of slave women on internal voyages between the colonies:
I used frequently to have different cargoes of new negroes in my care for sale; and it was almost a constant practice with our clerks, and other whites, to commit violent depredations on the chastity of the female slaves; and these I was, though with reluctance, obliged to submit to at all times, being unable to help them. When we have had some of these slaves on board my master’s vessels to carry them to other islands, or to America, I have known our mates to commit these acts most shamefully, to the disgrace, not of Christians only, but of men. I have even known them gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old; and these abominations some of them practised to such scandalous excess, that one of our captains discharged the mate and others on that account. And yet in Montserrat I have seen a negro man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut off bit by bit, because he had been connected with a white woman who was a common prostitute: as if it were no crime in the whites to rob an innocent African girl of her virtue; but most heinous in a black man only to gratify a passion of nature, where the temptation was offered by one of a different colour, though the most abandoned woman of her species.
From the other side of the racial divide, James Stanfield was perhaps the first ‘common tar’ to write about the horrors of the slave trade. In 1788, just as Equiano was preparing his Interesting Narrative for the press, Stanfield wrote Observations on a Guinea Voyage, in a Series of Letters Addressed to the Rev. Thomas Clarkson. A year later he published The Guinea Voyage, A Poem in Three Books. In both the prose work and the poem, he vividly and compellingly described the terrors of the slaver ships, coining the phrase ‘floating dungeon’.15 Stanfield’s writings were serialised in newspapers in Britain and America, and shocked their readers. His evidence that the slave trade was extremely destructive of the morals of English sailors as well as the lives of African slaves gave an additional argument to the abolitionist cause.
Stanfield’s accounts are striking for his depiction of the suffering of the female slaves. Time and again his poem re-enacts the particular abominations heaped on the women. He vividly describes a woman in childbirth, and her sorrow in giving birth to a baby born into slavery; two women who jump overboard arm in arm in a suicide pact; the rape of a nine-year-old girl by a captain; the barbaric flogging of a slave woman tied to a captain’s bedpost so he can witness the suffering on her face and hear her screaming in agony. Stanfield dressed her wounds.
In an attempt to show a slave ship from an African’s perspective, and to emphasise and humanise the sufferings of the slaves, Stanfield depicts a beautiful female slave, Abyeda, who has been kidnapped – ‘torn from all human ties’. Abyeda is on the point of marriage to her beloved, Quam’no, when she is seized. Trying to save her, he is killed. She is taken to the ship and lashed. As she cries out, her fellow women cry out with her. She is flogged to death: ‘Convulsive throbs expel the final breath’.16 She may have been a fictional invention, but her story was all too real.
John Newton noted how one sailor, disturbed by the sound of an African baby crying, tore the child out of its mother’s arms and threw it overboard.17 The mother was saved, as ‘she was too valuable to be thrown overboard’.18 At night on the ships, the women could be heard singing. The abolitionist author Thomas Clarkson, who wrote the first comprehensive history of the slave trade, described their powerful lamentations:
In their songs they call upon their lost Relations and Friends, they bid adieu to their Country, they recount the Luxuriance of their native soil, and the happy Days they have spent there … With respect to their singing, it consisted of songs of lamentation for the loss of their country. While they sung they were in tears: so that one of the captains, more humane probably than the rest, threatened a woman with a flogging because the mournfulness of her song was too painful for his feelings.19
Some women sang songs of resistance. Others resorted to hunger strike, only to face the dreaded ‘speculum oris’, a metal device employed to open the mouth for force-feeding. A dead slave was no good to anyone, least of all to the slave captain who had purchased her and hoped to sell her for a good price. Clarkson wrote about female slaves who went insane while chained to the ship’s mast.
The level of brutality on a slave ship was almost always determined by the conduct and character of the captain. The slaving captains had a vested interest in looking after their slaves, who were after all their property. Mortality rates dropped at the end of the eighteenth century with improved diet and medicine. Concentrated lemon and orange juice became compulsory issue in the British Navy in 1795, and many slavers followed suit, greatly reducing the prevalence of scurvy. Slaves were even inoculated against smallpox.
But whilst diet and medicine were improved in order to protect the slave traders’ investments, the mental and physical atrocities continued, partly because of the fear of insurrection by the slaves – although captains could always claim insurance for slaves who rebelled and were killed in retaliation, and thrown overboard to the hungry sharks.
Many captains were sadists who enjoyed inflicting pain on their slaves. Stanfield’s eyewitness account of Captain David Wilson’s ‘demon cruelty’ is shocking in the extreme. Wilson carried a ‘parcel of trade knives’ to hurl at slaves and crew. He beat his chef to death for burning his meat, and also killed his second mate. He didn’t care who he flogged: ‘pallid or black’, both sailors and slaves were victims of his brutality.
In 1792, slave trader Captain John Kimber was brought to trial for the murder of two female slaves. It was common practice on slave ships to make the slaves dance as a form of exercise (and degradation), usually to the ‘music’ of the whips. Kimber was alleged to have flogged to death a pregnant fifteen-year-old girl who had refused to dance naked for him. Her courageous, proud refusal cost the girl her life, but her story caught the attention of the abolitionist MP William Wilberforce, who accused Kimber of murder. Although he was acquitted, the story garnered considerable press in favour of the abolitionist cause. Cartoonist and satirist Isaac Cruikshank’s caricature depicts the half-naked ‘virjen’ girl suspended by her ankle from a pulley while Kimber looks on lasciviously. Three naked slave women sit in the background, while two sailors on the extreme right walk away, saying, ‘My Eyes Jack our Girls at Wapping are never flogged for their modesty,’ and ‘By G-d that’s too bad if he had taken her to Blackwall all would be well enough, Split me I’m allmost sick of this Black Business’ (Blackwall was one of the main shipyards on the Thames in London). The Kimber trial was viewed as a moral victory for the abolitionists, because it established the principle that slave captains could be called to account for murder.
James Stanfield claimed that the mere sight of the African coastline would transform the mildest captain into an enraged madman, bringing out his heart of darkness.20 The power of the captain was absolute. One vicious captain, facing a ‘rage for suicide’ among his human cargo, made an example of a female slave by lowering her into the shark-infested waters on a rope: she was bitten in half. Sharks were an ever-present threat to recalcitrant slaves. They circled the ships ‘in almost incredible numbers … devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes as they are thrown overboard’.21
Many of the abolitionists took up the rallying cry that the slave trade degraded both white and black, that the sailors were treated almost as badly as the slaves. Everyone was brutalised.
But there was another side to master/slave relations. William Butterworth, a sailor on the slave ship Hudibras, published an account of his travels in which he dwelt at length on his admiration for a slave called Sarah. ‘Ever lively! Ever gay!’, she was a superb dancer, and charmed everyone
