Among the many images created by Europeans in the period of the abolition of the slave trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is one undoubted masterpiece,
J. M. W. Turner's Slavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying, first exhibited in London on 4 May 1840, precisely one month before the first World's Anti-Slavery Convention opened in Exeter Hall.
It is one of Turner's finest paintings and the only ‘indisputably great work of Western art ever made to commemorate the Atlantic slave trade'. It is a dazzling yet disturbing picture: many critics at the time hated it and even John Ruskin, who purchased the work, thinking it Turner's greatest, eventually tired of its horrid themes and sold it so that it descended to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is a painting that tells a terrible story. It shows a sailing ship in the distance about to be engulfed by a hurricane and in the foreground black people, seemingly thrown overboard, drowning and being devoured by fish and birds. It was inspired by a 1730 poem called Summer written by James Thomson in which the poet envisioned a ‘direful shark' that was ‘lured by the scent / Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death' to make its own profit ‘from the partners of that cruel trade / Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her> I sons.
Turner probably also had another event in mind. Or if he did not, his viewers quickly identified the painting with a notorious incident in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. They assumed it was a visual representation of a dreadful crime, the throwing overboard of 122 captives from the Zong in late 1781 in order to claim the price of these murdered people from insurers.[17] [18] The case of the Zong became a cause celebre in England during the late 1780s, and campaigns to abolish the slave trade became the country's first mass-participation humanitarian protest movement. It showed how slave traders had so effectively equated humans with property that ‘the taking away of the life of a black man is [of] no more account than taking away the life of a beast'[19] and that violence was central to the slave trade and perhaps to the whole British imperial enterprise.
Britons accepted the new principles of an imperialism that was beginning to bestride the globe but felt distinctly queasy about particular aspects of its commerce and governance.The slave trade lasted from the mid fifteenth through to the mid nineteenth centuries. In it, around 12,521,300 Africans were transported and 11,062,000 Africans arrived alive to work mostly as plantation labourers in the Americas, especially in Brazil and the Caribbean.[20] One could list episodes of violence in the slave trade endlessly. Violence permeated every aspect of its operations. By the last decades of the eighteenth century, first-hand accounts of especially egregious acts of slave-trade violence formed a subgenre within a burgeoning British abolitionist literature. Much of the literature concentrated on the ways in which the slave trade was not as economically beneficial as defenders of slavery believed, on the inhumanity of treating humans as if they were animals and on the dolorous effects of slavery and involvement in the slave trade on the morals of whites. But the most successful efforts to bring the slave trade to the attention of the public came through the dramatisation of particular acts of violence.
Some accounts came from ex-slaves, captured in Africa and sent across the Atlantic.[21] The most famous account of the middle passage came from a man who may not actually have been born in Africa. Oladuah Equiano, possibly born in South Carolina, wrote what he called a ‘true narrative' in 1788, describing his remarkable life from his birth in 1745, supposedly in central Nigeria. He was captured as a slave and shipped to Barbados in 1756. His book details his subsequent experience as a plantation slave in various parts of the British Atlantic world, as a sailor in the navy and at various merchant levels, and his gaining of freedom, conversion to Methodism and career as an abolitionist.[22] It powerfully describes the middle passage and how Africans probably felt when they were shipped across the Atlantic.
Having never seen the sea and being scared of strange white men, Equiano was terrified of what might happen to him after being put on board. He even hoped ‘for the last friend, Death, to relieve me'. He emphasised in his account how terror was used systematically to demoralise and dehumanise Africans. The white sailors acted with ‘brutal cruelty' and were themselves treated brutally. He noted how the slaver captain had a white sailor ‘flogged so unmercifully... that he died in consequence of it'. If whites would do that to their own countrymen, he feared what they might do to him: ‘I expected nothing less than to be treated in the same manner.' He dwelt at length on the appalling conditions captives suffered, jammed below decks so close together that ‘each had scarcely room to turn himself. Arriving in Barbados did little to reduce the dread; Equaino thought that the captives ‘should be eaten by these ugly men'. Instead, they were washed, made to jump and then taken ashore to a merchant's yard where ‘we were all pent up together like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sheep or age'. Finally, Equaino was sold. He noted, with deep sadness, that the small amount of community feeling that captives had gained through their shared misery was now lost as ‘every tender feeling' was sacrificed to the planters' ‘lust of gain'. The violence directed at him, he insisted, was not just physical but psychological, as captives were transformed into commodities and alienated from family, friends and homeland.At least Equiano survived his ordeal. Over a million captives did not, consigned, dead from disease, namelessly, into the ocean and noted in ships' transcripts without reference to name, age, sex or ethnicity.[23] Others died more violently. John Newton, a slave captain turned abolitionist, enlivened his 1788 account by relaying several tales of horrific torture. In 1748 or 1749 another ship's captain, the sadistic Richard Jackson, had captives who started a rebellion aboard ship ‘jointed'.
According to Newton, ‘jointing' involved cutting off each man's limbs in turn with an axe until finally their heads were cut off. Jackson threw the bodies into the ocean for the sharks to feed on. Then, in front of the ‘trembling slaves' gathered on the foredecks, he placed a rope around the heads of some unfortunate captives and squeezed hard with a lever inserted in the point of the rope until ‘he forced their eyes to stand out of their heads'. As Newton commented in a letter to an abolitionist, Richard Phillips, ‘A savageness of spirit... infuses itself... into those who exercise power... It is the spirit of the trade, which, like a pestilential air, is so generally infectious that but few escape it.'[24]Sometimes slaves were killed because captains wanted to get rid of the sick captives before they infected the healthy. In a case reminiscent of the Zong, a ‘middle aged' slave woman aboard a slave ship bound for Rhode Island in 1791, captained by the Bristol-born James De Wolf, ‘was seized dangerously with the Small Pox'. The crew attempted to quarantine her, but fearing the spread of smallpox, De Wolf ordered her to be put ‘in the main top', where she stayed, aloft and terrified, for two days. The situation became increasingly tense and the crew were gathered together by the captain to give their opinion. They advised that the woman needed to be killed in order to preserve the health (and monetary value) of the remaining captives. Convinced that the slave woman ‘could not survive the Malady... it was concluded that the next Morning before day... the ailing bondwoman... should be thrown overboard... whether dead or alive' into the sea. Thus, she was lowered into a chair and thrown overboard, where, if other similar examples are any guide, she either drowned or was devoured by the sharks that customarily followed slave ships.[25] The only reason we know about this sad death is that, unusually, the ship's captain was put on trial for murder. In the trial transcript, jurors learned that what most disturbed De Wolf about the murder was that he lost with the dead woman a valuable chair.[26]