Transition to the Plantation
Violence did not end when the voyage finished. The slave trade may have even been instrumental not just in stocking plantations with fresh inputs of new labourers but also in developing the kind of management techniques necessary to keep large numbers of traumatised, brutalised and potentially hostile and dangerous slaves in check.
It is probably no accident that the rise of the very large West Indian plantation coincided temporally with the transformation of the English slave trade in the late seventeenth century asThe Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic Slave Trade seamen learned military practices aboard ship that helped them discipline slaves on the plantation.[45] Seamen may have hated what they did on slave ships, thinking it demeaning and dangerous, but they learned skills that they transferred to the large integrated plantation, especially the ability to keep large numbers of dangerous male slaves under control.
Nevertheless, the violence customary on a slave ship diminished on arrival and was less likely to be physical than psychological violence, at least while captives were being prepared for sale; purchasers of valuable commodities did not want to damage their expensive acquisitions. But the sale process could be traumatic. As ships neared the Americas, slaves were prepared for market through being primped and polished so that they might get the best prices. William Butterworth described how on the Hudibras’s voyage to Grenada in 1787 captives were rubbed with palm oil to make their skin gleam and ‘those who age or grief had rendered grey were selected, when, with a blacking brush, the silvery grey hairs were made to assume a jetty hue’. Some deceptions were more painful. Alexander Falconbridge described how a captain hid the fact that slaves suffered dysentery by stuffing a plug in their anuses, only removing them after sale when ‘the excruciating pain’ could no longer be ‘borne by the poor wretches’.[46]
If captives were unlucky, they might have to endure the ‘scramble’, when planters rushed aboard ship to try and secure the best-quality slaves before others did. The doctor Alexander Falconbridge popularised the idea that the scramble was the normal way of selling slaves, providing lurid details about the procedure: ‘[T]he doors of the yard were suddenly thrown open,’ he reported, ‘and in rushed a considerable number of purchasers, with all the ferocity of brutes’.
‘It is scarcely possible to describe the confusion’ he continued, ‘several of [the slaves], through fear, climbed over the walls of the court yard, and ran wild about the town.’[47] Such scenes of chaos were in fact rare - Guinea factors had little reason to see their valuable merchandise handled in such a way - but did occur, especially when the demand for slaves was much higher than the supply. But even if slaves were not sold by scramble, they suffered many indignities in the methods by which sales proceeded. Factors divided captives by condition, with ‘prime’ slaves and‘refuse' slaves separated out and with planters engaged in heated haggling over terms of credit and which slaves they wanted. If slave ships arrived when it was hard to dispose of cargoes, slaves, like Equiano in Barbados in 1757, might spend ages in cramped conditions in merchants' yards, being inspected as if they were horses. Abolitionists were especially outraged when white women examined naked black men, especially when they inspected their genitals. There was somewhat less revulsion, however, over white men luxuriating in the nakedness of captive African women.[48]