James Field Stanfield and The Guinea Voyage

A useful guide to the role of violence in the British slave trade in the eighteenth century is James Field Stanfield's three-volume book of poetry on the trade. It is an impressive work, written from the perspective of the ordinary seaman but with a panoptical view of the slave trade that was especially sensitive to how the trade operated in Africa.

Unusually for commentators on the slave trade in this period, Stanfield was also aware of the extent to which European traders were dependent upon African decision makers to get the captives they wanted. He was also different from most writers on the slave trade in not treating Africans with a disfiguring racism, declaring at one stage that all people were ‘of one blood’.^{^[30]} He was determined, moreover, to be confronting. John Oldfield notes that Stanfield ‘clearly set out to shock his readers; some of the scenes he describes were extremely graphic even by the standards of the eighteenth century’. But Stanfield was not merely being sensationalist. It is one of the few works that sees the violence employed at every point in the trade as part of an overall purpose to transform Africans into commodities.^{^[31]} ^{^[32]}

For Stanfield, the ‘vast machine’ that was the slave trade was rotten to its core, despite the wealth it produced for African rulers, British merchants, American planters and for Britain as a nation. The business, he asserted, did only ‘assume the honours of an honest trade / and hid, beneath a prostituted glare / thy poison’d purpose, and th’ insinsidious snare’. He described how difficult it was to man a Guinea ship, as sailors were so ashamed of doing slavesailors’ dire work that when they departed the shore, usually without friends or family to see them off, ‘shades of sorrow ev’ry face o’ercloud’. The slave trade suffered ferocious mortality for sailors: perhaps one fifth died within the course of a voyage, an even higher rate that that experienced by captives.16 Stanfield crewed on the Eagle, an old and leaky vessel that sailed from Liverpool to Benin to Jamaica and back to Liverpool in 1774-5.

Only four of the thirty-four people who embarked at Liverpool on this ship, including the villainous captain, David Wilson, as well as Stanfield himself, returned home.^{^[33]} Not surprisingly, most sailors wanted to avoid the trade. A crew was only procured by deceit, through crimps (or labour agents) getting ‘heedless’ sailors so drunk or indebted that they signed up for a very dangerous voyage, exchanging the likelihood of prison on land for a ‘floating dungeon’ at sea.

Violence accompanied the ship at all stages of its voyage. The floggings started when the Eagle reached the Canary Islands and quickly became more frequent and intense so that Stanfield felt that the violence ‘spread like a contagion’. As the ship got closer to Africa, he thought that ‘the dark pow’r / of savage rigour ripens ev’ry hour’. Arriving in Africa only increased the captain’s propensity for cruelty. Stanfield thought that the difficulty of doing business on the African coast brought out the worst in captains, noting that ‘the moment a Guinea captain comes in sight of this shore, the Demon cruelty seems to fix his residence within him'. Perhaps the captain was steeling himself for the horrors of the middle passage. Stanfield, however, had a more sophisticated view of why the mood turned uglier as the voyage proceeded, arguing that the savagery of the slave trade made Europeans realise that it was them as much as Africans who were reverting to savagery. He called the European traders ‘pallid robbers' and ‘traffickers in human blood'.

The height of the violence was reserved for the middle passage where both crew and captives were entrapped, Stanfield believed, in a single system of terror under a tyrannical captain. He argued that ‘when the capricious and irascible passions of their general tyrant were once set afloat, I never could see any difference in the cruelty of their treatment'. Such an argument was a dramatic overstatement, as clearly sailors were not just victims but perpetrators of horrific violence against captives.

There is little evidence of any shared sense of mutual mistreatment uniting white sailors with black captives. Sailors hated looking after slaves and clearing up their excrement amidst the ‘nasty filthiness' of the trade. Their dislike was translated into extreme contempt for the captives they guarded. They beat them incessantly, cared little about their welfare, considered that the noxious smell of the captives' rooms showed that Africans were little better than beasts and were principal agents in Africans' depersonalisation. The surgeon Ecroyde Claxton noted that when forced to clean up after captives, sailors ‘inhumanely beat [them] either with their hands or a cat [o'-nine-tails]'.^{^[34]} Stanfield was probably accentuating the misery of the sailors and underplaying their violence towards their charges in order to play upon the sympathies of an abolitionist audience who saw one of the major crimes of the slave trade as the degradation of Britain's proudJack Tars, whom they felt were an essential bulwark to naval strength.^{^[35]}

While sailors had an unpleasant time on the passage from Africa to the Americas, it was captives who suffered most. Stanfield's poem listed a litany of cruelties suffered by captives, from being kept in filth to the force-feeding of Africans who would not eat, to acts of slave suicide, to many examples of whipping and, most egregiously, to a rape ‘practiced by the captain on an unfortunate female slave, of the age of eight or nine'. The crime was, he thought, too dreadful to name but he noted that it was ‘too atrocious and bloody to be passed over in silence'. The final act of violence occurred when the ship arrived in Jamaica. Planters rushed the Eagle like ‘dread fiends' who with ‘impetuous sway / fasten rapacious on the shudd'ring prey'. The captives, now slaves, let out ‘one dreadful shriek' as they were parted from family and even from children, Stanfield describing in graphic relief the wails as ‘the frantick mother calls her sever'd child'.

At all times, in short, violence pulsed through the system. It worked because of terror - the apprehension of worse things happening if one did not obey commands. Both captives and sailors had to be kept powerless in the ‘floating dungeon' so that the ‘vast machine' could do what was necessary to make money for merchants in both Africa and Britain. The major actors profited while everyone else suffered. And they were determined to keep secret the pervasiveness of violence in the trade, knowing, Stanfield believed, that if ‘the impenetrable veil' that had been placed over the trade was cast aside then ‘the merciful slave merchant' would be forced to reveal the ‘long catalogue of rapacity, murder and destruction his own avarice has framed'. Stanfield showed, in often excruciating detail, that British wealth was only gained through the sufferings of others. The trade, he argued, was a reversion by a seemingly civilised society to savagery. As he explained, referencing a famous Scottish Enlightenment writer for support: ‘One real view - one MINUTE absolutely spent in the slave rooms of the middle passage, would do more for the cause of humanity than the pen of a [William] Robertson or the whole collective eloquence of the British senate.'

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Source: Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p.. 2020

James Field Stanfield and The Guinea Voyage

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