The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  A windsail, a funnel of sailcloth used to ventilate the ship, was sometimes employed to try and force air through the slave deck, but its effectiveness depended on there being enough wind.

  Officers and crew (and passengers, if there were any) also traveled in narrow circumstances on board these ships. The sailors would sleep in hammocks, or perhaps bunks, slung or built into any available corner. On the Brookes, for example, on one deck, the crew’s quarters lay aft the slaves’ compartment, and on the deck above were quarters for the officers, with a good cabin for the captain—on the Brookes this measured nearly fourteen feet long by about five feet broad and six feet high. Sometimes, if the ship was overloaded, these sailors would sleep in the boats, on the deck, or in gangways. The captain and the officers would often make less room for themselves by loading as many personal slaves as they could beneath their bunks, or in their cabins. This was specially noticeable on voyages between Luanda and Rio, about 1800, when at least twelve of these illegal slaves, depending on the size of the crew, would travel. Sometimes, both captains and officers concealed these personal slaves from the officials in Luanda who had inspected the ship for weight and slave per ton; or they would bring in the slaves over the gunwale at night, after the formal inspection, perhaps stopping at one of the bays along the coast below the city to take on the smuggled cargo.

  • • •

  After eight days, the ships would usually be out of sight of land, and the slaves would be allowed on deck. Great efforts were then made to maintain good spirits as well as good hygiene. Thus the captives would be organized in groups for the cleaning of the ship and required to sing while doing it. Jean Barbot wrote that, on the French ships from La Rochelle on which he had served, “thrice a week, we perfume betwixt’ decks with a quantity of good vinegar in pails, and red hot bullets in them, to expel the bad air, after the place has been well scrubbed with brooms: after which, the deck is cleaned with cold vinegar.”17 Captain Phillips of the Hannibal recalled that the Gold Coast slaves whom he used as the ship’s noncommissioned officers took care “to make the negroes scrape the decks where they lodge every morning very clean, to eschew any distempers that may engender from filth and dirtiness; when we appoint a guardian we give him a cat o’ nine tails as a badge of his office, which he is not a little proud of.” Female slaves were often asked to work the corn mill, the corn being put, perhaps with rice or peppers, into the bean soup. About “a fortnight after leaving,” recalled Thomas Tobin of Liverpool for the benefit of the House of Commons, to whom he was testifying, “I endeavoured, by keeping them in a good humour, to knock perhaps a dozen out of these irons on a morning; then the next morning the same; the men took it in good heart and they used to draw lots themselves to see who should be let out the next morning, until they were about half out, and then we let them all out.”18

  Brutality was neither normal nor inevitable. It was in everyone’s interest to deliver as many live slaves as possible to the Americas. An instruction of the Dutch Middelburgische Kamerse Compagnie in 1762-86 specifically insisted: “Do not permit any Negroes, slaves, or slave women to be defiled or mistreated.”19 That order went on to demand that “care be taken that the doctor and supercargo check the mouths and eyes of the slaves every morning.” Jean Barbot, after his own slave voyages, recommended good treatment of slaves in order to “curb their brutish temper,” but also “to lessen the deep sense of their lamentable condition, which many are sensible enough of, whatever we may think of their stupidity.” He also thought that, generally, on board ship, “all possible care is taken to preserve and subsist them [the slaves] in the interest of the owners.”20

  Yet the eighteenth century was a violent age; human life was not held in much respect. One description of a sea passage of a slaver was that, “once off the coast, the ship became half bedlam and half brothel.” Captains often treated their own crews with criminal sadism, too. Captain William Lugen, of Bristol, was tried at Charleston for murder, because one of his female captives had a baby and the woman died. The crew committed the “poor infant to the people of its own colour; but they, like true savages, handed it upon deck, and refused to admit it among them; their reason being that they believed the illness to be infectious. The infant was then left in the broiling heat of the sun and in the agonies of death (the surgeon said that it could not live the day). The captain ordered it to be thrown overboard.” He was later acquitted of murder, as “there could [have been] no premeditated malice.”21 On a French ship in the eighteenth century (probably the 1770s), the captain reported that the second captain, Philippe Liot, had “mistreated a very pretty negress, broke two of her teeth, and put her in such a state of terror that she could only be sold for a very low price in Saint-Domingue, where she died two weeks later.”22

  Thomas Tobin, the slaving captain of Liverpool who gave evidence to the House of Commons, on the other hand, recalled how, if the slaves whom he was transporting “had been in a nursery in any private family, they could not have been treated more [kindly].” The whole ship’s company, he said, was “constantly employed . . . making everything [as] comfortable as could possibly be for the slaves. . . . They came up at about eight o’clock in the morning, and people were appointed over the hatchways with cloths, and they were rubbed down by themselves.”23 Captain Thomas Phillips of the Hannibal wrote in 1694: “I have been informed that some commanders have cut off the legs or arms of the most wilful [slaves], to terrify the rest, for they believe that, if they lose a member, they cannot return home again: I was advised by some of my officers to do the same, but I could not be persuaded to entertain the least thought of it, much less to put in practice such barbarity and cruelty to poor creatures who, excepting their want of Christianity and true religion (their misfortune more than fault), are as much the works of God’s hands, and no doubt as dear to him as ourselves.”24

  Food en route to the Americas was of course simple, with, as usual, a few national differences: manioc (or cassava) was a staple food on Portuguese boats; maize (already known to the English as “Indian corn”) on English and Dutch ones; while oats, brought from France, on French ones. Rice or millet (grown in Africa) was also often available. To these, kidney beans, plantains (that is, coarse bananas), yams, potatoes, coconuts, limes, and oranges might be added. The food of the slaves was neither much inferior in quantity nor in quality to that of the crew. It was also probably better than what the slaves would have enjoyed during the months of waiting or traveling in Africa.

  By the late eighteenth century, a typical ration per day for a slave might be three pounds, ten ounces of yam, ten ounces of biscuit, three and a half ounces of beans, two ounces of flour, and a portion of salted beef. One plantain and one ear of corn might be added three days out of five. A mouthwash of vinegar or lime juice might be given in the mornings, to avoid scurvy (as people had begun to realize was necessary after James Lind’s celebrated treatise of 1754, though the Admiralty did not specify the need for such a juice till 1794; but surgeon Trotter of the Brookes, previously mentioned, was a pioneer in the practice).

  Once again, the Portuguese had laid down precise regulations in 1519 about the food for the journey of a slave vessel and, for a time at least, those rules were maintained. The Law of 1684 elaborated them. But captains bound for Rio from Luanda or Benguela in Angola often refused to buy what was needed. They even bribed officials in the port to permit them secretly to use the space which would have been taken up by food to add to the complement of slaves.

  Certainly the food was often much less than what was needed. An Irish sailor, Nics Owen, sailing with Captain William Brown from Sierra Leone to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1753, found that the ration for the crew was one ounce of salt meat every twenty-four hours, with just a half-biscuit in addition.

  The Dutch fed their slaves “three times a day with indifferent good victuals and”—so the crews insisted—“much better than in their own country.” On the other hand, on French boats, a stew of oats would be cooked
daily in a large copper, to which dried turtle meat (such as could be obtained in the Cape Verde Islands) or dried vegetables were added. Fresh vegetables and water were bought whenever the ship touched land. On English ships, meals were usually distributed to the slaves in tens in “a small fat tub, made for that use by our coopers . . . each slave having a little wooden spoon to feed himself handsomely. . . .” Captain Phillips recalled that these meals were held on the main deck and forecastle, so “that we may have them all under command of our arms from the quarterdeck in case of any disturbance; the women eat upon the quarterdeck with us, and the boys and girls upon the poop.” Meals on English ships were usually given twice a day, at ten in the morning and five at night: “The first meal was large beans, boil’d with a certain quantity of Muscovy lard which we have from Holland. . . . The other meal was of pease, or of Indian wheat ‘dabbadabb’ [Indian corn ground in an iron mill], which we take for that purpose, as small as oatmeal, then mixed with water and boiled well in a copper furnace till as thick as pudding, to which salt, palm oil, and malaguetta [pepper] were added to relish.” It was thought that malaguetta pepper would give “our negroes in their messes [something] to keep them from the flux [that is, acute diarrhea] and dry bellyache.”25

  The RAC always carried its own dry “bisket,” from England, as well as horsebeans and lard, and would buy maize on the Gold Coast before going to Calabar. In the early eighteenth century, these English ships would also take with them baskets of potatoes, barrels of salt, hogsheads of palm oil, pepper, rice, chests of corn, and sometimes quantities of Suffolk cheese, vinegar, “English spirits” (gin, presumably), and tobacco.

  Different observers left contrasting impressions of slaves’ desires. Jean Barbot found that slaves had “a much better stomach for beans . . . than Indian wheat, mandioca [manioc] or yams.” Thomas Phillips also recalled, “These beans, the negroes extremely love . . . beating their breasts eating them and crying ‘Pram, pram,’ which is very good.” On the other hand, Barbot said, about 1700, “a ship that takes in five hundred slaves must provide above 100,000 yams, which is very difficult, because it is hard to store them, by reason that they take up so much room; and yet no less ought to be provided, the slave being of such a constitution that no other food will keep them: Indian corn, beans and mandioca disagreeing with their stomachs.” A hundred years later, Thomas Tobin said much the same, save that he usually needed only ten to fifteen thousand yams.26

  Sometimes it was necessary to force slaves to eat to prevent them from committing suicide by self-starvation. Barbot, who was, so he said, “naturally compassionate,” had nevertheless “been necessitated sometimes to cause the teeth of those wretches to be broken because they would not open their mouths.” Wilberforce instanced a captain who had ordered his mate to offer a recalcitrant slave a piece of yam in one hand and a “piece of fire” in the other. For those recalcitrants, a special pair of scissors, or speculum oris, was carried. The blades were forced between the teeth of the rebel, and then the attached thumbscrew was turned in order to force the jaws apart.27, II

  The hour of meals was the most dangerous time for the crews: four o’clock in the afternoon was “the aptest time to mutiny [the slaves] being all on deck. . . . Therefore, all that time what of our men who are not employed in distributing victuals to them . . . stand to their arms; and some with loaded matches at the great guns that yawn upon them, loaden with cartridge, till they have done. . . .”28

  Dinner being ended, reported Jean Barbot, “we made the men go down between decks, for the women were almost entirely at their own discretion, to be on deck as long as they pleased, nay, even many of the males had the same liberty by turns . . . few or none being fettered [that is, when at sea]. . . . Besides, we allow’d each of them, between their meals, a handful of Indian wheat and mandioca and now and then short pipes and tobacco to smoke upon deck by turns and some cocoa nuts . . . and the women [put] a piece of coarse cloth to cover them and the same to many of the men, which we took care they did wash from time to time to prevent vermin. Towards evening, they diverted themselves on the decks as they thought fit, some conversing together, others dancing, singing and sporting after their manner, which pleased them highly and often made us pastime, especially the female sex who, being apart from the males on the quarterdeck, and many of them young sprightly maidens, full of jollity, and good humour, afforded us abundance of recreation.” Both sexes were indeed “encouraged to sing and dance as much as possible,” the captain of a French vessel declared; “for this purpose, two drums might be made available. Slaves who danced well might be given a small ration of eau de vie, as well as a little piece of meat or a biscuit. This gave them something to look forward to. They were never given pipes (for fear of fire), but a little tobacco in powder is all right for the same purpose.” Sometimes, these dances were executed under the menace of a whip. Thomas Phillips recalled, “We often at sea in the evening would let the slaves come up into the sun to air themselves, and make them jump and dance for an hour or two to our bagpipes, harp and fiddle.”29

  It was asserted in the 1790s by an English slave captain, Captain Sherwood, that on slave ships there was as a rule adequate water. That was sometimes true, usually not. An average man may be supposed to require, in one form or another, a quart of water to drink every day, and a quart and a half in food. Africans were accustomed to drink more than Europeans. The Portuguese in 1519 laid down that adequate water should be provided on these vessels, and their law of 1684 specified what that meant: enough water should be carried to give each slave a daily canada (1.5 pints), which was, however, only half the ration established as necessary earlier in the century. Liverpool ships would often carry enough water to provide two pints a day, and ships from Nantes 3 pints or even slightly over a full gallon.

  The space needed to provide adequate water was considerable: a Portuguese ship carrying three hundred slaves would have to ship thirty-five barrels (pipas) by law. Jean Barbot said that at “each meal we allowed each slave a full coconut shell of water and, from time to time, a dram of brandy.” In fact, a double supply of water was often shipped. Thus the ship Brookes in the 1780s carried 34,000 gallons of water for its six hundred slaves and forty-five sailors. Yet a ration of three pints of water per slave per day would have required only 12,000 gallons.

  These voyages were often very hot as well as very crowded. Many slaves suffered from dysentery and, therefore, lost liquid at a rate which made even the ration of water prescribed by Portuguese law inadequate. Dehydration in conditions of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit below-decks was not at all unusual.

  The RAC, during the early years of the eighteenth century, tried to provide machines “to make salt-water fresh . . . to render the voyage much the shorter and . . . lessen the mortality of the Negroes.” But they were quite unsuccessful.

  Water was also often carried in most unhealthy ways. For example, on the voyage between Angola and Brazil, it was frequently stored in the same barrels which had been used to bring over Rio’s special cane brandy, gerebita, on the outward journey, a preparation which fouled any liquid unless the barrels were thoroughly cleaned. Water in Luanda and Benguela was anyway notoriously bad, as well as in short supply.

  Despite the efforts of provident captains, illness was rife on slave ships. The enlightened Dominican Tomás de Mercado, whose treatise of 1569, Tratos y contratos de Mercaderes, included, as we have seen, one of the earliest criticisms of the slave trade,III recalled a Portuguese ship which lost a hundred slaves out of five hundred in a single night from an unrecorded disease.30 Later, if the surgeons found any slaves indisposed, they would cause them “to be carried to the lazaretto, under the forecastle, . . . a sort of hospital. . . . Being out of the crowd, the surgeons had more conveniency and time to administer proper remedies; which they cannot do properly between decks, because of the great heat that is there continually, which is sometimes so excessive that the surgeons would faint away and the candles would not burn; besides that
, in such a crowd of brutish people, there are always some very apt to annoy and hurt others, and all in general so greedy, that they will snatch from the sick slaves the fresh meat or liquour that is given to them.” Thus Jean Barbot, who added, “It is in no way advisable to put sick slaves in the long boat upon deck, as was imprudently done on the Albion, for they being exposed in the open air, and coming out of the excessive hot hold, and lying there in the cool of the nights for some time, just under the fall of the wind from the sails, were soon taken so ill of violent cholics and bloody fluxes that, in a few days, they died. . . .”31

  An English surgeon in 1790 thought that two-thirds of the deaths on a slave journey were due to “banzo,” a mortal melancholy, as it was described in a Brazilian dictionary, or “involuntary suicide.”

  In truth, dysentery, or “the flux,” was the worst of the diseases on the ships: a third of deaths were probably so caused, or from dehydration induced by it. Smallpox was probably the second-most-common cause of death, and, earlier on, it was probably even more destructive than the flux: “The negroes are so incident to the smallpox,” wrote Captain Phillips at the end of the seventeenth century, “that few ships that carry them escape without it and, sometimes, it makes vast havoc and destruction among them; but, though we had a hundred at a time sick of it, and . . . it went through the ship, yet we lost not a dozen by it . . . though it will never seize a white man.”32 That latter immunity, it should be said, was something which Europeans had become accustomed to after the epidemic which had been so destructive in Mexico in the days of Hernán Cortés. Scurvy (known as mal de Loanda on Portuguese ships) was also to be found regularly, as well as skin diseases. Several kinds of ophthalmia occasionally also had devastating effects.