Download PDF | (New Black Studies Series) Sowande M Mustakeem - Slavery at Sea_ Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage-University of Illinois Press (2016).
289 Pages
Acknowledgments
This book is marked by death on all sides through many forms and unexpected moments. Writing about slavery and terror while living with the unending cycles of death does not make for an easy living. Through the losses, I unknowingly found greater perspective over time on how best to navigate and transmit the coexisting worlds of the living and dead. This project and my own intellectual evolution have greatly expanded through a winding path connected to a diverse and large collective of people who each helped to make me a better historian, intellectual, and, most of all, an active and informed thinker about the world. I acknowledge and take full responsibility for any missing names or errors and ask that they be attributed to the erratic mind of an academic caregiver and not my heart.
The earliest support came in my undergraduate years at Elon University, when I knew less of what I envisioned for myself as my history professor, Dr. Mary Jo Festle, saw a spark of passion within me and nurtured my growing understanding of black history, gender, and civil rights, but also how to begin to walk the path of a historian—appreciating the ability to see all sides of humanity while discovering the best ways to document and mark time. Her incredibly meticulous and supportive teaching and mentoring still shape my approach to the ongoing evolution in the world of teaching and scholarship. The adventurous scholar I am, curious about the world’s deeply vast ways was also encouraged in me at a young age by a great many, including: Dr. Wilhemina Boyd, Professor Anne Cassebaum, Dr. Joan Gunderson, Dr. Chalmers and Pam Brumbaugh, Professor Tom Henricks, Tait Arendt, Dr. Angela Lewelyn Jones, Dr. Thomas Erdmann, Professor Iris Chapman, Dr. Leo Lambert, Mrs. Sara Peterson, Professor Helen Mackay, Professor Prudence Layne, Janice Ratliff, Robert Springer, Dr. L’- Tanya Richmond, and Father Dwight McBride, alon with connections and vital friendships forged among many, most especially Susie Mahoney and Shellie Johnson, two near and dear sisters on my path. I am eternally grateful for the space granted at Elon University enabling me to actualize a quest for deeper understanding of a gendered historical past through African and African American Studies.
My time in graduate school greatly expanded my view of untapped possibilities while also electrifying the collegial ties, pursuit of ideas, accountability, and ongoing meanings of community that solidified my own understanding of a scholar’s role for the present, future, and past. This crystallized first at Ohio State University in the Department of Black Studies, where I gained my deepest immersion in the actual discipline, its origins, its fights, its legacies, its needs, and political evolutionary struggles that many committed to the production of knowledge must endure for the uplift of many others. This greater appreciation for self, identity, and the understanding of on-the-ground scholaractivism began from the moments, conversations, laughs, and cries shared with my beloved professor, teacher, and mentor, the late Dr. William E. Nelson Jr. His absolute unwavering support on all my still budding ideas is the reason my future study of the Middle Passage exists today. I am also grateful for the very meaningful interactions shared with Drs. James Upton, Linda James-Myers, Magbaily Fyle, Leslie Alexander-Austin, and Lupenga Mphande, who through conversations, readings, and classes each helped to expand my wonders of the African diaspora and its future meanings. I also learned all over again the value of inspiration that exists at all levels, but through that I learned most about the power of open love, support, and unending laughs shared with Mrs. Shirley Turner and Ms. Jeanie, who both equally made my days in Ohio that much more cozy and always appreciated.
The external learning on the role of the black scholar at Ohio State University came through my lifelong ties within the Black Graduate Student Caucus that permanently forged my understanding that “being here is not enough,” but instead it is the work that we do as a collective for the uplift of many. For this and much more I wish to thank the circle of fellow graduate students who the and still now further enrich my life in many ways: Erik Wilson and Damian Wilson, Charlie “CP” Pryor and the Pryor family, Leon Stevenson and family, Michael “Mike J” Jackson, John Nathaniel Singer, Esther Jones Cowan, Jelani Favors, Alvin Conteh, Christine Platt Patrick, Staceyanne Headley, Corey Posey, Veianca Millet, Ezemenari Obasi, Talitha LeFlouria, Travis Simmons, Javonne Stewart, Vincent and Tanisha Briley, April Peters Hawkins, Rich Milner, Derrick White, Cicero Fain, and Ernest Perry. Iam even more grateful for the Black Graduate Caucus for strengthening our ties. I also thank my many Ohio families who supported me through this project, including my cousins Angela “Angie” Terry, Daniel Chadwick, Rodney Chadwick, and Aunt Mary and Uncle Lowell Terry, for making me and my friends always feel welcome and truly at home during time off. My other family and, most of all, Dr. Moriba and Barbara Kelsey and the surrounding tight-knit Columbus ASCAC community, who each lifted me up close and from afar amid my expansion and always reminded me of the bright future ahead, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Once enrolled, ironically at the suggestion of Dr. Mary Jo Festle, in the Comparative Black History (CBH) doctoral program in the History Department at Michigan State University, my intellectual pool expanded on even more profound levels. Within the confines of East Lansing my life changed most professionally through incredible support both institutionally and personally in every direction on my path, facilitating optimal growth to take full bloom. Those of us within the CBH program were extremely fortunate to have had the chance to study and learn from rigorous intellectuals and institution builders who exposed us at every level to the necessity of knowledge production, mentoring, conferences, supporting peers, and being thorough in our scholarship. This came especially from the many opportunities we were offered to travel to national conferences, visit archives, participate in study-abroad programs, and receive historical grants, and from the belief that the future of our own work truly matters. Professor Darlene Clark Hine showed, taught, and lifted each of us to our future potentials through these years. I owe a great debt to her, along with many others, including Peter Beattie, Laurent Dubois, and Jeffrey Wray, for furthering my intellectual advancement. To be a part of the continued institutional building and expansion, with this book being published in the New Black Studies Series edited by Dr. Darlene Clark Hine and Dr. Dwight McBride, is truly an honor.
This book and its development leading to what follows in published form has been made possible due to the tireless commitment of two professors, mentors, and close friends—Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and Dr. Pero Dagbovie—who individually and in tandem worked with and for me as a young aspiring historian, showing me even more concretely how to establish a viable career with rigorous and relevant scholarship. My love of history, the commitment to the scholarship, the archiving and telling the most deeply rich and researched stories of the lives of enslaved women and men, being always forward thinking, extending and forging generational legacies came most through one of the rarest gifts I gained when I chose to go to Michigan State University. When I was Daina’s first PhD student, she poured every bit of effort into me to prepare me for the future, but she also inspired me, believed in me, restored my faith in the utility of academia as a black female scholar, showed me how to be in the archives, shared her family with me across the globe, and most of all exposed and connected me to the networks and opportunities that enable generational legacies that will extend well beyond both and all of us. The conversations and work we do are building a future still unseen, and I thank you infinitely for believing in me and for believing with me that the Middle Passage had a deeper history still untold. To Pero, I say it all the time: thank you for keeping me encouraged to stay focused, remained grounded, stay on the grind and active in producing scholarship that extends the legacy that Carter G. Woodson bestowed upon those of us who follow. My publishing record reflects the many conversations and nudges over the years; thank you for showing and telling me how stay active and relevant. You are a true and trusted friend, inspiration, and always intellectually supportive force that I am eternally proud to have on my path and merely a moment’s call away.
My love of deeper reading and insightful questions came from the profound intellectual brilliance I was surrounded by in Michigan with Kennetta Hammond Perry, Eric Duke, Christina Cadora Webb, Meredith Roman, Mike Pfister, Marcie Cowley, Fumiko Sakashita, Ronald DeSuze, Mary Clingerman, Mary Phillips, Kafentse Chike, Osie Lee Gaines II, Taki Grant, Frank Alveranga, John Grant, Marshanda Smith, Ken Marshall, Dawn Curry, Mona Jackson, Rashida Harrison, Matt Pettway, Jennifer Barclay, Nik Ribianzsky, David Carletta, Piril Atabay, Keina J. Staley, Carlos Aleman, Jason Friedman, Lauren Anderson, Kelly Palmer, Amy Hay, Dan and Jamie Dalrymple, Nothkula Cele, Ryan Pettigrill, Ted Mitchell, Bethany Hicks, Ibra Sene, Asaan Starr, Alberto Nickerson, Leslie and Eric Washington, Bayyinah Jeffries, Darcia Grant, Harry Odamtten, Daniel Davis, Lindsey Gish, Chantalle Verna, Austin Jackson, Walter Sistrunk, and Brittany O’Neal.
This project spans various parts of the Atlantic because of the many conferences from which this book has received amazing support and excitement about the need for this area of historical scholarship. It would have not been possible without the array of libraries and archives whose collections I benefited from enormously across different parts of the country and diverse corners of the world, including the Duke University Special University Collections, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the South Carolina Historical Society, the Medical University Archives of the University of South Carolina, the John Carter Brown Library, the South Carolina Department of History and Archives, the South Caroliniana Library, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the New York Public Library, New York Academy of Medicine, the New York Historical Society, Liverpool Record Office, National Maritime Museum in London, University of Liverpool Sydney Jones Library, National Archives of UK Public Record Office, Royal College of Surgeons, Wellcome Medical Library, Royal Bank of England Archives, and the National Maritime Museum in Liverpool.
Even more, this book and its process has endured it own fascinating and sometimes uncertain journey to publication, and I am ever more fortunate that this project landed at the University of Illinois Press. Most of all lam grateful for continued interest expressed from Larin McLaughlin, who then passed it on to one of the kindest, most diligent, professional, and biggest champion editors I have ever met in an editor with Dawn Durante. She embodies what a real editor is by being truly thorough, transparent, empathic, passionate, and she remained enthusiastic about our partnered ideas on seeing this book and its future potential through to publication. Thank you a million times over to Jennifer Holzner for her incredibly artistic eye in helping to produce what I am more than certain will become an unforgettable book cover. Thank you also to Tad Ringo, Kevin Cunningham, Roberta Sparenberg, Laurie Matheson, and the entire UIP staff for fully believing in this book and its future promise.
My move to St. Louis has connected me to an incredible circle of support, love, and universal compassion on multiple levels of my life. My path is truly enhanced in connecting with and learning deeply from Victor Farwell; I thank you for lifting me even higher toward ascension and destined greatness. Along with him I am forever grateful to Jason Edwards, Matthew Wilke, Gayle Farwell, Jennifer Harpring, Walter Beckham, Selena Johnson, Simone Phillips, Joan Ferguson, Anahata Roach, John and Linda Vlasick, Beth Thater Thoesel, Allison Vandersand, Adam Richard, Justina Sharp, Travis Stephenson, Joseph Leaderbrand, Duane “Jingo” Williams, Cindy Lewis, Christie Lewis Agate and family, Shannon Dial, Cassie Overturf, Larry Tucker, Glenn Williams, Mark Lewis, Brandon Bokern, Jessica Caimi, Courtney DeLaria, Kira Gill, Anika and Will Townsel, Tiffany Monique, Tia Gaines, James Cassidy, Tiffany Barber, Broderick Pritchard, John Cobb, Dino Chase, Brad Stephens, Bradford James, Aaron Jacobs, Moondog Guebert, P. J. Heydt, Zach Jennings, Barrington Gates, Christian Paul, Aaron Perks, Tyrone Swinton, Val Hartwig, Don Tinsley, Valerie Myers, Alexis Tucci, Filomena Consiglio, Sarah Hayes, Kaci Morgan, T, James “Needles” Biko, Patrick O’Neill, James Savens, Christine Hughes, Stephanie Williams, Eric Littles, Jessica and Chris Clark and family, Aaron Blinkley, Anthony Hann, Michael Miller, Samantha Lee Braswell, Kat Welsh, and Robbie Luepker.
My family has proved to be a major source of strength through often unbearable times sincerely thank the many who have loved me both close and from afar throughout the years and trials, including Evelyn Lynch, Deardria Nesbit, Doris and Dot Black, the Harris-Eades family, the Hsi family, Missie Shealey, Janiyah Grant, Mike Shealey, Kelley Alexander, Miriam Phields, Uncle Sly Sanders and family, Uncle Kenny and Aunt Shirley Wood, Kenny Wood Jr. and family, my Mustakeem family in Atlanta, Vivian, Gene, and Teddy Buckingham and family, Grandpa “Dad” Preston Benton and the entire Benton family, Kenneth Butler and family, Selma Harkness, Euzelle and Bert Wood, Woody Wood, Diane Wood, Rose and Uncle Bill Salisbury, the Justice family, the Terry family, Conchita and Jai Battle, and the multitude of cousins, aunts, and uncles everywhere who loved me enough to allow the studies to come first. As time has gone by with this book’s evolution, I have also sadly lost a number of family, friends, and other people close to me whose energy and presence still shape this project in meaningful ways, including Grandma Marjorie Wood, Grandma Lena Benton, Grandma Helen Leggette, Queen Nzinga Heru, Shawn Yates, Bob Donaldson, Jamel Houseworth, Daina Howell, Keith Wood, Dean James E. McLeod, beloved historian Stephanie Camp, and more recently Jarrett Cochese Greene.
The greatest muses in my life are my students, because they hold the vision for social change and correcting humanity in the near and far future toward greatness. I have been fortunate to have taught many years’ worth of students who inspired the work, questioned greater transparency on academia and the writing process, and demanded to know why certain people and marginalized narratives were left out of the dialogue even in twenty-first-century historical narratives. I am especially grateful for the first students I learned from amid their own education at Ohio State University: Jamie Columbine, Ricardo Reis, and Brandi Hogan. Later at Michigan State University: Meagan Mason, Ileana Cortez, Ashley Eigner, Jenae Chinn, Eric Washington, Oke Chukwu, Jamal Williams, Jessica Shawver, Raven Jones, and Courtney Griffith. At Washington University in St. Louis, my cup runneth over with those I can only thank through mere words: Lauren Henley and family, Jasmine Knowles, Atima Lui, Jyotsna Ramachandran, Chyna Bowen and family, Susan Kunihiro and family, Josh Smith, Ashley Fox, Tiffany Anne Johnson, Ryan Forman, Will Hawley, Rachel Margolin and family, Melanie Gatewood, Georgia McCandlish, Briana Prickens, Leslie Salisbury, Dylan Simonsen and family, Kawana Tharps, Ahkianne Wanliss, Yasmin Boakye, Sujay Kulsthrestha, Sara Harris, Ali Karamustafa, Josh Aiken, Ezinne Arizor, Michele Hall, Harry Kainen, Nelson Nwumeh, Beth Pearl-Barr and family, Lori Schlatter, Ben Shanahan, Olivia Suber, Justin and Julian Nicks, Rachel Hoffman, Alex Novelli, Brandon Wilson, Chandler Malone, Jared Skoff, Katie Yun, Lee Winter, Olivia Marcucci, Rori Bridge, Shira Weissmann, Tobeya Ibitayo, Reuben Riggs-Bookman, Julie Kennedy, Courtney Gray, Candice Harden, Latrionna Moore, James Mason, Chris Halline, Hallie Dobkien-Gellar, Courtney Amegashie, Ari Salzberg, Scotty Jacobs and family, Jamal Sadrud Din, Jessica Simon, Liam O’ Donnell, Lori Schlatter, Samuel Lai, Satchel Siegel, Jason Silberman, and Zoe Sissac, among a multitude of many others who will always matter to me.
I have likewise amassed a collective of newer friends, colleagues, mentors, neighbors, and lifelong friends across the world through the decades and mean- ingful periods of my life who have established irreplaceable ties, who continued to call, and who also have kept me focused and motivated on the end goal. I thank especially Nzinga Kemp and Roshmond Patten, Holly Smith, Teishan Latner, Eric Kimball and family; Shellie and Anthony Pighet; Richard Mizelle, Rashaad Johnson, Jeff Fortin, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Sharita Jacobs, Nadia Brown, J. T. Roane, Bryan Sinche, Kevin Dawson, Brandon Winford, Jessica Millward, Jessica Johnson, Jamie Thomas, Sharla Fett, Thomas Foster, Keona Irving, Maurice Hobson, Scot Brown, David Goldberg, Zebulon Miletsky, Michele Reid, Abou Bambara, Tiffany Gill, Meghan Ferrence, Shirletta Kinchen, Treva Lindsey, Amrita Chakbarti Myers, Stacey Robertson, James Conway, Reggie Ellis, Thabiti Willis, Jakobi Williams, Amilcar Shabazz, Christina Davis, Jonathan Smith, Nadia Brown, Cheryl Laird, Amani Marshall, Persavia Praylow, Bryan Yates, Curtis Austin, Sherwin Bryant, Walter Rucker, Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, Katrina Thompson, Fatima Muse, Justin Hansford, Stephan Bradley, Charles Berry, Mr. Bill Durbin, Mr. Freeman and family, Meche and Joe Jackson and family, and my extended family Adell and Christine Patton.
I also have become known for forging circles of friends wherever I go, and that has proved a great source of strength and beauty through adversity, most especially through the ties that will always connect me with my dear sisterfriends Makiba Foster, Danice Brown, Michelle Adewumi, Korina Jocson, and Sasha Turner Bryson. Thinking on the necessity of these ties within and beyond home, I brought together several “sista-scholars” for our generation, and I am eternally grateful for the late-night calls, the tears, the grind-out conversations, and the belief continually shared that our work will soon collectively matter. Thank you for our unbreakable connection: Lashawn Harris, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Deirdre Cooper Owens, Sasha Turner Bryson, and Talitha LeFlouria.
At Washington University in St. Louis, I have been truly blessed. Iam much more clear in my place, purpose, and future contributions that have been and continue to be supported. But most of all, I have learned hands-on from an amazing array of scholars, friends, and colleagues over the years who demonstrated and taught me the necessity of mentor relationships and the spirit of true friendship and fantastic colleagues to work and live among: Andrea Friedman, Iver Bernstein, Gerald Early, David Konig, Daniel Bornstein, Anjanette Wells, Lorena Walsh, Jason Purnell, Darrell Hudson, Jeffrey McCune, Leah Merrifield, Jill Stratton, Harvey Fields, Matt Devoll, Bill Tate, Garrett Duncan, Carol Camp Yeakey, Rudolph Clay, Sheri Notaro, Janary Stanton, Margaret Williams, Pete Benson, Sheryl Peltz, Raye Mahaney, Linda Nicholson, Rebecca Wanzo, Bill Maxwell, Shefali Chandra, William Tate, Kimberly Norwood, Ron Himes, Samba Diallo and Wilmetta Toliver-Diallo, Venus Bivar, Ignacio Nacho Sanchez, Lori Watt, Daniel Bornstein, Alex Dube, Kenneth Ludmerer, Steven and Liling Miles, Heidi Kolk, Jenni Harpring, J. Dillon Brown, and Joe Lowenstein. The incredible junior faculty members at my university keep me both grounded and truly invigorated, including sharing intellectual space with Jonathan Fenderson, Douglas Flowe, Michelle Purdy, Monique Bedasse, Lerone Martin, Amber Musser, Anika Walke, Trevor Sangrey, Ebony Duncan, Vernon Mitchell, Diana Montano, Jordache Ellapen, and Maryan Soliman. I also remember and hold dear the years shared with the growing momentum of earlier intellectual exchanges forged then with and among other invigorating colleagues, including Sonia Lee, Yuko Miki, Paul Ramirez, Billy Acree, Derek Pardue, and Ignacio Infante.
There is a special group of leaders, friends, and exceptional models who represent still unimagined possibilities of collegiality and visionary support as they generously shared with and through me institutional support, incredible mentoring, and friendship through partnerships on new ideas. I thank you most of all to Vice Provost Adrienne Davis; you are a model of grace, empathy, incredible awareness and support, and insight on the future and its needs, and we are all, especially myself, much better because of your presence and vitality. My path has been incredibly supported by a great many in various corners, but my expansion has been unparalleled through the enduring connections and incredible collegial ties shared and maintained with Tim and Ann Parsons, Hillel and Debbie Kieval, Jean Allman, Peter Kastor, Dean Jen Smith, Assistant Vice Provost Rochelle Smith, Gerald Early, Rafia Zafar, Shanti Parikh, and Christine Johnson, each of whom has shown and taught me how to be even sharper in the prose of life as a scholar, leader, and friend. My many ideas would likewise have not ever taken shape in various ways without the forceful support and dynamic partnering put into motion with Jonathan Fenderson, Dean Mary Laurita, Makiba Foster, Sheretta Butler-Barnes, Paul Steinbeck, and Douglas Flowe through various exhilarating projects; they each reinforce the power of the collective toward igniting innovative real change.
Over the years I have learned the true value of mentors and mentoring, and they come in many forms at moments when we most need them. This project has grown exponentially over the years because of the unparalleled power of legacy, friendship, and mentoring. I am particularly indebted to conversations, conference commentary, and strategic guidance offered on my way forward from Marcus Rediker, Douglas Egerton, Vincent Brown, Richard Follett, Barbara Krauthamer, Jim Downs, Robin D. G. Kelley, Ed Baptist, Ben Vinson, Marcus Cox, Clarence Lang, Jeffrey Bolster, Glenn Gordinier, Ann Little, Christopher Brown Jr., Tera Hunter, Todd Savitt, David Barry Gaspar, David Roediger, Vincent Harding, Leslie Harris, Jennifer Morgan, Herman Bennett, Stephanie Smallwood, Peter Weinstein, Jane Landers, Wilma King, Heather Thompson, Kali Gross, Cheryl Hicks, and Khalil Muhammad. I end in thanking both of my parents for this path, my father, Mohammed “M” Mustakeem, and my mother, Velma J. Mustakeem, for making this entire path and soul contract possible. My mother, my best friend, I thank for her unwavering support, and for incredible and rather uncanny understanding of the academic and writing process beyond her own stroke survival. She continues to show me and the world around her strength, love, compassion, endurance, and zest for life that shines through her brilliance and greatness of her own daily miracles, which I am blessed to bear witness to and help facilitate. Thank you for another lifetime of memories, laughter, and for nurturing the nerd within me toward absolute greatness. May the future and days ahead become even brighter for us both.
Introduction
Middle Passage Studies and the Birth of Slavery at Sea
In a 1734 published account, British seaman William Snelgrave detailed his experiences while employed in the African slave trade. During his stay at Jaqueen, west of Benin in the Gold Coast region, a linguist brought him two black females for purchase, requesting that he “not let them be redeemed by any one that should offer to do it.”! Snelgrave obliged the proposal and inspected both women, estimating one was “fifty, and the other about twenty Years old.” Variables he used to calculate the bondwomen’s ages go unrecorded, although his estimations hinged on their displayed bodies—namely, their capacity for future childbearing. During initial assessments he determined the older female “was past her Labour” and, as he declared, “not for my purpose.” He chose instead to buy the younger female, believing she offered greater long-term productive and reproductive value. Snelgrave’s refusal of the older captive prompted an immediate reaction from the interpreter: “It would highly oblige the King” that he purchase both females. Yet Snelgrave suspected that the coastal men “made use of the Kings Name, to get rid of an old Woman,” leading him to cease negotiations.
Shortly after the failed proposition, Snelgrave gained insight into the circumstances surrounding the rejected older woman.” Disappointed with the female’s inability to secure a buyer, the ruler’s aide “ordered her to be destroyed” through forcible death. “The Woman’s Hands being tied behind her, and her Feet across,” several designated men put her “into the Cannoe, and carried [her] off about half a Mile from the Shore.” They steered into deeper waters, casting the enslaved woman overboard, after which they witnessed some “voracious Fishes” begin to “tear her to pieces in an instant.” Her seaborne execution reaffirmed racial and cultural biases that Snelgrave harbored against Africans given what he characterized as “the Barbarity of those people.” The next day, however, he received a letter from his chief mate explaining that instead of falling victim to the jaws of traveling sharks, “the Woman was on board our Ship.”
Traveling back from the coast, one of Snelgrave’s officers “spied something floating on the Sea” alerting his attention. “[He] perceived [it] to be a human Body lying on its back,” seeing the mysterious individual “now and then spurting Water out at the Mouth.” Realizing the person “was still living, he ordered [it] to be taken into the Boat” and out of the water beneath. Several crewmen moved the female into the dinghy, untied the rope restricting her movement, and “chafed her Limbs, and rolled her Body about” until she successfully “discharged a good quantity of salt Water out of her Mouth.” The sailors, unaware of the death sentence imposed on shore, remained perplexed with how “she had escaped the Sharks” routinely pervasive within open seawaters. The bondwoman’s escape, facilitated by his own crew, forced Snelgrave to grow apprehensive “if the King of Dahome’ should come to know” about her near missed tragedy.* He immediately ordered his first mate “to charge our People to keep the thing secret.” After concluding affairs on shore, Snelgrave rejoined the vessel, conducted an immediate body examination to locate any lingering injuries or ailments, and, more critically, he probed how the bondwoman became enslaved. Relying on an interpreter, he queried her relationship with the local ruler, to which she responded that “she would never confess the reason of the King’s displeasure against her.” Soon after, the unnamed captive altered her story, declaring “she knew not that she had in any respect offended him.” Still unclear is whether this captive was unaware of committing any previous wrongdoing or if her response was perhaps a protective measure used in lieu of possibly facing her accusers. The interpreter, fully cognizant of the prevailing circumstances, shared with Snelgrave that the female’s removal “was on account of her assisting some of the King’s Women in their Amours.’”*
Snelgrave remained uncertain about the bondwoman’s movement into slavery, yet his curiosity did not hinder him from capitalizing on her unexpected inclusion as part of the ship’s cargo. The crew maintained secrecy of her stowage, confining her within the hold and forcing her to journey across the Atlantic, leaving untold the experiences she endured and bore witness to on ship. Once docked overseas, this female captive, formerly cast and treated as worthless, was sold to an acquaintance of Snelgrave in Antigua. Bartered, sold, and exiled into a foreign space, she, much like scores of other slaves, never gained an opportunity to share her personal testimony of captivity. Historical details illuminating who this victim was, her life in Africa, the experiences she endured at sea, negotiations conducted for her overseas sale, or even how and if she survived enslavement in an unfamiliar environment are unrecorded. The fate of the younger female offered with the transported bondwoman is also obscured. What was the relationship of these two females? How long and with how many slave traders were they marketed? Did the king’s aide impose the bondwoman’s sentence, or was the operation perhaps a sole endeavor instigated by the linguist? Why was her execution left to be carried out at sea as opposed to on land? Direct evidence explaining what landed either of these women into slavery, along with the range of personal sufferings they endured is veiled. Their story, however, provides a glimpse into the unpredictable and often dangerous environments that slaves and sailors confronted. At the same time, invocation of these unnamed females, whose lives were tragically altered through the financial decisions of others, invites us to reckon more closely with complex factors of age, gender, value, and disposability of the black body amid the legal trade and traffic of people as commercial goods.
* * *
Historians have long been interested in the containment of black bodies and how freedom struggles inform dynamics between slaves and slaveholders. Tracing the movement of bondpeople in, out, and through the watery space of the Atlantic Ocean, this book explores the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery. It does not compare plantations with slave ships or attempt to suggest any spatial hierarchies of trauma. Instead it broadens the gaze of captivity toward the interior and rather contentious seaborne spaces occupied by bondpeople, surgeons, and sailors. Cargo ships are not often studied as central sites of slavery. However, this book aims to show how the Middle Passage comprised a violently unregulated process critically foundational to the institution of bondage that interlinked slaving voyages and plantation societies.
A wealth of studies centered on plantations and slave communities continue to flourish in exposing the intricacies of domestic slavery across the Atlantic world. Yet the fundamental nature of shipboard captivity and its many terrors still has not been fully interrogated. For more than a century, beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal 1896 work, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, early slave trade scholars who followed explored the social and economic histories contained in the commercial traffic of bondpeople out of Africa, to which Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Lorenzo Greene, Darold Wax, Daniel Mannix, and Malcolm Cowley, among a host of other historians, collectively expanded the intellectual scope of the slave trade in profound ways.> Philip D. Curtin’s 1969 publication of The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census sparked the most momentous redirection in slave trade scholarship. Relying on statistical models to quantify the movement of slaves out of Africa and into the Americas—infamously known as “the numbers game”—Curtin estimated that eleven million Africans were displaced across slave societies. The number-centered methodology, while useful, comprised the most dominant approach in slave trade historiography for over five decades.°
Quantifying slaving voyages and bondpeople is the most primary method for accessing the slave trading past, evident in the ongoing and rather exciting expansion of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.’ In an attempt to recover the wooden world of slave ships and the personal narratives lost behind the numbers, a small yet growing body of scholarship—which I refer to as “Middle Passage studies”—has begun to deepen the analysis of slavery by recentering the forcible sale and oceanic transport of African captives into the New World. Therein, Middle Passage studies within this book gives birth to a world of intellectual expansion still unseen in the historiography that poses more invasive new questions to extract the deeper and more painfully violent narratives of slave trading during the legal slave trading period.’ Marcus Rediker and Stephanie Smallwood produced pathbreaking works examining the magnitude of the Middle Passage as symbiotic to slave societies and the modern world. Rediker unravels the series of multifaceted human dramas involving crewmen, slaves, and abolitionists to argue that slaving voyages devastated the lives of purchased captives while slave ships became the primary instrument fueling globalization and capitalism. Whereas Smallwood frames the slave trade through the intricate process of commodification into which bondpeople were cast on different sides of the Atlantic, astutely revealing that “[t]he most powerful instrument locking captives in as commodities for Atlantic trade was the culture of the market itself.” Seeing a pressing need for a more engaged treatment of seafarers within the slaving industry, Emma Christopher chronicles the complex lives of slave ship sailors to forge much greater insight into the meanings of whiteness, power, and the fragility of their own freedom as laborers within histories and memories of the slave trade.!'° Eric Taylor, on the other hand, traces an incredible number of ship revolts to show how these resistive measures comprised the most contentious interactions between crewmen and adult black males on slaving voyages.'!
This book builds on the momentum of scholarship moving the Middle Passage from the periphery to consider how slavery functioned outside the locus of plantations. Looking beyond crowded cities, distant farms, murky swamps, and mountainous regions, it constructs a historical cultural womb of consciousness fueled by a commercial industry anchored on terror. Going further, it introduces the concept of “slavery at sea” into the lexicon of studies of slaving voyages, and makes meaning of the process. Doing so, this study examines the Middle Passage and, more importantly, the social space of ships and the ocean as epicenters in the making and unmaking of transported slaves. The Atlantic slave trade and, more specifically, the oceanic transport of African captives served as the lifeline of the evolving New World economy, based largely upon the labor of enslaved populations. These variegated seaborne pathways operated as the primary isolated channel through which bondpeople arrived into the Americas. How do we best frame, define, and make meaning of the Middle Passage to better understand its central importance in the cycle of Atlantic slavery? Slavery at Sea departs from most studies by integrating questions that probe the spectrum of human bondage through a multifocal lens extended toward sex, terror, the body, illness, and death. Delving even deeper, Middle Passage studies here interlinks the land and the sea by giving historical treatment to the scores of people directly affected by the fire of global financial interest ignited for slave labor. Left undefined and disjointed from Atlantic slave societies, the slave ship experience is remembered as a colorful mark in the triangular mapping of trade routes of goods, a chapter in history, an event, or at best a short trip that some slaves took. We therefore know far less about what power looked like up close and personal amid the trade and traffic of the most highly demanded eighteenth-century Atlantic good—A frican people—with considerably minimal attention to the gendered nature of this violent enterprise as well as the deeply painful legacies of loss and degradation permanently steeped in the memories of those made slaves and carried into the Americas.
Slavery is routinely understood through the prism of workplaces, fields, households, and landed sites of exploitation hinged upon the production of labor. Boundaries and the manipulation of space(s) continue to generate scholarly interest; however, the Atlantic Ocean remains tangential and largely invisible to these conversations.'” Viewing these far-reaching oceanic bodies of water as more than highways and routes for the transport of goods, both human and material, this book widens the optic to include and recast the sea as a viable and transformative space of history. The Atlantic Ocean was more than just a space; it became an agent that imposed significant impact on people, further bridging the relationship of man and the sea.'* As crewmen manned ships traveling into and between distant locales, the sea became a constant “zone of death.”'4 The ocean was not just where the story of slavery transpired as black bodies were ferried beyond coastal ways and into unknown lands, but as this book reveals, it also became a central conduit for how bondage unfolded and consequentially devastated lives. Slave vessels were intimately private spaces, public only to those aboard. Yet the sea represented an important open arena of struggle for power and agency as captives jumped to their deaths and sailors flung slaves overboard knowing about, and in many respects relying upon, the presence of sharks and other dangerous sea creatures lurking beneath."
Deepening our understanding of the Middle Passage as an embodied and far-reaching experience, Slavery at Sea historically traces it as a tangible experience of bondpeople rather than a cultural artifact of the African Diaspora. The Atlantic slave trade serves as the most iconic marker of struggle, oppression, unity, strength, and perseverance in the African Diaspora, but it is never thoroughly engaged for what really happened. As such, this horrific period in time continues unchallenged, untouched, and thus left as a bloodied yet sanitized chapter in global history. The Middle Passage likewise has long occupied an enduring focal point of diasporic cultural memory, evidenced by nations, poets, historians, and literary scholars who rely heavily on the symbolic nature of the slave trade as a useful departure for discussion of cultural idioms and emerging political ideologies that took shape within and beyond antebellum slavery. As such, imaginations of the slave ship experience continue to be invoked, redefined, and broadened to fit this middle ground of history, although often extending far from its conceptual origin. The pooling of distant monies for the buying and selling of black bodies set into motion an economy of violence systematically fueled through tightened entrepreneurial networks that proved enormously assistive in distribution needs. What was this system, and, more germane to this study, what were the human costs and consequences of these financial decisions?
To better understand the financial roots deeply tied to the massive traffic of black bodies for capital gain, the transatlantic slave trade is historically framed within this book as an industry and thus an institutional system that facilitated successful operation of the “human manufacturing process.” Manufacturing processes are fundamentally understood as the mass production of goods that are (1) put together, (2) packaged, (3) delivered, and (3) sold. Applying this same formulaic understanding to examination of the slave trade and its four-centurylong operation more concretely centers how this intercontinental enterprise contributed to the construction of a black labor force and the calculated terrain of brutal experiences bondpeople confronted prior to their landed displacement into the Americas. This process, which every slave endured, was operationalized through woven threads of power, exploit, and deprivation maintained by slave ship workers. Therein, within the sequential process of slavery at sea, captives faced and were refined, or rather manufactured, through three key phases: warehousing, transport, and delivery. From this socioeconomic lens, the movement of money—investment in ships and ship building materials; wages; and other financial incentives used to entice and employ captains and crews, inland capturers, coastal traders, and surgeons—served as initial down payments. Collectively the process financed and thus sponsored a global vortex of trade and terror internationally linked between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas not only through its laborers but most especially through the transport of human goods contained at its core and demanded by diverse Atlantic customers. By keeping the gaze upon merchants, investors, and currency, the many global laborers physically tasked with fulfilling these envisioned dreams of slave trading wealth remain trivialized along with the power these key players personally exacted in the lives of bondpeople.
Slavery at Sea centers the terrain of political struggle not only on oceangoing ships but also on the diverse and vulnerable bodies of captives continuously unmade by their transporters and the human manufacturing process. The hostile management of slaves is regularly associated with planters, overseers, slave drivers, and patrols; however, the production of black laborers was far from a land-based phenomenon. It is not enough to say that Africans were captured, transformed into commodities, shipped out of Africa, sold to interested buyers, and turned into slaves once moved into plantations. The human manufacturing process and, more importantly, the interior holds of merchant ships served as vital sites of power sailors used to dehumanize captives, enforce dependency, inflict pain, establish authority, and prohibit any sense of control over one’s personal life in the near and far future. This level of mistreatment under the guise of refinement closely mirrored the tactic of what is known to many as “seasoning, a brutal yearlong intensive process routinely understood throughout the West Indies to enforce bondpeople’s rapid adjustment to plantation slavery.' However, unbound by labor outputs and any immediate land-based laws of social order at sea, the totalizing of slavery began much earlier at the hands of slave ship workers through terror-centric means unimagined on land.
Sailors relentlessly unmade bondpeople’s bodies through physical, emotional, and psychological conditioning, making intimately clear the dynamics of power.!’ Exploring the cyclical assaults on slaves’ personhood uncovers the politics of the making and unmaking of black bodies for the first time, showing more holistically how men, women, the sick, weak, and unborn became paradigmatic to this foundational moment of conquest and debasement. This process of unmaking, which no captive was able to circumvent once forced into the slaving industry, produced a dramatic climate of terror in the world of slavery at sea that resulted in mental disorientation, familial and communal separation, malnourishment, lack of sanitation and cleanliness, severe isolation, debilitating diseases, miscarriages, sexual abuse, psychological instability, and bearing witness to physical violence committed against kin and shipmates. Equally salient to the slaving process was the refinement of manufactured slaves that it created. To be sure, testimonies that follow expose how slaves were broken and unmade through the relentless veins of violence anchored at its maritime core; doing so lays bare the formative and permanent stripping of their freedom. Carrying these deep psychological scars on land once imported overseas, the effects of the Middle Passage filtered within and beyond the ocean, irrevocably transforming bondpeople’s lives as well as the societies and communities into which they were imported. One cannot make sense of the behaviors widespread throughout Atlantic slave societies—reproductive agency, maroonage, resistance to familial separation, suicide, violent rebellions, or even poisoning—without examining how these insubordinate patterns took shape through early manifestation at sea.
Enslaved Africans were the primary commodities of the slave trade; however, narratives of terror and strife as well as the types of people directly and personally affected by oceanic transport are largely unknown as intimate voices of the slave trade.'* This book unveils multitudes of slaves whose stories of sorrow, saga, and triumph remain untold and thus unfamiliar to many. Dramatic scenes of degradation widespread on slave ships included more victims than adult black men, typically cast as representatives of all slaves purchased and sold to foreign buyers. The counting of bodies leaves silent the deeper interrogation of how gender informed the treatment of all transported slaves. As such, the metanarrative of black men, or rather the privileging of black masculinity within histories of the slave trade, symbolically confines black women and girls to plantations, marking slave ships as untraditional spaces where bonded females are rarely found, unexplored, forgotten, and therefore left out of the central story. Gendering the history of the slave trade solely through women’s experiences still does not fully encapsulate the sufferings of the sold and unprotected. By “mining the forgotten,” this book reconfigures a much larger human spectrum intentionally more inclusive of girls, boys, nursing mothers, infants, teenagers, elderly males and females, the diseased, as well as disabled slaves, similarly purchased and boarded on ships alongside healthy adult males.!® The human stories of slavery at sea included more than just slaves, extending further to employed slave trade workers. Widening the gaze to center the violent entanglement of slaves, sailors, and surgeons holistically on ships and showing more of the overlooked, forgotten, and the many unremembered whose lives help to fully humanize the histories of slavery’s horrors.
As slave transporters and working-class laborers of the sea, sailors served the most fundamental role in the transoceanic history of the slave trade, granting buyers access and furthering slave economies through the constant import of black bodies. Without them the commerce of African captives and exploitation of labor-based profit could not have transpired. The grueling labor and constant exposure of mariners’ own lives to the unending risks of slaving allowed for the continuation of this global enterprise. Much like plantation overseers, the contributions of sailors to slavery remains relegated within the obscured margins and footnotes of history. Therefore, I remain especially indebted to the work of Emma Christopher, Marcus Rediker, and Jeffrey Bolster for the valuable insight they provide to better explore the largely invisible world of sailors and shipping.”° The inner lives of seafarers are most times inaccessible due to the predominance of illiteracy, but also due to the construction of narratives that silence the labor that seamen performed in the movement and brutal management of bondpeople.
The forced mobility of slaves is often cast and claimed as solely a part of African American history, yet the reliance on and allocation of terrorizing violence for the sake of economic gain spanned more than four centuries and included a multiplicity of nations. The stories that follow emerge from the annals of the British and American slave trade during the peak and final century of the legal slave trading period of the eighteenth century, making what some would cast as simply a British Atlantic story. To be sure, the transoceanic movement of slaves superseded all national and landed boundaries, marking it as a painful and rather shameful aspect of history that many nations, countries, and states seldom choose to commemorate. This book does not intimately detail commercialized networks of slave trading in Central and Latin America, nor does it recount the forcible movement of slaves transported through the Indian Ocean or sub-Saharan networks. When carefully read through the lens of terror, however, parallels persist in the patterns of captivity and the relentless quest for power and wealth that put a premium on the Atlantic import of exploitable healthy black bodies at any human cost. Disaggregating the Middle Passage from an isolated event, but instead as an intricate part of a massively global human manufacturing process predicated on a continuum of abuses that every bondperson forced to chart the Atlantic confronted, it complicates the history more directly to account for diversity across gender, age, health, and the multiplicity of sufferings. Doing so reaffirms that not all slaves endured the transatlantic passage in the same way. By delving into the often volatile maritime world when the legal slave trade operated as a fashionable way of traffic, Slavery at Sea provides a more textured understanding of how human power, human pain, and economic greed enacted cycles of tragedies that spanned centuries, memory, time, and space.
Entrepreneurial ventures based upon African human capital served as crucial components to the evolving institution of slavery taking shape across the Caribbean and the Americas. The seventeenth century witnessed a gradual increase of involvement, particularly for the British, as merchants pooled resources to create joint stock companies—the Royal African Company, the Dutch West Indies Company, and the French Guinea Company—setting government-sanctioned monopolies into motion. Yet this period constituted a mere testing ground for slave sales. The eighteenth century bore witness to a dramatic transformation in commercial slavery across the Atlantic that created a spiraling intensification for African laborers. This explosion of interest resulted in the shipment of men, women, and children that underwent a quantum leap in numbers with more than six million captives being deposited into various Atlantic ports and slave societies.7! During the opening decades of the century, charter companies proved ill equipped to fulfill the vast demand for bondpeople amid the decline of monopolistic control. As such, the downfall of monopolies and loss of trade control to a growing base of private traders meant the slave trade operated as the least regulated branch of commercial interests until its legal demise in the nineteenth century.” Merchants, brokers, and planters throughout the Atlantic world, including Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, Antigua, South Carolina, Costa Rica, Barbados, Virginia, and St. Thomas, among many others, constituted the human web of commerce openly invested in the export and import of black bodies.
The main actors of Slavery at Sea are those who physically traveled the dangerous pathways of the sea—sailors, captives, and surgeons. By viewing the waterways as seminal spaces where history was made and slaves were produced, we can generate new questions of traditional sources. Surviving slave trade records are most times disjointed, fragmented, scattered, and disparate at best as they evoke greater violence on the lives and suffering of bondpeople through the omissions, silences, and limited access to their personal stories. To say that the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade inscribed a bloodied mark of mistreatment in human history is by no means novel. Within this book I attempt to provide a sensitive and comprehensive understanding of the operation of unabated power, deprivation, and violent exploit through the Middle Passage. The primary sources used for this study are grouped into four broad categories, which I label personal, professional, financial, and public. I have done a careful reading of an array of records to pose an entirely new set of critical questions and provoke an uncomfortably closer gaze into the continuum of torture, abuse, and survival that bound slaves and sailors together on ships.
Personal sources of the slave trade, including diaries and published accounts, offer an uncanny engagement with the varied thoughts and observations of seamen and surgeons. Illiteracy was widespread among working-class seafarers, therefore discovery of a diary maintained by a slave ship sailor is an incredibly rare find. The notion of inscribing one’s innermost thoughts without restriction into an object protected and locked away has significance in the depth of personal reflection the writer shares. A seaman’s diary offers an intimately unfiltered gaze on the self, sea, and boarded slaves, although it contains far fewer details than historians would hope for in extrapolating greater details on the oceanic slaving process. The fleeting, almost subtle, commentaries on marine life regarding shipboard duties, fishing and food supply, weather patterns, and any insubordinate behaviors that slaves acted out during the passage have proven useful to this study. In much the same way, accounts that ship captains and surgeons published respectively helped to extend a deeper gaze into the process of coastal trade conducted with local African rulers; the types of slaves offered, bought, and refused; along with addressing the more common aspects of life on a slave ship, including sexual assaults and the violent deaths of slaves. Widespread publication and construction of these narratives emerged for reasons many times unknown. Providing the literate world access to the business and fatal dangers of the slaving industry, these recollections comprise permanent records that shape where, how, and if certain details of the trade are revealed or instead withheld.
Correspondences exchanged between the many men employed as professionals throughout the trade—merchants, brokers, and surgeons—make up the professional sources used in this book. The roles that many of these people served were vastly different; however, their future reputations and social status hinged upon particular slaving needs and concerns carefully described in handwritten letters. As the primary investors, merchants orchestrated the trade from afar by employing, and thereby entrusting, sea captains and their crew with full control in securing the most ideal slaves to generate lucrative profits overseas. Although they relied on the personal choices and decisions that sailors made in completing a slaving voyage, these entrepreneurs expressed specific commands on a ship crew’s behaviors, specified slave preferences, and outlined the methods of necessary treatment and management of purchased captives. More than mere words, their demands legitimized a foundation of behaviors influential with how sailors transformed and thus broke bondpeople down through violence, separation, and extreme deprivation for frugal business purposes. Another category of professional sources equally germane to this project are the letters that various brokers from locally respected slave trading firms wrote. These men were tasked with marketing ships’ arrivals and gathering crowds for auction sales, yet they also reported on the current progress of the trade, which is useful in tracing the social and financial value of slaves carried into port, sold and unsold. We therefore gain a better sense of the constant movement of ships and slaves. The cursory attention these sources call to bondpeople’s bodies enables a bifocal-like gaze on their health—physical and psychological—while intimating how the terrorizing traumas of slavery at sea manifested in the behaviors of captives during market inspections and shoreline sales.
Slave ship surgeons similarly penned letters beneficial in uncovering details of the Middle Passage. Amid reports of personal tensions and abuses confronted with sea captains, these correspondences reveal the internal dynamics of shipboard authority relative to insurrections, the disciplining of slaves, dietary practices, medical outbreaks, and explanations of other human losses faced during a ship’s passage. To gain greater access to the medical stories of slavery at sea, these letters are viewed alongside medical logs, a series of mortality lists, and a range of eighteenth-century medical literature. Surviving medical logs portray captives’ treatment on slave ships through daily entries remarking on sickness, medical pain, and death as well as curative methods, including food and drinks, used to attempt to recover the health of ailing slaves. The listings of deaths that British surgeons were required to submit at the conclusion of a slaving voyage are valuable in foregrounding the range of illnesses and other ways bondpeople died on slaving voyages. These observations reaffirm that death pervaded slave ships not only through revolts but also through untreatable diseases, psychological shock, gynecological concerns, and suicidal means. Reading these slave trade records in tandem with eighteenth-century medical literature—books, pamphlets, and dissertations—I employ a nuanced approach to speculatively reconstruct how bondpeople perished from a range of contagious, debilitating, and deadly illnesses by examining shipboard diseases in conjunction with bodily symptoms and modes of treatment frequently used on land during this period of human trafficking.
Financial sources provide more than crude and cold numbers used to assess a bondperson’s value and success in distant market sales. Ship logs and ship manifests form a crucial component of records that merchants required to better reflect on their expenses and strategies for future involvement in the trade. These dual sources enable us to look beyond prices and the circulation of monies to extract daily insights into how sailors attempted to preserve and manage boarded slaves. Through these queries we gain additional evidence on illness, insubordinate slaves, and the use of shipboard surveillance and violence. Cargo receipts and account sales likewise permit scholars to gain sustained exposure toa vast array of captives, including nursing women, infants, and elderly bondwomen forced into the trade. Even more than the incredible opportunities to tease out gender and age, brief notes that invoke sickness, blemishes, and missing limbs among newly imported captives enable a more textured depiction of slaves’ bodies. We may not always have visual descriptions of how they entered the trade; however, the representation of their bodies—enfeebled, weakened, and many times traumatized—allows us the rare opportunity to interrogate their physical condition as they arrived into port. Therein, within this study the body is read as a text to better understand the tangible effects of slavery at sea. Doing so permits greater access to the different types of captives, family dynamics, illnesses, and body structures. It also encourages a reassessment of the meaning of “prime slaves” given the presence of “refuse slaves,” a category that included the young, very old, diseased, and disabled. Those deemed undesirable for laboring needs were unable to be sent back to Africa; therefore, their representation in auction sales nudges close consideration into how the influx of newly arriving slaves—both prime and refuse slaves—were treated and became absorbed into local communities of slaves and slaveholders.
The primary base of records incorporated throughout this book includes two sets of public sources: newspapers and the curiously underutilized volume of testimonies given before the British House of Commons during the closing decade of the eighteenth century by a broad range of slave trade actors. As sailors traveled in and out of different seaports, they recounted details of violent dangers common in the African slave trade that circulated throughout the pages of local and international newspapers. While many times sensationalizing details to arouse sympathy toward the losses of white men, these stories provide distant, unfamiliar, and mere sketches of shipboard rebellions and deaths confronted by captives and their guards. The most extensive source used to penetrate the experiential and sensory experiences generally unknown on slave ships lies in the scores of people, intricately familiar and many times central to the trade as active participants, who gave testimonies within the legal arena of courts. Scribbled notes that many of them jotted down and gathered together to assist in their public reflections are not as easy to locate; however, through the recalled memories of former slave trade participants, the questions asked and themes addressed become more expansive. The woven tapestry of narratives that emerged facilitate an in-depth exposure to the treatment of the aged and refused, violent marking of slaves, variations of suicide, mistreatment of children, moments of psychological breakdowns, funerary practices on slave ships, dietary habits, ship toxicity, the birthing of slaves, musical expressions of sorrow, as well as the drastically emotional process of separation through slave auctions. Anchored within the power of these testimonies—public or private—is not only the freedom that many who testified shared in never having to account for devastating lives while growing the wealth of others but also the crucial choices and calculations intricately bound to the performance of remembering and disremembering events, people, and moments of violent eruptions in which sailors and surgeons served as witnesses and participants.
Throughout these compiled sources, the various individuals who through their employed participation placed themselves as both subjects and narrators of an active slaving past become more present. Transmitting often murky details, they constructed narratives, perpetuated silences, and provided insight and biases on distant places and foreign people. Although fraught with inconsistencies, embellishments, and ethnic and racial stereotyping, these varied archival sources provide fertile opportunities to widen the spectrum of bondage to include the world of slavery at sea. Jamaica Kincaid’s critique of colonialism in constructing narratives of oppressed people within the Caribbean in many ways parallels the retelling of the history of the transatlantic crossing. She questions, “For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. It cannot explain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me.”
Historians are bound to the testimonies, memories, and selected narratives put forth by the very individuals who determined captives’ financial and social value while violently imposing the boundaries of life and death within which slaves were held. The voices of those enslaved therefore do not always exist where we would like. We instead gain momentary access to their bondage through their bodies, behaviors, and other characteristics that slave traders chose to record. Often renamed as mere units of sale, bondpeople were dehumanized, violently marked, and permanently remembered according to the numbers designating their inclusion among a vessel cargo, being renamed “No. 26,” “No. 58,” “No. 2,” or by any other shrewd calculative tactic used to define, mark, and keep record of all stowed ship goods, including bondpeople. Once transported, delivered, and sold to awaiting buyers, the import of men, women, children, the elderly, disabled, and diseased—unable to be sent back—came to represent the backbone of slavery across the Americas. Viewing them only in terms of the skills they possessed and the labor and wealth that buyers believed they could generate from their bodies, we miss the opportunity to engage and understand the terrorizing process of transport bondpeople confronted and, more precisely, how they arrived broken and unmade. Ship commanders and their crews decided how best to constrain, manage, and treat valuable black bodies, whereas consumers across the Americas engaged in the bidding and buying process. These same buyers, lured by the coming of new laborers and dreams of unforeseen wealth, were unable and unwilling to see how the many injuries and scars—visible and invisible—that captives incurred through slavery at sea were sponsored and thus fueled by their own money and aggressive market demands.
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This book reconceptualizes the Middle Passage as central to the operation of the Atlantic human manufacturing process. It traces the often unfamiliar world of slavery at sea from the point of capture through the massive import of bondpeople into distant slave societies. The first chapter, “Waves of Calamity,” explores the transformation of human beings into chattel property amid business ventures conducted on the African side of the Atlantic. It foregrounds the complicated system of racial and cultural biases, cooperation, and trickery acted out between African merchants, brokers, and foreign white sailors to show how such connections fueled an evolving commercial enterprise hinged upon the buying and selling of black bodies. These entrepreneurial pursuits produced an unstable environment that led to a range of brutally shrewd tactics used to forcibly move slaves into the domain of coastal sales, thereby initiating their entrance into the first phase of the human manufacturing process through capture and warehousing that soon followed. Ship captains and physicians scrutinized and sorted through countless bodies to fulfill distant demands in securing the prime slaves, therefore chapter 2, “Imagined Bodies,” analyzes the range of captives representative of the human merchandise made available to foreign buyers. Employing a less traditional lens, this discussion highlights critical factors of age, gender, health, and diverse bodily configurations represented among offered slaves. Even more, it problematizes the idea that every bondperson generated exploitable value—financial or social—by widening the range to include the fate of the sold and unsold.
Sea captains employed precautionary measures to secure the most viable captives, yet chapter 3, “Healthy Desires, Toxic Realities,” moves into the second phase of the human manufacturing process—transport—that bondpeople entered once sold into West African markets. This chapter reveals the landscape of unhealthy conditions bondpeople faced while locked within the bowels of slave vessels. Many captives boarded ships already distressed by intense starvation and the trauma of bondage. Going further, the discussion points to the nutrient-deprived sea diets, lack of cleanliness, and dangerous weather patterns, all of which jeopardized the health of boarded slaves and led to the continued erosion of their bodies. Crewmen relentlessly sought to exert complete control over the lives of slaves lodged within a vessel’s hold. Chapter 4, “Blood Memories,” addresses the violent legacies the Middle Passage ushered in by chronicling open battles and the counter-resistive measures that sailors used against bondpeople. The mere threat of armed slaves played upon racialized fears while tearing away the veneer of control mariners imagined over their captives. Violence on ships comprised more than rebellions and black male insurgents. This chapter reinserts black women into these deadly interactions while sharpening the focus to reveal how drastically hostile ship behaviors manifested not only through physical combat but also through poisoning, sexual terror, abortion, and the murders of enslaved infants.
Bondpeople regularly drew upon violence as an open mechanism to obtain their freedom. Chapter 5, “Battered Bodies, Enfeebled Minds,” focuses on those females and males who did not engage in bloodied clashes, choosing instead to direct their personal struggles with alienation and mistreatment toward their own bodies through suicide. This chapter examines how bondpeople attempted to cope psychologically with the shock of enslavement. The varied physical and cultural behaviors some slaves acted out reveals how self-sabotage operated in the social spaces of ships and the sea. Fusing the importance of the psyche, violence, and the physical body, chapter 6, “The Anatomy of Suffering,” examines how the cumulative effects of slavery at sea affected bondpeople’s overall well-being, making them even more vulnerable to the specter of disease and mortality. Centering bodily pain and the physical decline some captives underwent within the socio-medical history of slaving voyages, it goes further to trace how sailors and surgeons sought to counter many of these medical outbreaks.
The seventh chapter, “A Tide of Bodies,” traces the import of slaves through the third and final phase of the Atlantic human manufacturing process: product delivery. It does so by reconsidering the complexities of domestic slave markets to analyze how slaves arrived into New World slave societies following their oceanic transport. Once imported and docked into distant seaports, the Middle Passage may have physically ended for bondpeople; however, the layered cycles of violence, deprivation, and death confronted at sea forced them to arrive preconditioned by the terrorizing dynamics of shipboard captivity maintained by the various workers tasked with their transport and preservation. Broadening the categorical view of newly arrived Africans beyond the general rubric of prime, young, male, and presumably healthy allows us to more fully consider the diversity of human commodities made available within eighteenth-century Atlantic slave markets.
This chapter therefore traces how factors such as gender, age, trauma, illness, and disabilities influenced local markets and in some case prompted planters to forgo final slave sales. Most would agree that the Atlantic slave trade represented the largest forced migration of a group of people in recorded history. Viewing slaving voyages merely through the lens of supply, demand, and the triangular movement of goods bypasses the very process that not only landed Africans into slave societies but also created a massive influx of diverse personalities, diseases, psychological traumas, and bruised and disabled black bodies imported into the Atlantic plantation complex. Taken together, this book shows the refinement and consequential effects imposed on captives through the human manufacturing process that magnified most aptly through slavery at sea. The stories of incredible suffering, pain, and resiliency that follow collectively remind that the Middle Passage was not about the final destination but rather the violent production of slaves through the journey.
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