The Slave Ship
Page 34
The first point to be emphasized about kinship is that it was real and commonplace aboard the slave ship. Husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings, members of families both extended and nuclear found themselves on the same ships, as one observer after another pointed out. One of the primary means of enslavement in Africa made this likely. The “grand pillage” of entire villages, set afire in the middle of the night, meant that families, indeed clans and sometimes communities, were swept up by marauding enemy forces, carried to the coast, and often sold together as “prisoners of war.” As John Thornton has written, “An entire slave ship might be filled, not just with people possessing the same culture, but people who grew up together.”78
Kinfolk met regularly aboard the Guineamen. An Igbo man, an embrenché “styled of the higher class” (like Equiano’s father), encountered on the main deck of his vessel a woman of similar “countenance and color,” his sister. The two then “stood with silence and amazement,” looked at each other with the greatest affection, and “rushed into each other’s arms.” An “extremely clever and intelligent” fifteen-year-old girl was brought aboard another slaver only to find, three months later, that a “girl with similar features,” her eight-year-old sister, had been forced to join her. “They very soon embraced each other, and went below.” It happened repeatedly on slave ships that “relations are brought on board, such as Brothers and Sisters, Wives and Husbands, and these at Separate Times.” Brothers ate together, as did sisters. But because men and women were separated, it was not easy for all kin to maintain contact. Communication between husbands and wives, for example, “was carried betwixt them by the boys which ran about the decks.”79
Slowly, in ways surviving documents do not allow us to see in detail, the idiom of kinship broadened, from immediate family to messes, to workmates, to friends, to countrymen and -women, to the whole of the lower deck. Central to the process was the additive nature of many West African cultures, as explained by John Matthews: the people of Sierra Leone had an extraordinary “facility with which they form new connexions.” Captain James Bowen described the bonding process among the enslaved. On his ship there were among the Africans “many relations.” These were not, he made clear, traditional kin relations but something of more recent formation. These were people “who had discovered such an attachment to each other, as to have been inseparable, and to have partaken of the same food, and to have slept on the same plank during the voyage.” They had, in short, shared violence, terror, and difficult conditions, as well as resistance, community, and finally survival on the lower deck of the slave ship. They built “new connexions”: they were shipmates.80
Dr. Thomas Winterbottom explained the significance of the term. He worked as a physician in the Sierra Leone colony in the early 1790s and observed the connection between kinship in Africa, aboard the ship, and in the New World. He noted that at a certain age “the title of pa, or father, is prefixed to the names of the men, as a token of respect,” and the “title of ma, or mother, is also added to the names of the women.” This, he noted, was “also practised among the slaves in the West Indies.” Then he showed how the ship provided a link: “it is worthy of remark, that those unfortunate people who have gone to the West Indies in the same vessel, ever after retain for each other a strong and tender affection: with them the term ship-mate is almost equivalent to that of brother or sister, as it is rarely that matrimonial connection takes place between them.” This phenomenon prevailed throughout the Atlantic colonies: in the Dutch colonies, those who came over on the same ship called one another sibbi or sippi. In Portuguese Brazil, the word for seafaring kinship was malungo. In French Caribbean Creole, it was bâtiment. And from Virginia to Barbados to Jamaica and beyond, it was “shipmate.” Such kinship would be extended when those who sailed together on a ship would later instruct their children to call their shipmates “uncle” or “aunt.” Speaking of the changed social relationships aboard his own ship during the Middle Passage, seaman William Butterworth noted how “much were things altered in a few weeks sailing.”81
Evidence of such bonds appeared in the extreme anxiety and pain of shipmates as they were sold and separated at the end of the voyage. Part of their agitation was of course the fear of the unknown that lay ahead on the plantation, but part of it was losing what had been built, in anguish and desperate hope, aboard the ship. In the House of Commons hearings on the slave trade between 1788 and 1792, surgeon Alexander Falconbridge and seaman Henry Ellison were asked the same question by an MP: “Have you ever known the Slaves on board your ship to appear exceedingly distressed when they were sold in the West Indies?” They agreed that yes, “they seemed sorry to be parted from one another.” Falconbridge had witnessed four such sales, while the long-experienced Ellison had seen ten. Between them they had seen more than four thousand Africans sold off the ships. They spoke not just of formal kin, who would have been in a small minority in any case; rather they generalized about the enslaved of each ship as a whole who were “sorry to be parted from one another.”82
Others added depth to the observation. Dr. Thomas Trotter wrote that the people from his ship “were crying out for their friends with all the language of affliction at being parted.” He added that “on this occasion some husbands and wives were parted,” but also noted that there were “many other relations of different degrees of kindred”—in other words, from closest family to extended kin, to fellow villagers, to countrymen, to new shipmates. Captain Bowen tried to keep together for group sale (in a scramble) those “connected by consanguinity or attachments,” but he failed in his design. With “shrieking and dismay,” even fainting, the attached were parted, probably, the captain thought, never to meet again. A final sale and separation involved three young girls “of the same country” whose vessel docked in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1804. This produced “the most piercing anguish” among one of the three, who was “overloaded with horror and dismay at the separation from her two friends.” They in turn “looked wistfully at her, and she at them. At last they threw themselves into each others arms, and burst into the most piteous exclamations.—They hung together and sobbed and screamed and bathed each other with their tears.” At last they were torn apart, whereupon one of the girls took “a string of beads with an amulet from her neck, kissed it, and hung it on her friend’s.”83
Another instance of a shipboard community in formation appeared in the comments of Captain Thomas King, veteran of nine Guinea voyages between 1766 and 1780. Captain King had witnessed instances in which “religious Priests” of certain groups had been brought aboard among the captives and had proceeded to encourage insurrection. These spiritual leaders induced others “to make those attempts, with the expectation that they should get the ship to some shore, where they would form a little community of their own.” Here, on the ship, was a new community in formation. It began when the African Adam and Eve came aboard, and it would continue in plantation communities, maroon communities, church communities, and urban communities. Here was the alchemy of chains mutating, under the hard pressure of resistance, into bonds of community. The mysterious slave ship had become a place of creative resistance for those who now discovered themselves to be “black folks.” In a dialectic of stunning power, the community of mortal suffering aboard the slave ship gave birth to defiant, resilient, life-affirming African-American and Pan-African cultures.84
CHAPTER 10
The Long Voyage of the Slave Ship Brooks
By the late 1780s, slave ships had crossed the Atlantic in the thousands, delivering millions of captives to New World plantations and helping to create a powerful new Atlantic capitalist economy. Suddenly, in 1788-89, they were all called home, in a manner of speaking, by abolitionists, who realized that what happened on these ships was morally indefensible and that their violence needed to be known in the home ports of London, Liverpool, and Bristol in England, in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the United States. The opponents of the slave trade thus be
gan an intensive campaign to make the slave ship real to a metropolitan reading public, to bring the vessels that had long operated beyond the bounds of civil society into the glare of public scrutiny and, they hoped, under new political control.1
Making the slave ship real was accomplished in a variety of ways—in pamphlets, speeches, lectures, and poetry, for example—but probably the most powerful means was visual. Abolitionists produced images of the slave ship that would prove to be among the most effective propaganda any social movement has ever created. The best known of these, in its own day and since, was the slave ship Brooks, first drawn and published by William Elford and the Plymouth chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in November 1788. The Brooks would be redrawn and republished many times around the Atlantic in the years that followed, and indeed it would come to epitomize the cruelties of the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the many-sided struggles against it. Thomas Clarkson explained in his history of the abolitionist movement that the image made “an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it.” It gave viewers “a much better idea than they could otherwise have had of the horrors of [the Africans’] transportation, and contributed greatly . . . to impress the public in favour of our cause.”2
The creation of the image of the Brooks was part of a larger strategy to educate, agitate, and activate people in Britain and America, and indeed anywhere the slave trade went on. Manchester radical Thomas Cooper explained the approach in 1787: “Every man condemns the trade in general; but it requires the exhibition of particular instances of the enormity of this Commerce, to induce those to become active in the matter, who wish well to the cause upon the whole.” Knowledge of the slave trade must be concrete, material, and human in order to build a movement. It must not be exaggerated, indeed must be a “narration of miseries which cannot be exaggerated; which extend to millions of our fellow creatures,” miseries that were “increased and authorised, not alleviated, by laws, which avarice and oppression have enacted and enforced.” It is, he concluded, “particular distress, with its attendant circumstances, which is calculated to excite compassion” and motivate people to act. Cooper thus articulated the principles that would guide much successful abolitionist work.3
The Brooks represented the miseries and enormity of the slave trade more fully and graphically than anything else the abolitionists would find. The result of their campaign was the broad dissemination of an image of the slave ship as a place of violence, cruelty, inhuman conditions, and horrific death. They showed in gruesome, concrete detail that the slaver was itself a place of barbarity, indeed a huge, complex, technologically sophisticated instrument of torture. In making the public case against it, they demonstrated that the vessel that had carried millions of Africans into slavery also carried something else: the seeds of its own destruction.4
Why the Brooks?
The voyage of the Brooks toward infamy began with a simple notation. It was written by a Captain Parrey of the Royal Navy, who had been dispatched to Liverpool to measure the tonnage and internal dimensions of several slave ships. He noted: “Ship Brooks—burthen 297 Tons contains in her different apartments for the Negroes 4178 square feet, which allows for one half the number she carried (609). 5 feet 6 Inches Length & 18 Inches breadth, & the other half 5 feet length & 13 Inches breadth, or 6 feet 10 Inches to each person on board.” Parrey had inspected twenty-six vessels and taken the measurements of nine, three of which were larger than the Brooks, five smaller. When the square footage of each vessel was divided by the number of slaves carried on the last voyage, the Brooks had the second-smallest allocation of space per slave. In all other respects it seemed more or less typical.5
The Brooks came to be featured in abolitionist propaganda after the Plymouth and London abolition committees gained access to Parrey’s list of measurements, likely through Prime Minister William Pitt, who had sent Parrey to Liverpool in the first place. In the original broadside text, Elford provided part of the rationale by introducing the Brooks as “a capital ship.” The London committee, which apparently approved the Plymouth broadside, thought it necessary, in Clarkson’s words, “to select some one ship, which had been engaged in the Slave-trade, with her real dimensions, if they meant to make a fair representation of the manner of the transportation.” The Brooks therefore offered three advantages: it was, by chance, the first that appeared on Captain Parrey’s list, so it was randomly chosen. It would also admit of “no complaint of exaggeration” by the opponents of abolition. It was, finally, “a ship well known in the trade.”6
The Brooks had been built in 1781 and named for Liverpool slave-trading merchant Joseph Brooks Jr., who commissioned it and was its first owner. It was a big ship by the standards of the day, even for a Guineaman, at 297 tons (average was about 200). It was built “for the [slave] Trade,” as Captain Parrey noted in his report. Evidence lay in the fourteen scuttles or air ports cut in the sides of the ship to ventilate the lower deck where the enslaved would be stowed. (Other “car- goes”—except perhaps cattle and convicts—did not require such ventilation.) The Brooks had a long life as a slaver, making ten successful voyages over almost a quarter of a century. Its captains purchased an estimated total of 5,163 Africans, 4,559 of whom they delivered alive, giving the ship a mortality rate of 11.7 percent, close to the average for ships over the four centuries of the slave trade (12.1 percent), but high for its own day (average for British ships between 1775 and 1800 was 7.95 percent). Before the Dolben Act, the Brooks carried considerably more slaves than would be shown in the various diagrams: 666 slaves in 1781-83; 638 in 1783-84; a staggering 740 in 1785-86; and 609 in 1786-87, the last voyage before Captain Parrey’s inspection.7
The First Image: Plymouth
At the top of the large broadside created by Elford and the Plymouth Committee was the image of the Brooks with 294 Africans tightly packed and arranged in orderly fashion in four apartments, labeled from left (the stern of the vessel) “Girls Room,” “Womens Room,” “Boys Room,” and “Mens Room.” Each person was distinctly and individually drawn and wore only a loincloth. The men were chained at the ankles. On a broadside that measured twenty by thirty inches, the ship took up less than a quarter of the space. Immediately below the image was the heading “Plan of an AFRICAN SHIP’S Lower Deck with NEGROES in the proportion of only One to a Ton.” In the middle of the heading was another image, an oval featuring a supplicant slave in chains, hands raised and asking, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” At the left of the oval were manacles and at the right a whip, a cat-o’-nine-tails. This was an early use of what would become the primary emblem of the abolition society.8
Beneath the image and heading were two columns (eight paragraphs) of explanatory text, which took up the other three-fourths of the broadside. It began: “The above Plate represents the lower deck of an African ship of 297 tons burden, with the Slaves stowed in it, in the
The Brooks, original Plymouth edition, reproduced in Bristol
proportion of not quite one to a ton.” The next paragraph describes spatial allocation: men got six feet by sixteen inches; boys, five feet by fourteen inches; women, five feet ten inches by sixteen inches; girls, four feet by fourteen inches. The height between decks was five feet eight inches. Then followed a brief description of social conditions aboard the ship—how the men were fettered, how the enslaved were brought upon deck to be fed. The recently passed Dolben Act, which limited the number of slaves to be carried according to the tonnage of the vessel, is mentioned before the text returns to the question of stowage and then to the “thousand other miseries” suffered by the enslaved—being torn from their kin and native land, the “unremitting labours of slavery, without recompense, and without hope,” and ultimately premature death.
Then came an explanation that the current abolition campaign concerned the slave trade only, not the emancipation of the slaves, as some had falsely alleged, which would injure “private prop
erty.” On the contrary, the ending of the slave trade would result in better treatment for the slaves already in possession: “Thus then the value of private property will not only suffer no diminution, but will be very comfortably inhanced by the abolition of the Trade.”
A penultimate short paragraph rebuts an argument put forward by supporters of the trade “that the suppression of it will destroy a great nursery for seamen, and annihilate a very considerable source of commercial profit.” Thomas Clarkson’s research had recently demonstrated that the slave trade was not a “nursery” for seamen but rather a graveyard. Moreover, the precarious and uncertain nature of the trade made it a dangerous, sometimes ruinous, investment for merchants.
The text concluded with a call to activism. It noted the current parliamentary investigation of the slave trade and called on citizens “to stand forward” and provide relevant information to “throw the necessary lights on the subject,” presumably into the dark lower deck of the Brooks and other slave ships. It closed by noting the power and agency of an incipient social movement: “people would do well to consider, that it does not often fall to the lot of individuals, to have an opportunity of performing so important a moral and religious duty, as that of endeavouring to put an end to a practice, which may, without exaggeration, be stiled one of the greatest evils at this day existing upon the earth.” The Plymouth committee resolved that “1500 plates, representing the mode of stowing slaves on board the African traders, with remarks on it, be struck off and distributed gratis.”9