Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  The main cause of slave revolts was slavery. And indeed Africans themselves offered their own explanations aboard the ship that proved the observation true. Seaman James Towne, who knew the primary trading language of the Windward Coast “nearly as well as English,” conversed with the enslaved and learned their grievances. Asked by an MP in 1791 whether he had ever known them to attempt an insurrection on board a slave ship, he said that he had. He was then asked, “Did you ever inquire into the causes of such insurrections?” He replied, “I have. The reasons that were given me were ‘What business had we to make Slaves of them, and carry them away from their own country? That they had wives and children, and wanted to be with them.’” Other considerations that made insurrection more likely on any given ship were, for some, proximity to shore (worries about navigation once the vessel was out to sea) and poor health or lax vigilance among the crew. The captives’ previous experience in Africa of warfare in the expansion of slaving operations would add to the likelihood of insurrection.31

  Historian David Richardson has shown that insurrections aboard slave ships materially affected the conduct of the trade. They caused losses, raised shipping costs, and created disincentives for investors, as a writer in the Boston News-Letter recognized in 1731: “What with the Negroes rising, and other Disappointment, in the late Voyages thither [Gold Coast], [we have witnessed] a great Reducement in our Merchants Gains.” Richardson estimates that as many as one in ten vessels experienced an insurrection, that the average number of deaths per insurrection was roughly twenty-five, and that, all told, 100,000 valuable captives died as a result. Insurrections also generated other economic effects (higher costs, lower demand) that “significantly reduced the shipments of slaves” to America—by a million over the full history of the slave trade, by 600,000 in the period from 1698 to 1807.32

  Insurrections also affected the reading public, as newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic endlessly chronicled the bloody uprisings of the enslaved. Alongside and sometimes within this coverage, opponents of the slave trade also gave voice to the struggles from the lower deck, noting the “desperate resolution, and astonishing heroism” displayed by the enslaved. They often insisted that the prisoners were trying to recapture their “lost liberty,” their natural right. Moreover, when public debate about the slave trade exploded in Britain and the United States after 1787, abolitionists repeatedly used the resistance of the enslaved to disprove everything the slave-trading interest said about the decency of conditions and treatment aboard the ships. If slave ships were what merchants and captains said they were, why would the enslaved starve themselves to death, throw themselves over the side of the vessel, or rise up against long odds and suffer likely death in insurrection?33

  Thomas Clarkson wrote of the “Scenes of the brightest Heroism [that] happen repeatedly in the Holds or on the Decks of the Slave-Vessels.” So great and noble were these acts that the “Authors of them often eclipse by the Splendour of their Actions the celebrated Character both of Greece and Rome.” He continued:

  But how different is the Fate of the one and of the other. The Actions of the former are considered as so many Acts of Baseness, and are punished with Torture or with Death, while those of the latter have been honoured with publick Rewards. The Actions of the former again are industriously consigned to oblivion, that not a trace, if possible, may be found, while those of the latter have been industriously recorded as Examples for future Times.34

  Clarkson was right about the heroism, the torture, the death, and about the endless glorification of the history of Greece and Rome, but he was wrong about the legacy of the rebels. The effect of insurrection was probably greatest upon the enslaved aboard the ship, and this despite their various degrees of participation in the project. Those who refused to accept slavery initiated a struggle that would go on for hundreds of years. As martyrs they would enter the folklore and long memory of those on the lower deck, the waterfront, and the slave plantation. The rebels would be remembered and the struggle would continue.35

  “Going Home to Guinea”

  The experience of death and the impulse to all forms of resistance were linked to a broadly held West African spiritual belief. From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the time of abolition most captives seem to have believed that in death they returned to their native land. This allowed them to “meet their fate with a fortitude and indifference truely their own.” The belief seems to have been especially prominent among peoples from the Bight of Biafra, but it was also present among those of Senegambia, the Windward Coast, and the Gold Coast. It persisted long after the Middle Passage. Among people of African descent in North America and the West Indies, funerals often featured rejoicing, even rapture, because the deceased was “going home to Guinea.”36

  Early in the century an unnamed observer noted of those dying aboard his ship, “Their opinion is that when they dye, they go to their own country, which made some of them refuse to eat their victuals. Striving to pine themselves, as [most ex]peditious way to return home.” A woman of Old Calabar who starved herself to death aboard a slaver in the 1760s said to other women captives the night before she died that “She was going to her friends.” Late in the century, Joseph Hawkins wrote that after death the Ibau “must return to their own country, and remain forever free of care or pain.” Abolitionists knew of the belief in the transmigration of souls, as explained by Thomas Clarkson: “It is an opinion, which the Africans universally entertain, that, as soon as death shall release them from the hands of their oppressors, they shall immediately be wafted back to their native plains, there to exist again, to enjoy the sight of their beloved countrymen, and to spend the while of their new existence in scenes of tranquility and delight: and so powerfully does this notion operate upon them, as to drive them frequently to the horrid extremity of putting a period to their lives.” When someone died, the other Africans said, “he has gone to his happy country.”37

  A European observer who talked to various captives aboard his ship noted that among the majority, this belief was “so gross [ignorant] as to allow them to inhabit the same country with the same bodies.” Some even thought they would go back to life just as it was before, and even inhabit their “old dwellings.” Others (denominated the “more intelligent” Africans) thought they would return to “a portion of this vast continent which alive they can never know.” In an “African paradise” they would enjoy the joys and luxuries of life with none of its fears. The Islamic slaves on board the slave ship referred to the “law . . . which is to be the inheritance of all true Musselmen!” But they seemed to have a difference of opinion about who would accompany them into the afterlife, whether they would “carry their old wives along with them” or “blew eyed virgins.” According to the man who collected the lore, the anthropological foray led nowhere: “Their opinion of this matter however must be acknowledged to be so dark and unintelligible as scarce to deserve our attention.”38

  Slave-trade merchants and ship captains begged to differ. They gave the belief a great deal of attention, in contemplation and action. They not only hooked up the nettings to prevent suicides and readied the implements of forced feeding, they resorted to studied terror. Since many Africans believed that they would return to their native land in their own bodies, captains terrorized the dead body, and all who would look upon it, as a “preventative.” One captain brought all of the enslaved onto the main deck to witness as the carpenter cut off the head of the first slave who died, throwing the body overboard and “intimating to them, that if they were determined to go back to their own country, they should go back without their heads.” He repeated the grisly ritual with each subsequent death. Captain William Snelgrave had the same idea. After decapitating a man who had been executed for leading an insurrection, he explained, “This last part was done, to let our Negroes see, that all who offended thus, should be served in the same manner, For many of the Blacks believe, that if they are put to death and not dismembred, they shall retur
n again to their own Country, after they are thrown overboard.” Hugh Crow knew that the belief often led to the “the utter annihilation of the culprit.” To the many roles played by the slave ship captain in the burgeoning capitalist economy of the Atlantic must be added another: terrorist.39

  The determination to “go home to Guinea” also suggests that the goal of an insurrection was not always the capture of the ship. The objective on many occasions was collective suicide, as Thomas Clarkson explained: the captives often “determine to rise upon the crew, hoping by those means to find that death which they have wished for, and indulging a Hope at the same time, that they shall find it at the Expence of some of the Lives of their Oppressors.” Given this objective, a much larger number of insurrections must be counted as successful from the point of the view of those who made them. In death and spiritual return, insurgents reversed their expropriation, enslavement, and exile.40

  Bonding

  The violence of expropriation and enslavement shattered the structures of kinship that had ordered the lives of almost all of the people who had been forced aboard the slave ship. As deep, disruptive, and disorienting as this was, the enslaved did not suffer it passively. They did everything they could to preserve whatever may have survived of these kin relations, and, just as important, they set about building new ones, on the ship if not earlier, in the coffles, “slave-holes,” factories, and fortresses along their way to the ship. Olaudah Equiano developed new connections to his “countrymen,” a word that could refer to his fellow Igbo or to all of the African people with whom he found himself sharing the ship. What anthropologists have called “fictive kinship” was actually an endlessly reproduced series of miniature mutual aid societies that were formed on the lower deck of the slave ship. The kindred would call themselves “shipmates.”

  The first point to be emphasized about kinship is that it was real and commonplace aboard the slave ship. Husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings, members of families both extended and nuclear, found themselves on the same ships, as one observer after another pointed out. One of the primary means of enslavement in Africa made this likely. The “grand pillage” of entire villages, set afire in the middle of the night, meant that families, indeed clans and sometimes communities, were swept up by marauding enemy forces, carried to the coast, and often sold together as “prisoners of war.” As John Thornton has written, “An entire slave ship might be filled, not just with people possessing the same culture, but people who grew up together.”41

  Kinfolk met regularly aboard the slavers. An Igbo man, an embrenché “styled of the higher class,” encountered on the main deck of his vessel a woman of similar “countenance and color,” his sister. The two then “stood with silence and amazement,” looked at each other with the greatest affection, and “rushed into each other’s arms.” An “extremely clever and intelligent” fifteen-year-old girl was brought aboard another slaver only to find, three months later, that a “girl with similar features,” her eight-year-old sister, had been forced to join her. “They very soon embraced each other, and went below.” It happened repeatedly on slave ships that “relations are brought on board, such as Brothers and Sisters, Wives and Husbands, and these at Separate Times.” Brothers messed together, as did sisters. But because men and women were separated, it was not easy for all kin to maintain contact. Communication between husbands and wives, for example, “was carried betwixt them by the boys which ran about the decks.”42

  Slowly, in ways surviving documents do not allow us to see in detail, the idiom of kinship broadened, from immediate family, to messes, to workmates, to friends, to countrymen and women, to the whole of the lower deck. Central to the process was the additive nature of many West African cultures, as explained by John Matthews: the people of Sierra Leone had an extraordinary “facility with which they form new connexions.” Captain James Bowen described the bonding process among the enslaved. On his ship, there were among the Africans “many relations.” These were not, he made clear, traditional kin relations, but something of more recent formation. These were people “who had discovered such an attachment to each other, as to have been inseparable, and to have partaken of the same food, and to have slept on the same plank during the voyage.” They had, in short, shared violence, terror, and difficult conditions, as well as resistance, community, and finally survival on the lower deck of the slave ship. They built “new connexions”: they were shipmates.43

  Dr. Thomas Winterbottom explained the significance of the term. He worked as a physician in the Sierra Leone colony in the early 1790s and observed the connection between kinship in Africa, aboard the ship, and in the New World. He noted that at a certain age, “the title of pa, or father, is prefixed to the names of the men, as a token of respect,” and the “title of ma, or mother, is also added to the names of the women.” This, he noted, was “also practised among the slaves in the West Indies.” Then he showed how the ship provided a link: “it is worthy of remark, that those unfortunate people who have gone to the West Indies in the same vessel, ever after retain for each other a strong and tender affection: with them the term ship-mate is almost equivalent to that of brother or sister, and it is rarely that matrimonial connections take place between them.” This phenomenon prevailed throughout the Atlantic colonies: in the Dutch colonies, those who came over on the same ship called each other “sibbi” or “sippi.” In Portuguese Brazil, the word for seafaring kinship was “malungo.” In French Caribbean Creole, it was “bâtiment.” And from Virginia to Barbados, Jamaica, and beyond, it was “shipmate.” Such kinship would be extended when those who sailed together on the ship would later instruct their children to call their shipmates uncle or aunt. Speaking of the changed social relationships aboard his own ship during the Middle Passage, seaman William Butterworth noted how “much were things altered in a few weeks sailing.”44

  Evidence of such bonds appeared in the extreme anxiety and pain of shipmates as they were sold and separated at the end of the voyage. Part of their agitation was of course the fear of the unknown that lay ahead on the plantation, but part of it was losing what had been built, in anguish and desperate hope, aboard the ship. In the House of Commons hearings on the slave trade between 1788 and 1792, surgeon Alexander Falconbridge and seaman Henry Ellison were asked the same question by an MP: “Have you ever known the Slaves on board your ship to appear exceedingly distressed when they were sold in the West Indies?” They agreed, yes, “they seemed sorry to be parted from one another.” Falconbridge had witnessed four such sales, while the long-experienced Ellison had seen ten. Between them, they had seen more than four thousand Africans sold off the ships. They spoke not just of formal kin, who would have been in a small minority in any case; rather they generalized about the enslaved of each ship as a whole.45

  Others added depth to the observation. Dr. Thomas Trotter wrote that the people from his ship “were crying out for their friends with all the language of affliction at being parted.” He added that “on this occasion some husbands and wives were parted,” but also noted that there were “many other relations of different degrees of kindred”—in other words, from closest family to extended kin, to fellow villagers, to countrymen, to new shipmates. Captain Bowen tried to keep together for group sale (in a scramble) those “connected by consanguinity or attachments,” but he failed in his design. With “shrieking and dismay,” even fainting, the attached were parted, probably, the captain thought, never to meet again. A final sale and separation involved three young girls “of the same country” whose vessel docked in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1804. This produced “the most piercing anguish” among one of the three, who was “overloaded with horror and dismay at the separation from her two friends.” They in turn “looked wistfully at her, and she at them. At last they threw themselves into each others arms, and burst into the most piteous exclamations.—They hung together and sobbed and screamed and bathed each other with their tears.” At last they were torn apart, whereupon one of
the girls took “a string of beads with an amulet from her neck, kissed it, and hung it on her friend’s.”46

  Another instance of a shipboard community in formation appeared in the comments of Captain Thomas King, veteran of nine Guinea voyages between 1766 and 1780. Captain King had witnessed instances in which “religious Priests” of certain groups had been brought aboard among the captives and had proceeded to encourage insurrection. These spiritual leaders induced others “to make those attempts, with the expectation that they should get the ship to some shore, where they would form a little community of their own.” Here, on the ship, was a new community in formation. It began when the African Adam and Eve—the first man and woman—came aboard and it would continue in plantation, maroon, church, and urban communities. Here was the alchemy of chains mutating, under the hard pressure of resistance, into bonds of community. The mysterious slave ship had become a place of creative resistance for those who now discovered themselves to be “black folks.” In a dialectic of stunning power, the community of mortal suffering aboard the slave ship gave birth to defiant, resilient, life-affirming African American and pan-African cultures.47

  SEVEN

  “Black Pirates”

  The Amistad Rebellion, 1839

  The story began with a sensational headline: “A Suspicious Sail—a Pirate.” The New York Morning Herald announced on August 24, 1839, that a pilot boat had spotted a mystery ship about twenty-five miles off the coast of New York. On deck were “a number of negroes, twenty five or thirty, . . . almost or quite naked; some were wrapped in blankets, and one had on a white coat.” They were a “strange crew,” all the stranger for brandishing machetes, pistols, and muskets. One sailor “had a belt of dollars round his waist; another called the captain, had a gold watch. They could speak no English, but appeared to talk in the negro language.” Black pirates, armed and flush with plunder, were cruising the coast of Long Island.1