Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

But care such as Hugh Crow took was, I am afraid, rare, and terrible are the tales of the utter brutality suffered in addition to the overcrowding, the filth and the agonies of seasickness which already was the lot of the human cattle.

Clarkson tells the story of the ship Zong—Captain Luke Collingwood, and Captain Luke Colling-wood seems to have been a devil incarnate. Unluckily, he was not the only one in the trade.

On one day early in September 1781, the Zong sailed from the island of St Thomas, bound for Jamaica, with 440 slaves on board, and she arrived off the coast short of water. But Collingwood made the mistake of thinking he was off Hayti, and seeing that the slaves were sickly, and indeed had suffered much from want of water, he and his mate, James Kelsall, decided that since the slaves were sickly—sickly was probably a mild term to use since sixty of them had already died—it would be well to jettison the cargo, or some of it. For the death rate had been so great the voyage was likely to be unprofitable, and if he could prove that some of the cargo had been thrown overboard to save the rest, the underwriters would pay the value of it, while if these slaves died on board the ship would be at the loss. They selected accordingly 132 of the most sickly of the slaves. Fifty-four of these were there and then thrown overboard to the sharks that swarmed round the ship, and forty-two went the same way the next day, and in the course of the next three days the remaining twenty-six were brought out of the den below to complete the tale of the victims. Poor, wretched, suffering creatures! They looked at the sea, at the sinister fins appearing above the oily swell, and they looked back at their prison and the pitiless white faces that looked down upon them, and then they made their choice. Sixteen, they say, were thrown overboard by the officers, but the rest leaped into the bloody sea where the sharks were already fighting for their meal and shared their fate.

The plea that was set up on behalf of this atrocious act of wickedness was that the captain discovered, when he made the proposal, that he had only 200 gallons of water on board, and that he had missed his port. It was proved, however, in answer to this that no one had been put upon short allowance; and that rain fell and continued for three days immediately after the second lot of slaves had been thrown overboard. They might have filled all their barrels and done away with all necessity—if one could call it necessity—for the murder of the third lot. As a matter of fact they only troubled to fill six.

But the underwriters refused to pay, and the Solicitor-General actually held that the captain of the ship had an “unquestionable right” to throw the slaves into the sea. But not all men agreed with him. Light was coming, and Lord Mansfield, presiding in the higher court, said that this was a shocking case, and, in spite of the law, decided in favour of the underwriters. Still, nothing apparently was done to the murderers. They went scot-free. But imagine the state of public opinion when such a case could actually be brought before the courts, when the perpetrators of such a crime evidently regarded themselves as agents, doing their very best for those who had entrusted their business to their charge.

But once the trade was outlawed, and the vigilant warships were ever on the watch, life was still more cruel for the unfortunate chattel. Then, to run as many slaves as possible, and to make up for possible losses, the slaves were compelled to lie on their sides, breast to back, spoon fashion, and this when the space between decks was less than two feet. When it was as much as two feet they were stowed, says Spear, “sitting up in rows, one crowded into the lap of another, with legs on legs like riders on a crowded toboggan. In storms the sailors had to put on the hatches, and seal tight the openings into the infernal cesspool. It was asserted by the naval officers who were stationed on the Coast to stop the traffic that in certain states of the weather they could detect the odour of a slaver farther away than they could see her on a clear night. The odour was often unmistakable at a distance of five miles down the wind.”

And to what lengths these brutes might go we may see in the case of the Gloria, given by Drake in his Revelations of a Slave Smuggler, and quoted by Spear. The surgeon tells the tale.

The Gloria was coming from the Cape Verde Islands in ballast when she overhauled a Portuguese schooner with a full cargo of slaves. The captain of the Gloria, as thorough a scoundrel surely as ever sailed the seas, filled up his men with rum, attacked the schooner, murdered her officers and crew and one passenger, stole the gold, transferred the slaves to his own ship and scuttled the other. Dead men and sunken ships tell no tales, and 190 slaves as witnesses counted as naught in those days.

Then Ruiz the captain, I'm glad he wasn't an Englishman, bought 400 negroes on the Dahomean Coast and “hauled our course for the Atlantic voyage. But this was to be my last trip in the blood-stained Gloria. Hardly were we out a fortnight before it was discovered that our roystering crew had neglected to change the sea water, which had served as our ballast in the lower casks, and which ought to have been replaced with fresh water in Africa. We were drawing from the last casks before this discovery was made, and the horror of our situation sobered Captain Ruiz. He gave orders to hoist the precious remnant abaft the main grating, and made me calculate how long it would sustain the crew and cargo. I found that half a gill a day would hold out to the Spanish main; and it was decided that, in order to save our cargo, we should allow the slaves a half gill and the crew a gill each a day. Then began a torture worse than death to the blacks. Pent in their close dungeons, to the number of nearly five hundred, they suffered continual torment. Our crew and drivers were unwilling to allow even the half gill per diem, and quarrelled fiercely over their own stinted rations. Our cargo had been stowed on the platforms closer than I ever saw slaves stowed before or since. Instead of lowering buckets of water to them, as was customary, it became necessary to pour the water into half-pint measures. These farthest from the gratings never got a drop.... In a short time at least a hundred men and women were shackled to dead partners.”

It is a ghastly picture. Perhaps we could not expect any pity for the sufferings of the “cargo” from such a set of pirates. Everyone who was free on board drank hard “as well as myself,” said the frank narrator, and they did not trouble to throw the dead overboard, or presumably even to unshackle the living, for the captain finding his crew out of hand, ordered the hatches down, and “swore he would make the run on our regular water rations, and take the chances of his stock.”