The Slave Ship by Rediker Marcus

Author:Rediker, Marcus [Rediker, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-03-01T08:00:00+00:00

Sailors, Slaves, and Violence

The Liverpool writer “Dicky Sam” described the violent reality of the slave ship this way: “the captain bullies the men, the men torture the slaves, the slaves’ hearts are breaking with despair.” The statement expresses an important truth. Violence cascaded downward, from captain and officers to sailors to the enslaved. Sailors, often beaten and abused themselves, took out their plight on the even more abject and powerless captives under their supervision and control. How this happened on any given ship would depend to a large extent on the captain, who had enormous latitude to run the ship as he wished. Even though captains and officers were the prime agents of disciplinary violence, sailors occupied the front line of social war on the ship. This must be emphasized, because James Field Stanfield, in his dramatic rendering of the slaving voyage, tended to blur the line between sailors and slaves.37

The least documented type of violence on the slave ship was probably the most pervasive—the rough, sometimes cruel treatment of daily life. Dr. Ecroyde Claxton, surgeon on the Young Hero, noted that Captain Molineux treated the enslaved well but the sailors did not. On one occasion, when a group of sick slaves were brought on deck and covered with a sail, it was soon smeared “with blood and mucus, which involuntarily issued from them.” The sailors, who had to clean the sail, flew into a rage and beat them “inhumanly.” This made the sick slaves so fearful that they thereafter “crept to the tub, and there sat straining and straining.” This, the physician noted, produced “prolapsus ani, which it was entirely impossible to cure.” This was one of thousands of instances of everyday terror.38

The greatest explosion of violence from a ship’s crew followed a failed slave insurrection. Ringleaders would be gruesomely punished by captains and mates on the main deck, in full view of all the enslaved. When the officers tired themselves by repeated lashing, they passed the cat to sailors, who continued the flaying. On other occasions sailors were known to torment defeated rebels by pricking their skin with the points of the cutlasses. In a few cases, the sailors’ work included actual execution, by horrific means. Sailors thus not only maintained captivity, they viciously punished those who tried to escape it.

Another extremity of violence enacted by the crew, showing that “work” sometimes included outright murder, was illustrated aboard the Zong in 1781. Captain Luke Collingwood sailed with his crew of seventeen and a “cargo” of 470 tight-packed slaves from West Africa to Jamaica. The ship soon grew sickly: sixty Africans and seven members of the crew perished. Fearful of “a broken voyage,” Collingwood called the crew together and told them that “if the slaves died a natural death, it would be the loss of the owners of the ship; but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters” who had insured the voyage. Some members of the crew, including mate

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