Maritime slavery

INTRODUCTION

Maritime SlaveryPhilip D. Morgan

Think of maritime slavery, and the notorious Middle Passage – the unprecedented,

forced migration of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic – readily comes to mind.

This so-called middle leg (from Africa to the Americas) of a supposed trading triangle

linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas naturally captures attention for its scale and

horror. After all, the Middle Passage was the largest forced, transoceanic migration in

world history, now thought to have involved about 12.5 million African captives

shipped in about 44,000 voyages that sailed between 1514 and 1866. No other

coerced migration matches it for sheer size or gruesomeness.1

Maritime slavery is not, however, just about the movement of people as commod-

ities, but rather, the involvement of all sorts of people, including slaves, in the trans-

portation of those human commodities. Maritime slavery is thus not only about

objects being moved but also about subjects doing the moving. Some slaves were

actors, not simply the acted-upon. They moved commodities, not merely represented

commodities. They were pilots, sailors, canoemen, divers, linguists, porters, stewards,

cooks, and cabin boys, not forgetting all the ancillary workers in port such as steve-

dores, warehousemen, labourers, grumetes, washerwomen, tavern workers, and pros-

titutes. This attention to the seafaring community is part of a general movement to

explore oceans as arenas of interaction, to reverse the precedence usually given to

land over water. There is now a ‘maritime turn’ to rival the ‘linguistic turn’ in

recent historical scholarship. As Karen Wigen notes, ‘the sea is swinging into view’

as never before.2

The articles in this special issue reflect this current interest in maritime spaces. The

Mediterranean, the first stretch of water to be colonised by networks of routine,

round-trip exchange, the ‘ur-sea’ as it has been termed, is referenced in David

Wheat’s essay. The Caribbean, like the Mediterranean, is ‘a space between continents’,

and Wheat shows that the linkages between the two seas were direct, with

Slavery and AbolitionVol. 31, No. 3, September 2010, pp. 311–326

Philip D. Morgan is Harry C. Black Professor, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

21218, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/10/030311–16DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2010.504537 # 2010 Taylor & Francis

Mediterranean galleys and several hundred oarsmen from North Africa and the

Ottoman empire ending up in the Spanish Caribbean. Molly Warsh’s essay also

focuses on the Spanish Caribbean and the combination of Indian and African

divers whose exploitation produced a short-lived boom in pearl production near Mar-

garita and Cubagua Islands. Most of the other essays in this issue focus on the large

body of water that the Turks and Moors crossed to reach the Caribbean. The Atlantic

world has received much attention of late, although studies of its ocean are still in their

infancy. Thus, the Atlantic-based essays in this volume probe specific areas and topics

– whether Portuguese or Brazilian slave ships, Gold Coast castles, or Anglo-American

privateering voyages – as ways of approaching this vast area and much less venerable

field of scholarly endeavour than that of the Mediterranean.3

By the late eighteenth century, the incursions of Europeans into the Indian Ocean

grew apace and indigenous responses intensified. The Sulu Sultanate in Southeast Asia,

as James Warren elucidates, engaged in long-distance marauding to increase its supply

of slaves. Its slave raiders regularly travelled further than Southeast Asians had ever

gone before and established a vast network of raiding bases and forms of communi-

cation over great distances. The terror and trauma that these slave raiders visited

upon Philippine and Indonesian coastal communities cannot be underestimated,

although captives and slaves were often assimilated into the raiders’ societies – to

the point that some slaves could even organise raids of their own, eventually own

slaves, and earn their freedom. Another response occurred in the north-western

sector of the Indian Ocean, where East African men, slaves and freedmen alike,

played vital roles in shaping a maritime world. As steam vessels gradually supplanted

sailing ships, Janet Ewald notes, Africans worked almost exclusively in the engine

room, in part because other mariners disliked that work and already monopolised

deck crew positions, in part because even stokehole work on a vessel provided oppor-

tunities, in part because men freed or escaped from bondage naturally gravitated to the

mobility of maritime life, and in part because loading coal in port could easily lead to

working with coal below deck.4

With the inroads of whaling vessels and steamships in the nineteenth century, the

Pacific became a place of dense, criss-crossing connections. If to this point Africans

and slaves were comprised of the least favoured maritime workers, now the Chinese

vied for that dubious honour, as John Grider explains. Prejudice against the

Chinese stemmed in large part from the overcrowded ships transporting contracted

Chinese labourers, reminiscent of slave ships. In addition, as the Chinese entered

the seafaring labour market, they proved a direct threat to white sailors’ livelihoods

from their willingness to work for low wages. Steamships, as Grider notes, ‘devalued

sailors’ traditional skills and labor’. Grider tells a declension story: whites, blacks,

and Pacific Islanders served together on sailing ships in the first half of the nineteenth

century, but the latter half ushered in a new era of racial intolerance and exclusion.

Whether the Atlantic, Indian, or Pacific oceans, the maritime sphere was in some

ways a world apart. Life afloat – cocooned in a complex machine, a ‘wooden

world’ – was distinct from life ashore. Seamen can seem marginal figures, dwelling

on the fringes of settled society, speaking an argot unintelligible to outsiders,

312 Philip D. Morgan

wearing a distinctive garb, sporting particular hairstyles and bodily markings, and

even walking with a noticeably rolling gait. The Greeks, N.A.M. Rodger notes, hesi-

tated to count sailors among the living or dead; many Africans thought that the sea

was the realm of the dead. Seafaring is often thought to be the province of extremely

humble, desperate people. The ‘smell of tar’, one scholar notes, ‘did not ennoble

anyone’, and the risks associated with seafaring were palpable; people had to be in

dire straits, it is commonly assumed, to work in such a hostile environment. The low-

liness of jobs at sea explains why Jack Tar often likened his fate to slavery. The lot of the

‘common seaman’, one New Englander pointed out, was ‘noe better than commane

slauerye’. Or as, Edward Barlow, the seventeenth-century English mariner pungently

explained, ‘all the men in the ship except the master’ are ‘little better than slaves’. Con-

templating naval service, the young George Washington heard that it would ‘cut him

and staple him and use him like a Negro, or rather, like a dog’. Mariners can be con-

sidered a breed apart, and their profession for many was not an honourable one.5

At the same time, as Daniel Vickers astutely observes, the majority of sailors ‘spent

most of their lives – perhaps even most of their working lives – on land’. In that sense,

mariners could never be a breed apart; for many, seafaring was an extension of terres-

trial existence, and an occupation quite honourable, highly skilled, in fact. In any case,

the maritime world, and the focus of its historians, is as much on the intersection of

sea and land as on the sea itself. Intermediate zones – littorals, beaches, coastlines,

ports, and harbours – the environment of ‘saltwater peoples’, those living within

easy walking distance of the sea or growing up within earshot of surf, now hove

into view. Maritime history thus pays considerable attention to the lives of sailors

ashore; all the ancillary personnel and institutions that supported life afloat – the mer-

chants, shipping agents, crimps, stevedores, longshoremen, lighter-men, dockworkers,

artisans, as well as the shipyards, ropewalks, cooperies, boarding houses, taverns, and

brothels – require examination. In Bermuda’s whaling industry, for example, twice as

many slaves worked ashore processing the animals as toiled afloat catching them.

Sailor towns became as important as sailors.6

The maritime world was masculine in many ways, but women played significant

roles. Pablo E. Perez-Mallaına has noted how mulatto women seemed to be ‘especially

attractive’ to Spanish mariners. Ports were generally places of female majorities,

because of the economic opportunities they presented to women. Throughout the

Caribbean and North America, free black women operated small businesses such as

inns, taverns, shops, boarding-houses, and bakeries, forming key parts of the maritime

service economy. In Charleston, South Carolina, some white women lived off the

income generated by their hired-out slaves who hawked and peddled goods on city

streets, were seamstresses, and washerwomen. So-called ‘Negro washing houses’

were commonplace. As floating sojourners, sailors needed services provided by local

residents to satisfy their daily needs ashore. Local African and Afro-Creole women

– innkeepers, laundresses, and sexual companions – found a niche. Women could

even be mobile in ports. In 1688 a Sephardic Jewish woman and four women of

African descent – perhaps her slaves or companions, for she apparently comman-

deered the boat – lost their lives when their vessel was shipwrecked between the

Slavery and Abolition 313

Dutch entrepot of Curacao and Coro, a town on the northern coast of mainland

Spanish America (now Venezuela). In Africa and the Caribbean alike, incoming

ships were met by canoe-borne slaves – ‘bumboats’ in local parlance – offering pro-

visions and other services (a ‘charcoal seraglio’ was one contemporary term for the

phenomenon).7

Maritime labour had its obvious attractions for slaves. If plantation labour was the

alternative – as it was in many places – life at sea was generally preferable. Thus,

impressment did not hold the same fears for blacks as it did for whites, because

naval service, as Denver Brunsman puts it, ‘signified a step up’ from slaves’ everyday

lives. White sailors could view impressment as tantamount to slavery, but Samuel

Barber, Dr Samuel Johnson’s impressed manservant, was reluctant to leave the navy

because it improved his lot. As cribbed, confining, and dangerous as shipboard life

was, seafaring offered mobility and the opportunity to broaden horizons. Usually

the first to hear of major events, maritime slaves became valuable conduits and infor-

mants within their communities. Maritime slaves were the most cosmopolitan of men.

No wonder so many of the earliest black leaders ‘rolled out of the forecastle’, as Jeff

Bolster notes, rather than the pulpit. Furthermore, life afloat generally afforded

better treatment than plantation labour. Yes, the lash was still ubiquitous, but oppor-

tunities were greater too – the chance of cash wages, the ability to engage in private

ventures, and even exposure to literacy and book-reading were all more likely.

Sailors were not just wage workers, but traders, and they wrote the earliest black auto-

biographies. Letters from African American sailors, while rare, do exist; and such

letter-writers, impressed by the Royal Navy, avoided the metaphor of enslavement

so popular among white sailors; rather, they proclaimed their American citizenship.

On board ship, skin colour often mattered less than skill. The camaraderie of being

‘in the same boat’, working as part of a collective team, sharing food and accommo-

dations, had its allure.8

Whites testified to black maritime skills. In 1758 one white observer declared Ber-

mudian black sailors ‘the best in America, and as useful as the whites in their naviga-

tion’. Some Bermudian slaves were so adept at trading that they acted as informal

supercargoes, managing the purchase and sale of a cargo. A French visitor to

Jamaica in 1765 praised the ‘intelligence’ of these ‘black managers’ as they negotiated

with the rich island planters, revealing ‘the punctuality with they carry out the business

of their Masters, and bring back their vessels’. Experiencing a transitory inversion of

the typical racial order, the white captain who turned over the helm to a black pilot

had to trust in the man’s abilities. No wonder black pilots had a reputation for

being self-confident men. A Bermudian ‘colored boy’ in his teens (no doubt

exposed to the maritime world) taught the 9-year-old George Tucker how to count

and to multiply as far as his 12 times table.9

African-Americans no doubt contributed to the technology of seafaring in the age of

sail, but, so far as is known, only two concrete examples have come to light. First,

about the time of the Seven Years War ‘a happy expedient was hit upon for making

a ship ride easy in a storm at sea, which was affected by launching overboard a

spare boom made fast to the end of a hauser’. This technological improvement, a


simple form of sea anchor or ‘floating anchor’, used in deep waters when a regular

anchor would not reach the bottom and there was a pressing need to keep the

ship’s head pointed into the wind, was credited to ‘a negro seaman’. In 1848, Lewis

Temple, an African-American blacksmith in New England created the toggle iron

harpoon, which became standard in American whaling for at least half a century.10

The camaraderie of sailors sometimes trumped race. Seafaring involved, as Bolster

notes, one of ‘the most racially integrated labour forces in eighteenth-century

America’. The linking of sailors and slaves in the public mind is nicely captured in

the erection of a cage in Belize to ‘confine disorderly Seamen and Negroes’. Similarly,

in Charleston the workhouse became a ‘House of Correction’ for ‘fugitive Seaman &

Slaves’. Placed on the same plane, white sailors could befriend blacks.11

Nevertheless, despite the camaraderie and practical attractions of seafaring, mari-

time life was often brutal for blacks. Two incidents, centuries apart, can illustrate

the point. In 1583 on board the flagship of the New Spain fleet, a white sailor called

his fellow tar ‘a black dog’ whereupon the two scuffled, with the black sailor stabbing

his white compatriot in the ribs. That they later reconciled is remarkable, but surely the

black sailor never forgot the racial epithet. Similarly, in 1812, in English Harbour,

Antigua, Humphrey Clinker, a black sailor (perhaps a reader of Tobias Smollett),

was quietly minding his own business on the naval vessel Amaranthe’s deck when

his shipmate performing guard duty, abused him, calling him a ‘black bugger’.

When Clinker told the man to move along, the sentry ran his ramrod into Clinker’s

eye. Deprived of his sight in one eye, Clinker learned the dangers of provoking

white men, even if he could take consolation in the sentry’s guilty verdict when

tried for maiming a shipmate. Evidently racial prejudice was hardly absent on board

ship. The degree of abuse that fell on black sailors in New England vessels in the

early nineteenth century, Vickers notes, was ‘remarkable’. Cooks and stewards,

mostly black and composing just about one seventh of the crew, received over a

third of all punishments.12

Privateering exemplifies the risks and hardships that slaves ran at sea. Admittedly,

some enslaved sailors serving on privateers gained a significant share of the prize

money in recognition of the personal risks they ran and to motivate them in battle.

Slave mariners on privateering vessels often fought alongside white sailors and were

entrusted with weapons. Some masters even freed such slaves to safeguard them

from sale if captured; and Massachusetts during the American Revolution became

the one state that would not routinely sell captured slaves as commodities.

However, as Charles Foy emphasises, enslaved sailors faced greater hardship than

white sailors should their ship be captured. Generally, they were sold as prize goods

rather than jailed and exchanged as prisoners; the Massachusetts exception was

largely circumvented. Privateering was thoroughly ‘compatible with slavery’, as

Jarvis notes; and blacks almost always suffered the harshest fate if captured by

privateers.13

A major thrust of recent scholarship on the maritime world has been to show its

variations. Maritime slavery could never be a singular phenomenon. The experience

varied enormously, depending on whether slaves resided in big or small ports, were


bluewater or coastal sailors, went on long or short voyages, boarded large ships

or small sloops, fished or whaled, were privateers or naval hands. Where the scale

of operations was large, crews tended to be heterogeneous, life was riskier, tensions

more severe, discipline stricter, and the hierarchy of command more elaborate.

From outports and in smaller vessels, crews tended to be more cooperative, often

family-, household-, or neighbourhood-based. Deep-sea work was isolating whereas

boatmen, Bolster notes, ‘slept ashore, ate local foods in season, had more regular

contact with relatives, and avoided the clock-time regimentation of seafaring

watches’. Even the vessels engaged in the transatlantic slave trade – ranging from

the 1,269-ton ship Charles in 1857 to the 10-ton schooner Little Sally in 1763 –

suggest the extremes, the one with scores of sailors, and the other with just a

handful. Although maritime life could be cosmopolitan and international, it was

often intensely regional, local, even parochial. Paul Gilroy’s vision is of an integrative,

international, countercultural ‘Black Atlantic’, but deeply researched colony studies

show how important local identities were to ‘black Atlantic denizens’. Daniel

Vickers has complained of a tendency ‘to treat seafaring in general as a single

species of activity best illustrated by its most extreme varieties’, by which he means

‘vessels of the British Navy, the East India Companies, the long-distance whaling

industries’, and most extreme of all, the slave trade. Many other trades – coastal

and short-haul – were organised quite differently.14

Mapping the hierarchy of ports and the size of respective fleets would be a useful

exercise; only parts of the overall are known. In the eighteenth-century British Atlantic

world, London was the dominant hub, with 3,000 annual clearances by mid century,

and home to about 12,000 seamen. At about this time, approximately 75,000 mariners

were employed in the British Atlantic. Perhaps the busiest port in the eighteenth-

century Caribbean was Oranjestad, St Eustatius, with 2,000 clearances a year in the

early 1770s. This number almost matched the number of vessels clearing Boston, Phi-

ladelphia, and Rhode Island ports combined. Slaves would have formed a large pro-

portion of the crews coming in and out of Statia. Enslaved sailors, for example,

comprised more than two thirds of berths on mid-eighteenth-century Curacaon

vessels trading with Venezuela. Similarly, slaves must have dominated port life in Char-

lotte Amalie on Danish St Thomas, because two thirds of the island’s slaves lived in the

town. On sugar islands, perhaps 3 to 4 per cent of slaves were involved in maritime life,

but on non-sugar islands, the proportion rose to at least 15 per cent, sometimes much

more. The tiny Cayman Islands, with admittedly a small slave population to match,

had an almost total maritime orientation. Its enslaved population engaged in turtling,

fishing, trading, and wrecking. When in 1781 a transatlantic slave ship en route to

Jamaica was wrecked on the Caymans, apparently many of the enslaved Africans

were sold to pay salvage.15

The African coast gave rise to different maritime opportunities. The Gold Coast was

home to some of the most skilled canoe men in Africa; Europeans took these Fante

men to other coastal regions because of their expertise. As Ty Reese demonstrates, a

hybrid form of slavery emerged along this coast, melding European concerns about

property with African notions of rights in persons. In other coastal regions, the


French preferred Lebou and Wolof mariners; by the late eighteenth century the Kru

were seen as highly desirable auxiliary seamen in Sierra Leone. According to one

knowledgeable white observer, the Kru preferred ‘task work, or working by the

piece’, rather than a monthly wage; they then exerted themselves ‘exceedingly when

the reward is proportioned to the labour’. The ‘Kru mark’ was a broad blue or black

stripe running from the forehead down the bridge of the nose, sometimes extending

to the chin, with arrow marks on each temple. More conventional nautical tattoos

depicting boats, anchors, stars, and the like also came to decorate some Kru bodies.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, as Janet Ewald notes, so-called ‘seedies’

(deriving originally from ‘sidis or ‘sayyids’, Africans in northern India but coming

to denote sailors and dockside workers from the Swahili Coast) became ‘the Indian

Ocean equivalent of Atlantic krumen’.16

Maritime work varied greatly by task. A skilled mariner looked down on an ordinary

seaman, even more so on stewards, cooks, and cabin boys, some of the lowliest occu-

pations afloat, and for that reason often the preserve of slaves, people of African

descent, and later the Chinese in the Pacific. The slave trade involved specialised

work. Slave trade vessels often employed interpreters to calm captives, relay infor-

mation, and prevent insurrections. The 16-year-old cabin boy Antonio on the

famous Amistad acted as interpreter between crew and predominantly Mende speak-

ing African rebels who seized the ship, even though he claimed to have been born in

Cuba. The use of African guardians to police and intimidate their fellow captives seems

to have been common in the early slave trade. The Royal Africa Company certainly

engaged in the system for a while, but it was obsolete by the end of the seventeenth

century. The degree to which Portuguese ships followed suit is not wholly clear.17

A major variation in the Atlantic was between its northern and southern sectors.

Although slave sailors were found throughout the Atlantic basin, the southern Atlantic

saw far more slave sailors than the northern. In the most authoritative study, Stephen

Behrendt found that black mariners from Africa, the Atlantic Islands, the West Indies

or America comprised at most 3 per cent of all crewmen in the late British slave trade.

Given that on average, mariners in the British trade made about three slaving voyages

(because of high mortality and significant desertion, less than half of a slaver’s crew

usually returned to a British port), many white crew members in the North Atlantic

slave trade spent their whole career without serving with a black slave crew

member. By contrast, instructions to a captain sailing to Benguela in the South Atlan-

tic to ‘get rid of white sailors’ and ‘substitute them with black sailors’ (as revealed by

Marianna Candido) were probably commonplace. In ships setting out from Portugal,

the number of slaves in the crew was rarely more than a fraction, but most interest-

ingly, as Candido again demonstrates, captains tended to recruit Africans from the

coastal region they planned to visit. Presumably, their linguistic skills would be invalu-

able. In ships setting out from Brazil, slave sailors sometimes comprised as many as a

half, but frequently at least a sixth, of the crew. Thus, Brazilian slavers represent the

polar extreme in the recruitment of slave sailors – although of course they represented

nearly half of the transatlantic slave trade – and provide a most marked contrast with

slavers shipping out of Britain, France, or Portugal.18


Maritime slavery also waxed and waned over time. Wartime, for example, expanded

some kinds of maritime opportunities – privateering and naval service, most

obviously – while restricting the regular merchant marine. In some colonies large

transformations occurred over time. In 1700, white sailors outnumbered their black

counterparts 6:1 in Bermuda, and only about one sixth of the island’s slave men

were sailors; but on the eve of the American Revolution, about two thirds of the

men sailing Bermudian vessels were slaves. During the early nineteenth century,

North American shipping expanded, employing more than 100,000 men per year,

with black men filling about a fifth of sailors’ berths. In early nineteenth-century

Salem, approximately 10 per cent of crews were African American, and crews were

markedly more heterogeneous than they had been before. By the mid-nineteenth

century, however, opportunities for black sailors had contracted heavily in North

America. Similar expansions and restrictions occurred elsewhere, as Ewald and

Grider show, in particular.19

It is all too easy to romanticise maritime life. As Peregrine Horden and Nicholas

Purcell note, ‘sea history allows landlubber historians to indulge a taste for the

romance or the frisson of seafaring’. Perhaps no sphere is more prone to exaggeration

than piracy. On the one hand, Marcus Rediker argues that ‘Africans and African Amer-

icans both free and enslaved were numerous and active on board pirate vessels’. Alleg-

edly, black crewmen comprised a key part of the pirate vanguard, their ‘most trusted

and fearsome’ members – presumably because they had most to lose by being returned

to slavery. More than half of some pirate crews were supposedly black; thus, in 1718, 60

of Blackbeard’s crew of 100 were said to be black. Kenneth Kinkor goes further than

Rediker. For him, pirates were ‘united in a common enterprise transcending national-

ity, religion and race’. He believes that pirates displayed remarkable tolerance. The

shared experience of oppression was supposedly a solvent of racism. White crews

even elected blacks to positions of command: a quartermaster of fame, Captain

Kidd, was black. On the other hand, Arne Bialuschewski is deeply sceptical of such

claims. For him, pirates ‘usually saw little worth in’ slaves, and were much more inter-

ested in bullion and other valuables. He cites the brutalities inflicted on slaves by

pirates. He quotes a sailor captured by Blackbeard, describing his company as

‘about 130 Men all Stout Fellows all English without any mixture’. Perhaps his most

dramatic example concerns the mutineers of the slave ship Baylor who in 1722

‘threw about 100 slaves overboard’ – an incident that recalls the numbers involved

in the Zong atrocity some 60 or so years later. Bialuschewski punctures the romantic

aura surrounding piracy.20

The complexities of maritime slavery are encapsulated in specific stories. Especially

compelling is African seaman Gorge’s choice, as Walter Hawthorne relates it, to remain

a slave sailor rather than becoming nominally free. Gorge clearly identified as a

‘mariner’ and thought of himself as Portuguese, even as he acknowledged his

African heritage. Such choices complicate the stark polarities of slavery and

freedom. This individual story is similar to the tale of the 70 enslaved sailors of the

Bermudian privateer, the Regulator, who, when offered freedom in Massachusetts,

chose instead to return to Bermuda, even if it meant returning to slavery. There, at


least, they would rejoin families and friends ‘and a familiar, profitable seafaring life’.

Just as Gorge thought of himself as Portuguese, so these enslaved sailors thought of

themselves as Bermudian; indeed when being transported home, they cried ‘Huzzah

for Bermuda’ and seized the ship, which was later condemned as a prize. A more con-

ventional narrative occurred in 1747 when three Afro-Spanish mariners, who had been

victims of British privateers, sailed from New York on the Polly. Near Jamaica they

seized the sloop, killed the five crewmembers, and sailed for Santo Domingo. There,

they claimed that they had been enslaved by the crew and had rebelled to regain

their freedom.21

Gorge’s story can also be replicated in other tales of notable individual mariners.

The most famous black seaman in the eighteenth century was Olaudah Equiano.

Whatever the truth of his origins (whether the Bight of Biafra or South Carolina),

he unquestionably laboured as a slave for more than 10 years on merchant ships cross-

ing the Atlantic and Mediterranean. His complicated relations with white sailors who

both befriended and exploited him are telling. He purchased his freedom in 1766 and

continued to work as a seaman, travelling widely to Central America, the Caribbean,

the Arctic, and North America, before settling in England. In 1789 he published his

autobiography, much of it about his seaborne exploits.22

Equiano was the most famous enslaved mariner, but he was far from being the only

such fascinating individual. Another was the mulatto of Portuguese origin, Lope Mar-

tınez de Lagos, who in the 1560s acted as a pilot on three voyages between Mexico and

the Philippines. Discovering on his last trip that he was secretly condemned to death

for defrauding the royal treasury, he organised a successful mutiny, murdering all the

officers. From 1629 onward a Spanish mulatto, perhaps a Tortugan or Cuban (there

was conflicting testimony), Capitan Diego Martın, alias Diego el Mulato, was a

notable pirate, working with French and later Dutch sea-rovers, taking prizes and pris-

oners from Campeche to Veracruz. In 1638 he proclaimed his Catholic faith and

offered his services to Spain, promising that no enemy ship would stop along

Cuba’s coasts, in the knowledge that ‘I am here very few would dare pass on to the

Indies, for they certainly fear me’. Havana officials recommended acceptance of the

offer, with Diego receiving a royal pardon and a salary equivalent to that of an

admiral. Thomas Jeremiah was an enslaved harbour pilot in Charleston, South Caro-

lina, who gained his freedom probably in the 1760s and branched out into the fishing

and salvage businesses. He became a slave owner and ‘one of the wealthiest men of

African descent in British North America’. His dizzying ascent either led him to envi-

sage a role for blacks in the coming American Revolution or made him a target for

patriot forces who wanted to intimidate black harbour pilots. Either way, he was a

victim of his own success and was hanged and then burned for allegedly plotting a

slave insurrection. As a last example, consider the enslaved 17-year-old Yoruban,

who arrived in Bahia, in 1822. Thirteen years later he bought his freedom, took the

name Rufino Jose Maria, and became a cook on a slave ship. In 1841, after a

number of voyages, he was captured by a British anti-slaver and taken to Sierra

Leone. He managed to return to Brazil, but was soon back in Sierra Leone attending

Quaranic classes. In 1845 he settled down in Recife where he became a fortune teller


and healer. His wide travels exposed him to many worlds, and he spoke several

languages – Portuguese, Yoruba, Arabic, and probably slave-trade pidgin. These

four individual examples taken from successive centuries illustrate the opportunities

and dangers of maritime life.23

Not just individual biographies but illustrations can illumine the maritime world in

which slaves were a part; and a fair number of which are set in Europe. One of the ear-

liest is a depiction of black waterfront workers in Venice in 1495. About 30 years later,

Christoph Wieditz depicted black slaves filling water barrels for a vessel in a Spanish

port. In the 1570s a striking waterfront scene in Lisbon, Chafariz d’El Rey, where

perhaps about 10 per cent of the population was black, is notable for its depiction

of black life. In the painting, scores of individual blacks make an appearance, and

the range of activities is remarkable: blacks filling water vessels from a fountain; exten-

sive head-carrying of large jugs of water; two constables arrest one black man; another

black man dances with a white woman; one freed black, wearing a cape bearing the red

cross of the Order of Santiago, rides a horse; one black man in a small boat is rowing

while another is shaking a tambourine, as a white couple appear about to kiss. In 1745

William Hogarth famously created a picture of a slave playing a pipe and tabor to

mimic the pose of Captain Lord Graham in his cabin. Maritime veterans such as

Billy Waters, the one-legged busker, or Joseph Johnson with a model ship on his

head, graced London streets. In 1815 John Downman drew a sensitive portrait of

Thomas Williams, a black sailor from Liverpool. In the early nineteenth century a

drawing of Captain Robert Lawrie’s ‘servant’ (probably slave) Tom has him speaking

in dialect with the words reproduced in a bubble from his mouth. The watercolour

Drunken Sailor by John Locker shows a black sailor helping an obviously drunk

white compatriot. Their arms are symbolically linked.24

Naturally, Africans and their descendants populate African, Caribbean, and to a

lesser extent North American maritime scenes. African coastal illustrations, particu-

larly along the Gold Coast, regularly feature manned canoes of all sizes and dimen-

sions. One of the earliest New World equivalents (from the 1660s) is a group of six

blacks in a canoe turtle hunting in the French West Indies. Between 1774 and 1777,

Gabriel Bray painted about 70 watercolours of places and people he visited while on

the naval vessel the Pallas: particularly notable are a possible portrait of three

kroomen of Sierra Leone, three Gold Coast canoemen standing upright and paddling

vigorously, various West African coastal scenes, a remarkable delegation of Africans

on his ship, and a breaming of a naval vessel with about seventeen blacks at work,

probably in English Harbour, Antigua. In 1778 John Singleton Copley’s Watson

and the Shark was inspired by an event that took place in Havana, Cuba, in 1749,

when 14-year-old Brook Watson was attacked while swimming in the harbour.

Copley portrays nine of Watson’s shipmates, one of whom was black, coming to

his rescue. From the 1770s onwards, illustrations of tent boats or plantation

barges, usually manned by six to eight oarsmen and a black helmsman, shows

them navigating Surinamese rivers. In the same decade, Nicholas Pocock drew a

boat seemingly transporting slaves to a larger vessel off the Pitons, St Lucia,

perhaps part of an inter-Caribbean slave trade. In 1800 Pocock painted a view of


English Harbour, Antigua, with a group of blacks setting sail in a small boat. In 1823

William Clark famously depicted slaves rolling sugar hogsheads onto lighters for

transport to ocean-going vessels. ‘Bum Boat in Carlisle Bay’, shows a boat being

rowed by a man (on right) and woman; the boat is loaded with fruits and vegetables,

and a monkey is sitting on the gunnel. The bumboat, a term used in England for this

kind of vessel, was employed to bring provisions and commodities for sale to larger

ships in port or offshore. The appearance of an Iranun maritime raider, with three

banks of oars, under full sail, as illustrated in James Warren’s essay, was a much

less benign, indeed fearsome and frightening, sight.25

The lives of enslaved mariners exhibited paradoxes and contradictions. Living cheek

by jowl with free sailors could produce camaraderie but just as probably hostility. Mar-

itime slaves travelled widely, but were subject to collective isolation in a machine

resembling a wooden prison. The crew could act as one and yet was highly differen-

tiated by rank and function. The maritime world both blurred and rigidified the

spheres of freedom and slavery. A globalised labour force became a segmented

labour force, with particular racial groups confined to the lowliest positions. Some

mariners were highly cosmopolitan; others had highly localised identities. The ship

could be a ‘forcing house for internationalism’ but parochial attachments remained

strong. From a slave owner’s perspective, sending slaves to sea seems highly risky,

courting fate, but apparently familial ties and the autonomy of seafaring encouraged

slaves to return back to a home port. According to one study, slaves deserted far more

infrequently than whites. Similarly, in cases of smuggling, slaves were far from a liab-

ility, for their testimony was inadmissible in court, making them especially valuable to

owners. Maritime mobility was both a blessing and a curse; it could broaden horizons

and offer trading opportunities; but it posed significant risks. Ironies thoroughly bede-

villed the experiences of maritime slaves.26

Acknowledgements

I thank all the contributors for their essays, and Gad Heuman for his patience and

encouragement.

Notes

[1] See online Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces. Mortality rates for African slaves seem to have been by far the worst, muchhigher than for indentured Indian labourers, which in turn were higher than for free whitelabour: Shlomowitz, ‘Mortality of Indian Labour’. See also Christopher et al., eds, ManyMiddle Passages.

[2] Wigen, ‘Introduction’, 717. See also Klein and Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes; Bentley et al.,eds. Seascapes; Bethencourt and Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion.

[3] Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, 64–93, esp. 82.[4] Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea’. For other studies of different parts of this ocean, see Fisher,

‘Working Across the Seas’; Hooper, ‘An Island Empire’; and Eltis and Hooper, ‘The IndianOcean’.


http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces

http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces

[5] Rodger, The Wooden World, 15; McGaffey, ‘Dialogues of the Deaf ’, 249–67; Perez-Mallaına,Spain’s Men of the Sea, 36; Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 107; Wiencek, An Imperfect God, 59.

[6] Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 3, 17, 112, 181; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 248–9. These tworecent books are impressive, and along with Bolster, Black Jacks, are indispensable. For otherwork that stresses the connections between land and sea: Pearson, ‘Littoral Society’; Land,‘Tidal Waves’; and his War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor.

[7] Perez-Mallaına, Spain’s Men of the Sea, 166–7; Wheat, ‘Nharas and Morenas Horras’; Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy, 20, 45–7; Kennedy, Braided Relations, 150–3; Rupert, ‘Waters ofFaith’, 151–64; Shelford, ‘Sea Tales’.

[8] Brunsman, ‘Men of War’, 15, 30; Scott, ‘The Common Wind’; his ‘Afro-American Sailors’,37–52 and ‘Crisscrossing Empires’, 128–43; Bolster, Black Jacks, 2; Vickers, Young Men andthe Sea, 239; Bolster, ‘Letters by African American Sailors’; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade,107–8, 135, 137–8, 368; and ‘The Binds of the Anxious Mariner’, 88.

[9] Jarvis, ‘The Binds of the Anxious Mariner’, 90; In the Eye of All Trade, 152, 283.[10] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, III: 374; Frost, ‘Lewis Temple’, 803–4.[11] Bolster, Black Jacks, 45; Finamore, ‘Pirate Water’, 3–47. esp. 44; Harris, The Hanging of Thomas

Jeremiah, 119.[12] Perez-Mallaına, Spain’s Men of the Sea, 39; Morgan, ‘Black Experiences’, 105–33, esp. 119;

Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 240.[13] Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 241, 246–7.[14] Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 94–5, 129; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 80, 369; his ‘On The

Material Culture of Ships’, 51–72, esp. 54; Bolster, Black Jacks, 19; http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces, voyage ids 4252 and 36269 (using standardised tons); Gilroy, TheBlack Atlantic; Vickers, contribution to ‘Roundtable’, 325–6.

[15] Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade 123, 165, 252, 356–7; Rupert, ‘Contraband Trade’, and ‘Marro-nage, Manumission, and Maritime Trade’, 367; Hall, Slave Society, 87, 90; Bolster, BlackJacks, 18–19; Smith, Maritime Heritage, 51, 171.

[16] Brooks, The Kru Mariner, 3, 5, 34–5, 38; Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea’.[17] Fayer, ‘African Interpreters’; Sweet, ‘Mistaken Identities’, 298–9; Smallwood, ‘African

Guardians’.[18] Behrendt, ‘Human Capital’, 66–97, esp. 77–81; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 85–6; Rodrigues,

De costa a costa, 186–7; Crespi, ‘Negros apresados’; Sweet, ‘Slaves, Convicts, and Exiles’,193–202; Eltis, contribution to ‘Roundtable’, 294–9.

[19] Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 106, 149; Bolster, Black Jacks, 2; Vickers, Young Men and the Sea,177.

[20] Horden and Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean’, 724; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 53–6; Kinkor,‘From the Seas’, and ‘Black Men under the Black Flag’, 195–210; Bialuschewski, ‘BlackPeople under the Black Flag’, 468. See also Bolster, Black Jacks, 13–15 and Williams,‘Nascent Socialists’, 31–50, esp. 42–3.

[21] Jarvis In the Eye of All Trade, 445–6; Zabin, Dangerous Economies, 137–8.[22] Sweet, ‘Mistaken Identities?’; Byrd, ‘Eboe, Country, Nation’; Carretta, Equiano the African.[23] Perez-Mallaına, Spain’s Men of the Sea, x, 40–1, 213–15; Landers, Black Society 21; Wheat, ‘A

Spanish Caribbean Captivity Narrative’, 198; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 71; Harris, TheHanging of Thomas Jeremiah; Reis et al., ‘Rufino Jose Maria’, 65–75.

[24] Bugner, ed., The Image of the Black, vol. 2, part 2, 191; Perez-Mallaına, Spain’s Men of the Sea,40; Levenson, ed., Encompassing the Globe, 78–9; Earle and Lowe, eds., Black Africans, 29–31,41–2, 159–60; Hamilton and Blyth, eds., Representing Slavery, 95, 217, 236, 252, 293, 304; J.T.Smith, ‘Joseph Johnson’,; John Downman, Thomas Williams, Oct. 13, 1815, Tate Liverpool. Seealso Quilley, ‘The Face of the Sea’, and his From Empire to Nation.

[25] Transatlantic slave trade and slave life in the Americas, http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery,BRY01, BRY07, 2-589a, LCP-54, DAP6, VILE-60, 3-246, 229, Allen06 (egs of African canoes);


http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces

http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces

http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery

JCB_15102-3 (French West Indies); NW0264, JCB_04050-3, BEN5a (Surinam); NW0066(Clark); NW0007 (bum boat); Pocock, View of English Harbour, Antigua, PAD0940, NationalMaritime Museum; Hamilton and Blyth, eds., Representing Slavery, 32, 54, 121–2, 172, 236,252. For other North American and Caribbean maritime illustrations, see Bolster, BlackJacks, illustrations following p. 112.

[26] Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 151; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 150, 176, 365.

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