Sugar in the Blood (13 page)

Though the settlers of the British Americas cannot be credited with being the first nation to restrict bondage to peoples of African descent—that honour goes to the Iberians—there is no doubt that the attitudes Ligon and his contemporaries held helped them to feel comfortable with the idea of exploiting Africans. This same combination of ignorance, stereotype and naked racism was shared by the other nations operating in the region, including the French, Dutch, Spanish, and Germans, and marked the slave out as “the other” or “the stranger.” In this ideology, their difference—of appearance, beliefs and behaviour—made them somehow deserving of being treated inhumanely. And so in the colonies, Africans’ skin colour quickly became their manifest destiny. Not only did the Europeans who settled the New World give the institution of slavery what the historian David Eltis calls “
a new scale and intensity,” they also established a particularly noxious form of slavery: one in which race established a hierarchy of human life and decided which people were expendable and which were not, those who could be
transformed into commodities and those who could never be. For in the Atlantic world, though not all blacks were slaves, all slaves were black; and no white person could ever become one.

Not only would the American colonists develop a type of slavery that had never existed before, the demands of the New World would prompt the largest forced migration in recorded history, as twelve and a half million souls (some historians believe the number to be closer to fifteen million) were transported from Africa to the Atlantic world. W. E. B. DuBois has called this “
the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history,” but of course this “drama” was in fact a tragedy, not least because between 9 and 20 per cent of the captives died en route. Hence the fact that the slave trade, sugar’s sickening by-product, would eventually claim its place alongside the Gulag, the killing fields and the concentration camps as one of the greatest atrocities in human history.

The slave trade worked thus. When a planter decided he needed more “stock,” he would commission an agent to obtain them. This man then employed a ship’s captain, with whom he agreed the size of the cargo and negotiated the size of the commission, and who in turn gathered a crew, outfitted a ship, and set sail to Africa to fulfil the order. (Many of the richer planters, like James Drax, also had interests in slave ships, so they could make a profit from every aspect of the trade.)

The ordeal of most slaves began long before they even saw a slave ship. Spirited away from their communities, many as a result of inter-ethnic conflicts, they joined a dusty convoy across Africa in the company of others captured before them, as well as goats and horses, black traders and the occasional white slaver. The men were bound together into coffles, linked by wood and rope and chain, with the women and children straggling alongside, free of shackles but ever vulnerable to violence and opportunistic sexual abuse by the armed men who chaperoned them. They would have had no idea where they were destined to end up; all they knew for sure was that every day they became weaker, hungrier and more dispirited. And so they trudged on, mile after painful mile, watching the land that they knew disappear, to be replaced by strange new vistas and a gabble of unfamiliar tongues. En route any
number of measures—amulets and herbs, potions and incantations—were attempted to make the captives forget their past and render them more pliable. Even the Europeans hired medicine men to make concoctions to erase memories of home. But it was to no avail, and the captives, trudging along often for up to seven months, kept on grieving and remembering.

Throughout this reluctant march the prisoners were forced to carry the supplies that were to be traded: textiles and jewellery, pottery and cowhides. They were accompanied always by the incessant sound of clinking irons, swishing rods made of plaited reeds and cat-o’-nine-tails, as well as the cries and groans of their unfortunate companions. As the expedition progressed they watched helpless as those who were too weak to keep up were flogged or killed on the spot. Now the captives understood why people said that the slave routes to the coast were littered with the bones of the abandoned.

Along the way, the captives themselves were probably sold and resold many times, in exchange for any number of commodities: guns and brandy, beads and bracelets, pots and felt caps, knives and cowrie shells, gold dust and bolts of cloth. By the time the dejected caravan finally arrived at the coast, often after trekking hundreds of miles and passing through the hands of numerous African and European traders, its victims were instantly recognizable, by their dull eyes and emaciated bodies, bruises and ulcers, as condemned souls.

The next stage of their journey was just as terrible. For the “Slave Coast” that served the trade—Togo, Dahomey and western Nigeria—was covered with markets, pens, and forts in which they would next be incarcerated, often for several months. Some were held in prisons called barracoons located on the beach. A little further inland, there were markets in which the spectacle of brutalized captives was there for all to see, their skin shining with palm oil and their bodies stripped of everything except neck collars and chains connecting one to the other; while traders and ships’ captains forced open their mouths and inspected their orifices for disease. Many others ended up in forts like Elmina in modern Ghana, founded by the Portuguese. Once purchased, as William Bosman, a factor who worked there, noted, the slaves were numbered
and the name of the trader who delivered them was recorded. “
In the meanwhile, a burning Iron, with the arms or names of the companies, lyes in the Fire; with which ours are marked on the breast. This is done that we may distinguish them from the slaves of the English, French or others; (which are also marked with their mark) and to prevent the Negroes exchanging them for worse.” The death rate at Elmina was as high as 15 per cent, and when the fort was finally cleaned in 1972, it had accumulated on its floors a foot and a half of debris: a noxious mixture of blood and food waste, shit and sloughed-off skin.

Its English counterpart was the Cape Coast Castle, also in modern Ghana, which was built in 1674 as the headquarters of the Royal Africa Company and its successor, the company of Merchants Trading to Africa. The slaves there would endure similar treatment. The traders called it a “factory,” but in reality it was a mausoleum where people were buried and were reborn as products. Deprived of everything that defined their lives and made them meaningful—friends and family, homeland and traditions—the captives were reminded that they were no longer people but commodities: things to be used and abused, sold and bartered.

When the time finally came to depart the African continent, most captives had already been enslaved for several months; and yet the Atlantic voyage—the infamous Middle Passage—was still in front of them. As they were grouped together on the shore, awaiting transportation to the huge and unfamiliar “wooden worlds,” with their imposing sails and masts, one can only imagine the sounds of the slaves’ grief, and the miasma of fear that surrounded them. A terrible end awaited them, of that they were certain. Paul Isert, a surgeon stationed at a Danish slave fort neighbouring Cape Coast Castle, remarked that the slaves didn’t believe the future could possibly “
hold anything good in store for them, when the Europeans use such violent measures to secure them.” But there were no concessions made to their feelings, as they were thrown, like so many bolts of cloth, one by one, into the swampy bottom of a canoe, then ferried across the harbour to be manhandled aboard by rough white hands, and tossed onto the deck of the “floating dungeon,” the label which the historian Joseph Miller gave the slave ship. The uplifting and devout names inscribed across their bows—Christ the Redeemer, Blessed, and The Lord Our Saviour—belied the chaos and hell unfolding on board.

Here, after a cursory examination by a doctor, the slaves who were deemed unfit—often because of temporary illnesses like stomach disorders or fevers—were dispatched back to the coast to die in the market, or they were thrown into the sea. Those who were approved were divided by gender. The women were left sitting on deck, grateful initially for the light and fresh air, only to discover that they were vulnerable once again to the lust of the sailors. To their profound shame, some women were raped there in front of everyone; others were taken to the men’s quarters. Meanwhile, the male slaves were shackled and transported below deck, into a space that the sailors had converted into a prison. Partially loaded ships would then wait in the harbour for anything between two and seven months while the captain accumulated his full complement of slaves.

The voyage to the New World would take six to ten weeks (though the Portuguese slavers could make the run to Angola in less than five), which meant that for many Africans the voyage was often the shortest of the numerous stages of their journey. But the evil reputation of the Atlantic crossing to the New World was nonetheless deserved: the Middle Passage was truly a voyage of the damned. For the slave ship, like the gas chamber, was a diabolic innovation. Its talismans were “
instruments of woe,” such as manacles and neck rings, locks and chains, cat-o’-nine-tails and the
speculum oris
(designed to prise a slave’s mouth open so he could be force-fed), and its rationale was entirely commercial. Despite the traders’ constant fretting over the “perishability” of their cargo, most slavers believed that the loss of 10 per cent of their “stock” was inevitable, so there was no point in considering their captives’ comfort. They opted therefore to use a system they called “tight packing” (as opposed to “loose packing”) which meant that the slaves were fitted together as closely as “stones in a wall.”

The ship would have been adapted on the journey over when the sailors worked feverishly attaching netting around the deck to contain the slaves on board and building the wooden slave quarters below. Traditionally this area was around five feet in height, which meant that most of the captives could never stand fully upright. The space was organized to hold the maximum number of slaves possible, allowing them less room to move and turn than a corpse would have in a coffin.
When the weather was fair, slaves were brought up onto the main deck to consume their scant meals of beans and rice and to “dance,” a horrible euphemism for the enforced jumping and moving that passed for exercise. But most of the time they were locked in the dark and claustrophobic hold, attached to the decking by irons and ringbolts that were fixed along it at intervals. Trapped in the semi-darkness, stewing in their own filth, their wrists would almost inevitably develop ulcerated sores as their shackles chafed their bodies as they rolled around on the rough wooden planks. Held in such dank, unsanitary and painful conditions the detainees were assailed by illnesses: dysentery, fevers, malnutrition and septicaemia. As the journey progressed the smell, a terrible miasma of excrement, sweat and illness, would only thicken. It was no wonder that the sailors went about with handkerchiefs impregnated with perfume or camphor permanently pressed to their faces. Many claimed that the stench of the slave ship was such that it could be smelled five miles away downwind.

One of the few surviving accounts of these fateful voyages told from the perspective of the slave is the one that is left to us by Olaudah Equiano, whose chronicle of his capture in Africa and subseqent years as a slave in the Americas and England would later provide such a potent weapon for the abolitionist movement. Although it was written in the middle of the eighteenth century, Equiano’s story provides us with an insight into the experience of the millions of others who had gone before him and would come after.

Born in central Nigeria in 1745, Equiano was eleven years old when he was captured by African raiders, bundled into a sack and taken away from his village. Sold and resold, travelling by land and river, it would be almost seven months before he arrived at the coast, “
all the while oppressed and weighed down by grief at the loss of family and friends.” The first sight of the ship that would transport him away from his homeland filled him “with astonishment which was soon converted into terror.” Ferried to the vessel by canoe and bundled aboard by the African traders who had last purchased him, he was immediately grappled aboard by the crew members: “white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair.” He was then deposited on the main deck, where
he sighted a huge copper boiling pot and then nearby “a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow.” Fearing that he had fallen into the hands of cannibals, the child was “overpowered with horror and anguish” and promptly fainted.

What made matters worse was the ubiquitous violence of life on a slave ship. When he could not eat the boy was flogged. He also witnessed the fate of a number of slaves who managed to jump off the ship; they were revived and then brutally whipped as an example to the others for preferring “death to slavery.” And on one occasion he witnessed the ship’s captain whip one of his sailors so severely that he eventually died. The shock that the whites could treat one of their own people “in such a brutal fashion” made the young Equiano fear his captors even more.

But it was the account of the horrors of life below deck that would later mobilize the British population against the slave trade. When he was taken down to his quarters, the stench was so terrible that he was immediately sick. Confined below in the semi-darkness, in the extreme heat, with little light and ventilation, illness was inevitable, and when his companions began to expire, their corpses were not removed immediately, so the living were forced to share their space with the decaying dead.

In this “hollow world,” the only glimpse of light in the endless darkness was provided by Equiano’s fellow slaves. Over time these people from their different parts of the African continent found ways to communicate with each other and eventually developed a strong camaraderie. The women mothered the sick and orphaned boy and his companions allayed his fear that he was going to be eaten by his captors, instead reassuring him that he was to be “
carried to these white people’s country to work for them.” This news fortified the boy somewhat, and he managed to survive the long sea crossing, while all around him his fellow captives continued to expire.