The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Dead Reckoning

  To conclude, again, on a personal note. I chose to end this book with the account of Captain James D’Wolf, seaman John Cranston, and the masked African woman, name unknown, for three reasons. First, the story features the three central actors in the “most magnificent drama.” It is, moreover, appropriate that the book should end where it began, with the travails of an African woman whose name is unknown to us. Second, it sums up the reality of terror aboard the slave ship and at the same time suggests the gathering forces that would bring it to an end. Third, it calls attention to a fact that requires emphasis: the dramas that played out on the decks of a slave ship were made possible, one might even say structured, by the capital and power of people far from the ship. The dramas involving captains, sailors, and African captives aboard the slave ship were part of a much larger drama, the rise and movement of capitalism around the world.

  James D’Wolf is unusual in that he got his hands dirty—perhaps bloody would be a better way to put it—in the trade itself. The hands that threw the masked woman overboard would count profits at the merchant’s table and in the end help to craft legislation in the United States Senate. D’Wolf was certainly unusual, though not unique, in this regard, as the people who benefited most from the slave ship were usually distant from its torment, suffering, stench, and death, both physically and psychologically. Merchants, government officials, and ruling classes more broadly reaped the enormous benefits of the slave ship and the system it served. D’Wolf would soon join them, apparently making only one more slaving voyage (to evade the authorities after the murder), then moving up the economic ladder from captain to the more genteel status of slave-trade merchant. Most merchants, like Humphry Morice and Henry Laurens, insulated themselves from the human consequences of their investments, thinking of the slave ship in abstract and useful ways, reducing all to columns of numbers in ledger books and statements of profit and loss.

  Like growing numbers of people around the world, I am convinced that the time has come for a different accounting. What do the descendants of D’Wolf, Morice, and Laurens—their families, their class, their government, and the societies they helped to construct—owe to the descendants of the enslaved people they delivered into bondage? It is a complex question, but justice demands that it be posed—and answered, if the legacy of slavery is ever to be overcome. There can be no reconciliation without justice.

  It is not a new question. Slave-trade Captain Hugh Crow noted in his memoir, published in the aftermath of abolition, that opportunities existed “to make some reparation to Africa for the wrongs which England may have inflicted upon her.” He had in mind philanthropy and what would be called “legitimate trade” to Africa—that is, trade in “commodities” other than human beings. He did not include the people whom he and other captains had transported to the Americas. But even the slave-ship captain admitted that something had to be done to redress a monstrous historical injustice. This applies of course not only to the slave trade but to the entire experience of slavery.18

  Britain and the United States have made significant progress over the past generation in acknowledging that the slave trade and slavery were important parts of their history. This has come about primarily because various peoples’ movements for racial and class justice arose on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s and 1970s, demanding new histories and new debates about their meaning. Scholars, teachers, journalists, museum professionals, and others took inspiration from these movements and recovered large parts of the African and African-American past, creating new knowledge and public awareness. Still, I would suggest that neither country has yet come to grips with the darker and more violent side of this history, which is perhaps one reason the darkness and violence continue in the present. Violence and terror were central to the very formation of the Atlantic economy and its multiple labor systems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even the best histories of the slave trade and slavery have tended to minimize, one might even say sanitize, the violence and terror that lay at the heart of their subjects.19

  Most histories of the Middle Passage and the slave trade more broadly have concentrated on one aspect of their subject. Following the lead of eighteenth-century abolitionists, but distrusting their propaganda and sensationalism, many historians have focused on the mortality of the Middle Passage, which has come to stand for the horrors of the slave trade. Hence precisely how many people were transported and how many of them died along the way have been key issues to be studied and debated—rightly so, in my view, but the approach is limited. One of the main purposes of this book has been to broaden the conspectus by treating death as one aspect of terror and to insist that the latter, as a profoundly human drama enacted on one vessel after another, was the defining feature of the slave ship’s hell. How many people died can be answered through abstract, indeed bloodless, statistics; how a few created terror and how the many experienced terror—and how they in turn resisted it—cannot.

  An emphasis on terror does not make the question of redress easier to answer. Nor is it the place of a historian to answer the question in any case. The price of exploitation, of unpaid labor, might be computed, and should be, as all people, past and present, deserve the full and just value of their labor. Reparations are, in my view, in order, but justice cannot be reduced to a calculus of money, lest proposed solutions play by the rules of the game that spawned the slave trade in the first place. What in any case would be the price of terror? What the price of mass premature death? These are constituent elements of racism, especially when wedded to class oppression, and they are with us still.20

  In the end I conclude that answers to these questions must be decided by a social movement for justice, led by the descendants of those who have suffered most from the legacy of the slave trade, slavery, and the racism they spawned, joined by allies in a broader struggle to end the violence and terror that have always been central to the rise and continuing operation of capitalism. It is for this reason that I chose to end with the sailors’ testimony about enslaved people caring for diseased and dying seamen in Caribbean ports. Theirs was the most generous and inclusive conception of humanity I discovered in the course of my research for this book. These good deeds, taken by people who themselves had little enough food, shelter, health, and space for ritual and burial, seemed to suggest the possibility of a different future. With their inspiration and our hard work, it may still be possible. The long, violent passage of the slave ship might finally come to an end, and the “most magnificent drama” might become magnificent in an entirely new way.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could never have written this book without family, friends, colleagues, and no small number of helpful strangers. I thank the staffs at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Bristol Record Office (especially Pat Denney, archivist of the Society of Merchant Venturers); Bristol University Library; Bristol City Museum; Merseyside Maritime Museum (Tony Tibbles and Dawn Littler in particular); Liverpool Record Office; St. John’s College Library and Cambridge University Library; National Archives; House of Lords Record Office; Royal College of Surgeons; Friends House Library; Bristol (RI) Historical Society; Newport (RI) Historical Society; John Carter Brown Library; Providence Public Library; Baker Library, Harvard Business School; New-York Historical Society; Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center; Charleston County Public Library; Avery Research Center and Special Collections, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston; South Caroliniana Library; South Carolina Historical Society. I am also grateful to the wonderful staff at my home library, Hillman, at the University of Pittsburgh, especially Phil Wilkin, who helped me to get essential research materials.

  Thanks to the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies for fellowship support. My research has also been facilitated in various and generous ways at the University of Pittsburgh, by support from the Center for Latin A
merican Studies, the Center for West European Studies, the University Center for International Studies, the Central Research Development Fund, George Klinzing and Provost’s Office of Research, and Dean N. John Cooper and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

  It was my good fortune to speak about this project before many engaged and responsive audiences. Thanks to the facilitators of the events and those who came and spoke their minds: Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell University; Karen Kupperman, Sinclair Thomson, and Michael Gomez, New York University; Madge Dresser, University of the West of England; Peter Way, Bowling Green State University; Andrew Wells and Ben Maddison, University of Wollongong; Cassandra Pybus, Centre for the Study of Colonialism and Its Aftermath, University of Tasmania; Rick Halpern, University of Toronto; Pearl Robinson, Tufts University; William Keach, Brown University; Simon Lewis, College of Charleston; Modhumita Roy, Marxist Literary Group; Phyllis Hunter, University of North Carolina-Greensboro; Kirk Savage, Department of History of Art and Architecture, and Alejandro de la Fuente, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh. I also benefited from the thoughts and suggestions of colleagues who gathered in Fremantle, Australia, in July 2005 at the conference “Middle Passages: The Oceanic Voyage as Social Process,” organized by Cassandra Pybus, Emma Christopher, and Terri-Ann White.

  As I worked in maritime archives over the last thirty years, it took a long time to see that it might be possible to write a history of the slave ship and longer still to accept its challenge. The idea first came to me in the late 1990s as I visited prisoners on death row in Pennsylvania and worked to abolish capital punishment, a modern system of terror. Thanks to the many people I have met through this long and continuing struggle: our common work is reflected in countless ways, subtle and deep, in these pages. A critical moment in deciding to write the book was a meeting in 2003 with a host of talented scholars in the Sawyer Seminar on “Redress in Social Thought, Law, and Literature,” at the University of California-Irvine. Especially valuable then and since have been communications with Saidiya Hartman, author of the powerful new book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.

  Many of my colleagues and students at the University of Pittsburgh have helped me in countless ways. Joseph Adjaye has long been a vital source of knowledge and wisdom about African history. Stefan Wheelock encouraged me to think about the technology of enslavement, while Jerome Branche helped me to understand the concept “shipmate.” Seymour Drescher and Rebecca Shumway read chapters and gave me the benefit of their expertise. Patrick Manning has been a paragon of scholarly and comradely generosity, encouraging me at the beginning of the project, guiding me through the middle, and helping me in numerous and practical ways at the end. Rob Ruck has shared the ups and downs of this book and much else, not least many a Pitt basketball season. These people and others—Alejandro de la Fuente, Lara Putnam, Bill Chase, Reid Andrews, and the members of the Working-Class History Seminar—have helped to make the history department and the University of Pittsburgh my happy home for many years.

  I have had excellent research assistance along the way. Three of my former undergraduate students, Heather Looney, Ian Hartman, and Matt Maeder, did truly outstanding work, not only gathering primary sources but asking sharp, probing questions about what they found. My graduate students past and present have been a continual source of enthusiasm, assistance, and inspiration: thanks to Isaac Cur-tis, John Donoghue, Niklas Frykman, Gabriele Gottlieb, Forrest Hylton, Maurice Jackson, Eric Kimball, Christopher Magra, Michael McCoy, Craig Marin, Scott Smith, Karsten Voss, and Cornell Womack. Special thanks to Niklas, Gabriele, Chris, and Forrest, who helped me with research, as did my son, Zeke Rediker, who lent a hand in his own area of interest, African history.

  I owe a special debt to Peter Linebaugh, whose friendship and collaboration over many years were central to the formulation of this project. Michael West, a distinguished scholar-activist of Africa and the Black Atlantic, has given warm encouragement to the project from beginning to end. The splendid maritime artist and writer William Gilkerson lent a sailor’s hand with chapter two. George Burgess, coordinator of Museum Operations, and director, Florida Program for Shark Research, Florida Museum of Natural History, and Department of Ichthyology, University of Florida, helped me to understand the history and behavior of sharks, while Pieter van der Merwe of the National Maritime Museum gave generous assistance on James Field Stanfield (chapter five). David Eltis kindly provided recent figures from the updated Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Roderick Ebanks shared his knowledge of historical archaeology in Jamaica. My gratitude to all.

  Five superb historians read the entire manuscript and applied their enormous learning. Especially warm thanks to Cassandra Pybus, a gifted writer and historian who helped me to see new possibilities; Emma Christopher, whose pathbreaking study of slave-trade sailors helped to make my own book possible; and Robin Blackburn, whose synthetic, comparative, and comprehensive studies of Atlantic slavery have been exemplary. Ira Berlin, who has brilliantly reconceptualized the slave experience in the New World, made characteristically tough-minded suggestions. Kenneth Morgan, whose own forthcoming study of the British slave trade will reset the scholarly standard, helped me in many ways, sharing his extraordinary knowledge of sources and many careful, detailed comments. I thank all for what they suggested, including the comments I was too hard-headed to accept.

  My agent, Sandy Dijkstra, helped me to think my way into the project and to find the right publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maureen Sugden provided expert copyediting. Thanks to Eleanor Birne at John Murray, and to my excellent editors at Viking Penguin USA, Wendy Wolf and Ellen Garrison, who accompanied, challenged, and helped me along the way, especially as things got difficult at the end.

  Final thanks are reserved for my family. My wife, Wendy Gold-man, has read, discussed, argued, and helped endlessly, more than anyone else. The book is dedicated to her and to my children, Zeke and Eva Rediker.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Introduction

  1 This reconstruction of a woman’s experience is based loosely on an account by sailor William Butterworth of one who came aboard his vessel, the Hudibras, in 1786 in Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra. Other details are culled from numerous primary source descriptions of captives transported by canoe to the slave ships. Igbo words are taken from a vocabulary list collected by Captain Hugh Crow during his voyages to Bonny, a different port in the same region. See Three Years Adventures, 81-82, and Memoirs of Crow, 229-30. See also Robert Smith, “The Canoe in West African History,” Journal of African History 11 (1970), 515-33. A “moon” was a common West African way of reckoning time, equal roughly to a month.

  2 W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860- 1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 727. The significance of this quotation by DuBois was emphasized in Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travailleur 19 (1982), 63-121. I am indebted to this article, and to our joint work, for many of the fundamental ideas of this book. See also Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

  3 These numbers and others throughout the book are based on the updated but not yet final and published new edition of the TSTD, as kindly provided by David Eltis. On the origins and growth of the Atlantic slave system, see David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997). Jerome S. Handler has emphasized how little first-person African testimony has survived. See his “Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America,” Slavery and Abolition 23 (2002), 25-56.

  4 Estimates of death before boarding
range widely. For Angola, Joseph Miller has suggested that 25 percent of the enslaved died on the way to the coast and another 15 percent while in captivity once there. See his Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 384-85. Patrick Manning settles on a lower range, 5 to 25 percent (Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture [New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming, 2008]). Paul Lovejoy suggests a narrower range of 9 to 15 percent; see his Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2nd edition, 63-64. Herbert S. Klein likewise suggests that mortality on the coast was likely as low or lower than on the Middle Passage (that is, about 12 percent or less). See his The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 155.

  5 Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (orig. publ. London, 1787; rpt. London: Penguin, 1999), 46, 85.

  6 East Africa (including Madagascar) became a source of a few thousand captives in the 1790s but did not qualify as an important trading zone for the period as a whole.

  7 Dalby Thomas to the Royal African Company, February 15, 1707, quoted in Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 43.

  8 Richard H. Steckel and Richard A. Jensen, “New Evidence on the Causes of Slave and Crew Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of Economic History 46 (1986), 57-77; Stephen D. Behrendt, “Crew Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997), 49-71. The ditty about Benin is quoted in Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 47. The TSTD shows that the mortality rate for British vessels between 1700 and 1725 was 12.1 percent and that it had dropped to 7.95 percent for the period 1775-1800.