39. Letters of appointment from Jacob Thompson, 4 June 1860 (Young and Lindsly), 8 June 1860 (McCalla), in reel 1, RSI. Both McCalla and Grymes belonged to the District of Columbia Medical Society. Grymes had been born in Norfolk, Virginia, and received his M.D. in 1853 from Georgetown Medical School. McCalla was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and received his M.D. in 1853 from Columbia Medical School. See Nichols, History of the Medical Society, 253. John Moore McCalla Sr. supported the ACS, and some former McCalla slaves had emigrated to Liberia in the 1830s. See John M. McCalla Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
40. J. M. Grymes to B. A. Payne, 18 September 1860, Series 1.E, Miscellaneous Incoming Correspondence, folder 1860 “Liberated Slaves,” ACSR; J. M. Grymes to Rev. Wm. McLain, 18 December 1860, reel 10, RSI. Illegal slavers were built small and fast to avoid patrolling warships. Each of the four slaving vessels, listed by tonnage in the Voyages database, registered around 300 tons. Each chartered vessel for Key West recaptives registered at around 1,000 tons (Castilian, 1,000; South Shore, 941; Star of the Union, 1,057). Tonnage of the charter ships appears in “Forty-Fourth Annual Report of the American Colonization Society,” African Repository 37, no. 3 (March 1861): 70.
41. Christopher, Pybus, and Rediker, Many Middle Passages, 1–19, quote on 2.
42. “What Is to Be Done with the Africans?,” Courier, 6 September 1858; “For Africa Direct,” Courier, 22 September 1858. Examples of proslavery advocates claiming that recaptives wanted to remain with U.S. slaveowners include “Later from Havana,” Courier, 14 May 1860, and Edmund Ruffin, “African Colonization Unveiled,” De Bow’s Review 29, no. 5 (November 1860): 644.
43. Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 25 June 1860, reel 6, RSI.
44. “The Key West Africans,” Constitution, 17 July 1860, 83; Scarlet, “Key West Marine Correspondence,” Courier, 18 July 1860.
45. “Later from Havana and Key West,” Courier, 18 July 1860.
46. Eason Journal, 5 August 1860.
47. “The Exportation of the Africans,” Mercury, 20 September 1858; Log of United States Naval Ship Niagara, 19 September 1858, LNS; also described in Berkley Grimball to John Grimball, 27 September 1858, SCHS. While the Mercury’s racialized construction of recaptive Africans as cargo is indisputable, it was a common maritime practice to move individual passengers between vessels in rough seas using similar devices such as a “bos’ns chair” or “basket-chair,” known in the twentieth century as a “navy high-line.” Thank you to H-Maritime members Penelope Hardy and John Rusk for this information provided via email, 10 April 2015.
48. Webster Lindsly to William McLain, 3 September 1860, reel 10, RSI.
49. For Young’s reference to “shipping our cargo,” see Young Ship Log, 1 July 1860, and “Shipping the Recaptured Africans on Board the U.S. Steam Frigate Niagara, at Charleston, S.C.,” Frank Leslie’s, 9 October 1858, 298.
50. On rumors and confusion regarding recaptive migrant labor transport to Trinidad, see Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 77–80. For temporal and spatial disorientation in transatlantic slave passages, see Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 122.
51. Jacob Thompson to James Conner, 12 October 1859, and to John Y. Bryant, 29 October 1859, reel 1, RSI; “The Dolphin’s Crew,” Mercury, 29 September 1858; “Return of the Captured Negroes to Africa, on Board the U.S. Steamship Niagara,” Frank Leslie’s, 8 January 1859, 86–87.
52. “The Slaver Echo and Her Cargo at Charleston,” NYT, 6 September 1858; “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 345.
53. McCalla Journal, 1, 27 July, 14 August 1860.
54. On the acquisition of new languages over the course of enslaved captives’ journeys to the African coast, see Slenes, “‘Malungu, Ngoma’s Coming!,’” 221.
55. Young Ship Log, 17 August 1860. “Picanini” has Portuguese, Spanish, and English usage and would have been familiar in most Atlantic ports of trade.
56. Young Ship Log, 21 July 1860.
57. Grymes Report, 7.
58. Webster Lindsly to William McLain, 3 September 1860, reel 10, RSI. Lindsly reported that he was unable to provide the ACS with the requested roster of names, ages, sexes, and origins because of his inability to communicate with recaptives aboard the South Shore.
59. “The Cargo of Negros,” Mercury, 27 September 1858; “The Niagara,” Mercury, 14 September 1858. A contemporary account describes the unusually “clear and unobstructed space” of the Niagara’s spar deck. See Mullaly, Laying of the Cable, 77.
60. Young Ship Log, 1 July 1860. On Echo slave ship conditions, see Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 8.
61. Grymes Report, 16.
62. “From Liberia—Return of the Niagara,” African Repository 35, no. 1 (January 1859): 2. On the Castilian, Young reported seventeen deaths within the first week, primarily from diarrhea, which he attributed to the impact of the slave ship voyage and the “difference in water and food at Key West” (Young Ship Log, 8 July 1860).
63. See, for example, Hu-DeHart, “La Trata Amarilla.” On nineteenth-century technologies of mass, forced sea transport, see also Foxhall, “From Convicts to Colonists.”
64. McCalla Journal, 26 July 1860. An ACS emigrant ship used a similar tag system to organize passenger meals; see Cowan, Liberia, as I Found It, 9–10.
65. Grymes Report, 9.
66. Ibid., 3–4, 7–9. For examples of slave ship mess routines, see Vermilyea, Slaver, the War, and around the World, 7; Byrd, Captives and Voyagers, 33–34; and Rediker, Slave Ship, 237–38. Grymes stressed the healthfulness of these arrangements. In his professional view, to have fed weakened recaptive passengers “luxuriantly” on the ship’s stores of coffee, tea, sugar, and molasses would have imperiled their survival. He reported to the ACS that he left these stores untouched and transferred them to Liberian officials for recaptives’ enjoyment “in their own native and happy land.” Grymes’s ideas reflected common antebellum assumptions about the necessity of a mild, nonstimulating diet for invalids.
67. Grymes Report, 4. After the Star of the Union’s Liberian voyage, the William’s boiler was transferred to the recaptive reception yard at Sinoe.
68. Webster Lindsly to William McLain, 3 September 1860, reel 10, RSI. See also Malcom, “Transporting African Refugees.” Young’s description aligns with the host of illnesses and disabilities seen among survivors of the transatlantic passage in Brazil, though fortunately, there were no cases of smallpox. See Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 151.
69. Webster Lindsly to Harvey Lindsly, 28 August 1860, Series 1.B, Incoming Correspondence, Letters from Liberia, 1 March 1859–22 October 1860, ACSR.
70. Webster Lindsly to William McLain, 3 September 1860, reel 10, RSI; Young Ship Log, 5 Aug 1860. Malcom notes contrary evidence that marshal Moreno did supply provisions high in vitamin C at Key West; see “Transporting African Refugees,” 6 n. 6.
71. Rainey’s report, in contrast to Grymes’s, blamed the previous middle passage entirely. See “From Liberia—Return of the Niagara,” African Repository 35, no. 1 (January 1859): 1–7.
72. Grymes Report, 21.
73. R. R. Gurley to John Moore McCalla, 8 June 1860, John Moore McCalla Papers, West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. See also Letters of appointment from Jacob Thompson, 4 June 1860 (Young and Lindsly), 8 June 1860 (McCalla), in reel 1, RSI.
74. On white southern doctors’ views of black patients, see Fett, Working Cures, 142–92.
75. Young Ship Log, 1, 21 July, 7 August 1860.
76. McCalla Journal, 19 August 1860. As later discussed, the headman, Gooser, may have married his wife on the Star of the Union. It is also remotely possible that Gooser and his wife, already married, were enslaved in Dahomean military raids and sold from Ouidah together. Two males with the name Goosee appear in the African Origins website, embarking from Lagos and an unspecified Bight of Benin locatio
n; see African IDs 176004, 180795.
77. Young Ship Log, 28 July 1860. Young wrote this passage with a degree of sympathy and noted that the girl “gained courage when she found that the pain was not severe.”
78. See Log of United States Naval Ship Niagara, 25, 27 September, 2, 3, 7, 13, 16, 30 October, and 4 November 1858, LNS.
79. Ibid., 4 November 1858.
80. Young Ship Log, 14 July 1860 (emphasis in original).
81. Ibid., 12 July 1860.
82. Ibid., 12, 15 July 1860. Young made several references to the stealing of food. On 8 July 1860, he reported that one male recaptive was found with two dozen ship’s biscuits hidden in his blanket, which Young said he had stolen overnight. It is reasonable to ask whether prior periods of deprivation resulted in attempts to hoard food on the Castilian. Further references to flogging of recaptives as punishment for fighting appear in Grymes Report, 10–11.
83. Young Ship Log, 29 July 1860.
84. Ibid., 2 August 1860.
85. McCalla Journal, 23, 28 July 1860.
86. Young Ship Log, 15, 2 August 1860.
87. Ibid., 2 August 1860.
88. Quotes from Grymes Report, 11, 12. Similar descriptions of racial traits appear in Webster Lindsly to Harvey Lindsly, 28 August 1860, Series 1.B, Incoming Correspondence, Letters from Liberia, 1 March 1859–22 October 1860, ACSR.
89. Rediker, Slave Ship, 10. Although sailors on the Liberian voyages were not involved in the production of enslaved captives, as were slave ship crew members, their daily relations with recaptive Africans reflected some similar patterns of abuse and callousness. See Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors, 163–94.
90. Young Ship Log, 31 July 1860.
91. J. M. Grymes to William McLain, 4 September 1860, reel 10, RSI; Grymes Report, 24.
92. Grymes Report, 20–22.
93. Schuler, “Enslavement, the Slave Voyage, and Astral and Aquatic Journeys,” 186; Snyder, Power to Die, 23–45.
94. Young Ship Log, 13 August 1860.
95. Brown, “Social Death and Political Life,” 1232. Alexander Byrd describes the impact of serial dislocation as “the slow recession of former social ties and the domestication of new ones” (Captives and Voyagers, 26).
96. McCalla Journal, 24 July 1860.
97. “Return of the Captured Negroes to Africa, on Board the U.S. Steamship Niagara,” Frank Leslie’s, 8 January 1859, 86–87.
98. Stewart, “Burial at Sea.” Stewart (280–81) discusses the “nasal stitch,” a practice lasting into the nineteenth century of sewing the last stitch of a burial shroud through the corpse’s nose, said to assure the peaceful rest of the dead spirit and perhaps guard against accidental live burial.
99. Log of United States Naval Ship Niagara, 21, 24, 26 October 1858, LNS. The Niagara log regularly noted burials at sea, accompanied by the reading of the “Naval Service.”
100. For two of the most perceptive and eloquent discussions of alienated death in enslaved ocean passages, see Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 140–41, and Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 38–48.
101. Young Ship Log, 6 July 1860.
102. For sailor William Butterworth’s description of an enslaved woman’s improvised funeral on the 1786 voyage of the Hudibrus, see Brown, “Social Death and Political Life,” 1231–32.
103. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 284–99.
104. MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 74, 42–89 passim.
105. Ibid., 53.
106. Ibid., 63. Suzanne Blier’s extensive discussion of cord and binding pertains to a specific category of West African art produced far from the Wildfire shipmates’ West Central African origins. I cite it here not to identify a specific ethnic practice engaged by Bomba but to signal the potential depth and complexity of the collective action Young observed. See Blier, African Vodun, 242–49, 293–95.
107. “Roll of Names of Recaptives Landed at Robertsport per Ship Castilian in August 1860,” Series 1.E, Miscellaneous Incoming Correspondence, folder June–December 1860, ACSR.
108. Names related to the phonetic “Bomba” appear several times in the African Origins database. Several women listed as “Bombah” appear in the liberated African registers in Freetown. African Origins connects this name to the Kongo language group. For examples, see African IDs 29627, 50076, and 50210. Finally, there is the possibility that Bomba’s name had a link to the Mbumba Nkisi / N’kisi Bomba nature spirit centered in Vili and Yombe regions north of the Congo River. Mbumba is associated with the rainbow, snakes, and dual forces of construction and destruction. See Hersak, “There Are Many Congo Worlds,” and Janzen, Lemba, 53. Janzen (254) discusses the mid-nineteenth-century minkisi cult Pfemba (Phemba), related to women and midwifery.
109. Sweet, “Defying Social Death,” 257.
110. Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women, 1–2, 9.
111. Young Ship Log, 8 July 1860.
112. Rediker, Slave Ship, 270–72; Byrd, Captives and Voyagers, 44–46.
113. Young Ship Log, 11, 12 July 1860.
114. Ibid., 23 July 1860. Young’s log does not indicate how the steerage space was divided between men and women, and children and adults, prior to this point.
115. “Return of the Captured Negroes to Africa, on Board the U.S. Steamship Niagara,” Frank Leslie’s, 8 January 1859, 86.
116. For children’s circle dance, see McCalla Journal, 3 August 1860.
117. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 6–7, 87, 239.
118. Grymes Report, 10; C. C. Hoffman, “From Rev. C. C. Hoffman,” African Repository 37, no. 5 (May 1861): 132–34. For discussion of Bogota captive origins, see Chapter 3.
119. Grymes Report, 10–11.
120. Ibid., 17.
121. The phrasing here is ambiguous but seems to imply that one man objected to the woman coming into the men’s quarters at night; see McCalla Journal, 14 August 1860. Apart from this incident, evidence from the Liberian voyages is silent on the whole range of interactions related to sexual relationships and sexual violence that might have arisen on such an ocean voyage. The conflict may also have involved some violation of acknowledged status, since the “Princess” could have come from a Fon noble family, as occasionally happened when high-ranking free persons in Dahomey were either convicted of a crime or exiled for political reasons. See Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 33.
122. Grymes Report, 14.
123. McCalla Journal, 5 August 1860. These weddings provide intriguing counterevidence for historians who have claimed the taboo nature of sexual relations between shipmates. See Sweet, “Defying Social Death,” 271. Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 112, 271 n. 71, traces this unattributed idea of a proscription back to Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 150. She found that Clotilda shipmates followed endogamous marriage patterns, though not exclusively so. Marriage files in late eighteenth-century Montevideo show the significance of shipmate ties and common origins in slaving ports in building social networks between grooms and their male witnesses. See Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers, 57–83. See also Chapter 6 for a discussion of marriage between West Central African shipmates in Liberia.
124. Young Ship Log, 14 July 1860.
125. Grymes Report, 6. Grymes wrote that he at first refused their request, thinking that the presence of “bed and bunk” would serve as instruction “of the comforts of civilization,” but eventually he conceded for reasons of health.
126. Ibid., 14, 6–7. Grymes especially noted how the mattress bedding was cut up, fringed, and fit “for use and comfort.”
127. Young Ship Log, 13 July 1860. On the terrible itching of what English speakers called “scabies” and other skin diseases afflicting enslaved Africans in Rio in the nineteenth century, see Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 163–66.
128. Grymes Report, 23, lists scabies, scurvy, wounds, and ulcers as the skin conditions that distressed recaptives on the Star of the Union.
129. Grymes Report, 25. Because slush was considered the “perquisite” of the g
alley cook, who would sell it to others on the ship for such purposes as the making of candles, this was a significant appropriation of ship supplies. See “Slush” in the on-line version of Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (Oxford University Press, 2007) (accessed 26 March 2015). The use of oils for skin may have had an aesthetic component as well, given the exposure to sea and salt and the rationed water supplies. On the aesthetics and philosophical connotations of oiled and glowing skin in mid-twentieth-century Nigeria’s Benue Valley, see Bohannan, “Beauty and Scarification,” 77–78.
130. For scholarship on medical pluralism in precolonial Africa, see Janzen, “Ideologies and Institutions,” and Westerlund, “Pluralism and Change.”
131. Young Ship Log, 23 August 1860.
132. Janzen, Quest for Therapy, 106, plate 15; MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 222–24. Although Janzen and MacGaffey researched Congo therapies in the twentieth century, both anchor descriptions of the contemporary healing they observed in nineteenth-century practices. Of course, West Central African healing practices did not remain static over the convulsive years of colonialism and independence, and thus anthropological studies are only suggestive of therapeutic principles with which the Wildfire recaptive shipmates would have been familiar. Contemporary anthropologists also discuss the tradition of therapeutic and empowering incisions among Yoruba specialists. See Drewal and Mason, “Ogun Mind/Body Potentiality,” 336–37.
133. Janzen, Quest for Therapy, 77–79, 132–33, 225. Janzen and other medical anthropologists have called this attending group of kin the “therapy management group.”
134. Alanamu, “Indigenous Medical Practices,” 23; Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 9–26; Johnson, History of the Yorubas, 123.
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