The failure of the motley crew to find their place in the new American nation forced them into broader, more creative forms of identification. One of the phrases often used to capture the unity of the age of revolution was “citizen of the world.” J. Philmore described himself this way, as did others, including Thomas Paine. The real citizens of the world, of course, were the sailors and slaves who instructed Philmore, Paine, Jefferson, and the rest of the middle- and upper-class revolutionaries. This multiethnic proletariat was “cosmopolitan” in an original meaning of the word. Reminded that he had been sentenced to exile, Diogenes, the slave philosopher of antiquity, responded saying he sentenced his judges to stay at home. “Asked where he came from, he said, ‘I am a citizen of the world’”—a cosmopolitan. Transatlantic workers both created and made real the concept in the age of revolution.
SIX
African Rebels
From Captives to Shipmates
The man refused to eat. He had been sick, reduced to a “mere skeleton.” He had apparently made a decision to die. Captain Timothy Tucker was outraged, and probably fearful that his example might spread to the other two-hundred-plus captives aboard his ship, the Loyal George, as it made its way across the Atlantic to Barbados in the year 1727. The captain turned to his black cabin boy, Robin, and commanded him to fetch his whip. This was no cat-o’-nine-tails, but rather something much bigger, a horse whip. He tied up the man and lashed him: “From his neck to his ancles, there was nothing to be seen but bloody wounds,” said Silas Told, an apprentice seaman and crew member who recounted the story years later. All the while, the man made no resistance and said nothing, which incensed the captain, who now threatened him in his own language: “he would tickeravoo him,” that is kill him, to which the man answered, “adomma,” so be it.1
The captain then left the man “in shocking agonies” to take his dinner on the quarterdeck, eating “like a hog,” thought Told. After he had finished his meal, Captain Tucker was ready to resume the punishment. This time he called another ship’s boy, John Lad, to bring him two loaded pistols from his cabin. Captain Tucker and John Lad then walked forward on the main deck, approaching the nameless hunger striker, who was sitting with his back against the larboard gunnel of the ship. With a “malicious and virulent grin,” Tucker pointed a pistol at the man and repeated that he would kill him if he did not eat. The man answered simply, as before: “adomma.” The captain put the barrel of the pistol to the man’s forehead and pulled the trigger. The man “instantly clapped his hands to his head, the one behind, the other before,” and stared the captain directly in the face. Blood gushed from the wound, like the “tapping [of] a cask,” but he did not fall. The captain, infuriated, cursed, turned to the cabin boy, and screamed, “This will not kill him,” so he clapped the other pistol to the man’s ear and fired again. To the utter amazement of Told and surely everyone else who looked on, “nor did he drop, even then!” Finally the captain ordered John Lad to shoot the man through the heart, whereupon “he then dropt down dead.”
In consequence of the murder, the rest of the male captives rose in vengeful wrath “upon the ship’s company with full purpose to slay us all.” The crew scrambled to retreat behind the barricado. Once there they took up their positions at the swivel guns, raking the main deck with shot and sending the rebels flying in all directions. Some of the men dove below deck seeking cover, while others jumped overboard. As soon as the crew had regained control of the main deck, they took to the boats to save the men in the water, but were able to rescue only one or two from “violence of the sea” and the men’s own concerted efforts to drown themselves. A large but unknown number perished. Thus did an individual act of resistance spark a collective revolt, and one form of resistance give rise to another. The refusal to eat had led to a kind of martyrdom, an insurrection, and, once that failed, to mass suicide.2
Scenes like this played out on one slave ship after another, showing that the transoceanic ship was a site of fierce resistance. These scenes epitomized a deep dialectic of discipline and resistance—on the one hand, extreme violence enacted by the captain against an enslaved individual, with an expectation that the resulting terror would help him to rule the others; and in response from the enslaved, extreme opposition to that violence and terror, individually and in the end collectively. Beneath the response, however, lay a question: how did a multiethnic mass of several hundred Africans, thrown together in a slave ship, learn to act collectively? From the time they were first brought aboard the ship, they were socialized into a new order, one designed to objectify, discipline, and individualize the laboring body through violence, medical inspection, numbering, chaining, “stowing” below decks, and various social routines, from eating and “dancing” to working. Meanwhile, the captives communicated among themselves and fought back, individually and collectively, which meant that each ship contained within it a process of culture stripping from above and an oppositional process of culture creation from below. In the shadow of death the millions who made the great Atlantic passage in a slave ship forged new forms of life—new language, new means of expression, new resistance, and a new sense of community. Herein lay the maritime origins of cultures that were at once African American and pan-African, creative and hence indestructible. Crucial social processes occurred at sea.3
Resistance: Refusing to Eat
If the common experiences of expropriation and enslavement, including the violent, densely communal regimentation of the slave ship, created the potential for community among African prisoners, and if social practices—working, communicating, and singing—helped to realize it, nothing was more important to the collective project of creating group identity than resistance. This was in itself a new language, a language of action employed every time people refused food, jumped over the side of the ship, or rose up in insurrection. It was a universal language, which everyone understood regardless of cultural background, even if they chose not to speak it actively themselves. Every act of resistance, small or large, rejected enslavement and social death as it embraced creativity and a different future. Each refusal bound people together, in ever deeper ways, in a common struggle.4
The Atlantic slave trade was, in many ways, a four-hundred-year hunger strike. From the beginning of the waterborne human commerce in the early fifteenth century to its end in the late nineteenth century, enslaved Africans routinely refused to eat the food given to them. When some of the enslaved came on board the ship, they fell into a “fixed melancholy,” a depression in which they responded to nothing their captors said or demanded, including instructions to eat. Others got sick and were unable to eat even if they had wanted to. And yet even among some of the depressed and the sick, and among a much larger group that was neither, the refusal to eat was a conscious choice, which served several important purposes among the enslaved. Because the captain’s main charge from the merchant was to deliver as many live, healthy African bodies as possible to the New World port, anyone who refused sustenance, for any reason whatsoever, endangered profits and subverted authority. Refusing to eat was therefore first and foremost an act of resistance, which in turn inspired other acts of resistance. Second, it proved to be a tactic of negotiation. Mistreatment could trigger a hunger strike. Third, it helped to create a shipboard culture of resistance, a “we” against a “they.” Among the messages of the hunger strike were: we will not be property; we will not be labor power; we will not let you eat us alive.
On John Riland’s ship the Liberty, in 1801, several of the enslaved rejected their food. The officer on watch swore he would throw them overboard if they did not eat, then he threatened them with the cat (of nine tails), which seemed to work, or so he thought: “The slaves then made a show of eating, by putting a little rice into their mouths; but whenever the officer’s back was turned they threw it into the sea.” Seaman James Morley also saw slaves pretend to eat, holding food in their mouths “till they have been almost strangled.” The officers would damn them “for
being sulky Black b——.” They would try to force them to eat, using the cat, the thumbscrews, a “bolus knife” or a stick (to open the mouth), and a speculum oris or a “horn” to force food down obstinate throats.5
Anyone who resisted food posed a direct challenge to the captain’s powers, as the example might spread with disastrous results. This was made chillingly clear by seaman Isaac Parker when he testified before the House of Commons committee investigating the slave trade in 1791. Aboard the Black Joke in 1765, a small child, whose mother was on board, “took sulk, and would not eat,” refusing both the breast and standard fare of rice mixed with palm oil. Captain Thomas Marshall flogged the child with the cat as enslaved men looked on through the crevices of the barricado: they made “a great murmuring” in protest. Still the child refused to eat, and day after day the captain punished with the cat, but also by tying a mango log, eighteen to twenty inches long and twelve to thirteen pounds in weight, around its neck by a string. “The last time he took the child up and flogged it,” explained Parker, he “let it drop out of his hands” to the deck, saying, “Damn you . . . I will make you eat, or I will be the death of you.” In less than an hour the child died. In a final act of cruelty the captain commanded the child’s mother to throw the small corpse overboard. When she refused, he beat her. Eventually she complied, and afterwards, “She seemed very sorry, and cried for several hours.” Even the smallest rebel, a nine-month-old child who refused to eat, could not be tolerated aboard the Black Joke.6
What captains like Marshall feared, the contagion of resistance, was illustrated in a case that came before the High Court of Admiralty in 1730. James Kettle, captain of the City of London (owned by the South Sea Company), charged that seaman Edward Fentiman was too violent in his carriage toward the enslaved. He had beaten an unnamed slave woman, after which all of the others—and there were 377 on board—refused to take sustenance. This in turn earned Fentiman a beating from Kettle, who explained to the court that what had happened here was one instance of a larger problem: it is “the nature & disposition of Negroes & so frequently happens on board of Merchant Ships that when any one of them have been beat or abused for the whole Company of them on Board to resent it & grow Sullen and refuse to eat and many of them thereby to pine away and die.”7
Dr. T. Aubrey reinforced Captain Kettle’s point and raised it to a higher level of generalization. In his vade mecum for slave-trade surgeons, he explained that the violent mistreatment of the enslaved often resulted in their refusal to eat. Once they stopped, “then they lose their Appetites, and perhaps fall sick, partly thro’ fasting, and partly with Grief to see themselves so treated.” More tellingly still, once they had taken their resistance to heart, “all the Surgeon’s Art will never keep them alive; they will never eat any thing by fair Means, or foul, because they choose rather to dye, than be ill treated.” He referred, of course, to the various violent means used to make people eat. These would be resisted, in his view, and would in the end be useless against the will to refuse all sustenance. Like Kettle, Aubrey made it clear that the hunger strike was a tactic employed in the struggle that raged aboard every slave ship.8
The hunger strike aboard the Loyal George, as recalled by Silas Told, led directly to an insurrection and, once that failed, to mass suicide. The process of resistance also worked the other way, as hunger strikes often followed failed insurrections. After the captives rose aboard the Ferrers Galley in 1721, “near eighty” were killed or drowned. Most of those who survived, wrote Captain William Snelgrave, “grew so sullen, that several of them were starved to death, obstinately refusing to take any Sustenance.” After an uprising on an unnamed vessel in the Bonny River in 1781, three of the wounded leaders “came to the resolution of starving themselves to death.” They were threatened, then beaten, but “no terrors were effectual, for they never tasted any sustenance after their resolution, and they died in consequence of it.” Likewise aboard the Wasp in 1783, when two insurrections took place. Following the first, in which the women captives seized the captain and tried to throw him overboard, twelve died of wounds and the refusal to eat. Following the second, even bigger explosion, fifty-five Africans died of “bruises, swallowing salt water, chagrins at disappointment, and abstinence.”9
Jumping Overboard
Perhaps an even more dramatic form of resistance than self-starvation was jumping overboard. Some jumped in the hope of escape while docked in an African port, while others chose drowning over starvation as a means to terminate the life of the body meant to slave away on New World plantations. This kind of resistance was widely practiced and just as widely feared by the organizers of the trade. Merchants warned captains about it in their instructions, formal and informal. Captains in turn made sure their ships had nettings all around. They also had the male captives chained to a ring bolt whenever they were on the main deck, and at the same time made sure that vigilant watches were always kept. When the enslaved did manage to get overboard, captains like Timothy Tucker urgently dispatched emergency rescue parties, in boats, to catch and bring them back aboard.
African women had greater freedom of movement on the ship than men, so they played a prominent role in this kind of resistance. In 1714, four women, one of them “big with child,” jumped overboard as the Florida departed Old Calabar. As a man on board noted, they “shew’d us how well they could swim, & gave us ye slip.” The crew immediately went after them but caught only the pregnant one, because she “could not shift so well as the rest.” In Anomabu on the Gold Coast in 1732, Captain James Hogg discovered in the middle of the night that six women had jumped overboard and afterward was sure that only a brisk effort from the crew prevented the rest from following. Such escapes were dangerous, even for expert swimmers, as many of the enslaved from coastal regions happened to be. Anyone retaken in the water (and most who jumped overboard were) could expect severe punishment, even in some cases death (as a deterrent to others), once back aboard the ship. Even if the fugitives got to shore, chances were that their African captors would catch them and return them to the slaver. Finally, many of the waterways near shore where people jumped overboard were shark infested. Captain Hugh Crow recalled two Igbo women who went over the side of one of his vessels, only to be torn apart immediately by sharks.10
Some captives went overboard spontaneously, in response to a specific event, rather than in a calculated bid for freedom. In 1786 a gang of six, “enraged or terrified” at seeing the corpse of their deceased countryman cut open by a ship’s doctor for anatomical analysis, “plunged into the sea, and were instantly drowned.” A couple of years before, another forty of fifty jumped into the sea during a “scramble,” a deliberately terrifying manner of selling slaves on the ship’s deck in Jamaica. One hundred men jumped off the Prince of Orange after they had been released from chains upon the docking of the vessel at St. Kitts in 1737. Thirty-three refused assistance from the sailors and drowned. They were “resolv’d to die, and sunk directly down.” The cause of the mass action, according to Captain Japhet Bird, was that one of the countrymen of the enslaved came aboard and “jokingly” told them they would be blinded and eaten by the white men.11
One of the most illuminating aspects of these suicidal escapes was the joy expressed by people once they had gotten into the water. Seaman Isaac Wilson recalled a captive who jumped into the sea and “went down as if exulting that he got away.” Another African man, who knew that the nettings had been loosened to empty the lower deck’s “necessary tubs,” got free of a group of sailors and “darted himself through the hole overboard.” When the sailors went after him, and almost caught him, the man dived down and popped up again some distance away, eluding his would-be captors. All the while, recalled the ship’s surgeon, he “made signs which it is impossible for me to describe in words, expressive of the happiness he had in escaping from us.” Finally, he again went down again, “and we saw him no more.” After a bloody insurrection had been suppressed aboard the Nassau in 1742, the capta
in ordered all injured slaves on deck: everyone whose wounds made recovery doubtful was ordered “to jump into the sea,” which many of them did, going to their deaths with “seeming chearfulness,” according to the person who had been the cabin boy on the voyage. The same thing happened aboard the infamous Zong. As Captain Luke Collingwood ordered 122 sick captives thrown overboard, another ten jumped of their own accord.12
Hunger strikes and jumping overboard were not the only means of self-destruction. Some sick people refused medicine because “they want to die.” Two women found ways to strangle themselves to death aboard the Elizabeth in 1788–1789. Others cut their own throats, with hard-edged tools, sharp objects, or their own fingernails. A sailor named Thompson noted that he “has known all the slaves [locked below deck] unanimously [to] rush to leeward in a gale of wind, on purpose to upset the ship, choosing to drown themselves, than to continue in their situation, or go into foreign slavery.”13
The least common but most spectacular mass suicides involved blowing up the entire ship. In January 1773, the enslaved men below deck aboard the New Britannia, using tools slipped to them by the more mobile boys, cut through the bulkheads and got into the gun room, where they found weapons and used them to battle the crew for more than an hour, with significant loss of life on both sides. When they saw that defeat at the hands of the crew was inevitable, “they set fire to the magazine, and blowed the vessel up,” killing almost everyone on board, as many as three hundred altogether. When Captain James Charles learned in October 1785 that Gambian captives had successfully captured a Dutch slaver (and killed the captain and crew), he resolved go after the vessel, not least because the insurgents, if defeated, might become his property. After a chase of three hours and an indecisive engagement, a party of his own crew volunteered to board the self-emancipated people’s craft under fire. Ten men and an officer went aboard and, after a smart contest on deck, “drove the mutinous slaves into the hold.” As the battle continued, someone apparently blew the vessel up “with a dreadful explosion, and every soul on board perished.” Part of the wreckage fell upon the deck of Captain Charles’s vessel, the Africa.14
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