Due to the nature of the evidence, the story of the Echo cannot settle these ongoing debates on why illegal slavers from Congo to Cuba carried so many youth, but it can illuminate another set of pressing questions about the strategies and priorities of young slave trade refugees. Maintaining the visibility of youth in the recaptive history of Echo shipmates merges two lines of inquiry in recent Atlantic historiography: the nature of child enslavement and the efforts of the enslaved to rebuild their social worlds. Attending to young recaptive shipmates along their Atlantic journey thus allows us to ask how age, alongside other factors such as gender, region of origin, and experiences of capture, shaped the strategies of recaptives for social belonging. Present-day readers might choose to see seizure of an illegal slave ship as the first step in a passage from slavery to freedom. Yet it is far more likely that the youthful majority of Echo recaptives, coming from societies in which individuals derived identity through networks of kin and other corporate affiliations, prioritized the criteria of security and collective belonging over individual legal categories of “slave” versus “free.”36 Historian Marcia Wright, drawing on published narratives of women and children in nineteenth-century Central Africa, identifies a “psychological drama” of childhood enslavement, in which, as she put it, “the terrors of cruelty were eclipsed by the terrors of abandonment.” Wright shows how resilient women and children captives in East Central Africa acquired relative security and resources through kinship and domestic structures that tied them to powerful elders.37 Wright’s insights can be extrapolated to the young West Central African Echo shipmates. While legal frameworks may highlight recaptives’ rescue from Cuban slave markets, the immediate concerns of recaptive shipmates had more to do with the search for information, security, and social belonging that attended the aftermath of slave ship seizure. The imperative of the search for security would continue through the many phases of the journeys of recaptive children.
From the first moments of embarkation from Cabinda, age and gender determined how information would flow among the Echo’s enslaved captives. In July 1858, Cabinda maritime workers hustled naked and newly branded captives onto the massive lighters that carried them to the slave ship.38 At the waiting ship, Echo crewmembers sent the smaller number of women and girls, along with the younger boys, to a forward slave deck. At least two of the women were pregnant or carrying very young infants.39 Sailors drove the men and older boys to the rear of the slave deck. In both the male and female sections of the ship, it is probable that captives familiar with Portuguese colonial towns in Angola could communicate some of their understanding of the transatlantic slave trade. Most likely, some of these individuals had already witnessed the capture and shipping of family and friends before their own ordeal began.40 Other young captives may have been completely disoriented, as was the child captive Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who reported his embarkation by Portuguese slavers at Lagos: “Being a veteran of slavery,... and having no more hope of ever going to my country again, I patiently took whatever came; although it was not without a great fear and trembling that I received, for the first time, the touch of a White man.”41 On the Echo, those who trusted one another enough responded with plans of insurrection in the first days at sea. U.S. defense attorneys in the Echo crew’s trial later claimed that some of the captives attempted to “rise upon the crew” and were kept shackled below in the hold for the rest of the voyage.42 Unfortunately, little else is known of this attempted uprising.
In the last weeks of the Echo’s passage, however, sickness and exhaustion made movement, let alone planning revolt, difficult. With less than four feet of headroom, the cramped captives could only sit with knees drawn to the chin or sleep spooned against one another; those placed under the hatchways breathed fresher air but, according to the ship’s coxswain, “were exposed to all weathers.”43 Freshly branded letters, half an inch long each, on shoulders and backs increased the captives’ bodily suffering.44 With no medical attention, and fed on an unchanging diet of rice and beans, both adults and children quickly developed dysentery, eye infections, and skin lesions.45 Excrement, urine, and vomit spread across the slave deck, and the stench of the airless quarters increased daily. Six weeks into the voyage, as the Echo passed along the north coast of Cuba, the vessel “was filthy to the last degree.” The USS Dolphin’s surgeon later testified that two boxes of medical supplies had been found aboard the Echo, but no effort was made to separate the sick from the well.46 Estimates from trial records and interviews with the crew indicate that 132 captives, or 29 percent of those embarked, did not live to see the crew of the U.S. Navy brig Dolphin board the Echo.
Just what Echo shipmates understood about the consequences of slave ship seizure bears directly upon how they understood their subsequent internment in Fort Sumter. Viewed from the perspective of scholarship on Kongo cosmology, the events of the middle passage took place beyond the kalunga line, between this world and the spirit world, a symbolic threshold associated with rivers and the sea.47 West Central Africans frequently associated this crisis of saltwater enslavement as the work of witches who, as historian Monica Schuler put it, “visibly sucked the life out of [their] victims.”48 Moreover, accusations of witchcraft in parts of Africa ranging from Upper Guinea to Angola directly resulted in enslavement. According to historian Roquinaldo Ferreira, an accusation of witchcraft and the ensuing trial by ordeal could lead to the enslavement of either the accused or the accuser, along with family members.49 As deaths mounted among the Echo shipmates in U.S. custody, recaptivity could have simply been perceived as a continuity of malevolent consumption.50
Recaptives also incorporated into their broader Kongo frameworks specific information gleaned from circuits of commerce and migration between the Americas and the places on the African western coast where the transatlantic slave trade persisted into the late 1850s.51 Histories of U.S. slave trade suppression have generally treated slave ship captives as silent and passive subjects of naval pursuit.52 However, even when physically restrained, enslaved captives would have endeavored to understand what the interruption of their terrible passage portended. There is good reason to believe that many African captives on nineteenth-century slaving vessels had been exposed to the possibilities of interception. For example, even before the Echo left Cabinda, captives may have gained clues about the illegality of the vessel from the words and actions of the Cabinda mariners who were trained to deflect British suspicions as they conveyed captives from shore to ship.53 Once under way, and already alert to clues such as the changing color of the water, some captives noted the crew’s constant watch for British patrols, a hint that the slavers had enemies of their own. Cudjo Lewis, a young Yoruba man taken to Alabama from Ouidah in 1860, later described the captain’s continuous watch on the horizon and his rapid orders to force African captives down into the hold when he spied a possible British cruiser.54 Slave ship sailors sometimes directly communicated a threat of recapture to their captives. According to the narrative of Joseph Wright, enslaved in the 1820s in the Yoruba city of Oba, Portuguese sailors departing Lagos told the enslaved boys that the British would eat them if “we suffered them to prize us.”55 Such experiences aboard other slavers suggest that at least some Echo recaptives would have understood that their voyage could be interrupted, even if the outcome was not clear.
The moment of a ship’s seizure by naval cruiser clearly signaled to enslaved captives a shift in power that could prove either advantageous or lethal. The danger lay in the fact that slavers, especially in proximity to naval cruisers, depended to some degree on the silence of enslaved captives in the hold to avoid detection.56 Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, embarked at Ouidah in 1844, recalled that as the ship approached the shore at Pernambuco, “we were given to understand that we were to remain perfectly silent, and not make any out-cry, otherwise our lives were in danger.”57 Compounding the terror of a chase near the Cuban coast in 1860, slavers reportedly killed six of the William shipmates to silence them as the U.S. steame
r Wyandotte approached within hearing distance.58 A less direct but equally deadly threat was the denial of food or water during pursuits at sea that could last a day or longer. Suffocation and heat exhaustion also threatened the lives of captives confined below decks with covered hatches.59 As in the case of the Echo’s captives, the approach of a naval gunboat could mean hours in stifling heat and darkness before a boarding officer lifted the hatches and declared them “prize negroes.”60
When naval prize crews boarded a slaver, further uncertainty plagued recaptives waiting on the slave deck. Crowther, for example related his initial dread of British seamen, whom he regarded as simply “new conquerors” in a long line of captors.61 Crowther’s narrative alerts us to read with some skepticism the many self-congratulatory U.S. and British accounts of African captives exulting at the sight of naval officers. Yet reports of slave ship seizures in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans do suggest that recaptives understood they might influence the outcome of a naval seizure with their own testimony. This was particularly true during the 1820s when Anglo-Portuguese treaties banned only the slave trade originating north of the equatorial line.62 In the case of a naval seizure, Joseph Wright reported, his captors gave threatening instructions to say that the ship had been at sea for a month, thus making a southern hemisphere embarkation more plausible and concealing their recent departure from Lagos. During the British boarding of the previously mentioned Veloz, some captives asserted their origins at Badagry (north of the equator) but were tragically overruled by the Brazilian captain’s testimony that he had adhered to the current restriction to Angolan slaving ports.63 When slavers were successfully seized, some recaptives found gratification in seeing the tables turned on their captors.64 Crowther, for instance, reacted strongly to seeing his enslaver come aboard the British ship in fetters. He recalled, “Thinking that I should no more get into his hand, I had the boldness to strike him on the head.” Yet Crowther also described much doubt and uncertainty, reporting his shipmates’ continual suspicion of being reenslaved even after disembarking in Sierra Leone as “liberated Africans.”65
A similar range of responses also characterized the Echo shipmates’ first hours with the U.S. Navy prize crew. Those on the main deck would have observed and been able to relay the news that the slaver’s crew had been seized and confined below.66 Some recaptives took this moment of discovery to defy the violently enforced rules of access to food and drink imposed by slavers.67 As First Lieutenant Joseph Bradford put it, when the Africans realized they had “new masters,” some “destroyed large quantities of water and provision” in attempting to slake their thirst. Efforts to satisfy even the most urgent physical needs, however, were not long tolerated by naval officers, for Bradford soon “restored their former masters,”—meaning that he unchained arrested members of the slaving crew to exert control over recaptives—“and they had to resort to the fiercest cruelty before they could break up these practices of the slaves.”68 The moment in which Echo shipmates battled their former captors for water under the gaze of U.S. naval officers foreshadowed recaptives’ struggle for survival in the hands of authorities who deemed them barbaric and in need of control.
In the days immediately after the Echo was boarded by officers of the USS Dolphin, recaptives confined to the slave deck under supervision by some of the slaver crew would have seen little evidence of their altered legal status. The seized slaver sailed another six days to reach Charleston, during which time the daily routines and spatial packing of recaptives remained very similar to that of the middle passage. “A pint of water is given to each, morning and evening,” explained an eyewitness. At night they slept “spoon-fashion, on their sides,” and “at day light they are dashed with buckets of water.”69 Reported to be “without medical assistance of any kind,” the recaptives lost another twelve of their shipmates during their passage to Charleston. With cases of yellow fever appearing in the city, Charleston officials took no chances on a shipload of sickly African passengers. Against Lieutenant Bradford’s protests, the port physician held the Echo in quarantine on Sullivan’s Island, where slave ships had arrived with their enslaved human cargo for over a century and a half.70 Like the hundreds of thousands of enslaved captives who preceded them, Echo shipmates ended their transatlantic crossing uncertain of what future catastrophes awaited them.
Unlike the earlier generations of enslaved captives quickly dispersed through Charleston’s slave market, however, Echo recaptives continued their journey together as a shipmate group struggling to comprehend and survive their situation. After two days at Sullivan’s Island, the recaptives disembarked at Fort Pinckney and within twenty-four hours had been transferred again, this time to Fort Sumter.71 At the massive granite fortification farther out in the harbor, federal authorities supplied shipmates with blankets, rice, and beans. Shipmates may have had shelter from summer thunderstorms in the brick barracks still under construction but little else in the way of material comfort.72 It was here at Fort Sumter that the first white visitors from Charleston witnessed the skeletal forms of recaptives ravaged by ophthalmia, edema, and dysentery. A child of “six or eight years,” observed lying near death on the fort’s stone wharf, revealed the absolute vulnerability of young isolated captives unable to secure protection and care.73 As days went on, authorities at the fort improvised a hospital area where Charleston physicians States Lee Lockwood and Thomas L. Ogier tended to the sick and dying.74 Lockwood later testified at the trial of the Echo crew that the condition of African captives “in point of physical strength, was very much enfeebled, and this was the case of the whole ship’s cargo of them.”75 Death and disease strained the social resources of the surviving Echo shipmates, who remained for one another the only familiar touchstone in a seemingly endless progression of captors, dislocations, and carceral spaces.
In the aftermath of the middle passage, physical and psychic trauma severely curtailed the ability of recaptives to strengthen the social fabric of their fragile shipmate relations. Whereas recent Atlantic World scholarship has emphasized enslaved and recaptive shipmates’ defiance of enslavement’s “social death,” the recaptive camps at Fort Sumter (and later at Key West) force us also to see those who lost that struggle, those who had been pushed too far in body and soul.76 Atlantic slave traders tested the limits of human endurance with calculations of how little water and food could profitably convey a human cargo across the sea.77 Fear of detection and high slave prices in Cuba further degraded the condition of midcentury slave ships, where rations and people were hurriedly loaded into ship spaces not originally constructed for mass human transport.78 What historian Rosanne Adderley has argued for liberated African settlements in the Bahamas merits repeating for Echo shipmates: “One cannot overemphasize how much these Africans, although emancipated, continued to suffer medically as victims of the Atlantic slave trade.”79 The recaptive community included not only survivors with reserves of physical and mental resilience but also individuals on the brink of death, whom scholars of contemporary trauma might call “a walking fatality.”80 Recognizing the many registers of aftermath for slave ship survivors requires an acknowledgment of despair and resignation as well as hope and struggle.
Even in these dismal circumstances, however, recaptives enslaved in the coastal regions near slaving ports like Cabinda possessed language skills and knowledge of legal processes to advocate on their own behalf. Notably, according to one observer, the three adult maritime workers soon informed Charleston officials that “they were not purchased, but that the white men brought them away without their consent.”81 Making their claim in Portuguese and Spanish through Echo crewmember Frank (Franco) Lear, the men distinguished their enslavement as illegitimate within the legal frameworks of slavery prevailing near Cabinda. Political tradition of the Loango Coast throughout the era of the transatlantic trade forbad the enslavement of individuals born in Loango, except for those enslaved through criminal conviction—a loophole increasingly abused in the last decades of the slav
e trade.82 Although their claims made little difference to their status as recaptives within U.S. suppression law, the Cabinda barracoon workers nevertheless drew upon their own legal frameworks in an attempt to shape their fate. In doing so, they refuted the proslavery imperialist claim of the ubiquity of slavery throughout western Africa. At the same time, in their protest they implicitly acquiesced to the concept of legitimate enslavement, and in doing so, they drew a line between themselves and the youthful Congo captives who were also their shipmates.83
The age, gender, former occupations, and language abilities of the three Cabinda men gave them authority among Echo recaptives recognized by both other shipmates and Charleston authorities. Their presence is thus significant to our understanding of the hierarchies and social networks that developed among slave ship survivors. From this vantage point, the newspaper report of recaptives singing and dancing, with which this chapter began, acquires additional meaning. A white observer for the Mercury referred to one of the three Cabinda barracoon workers as “the principal negro,” describing him as a large man who was apparently able to bring together separate linguistic groups. Despite their “evident inability to converse generally with each other,” the observer noted, disparate groupings of recaptives became “united” under the man’s leadership when they sang together.84 The scene as described for the Mercury is ambiguous, for although one paternalistic account assumed that recaptives sang and danced to entertain white observers, the report of recaptives singing under the headman’s leadership made no mention that recaptives sang for the benefit of white onlookers. Whether or not the Charleston onlookers’ arrival triggered the performance, the re-creation of West Central African music and movement in a U.S. federal fort carried much larger importance as an expressive vehicle through which shipmate networks could be forged.85
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