object, saying he “should not beat the old Man (meaning ye Boatswain who was a very old Man).” A shouting match ensued, in which the crew gave the captain “ill language.” The confrontation, which apparently took place the night before the first work stoppage, may have been the breaking point.55

  In comparative terms Captain Sanderson was lucky to escape unharmed or even with his life.56 Mutineers aboard the Endeavour in 1721 flogged Captain John Wroe, while others gruesomely killed captains, usually over the same causes that existed on the Antelope.57 A mutineer aboard the Abington in 1719 commented on the c
onditions of working life by saying, “Damn it, it was better to be hanged than live so.”58 The sailors aboard the Buxton in 1734 decapitated Captain James Beard with an ax. After it was over, common seaman Thomas Williams sighed with relief, “Damn the Dog I have done it at last. I wish it had been don long enough agoe.” More than two years later, grumbling sailors aboard the Pearl Galley engaged in a war of nerves, asking Captain Eustace Hardwicke and others if anyone remembered the fate of Captain Beard, implying, with menace, that the same thing could happen again, soon.59 Aboard the Tewkesbury in 1737, the “young Lads” among the sailors axed their captain in the face and threw him overboard. Mutineer John Kennelly was heard to say that now “they should have Rum enough,” while John Rearden boasted that now the captain would not “kill half a dozen of us.” Captured and taken to Cape Coast Castle, where they were tried and convicted, two of the rebels were made seven-year indentured servants to the traders and five others were hanged at the waterside gates of the fort.60

  Some mutineers set up as pirates, especially in the 1710s and 1720s, when slave-trade sailors like “Black Bart” Roberts roamed the seas, captured prizes, and created a crisis in the Atlantic trading system. That generation of pirates was crushed by a bloody campaign of grisly executions and more rigorous naval patrolling, but nonetheless mutineers on the coast of Africa occasionally set up as pirates. An official from the slave-trading port of Anomabu notified merchants in 1766 that “the Coast is very much infested with Pirates, and that one, in particular, is a Schooner, copper sheathed, commanded by one Hide, has on board thirty four Men, and is extremely well fitted with Swivels, and Small Arms.” The pirate had taken twelve to fourteen small vessels and “had on board 1200. Sterling in Goods, and 50 ounces of Gold Dust.” After a mutiny aboard the Black Prince in 1769, sailors “hoisted the black flag” and changed the name of the ship to the Liberty.61