Jamaica - Slave Ships

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The oldest slave ship ever excavated

The oldest slave ship ever excavated, wrecked off Florida in 1700, is yielding a multitude of artifacts—and blood-curdling history.
She was a British merchant ship employed in cruel commerce, her sweltering hold crammed with human chattel. It was the 18th of May, 1700, and the Henrietta Marie was nearing the coast of Jamaica, her final destination before the long ride back to England. The ship had left Africa with as many as 300 captives sold into slavery by fellow Africans—likely of rival tribes—mostly for iron and copper bars offered by the British crew. Many died along the way; slave-ship mortality averaged 20 percent.As land appeared on the horizon, Captain Thomas Chamberlain, anxious to conduct business, ordered his crew to prepare the prisoners for arrival. Goaded onto deck, men, women, and children were fed, cleaned, shaved, and oiled, their wounds finally tended, in preparation for sale.
At Port Royal, naked and in chains, slaves went on the auction block. Potential buyers might prod their bellies, poke fingers in their mouths to check their teeth, and even taste their sweat—thought by some to be a gauge of health. By one estimate Henrietta Marie’s cargo grossed well over £3,000 (more than $400,000 today) for the ship’s investors. Most of the captives were headed for sugar plantations where they’d be worked to exhaustion, many dying within five to ten years.
Their fate was not Chamberlain’s concern. Captain and crew weighed anchor in late June and set a homeward course, their ship now packed with New World sugar, cotton, wood, indigo, and leftover trade goods. But storms plagued their exit and the ship foundered on New Ground Reef, 34 miles (55 kilometers) off Key West, Florida. All aboard perished at sea.
It was nearly 300 years before treasure hunters, employed by salvager Mel Fisher, raised the first relics from the wreck. But their passion was gold, and they soon abandoned the slaver to search for richer ships. In the 1980s and ’90s other divers continued the salvage as scientists began conserving the rescued items. Today those scientists are in the water, examining the ship’s fragile hull and coaxing the last artifacts from the sand. Their work is key: Henrietta Marie is the oldest slaver ever excavated and one of only a handful from American waters. Says marine archaeologist David Moore, “She’s a vital piece of history.

http://www.fold3.com/page/1424_a_slave_ship_speaks

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The Middle Passage

The Middle Passage refers to the part of the trade where Africans, densely packed onto ships, were transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies. The voyage took three to four months and, during this time, the enslaved people mostly lay chained in rows on the floor of the hold or on shelves that ran around the inside of the ships' hulls.
The shelves were under a metre high and often the enslaved Africans could not sit up. There could be up to more than six hundred enslaved people on each ship. Captives from different nations were mixed together, so it was more difficult for them to talk and plan rebellions. Women and children were held separately.
The following description is from 'The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano':
At last, when the ship we were in, had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. ...The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome....The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died -- thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.
Hear the Extract
A large amount of evidence remains: letters, diaries, memoirs, captain's logbooks, shipping company records and testimony before British Parliamentary investigations, all give a picture of life on board. For example, when asked if the slaves had ‘room to turn themselves or lie easy', a Dr Thomas Trotter replied:
"By no means. The slaves that are out of irons are laid spoonways"... and closely locked to one another. It is the duty of the first mate to see them stowed in this manner every morning....and when the ship had much motion at sea.... they were often miserably bruised against the deck or against each other....I have seen the breasts heaving...with all those laborious and anxious efforts for life.....".
However, during a Parliamentary investigation, a witness for the slave trade, Robert Norris, described how ‘delightful' the slave ships were. The enslaved people, he suggested, had sufficient room, sufficient air, and sufficient provisions. When upon deck, they made merry and amused themselves with dancing... In short, the voyage from Africa to the West Indies was one of the happiest periods of their life!
To hear an extract from Mr Norris's speech
In reality, it was a system that brutalized both the sailors and the enslaved people. The captain had total authority over those aboard the ship and was answerable to nobody. Captives usually outnumbered the crew by ten to one, so they were flogged or put in thumb screws if there was any sign of rebellion. Despite this, resistance was common.
The European crews made sure that the captives were fed and forced them to exercise. On all ships, the death toll was high. Between 1680 and 1688, 23 out of every 100 people taken aboard the ships of the Royal African Company died in transit. When disease began to spread, the dying were sometimes thrown overboard. In November 1781, around 470 slaves were crammed aboard the slave ship Zong. During the voyage to Jamaica, many got sick. Seven crew and sixty Africans died. Captain Luke Collingwood ordered the sick enslaved Africans, 133 in total, thrown overboard (one survived). When the Zong arrived back in England, its owners claimed for the value of the slaves from their insurers. They argued that they had little water and the sick Africans posed a threat to the remaining cargo and crew. In 1783, the owners won their case. This case did much to show the horrors of the trade and sway public opinion against it.
The death toll amongst sailors was also appallingly high (20%). Sometimes the crew would be harshly treated on purpose during the ‘middle passage'. Fewer hands were required on the third leg and wages could be saved if the sailors jumped ship in the West Indies. It was not uncommon to see injured sailors living rough in the Caribbean and North American ports.
A law (The Dolben Act) was passed in 1788, which fixed the number of enslaved people in proportion to the ship's size but conditions were still appalling. Research byWadstrom (published in 1794) calculated that a man was given a space of 6 feet by 1 foot 4 inches; a woman 5 feet by 1 foot 4 inches and girls 4 feet 6 inches by 1 foot.
In his speech, made to the House of Commons in 1789, William Wilberforce quoted evidence showing that not less than 12½ percent of enslaved people perished in the passage and another 4½ percent died on shore, before the day of sale.He also described the conditions on the ships for the enslaved people.
Hear extract 1 from the speech
Hear extract 2 from the speech
Other extracts about the middle passage:
Dr Alexander Falconbridge describes and outbreak of fever
Dr Alexander Falconbridge describes conditions on board

R. Drake Slave Smuggler describes a how sickness spread on board

http://abolition.e2bn.org/slavery_44.html

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In early April 1793, the experienced British slave ship captain Samuel Gamble took his ship, Sandown, owned by an investment syndicate of London brokers and consigned to Joseph and Angus Kennedy, merchants in Kingston, Jamaica, to Upper Guinea in West Africa to buy Africans for transhipment to Jamaica where they would become slaves. He decided to keep a journal, or log, of his activities, from the loading of the ship in late January 1793 in Greenwich until the voyage ended at roughly the same place on 11 October 1794. The log fortuitously has been preserved and is owned by the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, London. Bruce Mouser, emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and an expert on the history of Sierra Leone as well as an experienced editor of primary material relating to that area in the period of the Atlantic slave trade, has produced a modern, heavily annotated, version of this log that enables Gamble's observations to become more widely known. I have not examined the original manuscript and thus cannot verify that the edition offered to the public matches the original. But the care with which Mouser has annotated the text invites confidence that this edition meets the highest scholarly standards.Professor Mouser should be congratulated on his labors in bringing this very impressive text before our notice. The log is of intrinsic interest for several reasons and will be fascinating to several different constituencies. The primary audience is Africanists, especially specialists in West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gamble describes succinctly but vividly the structure of the Atlantic slave trade in the Rio Nunez region of present day Sierra Leone, outlining the role that private traders such as Dr. James Walker and David Lawrence played as middlemen, facilitating trade between African sellers and European buyers. Anyone interested in understanding the structure of slave commerce as it was practiced on the windward coast will find this edition, along with its extensive and helpful annotations, extremely useful. Nearly two-thirds of the text deals with Gamble's difficulties in Africa. They demonstrate how complicated and difficult the Atlantic slave trade was in Africa. Gamble was an experienced and seemingly efficient slave captain but he faced enormous difficulties in procuring slaves and in keeping his ship and its crew in proper shape. As Mouser explains, ship captains had to get the timing of both arrival and departure exactly right in order to maximise profits. Gamble was off in both respects. He arrived too early (mid-June) to be able to meet the peak of the slave buying season and his early arrival meant that his crew was exposed to the end of the rainy season and the very real likelihood of catching fever. Mouser details the deaths of numerous seamen, lamenting on September 4 that his crew "are become quite Peevish, fraxious, ill natur'd and Childish [...] am at a loss to know what to do with them." His early arrival did not help him in getting his cargo on board such that he could arrive in Jamaica in good time when the sugar harvest began and when planters were most likely to buy slaves. Ideally, he should have left West Africa in November but the necessity of replacing dead crew with new people, his own illness, and difficulties in dealing with both European traders as well as African intermediaries meant that his many journeys inland and around the coast to facilitate the purchase of slaves had little effect. By mid- to late November, he should have been able to secure a full complement of slaves. On November 2, 1793, however, theSandown held just five slaves with "No Slaves coming down owing to a dispute in the Interior part of the Country." By mid-December, Gamble had bought 40 slaves but he was still far short of his full complement of 220 slaves. He only reached that number on March 26, 1794, meaning that he was likely to arrive in the British West Indies far too late for optimum sales. Gamble's travails shows how precarious was the difference between success and failure in the trade, serving as a useful corrective to simplistic accounts that assume the trade to be a simple and lucrative way of denuding West Africa of people and profits.
Africanists will be interested in other features of the text besides its elucidation of business success and failure in the slave trade. The remarks that Gamble made concerning the coast of Africa and the appearance of the interior are valuable first-hand testimony about an area of the world little commented upon in this period. More significant, perhaps, is Gamble's occasional commentary upon the people that he meets. He thought little of Africa--a "country at variance with Mankind" and full of disagreeable wild beasts, enormous snakes, and an abundance of annoying insects. The animals of Africa indeed made such a racket that "there's little if any sleep to be got so that a European richly deserves what he gains." He was even less impressed with Africans, whom he describes at first encounter in the Cape Verde islands as "rogueishly inclin'd from their Infancy." Africans in the Sierra Leone interior were even worse: "filthy and beastly as ugly" with "Miserable" houses; moreover, they were jealous, indolent, and "capable of depraved barbarity." "A Philosopher," he concludes "would here find an ample field to display his genius which may justly be term'd a Natural History of the Human Species in their Savage state." Gamble's distaste for Africans and easy capacity for comparing them to animals reflect standard European thinking but his expressions of distaste are sufficiently detailed and forceful as to make his words arresting. His words are given more force when counter-posed with his equally contemptuous attitude to the Irish peasants that he encountered in Cork. He asserted that the Irish live worse than Africans did in Africa, especially Irish women who were "us'd to a degree of barbarity carrying the manure on their backs to the land, while as of[ten] great idle fellows are looking on at their ease." Teachers will find it useful to expose students to Gamble's prejudices to both Africans and the Irish, in order to show that it was not only Africans that Englishmen compared to animals: Gamble noted that in Cork "People[,] Hogs[,] and Dogs all live in the same place" and were probably fed "out of the same vessels."
Scholars interested in the organisation of the slave trade, particularly as regards the crossing itself and the sale of Africans in the New World, will also find Gamble's log interesting, although the information about these activities is less full than that on slavery and society in Sierra Leone. Gamble had no more luck transporting Africans to sell in the Caribbean than he did in procuring slaves. Soon after his ship left he faced a slave insurrection where ten slaves died. Sadly, he tells us little about how the insurrection developed and how it was put down. But the fact that it did occur illustrates the danger of trading in slaves and why slave captains heavily armed their ships. Insurrection was less detrimental to the success of the mission than disease and crossing the Atlantic. Gamble barely did either. He lost thirty-four slaves to disease, as well as several crewmen. His water kegs leaked, forcing him to put his crew on three-quarters rations. Not surprisingly, when he put into Barbados to get fresh supplies, sixteen of his crew absconded, losing all their pay in the process. Gamble's log gives evidence of just how appalling conditions were on slave ships and why only the most desperate men signed up to serve as seamen on slavers. By the time he limped into Kingston on May 13, he had only 6 crew and fewer than 200 slaves.
Gamble's travails were not over on arrival, as his delay in leaving Africa had cost him dearly. He arrived in Britain's premier slave-buying colony when planters were busily restocking their plantations after the reduction in the supplies of slaves during the 1780s. But the supply of slaves in Kingston in May 1794 was too great even for Jamaican planters. Gamble noted that the island was overrun with French emigrants, was subject to an epidemic of yellow fever and had "very scarce and dear" provisions. Planters could not buy slaves because they lacked adequate foodstuffs. Moreover, the harbor was clogged with ships--Gamble noted seventeen slave ships in Kingston, carrying 5,432 Africans. Not surprisingly, he found the "Sale of Negroes here very indifferent at present." It took him nearly two months to sell all his slaves (save for four sickly ones he could not sell). Gamble does not mention the prices he received for slaves and says little about the process of selling slaves in Kingston. This absence of detail is a great shame, but one suspects that Gamble's profits from the eighteen-month expedition were very slim. The slave trade was not an easy business, even if overall profits in the trade were healthy.
Africanists will find this work more useful than will Caribbeanists. But scholars in general will enjoy Mouser's careful annotations of Gamble's interesting text and will appreciate his careful index and full bibliography. The only regret is that Mouser could include only a few of Gamble's many illustrations in his edition. That cannot be helped. We should be grateful for what we have and be pleased that this important text has been given the sort of care and attention that mark good scholarship.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7095

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Quobna Ottobah Cugoano: a Former Slave Speaks Out

Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, usually known by the shorter form Ottobah Cugoano, was born in present-day Ghana in the 1750s. Kidnapped and taken into slavery, he worked on plantations in Grenada before being brought to England, where he obtained his freedom. He was baptised as 'John Stuart' in 1773, a name he continued to use over the next fifteen years, during which time he worked as a servant to the artist Richard Cosway. While working for Cosway he wrote his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Commerce of the Human Species, the first directly abolitionist publication in English by an African, which was published in 1787. In London, he was a friend of Olaudah Equiano, and a neighbour of Ignatius Sancho. After publishing his work, he dropped out of the historical record, and we do not know where, when, or how he died. His work; part autobiography, part political treatise, and part Christian exegesis, has an enduring legacy as the first substantial anti-slavery text written in English by an African. Despite being employed by one of the most famous artists of his day, no attested image of Cugoano survives.

Cugoano is Kidnapped and Sold into Slavery

This extract, abridged from the Thoughts and Sentiments, describes how the young Cugoano was kidnapped, and put aboard a slave ship on the coast of Africa.

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I was born in the city of Agimaque, on the coast of Fantyn; my father was a companion to the chief in that part of the country of Fantee, and when the old king died I was left in his house with his family; soon after I was sent for by his nephew, Ambro Accasa, who succeeded the old king in the chiefdom of that part of Fantee known by the name of Agimaque and Assinee. I lived with his children, enjoying peace and tranquillity, about twenty moons, which, according to their way of reckoning time, is two years. I was sent for to visit an uncle, who lived at a considerable distance from Agimaque.

The first day after we set out we arrived at Assinee, and the third day at my uncle's habitation, where I lived about three months, and was then thinking of returning to my father and young companion at Agimaque; but by this time I had got well acquainted with some of the children of my uncle's hundreds of relations, and we were some days too venturesome in going into the woods to gather fruit and catch birds, and such amusements as pleased us.

One day I refused to go with the rest, being rather apprehensive that something might happen to us; till one of my play-fellows said to me, because you belong to the great men, you are afraid to venture your carcase, or else of the bounsam, which is the devil. This enraged me so much, that I set a resolution to join the rest, and we went into the woods as usual; but we had not been above two hours before our troubles began, when several great ruffians came upon us suddenly, and said we must go and answer for it ourselves before him.


Soon some of us attempted in vain to run away, but pistols and cutlasses were soon introduced, threatening, that if we offered to stir we should all lie dead on the spot. One of them pretended to be more friendly than the rest, and said, that he would speak to their lord to get us clear, and desired that we should follow him; we were then immediately divided into different parties, and drove after him. We were soon led out of the way which we knew, and towards the evening […] we came in sight of a town, they told us that this great man of theirs lived there. […] I was kept about six days at this man's house, and in the evening there was another man came and talked with him a good while, and I heard the one say to the other he must go, and the other said the sooner the better. […] Next day we travelled on, and in the evening came to a town, where I saw several white people, which made me afraid that they would eat me, according to our notion as children in the inland parts of the country. This made me rest very uneasy all the night. […] After I was ordered out, the horrors I soon saw and felt, cannot be well described; I saw many of my miserable countrymen chained two and two, some hand-cuffed, and some with their hands tied behind. We were conducted along by a guard, and when we arrived at the castle, I asked my guide what I was brought there for, he told me to learn the ways of the brow-sow, that is the white faced people. […] But when a vessel arrived to conduct us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow-men. Some would not stir from the ground, when they were lashed and beat in the most horrible manner. I have forgot the name of this infernal fort; but we were taken in the ship that came for us, to another that was ready to sail from Cape Coast. When we were put into the ship, we saw several black merchants coming on board, but we were all drove into our holes, and not suffered to speak to any of them. In this situation we continued several days in sight of our native land; but I could find no good person to give any information of my situation to Accasa at Agimaque. And when we found ourselves at last taken away, death was more preferable than life, and a plan was concerted amongst us, that we might burn and blow up the ship, and to perish all together in the flames; but we were betrayed by one of our own countrywomen, who slept with some of the head men of the ship, for it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take African women and lie upon their bodies; but the men were chained and pent up in holes. It was the women and boys which were to burn the ship, with the approbation and groans of the rest; though that was prevented, the discovery was likewise a cruel bloody scene.


But it would be needless to give a description of all the horrible scenes which we saw, and the base treatment which we met with in this dreadful captive situation, as the similar cases of thousands, which suffer by this infernal traffic, are well known. Let it suffice to say, that I was thus lost to my dear indulgent parents and relations, and they to me. All my help was cries and tears, and these could not avail; nor suffered long, till one succeeding woe, and dread, swelled up another. Brought from a state of innocence and freedom, and, in a barbarous and cruel manner, conveyed to a state of horror and slavery: this abandoned situation may be easier conceived than described. From the time that I was kid-napped and conducted to a factory, and from thence in the brutish, base, but fashionable way of traffic, consigned to Granada, the grievous thoughts which I then felt, still pant in my heart; though my fears and tears have long since subsided. And yet it is still grievous to think that thousands more have suffered in similar and greater distress, under the hands of barbarous robbers, and merciless taskmasters; and that many even now are suffering in all the extreme bitterness of grief and woe, that no language can describe. The cries of some, and the sight of their misery, may be seen and heard afar; but the deep sounding groans of thousands, and the great sadness of their misery and woe, under the heavy load of oppressions and calamities inflicted upon them, are such as can only be distinctly known to the ears of Jehovah Sabaoth.
This extract is abridged from Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, ed. Vincent Carretta (London and New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 12-16.

http://www.brycchancarey.com/cugoano/extract1.htm