Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  Even though suicides run like a blood-red thread through the documentation of the slave trade, it is impossible to be sure how common they were. One measure, for a limited time period, may be found in the journals that slave-ship surgeons were required to keep in the aftermath of the Dolben Act, or Slave Carrying Bill, of 1788. For the period 1788 to 1797, physicians for eighty-six vessels recorded in their journals the cause of death for all of the Africans under their charge, and in these suicide looms rather large. Twenty-five surgeons recorded what appeared to be one or another kind of self-destruction: eight ships had one or more person jump overboard; three others listed captives “missing” (no doubt overboard) after an insurrection; three others experienced nonspecific forms of suicide; and another twelve gave causes such as “lost,” “drowned,” “sulkiness,” and “abortion.” Almost one third of the vessels in the sample witnessed a suicide, and even this is likely a serious understatement as surgeons had vested interests in not reporting suicides in this era of charged debate about the inhumanity of slave ships.15 Another reason to reduce or conceal the number of suicides was the ruling of an English court, Judge Mansfield presiding, in Trinity Term 1785: insurance companies would be required to pay for insured slaves who died in an insurrection but would not be required to pay for those who died of chagrin, abstinence, or despair. More specifically, “all who died by leaping into the sea, were not to be paid for.”16

  Rising Up

  Hundreds of bodies packed together below deck were a potent source of energy, as could be seen in material emanation anytime a slave ship sailed through cool, rainy weather. On these occasions steam billowed up from the mass of hot bodies on the lower deck, through the gratings, onto the main deck where the crew worked. Aboard the slave ship Nightingale in the late 1760s seaman Henry Ellison saw “steam coming through the gratings like a furnace.” Not infrequently, the human furnace down below exploded—into open insurrection. The peculiar war that was the slave trade would now be waged openly on the ship.17

  Yet insurrection aboard a slave ship did not happen as a spontaneous natural process. It was, rather, the result of calculated human effort—careful communication, detailed planning, precise execution. Every insurrection, regardless of its success, was a remarkable achievement, as the slave ship itself was organized in almost all respects to prevent it. Merchants, captains, officers, and crew thought about it, worried about it, took practical action against it. Each and all assumed that the enslaved would rise up in a fury and destroy them if given half a chance. For those who ran the slave ship, an insurrection was without a doubt their greatest nightmare. It could extinguish profits and lives in an explosive flash.

  Collective action began in communication among people who identified common problems and searched together for common solutions. They began to converse in small groups, probably twos and threes, literally conspiring in the dank, fetid air below deck, probably at night, away from the ears of captain and crew. The lower deck was usually crowded, but mobility among the enslaved was possible, even among the shackled and manacled men, so potential rebels could move around, find each other, and talk. Once they had formulated a plan, the core conspirators might take a “sangaree,” an “Oath to stick by each other, and made by sucking a few Drops of one another’s Blood.” They would then organize others, mindful of a dangerous contradiction: the greater the number of people involved in the plot, the greater the chance of success, but at the same time the greater the chance that someone would snitch. Many would therefore opt for a smaller number of more committed militants, wagering that once the insurrection was under way, others would join them. Most conspirators would proceed carefully and wait for their moment to strike.18

  Everyone involved in running the slave trade assumed, correctly, that the most likely insurrectionists were African men, who were therefore fettered and chained at almost all times, whether on the lower or main deck. But women and children had important roles to play as well, not least because of their greater mobility around the ship. Indeed, women sometimes played leading parts in uprisings, as, for example, when they seized Captain Richard Bowen aboard the Wasp in 1785 and tried to throw him overboard. The captives on board the Unity (1769–1771), like those aboard the Thomas (1797), rose up “by the means of the women.” On other occasions women used their proximity to power and freedom of movement to plan assassinations of captains and officers, or to pass tools to the men below. The boys on board the New Britannia, anchored in Gambia, passed to the men down below “some of the carpenter’s tools where-with they ripped up the lower decks, and got possession of the guns, beads, and powder.”19

  Insurrection on a slave ship (Library Company of Philadelphia)

  Crucial to any uprising was the previous experience of those involved. Some of the men (like the Gola), and perhaps a few of the women (from Dahomey), had been warriors, and hence had spent their lives mastering the courage, discipline, and skills of warfare. They would have been trained to fight at close quarters, to act in coordinated ways, and to hold position, not retreat. Others had valuable knowledge of Europeans, their ways, even their ships. Seaman William Butterworth described several captives “who, by living at Calabar and the neighbouring towns, had learned the English tongue so as to speak it very well; men who, for the commission of some misdemeanour, had forfeited their freedom, and who, desirous of regaining their liberty at any risk, had for some time been sowing the seeds of discontent in the minds of the less guilty, but equally unfortunate slaves, of both sexes.” Such savvy men and women from the port cities could “read” their captors in ways others could not, and some could even read their ships. A special port city denizen was the African seafarer, skilled in the ways of the deep-sea sailing ship and probably the most valuable person to an insurrectionary attempt. The Kru of the Windward Coast and the Fante of the Gold Coast were known to be especially knowledgeable about European ships and sailing, as were lots of other coastal and riverine peoples. For these reasons, captives known to have come from the waterside were considered by slave ship captains to be special security risks.20

  Knowledge of European arms was evident aboard the Thomas, which lay in the Gambia River in March 1753. All eighty-seven of the enslaved “privately got off their Irons,” came upon deck, and threw the chief mate overboard. Alarmed, the seamen fired their small arms and drove the rebels back below. But some of the captives noticed that the seamen’s firearms were not working properly, whereupon they picked up “Billets of Wood, and Pieces of Board” and came back upon deck, battling the crew, who numbered only eight at the moment, driving them to the longboat, in which they escaped, leaving “the Sloop in Possession of the Slaves”—who suddenly were slaves no longer. When two slave ship captains tried to recapture the sloop, they got a blistering engagement, “the Slaves making use of the Swivel guns, and trading Small Arms, seemingly in an experienced Manner against them.” Such use of firearms was not uncommon, provided the enslaved could get to them.21

  Certain cultural groups were widely known for their rebelliousness. Several observers noted that captives from the Senegambia region had a special hatred for slavery, which made them dangerous on board the ships. According to Royal African Company employee William Smith: “the Gambians, who are naturally very idle and lazy, abhor Slavery, and will attempt any Thing, tho’ never so desperate, to obtain Freedom.” The Fante of the Gold Coast were ready to “undertake any hazardous enterprise,” including insurrection, noted Dr. Thomas Trotter based on his experience of the 1780s. Alexander Falconbridge agreed: those from the Gold Coast were “very bold and resolute, and insurrections happen more frequently among them, when on ship-board, than amongst the negroes of any other part of the coast.” The Ibibio of the Bight of Biafra, also known as “Quaws” and, in America, the “Moco,” were, according to Captain Hugh Crow, “a most desperate race of men,” always “foremost in any mischief or insurrection amongst the slaves” in the late eighteenth century. They killed many crew members and were known to blow
up ships. “The females of this tribe,” added Crow, “are fully as ferocious and vindictive as the men.” Indeed the Ibibio were considered so dangerous that captains were careful “to have as few of them as possible amongst their cargoes.” When they did take them aboard, they “were always obliged to provide separate rooms for these men between decks.” The Ibibio were the only group known to warrant special quarters for their rebelliousness, which the captains sought to contain by isolation.22

  Each line of recruitment, among women, boys, and cultural groups, contained within it potential divisions. Numerous were the times when either the men or the women rose up in insurrection, unsupported by the other, which of course made it much easier for the crew to put down the uprising. The men, for example, did not act when the women attacked Captain Bowen of the Wasp in 1785, while the women did not rise up with the men on the Hudibras in 1786. Boys were known to pass not only hard-edged tools to the enslaved men, but information to the crew about designs afoot below deck. And if certain African groups were inclined to rebellion, it did not necessarily follow that their militant ways were agreeable to others on the ship. The Ibibio and Igbo were called “mortal enemies,” the Chamba despised the Fante, and during the middle of an insurrection in late 1752 Igbo and Coromantee insurgents began to fight each other. It is not always clear in any given case whether the divisions arose from previous history, inadequate communication and preparation, or disagreement about insurrection as a goal.23

  Uprisings required knowledge of the ship, hence one of the things that people whispered about was what they knew of the hold, the lower deck, the main deck, the captain’s cabin, the gun room, and how they should therefore proceed based on this knowledge. They found that they needed three specific kinds of knowledge about Europeans and their technologies, and that these were related to three distinct phases of the uprising: how to get out of the chains, how to find and use weapons against the crew, and how to sail the ship if they were successful. Insurrections tended to break down and suffer defeat at one of these moments in the process.

  The iron technology of manacles, shackles, and chains was largely effective for its purpose, as its continued use, for centuries, on the enslaved and on all kinds of other prisoners, makes perfectly clear. But it is also clear that male captives on the lower deck regularly found ways to get out of these fetters. Sometimes the irons fit too loosely and the enslaved could, with lubrication and effort, simply squirm out of them. In other cases they used nails, picks, slivers of wood, and other instruments to pick the locks or a hard-edged tool of some kind (saw, adze, knife, hammer, chisel, hatchet, or ax, likely passed below by one of the women or boys) to cut or break through the iron. An additional challenge was to use the tools quietly so as not to be discovered in the process of breaking free. Once the chains were off, the rebels had to get through the fortified gratings, which were always locked overnight. Surprise at the morning opening frequently represented the best opportunity, unless someone could trick a member of the crew to open the gratings overnight.24

  The next step was to unleash the explosive energy from below decks, the sounds of which were, to a terrified crew member, “an uncommon uproar” and “several dreadful shrieks,” perhaps “from a sailor being killed.” African war cries would pierce the morning quiet. Striking with speed, surprise, force, and fury was important, because it could shock the crew into running for the longboat in an effort to escape the insurrection. Meanwhile, hand-to-hand combat engulfed the forward part of the ship, and if a substantial number of the enslaved managed to get out of their irons, they would have had a decided numerical advantage over the sailors assigned to guard them. The sailors, however, had cutlasses, and the insurgents had no weapons other than what they could pick up from the deck, such as belaying pins, staves, perhaps an oar or two. If the women had risen in coordination with the men, fighting would have broken out in the aft part of the ship, behind the barricado, where they would have had access to better implements such as fish gigs and the cook’s hatchet. Most insurrectionists found themselves in the situation of a group who had burst onto a moonlit deck at midnight: “They had no fire arms, and no weapons, except the loose articles which they could pick up on the deck.”25

  As all hands rushed on deck to quell the uprising, they picked up pistols and muskets and took their positions at the barricado, firing through the peepholes at the men. They also manned the swivel guns at the top of the barricado, which allowed them to sweep the deck with shot. This was a decisive moment. If the enslaved had any hope of victory, they had to breach the barricado, not least to get into the gun room, which was located as far from the men’s section as possible, in the stern of the vessel, near the captain’s cabin, where crew members would be around to guard it. Many insurrectionists therefore tried to crash through the small door of the barricado or scale its wall, which ranged from eight to twelve feet high with spikes at the top. If they managed to get through or over, if they could fight their way to the gun room and break it open, and if they knew how to use European firearms (as many African men with military experience did), they might have an outcome like that of the enslaved aboard the ship Ann in 1750: “the Negroes got to the Powder and Arms, and about 3 o’Clock in the Morning, rose upon the Whites; and after wounding all of them very much, except two who hid themselves: they run the Vessel ashore a little to the Southward of Cape Lopez, and made their Escape.”26

  As the fighting raged on, the rebels would act on previous planning. What would they do about the crew? They usually had a straightforward answer: they would kill them. Such would appear to have been the choice on an unnamed vessel out of Bristol when, in 1732, the enslaved “rose and destroyed the whole Crew, cutting off the Captain’s Head, Legs and Arms.” This issue was complicated, however, by another one—that is, whether the Africans had any among them who knew how to sail the ship. The absence of such knowledge was always considered by Europeans to be one of their greatest bulwarks against insurrection once the ship was out at sea, as John Atkins pointed out in 1735: “it is commonly imagined, the Negroes Ignorance of Navigation, will always be a Safeguard.” Some insurrectionaries therefore made it a point to keep several crew members alive, to assist with navigation and sailing the ship back to Africa.27

  Insurrections aboard slave ships usually had one of four outcomes. The first of these was exemplified in 1729 aboard the Clare galley. Only ten leagues out to sea off the Gold Coast, the enslaved “rose and making themselves Masters of the Gunpowder and Fire Arms,” drove the captain and crew into the longboat to escape their wrath and took control of the ship. It is not clear whether the successful rebels sailed the vessel or simply let it drift toward the shore, but in any case they made landfall and their escape to freedom not far from Cape Coast Castle. An even more dramatic rising occurred off the Windward Coast in 1749. The enslaved picked the locks of their shackles, grabbed large billets of wood off the deck, fought the crew, and after two hours overpowered them, forcing them to retreat to the captain’s cabin and lock themselves inside. The following day, as the captives ripped open the quarterdeck, five members of the crew jumped overboard in an attempt to escape but discovered the hard way that some among the captives knew how to use firearms; they were shot and killed in the water. The successful insurrectionists then ordered the rest of the crew to surrender, threatening to blow up the powder room if they refused. The vessel soon ran aground, and before leaving the victors plundered it. Some of them went ashore, not in the nakedness required on the ship, but now clad in the clothes of the crew.28

  Sometimes an insurrection resulted in the mutual destruction of the contending sides. Such would appear to have been the case aboard a “ghost ship” discovered adrift in the Atlantic in 1785 by another vessel. The unnamed slave schooner had sailed about a year earlier with a Newport, Rhode Island, crew to the coast of Africa. Now it had no sails and no crew, only fifteen Africans on board and they were in “very emaciated and wretched condition.” It was supposed by those who found t
hem that they had “been long at sea.” It was also supposed that the enslaved had waged an insurrection on board, “had rose and murdered the Captain and crew,” and that during or after the rising “many of the Blacks must have died.” Perhaps no one knew how to sail the vessel and some slowly starved to death.29

  By far the most common outcome of shipboard rebellion was defeat, which always featured torture, torment, and terror in its aftermath. Those who had played a leading role in the insurrection would be made examples to the rest. They would be variously flogged, pricked, cut, razored, stretched, broken, unlimbed, and beheaded, all according to the overheated imagination of the slave ship captain. The war would continue through these savage punishments, the insurgents refusing to cry out when they were whipped or going to their deaths calmly, as the Coromantee notoriously did, despising “Punishment, even death it self.” Sometimes the body parts of the defeated would be distributed among the remaining captives throughout the ship as a reminder of what happened to those who dared to rise up. It was proven again and again that the slave ship was a well-organized fortress for the control of human beings. It was, by design, extremely difficult for its prisoners to capture it and sail to freedom.30