American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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"A man in his coffin has more room than one of these blacks," is the terse
way in which witness after witness before the British House of Commons
described the miserable condition of the slaves on shipboard.

An amazing feature of this detestable traffic is the smallness and often
the unseaworthiness of the vessels in which it was carried on. Few such
picayune craft now venture outside the landlocked waters of Long Island
Sound, or beyond the capes of the Delaware and Chesapeake. In the early
days of the eighteenth century hardy mariners put out in little craft, the
size of a Hudson River brick-sloop or a harbor lighter, and made the long
voyage to the Canaries and the African West Coast, withstood the perils of
a prolonged anchorage on a dangerous shore, went thence heavy laden with
slaves to the West Indies, and so home. To cross the Atlantic was a matter
of eight or ten weeks; the whole voyage would commonly take five or six
months. Nor did the vessels always make up in stanchness for their
diminutive proportions. Almost any weather-beaten old hulk was thought
good enough for a slaver. Captain Linsday, of Newport, who wrote home from
Aumboe, said: "I should be glad I cood come rite home with my slaves, for
my vessel will not last to proceed far. We can see daylight all round her
bow under deck." But he was not in any unusual plight. And not only the
perils of the deep had to be encountered, but other perils, some bred of
man's savagery, then more freely exhibited than now, others necessary to
the execrable traffic in peaceful blacks. It as a time of constant wars
and the seas swarmed with French privateers alert for fat prizes. When a
slaver met a privateer the battle was sure to be a bloody one for on
either side fought desperate men--one party following as a trade legalized
piracy and violent theft of cargoes, the other employed in the violent
theft of men and women, and the incitement of murder and rapine that their
cargoes might be the fuller. There would have been but scant loss to
mankind in most of these conflicts had privateer and slaver both gone to
the bottom. Not infrequently the slavers themselves turned pirate or
privateer for the time--sometimes robbing a smaller craft of its load of
slaves, sometimes actually running up the black flag and turning to piracy
for a permanent calling.

In addition to the ordinary risks of shipwreck or capture the slavers
encountered perils peculiar to their calling. Once in a while the slaves
would mutiny, though such is the gentle and almost childlike nature of the
African negro that this seldom occurred. The fear of it, however, was ever
present to the captains engaged in the trade, and to guard against it the
slaves--always the men and sometimes the women as well--were shackled
together in pairs. Sometimes they were even fastened to the floor of the
dark and stifling hold in which they were immured for months at a time. If
heavy weather compelled the closing of the hatches, or if disease set in,
as it too often did, the morning would find the living shackled to the
dead. In brief, to guard against insurrection the captains made the
conditions of life so cruel that the slaves were fairly forced to revolt.
In 1759 a case of an uprising that was happily successful was recorded.
The slaver "Perfect," Captain Potter, lay at anchor at Mana with one
hundred slaves aboard. The mate, second mate, the boatswain, and about
half the crew were sent into the interior to buy some more slaves.
Noticing the reduced numbers of their jailors, the slaves determined to
rise. Ridding themselves of their irons, they crowded to the deck, and,
all unarmed as they were, killed the captain, the surgeon, the carpenter,
the cooper, and a cabin-boy. Whereupon the remainder of the crew took to
the boats and boarded a neighboring slaver, the "Spencer." The captain of
this craft prudently declined to board the "Perfect," and reduce the
slaves to subjection again; but he had no objection to slaughtering naked
blacks at long range, so he warped his craft into position and opened fire
with his guns. For about an hour this butchery was continued, and then
such of the slaves as still lived, ran the schooner ashore, plundered, and
burnt her.

[Illustration: "THE ROPE WAS PUT AROUND HIS NECK"]

How such insurrections were put down was told nearly a hundred years later
in an official communication to Secretary of State James Buchanan, by
United States Consul George W. Gordon, the story being sworn testimony
before him. The case was that of the slaver "Kentucky," which carried 530
slaves. An insurrection which broke out was speedily suppressed, but
fearing lest the outbreak should be repeated, the captain determined to
give the wretched captives an "object lesson" by punishing the
ringleaders. This is how he did it:

"They were ironed, or chained, two together, and when they were hung, a
rope was put around their necks and they were drawn up to the yard-arm
clear of the sail. This did not kill them, but only choked or strangled
them. They were then shot in the breast and the bodies thrown overboard.
If only one of two that were ironed together was to be hung, the rope was
put around his neck and he was drawn up clear of the deck, and his leg
laid across the rail and chopped off to save the irons and release him
from his companion, who at the same time lifted up his leg until the other
was chopped off as aforesaid, and he released. The bleeding negro was then
drawn up, shot in the breast and thrown overboard. The legs of about one
dozen were chopped off this way.

"When the feet fell on the deck they were picked up by the crew and thrown
overboard, and sometimes they shot at the body while it still hung,
living, and all sorts of sport was made of the business."

Forty-six men and one woman were thus done to death: "When the woman was
hung up and shot, the ball did not take effect, and she was thrown
overboard living, and was seen to struggle some time in the water before
she sunk;" and deponent further says, "that after this was over, they
brought up and flogged about twenty men and six women. The flesh of some
of them where they were flogged putrified, and came off, in some cases,
six or eight inches in diameter, and in places half an inch thick."

This was in 1839, a time when Americans were very sure that for
civilization, progress, humanity, and the Christian virtues, they were at
least on as high a plane as the most exalted peoples of the earth.

Infectious disease was one of the grave perils with which the slavers had
to reckon. The overcrowding of the slaves, the lack of exercise and fresh
air, the wretched and insufficient food, all combined to make grave,
general sickness an incident of almost every voyage, and actual epidemics
not infrequent. This was a peril that moved even the callous captains and
their crews, for scurvy or yellow-jack developing in the hold was apt to
sweep the decks clear as well. A most gruesome story appears in all the
books on the slave trade, of the experience of the French slaver,
"Rodeur." With a cargo of 165 slaves, she was on the way to Guadaloupe in
1819, when opthalmia--a virulent disease of the eyes--appeared among the
blacks. It spread rapidly, though the captain, in hopes of checking its
ravages, threw thirty-six negroes into the sea alive. Finally it attacked
the crew, and in a short time all save one man became totally blind.
Groping in the dark, the helpless sailors made shift to handle the ropes,
while the one man still having eyesight clung to the wheel. For days, in
this wretched state, they made their slow way along the deep, helpless and
hopeless. At last a sail was sighted. The "Rodeur's" prow is turned toward
it, for there is hope, there rescue! As the stranger draws nearer, the
straining eyes of the French helmsman discerns something strange and
terrifying about her appearance. Her rigging is loose and slovenly, her
course erratic, she seems to be idly drifting, and there is no one at the
wheel. A derelict, abandoned at sea, she mocks their hopes of rescue. But
she is not entirely deserted, for a faint shout comes across the narrowing
strip of sea and is answered from the "Rodeur." The two vessels draw near.
There can be no launching of boats by blind men, but the story of the
stranger is soon told. She, too, is a slaver, a Spaniard, the "Leon," and
on her, too, every soul is blind from opthalmia originating among the
slaves. Not even a steersman has the "Leon." All light has gone out from
her, and the "Rodeur" sheers away, leaving her to an unknown fate, for
never again is she heard from. How wonderful the fate--or the
Providence--that directed that upon all the broad ocean teeming with
ships, engaged in honest or in criminal trade, the two that should meet
must be the two on which the hand of God was laid most heavily in
retribution for the suffering and the woe which white men and professed
Christians were bringing to the peaceful and innocent blacks of Africa.

It will be readily understood that the special and always menacing dangers
attending the slave trade made marine insurance upon that sort of cargoes
exceedingly high. Twenty pounds in the hundred was the usual figure in the
early days. This heavy insurance led to a new form of wholesale murder
committed by the captains. The policies covered losses resulting from
jettisoning, or throwing overboard the cargo; they did not insure against
loss from disease. Accordingly, when a slaver found his cargo infected, he
would promptly throw into the sea all the ailing negroes, while still
alive, in order to save the insurance. Some of the South American states,
where slaves were bought, levied an import duty upon blacks, and cases are
on record of captains going over their cargo outside the harbor and
throwing into the sea all who by disease or for other causes, were
rendered unsalable--thus saving both duty and insurance.

In the clearer light which illumines the subject to-day, the prolonged
difficulty which attended the destruction of the slave trade seems
incredible. It appears that two such powerful maritime nations as Great
Britain and the United States had only to decree the trade criminal and it
would be abandoned. But we must remember that slaves were universally
regarded as property, and an attempt to interfere with the right of their
owners to carry them where they would on the high seas was denounced as an
interference with property rights. We see that even to-day men are very
tenacious of "property rights," and the law describes them as
sacred--however immoral or repugnant to common sense and common humanity
they may be. So the effort to abolish the "right" of a slaver to starve,
suffocate, mutilate, torture, or murder a black man in whom he had
acquired a property right by the simple process of kidnapping required
more than half a century to attain complete success.

The first serious blow to the slave-trade fell in 1772, when an English
court declared that any slave coming into England straightway became free.
That closed all English ports to the slavers. Two years after the American
colonists, then on the threshold of the revolt against Great Britain,
thought to put America on a like high plane, and formally resolved that
they would "not purchase any slave imported after the first day of
December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the
slave-trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we
hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who
are concerned in it." But to this praiseworthy determination the colonists
were unable to live up, and in 1776, when Jefferson proposed to put into
the Declaration of Independence the charge that the British King had
forced the slave-trade on the colonies, a proper sense of their own guilt
made the delegates oppose it.

It was in England that the first earnest effort to break up the
slave-trade began. It was under the Stars and Stripes that the slavers
longest protected their murderous traffic. For a time the effort of the
British humanitarians was confined to the amelioration of the conditions
of the trade, prescribing space to be given each slave, prescribing
surgeons, and offering bounties to be paid captains who lost less than two
per cent. of their cargoes on the voyage. It is not recorded that the
bounty was often claimed. On the contrary, the horrors of what was called
"the middle passage" grew with the greed of the slave captains. But the
revelations of inhumanity made during the parliamentary investigation were
too shocking for even the indifferent and callous public sentiment of that
day. Humane people saw at once that to attempt to regulate a traffic so
abhorrent to every sense of humanity, was for the nation to go into
partnership with murderers and manstealers, and so the demand for the
absolute prohibition of the traffic gained strength from the futile
attempt to regulate it. Bills for its abolition failed, now in the House
of Lords, then in the House of Commons; but in 1807 a law prohibiting all
participation in the trade by British ships or subjects was passed. The
United States moved very slowly. Individual States under the old
confederation prohibited slavery within their borders, and in some cases
the slave trade; but when our forefathers came together to form that
Constitution under which the nation still exists, the opposition of
certain Southern States was so vigorous that the best which could be done
was to authorize a tax on slaves of not more than ten dollars a head, and
to provide that the traffic should not be prohibited before 1808. But
there followed a series of acts which corrected the seeming failure of the
constitutional convention. One prohibited American citizens "carrying on
the slave trade from the United States to any foreign place or country."
Another forbade the introduction of slaves into the Mississippi Territory.
Others made it unlawful to carry slaves to States which prohibited the
traffic, or to fit out ships for the foreign slave trade, or to serve on a
slaver. The discussion caused by all these measures did much to build up a
healthy public sentiment, and when 1808--the date set by the
Constitution--came round, a prohibitory law was passed, and the President
was authorized to use the armed vessels of the United States to give it
force and effect. Notwithstanding this, however, the slave trade, though
now illegal and outlawed, continued for fully half a century. Slaves were
still stolen on the coast of Africa by New England sea captains, subjected
to the pains and horrors of the middle passage, and smuggled into Georgia
or South Carolina, to be eagerly bought by the Southern planters. A
Congressman estimated that 20,000 blacks were thus smuggled into the
United States annually. Lafitte's nest of pirates at Barataria was a
regular slave depot; so, too, was Amelia Island, Florida. The profit on a
slave smuggled into the United States amounted to $350 or $500, and the
temptation was too great for men to be restrained by fear of a law, which
prescribed but light penalties. It is even matter of record that a
governor of Georgia resigned his office to enter the smuggling trade on a
large scale. The scandal was notorious, and the rapidly growing abolition
sentiment demanded that Congress so amend its laws as to make manstealers
at least as subject to them as other malefactors. But Congress tried the
politician's device of passing laws which would satisfy the
abolitionists, the slave trader, and the slave owner as well. To-day the
duty of the nation seems to have been so clear that we have scant patience
with the paltering policy of Congress and the Executive that permitted
half a century of profitable law-breaking. But we must remember that
slaves were property, that dealing in them was immensely profitable, and
that while New England wanted this profit the South wanted the blacks.
Macaulay said that if any considerable financial interest could be served
by denying the attraction of gravitation, there would be a very vigorous
attack on that great physical truth. And so, as there were many financial
interests concerned in protecting slavery, every effort to effectually
abolish the trade was met by an outcry and by shrewd political opposition.
The slaves were better off in the United States than at home, Congress was
assured; they had the blessings of Christianity; were freed from the
endless wars and perils of the African jungle. Moreover, they were needed
to develop the South, while in the trade, the hardy and daring sailors
were trained, who in time would make the American navy the great power of
the deep. Political chicanery in Congress reinforced the clamor from
without, and though act after act for the destruction of the traffic was
passed, none proved to be enforcible--in each was what the politicians of
a later day called a "little joker," making it ineffective. But in 1820 a
law was passed declaring slave-trading piracy, and punishable with death.
So Congress had done its duty at last, but it was long years before the
Executive rightly enforced the law.

It is needless to go into the details of the long series of Acts of
Parliament and of Congress, treaties, conventions, and naval regulations,
which gradually made the outlawry of the slaver on the ocean complete. In
the humane work England took the lead, sacrificing the flourishing
Liverpool slave-trade with all its allied interests; sacrificing, too, the
immediate prosperity of its West Indian colonies, whose plantations were
tilled exclusively with slave labor, and even paying heavy cash indemnity
to Spain to secure her acquiescence. Unhappily, the United States was as
laggard as England was active. Indeed, a curious manifestation of national
pride made the American flag the slaver's badge of immunity, for the
Government stubbornly--and properly--refused to grant to British cruisers
the right to search vessels under our flag, and as there were few or no
American men-of-war cruising on the African coast, the slaver under the
Stars and Stripes was virtually immune from capture. In 1842 a treaty with
Great Britain bound us to keep a considerable squadron on that coast, and
thereafter there was at least some show of American hostility to the
infamous traffic.

The vitality of the traffic in the face of growing international hostility
is to be explained by its increasing profits. The effect of the laws
passed against it was to make slaves cheaper on the coast of Africa and
dearer at the markets in America. A slave that cost $20 would bring $500
in Georgia. A ship carrying 500 would bring its owners $240,000, and there
were plenty of men willing to risk the penalties of piracy for a share of
such prodigious profits. Moreover, the seas swarmed then with adventurous
sailors--mostly of American birth--to whom the very fact that slaving was
outlawed made it more attractive. The years of European war had bred up
among New Englanders a daring race of privateersmen--their vocation had
long been piracy in all but name, a fact which in these later days the
maritime nations recognize by trying to abolish privateering by
international agreement. When the wars of the early years of the
nineteenth century ended the privateersmen looked about for some seafaring
enterprise which promised profit. A few became pirates, more went into the
slave-trade. Men of this type were not merely willing to risk their lives
in a criminal calling, but were quite as ready to fight for their property
as to try to save it by flight. The slavers soon began to carry heavy
guns, and with desperate crews were no mean antagonists for a man-of-war.
Many of the vessels that had been built for privateers were in the trade,
ready to fight a cruiser or rob a smaller slaver, as chance offered. We
read of some carrying as many as twenty guns, and in that sea classic,
"Tom Cringle's Log," there is a story--obviously founded on fact--of a
fight between a British sloop-of-war and a slaver that gives a vivid idea
of the desperation with which the outlaws could fight. But sometimes the
odds were hopeless, and the slaver could not hope to escape by force of
arms or by flight. Then the sternness of the law, together with a foolish
rule concerning the evidence necessary to convict, resulted in the murder
of the slaves, not by ones or twos, but by scores, and even hundreds, at a
time. For it was the unwise ruling of the courts that actual presence of
slaves on a captured ship was necessary to prove that she was engaged in
the unlawful trade. Her hold might reek with the odor of the imprisoned
blacks, her decks show unmistakable signs of their recent presence,
leg-irons and manacles might bear dumb testimony to the purpose of her
voyage, informers in the crew might even betray the captain's secret; but
if the boarders from the man-of-war found no negroes on the ship, she went
free. What was the natural result? When a slaver, chased by a cruiser,
found that capture was certain, her cargo of slaves was thrown overboard.
The cruiser in the distance might detect the frightful odor that told
unmistakably of a slave-ship. Her officers might hear the screams of the
unhappy blacks being flung into the sea. They might even see the bodies
floating in the slaver's wake; but if, on boarding the suspected craft,
they found her without a single captive, they could do nothing. This was
the law for many years, and because of it thousands of slaves met a cruel
death as the direct result of the effort to save them from slavery. Many
stories are told of these wholesale drownings. The captain of the British
cruiser "Black Joke" reports of a case in which he was pursuing two slave
ships:

"When chased by the tenders both put back, made all sail up the river, and
ran on shore. During the chase they were seen from our vessels to throw
the slaves overboard by twos, shackled together by the ankles, and left in
this manner to sink or swim as best they could. Men, women, and children
were seen in great numbers struggling in the water by everyone on board
the two tenders, and, dreadful to relate, upward of 150 of these wretched
creatures perished in this way."

In this case, the slavers did not escape conviction, though the only
penalty inflicted was the seizure of their vessels. The pursuers rescued
some of the drowning negroes, who were able to testify that they had been
on the suspected ship, and condemnation followed. The captain of the
slaver "Brillante" took no chance of such a disaster. Caught by four
cruisers in a dead calm, hidden from his enemy by the night, but with no
chance of escaping before dawn, this man-stealer set about planning murder
on a plan so large and with such system as perhaps has not been equaled
since Caligula. First he had his heaviest anchor so swung that cutting a
rope would drop it. Then the chain cable was stretched about the ship,
outside the rail, and held up by light bits of rope, that would give way
at any stout pull. Then the slaves--600 in all--were brought up from
below, open-eyed, whispering, wondering what new act in the pitiful drama
of their lives this midnight summons portended. With blows and curses the
sailors ranged them along the rail and bound them to the chain cable. The
anchor was cut loose, plunging into the sea it carried the cable and the
shackled slaves with it to the bottom. The men on the approaching
man-of-war's boats, heard a great wail of many voices, a rumble, a splash,
then silence, and when they reached the ship its captain politely showed
them that there were no slaves aboard, and laughed at their comments on
the obvious signs of the recent presence of the blacks.

[Illustration: "BOUND THEM TO THE CHAIN CABLE"]

A favorite trick of the slaver, fleeing from a man-of-war, was to throw
over slaves a few at a time in the hope that the humanity of the pursuers
would impel them to stop and rescue the struggling negroes, thus giving
the slave-ship a better chance of escape. Sometimes these hapless blacks
thus thrown out, as legend has it Siberian peasants sometimes throw out
their children as ransom to pursuing wolves, were furnished with spars or
barrels to keep them afloat until the pursuer should come up; and
occasionally they were even set adrift by boat-loads. It was hard on the
men of the navy to steel their hearts to the cries of these castaways as
the ship sped by them; but if the great evil was to be broken up it could
not be by rescuing here and there a slave, but by capturing and punishing
the traders. Many officers of our navy have left on record their
abhorrence of the service they were thus engaged in, but at the same time
expressed their conviction that it was doing the work of humanity. They
were obliged to witness such human suffering as might well move the
stoutest human heart. At times they were even forced to seem as merciless
to the blacks as the slave-traders themselves; but in the end their work,
like the merciful cruelty of the surgeon, made for good.

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