The Slave Ship: A Human History

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Marcus Rediker talked about his book [The Slave Ship: A Human History], published by Viking. In his book he ...

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

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 theNightingale, 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.”

http://www.marcusrediker.com/books/slave_ship/extracts_Slave_Ship.htm

The Slave Ship: Marcus Rediker

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Books

Issue: 

December 2007

(320)

By

Hassan Mahamdallie

Marcus Rediker

US historian Marcus Rediker talks to Hassan Mahamdallie about oppression and resistance.

You have written many books on maritime history. In the introduction to The Slave Ship you say that this was a painful book to write. Why was that?

Life at sea was violent for everybody. And I was no stranger to all that. In previous books I had witnessed the brutal killings of sailors, the press gangs, the desperate resistance, but I have to say that the slave ship was different, because you have hundreds of people subjected to terror on a daily basis. In fact that terror is the fundamental operating principle of the ship. That was one of the things that was daunting about the project and that made it so painful.

The genesis of The Slave Ship came to me as I was doing work with people on death row in Pennsylvania. I worked on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther who has been on death row for 26 years now for a crime he didn't commit.

I talked to Mumia a lot about history; I saw the death penalty as a modern system of terror and how closely it was connected to issues of race. Race and terror have long gone together and it suddenly hit me that it all began on the slave ships.

Karl Marx talked about how at the start of capitalism Africa became "a warren for the hunting of black skins", and one of the things you are trying to do is tie slavery back into its relationship with the profit system.

I wanted to talk about the slave trade and slavery generally as a critical part of the rise of capitalism. 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.

In the book you describe how objects and people are transformed. The ship started out as a thing of beauty, becomes a factory as it sails towards Africa, and then when it reaches Africa it becomes a dungeon. The roles of groups of people change simultaneously. The sailors are incredibly badly treated but then at a certain point they too become the oppressor.

The malevolent genius of the slave ship lay in its combination of many different roles. On the one hand it was a warship; a huge powerful vessel loaded with cannon. It was also a factory producing labour for the world economy. (It also makes categories of race.) And it was a moving prison. That means the sailors played various roles.

The ship itself was transformed. On the outward passage the crew would build the platforms on the lower deck to increase the numbers of people who could be stowed there; they would build the barricade - the defensive structure behind which they crew could retreat in the event of a slave insurrection. When they had transported the slaves they would take those structures down so that they could load sugar casks between decks, so that when the ship arrives back in port it did not look like a slave ship any more. The ship itself and its physical structure are a very important part of the story.

There are three groups to your seaborne story, the sailors, the ships' captains and the slaves themselves.

The sailors' was a world of grave contradictions. The reasons they served on slave ship voyages were many and complicated. The slave merchants, captains and tavern keepers would conspire to run sailors into debt, and they would either be thrown in jail or sold directly to the slave ship captain. A big recruiter was hunger and poverty; sailors were among the poorest occupational groups of the 18th century.

For those sailors who wanted to move up in the world, you could become a skilled worker on the ship, maybe a second, third or fourth mate, because the people above you on the maritime ladder are dying and falling off. Finally, some people were motivated because they had sadistic personalities, they liked the idea of wielding power and some liked the idea of having unlimited access to the bodies of enslaved African women.

Once they were on the ship what kind of life was it?

It was a hard life and the captains established their power very quickly. But when they arrive in West Africa and the slaves start coming aboard it's a whole new situation. The captain and the crew discover that they have something in common - fear.

They realise they have a vast body of people on board who will kill them given half a chance. This tends to drive the captain and the crew together. From that point on, until they get to the New World, the sailor is going to be in this antagonistic relationship with the slaves.

But about three quarters of the way through the voyage the captain starts to act differently. You need a big crew to get to the coast of West Africa and guard the slaves, but you don't need such a large crew for the last leg of the voyage home, so the captain drives the sailors very hard with the hope that they will desert and he will save on their wages.

The crew is getting sick and sicker. They would catch diseases - yellow fever and malaria were most common. The sailors died in proportions equal to or greater than the slaves - 15 to 20 percent - and on some voyages the entire crew was wiped out, leaving a ghost ship.

In every slave trading port these poor diseased sailors were a major social problem. They had no money or food, so they survived by begging.

Some of the most stunning evidence I found was that many marooned sailors survived on the charity of enslaved people. We have testimony describing how in some cases slave women would try to nurse them back to health. There is evidence to show that when these sailors died the enslaved buried them in the African burial grounds in places like Jamaica. There was a compassion shown for people who had literally been their prison guards. It's the most hopeful thing I found in this whole subject.

One of the strengths of your book is that you dispel forever any notion that the slaves were passive in the face of their misfortune.

Every captain assumed that the enslaved would do anything to escape. Everything was geared to overcome resistance, whether it was the manacles, the chains, the whips, and the barricade at mid-ship - all these things were in anticipation of resistance. The slave ship was a war zone and people constantly fought for freedom.

I was inspired by the variety of resistance. All the new research shows that insurrections aboard the slave ships were vastly more common than we thought. One out of ten vessels had an insurrection so great as to lead to a loss of life, and there must have been two or three times as many that did not get that far.

The ability of Africans from differing backgrounds to communicate on board the ship was also much greater than we thought. Boys would take messages from the men's chamber to the women's chamber. People would sing to each other back and forth. They would exchange information; Where are we going? What will we do when we get there? In that communication rose up a cooperation against their common oppressors.

Both patterns and methods of oppression and resistance are carried ashore onto the slave plantations. African-American culture in the broadest sense begins on those ships; multi-ethnic people are finding ways to cooperate and a huge part of that is common resistance.

There is very strong evidence to suggest that the frequency of insurrections increased the cost of investment, made the trade less profitable and discouraged future investors. One historian has suggested that the number of insurrections may have saved another million people from being enslaved by reducing demand and capital investment.

How has your book been received?

I have been gratified by the reception so far. I wrote this book hoping that it would get into the hands of activists and that people would use it in their own struggles for justice. That's the best way of honouring the legacy of those on the slave ships, by making their struggles real again in the hope of a better world.

---

The Slave Ship is published by John Murray, ￡25

http://socialistreview.org.uk/320/slave-ship-marcus-rediker

African Slave Ships Research Article from The Way People Live

This Study Guide consists of approximately 110 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of African Slave Ships.

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This section contains 4,077 words (approx. 14 pages at 300 words per page)

As the slave ship made its way across the Atlantic Ocean, life was a continual battle for survival for both slaves and crew members. At any moment the terrible daily hardships could easily overwhelm and destroy everyone on board.

For the slaves, chained and imprisoned in the putrid hold, surviving the suffocating slave deck and the deadly diseases it bred became a feat of endurance. Another equally threatening aspect of daily life involved the abuse and mistreatment that slavers inflicted on captives during the crossing. As freed slave Ottobah Cugoano later expressed, "It would be needless to give a description of all the horrible scenes which we saw, and base [degrading] treatment which we met with in this dreadful captive situation."

For the crew, life aboard a slave ship was also extremely perilous. Like the slaves, crew members died of the contagious diseases that ravaged the hold, and slave ship captains treated crew members cruelly, often punishing them severely for petty blunders. Many sailors could recount stories such as the one seaman James Morley remembered: For accidentally breaking a glass belonging the captain, "I was tied up to the tiller in the cabin by my hands, and then flogged with a cat [-o'-nine-tails], and kept hanging there some time."

Other perils also challenged those aboard the ship. The unpredictability of the weather and the imprecise navigation skills of the era made crossing the Atlantic Ocean dangerous. Crew members often wrestled with ropes and sails as wind and driving rain pummeled their tiny vessels. In addition, slave ships might find themselves embroiled in a battle at sea with a pirate ship or a vessel from a rival nation. Often without warning, in the middle of the Atlantic the captives and crew would suddenly become the target of cannon fire from an attacking ship.

Abuse and Mistreatment of the Captives

The dangers captives suffered from outside forces such as bad weather and enemy ships were far less life-threatening than the cruelty and wanton acts of violence they had to endure on board. From the moment they were captured, slaves were abused and mistreated. The violence they experienced on land in Africa continued and was often heightened during the Middle Passage. As former slave Olaudah Equiano comments, "The white people looked and acted... in so savage a manner.... I had never seen such instances of brutal cruelty."

Sometimes, historians attest, slave treatment was less vicious than other times, depending on the nature of the captain and the crew. But even sympathetic behavior during the eighteenth century could include very brutal actions. African women, for example, were regularly abused by the slave ship crew.

Slaver John Newton, known as a kind captain, noted one practice in his journal: "When women and girls are taken on aboard a ship, naked, trembling, terrified, perhaps almost exhausted from cold, fatigue and hunger, they are often exposed to the wanton rudeness of white savages." Women who protested were whipped and beaten.

Some slave trading companies such as the Dutch Middleburg Commercial Company, active during the eighteenth century, made it illegal and severely punishable for sailors to assault female slaves. On the long, exhausting trip to and from Africa, however, where crew members were themselves often brutalized, it is unlikely the laws were enforced.

Captain Newton tried to protect female slaves on his ship. Once, when he caught a sailor assaulting an African woman, he wrote that he "put him in irons. I hope this has been the first affair of the kind on board and I am determined to keep [the crew] quiet if possible. If anything happens to the woman, I shall impute it to him."

At the same time that African women became targets of abuse from the white crew members, they were also given more freedom than men. Male slaves were kept in irons for longer periods throughout the voyage. They also spent a greater amount of time in the hold and were forced to do more strenuous labor aboard the ship. Women and children were often allowed to remain on deck without shackles throughout the voyage.

Sickness and Death

In addition to the physical abuse slaves suffered, they also often fell victim to any number of fatal epidemics, such as smallpox, that the unsanitary conditions of slave ship life bred. Keeping the slaves healthy became a major worry for slavers during the Middle Passage. As a way of preventing widespread illness, some crews tried to keep the slave decks clean. "Thrice a week," reported slaver Jean Barbot, "we perfume betwixt' decks with a quantity of good vinegar in pails, and red hot bullets in them to expel the bad air, after the place had been well scrubbed with brooms: after which the deck is cleaned with cold vinegar."

However, not all slave ship captains attempted to maintain a degree of cleanliness to promote health. Eyewitness accounts such as the one left by slaver Richard Drake, who was a trader for twenty-four years, describe a different scene below deck: "On the eighth day [out at sea]... I took my round of the half deck, holding a camphor bag in my teeth; for the stench was hideous. The sick and dying were chained together. I saw pregnant women give birth of babies whilst chained to corpses, which our drunken overseers had not removed."

Often, unsanitary conditions, combined with inadequate food rations, caused raging epidemics of fever, the flux, and smallpox to sweep through the slave decks and kill many of the captives. Venture Smith, an African slave who was later freed, recalled that at the time of his crossing, there was "a great mortality by the small pox, which broke out on board.... Out of the two hundred and sixty that sailed from Africa, [we found] not more than two hundred alive."

Slaves whom the captain believed were too weak and sick to recover, were sometimes hurled into the ocean. Some slavers believed ridding the ship of diseased slaves might stop contagion from spreading. As Thomas Howard explains, "Ruthless ship captains would throw over the side the first slave or two to show any evidence of sickness, thus hoping to prevent its spread."

When slaves and crew members died, their bodies were also tossed into the sea. Often a school of sharks followed the slave ship to feed on the bodies thrown overboard.

The Perils of Maritime Work

In addition to the constant danger of becoming deathly ill, seamen faced the ongoing hazards of maritime work itself. Seamen often became maimed or disabled as a result of the everyday chores. Even loading and unloading barrels of goods for trade could cause injury, particularly since heavy crates sliding around the hold of a rocking ship could crush a sailor's limb. "It was not unusual," one sailor reported, "for a finger to be lost to a rolling case, for an arm or leg to be broken by shifting cargo, or for a hand to be burned in tarring ropes."

Sometimes seamen died while working on the ship. For example, during a strong wind or turbulent sea, crew members perched on a rope rung high above the deck could lose their balance, fall overboard, and drown. Also, the equipment used aboard a slave ship was heavy. If, as a result of the wear and tear of life at sea, a loose iron spike or piece of equipment fell from a yard and hit a crew member below, the blow could kill him.

As historian Marcus Rediker notes, "The chances of a seaman ending his life in... a catastrophe were high, and many a man fell from the rigging, was washed overboard, or was fatally struck by falling gear."

Attacking Ships

Another peril that crews suffered was the ongoing possibility of a hostile attack from an enemy ship. These vessels might be manned by pirates, privateers, or coastal raiders cruising the waters for plunder. Attacks were frequent, and the slave ports in the Caribbean were particularly treacherous for any trading ship bound for the West Indies.

Newspapers at the time often ran articles about slavers narrowly escaping pirate attacks. On October 3, 1754, the South Carolina Gazette, for example, reported that "Capt. Seymour, in a large Bemuda Sloop... had been chased... for two Days and Nights by a large Black Schooner, [later] being informed [that] she was a Pirate."

Articles told of ships that pirates had robbed. In the same issue of theSouth Carolina Gazette, a story about a sloop captained by James Berry recounts how the vessel was

 boarded by a fine large Bermuda built sloop, arm'd only with Blun de busses [guns], commanded by a Spaniard (who said he had taken many Prizes on this Coast...) with a mixed crew of many Nations [who] strip[ed] Capt. Berry, a Passenger he had, and his Crew, of all their Cloaths [clothes], Money, Watches, &c, and took out of the Vessel, two negro men, 4 Hogsheads of Rum, one of Sugar, with whatever else they wanted.

In addition to the dangers that pirate attacks posed, a slave ship might discover itself caught between the crossfire of warring nations. Over the four hundreds years during which European nations participated in the slave trade, alliances shifted frequently, and even if not actively at war, each European nation defended its own territorial waterways. If, for example, an English slaver happened to drift into Spanish territory as it made its way across the Atlantic, the seamen aboard might find themselves in the midst of a pitched battle at sea, fighting for their lives.

Sailors understood the risks of these battles, which could often leave them badly wounded or maimed. Sometimes, they banded together in protest. "[We] did not hire [ourselves] to fight," seamen Samuel Howell asserted in 1713. "Who would maintaine [us] and [our] Familys in case (we) should lose a Legg or an Arm?" At best, after years at sea, if they were still alive, they emerged from the experience broken, sickly, and unfit to work.

Discipline and Abuse of the Crew

Although pirate attacks were brutal, they were rare, and some historians believe that the most perilous aspect of manning a slave ship was the cruel discipline a captain or another commanding officer used to intimidate the crew. Seamen were regularly beaten for minor infractions or occurrences. The cook, for example, might become the target of a captain's murderous rage if the captain disliked how the food tasted. Once, when the cook on a particular slave ship served tainted meat, the infuriated captain beat both the cook and steward and tied them together. They were imprisoned in the hold for two days.

Officers often beat crew members to punish and discipline them. As a result, sailors sustained lasting injuries, including lameness or constant headaches, or even permanent bouts of dizziness. Sometimes bouts of dizziness were referred to as "falling sickness." Ordinary seaman John Marchant reported before the High Court of Admiralty that he had been caned mercilessly by first mate John Yates during one voyage. Because of the caning, he became continually "troubled with a diziness in his Head... in so much that he cannot go aloft without danger of falling down."

Even captives such as Olaudah Equiano expressed horror over the brutality officers showed crew members during the Middle Passage. Describing his feelings in his memoir, he remarked,

 I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty; and this not only shown towards us blacks, but also to some of the whites themselves. One white man in particular I saw, when we were permitted to be on deck, flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast, that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute.

Relations Among the Crew

It is little wonder that crew relations were tense. Sailors on a slave ship lived for months at a time in the middle of the ocean on a ship that most teenagers could cross in fifteen paces. They slept in hammocks for only three or four hours at a time in a forecastle that stank of bilge water, and they rarely had enough to eat or drink. They always felt chilled or wet and lived day after day in the same damp clothes, sharing the small cramped space of the boat with fifteen to forty-five other people.

The type of people who frequently manned slave ships heightened the harsh environment: poor vagrants or runaways, drunkards, hardened seamen, and tyrannical captains. One justification officers gave for their inhuman treatment of seamen was that severe discipline provided order within an otherwise unruly group.

However, cut off from contact with other people, sailors created a bond with each other, forged from the years spent together aboard ship. Pitted against the forces of nature, seamen banded together to battle the ever-present dangers of wind and water.

Sailors also became allies to unite against the power and cruelty of commanding officers. Within the ship's world, two separate communities arose—seamen at the bottom of the social ladder and officers at the top, each group socializing among themselves. Sometimes stronger seamen looked out for the welfare of weaker seamen. For example, "young seamen often tried to protect the older ones by giving them more or better provisions or by shielding them from an abusive captain." In 1749 it was reported that when a drunken captain, Thomas Sanderson, hit the boatswain aboard his ship, "the Crew rose and said that [the Captain] should not beat the Boatswain (who was a very old man.)"

Racial Relations on Board

Another aspect of crew relations involved the relationship between black and white mariners. As historian W. Jeffrey Bolster explains, "One of the most significant changes during the period between 1740 and 1820 was in the increase in the number of black mariners who manned ships traveling the Triangle of Trade." Most men were slaves, rented out by their masters to assist on trading voyages. Some, however, were free men, who saw seafaring as one of their only opportunities to make a living.

Blacks attained skills that enabled them to serve in any station aboard ship, but prejudice denied them positions beyond that of able-bodied seamen. Usually, free blacks were hired as cabin boys, cooks, musicians, and stewards. However, slaves who worked on board might be allowed to assume positions of authority more easily than free blacks. Slaves could serve their white masters, using the very seafaring skills with which free blacks were not allowed to use to earn a living.

Racial prejudice also included ongoing brutal physical abuse. In his autobiography, John Jea, a veteran seacook during the early nineteenth century, recalled enduring terrible treatment because of his color. "They used to flog, beat, and kick me about the same as if I had been a dog," 111 he recounted. Yet Jea persisted for years because seafaring allowed him to make a living, travel widely, and, as a preacher, spread the word of spiritual awakening and social equality, two ideas that ultimately contributed greatly to outlawing the slave trade.

Racial relations on board were not always horrible, though. Olaudah Equiano, for example, described one rare instance when a friendship formed between blacks and whites aboard ship. As a young teenager enslaved on his master's ship, Equiano wrote that he met

 a young lad who had never been at sea before, about four or five years older than myself; his name was Richard Baker.... Soon after I went on board, he showed me a great deal of... attention.... [F]or the space of two years [he] was my constant companion and instructor. Although he had many slaves of his own,... such a friendship was cemented between us... a faithful friend who, at the age of fifteen, discovered a mind superior to prejudice.

Surviving Storms

In addition to the harsh treatment sailors received at the hands of their superiors, they also had to grapple with harsh weather, which made slave ship life a life-and-death drama. Historian Marcus Rediker recounts the valiant efforts of two seamen, who tried to keep their ship from capsizing in the midst of a raging storm. While

 whitecapped waves slapped the bobbing ship and... water casks rolled from side to side... the violence of the elements ... quickly flipped the frail vessel onto its side.... Two seamen armed with axes went on deck [to cut down the foretop mast and some of the rigging.] As they hacked [away], a monstrous wave hit the forward part of the ship, snapping the foremast as though it was a thin twig and carrying... one... sailor into the sea.... The other seaman was crushed between the mast and the side of the ship.

Devastating storms also brought death to the slaves. Sometimes disastrous weather might result in a path of destruction that claimed hundreds of lives. In 1702, for example, more than eight hundred slaves died when the Danish vessel the KronPrintzen perished during a tempest at sea.

Even if they survived the storm, the horror of the experience left slaves terrified and bewildered. Locked on the hold of the ship, they braved extreme anguish as the brutal weather tore the vessel apart. Sometimes, the captives were flung about the lurching ship so violently that they suffered broken bones. One Portuguese captain, who lived through a violent storm off the coast of Mozambique, left a vivid account:

 Suddenly, the weather closes in, and the sea rises so high and forcefully that the ships obey the waves without course or control, at the mercy of the winds. It is then that the din [noise] from the slaves, chained to one another, becomes horrible. The clanking of the irons, the moans, the weeping, the cries, the waves breaking over one side of the ship and then the other, the shouting of the sailors, the whistling of the winds, and the continuous roar of the waves.... Some of the food supplies are pushed overboard.... Many slaves break their legs and their arms, while others die of suffocation. One ship will break apart from the fury of the storm and sink. The other drifts on, dismasted, ruined by the force of the ocean... on the verge of capsizing.

When mariners battled a tumultuous sea, they relied on slaves to help shoulder the burden. Captains used slaves to relieve tired crews of the backbreaking job of pumping water, often pushing them to the point of physical collapse. According to historian Hugh Thomas,

 Slaves were often called on to help an over worked or exhausted crew. Thus we hear how in the midst of these distresses, the vessels, after being three weeks at sea, became so extremely leaky, as to require constant exertion at the pumps. It was found necessary, therefore, to take some of the ablest negroes out of the irons and employ them at this labour, in which they were often worked beyond their strength.

During storms, the captives on board were sometimes in danger of more than the weather. In 1738 a Dutch slaver foundered on rocks off the coast of South America. Stormy weather blinded the crew, and the ship was about to sink. Asserts Thomas, "The crew closed the hatches of the slave decks to avoid pandemonium and then escaped with fourteen slaves who had been helping them; 702 slaves were left to drown."

Factors of Survival

During the slave trade, ship captains often argued over the most efficient way to transport slaves while minimizing disease and loss of life. Their interest derived from discovering how to make the highest profit. Says Thomas Howard, "Some captains favored giving each slave plenty of room, thus giving each and all a better chance for health en route." Other captains thought that filling the ship beyond capacity would ensure the greatest profit from the slaving voyage. Howard described their motto as "don't worry about the loss from disease, because those who survived would more than make up the cost of the dead."

According to many historians today, however, the length of the voyage played a far more significant role than the number of slaves a ship carried. Slaves aboard a ship that took a little over three weeks (the least amount of time an eighteenth-century slaver required to sail from Africa to the New World) had a greater chance of survival than ships that took three months. According to historian Edward Reynolds, "The time-span of the voyage and the danger of... contagious disease probably had more effect on mortality than overcrowding.... The reduced rations sometimes necessary during long voyages lowered the resistance of both slaves and crew.... The longer the voyage the greater the chance of illness and death."

Staying alive amid extreme abuse was the real concern for most Africans and crew members. Even though the slave traders mistreated the slaves profoundly, they had a great interest in keeping the enslaved Africans alive. As one slave trader observed, "There was no profit on a slaving voyage until the Negroes were landed alive and sold."

Emergencies at Sea

On February 29, 1758, Captain Joseph Harrison of the Rainbow wrote to his ship's owners, informing them of his situation. The following portion of his letter, excepted from Black Cargoes, by Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, illustrates the dangers a slave ship captain had to face as he made his slaving voyage.

 "We arrived here on the 25 [February] in company with Capt. Perkins from Bonny, and Capt. Forde from Angola. ... I expected to sail for hence for South Carolina in five days, having on board 225 slaves, all in good health except eight. On the 23rd of June last, I had the misfortune to fall in with a French brig privateer [enemy ship], of fourteen 6-ponders [cannons]. We engaged him four hours, and were so near... that I expected every moment we should run on board him, as he had shot away all my running rigging and the fluke of my small bow anchor. My standing rigging and sails were mostly cut to pieces and the privateer was in a little better condition. Fifteen of his shot went through and through my sides. I lost in my engagement my boatswain.... My first and second mates, three landsmen, and one servant wounded. The privateer being well satisfied sheered off. We were three days in repairing."

Crew Conditions

Crew conditions aboard a slave ship caused significant illness and a notable number of deaths. Although more than half of all crew deaths occurred on the African coast, during the Middle Passage, sailors suffered from conditions similar to those suffered by slaves, including exposure to disease, insufficient food, and deprivation when the voyage took a long time.

In his book Stand the Storm, historian Edward Reynolds describes the treatment of sailors during the Middle Passage.

 "Day and night, seamen were exposed to wind and sea. They were forced to sleep on deck [especially when the ship was overcrowded] exposed to all types of weather, an old tarpaulin thrown over a boom being their only shelter. This exposure frequently caused illness and death.... Often, the crew was given only one meal a day [consisting of a small amount of bread, meat, and water] and because they were the first to be deprived when there was a shortage of provisions, it was common for sailors to beg rations from the slaves. Provisions were commonly refused to sick sailors: on many slavers, the rule was 'no work, no victuals.'"

Opthamalia

One of the worst diseases that slaves and crew could acquire during the voyage across the Atlantic was a blinding eye infection called opthamalia. In his book Black Voyage, Thomas Howard quotes from the letter of J. B. Romaigne, a twelve-year-old boy on his way to visit his father in the West Indies. Romaigne's letter tells what happened as a result of an opthamalia outbreak on the French slaver Le Rodeur .

 "The man who preserved his sight the longest recovered the soonest. To his exertions alone... is it owing that we are now within a few leagues of Guadaloupe, this twenty-second day of June, 1819.... I am myself almost well.... Among the slaves 39 are completely blind.... This morning the Captain called all hands on deck.... The mate picked out thirty nine who were completely blind, and, with the assistance of the rest of the crew, tied a piece of ballast to the legs of each. The miserable wretches were then thrown into the sea."

http://www.bookrags.com/history/african-slave-ships/06.html

The Slave Ship Embodies the Whole Story of Slavery

by Nirit Ben-Ari • 22 May 2014

Nirit Ben-​Ari interviews Marcus Rediker, author of “The Slave Ship: A Human History”

Slave Ship: Held by Anti-​Slavery International

The man refused to eat. He had been sick, reduced to a ‘mere skeleton.’ He had apparently made a decision to die. Captain Timothy Tucker was outraged, and probably fearful that his example might spread to the other 200-​plus captives aboard his ship, the Loyal George, as it made its way across the Atlantic to Barbados in the year 1727. The captain turned to his black cabin boy, Robin, and commanded him to fetch his whip. This was no cat-o’-nine-tails but rather something much bigger, a horsewhip … All the while the man made no resistance and said nothing, which incensed the captain, who now threatened him in his own language: ‘He would tickeravoo him,’ that is, kill him, to which the man answered, ‘Adomma,’ so be it.

This is not the only, nor the most horrific, description in the book “The Slave Ship: A Human History,” by the American historian Marcus Rediker (originally published in 2007 and now available in Hebrew translation). The book recounts the history of the modern slave ship, from the moment the first captives boarded it on the coast of Africa — 12.4 million souls from the 15th to the 19th century — until the last of them disembarked on the shores of the New World. No fewer than 1.8 million of them died during the journey; their bodies were thrown to the sharks that trailed the ships across the sea. The 10.6 million who made it to the other side became slaves on the plantations of the American South or in the Caribbean.

Much has been written about the slave trade, but “The Slave Ship” is the first and only study that focuses solely on the vessels that made slavery possible. It’s not a book to pack for light reading on a beach vacation. Its pages are filled with bloodcurdling accounts of the agonies and tortures undergone by the captives. There are descriptions of coerced cannibalism, the hanging of innocent individuals by their toes, the amputation of limbs, feeding by means of the “speculum oris, the long, thin mechanical contraption used to force open unwilling throats to receive gruel and hence sustenance,” branding with white-​hot metal rods, starvation to death, shackling with handcuffs or by chains to other captives, and rape.

A large part of the book is devoted to the resistance that was mounted on the ships, on a daily basis, and to the captives’ attempts at suicide. Some of them leaped from the ship in mid-​ocean, to be mangled by sharks, and there is testimony about one man who tried to kill himself by slashing his throat with his fingernails.

The purpose of the death and torture was not to satisfy the sadistic streak of the captains or sailors. Indeed, the overseers of the slave trade had a vested interest in having the sea voyage end with the lowest possible number of dead captives, because every live captive was worth money. Their aim was to offer the captives as merchandise on the international slave market.

Race and class

I meet Prof. Marcus Rediker at a hotel in Greenwich Village near New York University, where he has been invited to give a talk on revolts aboard slave ships. Even before we sit down, he tells me he is thrilled about the book’s publication in Hebrew. “My father-​in-​law, Laurence Goldman, was born in the Old City of Jerusalem,” Rediker relates. “He died about 18 months ago, at the age of 95. His family left Jerusalem in 1929, when he was 14. He was born into an ultra-​Orthodox family, mostly rabbis, and became a rabbi himself, until one day he gave it all up and joined the Communist Party, living in New York until his death.” Rediker’s father-​in-​law was not the only rebel in the family.

Rediker himself, who holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh, espouses views that might easily be broached by radical circles of black social-​justice movements. He wants compensation to be paid for slavery, for example, and is a member of a worldwide campaign for the abolition of the death penalty.

“At my 20-​year high school reunion,” he says, “I met an African-​American friend whom I played with on a basketball team. There was a little booklet there about the graduates’ careers. He says, ‘Hey man, I hear you write books.’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ ‘What’s the main idea of these books that you write?’ he asks. I had just finished ‘Who Built America?’ – a history book from the point of view of the working-​class people who built the country. I told him that one of the ideas of the book is that the people who produce the wealth of the world ought to have the wealth of the world. So he leans back and looks at me like this, and I say, ‘What’s the matter – you never heard that idea before?’ ‘No, man,’ he says, ‘that’s not it. I just never heard a white man talk like that.’”

Born in Kentucky to a working-​class family, Rediker grew up in Tennessee and Virginia. His desire to study African-​American history, he says, has its roots in two formative experiences from his youth. “Interracial sports was a big thing when I played basketball in the Richmond, Virginia, high school I attended. As a good basketball player, I was an honorary member of the black community in my school – my first experience of the other world that most white Southerners never experienced. The second experience was that when I worked in a factory for several years, my two best friends there were devotees of Malcolm X, so we were part of a group. But in the same part of the factory there was a grand wizard– the highest rank of the Ku Klux Klan. So there was a lot of racial tension, fist fights, and as someone who chose to be part of the black workers’ group, I was often attacked. What struck me in that setting, though, was this: Here are these two groups, who would rather fight each other than fight the bosses. From that moment, I became interested in the relationship between race and class.”

Rediker decided to make a study of the slave ships while visiting Mumia Abu-​Jamal on death row. Abu-​Jamal, an African-​American activist in the Black Panthers, was convicted of murdering a policeman in Philadelphia in 1981 and sentenced to death. He insisted he had not committed the crime. In 2012, the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment without parole. Abu-​Jamal will turn 60 on April 24.

Rediker’s talks with Abu-​Jamal “took me into a discussion about the relation between race and terror,” he says, “because so much of the experience of race in America has been the experience of terror. The punishments and hangings and mutilations, but also the lynching, survival in the face of police violence – cases such as those of Rodney King and Trayvon Martin.”

In many ways, Rediker observes, “The whole concept of race was created aboard the slave ships. The people who boarded the slave ships did not speak the same language and were often members of ethnic groups that were enemies on land. Many multi-​ethnic Africans boarded the ships as Fante, Igbo, Mandinka, but were unloaded as members of the Negro race, so-​called. That new entity was created under the pressure of violence and terror. I thought I could make a contribution by studying the slave ships, where this relationship was forged.”

The idea that the slave ships produced the notion of “race” is the book’s major contribution to the study of the period of slavery. “In producing workers for the plantation, the ship-​factory also produced ‘race,’” Rediker writes. “At the beginning of the voyage, captains hired a motley crew of sailors, who would, on the coast of Africa, become ‘white men.’ At the beginning of the Middle Passage [across the Atlantic], captains loaded on board the vessel a multi-​ethnic collection of Africans, who would, in the American port, become ‘black people’ or a ‘Negro race.’ The voyage thus transformed those who made it.”

Intricacies of memory

Before he won the Best Picture Academy Award for “12 Years a Slave,” director Steve McQueen accused Hollywood of ignoring the subject of slavery. “The Second World War lasted five years, and there are hundreds of films about [that] and the Holocaust. Slavery lasted 400 years and yet there are less than 20 films about slavery in North America,” McQueen said, in an interview with the British paper The Voice. “We have to open our eyes and look at it and other people have to acknowledge it.” The black community, he added, must remember slavery in the same way the Jews remember the Holocaust. “They believe in the saying ‘Never forget’ when it comes to the Holocaust, and I think we should be the same when it comes to slavery.”

I asked Rediker if he agrees that Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day could act as a model for remembering slavery in the United States. “I think it would be absolutely impossible in this country,” he replied, “because the majority of the white population is utterly opposed to reparations and would not like to remember slavery in any way that might lead to economic and political conclusions. The difference is that the people who want to remember in Israel are in charge in the government. John Conyers [a veteran Democratic Congressman] has for many years proposed, at the beginning of each Congress, a bill to study the effects of slavery in American history. And every year, it’s voted down.”

Do you think the United States does a good job teaching and remembering the history of slavery?

“It’s true, thanks to the rise of the civil rights movement, that the textbooks have changed over time for people on all levels of education, and there is more and more acknowledgement that slavery has been part of our history. But I think that when it comes to really facing all of the darker implications, we still have a long way to go. In the United States, a lot of energy is put into denying that we have this history.

“There is a new African-​American museum that is being created as we speak [on the National Mall in Washington], and slavery will be central to it – and that’s long overdue. You would expect that the United States would have a reason to deny this history: It’s easy to talk about the glorious pages in history, but much tougher to evoke the dark pages. On the other hand, it is very odd, because the abolition of the slave trade is one of the most virtuous things the American government ever did. You’d think they would want to celebrate the fact that finally we were on the right side of history.”

How do you explain this?

“I feel as though the presence of slavery in everything that we do now makes it very hard to talk about. In other words, if it was safely in the past, it would be easy to have a discussion about slavery, but the fact is that we still live with its consequences: Deep structural inequality, poverty, discrimination, premature death for large numbers of people who live in our cities, highly radicalized mass incarceration. If you think of slavery as an injustice that produced lasting consequences across many generations, then you have a responsibility to commit to doing something about it.”

You write that the countries that were involved in the slave trade should pay reparations to the slaves’ descendants. Who would be entitled to these payments?

“I don’t have any specific policy, predictions or suggestions – I think that should be a demand made by social movements. There are lots of creative options – it doesn’t have to be cash payments for individuals. You could set up investment programs in the inner cities, create jobs and arts programs, strengthen public education. Those projects will benefit all citizens, but maybe have a special impact for people who have long felt the legacy of slavery. Reparations are to repair, so what can you do to repair the situation?”

The capitalist connection

You describe the ships as a prison, a factory to produce slaves. Can they be thought of in terms of a floating Auschwitz?

“The ship was a concentration camp, an enclosure of human bodies. Here’s the difference: The point of the slave trade was not to kill people. The point of the slave trade was to get as many living bodies as possible to the New World in order to use them to make money. The idea was not to kill people, even though there were millions of deaths of what we would call ‘collateral damage.’

“In addition, the slave trade went on for 370 years. That in some ways makes it not better, but worse. It went on forever, and its horrors were known to a great many people. The reason it went on is that it was so profitable, because slavery was a centerpiece of international capitalism of those days, and they had to have these bodies. I call slavery the ‘African holocaust.’ I think the millions who died deserve that word.”

The question is whether it’s a capital “h” or not.

“That’s true, that makes a big difference. I give a lot of talks about the slave ships, and the one thing I always try to do is to avoid comparative suffering. Instead of asking who suffered more, we should ask whether there are systemic links among these mass deaths, and how such things are part of the larger history of capitalism.”

To use Hannah Arendt’s term, do you think the evil of the captains and sailors was characterized by “banality”?

“I would be leery of making a moral category like evil primary to our understanding, because evil is a culturally relative term and there are many different ways to understand it. The larger question that Arendt raises is how individuals get caught up in that machinery, without necessarily knowing what the system actually is. I think a lot of people on slave ships did have a pretty good idea of the larger picture of the transatlantic slave trade. Especially the captains, who visited slave plantations in the New World and knew about the production of sugar for the world market. They loaded the sugar onto the same vessels and sailed back to their home port.

“As for the sailors, they died in roughly the same proportion as the slaves, and many of them were forsaken, hungry and sick. The primary causes of the slave trade were the wealthy merchants who owned the ships and organized the trade and made sure that the plantation owners had slaves to produce the sugar. You have to see the system. The sailors signed on for the ship because they had no other way of getting money. Some of them didn’t even sign on, they were taken straight from jail. They were forced laborers, shanghaied.”

Indeed, this is perhaps the most stunning discovery of Rediker’s study — that the drama of the slaves was not the only drama being played out on the ships. The fact is that there were not two but three classes of people on the slave ships. Whereas the captains were the agents of the owners of capital who owned the plantations and the ships, and raked in handsome profits from the slave trade, the ordinary sailors and deckhands were poor white folk from the lower classes. Often they were sold to the slave ships by their debtors, or taken straight from prison, forced to serve their prison term on a slave ship. Rediker found that control on the ship was based on violence meted out to the sailors with the same degree as it was wielded against the captives. In some cases, sailors and deckhands were beaten to death. They received paltry portions of food, their wages were low and their mortality rate high. When the ship arrived in the West Indies, the captain got rid of them, as they were not needed for the voyage back. Many were in a poor state of health, suffering from malaria, retinal diseases, worms, ulcers and parasites. Sick and incapable of working, they became beggars in the ports of the countries in which they were abandoned.

Does their victimhood absolve them of a charge of moral failure?

“Not at all. They are part of it. Their labor is part of the story. But we do have to understand that a slave ship captain, who by today’s standards made hundreds of thousands of dollars on a given voyage, was in a very different situation than a sailor who may have been a forced laborer or was dumped overboard.”

We conclude our conversation by discussing U.S. President Barack Obama – it’s impossible to talk about race in America without mentioning the black family in the White House. Have racial relations in the United States changed under President Obama?

“One of the most pernicious myths out there is this idea that we live in a post-​racial society. I think that is an attempt to deny the history that we have. All kinds of studies show that since Obama’s election, the amount and variety of racism in America has gone up. It’s a reactionary response. I think there are a lot of people who really don’t like having a black president.”

What would you like to see happen?

“I just wish people had the courage to say that it is all right to examine the history of the slave trade and slavery in this country. As I indicated earlier, we still have not yet addressed deeply the dark and violent side of this history, which is perhaps the reason that the discrimination and violence are continuing in the present.”

Published with permission from Haaretz and the authors.

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/05/22/slave-ship-embodies-whole-story-slavery/