The Sons of Neptune and the Sons of Ham: A History of Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes Emma L. Christopher University College London A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy At the University of London Department of History University College London May 2002 ProQuest Number: U643813 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U643813 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis studies sailors who worked onboard British and North American slave ships between 1750 and 1808. Its starting point is the discrepancy between maritime historiography and that of the slave trade: in the former seamen appear as radical, anti-authoritarian figures who were far more accepting of black men and women than other occupational groups in this era. In slave trade literature, by contrast, sailors appear as shadowy figures ready to do the captain’s bidding, which generally meant abusing, maltreating and assaulting men and women of African origin. Through detailed analysis of the lives and working conditions of those who were lowly employees in the slave trade, it is possible to see that the much-vaunted radicalism of seamen as a group grew at least in part from their work onboard ‘guinea ships’. Freedom and fair payment for labour were hardly unconnected to slavery and the slave trade, and sailors who were involved in the delivery of slaves to the Americas had ample occasion to compare their own situation with that of slaves. It was this which, to some extent, led to their famous politicised protests for freedom and better pay around the Atlantic rim. In addition the slave trade brought European seamen into contact with people of African origin on a large scale. Sailors on slave ships worked alongside free Africans and Afro-Caribbeans at all points of their journey, and often had men of African origin as colleagues even during the middle passage. While seamen were certainly the perpetrators of many of the middle passage’s atrocities, racial constructs and interracial interaction were vastly more complex during a slaving voyage than is often accepted. Table of Contents Introduction Race and Class in “the most magnificent drama.. .of human history” Part 1 Chapter 1 Galley Slavery and Free Waged Labour 12 Chapter 2 Black Jacks and the Trade in Black Gold 44 Chapter 3 The Bloody Rise of Western Freedom 78 Part 2 Chapter 4 The Sons of Neptune among the Sons of Ham 110 Chapter 5 Sea Changes 141 Chapter 6 ‘This Market of Human Woe.’ 170 Afterwards The Transatlantic Slave Trade in Global Perspective 198 Appendix 1 Black Sailors on Liverpool Slave Ships, 1794-1805 203 Appendix 2 Black Sailors on Rhode Island Slave Ships, 1803-1807 207 Bibliography 209 Introduction Race and Class in ‘^the most magnificent drama...of human history”^ When Derek Walcott turned his attention to the slave trade in his epic poem Omeros, he ended the beautifully haunting description of its victims by admonishing today’s tourists visiting the Caribbean to “remember us to the black waiter bringing the bill.”^ What Walcott’s poem so eloquently illustrates is that even now the wounds inflicted by the slave trade are far from healed, and the racial injustices it created still cut a cataclysmic divide through western society. Indeed, the middle passage—the voyage from Africa to the Americas—is often used to symbolise the shared pain of all those who have suffered and do suffer as the result of racism.^ Although academic scholarship, concerned with historical data rather than heritage, and facts rather than symbolism, remains somewhat alien to this public image of the slave trade, nevertheless works that gaze out from Africa into diaspora, or conversely look east over the ocean from the Americas identifying African roots, partially address this search for answers and meaning. Another strand of historiography surrounding the slave trade is perforce even further removed from the wider perception of the slave trade, being the study of profit and loss, numbers and figures, accounts and economics. Philip Curtin’s 1969 The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, the first monograph to seriously attempt to calculate the number of Africans who were traded across the Atlantic Ocean, is a work historians relied upon, with modifications, until the release of The Trans-Atlantic ' W.E.B. Du Bois, quoted in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors. Slaves. Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000)152. ^ (New York: Farrar, 1990) 149. ^ I accept that the term ‘middle passage’ is unacceptable in many ways, and to many people, because of its Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, as to the majority of seamen of many nationalities the voyage was a ‘triangular’ affair, o f which the middle, transatlantic section was the most feared, I have used it in this work. Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM in 1999/ Others have been concerned not so much with the number of Africans bought and sold, but the profits garnered by slaving merchants/ Without such facts and figures this history would be without an anchor, to use a suitable maritime metaphor. Despite this rich and diverse historiography, and to some extent because of the gap between public perception and academic study, a large group of people involved in the trade is hidden from view, appearing as ‘bit part’ players if they emerge on stage at all. Bridging that gap, the starting point of this work is neither the merchants’ economics nor the slaves’ suffering, but the men who were paid employees on slave ships, the irrepressible Jack and his brother tars. There were approximately 330,000 seamen involved in Britain’s slave trade during 1680-1780, but they are infrequently mentioned in slave trade studies, and analysed even less.^ The implication of sailors being mentioned so seldom and their separate perspective rarely being acknowledged is that lowly tars appear passively complicit figures in the travesty wrought by slaving merchants. When a slave trade sailor appears in the literature, it is commonly with cat-o’-nine-tails or branding iron in hand, firing fiercely on rebel slaves, or mercilessly raping a captive African woman. This image of them is not incorrect; certainly seamen were responsible for many of the individual travesties of the trade. All these aspects of a slave ship sailor’s multipart character and behaviour are examined in detail in chapter five. Where this representation falls short is not that it wrongly ascribes brutality to seamen—that they were often cruel is beyond doubt—but that it tacitly suggests that they were consciously occupied in the production of one of the most repellent racial injustices the world has known. Along with the American or Caribbean slaveowner wielding his whip, a sailor standing over a captive African with a branding iron is part of our collective imagery not just of almost indescribable inhumanity, but racial hatred on a scale, in terms of longevity at least, virtually unsurpassed. ^ (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) [hereafter cited as Eltis, CD-ROM with, where relevant, the ID number of the voyage being discussed]. ^ A large field of literature has developed around the assertions Eric Williams made in Capitalism and Slaverv (London: Andre Deutsch, T‘ published 1944). For a recent review of this debate and the latest understand regarding the profits garnered by the slave trade, see David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “The Importance o f Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain” Journal o f Economic History 60:1 (2000) 123-144. A major problem with this supposition is that it is thoroughly in contradiction to the way seamen as a group in this time period are represented in the separate historiography of sailors in all trades, and in the profession in general. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks argues that white sailors in the eighteenth century Atlantic were more accepting of blacks as colleagues than their landlubber peers, often working alongside them as equals. Furthermore he argues that they “empathized with the plight of blacks” in general.^ Julius S. Scott has argued that in the Caribbean, sailors and slaves often found “common cause”. He posits slave trade seamen, furthermore, as major purveyors of information about the French Revolution and British abolitionism to West Indian enslaved field hands.® In fact, the shared history of seamen and slaves, as Scott suggests, is in turn part of a much bigger history, that of the radical Atlantic. For example, sailors and slaves famously fought side by side during the opening frays of the American Revolution. The rebels who stormed Newgate gaol in London in 1780 consisted of both sailors and freed slaves working together. All around the Atlantic in this era sailors and (former) slaves were a visible and vocal element of the rebellious mobs that so terrified the established authorities.^ In its widest implication, therefore, the picture of seamen revealed in these radical histories not only challenges the racial arguments of slave trade history, but also the economics embedded therein.