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 with her ‘sprightliness’ and ‘good nature’. She was ‘universally respected by the ship’s company’. Butterworth’s captain, Jenkins Evans, selected Sarah to be one of his favourites, or ‘wives’.22 This was not unusual. On the slaver Charleston, the captain and officers took three or four ‘wives’ each for the journey.23
Sarah was suspected of being involved in a plot to overthrow the ship. It was not unknown for slave women and children to be involved in rebel plots against the sailors. Because they were given greater freedom than the male slaves, they were able to take messages and surreptitiously pass weapons to them, allowing them to hack off their shackles and fight back. Despite Sarah’s involvement in the plot against Captain Evans, he spared her life.
Other female slaves who were quick to learn English and could help to maintain order were given positions of trust. Known as ‘guardians’ or ‘confidence slaves’, some of them became cooks or made clothes, and were given ‘wages’ of brandy or tobacco.
Sea surgeon Thomas Boulton was mesmerised by a black slave he called Dizia – ‘who did my piece of mind destroy’, as he wrote in a poem which alleged that she also wielded power over the captain: ‘Whose sooty charms he was so wrapt in,/He strait ordain’d her second captain’.24 The power exerted by the female slave over her master conformed to the sexual stereotyping of African women. Equally, many white masters raped and seduced female slaves as a way of emasculating, humiliating and punishing male ones: one master was so besotted with his slave lover that he ‘cut off the lips, upper lip almost close to her Nose, of his Mulatto sweetheart, in Jealousy, because he said no Negroe should ever kiss those lips he had’.25
However, the exceptionally close interaction between white and black, in both the slave ships and the plantation houses, created unusual psychological, moral and ethical situations. Can a relationship between a white captain and a slave woman within the British Empire in the eighteenth century ever be considered anything other than sexual exploitation? Could there ever be a consensual relationship between black and white, slave and captain? The short answer is yes.
When Mary Prince published her ‘slave narrative’ in 1831 she was advised not to mention her seven-year affair with a white man, Captain Abbot. Prince’s editors were keen to present her as an innocent victim, and it’s striking that they were uncomfortable with her revelation of this affair. Only later did Prince reveal the details of her liaison