Navio Negreiro

That transport of human beings made the slave ship one of the most significant mechanisms in all of world history. It created the world’s greatest forced migration. It was itself an engine of globalisation. Now, if we think about that as something that has a very long history, although I think many journalists think it was invented 10 years ago – it’s been going on for hundreds of years. The slave ship was also a crucial instrument to the formation of empires, plantations, the rise of capitalism itself, because the labour power that was brought across the Atlantic on ships like this literally powered the world economy in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Producing an accumulation of wealth that is almost impossible to describe. The great West Indian writer, CLR James said, “It was the greatest planned accumulation of wealth the world had yet seen.” In Britain one effect of it was the sugar planters - those people who owned sugar plantations in the West Indies and who lived in England, especially around London where some of them sat in London – they were known to be the wealthiest of the wealthy with a long train of servants and the most gorgeous gilded carriages. This was wealth that was just mind-boggling at the time, and in retrospect, and the slave ship made it all possible. So we are talking about a piece of technology, that was what a slave ship was – a machine – that was really central to the world in which we live. And one of the arguments of this book is that we are still living with the consequences of it. The slave ship and the institution of slavery are still very much with us. We live with inequalities that they helped to create. So one of the things I’ve said in this book is that the slave ship in a way is the ghost ship of our modern consciousness. It is kind of sailing on the edges. We can’t always get it into focus but I think it is critically important and I think one of the issues raised – I know there has been quite a bit of discussion about this in this country – is that the slave ship is part of a monstrous historical injustice. So the question is, what are we going to do about it? Because we still live with its crippling effects every day. All around the Atlantic world the effects of the slave ship are still felt.

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Ok, now here’s Olaudah Equiano, whom Tony mentioned. Part of the tragedy of the slave trade is that we know so little about the millions of Africans who were transported. In fact, if you figure for the 18th century - the period I studied – there are about 3-4,000 ship captains, somewhere between 180-200,000 sailors and 6-7million enslaved Africans. Of that 6-7million we have maybe a dozen first hand accounts – almost none. What we know is directly inversely related to the number involved in the trade. So one of the challenges of writing this book was to try to reconstruct the history of the enslaved from the records produced by the enslavers. Well, Equiano provides a human face to all this. As I said he went abroad a slave ship, Arden, yet another Liverpool ship (all three of the people I’ve written individual chapters about had a connection to Liverpool). He was only about 12 years old. He talked about the stench, he talked about the fear. When he first saw the slave ship he said, “I was gripped by astonishment that was soon converted to terror”. Astonishment and terror. I think that is actually a perfect description of what one of these European tall ships would have produced as a reaction in someone who had never seen one before. One European empire builder, by the way, said, “Well, the very sight of our ships and the sound of our cannon is enough to make savages all over the world worship Jesus Christ”. Well you’re talking about a technological wonder. He saw it. One event that he described soon after he went board was going below decks and then immediately becoming sick. The stench is what made him sick. He became weak and soon thereafter, some sailors bought him some food which he waived off – he couldn’t eat it. They thought he was refusing to eat for another reason, and so what they did was grab him and take him up on main deck, tie him up and then began to flog him with a cat o’ nine tails. Equiano remembers this years later when he wrote his autobiography, and he said, “My first thought was to fly over the side of the ship or try to”. But lo and behold the slave ships captains knew that the enslaved wanted to do that so they put netting round the outside of the ship in order to prevent them committing suicide that way. He got the lashing. What is fascinating to me is that his first experience is one of disciplinary violence coupled with resistance – the will to resist. The desire to resist. And I must say one of the things that impressed me the most in doing this research is that the enslaved fought back under the most extreme conditions imaginable. Even when they were in the middle of the ocean without a clue about how to sail the ship they fought. They fought in every way they could think of. One of the things I’ve suggested in the book is that the slave trade was in many ways a 400 year hunger strike, because the enslaved routinely refused to eat. They came board the ship and immediately refused sustenance. But he did even more – he cut his own throat when the physician was summoned – man named Thomas Trotter – he found the man had succeeded in cutting the jugular vein on one side but he stitched him up and then next night the man cut his throat on the other side. But in both cases he lived. Trotter commanded the sailors to go search the men’s department to see if they could find the knife or metal tool he had used to cut his throat. And they searched and came back and said they couldn’t find anything. So Trotter had a closer look and discovered that there was blood all over the man’s finger tips and under his finger nails. And the wounds on his neck were jagged, and he concluded he had cut his own throat using his finger nails. This kind of thing prompted some captains to clip the finger nails of slaves because those too could be weapons in the struggle to resist. Another kind of resistance, jumping overboard which I’ve already mentioned. But remember we are talking about jumping overboard in the middle of the ocean with sharks trailing the ship. To certain death. And when people sometimes get into the water we have descriptions that say, “When they get into the water they are exultant. They are happy because they’ve escaped us”. Even though they know they’re going to die they’ve escaped. And of course the biggest kind of resistance was the insurrection. I’ve more to say about that in a moment.

I should also say Equiano is a man about whom there is a bit of current debate about whether he was born in Africa like he says. Literary scholar Vincent Carretta has found two pieces of evidence in which Equiano told people that he was born not in Igboland – present day Nigeria as he says in his autobiography – rather in South Carolina. And Carretta has used this to raise questions about the most famous account we have really, of the slave trade and one of the most famous of the African diaspora.
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OK. Here’s where we get down to the deepest and most fundamental reality of the slave ship. One of the elements of this book is that the slave ship itself was one big instrument of terror. The terror is the operating principle of the slave ship. Now this in partial contrast to a body of scholarship out there that has tended to make mortality the central reality of the slave ship. I think mortality rates are important but I think terror is something bigger and more crucial and that death is a part of terror. Moreover, you can counts deaths you can’t count terror. So how did terror work? Slave ship captains were terrorists. They studied how you controlled people through the application of violence. Sailors as well as slaves. There is actually a dual system of terror on the slave ship – one to do with the crew and the other the enslaved, and the captain had to work very hard to make this work in tandem. But terror was absolutely central. It was not, by the way in terms of these captains an individual moral failure - I want to emphasise that. It was a requirement of the job. And all captains used terror even John Newton. OK?

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