A New World of Labor by Simon P. Newman

Author:Simon P. Newman [Newman, Simon P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, West, Europe, Great Britain, General, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Social Science, Slavery
ISBN: 9780812245196
Google: TKvIZHzNHJMC
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-06-14T03:43:06+00:00

Figure 9. Top: “Fishing Cannoes of Mina 5 or 600 at a time.” Bottom: “Negro’s Cannoes, carrying Slaves on Board of Ships at Manfroe,” in Awnsham and John Churchill (compilers), Collection of Voyages (London, 1732), vol. 5, plate 9, p. 156. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

At a time when many Europeans, including sailors, could not swim, coastal Africans were comfortable with and in the sea. “From the seventh or eighth year of their age they learn to swim, which they do with so much success and perfection, that when they are grown up, if their Canoe oversets at any time at Sea, they are not affrighted, but swim back again very quietly from whence they came.” The canoes themselves changed little, if at all, during the era of the transatlantic slave trade.14 John Ogilby provided a detailed description in the late seventeenth century, which would have been just as accurate a century later. The largest canoes were fashioned from a single mighty tree trunk and were as much as forty feet long, five feet wide, and about three feet in depth, and these could carry up to ten tons of goods, but for all their size the skilled canoemen “make such swift-way in still water, that they seem to flye.” The canoes were often painted in bright colors, and decorated “with fetishes, behind and before, to keep them safe, as some people do with guardian angels.”15

Europeans admired the skills involved in making and sailing these canoes, not least because they were unable to emulate them. Occasionally the British bought or made smaller boats for travel up and down the coast, but they rarely enjoyed the services of Britons skilled in constructing and maintaining such craft, let alone sailors who could navigate the treacherous coastal waters. One Cape Coast Castle governor wrote pointedly that he “Wishes you [the RAC] had a Carpenter that understood ye making great Cannoe or small vessels it would be of singular Service.” Royal African Company officials enumerated the goods and people carried between ships and shore by the canoemen, the terms of their employment, their payment, and the regular negotiations between the canoemen and their employers. Long letters back to London, as well as the accounts of visitors to the Gold Coast, make clear European displeasure at the relative power and autonomy of this group of African workers, with constant complaints about theft, refusal to work, and other actions by the canoemen. It is far harder to hear the authentic voices of the canoemen themselves in these records, although the rare occasions on which their sentiments were recorded by British officials, together with the actions they undertook collectively during the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, combine to illuminate their evolving sense of an identity and a power as skilled workers upon whom Europeans and West Africans alike depended.16

Whether newly arriving on ships from Europe, or long-term residents of the Gold Coast, Britons constantly marveled at the skill of the canoemen, whose vessels “swim at the top of the foam” in waters that “no European boat can live in.

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