Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

“The Duke of York having given the signal, most of the other ships followed her example, and the inhabitants of New Town, concealed in the mangrove swamps along the shore, where the monkeys play and the grey parrots call, came out of their hiding-places and joined in the ghastly fray. And the lust of killing got hold of the aggressors. The ships' boats were manned, and joined themselves to the canoes from New Town. They pursued' the fleeing men from Old Calabar, and they apparently forgot the object for which they had lured these men to the ships, and killed at least as many of the men of the Old Town as they enslaved.

“And then came a canoe with the principal men from New Town to the Duke of York, demanding Amboe Robin John, the brother of the “grandee” of the rival town. And Amboe Robin John pleaded pitifully for his life. He put the palms of his hands together and beseeched and prayed his captor not so to violate the rights of hospitality. But he spoke to deaf ears. The captain of the Duke of York only wanted a slave, and the men of New Town offered him one, named Econg, in exchange, and they forced their enemy into the canoe and struck off his head, and the slaver put in his place the man named Econg, who, like the thirty pieces of silver traded so long ago, was the price of blood.”

Was ever there a more atrocious story of treachery? Nothing happened to those white men whereas when a slave struck for liberty in Jamaica—but I have told this story just because presently I shall have occasion to tell of slave risings in Jamaica, and if the slaves were fiendishly cruel—and they were—nothing can exceed the cruelty of the white men who first brought them hither. Clarkson says that the deputy town-clerk of Bristol, Mr Burges, said that he only knew of one captain from the port in the slave trade who did not deserve to be hanged.

Perhaps the fate of those men of Old Calabar, whose dead bodies were washed up on the sands and caught in the mangrove swamps, was the most merciful, for those who were taken on board the ships truly had a terrible time. From the very beginning the last thing the slavers considered was the comfort of the slaves. No, “comfort” is the wrong word to use, such a word as comfort from the days of Queen Elizabeth to those of Victoria, was a word not in the language as far as the slaves were concerned. No one ever thought to see that these men and women, these living beings, to put them on the very lowest rung of the ladder, were likely to be free from discomfort, nay, free from actual pain. Spear tells how he read of “the new slaver built at Warren in the country of Bristole in the colony of Rhode Island, that was three feet ten inches between decks,” and Clarkson, who went up and down the country collecting information about the slavers and their doings, tells us of two little sloops which were fitting out for Africa, the one only of 25 tons which was said to be destined to carry seventy, and the other of only 11 tons which was to carry thirty slaves, and these were not to be used as tenders bringing small parties down the rivers to the bigger ships, but were to sail for the West Indies with the slaves themselves, and on their arrival, one if not both, were to be sold as pleasure boats. Then he gives the dimensions. In the larger one each slave “must sit down all the voyage, and contract his limbs within the narrow limits of 3 square feet, while in the smaller, each slave had 4 square feet to sit in, but since the height between decks was only 2 feet 8 inches, his head must touch the deck above. When the matter was investigated in Parliament, it was stated that if the space between decks in a slaver reached 4 feet—it never seems to have exceeded 5 feet 8 inches—they invariably put up a shelf to the width of 5 feet, so that another layer of slaves might be placed on top of the first. The men were ironed together two and two by the ankles, and sometimes their wrists were handcuffed together, and a chain usually fastened the irons to ringbolts, either on the deck above or below. The women and children were left unironed, and the men were stowed forward and the women aft. If they could get a cargo—and they generally waited on that sweltering coast, rolling in the surf, until they did—the slaves covered the entire deck.” In Parliament, at the end of the eighteenth century, they took the dimensions of the slaver Brookes, picking her at haphazard from a long list of slavers given them. They found that if each man was allowed 6 feet by 1 foot 4 inches, every woman 5 feet by 1 foot 4 inches, every boy 5 feet by 1 foot 2 inches, and every girl 4 feet 6 inches by 1 foot, they could stow in her 432. There is a plan given in Clarkson's book with every slave in place, and you could not put a pin between them. Certainly it was utterly impossible for any one to move amongst them, at least I should have said so. And yet it was proved that on a previous voyage the Brookes had carried no less than 609 slaves! And the slave ships were on the coast, the stifling Guinea Coast, from three to ten months, and from six to ten weeks crossing the Atlantic. It was quite possible for a slave to be on board in that ghastly stinking slave deck, stinking is a mild word to use for so foul a den, for over a year. In this place they must stay for at least sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, when the weather was bad, or even when it was wet, they were kept there for days together. Nothing that breathed, it seems to me, but must have died in such a place. It was stated in Parliament that “if the ship was full their situation was terribly distressing. They sometimes drew their breath with anxious and laborious efforts, and some died of suffocation.”

“Thus crammed together like herrings in a barrel,” said Sir William Dolben, “they contracted putrid and fatal disorders, so that they who came to inspect them,” (how could they inspect them save by tramping over them), “in the morning had occasionally to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their carcases from the bodies of their wretched fellow sufferers to whom they had been fastened.”

We do well to remember too, that there were no sanitary arrangements upon a slave ship. All the calls of Nature had to be performed upon the spot to which the wretched beings were shackled. And when they were sea sick———

But no words of mine can convey the horror of it.

These unhappy people were allowed a pint of water a day each, and were fed twice a day upon yams and horse beans. Also, since it was absolutely necessary that they should have exercise for their health's sake, they were obliged after each meal to jump up and down, or dance in their shackles, and if they did not do so—I can imagine they hardly felt inclined for that form of amusement—they were whipped until they did, and the same stimulus was used to make them sing!

And yet it was possible to arrive at their final destination with only the loss of 1 or 2 per cent., and Captain Hugh Crow, the one-eyed slaver of Liverpool, says Spear, by daily washings, good food, and keeping them amused by playing on musical instruments, did it, and one, Captain John Newton, returned thanks in church, because he had performed the voyage from Africa without the loss of a single man.

But these were in the days when the trade was counted, according to John Newton, “genteel employment,” when the rich ship owners of Liverpool and Bristol had no more shame in owning slavers than nowadays they have in taking passengers to America, or trading to Sicily for oranges and wine.