The Middle Passage
Cannibalism was also something that captives expected when they boarded a European slaver, as Equiano made clear. That white people might be cannibals seemed a reasonable assumption to make given the roughness with which they customarily dealt with Africans, even on shore.
Lots of tales exist about white cannibals that represent a collective folk wisdom that distilled the exploitative business of slavery and the slave trade down to a kind of analogy. William Pierson, who collected such tales, argues that ‘as a mythopoetic analogy, it does not seem far-fetched to portray chattel slavery as a kind of economic cannibalism; and in that sense, mythic stories of maneaters were true enough'.[40]Captives may not have been eaten by voracious whites once they boarded a slave ship, but what they suffered instead was bad enough. There are few examples in history of such planned and sustained cruelty against defenceless people to compare to the Atlantic slave trade. The middle passage is one of the great crimes in history and a crime even more galling insofar as the beneficiaries of it suffered little for their actions. Indeed, the list of British individuals and institutions that have benefited from the workings of the slave trade is extremely long, as the path-breaking Legacies of British Slaveholding project is making clear.[41]
The slave ship during the middle passage was as much a floating prison as a sailing vessel. It was full of weapons, especially guns, to keep Africans in check, and was overly crewed by poorly paid seamen. The crews were so large because seamen were employed less to sail ships than to keep order. They were prison guards and soldiers as much as sailors; in short, the ‘capos' of the system. But the slave ship was not a killing machine. The aim of the captain and the officers was to keep captives alive and as healthy as possible (given the constraints of having to ship lots of people in limited space) so that they would fetch high prices on arrival in the Americas.
Crews were responsible for steering a course between cowing captives so that they would do as they were told and preparing slaves for market. It was a hard to do both things at once, and many of the problems that occurred on slave ships were the result of getting the calibrations between punishment and sustenance wrong.Slave captains were harsh masters, even if they were not tyrants. Moreover, the gap in status and wealth between captain and crew was comparatively greater than in other maritime trades, mainly because captains had a direct interest in the result of the voyage as a result of being given ‘privilege' slaves. They augmented their wages by being allowed to sell several ‘privilege' slaves, usually prime male slaves transported free of cost. Given the prices paid in the Caribbean for top-quality slaves, the amount of money captains received for ‘privilege' slaves was considerable. It meant also that the crew had to pay particular attention to keeping the captain's slaves in good health.
Sailors therefore tended to take out their frustration on captives. They had ready recourse to the whip, sometimes as part of their daily duties, when they used it to force slaves to ‘dance' when brought up on deck, but more often as a means of disciplining people or for sadistic pleasure. But they did more than just punish captives. Part of their duties included participating in the preparation of people for sale at markets. Their harsh treatment of captives helped dehumanise them and thus advanced the process whereby people were transformed into chattel. As Emma Christopher notes, ‘many of the acts of this conversion were simply stark, horrific terror, but they also formed part of the larger panorama that attempted to alter human beings to things'.[42]
We can see the process of self-disintegration best in how male captives were treated. Separated from the women and children, who tended to have more freedom to move about the ship, and restrained by iron fetters around their ankles and sometimes around their wrists and necks, they were packed so tightly into the lower decks of the ship that they could hardly move.
Their nakedness only increased their resemblance to animals. They were forced to wallow in their own excrement, unable to reach buckets provided for them as toilets. And, of course, they had to endure the screams of those driven mad by their hardships and sometimes had to lie chained to a person dead from the ‘bloody flux' (the most common cause of death on ship) for days. Observers compared them to beasts and treated them as such. A British seaman remembered that ‘the floor of their rooms was so covered with blood and mucus which had proceeded from them having the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house', with prisoners gasping for breath like ‘expiring animals'.27 It was very difficult to preserve one's humanity in such an environment. Stephanie Smallwood suggests that such disorientation was deliberate, a method whereby Africans had an ‘ontological crisis of identity' as they were reduced from being people to becoming mere commodities. The slave ship, she insists, was a ‘hollow place', distinguished by material and social misery and cognitive dissonance.[43]There was, however, a more practical reason why male captives were confined so rigidly and kept in such a helpless condition. They were considered too dangerous to be given any latitude. Slave captains over-crewed their ships on the passage across the Atlantic because they feared captives rebelling. They had good reason to do so. David Richardson has shown that captive resistance on slave ships was considerable. He has counted 485 acts of violence by Africans either on shore immediately before shipment or when on British ships at sea, 90 per cent of which occurred between 1698 and 1807. About one in ten voyages was affected by violence. Most acts of violence happened soon after a ship set sail, as captives realised they were unlikely to see their homelands again and as they began to fear what might happen to them during and after their sea voyage. If they could, captives tried to take over the ship and gain access to where the gunpowder was stored. If successful, they might try and blow up the ship.
The frequency of resistance aboard slave ships was so great that ships had large arsenals to quell any possible rebellion. Male slaves, in particular, were treated with great care, especially if they came from places, like Senegambia or the Gold Coast, with strong warrior traditions. Any suspicious signs suggesting that a slave would provide resistance usually resulted in a slave being shot. As the anecdote above of Captain Richard Jackson shows, captives caught rebelling would be punished with even more severe cruelty than normal. In such a way, most captives were kept sufficiently terrified that they put up with the bad treatment they received.[44]