|
Captain Evans gave her the name “Sarah.” He
chose a Biblical name, linking the enslaved woman, who was likely an Igbo
speaker, to a princess, the beautiful wife of Abraham. Perhaps the captain
hoped that she would share other traits with the Biblical Sarah, who
remained submissive and obedient to her husband during a long journey to
Canaan.
Soon the enslaved men on the Hudibras
erupted in insurrection. The goal was to “massacre the ship’s company, and
take possession of the vessel.” It was suppressed, bloody punishments
dispensed. Afterward, Captain Evans and other officers suspected that
“Sarah” and her mother (who was also on board) were somehow involved, even
though the women had not joined the men in the actual uprising. When
questioned closely, with violence looming, they denied having any knowledge,
but “fear, or guilt, was strongly marked in their countenances.” Later that
night, as male and female captives angrily shouted recriminations around the
ship in the aftermath of defeat, it became clear that both “Sarah” and her
mother not only knew about the plot, they had indeed been involved in it.
Sarah had likely used her privileged position as a “favourite,” and her
great freedom of movement that this entailed, to help with planning and
perhaps even to pass tools to the men, allowing them to hack off their
shackles and manacles.
“Sarah” survived the middle passage, and
whatever punishment she may have gotten for her involvement in the
insurrection. She was sold at Grenada, with almost three hundred others, in
1787. She was allowed to stay on the vessel longer than most, probably with
the special permission of Captain Evans. When she went ashore she carried
African traditions of dance, song, and resistance with her.
Sailor and Pirate Bartholomew Roberts
Bartholomew Roberts was a young Welshman who
sailed as second mate aboard the Princess, a 140-ton Guineaman out of
London bound for Sierra Leone. He had apparently worked in the slave trade
for a while. He knew navigation, as the mates of slavers had to be ready to
assume command in the not uncommon event of the captain’s death. The
Princess was captured in June 1719 by Howell Davis and a rowdy gang of
pirates, who asked Roberts and his mates on the prize vessel if any of them
wished to join “the brotherhood.” Roberts hesitated at first, knowing that
the British government had in recent years left the corpses of executed
pirates dangling at the entrance of one Atlantic port city after another.
But soon he decided that he would indeed sail under the black flag.
It was a fateful decision. When Davis was
killed by Portuguese slave traders not long afterwards, “Black Bart,” as he
would be called, was elected captain of his ship, and soon became the most
successful sea-robber of his age. He commanded a small flotilla of ships
and several hundred men who captured more than 400 merchant vessels over
three years, the peak of “the golden age of piracy.” Roberts was widely
known and just as widely feared. Naval officers on patrol spotted him and
sailed in the opposite direction. Royal officials fortified their coasts
against the man they called “the great pirate Roberts.” He acted the part
by strolling the decks of his ship dressed as a dandy, in a lush damask
waistcoat, a red feather in his hat, and a golden toothpick in his mouth.
His motto as a pirate was, “A Merry Life and Short One.”
Roberts terrorized the African coast, sending
the traders there “into a panick.” He so despised the brutal ways of
slave-trading captains that he and his crew enacted a bloody ritual called
the “distribution of justice,” dispensing a fearful lashing to any captured
captain whose sailors complained of his usage. Indeed Roberts gave some of
these drubbings himself. Slave-trading merchants responded to this threat
to their profits by persuading Parliament to intensify naval patrols on the
coast of West Africa. HMS Swallow found and engaged Roberts in
February 1722. Roberts stayed upon deck to lead the battle and encourage
his men, but took a fatal volley of grapeshot in the throat. His mates
honored a longstanding pledge and dumped his still-armed body overboard.
The naval vessel defeated the pirates, captured the survivors, and took them
to the slave-trading fortress at Cape Coast Castle, where they were tried
and hanged en masse. Captain Challoner Ogle then distributed corpses up and
down the African coast so local slave traders could hang them up as a
message to sailors. Ogle made it a special point to visit the King of
Whydah, who had promised him fifty-six pounds of gold dust “If he should
secure that rascal Roberts, who had long infested his coast.”
Captain William Snelgrave
Captain William Snelgrave was gathering a
cargo of Africans on the “Slave Coast” of Benin to transport to Antigua
when, to his surprise, he was invited by the King of Ardra (also called
Allada) to visit. This presented a dilemma. On the one hand, Snelgrave
dared not refuse if he wanted to curry favor for future supplies of slaves.
But on the other hand he considered the king and his people to be “fierce
brutish Cannibals.” The captain resolved the dilemma by deciding to visit
and to take with him a guard of ten sailors “well armed with Musquets and
Pistols, which those savage People I knew were much afraid of.”
Canoed by escorts a quarter mile upriver,
Snelgrave found on his arrival the king “sitting on a Stool, under some
shady Trees,” with about fifty courtiers and a large troop of warriors
nearby. The latter were armed with bows and arrows, swords, and barbed
lances. The armed sailors took a guarded position “opposite to them, at the
distance of about twenty paces” as Snelgrave presented gifts to a delighted
king.
Snelgrave soon noticed “a little Negroe-Child
tied by the Leg to a Stake driven in the Ground.” Two African priests stood
nearby. The child was “a fine Boy about 18 Months old,” but he was in
distress, his body covered with flies and vermin. Agitated, the slave
captain asked the king, “What is the reason of the Child’s being tied in
that manner?” The king replied, “It was to be sacrificed that night to his
God Egbo, for his prosperity.” Upset by the answer, Snelgrave
quickly ordered one of his sailors “to take the Child from the Ground, in
order to preserve him.” As he did so, one of the king’s guards ran at the
sailor, brandishing his lance, whereupon Snelgrave stood up and drew a
pistol, halting the man in his tracks and sending the king into a fright and
the entire gathering into a tumult.
When order was restored, Snelgrave complained
to the king about the threatening action of the guard. The king replied
that Snelgrave himself “had not done well” in ordering the sailor to seize
the child, “it being his Property.” The captain excused himself by
explaining that his religion “expressly forbids so horrid a Thing, as the
putting of a poor innocent Child to death.” He added the golden rule: “the
grand Law of human Nature was, To do to others as we desir’d to be done
unto.” The conflict was ultimately resolved not through theology but the
cash nexus as Snelgrave offered to buy the child. He offered “a bunch of
sky coloured beads, worth about half a Crown Sterling.” The king accepted
the offer. Snelgrave was surprised that the price was so cheap, as traders
such as the king were usually “very ready, on any extraordinary occasion, to
make their Advantage of us.”
The rest of the meeting consisted of eating
and drinking the European food and liquor Snelgrave had brought for the
king. African palm wine was also on offer, but Snelgrave refused to drink
it as the wisdom among slave ship captains was that it could be “artfully
poison[ed].” The sailors had no such worries and drank avidly. Upon
parting, the king declared himself “well pleased” with the visit, which
meant that more slaves would be forthcoming. As the Europeans canoed back
to the ship, Snelgrave turned to a member of his crew and said that they
“should pitch on some motherly Woman [among the enslaved already on board]
to take care of this poor Child.” The sailor answered, “He had already one
in his Eye.” The woman “had much Milk in her Breasts.”
As soon as Snelgrave and the sailors came
aboard, the very woman they had been discussing saw them with the little boy
and ran “with great eagerness, and snatched him from out of the white Man’s
Arms that held him.” It was the woman’s own child. Captain Snelgrave had
already bought her without realizing the connection. Snelgrave observed, “I
think there never was a more moving sight than on this occasion, between the
Mother and her little Son.”
The ship’s linguist then told the woman what
had happened, that, as Snelgrave wrote, “I had saved her Child from being
sacrificed.” The story made its way around the ship, through the more than
three hundred captives on board, who soon “expressed their Thankfulness to
me, by clapping their Hands, and singing a song in my praise.” Nor did the
gratitude end there, as Snelgrave noted: “This affair proved of great
service to us, for it gave them a good notion of White Men; so that we had
no Mutiny in our Ship, during the whole Voyage.” Snelgrave’s benevolence
continued upon arrival in Antigua. As soon as he told the story of child
and mother to a Mr. Studely, a slave-owner, “he bought the Mother and her
Son, and was a kind Master to them.”
William Snelgrave could thus think of
Africans as “fierce brutish Cannibals” and think of himself as an ethical,
civilized redeemer, a good Christian with qualities that even savages would
have to recognize and applaud. He could think of himself as the savior of
families as he destroyed them. He could imagine a humane outcome for two as
he delivered hundreds to a plantation fate of endless toil and premature
death. His justifications in place, he could even invoke the Golden Rule,
which would soon become a central saying of the anti-slavery movement.
Captain William Watkins
As the Africa,
a Bristol guineaman captained by William Watkins, lay at anchor in Old Calabar
River in the late 1760s, its prisoners were busy down in the hold of the vessel,
hacking off their chains as quietly as they could. A large number of them
managed to get free of the fetters, lift off the gratings, and climb onto the
main deck. Their first target was the barricado door, behind which lay the
weapons with which they might recover their lost freedom. It was not unusual,
explained sailor Henry Ellison, for the enslaved to rise, whether because of a
“love of liberty,” “ill treatment,” or “a spirit of vengeance.”
The crew of the Africa was taken entirely
by surprise; they seemed to have no idea that an insurrection was afoot,
literally beneath their very feet. But just as the mutineers “were forcing open
the barricado door,” Ellison and seven of his crew mates “well armed with
pistols and cutlasses” boarded from a neighboring slave ship, the
Nightingale. They saw what was happening, mounted the barricado, and fired
above the heads of the rebels, hoping to scare them into submission. The shots
did not deter them, so the sailors lowered their aim and fired into the mass of
insurgents, killing one. The captives made a second attempt to force open the
barricado door, but the sailors held firm, forcing them to retreat forward,
giving chase as they went. As the armed seamen pressed forward, a few of the
rebels jumped overboard, some ran below, and others stayed on the deck to
fight. The sailors fired again and killed two more.
Once the crew had regained control of the
situation, Captain Watkins reimposed order. He selected eight of the mutineers
“for an example.” They were tied up, and each sailor – the regular crew of the
Africa, plus the eight from the Nightingale – were ordered to take
a turn with the whip. They “flogged them until from weariness they could flog
no more.” Captain Watkins then turned to an instrument called “the tormentor,”
a combination of the cook’s tongs and a surgeon’s instrument for spreading
plasters. He had them heated white hot and used them to burn the flesh of the
eight rebels. “This operation being over,” Ellison explained, “they were
confined and taken below.” Apparently all survived.
Yet the torture was not over. Captain Watkins
suspected that one of his own sailors was involved in the plot, that he had
“encouraged the slaves to rise.” He accused an unnamed black seaman, the ship’s
cook, of assisting the revolt, “of having furnished them with the cooper’s
tools, in order that they might knock themselves out of irons.” Ellison doubted
this, calling it “supposition only, and without any proof of the fact.”
Captain Watkins nonetheless ordered an iron
collar – usually reserved for the most rebellious slaves – fastened around the
neck of the black seaman. He then had him “chained to the main mast-head,”
where he would remain night and day, indefinitely. He was to be given “only one
plantain and one pint of water per day.” His only clothes were a pair of long
trousers, which were little “to shield him from the inclemency of the night.”
The shackled seaman remained in the foretop of the ship for three weeks, slowing
starving to death.
When the Africa had gathered its full
cargo of 310 slaves and the seamen prepared to sail away from the Bight of
Biafra, Captain Watkins decided that the cook’s punishment should continue, so
he made arrangements with Captain Joseph Carter to send him aboard the
Nightingale, where he was once again chained to the main top and given the
same meager allowance of food and water. After ten more days, the black seaman
had grown delirious. “Hunger and oppression,” said Ellison, “had reduced him to
a skeleton.” For three days he struggled madly to free himself from the
fetters, causing the chains to rub “the skin from several parts of his body.”
The neck collar “found its way to the bone.” The “unfortunate man,” said
Ellison, had become “a most shocking spectacle.” After five weeks in the two
vessels, “having experienced inconceivable misery in both, he was relieved by
death.” Ellison was one of the sailors charged to throw his body from the
fore-top into the river. The minimal remains of the black seaman were
“immediately devoured by the sharks.” |
