Drink was of equal importance to food. Clean water was hard to find and more difficult to preserve. Most water was drawn from rivers just upstream from the ports through which they flow, the Thames above London, for instance. Even if the source of the water was relatively clean, its quality on long voyages could hardly be maintained. Writing on his passage to Southeast Asia in 1614, VOC governor-general Gerard Reynst observed that, “The water and the wine which are daily taken from the hold are about as hot as if they were boiling, and this is the reason why much of the victuals go bad.” Apart from being vile, the usual allowance of water—one liter per day per man in Spanish ships of the 1600s—was inadequate for the maintenance of good health. A 150-pound man consuming thirty-five hundred calories per day normally needs about two to three liters of water, and in hot climates the requirement is about ten liters. A method for distilling freshwater from salt was known within a decade of Reynst’s complaint but improvements were slow. In 1762, Lind demonstrated a distillation process and recommended that stills be put aboard Royal Navy ships. Eight years later, Parliament awarded Charles Irving £5,000 for a device that could render almost one hundred liters of freshwater from three hundred liters of saltwater in an hour. In the 1780s, the still carried by HMS Bounty distilled only about twelve gallons of water per day—not so much for the ship’s complement of 117 men as for the cargo of breadfruit trees they were trying to get to the West Indies. Finally, in 1772 the Royal Navy required that all warships carry a still. Merchant crews and passengers were again less fortunate. British regulations did not require government-run emigrant ships to carry distillers until 1864, and even then the law did not apply to privately run ships.
In northern Europe, the usual substitute for water was beer. English records from the Armada campaign show that seamen received one gallon of beer per day, the standard allowance for more than two centuries. On his first voyage to the Indies in 1598, Jacob van Neck had written that “we dranke the last Beere, and we began our first allowance to drinke water, foure mutskins [of about eight ounces] or measures everie day, and three of wine.” Yet beer could only be brewed and carried in the winter months; in warmer climes it soured quickly. The challenge was to develop a brew that could survive a long voyage without going flat or sour, a process that seems to have taken until the mid-eighteenth century, when brewers began increasing the amount of hops to create a more stable and alcoholic beer. This improvement notwithstanding, when the Royal Navy began operating regularly in the West Indies in the mid-1600s, rum, a by-product of sugarcane, became the beverage of choice. A century later, Admiral Edward Vernon fixed the rum ration: “every day mixed with the proportion of a quart of water to every half pint of rum … served … in two servings in the day, the one between the hours of 10 and 12 in the morning, and the other between 4 and 6 in the afternoon.” The revolutionary aspect of Vernon’s diktat was that the rum could no longer be drunk neat. In addition to water, the rum could also be fortified with a helping of lime juice and sugar to make a crude ancestor of the daiquiri known as grog, in honor of Vernon, who was dubbed “Old Grogram” for his signature grogram cape. In 1789, the Bounty mutineers set their former messmates adrift with, among other provisions, a gallon of rum, which Lieutenant William Bligh issued in daily rations of one teaspoonful per man. It is this, some believe, that enabled the nineteen castaways to sail thirty-six hundred miles in a seven-meter-long boat without losing one of their number.
Life and Death in the Slave Trade
Naval crews were not the only people afflicted by disease or malnutrition at sea, but they received legislative protection from the worst features of shipboard life earlier than either slaves or free passengers. Depending on their ports of origin and destination, transatlantic travelers spent between five and ten weeks at sea in conditions almost none could have imagined or anticipated. The fate of slaves was unfathomably worse than that of anyone else, and it was in part due to reports of the abject brutality involved that abolitionists in Britain, France, and the United States began to sever the debate on the slave trade from that on the institution of slavery itself. Life as a working slave was appalling, but as an appeal to public emotion accounts of the horrific conditions aboard slave ships had no equal. Addressing Parliament in 1806, Foreign Secretary Charles James Fox observed that “Slavery itself, odious as it is, is not nearly [so] bad as the slave trade.”
Only fifteen autobiographical accounts by African-born slaves transported to the British colonies of the Caribbean and North America survive, and of these only one, by Olaudah Equiano, treats the transatlantic passage in any detail. Equiano wrote his account three decades after his passage, at the age of about ten, and however impressionable his experience was, his narrative is doubtless colored by that of others he heard from fellow slaves. More immediate and graphic is the published testimony of such witnesses as Alexander Falconbridge, a “surgeon in the African trade” in the 1780s, and author of one of many indictments of the trade by people with firsthand experience of it. “During the voyages I made,” wrote Falconbridge, describing the virtual entombment of slaves belowdecks,
I was frequently a witness to the fatal effects of this exclusion of the fresh air. I will give one instance, as it serves to convey some idea, though a very faint one of the sufferings of those unhappy beings.… Some wet and blowing weather having occasioned the port-holes to be shut and the gratings to be covered, fluxes [that is, dysentery] and fevers among the negroes ensued. While they were in this situation, my profession requiring it, I frequently went down among them, till at length their apartments became so extremely hot, as to be only sufferable for a very short time. But the excessive heat was not the only thing that rendered their situation intolerable. The deck, that is, the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination, to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting. Numbers of the slaves having fainted, they were carried upon deck, where several of them died, and the rest were, with great difficulty, restored.
The amount of space allotted to each slave was only about 5 to 6 square feet (0.5 to 0.6 square meters), and the height between decks usually made it impossible to stand upright. In 1788, Sir William Dolben proposed regulating the number of slaves that could be carried per ship to reduce the number of fatalities on British slavers from ten thousand per year. This law lapsed after three years in the face of opposition from traders and the identification of abolition with French revolutionaries.
Description of a Slave Ship. “The PLAN and SECTIONS annexed exhibit a slave ship with the slaves stowed. In order to give a representation of the trade against which no complaint of exaggeration could be brought by those concerned in it, the Brooks is here described.… The number of slaves this vessel actually carried appears from the accounts given to Captain Parrey by the slave-merchants themselves, as follows: Men—351; Women—127; Boys—90; Girls—41. The room allowed to each description of slaves in this plan is: To the Men 6 feet by 1 foot 4 inches. Women 5 feet 10 in. by 1 foot 4 in. Boys 5 feet by 1 foot 2 in.; Girls 4 feet 6 in. by 1 foot.” Printed by James Phillips, London, 1789. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Abolitionists also sought to tie the iniquity of the slave trade to the dismal lot of the crew, whose treatment was little better than that of their captives. Because the tween decks were reserved for the slaves, such shelter as the crew had was beneath a torn tarpaulin on deck. The crews were fed less than their counterparts in other merchant or navy ships and they were not allowed any spirits. Officers treated their crews with an uncommon savagery because, as Falconbridge explained, “to harden the feelings, and to inspire a delight in giving torture to a fellow creature, is the natural tendency of this unwarrantable traffick.” Falconbridge recounts endless “barbarities exercised by the officers in the slave trade” including beating, flogging, dunking, and other
humiliations that led to desertion and suicide.
The movement to ban the slave trade spanned the Atlantic, but to secure passage of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, American abolitionists had to table the issue and settle for the prospect of revisiting the question in 1808, when the government banned it, one year after Great Britain, but seven years before any other European government. Although the importation of slaves was illegal, enforcement of the law in American waters was complicated by the fact that interstate trade in slaves by sea—from Charleston to New Orleans, for instance—remained legal, and the government made no serious effort to interdict slave traders until the 1820s.
The Colonial Passenger Trade
While survival rates were worse for slaves than for free passengers, the difference is less dramatic than one might suppose—a fact that does not reflect well on the carriage of slaves, but indicates the deplorable circumstances of life afloat for most people. Although there are examples of colonial legislation in North America aimed at mitigating the conditions to which free passengers were subject earlier in the century, the first national laws to lessen the physical horrors of the slave trade preceded those intended to guarantee minimum standards for nonslaves. As British North America began to prosper in the eighteenth century, it attracted immigrants from beyond Great Britain, including French Huguenots and Germans from the Rhineland. The French tended to migrate to the Southern colonies, to which some of them had been introduced through their involvement in the slave trade, while Germans tended to sail for Philadelphia. A German immigrant wrote of his experience in 1725: “The ship voyage is as one takes it. For my part, I maintain that it is a comfortable trip if one carries along victuals to which one is accustomed and controls one’s imagination.” But the halcyon days of the Great Migration to New England were long past and such sanguine views of an Atlantic crossing were probably rare in the eighteenth century. More people would seem to have concurred with Gottlieb Mittelberger, who left Germany in 1750 to take up a four-year post as organist in Pennsylvania. Mittelberger originally had no intention of writing about his experiences and did so solely to warn innocent travelers of “the sad and miserable condition of those traveling from Germany to the New World, and the irresponsible and merciless proceedings of the Dutch traders in human beings and their man-stealing emissaries—I mean the so-called Newlanders. For these at one and the same time steal German people under all sorts of fine pretexts, and deliver them into the hands of the great Dutch traffickers in human souls. From this business the latter make a huge profit.” His description of shipboard life is a litany of agonies almost indistinguishable from Falconbridge’s account of a slave ship:
During the journey the ship is full of pitiful signs of distress—smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot, and similar inflictions [sic], all of them caused by the age and the highly salted state of the food, especially the meat, as well as the very bad and filthy water, which brings about the miserable destruction and death of many. Add to all that shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery, vexation, and lamentation, as well as other troubles.
With such apotropaic testimony in circulation, it is remarkable that anyone would consider the prospect of leaving Europe for America, but leave they did. Of the 11.4 million people who sailed to the Americas between 1500 and 1820, 2.7 million were Europeans; the remainder—more than three-quarters of the total—were African slaves.
The Balance of Power in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Religious conflict, warfare, land hunger, the apparent abundance of opportunity, and the diminished threat of pirates and privateers were all inducements for crossing the Atlantic. By the eighteenth century, the security of overseas territories was increasingly assured by the naval power of their home countries, and the governments of England, France, and the Dutch Republic were assuming a role in transoceanic affairs that had previously been delegated to private interests. But there was no direct correspondence between a strong navy and a large merchant marine. The Dutch Republic maintained a vigorous carrying trade even as its navy declined; the French built a huge navy and had a prosperous merchant marine, although merchants wielded comparatively little influence in naval circles; and Russia’s navy antedated the creation of its commercial fleet altogether. England was the country in which naval and foreign policy objectives tallied most closely with the aims of merchants.
State fleets did not fight each other regularly beyond the Mediterranean or European Atlantic until the “second hundred years’ war” (1689–1815) between England and France. Whereas all the major fleet actions of the Dutch Wars were fought in the English Channel or southern North Sea, between England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, England and France and their respective allies were at war for sixty-three years and fought about forty major fleet engagements, only two of which took place in northern Europe. The proximate causes of the individual conflicts differed, but common to all was the aim of preventing any one power—Britain, France, or Spain—from dominating European affairs, which accounts for the shifts in alliances at the margins. The wars had enormous consequences beyond Europe, chief among them being the emergence of Great Britain as the first truly global power, a result that could hardly have been anticipated: there was no Great Britain until the Act of Union in 1707, and seventy years later the American Revolution cost Britain dear in territory and prestige.
Conducting prolonged campaigns in distant seas depended on healthy crews, adequate funds for sustained operations, and overseas bases, problems first solved during the Nine Years’ War, or War of the English Succession.a When the Dutch Protestant William III of Orange and his wife, Mary, overthrew England’s James II, Mary’s Catholic father, in 1688, France was at war with both the Netherlands and England. While the two states over which William ruled had a naval agreement, the English and Dutch had different motives for fighting France and seamless coordination was not assured. Many English understandably regarded William as a usurper, and William’s supporters suspected the navy of Jacobite sympathies. To the extent that this was true, it may have reflected a professional respect for James’s seamanship. As lord high admiral, he had distinguished himself in the Anglo-Dutch Wars, when one officer described him as “better acquainted in these seas than many masters which are now in his fleet; he is general, soldier, pilot, master, seaman; to say all, he is everything that man can be.” Regardless, given that William had managed to elude the English fleet, and that the navy’s record following his landing was undistinguished, there were grounds for concern, especially after the French defeated an Anglo-Dutch fleet at the battle of Beachy Head (or Bévéziers).
The English fleet could not be written off thanks to the government’s increased attention to naval affairs and because France’s naval administration and strategic vision were inadequate for a prolonged naval war. For all their scrupulous care, the preparations laid down by the naval ministers Colbert and his son and successor, Seignelay, proved unequal to the exigencies of actual hostilities. When war came, there were deficiencies in implementation across the board: manning requirements could not be fulfilled, ships were in disrepair, promised armaments were delayed, and fetid provisions sickened the crews. The English were not without their problems, and they resorted to impressment to fill their ships’ rosters. One ship had a complement of more than 600 men, nearly two-thirds of whom were ordinary seamen (“inferior sailors” as distinct from “the more expert and diligent … rated able on the navy-books”), and of these, 120 had never been to sea. As Admiral Edward Russell complained, “The fighting part is by much the least trouble that an Admiral of the English Fleet meets with.”
Another preoccupation was how to finance the navy’s operations and infrastructure. In the seventeenth century, England and France had constructed or renewed naval bases, shipyards, and port facilities, and attended to their sailors’ welfare by buil
ding hospitals for the wounded and ensuring funds for veterans and widows. Warships in the age of sail were extremely labor-intensive machines and keeping crews at full strength would remain a major problem through the nineteenth century. Financing naval operations and infrastructure proved more susceptible to improvement. The inadequate budgeting that had long hampered England’s naval establishment was alleviated somewhat in 1694 when the Scottish merchant and entrepreneur William Paterson raised a loan of £1.2 million, the subscribers to which became the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. This institution became the government’s banker and debt manager, and increased the flexibility with which the state addressed its financial obligations in war and peace. By managing the national debt and guaranteeing the availability of loans, the bank ensured that the government could prosecute wars, either directly or through subsidies to continental allies. The Bank of England was far in advance of any comparable institution in Europe, except the Netherlands—the bank’s policies were known as “Dutch finance”—and gave the island nation unprecedented diplomatic and military leverage.
A steady stream of revenue and advances in administration enabled the British to maintain a brisker, more sustained operational tempo than any navy had demonstrated previously, and to do so increasingly beyond home waters. The shape of things to come was heralded in the campaign of 1694–95 when rather than return from the Mediterranean to England for layup and repairs, Admiral Edward Russell put into Cádiz, the first time a British squadron wintered on foreign station. Such long-range, long-term operations became the norm in the eighteenth century. Other indications of the new orientation of England’s naval ambitions were the completion of the new royal dockyard at Plymouth, on the western English Channel north of Brest, and the conclusion of an alliance with Portugal that allowed English ships to reprovision at Lisbon.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 67
