The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  49 I have inferred the tonnage of the ship from the number of slaves brought on board, using a ratio created by the Dolben Act of 1788—roughly 1.8 slaves per one ton carrying capacity.

  50 According to William Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine, gratings were “a sort of open covers for the hatches, formed by several small laths or battens of wood, which cross each other at right angles, leaving a square interval between. They are formed to admit the air and light from above into the lower apartments of the ship, particularly when the turbulence of the sea or weather renders it necessary to shut the ports between decks.”

  51 Falconer, Universal Dictionary of the Marine, s.v., “boat,” “long-boat, “yawl”; Stammers, “Guineamen,” 40.

  52 Thomas Clarkson noted that “the Stern Part of the Vessel is the place, first, where the Arm Chest stands, and secondly, where the Vessel is principally worked. Hence the weakest [captives, often little girls] are put into Stern Division.” See Clarkson to Comte de Mirabeau, November 17, 1789, ff. 3-4, Papers of Thomas Clarkson, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. For a public auction of “Four large IRON BOILERS, suitable for a guineaman or vessel of war,” see South-Carolina State Gazette and Timothy’s Daily Adviser, June 14, 1799. On “Guinea casks,” see William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620-1789 (New York: Hillary House Publishers, Ltd., 1963), vol. II, 458.

  53 In the 1770s a new method of sheathing appeared, as reported by the Providence Gazette: “The new method of sheathing with ground glass has answered so, that sloops which have been sent up the rivers Senegal and Ganges, where the worms are largest, are returned uninjured.” When the vessels returned from Senegal to England, the Admiralty took notice and introduced the practice into the Royal Navy, but in the end it did not have the effectiveness and staying power of copper. See the Providence Gazette; and Country Journal, July 7, 1770, and April 9, 1774.

  54 Newport Mercury, March 25, 1809. The earliest reference I have found to copper sheathing appeared in the records of the Royal African Company in the 1720s. See Ship’s Book (unidentified), 1722-24, Treasury (T) 70/1227, NA.

  55 According to a letter from Liverpool of August 15, 1791, “This day a new ship for the African trade, called the Carnatic, was launched from a slip near the king’s dock, for the same respectable merchant; she is sheathed upon a new principle of coppering—the sheets being all wrought cold, instead of the usual mode by fire, from which great advantages are expected.” See City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, October 26, 1791 and TSTD, #80733.

  56 Falconer, Universal Dictionary of the Marine, s.v. “windsail.”

  57 Connecticut Centinel, August 2, 1804.

  58 Providence Gazette; and Country Journal, August, 5, 1790.

  59 Providence Gazette, July 19, 1800.

  Chapter 3: African Paths to the Middle Passage

  1 This and the next three paragraphs are based on Joseph Hawkins, A History of a Voyage to the Coast of Africa, and Travels into the Interior of that Country; containing Particular Descriptions of the Climate and Inhabitants, particulars concerning the Slave Trade (Troy, N.Y.: Luther Pratt, 2nd edition, 1797), 18-149. Hawkins was a young man of no property but some education, who worked as supercargo aboard the slave ship Charleston on a voyage of 1794-95. For a survey of the Rio Pongas region in this period, see Bruce L. Mouser, “Trade, Coasters, and Conflict in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808,” Journal of African History, 14 (1973), 45-64.

  2 Hawkins called the adversaries in this war “Galla” and “Ebo.” Location inland from the Windward Coast suggests that the former were the Gola but that the latter were not the Igbo, who lived several hundred miles to the east in present-day Nigeria. I have tentatively identified the “Ebo” as Ibau based on information in George Peter Murdock, Africa: Its People and Their Culture History (New York: MacGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959), 91.

  3 J. D. Fage questioned (but did not finally reject) the authenticity of Hawkins’s account in “Hawkins’ Hoax? A Sequel to ‘Drake’s Fake,’ ” History in Africa 18 (1991), 83-91. Additional evidence has now come to light to support its credibility. First, Fage did not know about the Ibau and therefore wrongly assumed that Hawkins had misplaced the Igbo on the Windward Coast. Second, the clearance of the Charleston was noted in the City Gazette and Daily Advertiser on January 5, 1795, and its return in July 1795 in the same newspaper (July 24, 1795, August 5, 7, and 15, 1795) and in the Columbian Herald or the Southern Star (August 14, 1795), where a sale of a “cargo of Prime Slaves” was advertised. These dates square with Hawkins’s account. Third, Hawkins advertised his book in Charleston’s City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (March 14 and 15, 1797, August 16, 1797), which he would not likely have done had it been fraudulent.

  4 The idea of the Middle Passage as concept, linking expropriation in one location to exploitation in another, was suggested in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). The idea was developed in various ways in essays that appeared in Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

  5 In this section and the six that follow (on the basic regions of trade), I have drawn on the following major interpretive works: Walter Rodney, “The Guinea Coast,” in J. D. Fage and Roland Olivier, eds., The Cambridge History of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), vol. 4, From c. 1600 to c. 1790; J. D. Fage, A History of West Africa (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 4th edition; J. F. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1971, 1974), 2 vols.; Elizabeth Allo Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 2nd edition, 1998); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2nd edition; Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Michael A. Gomez, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming, 2008). Also valuable have been Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); idem, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Johannes Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003). Specialized studies for each region are listed in following sections.

  6 Manning, African Diaspora; Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 206.

  7 Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 114.

  8 South Carolina Gazette, August 3, 1784.

  9 A more modern transcription would be Ayub ibn Suleiman, ibn Ibrahim, or Ayuba Suleyman Diallo.

  10 Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa, Who was a Slave about two years in Maryland; and afterwards being brought to England, was set free, and sent to his native Land in the year 1734 (London, 1734), 12-17, 44-48; Job ben Solomon to Mr. Smith, January 27, 1735-36, in Donnan II, 455; Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London, 1738), 69, 204-9, 223-24. See also Arthur Pierce Middleton, “The Strange Story of Job Ben Solomon,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 5 (1948), 342-50; Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).

  11 Richard Roberts, W
arriors, Merchants, and Slaves: The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), ch. 3.

  12 Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 164-66; Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 68-70; James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa (London: ME Sharpe Inc., 2004).

  13 Nicholas Owen, Journal of a Slave-Dealer: A View of Some Remarkable Axedents in the Life of Nics. Owen on the Coast of Africa and America from the Year 1746 to the Year 1757, ed. Eveline Martin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 76; John Newton, Journal of a Slave Trader, 1750-1754, ed. Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell (London: Epworth Press, 1962), 43.

  14 Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations Along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 ((Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003), ch. 3; George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 178, 246-47; Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); L. Day, “Afro-British Integration on the Sherbro Coast, 1665-1795,” Africana Research Bulletin 12 (1983), 82-107; Rodney, “The Rise of the Mulatto Traders” in History of the Upper Guinea Coast.

  15 Accounts of Fort Commenda, October 23, 1714; “Diary and Accounts, Commenda Fort, In Charge of William Brainie, 1714-1718,” in Donnan II, 186; David Henige, “John Kabes of Kommenda: An Early African Entrepreneur and State Builder,” Journal of African History 13 (1977), 1-19. Henige writes, “Kabes was an employee of the Royal African Company in the sense that he was on its payroll and unquestionably performed useful services in its behalf. But he was not—and did not consider himself to be—its ‘servant’ ” (10).

  16 Yaw M. Boateng, The Return: A Novel of the Slave Trade in Africa (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), vii.

  17 Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Kwame Yeboa Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast: 1600-1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Rebecca Shumway, “Between the Castle and the Golden Stool: Transformations in Fante Society, 1700-1807,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2004; William St. Clair, The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade (London: Profile Books, 2006). See also two articles by Peter C. W. Gutkind, “Trade and Labor in Early Precolonial African History: The Canoemen of Southern Ghana,” in Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., The Workers of the African Trade (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985), 25-50; “The Boatmen of Ghana: The Possibilities of a Pre-Colonial African Labor History,” in Michael Hanagan and Charles Stephenson, eds., Confrontation, Class Consciousness and the Labor Process (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 123-66.

  18 James Field Stanfield, Observations on a Guinea Voyage, in a Series of Letters Addressed to the Rev. Thomas Clarkson (London: James Phillips, 1788), 20; Interview of Henry Ellison, in Substance, 218-19 ; Testimony of Henry Ellison, 1790, in HCSP, 368-69, 383.

  19 C. W. Newbury, The Western Slave Coast and Its Rulers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640- 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550-1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Robin Law, The Oyo Empire, c.1600-c.1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 54 (1999), 307-34.

  20 Antera Duke’s diary appears in two forms, an original text in pidgin English and a “modern English version,” in C. Daryl Forde, ed., Efik Traders of Old Calabar . . . ; The Diary of Antera Duke, an Efik Slave-Trading Chief of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1956), 27-115. See the entries for the following days: June 5, 1787; August 29, 1785; January 27, 1788; April 8, 1785; September 26, 1785; December 25, 1787 (a Christmas Day party); October 9, 1786; October 5, 1786; May 26, 1785; October 23, 1785; Mar. 21, 1785; January 30, 1785; August 9, 1786 June 27, 1785. Early in his career, in late 1769 and early 1770, Duke was one of thirty Old Calabar traders who sold slaves to Captain John Potter of the Dobson. Duke himself sold thirty-seven, along with a thousand yams, for which he earned 4,400 coppers, the equivalent of 1,100 iron bars or 550 kegs of gunpowder. See P. E. H. Hair, “Antera Duke of Old Calabar—A Little More About an African Entrepreneur,” History in Africa 17 (1990), 359-65.

  21 Twenty vessels (which made twenty-five voyages) mentioned by Duke can be found in the slave-trade database. The actual and (in eight cases) imputed number of slaves shipped on these voyages was 10,285 (although not all from Old Calabar), an average of 411 per ship. See TSTD, #81258, #82312, #81407, #81841, #82233, #82326, #83268, #83708, #81353, #81559, #81560, #81583, #82362, #82543, #83063, #81913, #82327, #83168, #83169, #83178, #84050, #83365, #83709, #84018, #84019.

  22 For an excellent study of an important event in the history of the region, see Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  23 Robin Horton, “From Fishing Village to City-State: A Social History of New Calabar,” in Mary Douglas and Phyllis M. Kaberry, eds., Man in Africa (London: 1969), 37-61; A. J. H. Latham, Old Calabar, 1600-1891: The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); David Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978); Elizabeth Allo Isichei, A History of the Igbo People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976); Douglas B. Chambers, “ ‘My own nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997), 72-97; David Northrup, “Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition 71 (2000); Douglas B. Chambers, “Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave Trade and the Creation of African ‘Nations’ in the Americas,” Slavery and Abolition 22 (2001), 25-39 ; Douglas B. Chambers, “The Significance of Igbo in the Night of Biafra Slave-Trade: A Rejoinder to Northrup’s ‘Myth Igbo,’ ” Slavery and Abolition 23 (2002), 101-20; Douglas B. Chambers, Murder at Montpelier: Igbo African in Virginia (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005).

  24 Robert Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 7, 8, 27, 33, 35, 92.

  25 David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and Their Neighbors Under the Influence of the Portuguese, 1483-1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow; Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 (1988); Herbert S. Klein, “The Portuguese Slave Trade from Angola in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972), 894-918.

  26 Testimony of Robert Norris, 1789, in HCSP 69:38-39. See also John Thornton, Africa and Africans, 99-105.

  27 “Anonymous Account of the Society and Trade of the Canary Islands and West Africa, with Observations on the Slave Trade” (n.d., but c. 1784), Add. Ms. 59777B, f. 42v, BL; John Matthews, A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone, on the Coast of Africa, containing an Account of the Trade and Productions of the Country, and of the Civil and Religious Customs and Manners of the People; in a Series
of Letters to a Friend in England (London: B. White and Son, 1788), 85-86; John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West Indies; In His Majesty’s Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth (London, 1735; rpt. London: Frank Cass, 1970), 176; Testimony of Thomas Trotter, 1790, in HCSP, 73:83-84; Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, which was honoured with the First Prize in the University of Cambridge for the Year 1785, with Additions (London, 1786; rpt. Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969), 45; Testimony of Henry Ellison, 1790, HCSP, 73:381. See also John Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa: 1500-1800 (London: Routledge, 1999), 128. On the import of guns into West Africa, especially for the period 1750-1807, see J. E. Inikori, “The Import of Firearms into West Africa 1750-1807: A Quantitative Analysis,” Journal of African History 18 (1977), 339-68 and W. A. Richards. “The Import of Firearms into West Africa in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of African History 21 (1980), 43-59.

  28 Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa, 30; Rodney, History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 114.

  29 Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 6-7.

  30 Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea,180; Bruce Mouser, ed., A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 81-82 ; Thomas Clarkson, Letters on the Slave-Trade and the State of the Natives in those Parts of Africa which are Contiguous to Fort St. Louis and Goree (London, 1791).

  31 Robert Norris wrote that the “Mahees” resisted enslavement by the king of Dahomey in the 1750s and 1760s by escaping to rugged, inaccessible mountain terrain, where they defended themselves. See his Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee, King of Dahomy, an Inland Country of Guiney, to which are added the Author’s Journey to Abomey, the Capital, and a Sort Account of the African Slave Trade (orig. publ. London, 1789; rpt. London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1968), 21-22. See also Ismail Rashid, “ ‘A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at Any Price’: Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Sylviane A. Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 137, 142.