The Slave Ship (27 page)

Newton determined once again to find advantage in disaster. On December 30 he bought the
Racehorse,
presumably from the Susu people who had taken and probably plundered it. It was a small vessel at forty-five tons, but it had new copper sheathing on its hull. Newton paid the modest sum of £130 and put his friend Job Lewis aboard as captain. The vessel had to be refitted, which took about three weeks. A major setback took place on February 21, when Captain Lewis died. Newton distributed his clothes to his officers and promoted to command chief mate Alexander Welsh. Newton hoped that the purchase of the
Racehorse
would serve Mr. Manesty’s interest, but the plan was, at bottom, self-serving: he would send several of his seamen aboard and depart the coast of Africa early, after only four months, with a small cargo of only eighty-seven slaves, cutting short the dangerous stay on the coast, limiting his mortality, and leaving the
Racehorse
to gather the rest of the slaves.
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On April 8, 1754, the day after the
African
departed the coast of Africa, Newton reflected on the news and lore that circulated among captains, then on his own situation: “This has been a fatal season to many persons upon the coast. I think I never heard of so many dead, lost, or destroyed, in one year. But I have been kept in perfect health, and have Buried neither White, nor Black.” (He regarded Lewis as a death on a separate ship and therefore not his responsibility.) Yet ten days later, early in the Middle Passage, he found that he had spoken too soon. Newton himself fell ill of a violent, debilitating fever. Racked by high temperature and sore eyes, he thought he was going to die. He was terrified at the prospect of perishing “in the midst of this pathless ocean, at a distance from every friend,” but he nonetheless decided to “prepare for eternity.” He prayed and wrote a farewell letter to Mary.

It turned out that Newton had not caught the “most dangerous species” of fever and did not suffer the pain and delirium he had seen so often in sailor and slave. He languished for eight to ten days and felt “rather faint and weak” for almost another month once the fever had passed, even after the ship had arrived in St. Kitts on May 21. One reason the recovery took so long, Newton thought, was that he had generously distributed his stock (food and drink) “among the sick seamen, before I was taken ill myself.”

After an uneventful passage from St. Kitts, Newton arrived in Liverpool on August 7, 1754. His third voyage had proved the quickest, and in many ways the easiest he made, but it is impossible to know if it was successful in economic terms. Newton certainly had his doubts. Having made three consecutive voyages of uncertain profitability in a row, he appealed to a different measure of success. He had managed, he proudly announced, “an African voyage performed without any disaster.” He went around from church to church in Liverpool to return thanks for their blessings, noting everywhere that he had lost neither sailor nor slave. “This was much noticed and spoken of in the town,” he explained, “and I believe it is the first instance of its kind.” He considered it, of course, to be a sign of “divine Providence.”
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Whether doubtful, proud, or both, Newton was rehired by Mr. Manesty and soon took command of a new slave ship, the
Bee.
He was within two days of sailing when his career and life took a sudden and unexpected turn. As he wrote later, “it pleased God to stop me by illness.” Newton suffered an apoplectic stroke, a “violent fit, which threatened immediate death, and left me no signs of life, but breathing, for about an hour.” On the advice of physicians, he resigned command of the ship and left the slave trade altogether—not by his own choice, it must be noted. He eventually got a job as the tide surveyor of Liverpool. It would be years before he wrote a critical word about the slave trade, and it would be more than three decades before he would declare himself against it.

John Newton considered his role as a slave-ship captain to be a godly calling. He was, he wrote, “upon the whole satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me.” Occasionally, he prayed “that the Lord, in his own time, would be pleased to fix me in a more humane calling, and, if it might be, place me where I might have more frequent converse with his people and ordinances, and be freed from those long separations from home which very often were hard to bear.” Yet among his misgivings the inhumane work of the slave ship ranked as only one of three reasons to prefer a different calling. Writing to David Jennings from the coast of Sierra Leone in August 1752, Newton noted that he once was lost, “a deprav’d unhappy apostate,” but now, as Christian master of a slave ship, he was “found.” It is a cruel twist on the lyrics of “Amazing Grace,” which Newton would write twenty-one years later, in 1773.
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Newton’s Christianity played a double role in his life aboard the slave ship. On the one hand, it served a prophylactic screen against recognition of the inhuman things he was actually doing. He could sit in his captain’s cabin vowing to do “good to my fellow creatures” as he gave orders to guarantee their killing enslavement. On the other hand, his Christianity limited, but did not eliminate, the cruelty so common to slave ships. He admonished himself to remember his own experience as a sailor harshly punished aboard the
Harwich
and as a slave much abused on Plantain Island. He exhorted himself not to be cruel to the sailors who had organized a mutiny against his command on the second voyage. He brought a limited Christian paternalism to his dealings with sailors, but apparently not to his dealings with slaves. And even though Newton was probably less cruel than most eighteenth-century slave-ship captains, he nonetheless faced mutiny by his sailors and insurrection by his slaves. He responded with chains, whips, and thumbscrews—in short, with terror.
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As Newton sat in the captain’s cabin writing by candlelight to his wife on July 13, 1753, he looked back over his life, particularly his own enslavement in 1745 by a trader on Plantain Island, where he lay “in an abject state of servitude and sickness.” He had come a long way in eight short years. He was now married, a man of some property and standing, and a proud Christian. He explained that God “brought me, as I must say, out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage; from slavery and famine on the coast of Africa to my present situation.” His situation, at that very moment, was to share a small wooden world with eighty-seven men, women, and children whom he was carrying through the Middle Passage into ever deeper bondage. Newton may have escaped Egypt, but he now worked for Pharaoh. He was blind to the parallel.
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CHAPTER 7

The Captain’s Own Hell

Family, friends, and loved ones gathered on the docks at Liverpool to say good-bye to the men aboard the slave ship
Brownlow,
including chief mate John Newton, as they set sail for the Windward Coast of Africa in early 1748. Liverpool’s slave trade was booming, offering both opportunities and dangers to its denizens. “Farewells” were literal hopes. Merchants and captains sometimes posted notices of impending voyages in places of worship on a Sunday morning, asking congregations to mention the name of each person on board the ship as they prayed for a safe and successful voyage. Everyone therefore understood that the wave of the hand from the dock might be the final communication with any given member of the crew, from captain to cabin boy. Death at sea was “no respecter of persons” and could strike at any time, especially in the Guinea trade, by accident, disease, or human will. Such departures for long and perilous voyages always had an emotional charge.
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Captain Richard Jackson stood upon the quarterdeck of the
Brownlow,
apparently unaffected by the collective feeling of the occasion. He was, however, keenly conscious that deep changes were afoot the moment the ship pushed off from the pier. He and his men were taking leave of landed society for an extended period, a year or more, sailing to places where social institutions such as family, church, community, and government had little reach. “With a suitable expression of countenance,” Newton recalled years later, and perhaps with disdain for the religious overtones of the occasion, Captain Jackson took leave of the people standing on the pier, and muttered to himself, “Now, I have a Hell of my own!”

Captains wielded such power because they occupied a strategic position in the rapidly expanding international capitalist economy. Their power derived from maritime custom, but also from law and social geography. The state licensed the captain to use corporal punishment to maintain “subordination and regularity” among his crew as he linked the markets of the world. Resistance to his authority could be construed in court as mutiny or insurrection, both punishable by hanging. The geographic isolation of the ship, far from the governing institutions of society, was both a source of and a justification for the captain’s swollen powers.
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The captain of a slave ship, like Richard Jackson, was the most powerful example of this general type. Like other captains, he was something of a craftsman—a highly skilled, experienced master of a sophisticated machine. He possessed technical knowledge about the working of the ship, natural knowledge—of winds, tides, and currents, of lands, seas, and sky—and social knowledge about how to deal with a wide variety of people. He worked as a multicultural merchant in far-flung markets. He acted as a boss, a coordinator of a heterogeneous and often refractory crew of wage laborers. He served as a warden, jailer, and slave master to transport hundreds of prisoners from one continent, across a vast body of water, to another. To succeed in these many roles, the captain had to be able to “carry a command”—of himself, a ship, a vast sum of property, his workers, and his captives.
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“CROW! MIND YOUR EYE!” ordered Liverpool merchant William Aspinall as he sent his one-eyed captain, Hugh Crow, off to Bonny to buy a big shipload of slaves in July 1798. Crow had already made five voyages to Africa and would go on to a long and successful career as a slave-ship captain, making five more voyages and one of the last before the trade was abolished in 1807. Crow left a memoir of his life in the slave trade, which was published posthumously by friends in 1830. In it he explained how he got from his birthplace to the captain’s cabin of a Guineaman.
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Crow was born in 1765 in Ramsey, on the north coast of the Isle of Man, located in the Irish Sea about eighty miles northwest of Liverpool, well within the booming port city’s gravitational pull. He was, from his youth, blind in his “starboard eye,” yet nonetheless early on he wanted to go to sea. His father was a respectable craftsman who worked along the waterfront. “Being brought up in a sea-port town,” he explained, “I naturally imbibed an inclination for a sea-faring life.”

Apprenticed by his father to a boatbuilder in Whitehaven, Crow worked for two years and got a little education before he took his first voyage, at age seventeen, in the coal trade. He soon ranged far and wide, sailing over the next four years to Ireland, Barbados, Jamaica, Charleston, Newfoundland, and Norway, among other places. He experienced seasickness, backbreaking work at the pump, a hurricane, mistreatment at the hands of his fellow sailors, a near drowning (saved by his fellow sailors), and a mutiny (along with his fellow sailors) against a drunken, incompetent captain. After five voyages Crow had completed his apprenticeship and was now an able seaman. He kept his one eye peeled for the main chance. He studied navigation, bought a quadrant, and began to move up the maritime hierarchy.

From the start he had a “prejudice” against the slave trade, or so he claimed, but he was eventually enticed by an offer to go as chief mate aboard the
Prince
to the Gold Coast in October 1790. He made four more voyages to Africa as a mate, following which Aspinall offered him his first command. After sixteen years at sea, half of them in the slave trade, the thirty-three-year-old Crow took the helm of the
Mary,
a three-hundred-ton ship.
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The captain Aspinall hired in 1798 was fairly typical in his origins, if not in the number of his eyes or his ability to survive in a deadly line of work. Most, like Crow, became captains of Guineamen after making numerous small decisions rather than a single big one. They grew up along the waterfront, were “bred to the sea,” got aboard a slaver one way or another (perhaps not by choice), survived a first voyage, slowly progressed up the ship’s working ladder, acquired experience, built a reputation among captains and merchants, and finally achieved command of their own vessel. The historian Stephen Behrendt has found that 80 percent of the captains of British slavers, sailing mostly out of Liverpool and Bristol, between 1785 and 1807, came from commercial backgrounds. A few had fathers who were merchants, usually of modest means. Some, like John Newton, descended from ship captains, others from slave-ship captains, as in the Noble and Lace families in Liverpool and the D’Wolfs in Rhode Island. But most were, like Crow, the sons of waterfront artisans of one kind or another. Family connections often guided the way to the captain’s cabin, but only after considerable experience at sea. On average, the first command of a slaver came at age thirty in Liverpool and thirty-one in Bristol. The path to the ship was similar among captains in the Rhode Island slave trade, although American masters were less likely to specialize in it. The historian Jay Coughtry found that captains made an average of only 2.2 African voyages, but within this group fifty captains made 5 voyages or more each. A writer who knew several families involved in the British trade observed that “such is the dangerous nature of the Slave Trade, that the generality of the Captains of the vessels employed in it think themselves fortunate in escaping with life and health after four voyages.” And “fortunate” is precisely the right word, because a captain who survived four voyages or more would likely have made a small fortune, far beyond what most men of his original station in life could expect to achieve. It was a risky but lucrative line of work, freely chosen.
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