Maritime Slavery

Philip Morgan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415505123
• eBook ISBN: 9781135702717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

Maritime slavery is not, however, just about the movement of people as commodities, but rather, the involvement of all sorts of people, including slaves, in the transportation 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 were pilots, sailors, canoemen, divers, linguists, porters, stewards, cooks, and cabin boys, not forgetting all the ancillary workers in ports such as stevedores, warehousemen, labourers, washerwomen, tavern workers, and prostitutes.

Maritime Slavery reflects this current interest in maritime spaces, and covers all the major Oceans and Seas. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

INTRODUCTION

Maritime Slavery

Philip 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 commodities, but rather, the involvement of all sorts of people, including slaves, in the transportation 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 stevedores, warehousemen, labourers, grumetes, washerwomen, tavern workers, and prostitutes. 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 Kären 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 cur-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 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 Margarita 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 communication 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 opportunities, 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, 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, hesitated 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 lowliness 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 ‘floe 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’. Contemplating 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 considered 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 terrestrial 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 merchants, 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. Pérez-Mallaina 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 commandeered the boat — lost their lives when their vessel was shipwrecked between the Dutch entrepôt of Curaçao 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 provisions 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 informants 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 opportunities 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 autobiographies. 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 accommodations, had its allure.⁸

Whites testified to black maritime skills. In 1758 one white observer declared Bermudian black sailors ‘the best in America, and as useful as the whites in their navigation’. 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Maritime Slavery
• Part I: Caribbean Sea
• Part II: Atlantic Ocean
• Part III: Indian and Pacific Oceans
• Index