Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Wendy Wilson-Fall

In 1758 two ships, the Mercury and the Fly, arrived at Saint Helena after having bought slaves in Madagascar. In all, twenty-six men were landed at Saint Helena from these two ships—sixteen men and ten boys.²⁰ In the Saint Helena archives another ship is mentioned that we earlier noted continued on to Virginia on at least one voyage, the Prince Eugene.

      The ships that departed from eastern Madagascar were probably loaded with slaves from there, rather than slaves from Mozambique transshipped eastward across the north from Majunga (which occurred later). By this time the Betsimisaraka were already trading in slaves from the eastern regions (see chapter 1), and in fact some slaves were being transshipped in the opposite direction, westward by land, to the Bay of Boina. Ocean-bound Madagascar slaves were probably from the same or contiguous regions, and the ships almost, if not exclusively, filled with captives from Madagascar. These slaving vessels were not filled with people from starkly different ethnicities and nations, as was the case for most slave ships who packed in slave cargo from several ports along the West African coast.²¹

      It is probable that at least some of the Malagasy destined for the ports of Virginia also were offloaded at Saint Helena for a short break. I have not been able to verify that all slaves on the five ships that arrived between 1719 and 1721 were actually disembarked there. However, it is likely that they were, because this was a chance to clean the lower decks, wash them down, and improve the health, however marginally, of the captive cargo. Further, the trajectory was a long one, and a stop at Saint Helena’s was a way to keep valuable slave cargo alive. From the slaves’ point of view, it is likely that some friends and relations were lost to each ship’s captive community at this juncture. We do know that the Prince Eugene and the Mercury disembarked some slaves at Saint Helena. We can extrapolate from this that long before arriving in the Americas, the captives experienced many dislocations, losses, and tragedies that included but were not limited to death on the high seas. Indeed, death and loss lurked everywhere along the trajectory they followed.²²

       Arriving in Virginia: The Other Middle Passage

      The shipmates’ fragile communities were fractured again upon their arrival on the shores of Virginia and its inland rivers. Many authors have written about the trauma of this fourth great fracture for enslaved captives. The first trauma was the site of capture or initial sale—the moment when the slave was separated from family, familiar landmarks, friends, and an imagined future in his or her community. In fact, recent research has also shown that it was not uncommon for shipmates to find relatives and neighbors who were caught up in the same raid, although these would usually be a small group within the larger cargo.²³ The second great trauma was the slave factory—the holding pens where slaves from various origins within a region and even beyond were pushed together to become one strange, polyglot, frightened, and powerless community. For the captives of eastern Madagascar, small offshore islands were sometimes used to lodge women and men separately.²⁴ The next stage of the ordeal was the forced descent into the slave ship itself. This was the experience of the below decks, where suffering was great, people were disoriented, and sickness and death were as intimate company as the living bodies and the odoriferous wood to which people were chained. This situation, perhaps more than any other, gives proof of the resiliency of human beings. For in this floating prison, as Rediker rightly calls it, new relationships were built on the basis of shared suffering, shared witness, and shared survival.²⁵ The consequent disruption of these new and fragile relationships caused by ensuing sales at arrival points was another cause of trauma for shipmates arriving in the New World. Despondency, despair, and even “torpid insensibility” were common descriptions of the condition of the enslaved when they first came aboard a slave ship or arrived at their first American port.

      We can thus imagine the Malagasy ancestors wrenched again from a newly familiar community, only to enter into other smaller boats, or to remain aboard the big ships, as people were dropped off at river ports, such as the docks along the James, Pamunkey, York, and Rappahannock Rivers that belonged to the great Virginia planters.

      Thus came another round of painful separations, and it is easy to imagine the dislocation and shock that must have continued to settle into the psyche of these unfortunate travelers. Planters and ship captains alike saw this “melancholy” that afflicted slave cargoes as a management issue that had to be considered along with other slaving risks if one was going to make a go of the venture. Many slaves were thought simply to “pine away” or to go mad. If there was an advantage for those slaves who disembarked at Saint Helena, it must have been that they would find themselves in creole communities much marked by a Malagasy presence, which would not be the case for their fellows who continued on to Virginia.²⁶