Atlantic (26 page)

Beatings and torture were familiar practice on the Middle Passage slave ships. Even though the teenage girl shown being hanged and beaten in this famous cartoon subsequently died of her injuries,
John Kimber
, the notorious Bristol-based slaver charged with her murder, escaped conviction and mounted a lifelong campaign against his accuser, the abolitionist William Wilberforce.

Eleven million Africans were carried westward across the Atlantic between the middle of the fifteenth century and the end of the nineteenth. Three million of them were carried in British ships, owned by slave traders based in Liverpool, Bristol, London, and such smaller west coast ports as Lancaster and Whitehaven. (The comparable French slaving ports were Honfleur, Le Havre, and the biggest, Nantes.) The entire British establishment—from the royal family to the Church of England—won dividends from the business. And even beyond the rarefied world of an aristocracy who risked money to back the slavers, everyone else in Britain who used such mundane products as sugar, tobacco, or rum benefited from the slave trade as well. It was not just a singular evil: it was a singularly pervasive evil.

The so-called triangular trade was arranged so that goods were taken from Britain to the African ports or slave castles, like that at Cape Coast;
⁴³
slaves from these ports were then shipped across the infamous Middle Passage to the American slave depots; and then, once the vessel had been emptied and cleansed, New World cargoes went from there back to Britain.

And so, in small vessels called
snows,
in barques and brigs or in three-masted square-rigged vessels that, somewhat oddly to modern ears, were formally known as
ships
, the slave-ship captains set off fully laden, from England. Their orders were quite simply to proceed to West African ports and, using the cargoes they had shipped with them from England as barter, according to their standing orders “to procure as many good merchantable slaves as you can.” With most of their crewmen pressed into service through the work of crimping gangs who found drunken and persuadable young seamen in the shoreside inns, the ships set sail filled to the gunwales with Africa-bound trade goods. They took such marketable items as muskets, felt hats, iron knives, brass casks, gunpowder, cotton, and gun flints, and on one ship, the
Pilgrim
, which left Bristol in 1790, the somewhat more bizarre inventory of “1 trunk East India goods, 4 chests bugles, 12 cases calicoes, 2 puncheons rum and 15 dozen bottles wine.” Hugh Crow, a successful (albeit one-eyed) slaver from the Isle of Man, always made a point of first calling in at Rotterdam and Jersey to buy extra spirits (more cheaply than he could in England) to use as trade goods for the African slave merchants, who liked nothing better than a drink.

Most vessels took what the French called
la petite route
south, sailing via the Canary and the Cape Verde islands before turning inland along the now-east-trending African coast. They first bartered their goods, usually for some rather prosaic set of objects—iron bars, brass bars, swatches of cloth—that had become a crude currency for the buying of slaves. The prices in this currency—the iron bars looked rather like stair rods—remained fairly constant for years: a male slave bought on the Senegal River in the mid-eighteenth century fetched seventy bars; a woman, somewhat more costly despite being offered “with a bad mouth,” went for sixty-three bars, another for “the excessive price of 86 bars,” according to the famous journal kept by the Reverend Newton. (For purpose of comparison, a two-pound bag of gunpowder went for one bar.)

And then, armed with wagonloads of such bars or swatches, the British captains went either to the slave castles, which were run by the Royal African Company, and bought officially sanctioned and price-regulated slaves, or else threw aside convention and visited the more competitive (and in later years, more commercially successful) upriver slave markets, where they bought a clutch of such black-skinned humans, either men, women, or young boys, who seemed most suitable for work on the far side of the ocean.

Whether these unfortunates came from the rivers, or through the doors of no return found in the Gold Coast castles and the other slave factories, they were first marshaled roughly onto the waiting boat. Next they were branded—often with the initials “DY” for the Duke of York—and shackled into pairs, the left wrist and ankle of one to the right wrist and ankle of the next. They were then taken belowdecks in the storage areas, where, it was hoped, they would survive the crossing—a hope born not of compassion, but of commerce.

Normally slave merchants were allowed—for there was regulation—to carry some two slaves for every ton of the ship’s burthen, later raised slightly to five slaves for every three tons up to 207 tons, and one slave per ton thereafter. A 500-ton ship was permitted to carry more than 360 slaves—and for reasons of commercial efficiency these beings were stacked like so much tightly packed lumber, lying on shelves with no more than thirty inches of headroom. Even in calm water and cool days, the conditions were intolerable; when it was hot and the waters rough—which was common on the eight-week voyage—they were insufferable. The sanitary conditions were execrable. Privacy was nonexistent. Security was everything: the men were closely watched and guarded, and any attempt at insurrection or mutiny was put down with terrible force. The slaves were fed two meals a day—yams, rice, barley, corn, and ship’s biscuit boiled up together into an unattractive mess—and to guard against scurvy (for the contracts with the American and Caribbean slave importers specified that the slaves be delivered in good physical condition) they were made to wash their mouths with lime juice or vinegar. They were also made to “dance”—being brought up on deck to be exercised, jumping rhythmically on the deck to the extent that their shackles allowed, crew members armed with whips standing nearby to make sure everyone moved with equal energy and kept their muscles in tone.

The ferocity of the slave masters is legendary—men were brutalized, women sexually assaulted, sick slaves thrown overboard (as long as they were covered by the ship’s insurance policy). One passage will serve to illustrate the piteous conditions under which the human freight had to live, and on all too many occasions, die. It comes from evidence given to a British House of Commons committee by a crewmen named Isaac Parker of the Liverpool slave brig
Black Joke
, and of his commander, a certain Captain Thomas Marshall. There were ninety slaves aboard this fifty-six-ton ship, all collected from a castle in Gambia and headed for South Carolina.

What were the circumstances of this child’s ill-treatment? The child took sulk and would not eat . . . the captain took the child up in his hand, and flogged it with the cat. Do you remember anything more about this child? Yes; the child had swelled feet; the captain desired the cook to put on some water to heat to see if he could abate the swelling, and it was done. He then ordered the child’s feet to be put into the water, and the cook putting his finger into the water said, “Sir, it is too hot.” The captain said, “Damn it, never mind it, put the feet in,” and so doing the skin and nails came off, and he got some sweet oil and cloths and wrapped them round the feet in order to take the fire out of them; and I myself bathed the feet with oil, and wrapped cloths around; and laying the child on the quarter deck in the afternoon at mess time, I gave the child some victuals, but it would not eat; the captain took the child up again, and flogged it, and said, “Damn you, I will make you eat,” and so he continued in that way for four or five days at mess time, when the child would not eat, and flogged it, and he tied a log of mango, eighteen or twenty inches long, and about twelve or thirteen pound weight, to the child by a string around its neck. The last time he took the child up and flogged it, and let it drop out of his hands, “Damn you (says he) I will make you eat, or I will be the death of you;” and in three quarters of an hour after that the child died. He would not suffer any of the people that were on the quarter deck to heave the child overboard, but he called the mother of the child to heave it overboard. She was not willing to do so, and I think he flogged her; but I am sure that he beat her in some way for refusing to throw the child overboard; at last he made her take the child up, and she took it in her hand, and went to the ship’s side, holding her head on one side, because she would not see the child go out of her hand, and she dropped the child overboard. She seemed to be very sorry, and cried for several hours.

Whether or not Parker was telling the entire truth we shall never know. All that is certain is that this account is to be found in official British parliamentary papers for the year 1790,
⁴⁴
and that the child in question was said by Parker to have been indecently young, little more than an infant.

Some fifty days after leaving West Africa, the American coast came into view, and the second leg of the triangular voyage of what the French called
le trafic Négrier
was over. Most of the slaves had already been spoken for under contract, and the master’s orders had him head for a seasoning camp at certain island distribution centers—in Barbados, say, or Jamaica—or to one of the mainland slave ports, such Norfolk or Charleston. Perhaps the master would be fortunate and the American slave factor would manage both to clear the holds of their human cargo—to buy the merchandise in bulk and wholesale, and sell them individually at retail prices at a market later on—and then to arrange for other freight to be carried home on the empty ship. Maybe there would be an auction, held either aboard the vessel or on the quayside below.

Or perhaps the slaves would be subject to the final indignity of their passage—the so-called
slave scramble
. The waiting merchants would have been told that each of the Africans aboard could be had for a certain price; and at a given signal, usually the stroke of a drum, they would all rush board the ship, and like the crazed mob at a department store sale would feverishly make their selections from among the terrified men and women who, still in the shackles, had been herded up onto the quarterdeck. Families would inevitably be broken up, with one merchant demanding the man, another the female partner, still others the children.

And then the ship would be off again, its decks fully cleansed with vinegar and lye, the shelves on which close-packed black humanity had been crammed for the previous weeks now jammed solid with tobacco or furs or the manufactured products of the settlements. Some weeks later the Head of Kinsale would be sighted off the port bow, and a day or so beyond that, the lighthouses off the Mersey, or the Avon, and the long trick would at last be over. There were wives and children to be seen once again, lanes to be walked and churches to attend, and the matter of the black cargo—morally vexing to some, but merely routinely unpleasant to others—could be safely shelved in the very back of the mind, until the next journey.

Slave traders remained cunningly determined for many years—most notably by buying shares in Portuguese slaving boats, since Lisbon kept slavery legal in its African colonies until 1869 and continued to supply Brazil with slaves from Angola until Brazil banned the trade in 1831. But over the years the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy did gain the upper hand; and though service in its enormous Portsmouth-based fleet was wildly unpopular—mainly because of the deeply unpleasant tropical diseases that killed so many seamen—by the middle of the nineteenth century the men of the so-called Preventative Squadron had captured some 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 slaves. The final slave ships to cross the ocean were American, the
Wanderer
and the
Clotilde
, and they managed to get through the various cordons and blockades in 1858 and 1859 respectively. The last surviving slave from the last arriving slaver died in 1935, in a suburb of Mobile, Alabama. And with the death of this dignified old man from Benin, a ninety-four-year-old named Cudjoe Lewis, so was severed history’s final living link to the transatlantic slave trade, which had begun with the French in Florida and the English in Virginia in the beginning of the sixteenth century and had endured for more than four hundred years.

As coda, though, there is one further account worth relating—that of a white American who after crossing the Atlantic became a slave in coastal Africa, and thus provided history with the mirror image of a trade that was otherwise overwhelmingly conducted in the opposite direction.

He was James Riley, a Connecticut farmer’s son who was master of the American trading brig the
Commerce
, which set out from Hartford, Connecticut, in 1815 to trade in North Africa. That August, while trying to make the Cape Verde Islands, he was blown off course inside the Canaries, got himself lost in a fog, and rode up onto the rocks near Cape Bojador—the cape that Gil Eannes had managed so famously to double nearly four centuries before. He and his crew were captured and used as slaves by Sahara nomads, were forced to trek for weeks through the desert, half starved and compelled to drink the urine of camels.