A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  There was another sense in which the transatlantic slave trade was qualitatively more inhuman than the norms of slavery prevailing in the Islamic and pagan African worlds. For slaves in these regions, while indisputably unfree, were made into status objects, attached to the households, court and military retinues or seraglios of their owners. They were, in every sense, prized. And this had also been true for slaves in urban Europe: blacks in Dutch or English households were shown off and cosseted as if they were exotic pets. Never before, though, had masses of one particular race – black Africans – been treated as mere units of production in the calculus of profit. By definition, slaves had always been property. But now they were inventory: priced, sold, packaged, freighted, resold, amortized, depreciated, written off and replaced. They were, as Baxter had said, nothing more than beasts of burden. Perhaps the most shaming aspect of that dehumanization was the retrospective adoption of a set of racist commonplaces in the apologetic literature claiming that Africans were animal-like in their incapacity to feel pain or even emotion in the same manner experienced by the white races.

  Who knows when the awareness of their bestialization made itself inescapably clear to the terrified Africans themselves? By the time they reached their first selling point – from the holding pens at places like Cape Coast Castle – they had already endured a succession of traumas. Olaudah Equiano, the Ibo who wrote his memoirs in the mid-eighteenth century under his bizarre slave name of Gustavus Vasa, taken from the Swedish kings, had been well aware of the dangers of abduction as a child. When the adults of his village were away at work in the fields he would climb trees to sound the alarm when suspicious persons made an appearance. One day, none the less, he and his sister were taken. It was when they were separated that misery first took hold: ‘I was left in a state of distraction not to be described. I cried and grieved continually and for several days did not eat anything but what they forced in my mouth.’ Though he was to see his sister again, it was a moment of false hope, for Equiano, like countless others, was deliberately uprooted from any kind of familiarity – country, customs, language, kin. When he was taken on board the slave ship and ‘tossed up to see if I was sound’, the sense that he had been reduced to a workhorse must have been unmistakable. The master of the Hannibal, Thomas Phillips, who wrote an account of a typical voyage of the 1690s, described even more degrading procedures when inspecting the shipment supplied by the African dealers at Ouidah. Searching for signs of the yaws that ‘discovers itself by almost the same symptoms . . . as clap does for us . . . our surgeon is forced to examine the privities of both men and women with the nicest scrutiny, which is a great slavery but what can’t be omitted’. Once purchased, the slave was branded on the breast or shoulder with the letter of the ship’s name, ‘the place before being anointed with a little palm oil which caused but little pain, the mark being usually well in four or five days, appearing very plain and white’.

  There were other regrettable inconveniences that marred the smoothness of the loading process: negroes who were ‘so wilful and loth to leave their own country that they have often leapt out of the canoes, boat and ship into the sea and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats which pursued them, they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbados than we can have of hell’. Once on board there were still possibilities for suicide, especially since the slavers usually prowled the coast to take on extra cargo: the Africans would jump overboard, shackled or not. ‘We have . . . seen divers of them eaten by the sharks,’ wrote Phillips, ‘of which a prodigious number kept about the ships in this place [Ouidah] and I have been told will follow her to Barbadoes for the dead negroes that are thrown overboard in the passage . . . I am certain in our voyage there we did not want the sight of some every day . . . we had about twelve negroes did wilfully drown themselves and others starvd themselves to death for ’tis their belief that when they die they return home to their own country and friends.’

  Other accounts register the inconsiderateness of negroes who went ‘raving mad’, or mutilated themselves during the passage, or who had the audacity to refuse to eat, thereby jeopardizing the value of the cargo. When the young Equiano declined his gruel of horse beans and vegetables, he was flogged until he changed his mind. But what the slavers and their surgeons described as ‘melancholy’ was almost certainly the semi-catatonic state characterized by sunken eyes, swollen tongue and extreme torpor that is induced by extreme, potentially fatal, dehydration. The average adult male weighing around 150 pounds needs under normal circumstances about 4 pints (2.3 litres) of fluid a day to recover losses from urine and sweat. The standard ration for slaves on the Middle Passage – a journey lasting anything from thirty to seventy days in anything but ‘normal circumstances’ – was a pint of water and 2 pints of soup. That ration was seldom if ever given in full, but even if it were the slave would still be in fluid deficit. If, over a long journey, he or she lost just 10 per cent of their body’s 80 pints (just under 50 litres) water content, they would certainly die. Between 10 and 20 per cent of slaves on board died this way.

  Major slaving zones and ports in Africa, c. 1700–1800.

  Fluid loss from extreme perspiration was the first cause. When the ships were out in the open ocean, the slaves were taken up on deck twice a day for air, water and soup. If the sea were too rough, however, they would be kept in the stifling heat of the cramped holds, shackled in pairs and given less space (according to the Royal Africa Company specifications) than for a European pauper’s coffin. If the ship was still sailing the West African coast (one of the hottest and dampest regions of the world) picking up more cargo, the climate below decks was even more dangerous. Olaudah Equiano recalled:

  The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspiration so that the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This deplorable situation was again aggravated by the galling [chafing] of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of necessary tubs into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

  Equiano is describing a perfect environment for faecal contamination, in which both shigellosis or bacillary dysentery, the ‘red flux’, and, more ominously, amoebic dysentery, the ‘white flux’, could rage. Commonly chronicled by surgeons aboard the slavers, both triggered violent spasms of vomiting and diarrhoea, which would induce further fluid loss. No wonder that when he was taken below decks for the first time Equiano ‘received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life’. Amoebic dysentery, which had a longer incubation period, attacked the victim in mid-voyage and was the more serious of the two infections since it lasted for weeks rather than days, with its victims suffering around twenty evacuations a day. Fluid losses would have been massive, triggering rapid sodium depletion and the excretion of potassium. Potassium loss in its turn would affect brain function, leading to the strange twilight dreaminess in which sufferers entered before their cardiac function was finally traumatized. Under the circumstances it is surely amazing that the mortality rate on slave ships was only around 12–15 per cent, though it could be as high as 20 per cent for children, who were naturally more vulnerable to acute dehydration than the adults.

  What happened to them next, if they did survive to landfall, may have made the young slaves wish they had perished on board. Naked except for loincloths, they were paraded, poked and inspected all over again like livestock, their jaws clamped open for the inspection of teeth. A few were sold directly to planters. But many more were taken by wholesale merchants who confined them once more in a holding yard or pen. There they had to endu
re another extraordinary ordeal known to the planters as ‘the scramble’. At Bridgetown in Barbados, Equiano described the prospective buyers ‘on a signal given, such as the beat of a drum’, rushing into the yard like bargain-hunters at a sale, sprinting towards the chained slaves and laying hands on them to secure their purchase. The most desirable job lots were young boys, just like Olaudah, between twelve and fifteen, for as David Stalker, a planter’s buyer on the island of Nevis, explained, ‘they are fully seasoned by eighteen and is [sic] full as handy as them that is born in the country, but them full grown fellers think it hard work never being brought up to it and take it to heart and dye or are never good for anything’. If they were too ‘meagre’, though, Equiano wrote, they would be put in scales, weighed and sold at threepence or sixpence the pound like cabbages. Bought again, they were branded again. Some of those branding irons survive in the museum at Bridgetown: made of fine silver, delicately fashioned in the form of a monogram, and indecently untarnished.

  Now they truly belonged to King Sugar and toiled to make him rich. He was no sparer of age or sex. At least 80 per cent of the slave population worked, in some form or other, on the plantation for seventy to eighty hours a week. Some 20 per cent of those born there failed to survive beyond their second birthday, but if they did they had four or five years before they joined the ‘third’ work gang of the child labourers, gleaning, weeding, cutting grass and taking care of domestic animals. The ‘second gang’ comprised adolescents from twelve to nineteen, already out in the fields as well as tending to the animal population. The work on the second gang – around eleven hours of toil from before dawn to night – was so hard that many of the girls, in particular, died before they could graduate to the even more relentlessly back-breaking routine of the ‘great gang’ of adults. About 60 per cent of the total slave force in Barbados, Jamaica and Antigua worked in the ‘great’ or ‘first’ gang drilling holes for the new canes; cutting and stripping the harvest during the frantic ‘crop time’ between January and May; bundling and hauling the cumbersome canes at a smart-enough pace not to compromise the sugar quality. Looking on to see that the work was going quickly was the overseer, as often black as white, quick to use the whip should he see any laggards. Assignment in the mill or the boiling house was hardly an improvement. The vertical rollers that crushed the cane were notorious for taking hands with them since the cane had to be fed in manually, and hatchets were kept beside the mill to sever an arm before the entire body was pulled in. Slaves in the boiler houses worked in conditions of intense heat, dirt and exhaustion and were in constant danger of being scalded by the boiling syrup as it was poured from larger to smaller copper vats.

  One would suppose that economic rationality might mitigate the severity of labour at least to the point where the planters could get full value from their investment, especially since deaths were never made up by births. Reproduction rates on the plantations were notoriously low – possibly 10–15 per 1000 compared with perhaps 20–30 per 1000 in Britain. But neither the balance of the sexes nor the way women were treated was likely to favour a home-grown slave population. Women were outnumbered by men almost two to one, and those who did become pregnant were not spared from work in the fields until they were virtually on the point of delivery. Those women were no more immune than anyone else from floggings administered by overseers if they lagged in the pace of their work. Poor nutrition, damp and vermin-infested huts, exposure to smallpox and yellow fever as well as diseases brought from Africa like elephantiasis and yaws, further added to the toll of miscarriages and low fertility. But it seems unlikely that the managers of the plantations were unduly troubled about wastage, at least until the third quarter of the eighteenth century when prices rose. For while it took at least £40 to raise a slave child to the point when child and mother could become productive, a new slave could be bought from the traders for between £15 and £30. No wonder, then, that, although 1.5 million slaves were imported into the British Caribbean during the eighteenth century, the population never rose above 800,000.

  Violence – threatened or delivered – was what made the system work, and it fell with special savagery on African women. In one year, 1765, the estate manager of the Egypt plantation on Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood, administered twenty-one floggings to thirteen women, each likely to have been no less than fifty lashes. (Equiano wrote that it was common to make the slaves kneel down after such a flogging and thank their masters for it.) Arguably, adult women endured the hardest lot of any section of the slave population, since so much was demanded of them – cooking, caring for infants, mending and washing clothes in addition to field work. And they also had to endure the habitual sexual aggression of masters and overseers who assumed they could copulate with any woman they chose whenever and wherever the mood took them: in the kitchen, pantry or laundry of the houses, or out in the yards and barns. Female field hands, like the men, worked naked but for a loincloth, and must therefore have been especially vulnerable. The fastidious data collector Thistlewood kept a regular slave mistress, Phibbah, with whom he carefully records having intercourse one hundred times during 1765. But in addition to Phibbah he had twenty-three other slave women on fifty-five separate occasions that year, most often out in the cane fields. Despite the resort to abortion by slave women who, forced to take more than one sexual partner, were terrified of alienating any one of them with a compromisingly coloured birth, 10 per cent of all births were in fact mulatto.

  A small minority of the slaves of both sexes did manage to escape the punishing toil of the fields, either as domestic servants in the plantation house or as artisans who had brought with them from Africa specialized skills, which were much needed on the plantation. These coopers, masons, carpenters and blacksmiths, along with carters and wagoners as well as fishermen and even sailors, constituted a special class among the slaves, freer to move around and to buy and sell materials for their work. And there were times, too, when the slaves were not utterly dominated by the tyranny of the cane. The planters knew it was in their interest to give them some respite, and on Barbados there were some sixty free days and holidays a year. ‘Free time’ on Saturday afternoons and evenings was given over to the release of emotions and energies – often in music and dance, which the planters usually characterized as ‘howling’. But in these brief moments of freedom business was at least as important as pleasure, for it offered a little taste of independence.

  The Sunday market in towns like English Harbour on Antigua or Bridgetown on Barbados was where the African world remade itself. Beneath shady awnings, women and men sold vegetables or chickens that had been legally brought from villages, articles they had made themselves – baskets, pots, wooden stools, hammocks, ropes and gourd bowls, as well as objects they had managed to pilfer (often through relatives working as domestics) from the plantation house – nails and pieces of copper and lead. The ‘hucksters’, as the whites called them, sold their commodities sitting on the ground, or, if it were more obviously contraband (sugar, tobacco or rum), walking around the market waiting for selling opportunities. Money might change hands, but there were other objects that could be used as currency in the market: beads, copper wire or even cowrie shells, the exchange medium of West Africa.

  The world of the market and the coopers’ and carpenters’ shops created a class of slaves who were more literate and assertive than the field hands, and whose social horizons were a lot broader than the cane fields. Because they depended on the artisans and carters in particular and got to know them well, some of the planters and their managers naïvely imagined that these more enterprising slaves might act as intermediaries between themselves and the mass of field hands. They were badly mistaken. The records of uncovering and suppressing rebellions almost invariably featured ringleaders from this ‘slave elite’. Even though there was little chance of any of these revolts succeeding over the long term, especially in islands like Barbados where a potentially sheltering forest had been almost completely stripped to
make way for cane, there was a steady drum-beat of rebellion, some of it, as in Antigua in the 1720s and 1730s and in Jamaica in mid-century, flaring into ferocious violence. ‘Tacky’s Rebellion’ on Jamaica in 1760 took the lives of close to 100 whites and 400 blacks, as well as exiling 600 more, before it was finally put down with a great deal of difficulty.

  Resistance to being reduced to a cipher in a manager’s account-book (bought, worked, died) could also take forms other than violent insurrection. Among the socially traumatized slave community there were those who took it on themselves to preserve some sense of African tradition and cultural memory in a world that had been stripped of it. Different language groups, regions and tribes had been deliberately mixed to pre-empt any kind of potentially threatening solidarity. But the need for shared life, the need to make the scraps and shards of ancient, half-kept memory, was stronger even than slavery. African culture, though pulverized by terror and hardship, was reduced not to fine dust that could be blown away into the wind but to small, resistant grains that could be replanted, regrown, remade. And those new growths were tended by keepers of ancestral wisdom, keepers of the knowledge of religion, obeah healing and music. Because the tribal and language groups – Akan, Twi, Efik, Ewe – could not just be transposed to St Kitts, Antigua and Barbados, the healers, drummers, singers, weavers and carvers had to create unapologetically new forms from many strands of material, some inherited, others discovered, all shared. But it was, none the less, theirs – hard-earned, not the gift of their masters. In fact, the reluctance of the Caribbean masters in the early years to Christianize the slaves – lest literacy and religion produce a sense of presumptuous brotherhood in Christ, and lest the uses of literacy turn seditious – gave the Africans a generation or two to establish their own kind of syncretic culture, free from interference. When, finally, an effort was made to convert them, the missionary gospel was inevitably grafted on to cultural roots that had already sunk deep into the West Indian soil.