The Slave Ship: A Human History

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The Slave Ship:  A Human History The missing link in the chain of American slavery For more than three centuries slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the New World. Much is known of the slave trade and the American plantation complex, but little of the ships that made it all possible. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker draws on thirty years of research in maritime archives to create an unprecedented history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. He reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a “floating dungeon” trailed by sharks. From the young African kidnapped from his village and sold to the slaver by a neighboring tribe; to the would-be priest who takes a job as a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified by the evil he sees; to the captain who relishes having “a hell of my own,” Rediker illuminates the lives of people who were thought to have left no trace. This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely new, something that could only be called African-American. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern capitalism was made. Table of Contents Introduction Chapter One:     Life, Death, and Terror in the Slave Trade Chapter Two:    The Evolution of the Slave Ship Chapter Three:  African Paths to the Middle Passage Chapter Four:    Olaudah Equiano: “Astonishment and Terror” Chapter Five:     James Field Stanfield and the Floating Dungeon Chapter Six:      John Newton and the Peaceful Kingdom Chapter Seven:  The Captain’s Own Hell Chapter Eight:   The Sailor’s Vast Machine Chapter Nine:    From Captives to Shipmates Chapter Ten:     The Long Journey of the Slave Ship Brookes Conclusion:       Endless Passage Excerpt From Chapter One, “Life, Death, and Terror in the Slave Trade” Sarah When the young woman came aboard the Liverpool slave ship, the Hudibras, in Old Calabar in 1785, she instantly captured everyone’s attention.  She had beauty, grace, and charisma: “Sprightliness was in her every gesture, and good nature beamed in her eyes.”  When the African musicians and instruments came out on the main deck twice a day for “dancing,” the exercising of the enslaved, she “appeared to great advantage, as she bounded over the quarter-deck, to the rude strains of African melody,” observed a smitten sailor named William Butterworth.  She was the best dancer and the best singer on the ship.  “Ever lively!  ever gay!” seemed to sum up her aura, even under the extreme pressure of enslavement and exile. Other sailors joined Butterworth in admiration, and indeed so did Captain Jenkin Evans, who selected this young woman and one other as his “favourites,” to whom he therefore “showed greater favours than the rest,” likely as small recompense for coerced sexual services.  Slave-ship sailors like Butterworth usually detested the captain’s favorites as they were required to be snitches.  But for the nimble singer and dancer the sailors had the highest esteem.  She was “universally respected by the ship’s company.” Captain Evans gave her the name “Sarah.”  He chose a Biblical name, linking the enslaved woman, who was likely an Igbo speaker, to a princess, the beautiful wife of Abraham.  Perhaps the captain hoped that she would share other traits with the Biblical Sarah, who remained submissive and obedient to her husband during a long journey to Canaan. Soon the enslaved men on the Hudibras erupted in insurrection.  The goal was to “massacre the ship’s company, and take possession of the vessel.”  It was suppressed, bloody punishments dispensed.  Afterward, Captain Evans and other officers suspected that “Sarah” and her mother (who was also on board) were somehow involved, even though the women had not joined the men in the actual uprising.   When questioned closely, with violence looming, they denied having any knowledge, but “fear, or guilt, was strongly marked in their countenances.”  Later that night, as male and female captives angrily shouted recriminations around the ship in the aftermath of defeat, it became clear that both “Sarah” and her mother not only knew about the plot, they had indeed been involved in it.  Sarah had likely used her privileged position as a “favourite,” and her great freedom of movement that this entailed, to help with planning and perhaps even to pass tools to the men, allowing them to hack off their shackles and manacles. “Sarah” survived the middle passage, and whatever punishment she may have gotten for her involvement in the insurrection.  She was sold at Grenada, with almost three hundred others, in 1787.  She was allowed to stay on the vessel longer than most, probably with the special permission of Captain Evans.  When she went ashore she carried African traditions of dance, song, and resistance with her. Sailor and Pirate Bartholomew Roberts Bartholomew Roberts was a young Welshman who sailed as second mate aboard the Princess, a 140-ton Guineaman out of London bound for Sierra Leone.  He had apparently worked in the slave trade for a while.  He knew navigation, as the mates of slavers had to be ready to assume command in the not uncommon event of the captain’s death.  The Princess was captured in June 1719 by Howell Davis and a rowdy gang of pirates, who asked Roberts and his mates on the prize vessel if any of them wished to join “the brotherhood.”  Roberts hesitated at first, knowing that the British government had in recent years left the corpses of executed pirates dangling at the entrance of one Atlantic port city after another.  But soon he decided that he would indeed sail under the black flag. It was a fateful decision.  When Davis was killed by Portuguese slave traders not long afterwards, “Black Bart,” as he would be called, was elected captain of his ship, and soon became the most successful sea-robber of his age.  He commanded a small flotilla of ships and several hundred men who captured more than 400 merchant vessels over three years, the peak of “the golden age of piracy.”  Roberts was widely known and just as widely feared.  Naval officers on patrol spotted him and sailed in the opposite direction.  Royal officials fortified their coasts against the man they called “the great pirate Roberts.”  He acted the part by strolling the decks of his ship dressed as a dandy, in a lush damask waistcoat, a red feather in his hat, and a golden toothpick in his mouth.  His motto as a pirate was, “A Merry Life and Short One.” Roberts terrorized the African coast, sending the traders there “into a panick.”  He so despised the brutal ways of slave-trading captains that he and his crew enacted a bloody ritual called the “distribution of justice,” dispensing a fearful lashing to any captured captain whose sailors complained of his usage.  Indeed Roberts gave some of these drubbings himself.  Slave-trading merchants responded to this threat to their profits by persuading Parliament to intensify naval patrols on the coast of West Africa.  HMS Swallow found and engaged Roberts in February 1722.  Roberts stayed upon deck to lead the battle and encourage his men, but took a fatal volley of grapeshot in the throat.  His mates honored a longstanding pledge and dumped his still-armed body overboard.  The naval vessel defeated the pirates, captured the survivors, and took them to the slave-trading fortress at Cape Coast Castle, where they were tried and hanged en masse.  Captain Challoner Ogle then distributed corpses up and down the African coast so local slave traders could hang them up as a message to sailors.  Ogle made it a special point to visit the King of Whydah, who had promised him fifty-six pounds of gold dust “If he should secure that rascal Roberts, who had long infested his coast.” Captain William Snelgrave Captain William Snelgrave was gathering a cargo of Africans on the “Slave Coast” of Benin to transport to Antigua when, to his surprise, he was invited by the King of Ardra (also called Allada) to visit.  This presented a dilemma.  On the one hand, Snelgrave dared not refuse if he wanted to curry favor for future supplies of slaves.  But on the other hand he considered the king and his people to be “fierce brutish Cannibals.”  The captain resolved the dilemma by deciding to visit and to take with him a  guard of ten sailors “well armed with Musquets and Pistols, which those savage People I knew were much afraid of.” Canoed by escorts a quarter mile upriver, Snelgrave found on his arrival the king “sitting on a Stool, under some shady Trees,” with about fifty courtiers and a large troop of warriors nearby.   The latter were armed with bows and arrows, swords, and barbed lances.  The armed sailors took a guarded position “opposite to them, at the distance of about twenty paces” as Snelgrave presented gifts to a delighted king. Snelgrave soon noticed “a little Negroe-Child tied by the Leg to a Stake driven in the Ground.”  Two African priests stood nearby.  The child was “a fine Boy about 18 Months old,” but he was in distress, his body covered with flies and vermin.  Agitated, the slave captain asked the king, “What is the reason of the Child’s being tied in that manner?”  The king replied, “It was to be sacrificed that night to his God Egbo, for his prosperity.”  Upset by the answer, Snelgrave quickly ordered one of his sailors “to take the Child from the Ground, in order to preserve him.”  As he did so, one of the king’s guards ran at the sailor, brandishing his lance, whereupon Snelgrave stood up and drew a pistol, halting the man in his tracks and sending the king into a fright and the entire gathering into a tumult. When order was restored, Snelgrave complained to the king about the threatening action of the guard.  The king replied that Snelgrave himself “had not done well” in ordering the sailor to seize the child, “it being his Property.”  The captain excused himself by explaining that his religion “expressly forbids so horrid a Thing, as the putting of a poor innocent Child to death.”  He added the golden rule: “the grand Law of human Nature was, To do to others as we desir’d to be done unto.”  The conflict was ultimately resolved not through theology but the cash nexus as Snelgrave offered to buy the child.  He offered “a bunch of sky coloured beads, worth about half a Crown Sterling.”  The king accepted the offer.  Snelgrave was surprised that the price was so cheap, as traders such as the king were usually “very ready, on any extraordinary occasion, to make their Advantage of us.” The rest of the meeting consisted of eating and drinking the European food and liquor Snelgrave had brought for the king.  African palm wine was also on offer, but Snelgrave refused to drink it as the wisdom among slave ship captains was that it could be “artfully poison[ed].”  The sailors had no such worries and drank avidly.  Upon parting, the king declared himself “well pleased” with the visit, which meant that more slaves would be forthcoming.  As the Europeans canoed back to the ship, Snelgrave turned to a member of his crew and said that they “should pitch on some motherly Woman [among the enslaved already on board] to take care of this poor Child.”  The sailor answered, “He had already one in his Eye.”  The woman “had much Milk in her Breasts.” As soon as Snelgrave and the sailors came aboard, the very woman they had been discussing saw them with the little boy and ran “with great eagerness, and snatched him from out of the white Man’s Arms that held him.”  It was the woman’s own child.  Captain Snelgrave had already bought her without realizing the connection.  Snelgrave observed, “I think there never was a more moving sight than on this occasion, between the Mother and her little Son.” The ship’s linguist then told the woman what had happened, that, as Snelgrave wrote, “I had saved her Child from being sacrificed.”  The story made its way around the ship, through the more than three hundred captives on board, who soon “expressed their Thankfulness to me, by clapping their Hands, and singing a song in my praise.”  Nor did the gratitude end there, as Snelgrave noted: “This affair proved of great service to us, for it gave them a good notion of White Men; so that we had no Mutiny in our Ship, during the whole Voyage.”  Snelgrave’s benevolence continued upon arrival in Antigua.  As soon as he told the story of child and mother to a Mr. Studely, a slave-owner, “he bought the Mother and her Son, and was a kind Master to them.” William Snelgrave could thus think of Africans as “fierce brutish Cannibals” and think of himself as an ethical, civilized redeemer, a good Christian with qualities that even savages would have to recognize and applaud.  He could think of himself as the savior of families as he destroyed them.  He could imagine a humane outcome for two as he delivered hundreds to a plantation fate of endless toil and premature death.  His justifications in place, he could even invoke the Golden Rule, which would soon become a central saying of the anti-slavery movement. Captain William Watkins  As the Africa, a Bristol guineaman captained by William Watkins, lay at anchor in Old Calabar River in the late 1760s, its prisoners were busy down in the hold of the vessel, hacking off their chains as quietly as they could.  A large number of them managed to get free of the fetters, lift off the gratings, and climb onto the main deck.  Their first target was the barricado door, behind which lay the weapons with which they might recover their lost freedom.  It was not unusual, explained sailor Henry Ellison, for the enslaved to rise, whether because of a “love of liberty,” “ill treatment,” or “a spirit of vengeance.” The crew of the Africa was taken entirely by surprise; they seemed to have no idea that an insurrection was afoot, literally beneath their very feet.  But just as the mutineers “were forcing open the barricado door,” Ellison and seven of his crew mates “well armed with pistols and cutlasses” boarded from a neighboring slave ship, the Nightingale.  They saw what was happening, mounted the barricado, and fired above the heads of the rebels, hoping to scare them into submission.  The shots did not deter them, so the sailors lowered their aim and fired into the mass of insurgents, killing one.  The captives made a second attempt to force open the barricado door, but the sailors held firm, forcing them to retreat forward, giving chase as they went.  As the armed seamen pressed forward, a few of the rebels jumped overboard, some ran below, and others stayed on the deck to fight.  The sailors fired again and killed two more. Once the crew had regained control of the situation, Captain Watkins reimposed order.  He selected eight of the mutineers “for an example.”  They were tied up, and each sailor – the regular crew of the Africa, plus the eight from the Nightingale – were ordered to take a turn with the whip.  They “flogged them until from weariness they could flog no more.”  Captain Watkins then turned to an instrument called “the tormentor,” a combination of the cook’s tongs and a surgeon’s instrument for spreading plasters.  He had them heated white hot and used them to burn the flesh of the eight rebels.  “This operation being over,” Ellison explained, “they were confined and taken below.”  Apparently all survived. Yet the torture was not over.  Captain Watkins suspected that one of his own sailors was involved in the plot, that he had “encouraged the slaves to rise.”  He accused an unnamed black seaman, the ship’s cook, of assisting the revolt, “of having furnished them with the cooper’s tools, in order that they might knock themselves out of irons.”  Ellison doubted this, calling it “supposition only, and without any proof of the fact.”  Captain Watkins nonetheless ordered an iron collar – usually reserved for the most rebellious slaves – fastened around the neck of the black seaman.  He then had him “chained to the main mast-head,” where he would remain night and day, indefinitely.  He was to be given “only one plantain and one pint of water per day.”  His only clothes were a pair of long trousers, which were little “to shield him from the inclemency of the night.”  The shackled seaman remained in the foretop of the ship for three weeks, slowing starving to death. When the Africa had gathered its full cargo of 310 slaves and the seamen prepared to sail away from the  Bight of Biafra, Captain Watkins decided that the cook’s punishment should continue, so he made arrangements with Captain Joseph Carter to send him aboard the Nightingale, where he was once again chained to the main top and given the same meager allowance of food and water.  After ten more days, the black seaman had grown delirious.  “Hunger and oppression,” said Ellison, “had reduced him to a skeleton.”  For three days he struggled madly to free himself from the fetters, causing the chains to rub “the skin from several parts of his body.”   The neck collar “found its way to the bone.”  The “unfortunate man,” said Ellison, had become “a most shocking spectacle.”  After five weeks in the two vessels, “having experienced inconceivable misery in both, he was relieved by death.”  Ellison was one of the sailors charged to throw his body from the fore-top into the river.  The minimal remains of the black seaman were “immediately devoured by the sharks.” To purchase a signed copy of this book or inquire about publishing rights, e-mail Contact@MarcusRediker.com Selected Reviews of The Slave Ship: The London Review of Books, July 31, 2008, Demon Cruelty, by Eric Foner The Nation, January 17, 2008, Little Ships of Horror, by Christopher Leslie Brown Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2008, "'Slave Ship' Navigates a Savage Sea," by Tim Rutten Boston Globe, November 4, 2007, Souls on Ice, by James Smethurst The New York Sun, October 24, 2007, Life in the Hold, by Melissa Harris-Lacewell New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 21, 2007, Voyage of the Damned, by Adam Hochschild Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2007, The Price of Human Cargo, by Fergus Bordewich Christian Science Monitor, October 9, 2007, The Horrors of "The Slave Ship," by Colin Woodard Pittsburgh City Paper, February 21, 2008, Slaves to History, by Bill O'Driscoll Providence Journal, Sunday, December 16, 2007, The human drama aboard slave ships, by Richard J. Ring Daily Mail, December 13, 2007, Cargo of the living dead: The unspeakable horror of life on a slave ship, by Christopher Hudson The Spectator, November 11, 2007, Cargoes of Despair, by Ian Thomson Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune, October 19, 2007, An eye-opening history of slave ships, by Richard Thompson San Diego Union-Tribune, October 14, 2007,  Haunted by the ghost 'Ship,' by Jacqueline Bacon Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 7, 2007, Pitt professor goes inside the barbarity of the slave trade, by Margo Hammond http://www.marcusrediker.com/Books/Slave_Ship/Reviews_of_The_Slave_Ship.htm

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Book Review: The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker

A revolt on a slave ship in 1787

In what amounts to a pioneering and path-breaking work, in The Slave Ship: A Human History Marcus Rediker reminds us of what he calls 'the darker and more violent side' of the history of Atlantic slavery, noting that with their 'abstract, indeed bloodless statistics...even the best histories of the slave trade and slavery have tended to minimise, one might even say sanitise, the violence and terror that lay at the heart of their subjects.' Not that Rediker passes over the bloody facts of the matter, but he contextualises them within the rise of the capitalist system from its breakthrough in Western Europe to global hegemony.

The slave trade lasted almost four hundred years, from the late fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century, and saw over 12 million souls transported across the Atlantic ocean in the greatest forced migration history has ever seen. Almost two million never survived the six to ten week long Middle Passage, whether dying from the ever present danger of deadly disease or from causes man-made, their bodies cast into the sea for the trailing sharks. If one attempts to calculate the initial costs of capturing and enslaving Africans in Africa, and then add the numbers who perished within the first year of work in the New World of the Americas, then some idea of the full horror becomes apparent. 'From stage to stage - expropriation in Africa, the Middle Passage, initial exploitation in America - roughly 5 million men, women and children died. Another way to look at the loss of life would be to say that an estimated 14 million people were enslaved to produce a "yield" of 9 million longer-surviving enslaved Atlantic workers'.

As Rediker notes though, there is a 'violence of abstraction' that has plagued the study of the slave trade and slavery in general. 'Numbers can occulate the pervasive torture and terror, but European, African, and American societies still live with their consequences, the multiple legacies of race, class, and slavery. The slaver is a ghost ship sailing on the edges of modern consciousness'.

Rediker's achievement is to resurrect this ghost ship, to bring back the dead as real living people with names and faces, and to try and let us listen as far as humanly possible to the voices of the voiceless. There is abundant scholarship on the slave trade, but the view from the slave ship itself, Rediker notes, remains 'in many ways unknown'. He describes for example the 'shock and awe' experienced by many Africans on seeing the European slave ships, bristling with cannon, for the first time. How did they sail? Did magical spirits make them start and stop? As the young eleven year old Olaudah Equiano was taken on board a ship with his enslaved fellow Africans, he felt astonished and terrified at the savagery on display by the 'white men', the motley crew of mainly European sailors. What did they want from him? Only a child, he feared cannabalism and being eaten alive, but some older slaves on board offered him comfort and 'gave me to understand we were to be carried to these white people's country to work for them'. Equiano of course was to have an extraordinary life, and grew up to become an abolitionist and author of the 'most influential literary work of the abolitionist movement from an African perspective'.

Rediker is at his strongest in describing how the slave ship and its crew changed through each leg of its journey, looking from the point of view of the increasingly tyrannical ship's captain, the motley crew of mariners, and the rebellious multitude of the enslaved. At first it looked a thing of beauty when constructed, then the slaver became a 'vast machine' from the point of view of its working crew, then a 'floating dungeon' housing a 'macabre chamber of horrors' from the point of view of both the sailors and the enslaved during the Middle Passage. In the process, racial thinking and ideas emerges, and 'race' is made and remade as the ship sails its course. The systematic terror and violence that it was necessary to deploy on board by the captain and crew against the enslaved in order to prevent the ever present danger of insurrection is also an overriding theme. The captives outnumbered the crew ten to one, and an estimated one in ten voyages saw an uprising. Rediker carefully describes the complicated 'deep dialectic of discipline and resistance' on board the slaves ships, from individual attempts to resist to mass collective acts of explosive opposition.

Explosive is the right word - sometimes the slaves succeeded in blowing up the whole ship with gunpowder - and an estimated total of 100,000 people died in insurrections in the history of the slave trade - with an average of 25 people killed in each attempted rising. Most uprisings failed - the whole slave ship was built as a prison in order to precisely stop them even getting off the ground, and there was a stash of weapons and torture equipment on board to punish and humiliate. To rise up, the unarmed enslaved had to first free themselves from their iron manacles and shackles, then escape from their dungeon below deck, and then try to take control of the ship by force against a crew armed with cutlasses and blunderbusses, often protected by a barricado especially constructed on the upper deck for just such an eventuality. If they did all that, they would then need to work out how to sail the ship itself. The vast majority of insurrections inevitably failed, and then the punishment meted out against the organisers of the rebellion was brutal and sadistic - as all counter-revolutionary violence tends to be. John Newton, a slave captain who later in life was to commit himself to the cause of abolition, once wrote in a private letter describing what he witnessed on board the Brownlow during its voyage of 1748-9. After a failed insurrection, the good Christian captain, Richard Jackson, sentenced the rebellious slaves to death. The first group:

'He jointed; that is, he cut off, with an axe, first their feet, then their legs below the knee, then their thighs; in like manner their hands, then their arms below the elbow, and then their shoulders, till their bodies remained only like the trunk of a tree when all their branches are lopped away; and lastly, their heads. And, as he proceeded in his operation he threw the reeking members and heads in the midst of the bulk of the trembling slaves, who were chained upon the main-deck.'

The second group of rebellious slaves:

'He tied round the upper parts of the heads...a soft, platted rope, which the sailors call a point, so loosely as to admit a short lever: by continuing to turn the lever, he drew the point more and more tight, till at length he forced their eyes to stand out of their heads; and when he had satiated himself with their torments, he cut their heads off.'

As Newton noted, 'a savageness of spirit, not easily conceived, infuses itself...into those who exercise power on board an African slave ship, from the captain downwards...it is the spirit of the trade'. Why such murderous barbarity? In part it was necessary to counter this enslaved African resistance, what Thomas Clarkson called those moments of 'the brightest Heroism [that] happen in the Holds or on the Decks of the slave vessels'. The economic costs of slave resistance were high - and resistance 'significantly reduced the shipments of slaves' to America by an estimated one million over the full history of the slave trade.

By the end of the 1780s, as Rediker notes, abolitionists were able to use the powerful image of the slave ship, built up by the likes of Thomas Clarkson, to demonstrate 'that the vessel that had carried millions of Africans into slavery also carried something else: the seeds of its own destruction'.

What made such a cruel barbaric system last so long? Well, the plantations of the Americas were able to devour the labour of Africans because there were huge profits to be made by merchant capitalists. In 1807 alone, one year, Britain imported for domestic consumption 297.9 million pounds of sugar, 3.77 million galleons of rum, 16.4 million pounds of tobacco and 72.74 million pounds of cotton, almost all of it produced by enslaved labour. The slave ship 'was a concentration of capital, and it was the bearer of capitalist assumptions and practices about the world and the way it ought to be.' As Rediker noted in a recent interview:

We sometimes think of slavery as being pre-capitalist or non-capitalist, and that capitalism only really begins with free waged labour, but I think that blinds us to a lot of very important processes.

People were expropriated in one setting and then moved to a more market-orientated setting where their labour was exploited through usually quite violent means. In that way the slave trade is emblematic of a larger process that is happening to workers everywhere.

All these enslaved Africans were moved to the western Atlantic plantation system and their lives would be consumed by producing sugar, tobacco and rice for the world market. I like to paraphrase the great Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney who said that in the slave trade capitalism paraded without even a loincloth to cover its nakedness.

Today, when the great imperial powers are again using all kind of sophistry in order to try and re-colonise Africa, a historical understanding of the utterly barbaric methods by which European merchant capital under-developed Africa through the slave trade could not be more necessary. There could be few better introductions than Rediker's vivid and panoramic history, which surely deserves to become the classic account of life and death on the slave ships.

Labels: Africa, books, empire, history, race, slavery

posted by Snowball @ 10:47 AM

http://histomatist.blogspot.kr/2008/01/book-review-slave-ship-by-marcus.html

Little Ships of Horror

Christopher Leslie Brown

January 17, 2008   |    This article appeared in the February 4, 2008 edition of The Nation.

"Every man condemns the [slave] trade in general," wrote the abolitionist Thomas Cooper, of Manchester, England, in 1787, "but it requires the exhibition of particular instances of the enormity of this Commerce, to induce those to become active in the matter, who wish well to the cause upon the whole." Those accounts of the trade that present "particular distress, with its attendant circumstances," are best "calculated to excite compassion." Such were the principles of the British campaign against the slave trade at the end of the eighteenth century, as historian Marcus Rediker explains. And this emphasis on itemizing particular instances describes just as well the approach that guides Rediker's breathtaking new book on the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade.

Christopher Leslie Brown teaches history at Columbia University. He is the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of...

The Slave Ship opens with an extensive and unforgettable inventory of the trade's particular horrors. There are the accused conspirators in a failed slave ship revolt forced by their captors to eat the hearts and livers of the recently executed. A captive starves himself to death after several unsuccessful attempts to rip open his throat with his fingernails. A black sailor accused of fomenting an insurrection gets pinned to the mast by the ship's captain, who leaves him to rot to death without food or water over the course of three weeks. Sharks trail slave ships from one edge of the Atlantic to the other, overgrown by the time they reach Jamaica from feeding on human carcasses tossed overboard en route. Captains embrace the spectacle of grisly executions with devilish glee. The desecration of human bodies becomes at once efficient, whimsical and sadistic. A London merchant orders the captain of his ship to brand each captive with the first initials of his wife's and daughter's names. One master lowers a shrieking woman feet first into the Atlantic; when "she was drawn up" moments later, according to Rediker, "it was found that a shark...had bit her off from the middle." The Atlantic slave trade has been the subject of rigorous historical study for more than four decades, but no previous work comes as close to conveying its terror.

Rediker describes The Slave Ship as a "human history." By this he means, in the first place, that there are people in the story--not aggregates, not statistics, not categories, but individuals. His approach stands in sharp contrast to the mode of analysis that has dominated the study of the Atlantic slave trade since the late 1960s, when historians began to seek reliable numbers--the number of captives shipped from Africa, mortality rates in the middle passage, sex ratios on board slave ships, average rates of profit, the relative importance of specific ports of embarkation in Africa and arrival in the Americas. This research, which continues apace, has revolutionized the economic and demographic history of the early modern era. There's no better example of this revolution than the extraordinary database compiled by a team of historians led by David Eltis of Emory University, which, to date, provides documentation for approximately 30,000 voyages from the late fifteenth century to the last half of the nineteenth--a database that Rediker often mines to good effect in this book.

Yet lost in this welter of numbers, too often, are those aspects of the history less amenable to quantification. "Even the best histories of the slave trade and slavery," Rediker writes, "have tended to minimize, one might even say sanitize, the violence and terror that lay at the heart of their subjects." Indeed, for historian Philip Curtin, who launched the "numbers game" with his 1969 The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, the emotions that the subject stirs recommended even more powerfully a commitment to dispassionate analysis. "The evils of the slave trade," he wrote, "can be taken for granted as a point long since proven beyond dispute." But those injunctions now prove increasingly dissatisfying to an emerging generation of scholars interested less in enumeration than in the history of immiseration. In writing about topics such as mortality rates in the Atlantic slave trade, literary critic Ian Baucom recently insisted that we attend not only to the cumulative numbers, to the many thousands gone, but also to the sound of each corpse hitting the water one at a time.

It is this concern with the texture of individual experience, with the minutiae of misery and the ordeal of its endurance, that decides the shape and content of The Slave Ship. Rediker offers a view not so much from the bottom up as from the inside out. The personal testimony of captives, sailors and captains carry this account so that we may know the slave ship in the way that those who lived it knew it then. This approach, inevitably, leads Rediker to neglect what historians know now but actors at the time could not fully know--information fundamental to any comprehensive understanding of the slave trade's history. A reader new to the subject will learn only a little about where captives came from and almost nothing about where they went (assuming they had survived the middle passage) once they disembarked. The fundamentals of the Atlantic economy in the eighteenth century receive only passing mention. There is little attempt to sketch change over time. And as Rediker readily acknowledges, there is no effort to assess the ways that British and American slave voyages might have differed from the practices of other nations. But these subjects, to varying degrees, have been addressed by others. By choosing to set these questions aside, Rediker is able to go much further than others have before in describing what the slave ship was like. And few have worked harder to recover the countless stories preserved in published memoirs, remote provincial archives and records assembled by the British Parliament to investigate the slave trade at the height of the abolition movement. Even those who know the subject well will be surprised by the details that Rediker unearths. The Slave Ship is rich with anecdotes--so rich, in fact, that the book never feels anecdotal. Instead, what emerges is a fine-grained account of everyday savagery.

This command of the subject shows not only in Rediker's knowledge of the sources but also in his precise depictions of life at sea. Few historians at work today know the age of sail better. The virtues on display here--eloquence, empathy, erudition--are characteristic. His previous books treated the social history of merchant seamen, the golden age of piracy and revolutionary politics in Atlantic port towns. In each of these books, Rediker presented the growth of merchant capitalism in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a pivotal moment in the making of the modern world and in the transformation of the world of work. The deepening networks of Atlantic exchange called into existence a growing merchant marine whose labor made the emerging economy go, although they profited little from the new economy and suffered much from its toils. Those sailors responded by recognizing that they shared a common identity. They forged an oppositional culture in response. In some instances, they turned to piracy. At times they sought out alliances with the dispossessed in the colonies, such as slaves and indentured servants. Before the Industrial Revolution, Rediker has suggested, there emerged a class identity that gave sailors and port town workers a sense of collective purpose. And before the American Revolution, it was Atlantic seamen and their brethren on shore who conceived and practiced precocious ideals of equality and liberty. To know the making of the modern world, Rediker has insisted, we must know the history of the sea.

In The Slave Ship, his fifth book, he prepares the way by offering a tour of the slave ship itself. The vessel, he explains, took on varied purposes from one moment to the next. It was at different times a floating warehouse, an open-air market, a workplace, a prison and a factory that transformed captives into commodities. Rediker describes slave ship construction, the distribution of responsibilities assigned to the crew, the variations in ship design and scale, and the administration and allocation of space on board. On these subjects he is a sure-footed and knowledgeable guide. When presenting how captives in Africa reached the Atlantic shore and the waiting slave ships, he relies rather more on the expertise of others. Here too, though, he has read widely and deeply in the relevant scholarly literature. And his mastery of the slave ship's special characteristics allows him to convey fully the shock and fear such vessels would inspire among enslaved men, women and children who had never seen them before.

The Slave Ship is, however, less about slave ships per se than about the people who found themselves on them. The heart of the study lies with an extended assessment of captains, captives and crew. Rediker works his way up the social hierarchy through biographical chapters on Olaudah Equiano, the slave ship sailor James Stanfield and slave ship master (and later evangelical convert and slave trade opponent) John Newton. All three wrote extensively and precisely about what life on a slave ship entailed. Rediker then works back down the ladder of authority to explore, more broadly, the art of brutality at sea, the experience of slave ship work among the free and the contours of captivity. The slave ship, Rediker notices, demeaned everyone it touched.

"Learning cruelty was intrinsic to learning the trade itself," Rediker writes. For the slave ship captain, it was "a requirement of the job and the larger economic system it served." At sea, he held within himself every element of authority and command typically distributed more widely through the institutions of social, political and legal authority on land. Each slave ship stood as a despotic state in miniature. But if the captain was an absolute sovereign in his domain, he was also an employee and partner, a principal agent in a heavily capitalized commercial enterprise, the profits of which turned upon the delivery of captives, not corpses. So the captain had to combine the arts of commercial negotiation and economic calculation with the imperatives of carefully calibrated cruelty. In Rediker's telling, the brutality of the slave trade lay not only in the sometimes casual and sadistic destruction of human life but also in the callous "moral insensibility" that it induced. So, for example, Rediker presents us with the striking image of the pious John Newton rehearsing passages from Scripture while strolling across what he called his "peaceful kingdom" as he prepared to purchase 250 captives on the coast of Sierra Leone. The slave ship produced not only slaves but monsters too.

Rediker dwells on the terror of the middle passage to inform as well as to horrify. To know what became of Africans in the Americas, we must first come to terms with what they came through. Rediker calls attention to the choices slaves made in a setting conceived and designed to forbid willed activity completely. The prisoners thwarted their captors as far as the ghastly circumstances permitted. They seized weapons. They threw themselves overboard. They refused to eat. When unable to lash out at the crew, they sometimes turned on one another. Rediker devotes particular attention to the distinctive experience of enslaved women, far more than most who have written about the middle passage to date. Because slave ship captains regarded women and children as less of a threat to revolt, these prisoners often were allowed more freedom of movement on the ship. This freedom of movement, predictably, helps explain the key roles some women played in shipboard insurrections. A great many more, though, only suffered additional indignities and abuse. Captain and crew raped women and girls with impunity. More than a few captains seem to have done so systematically. And Rediker guesses "that some men signed on to slaving voyages in the first place precisely because they wanted unrestricted access to the bodies of African women."

The account of the captives' experience, however, extends beyond the themes of victimization and resistance. Rediker presents striking evidence detailing how captives coped. On one ship enslaved women sing in unison of their despair and longing for home. On another, an enslaved woman offers a long oration of sorrow to other women and girls, who surround her in a series of concentric circles that mark the listeners' age and status. The slave community, Rediker suggests, first took shape on the slave ship, not on the plantation. Previous scholars have speculated about the kinds of relationships that developed among slaves during the middle passage. But no one has done more than Rediker to document the limits that the circumstances imposed or the possibilities they permitted.

The sailors, the men in between, emerge here at once as tormentors and victims. Often drawn into the work by either poverty or deceit, some seamen in the trade described their fate as worse than slavery. Although Rediker emphatically rejects such claims, he does give extended attention to sailors' own special hell. Because they were laborers rather than a capital investment, slave ship sailors were more disposable than the captives. As a consequence, in part, they perished with even greater frequency. Many met desperate, lonely deaths from disease on the West African coast. Others died en route to the Americas as the unsanitary conditions of the ship wreaked havoc on workers and captives alike. With astonishing frequency, men broken or disabled by service in the trade were abandoned to poverty and despair in the port towns of the Americas. Rediker is probably the first to call attention to the legacy of misery the trade left among those who made it go. It is not a surprise, then, to learn that a loathing of the slave ship seems to have been common among them. Mutiny and desertion occurred with some frequency. The two or three thousand sailors who led an uprising in Liverpool in August 1775 targeted the property of slave merchants in particular.

Yet, as Rediker is careful to note, these protests aimed not to abolish the slave trade but to improve payment and working conditions within it. In The Slave Ship, he does not assume that the oppressed found a common interest across racial lines, as he tended to do in some of his earlier work. "Victims of poverty, deception, and violence themselves," slave ship sailors, Rediker writes, "took out their plight on the even more abject and powerless captives under their supervision and control." On the middle passage, in the months and weeks that they served as prison guards, their racial status as "whites" briefly mitigated the disadvantages of class. If sailors did not, on their own, become abolitionists, they were in an unusually good position to testify to slavery's brutalities. In a highly original chapter on the early antislavery movement in Britain, Rediker finds that the testimony of sailors made abolitionist propaganda particularly plausible and compelling. Moral denunciations carried far more weight when coupled with detailed descriptions of particular abuses. "Real enlightenment," Rediker writes, "began not with a Scottish philosopher or a member of Parliament, but rather in the meeting of a sailor and a slave amid the 'instruments of woe' on board the 'vast machine.'" Thomas Clarkson, the lead propagandist for the London abolition committee, understood the strategic value of slave ship sailor accounts particularly well. Sailors knew the character of the trade better than anyone. And their sufferings promised to draw special concern from those statesmen less interested in the morals of the trade than in its impact on the lives of those men upon whom the imperial state would depend in time of war. The oral histories that Clarkson collected on the docks of Liverpool, Bristol and London yielded the evidence that abolitionists presented to Parliament, and provided the basis for countless antislavery pamphlets and poetry. Sailor testimony informed, as well, the text that accompanied the famous depiction of the slave ship Brooks, the visual image that came to represent then and thereafter what a fully loaded slave ship looked like, an image that Rediker demonstrates, incredibly, to have been a "graphic understatement."

Fittingly, this first history of the slave ship concludes with an extended assessment of the making and circulation of this most famous of images. Its design began with a simple description recorded by an officer of the Royal Navy who had been dispatched to Liverpool to measure the dimensions and tonnage of representative slave ships. The Brooks, as Rediker quotes from an eighteenth-century source, was "well known in the trade," embarking 5,163 captives from Africa in ten different voyages over more than two decades. What was not well known, though, was what a fully loaded ship looked like. So, working from the measurements and its declared carrying capacity, an antislavery committee in Plymouth, England, transformed the raw data into an emblem of atrocity; 1,500 copies of the image were circulated in England in 1788. The Brooks became "a central image of the age, hanging in public places during petition drives and in homes and taverns around the Atlantic." It served as a backdrop to debates in Parliament during the first thrust of antislavery organizing, from 1788 to 1792. And it was reprinted and distributed abroad, in Philadelphia, New York and Paris, carrying the British antislavery movement beyond the British Isles. For the abolitionists, the Brooks distilled an essential truth about the trade. "It depicted the violence and terror of the ship," Rediker explains, "and at the same time it captured the brutal logic and cold, rational mentality of the merchant's business.... It was itself a concentration of capital, and it was the bearer of capitalist assumptions and practices about the world and the way it ought to be."

These closing thoughts, in some ways, point up one shortcoming of The Slave Ship. Rediker largely neglects the merchant capitalists who put the ships in the water. Their ambitions and purposes remain largely offstage. The result is to direct attention to the most immediate consequences of slave ship voyages--the brutality of life on board--rather than the comparably immediate causes that set these voyages in motion. The critique of the eighteenth-century economic order does not quite center, then, on those who might have been its principal targets--the investors in slave ships, the producers of plantation crops and the consumers of slave-produced goods. Rediker, though, in this work, is less interested in developing a critique of the Atlantic economy than in dissecting the anatomy of terror and understanding its most immediate social consequences. He does draw attention throughout to the ways this history resonates into the present day, both in the creation of a racial order in the Atlantic world and with the casual destruction of human life at a distance through the imperatives of global trade. And at the close, he invokes the fleeting but thought-provoking evidence that shows slaves and ex-sailors assisting one another in the work of survival in Atlantic port towns and in the reckoning with death. Rediker closes with an account of enslaved men and women nursing diseased and mangled slave ship sailors back to health or, as was often necessary, arranging a proper burial in a "negro" cemetery.

In these ways, The Slave Ship restates and extends imperatives at work in Rediker's earlier books. The Slave Ship is at once impassioned and restrained. This is because the "darkness and violence" needs no embellishment. It only requires, as Thomas Clarkson knew and as Rediker demonstrates, a skilled advocate to tell the story. This year and the next mark the bicentennial of slave trade abolition in the British Empire and in the United States, events that, properly, have been marked by commemorations of various kinds on both sides of the Atlantic. This landmark work provides a timely and unforgettable reminder of what was abolished and hints also, indeed, at what was not.

http://www.thenation.com/article/little-ships-horror?page=0,1