Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

Three days those fiends continued their course, drinking in plenty, while “the negroes suffocated below.” And then came retribution swift and sure.

“Ruiz and four of the men were taken suddenly ill with a disease that baffled my medical knowledge. Their tongues swelled and grew black; their flesh turned yellow, and in six hours they were dead. The first mate went next, and then three others of the crew, and a black driver whose body became leprous with yellow spots. I began to notice a strange fetid smell pervading the vessel, and a low heavy fog on deck, almost like steam. Then the horrid truth became apparent. Our rotting negroes under hatches had generated the plague, and it was a malaria or death mist I saw rising. At this time all our men but three and myself had been attacked; and we abandoned the Gloria in her long boat, taking the remnant of water, a sack of biscuit, and a rum beaker, with what gold dust and other valuables we could hastily gather up. We left nine of our late comrades dead and five dying on the Gloria's deck.”

I have only read the extract that Spear gives in his book, but if it is true—and it may well be—judging by what I have read elsewhere—this ship's surgeon appears to have been a pretty considerable villain himself. The “cargo,” I suppose, must have been dead. It was hardly likely one could have survived so long without water in the tropics, but what about the dying comrades he abandoned on the decks?

As a matter of fact, the slavers themselves often did so suffer, for it is hardly possible to generate disease, live over it, and escape scot-free. One of the most ghastly cases is that of the French slaver Rôdeur.

In the year in which Queen Victoria was born, she was on her way to the West Indies with 162 slaves, when ophthalmia appeared among them. Probably it was not treated properly, but in any case, crowded as they were between decks, it was bound to spread rapidly, and at last, the captain with a view to saving the majority repeated the horror of the Zong, and threw thirty-six of them, the ones of least value, I presume, alive to the sharks. But this living sacrifice did not stop the disease. As it was bound to, being a filth disease, it spread to the crew, and presently there was but one man among the crew who could see. And this one man steering, and with all the work of the ship upon his shoulders, saw with thankfulness a sail, and steered towards her. But there was something strange about that sail. As he approached the ship he saw she was drifting as if derelict, though men were wandering about her decks. And she, too, was a slaver. On the Rôdeur they might have known that by the smell, if custom had not deadened in them that sense. In answer to a hail the crew of the stranger came crowding to the rail begging, praying for aid, and everyone on board that ship was blind. She was, they said, the Spanish slaver Leon, and among their slaves, too, ophthalmia had broken out, and had spread to the crew, and there they lay rolling on the Atlantic helpless.

But what was the good of prayers and cries, and bribes, and wild appeals for help. One man who could see had as much as he could do to steer his own ship to port, for the disease was creeping upon him, and tradition says that he, too, went blind when he reached haven, and of the Spanish slaver Leon, with all her crew and all her slaves, no man ever heard again.

But the white men, at least, took the risks with their eyes open; upon the blacks, it had been forced, and no wonder the wretched cargo in their hopeless misery tried rebelling, though rebellion meant death to all concerned, and often, to some who had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Take the story told by the surgeon of the slaver Little Pearl, which sailed from the Coast in 1786. The chief mate used to beat the men slaves in season and out of season. One night he heard a noise and jumped down amongst them with a lantern. On the Brookes there wouldn't have been room for a lantern, and I doubt if there was more on the Little Pearl. Two of the slaves forced themselves out of their irons, and seizing him, began to strike him with these, their only weapons. His cries brought the crew to his aid, we can imagine how mercilessly they trampled on the slaves in that confined space to do it, and they got him out, and the “cargo” began one of those hopeless struggles for freedom which could only end one way. At least, as a rule, it did. They were still on the Coast, and the thought that they were near their homes, probably gave added vigour to the arms of those who fought. The crew fired down upon them, careless of whom they might hurt. In truth, there was hardly anything else they could do, for, if the slaves got the upper hand, it would have been “Good-night,” as far as the white men were concerned. Next morning they were brought up one by one, and then it was found a boy had been killed. Only the two men who had first broken their bonds did not come with the others. They found their way into the hold, and armed themselves with knives from a cask that had been opened for trade. Oh, the forlorn hope! If they had been white men someone would have enthused over their pluck and valour, but they were only two negro slaves. One was persuaded to come up by a negro trader calling to him in his own tongue, and the moment he appeared on deck, one of the crew, “supposing him to be yet hostile,” shot him dead. The other held that hold for twelve hours! They mixed scalding water with fat and poured it down upon him to make him come up, but, “though his flesh was painfully blistered,” by these means he kept below. A promise was then made to him in the African tongue by the same trader that no injury should be done him if he would come amongst them. To this at length he consented. But, on observing when he was about half way up that a sailor was armed between decks, he flew to him and threw him down. The sailor fired his pistol in the scuffle, but, without effect; he contrived, however, to fracture his skull with the butt end of it, so that the slave died on the third day. Mercifully. Though we are left in the dark as to his sufferings before he died, but we may judge of them by the way the same men treated a boy when they arrived at their destination in the West Indies.

There was a boy slave on board, says Clarkson, who was very ill and emaciated. Now the rule in slavers was that each officer of the ship was allowed one or more slaves for his own benefit, according to his rank. But the slaves were not given to them. When they were sold, the total amount brought in was added together and then divided by the number of slaves sold, and in that way each officer took his share in money. Therefore, if a slave were sold for a trifling amount, he brought down the value of the officers' slaves. The chief mate objected to this boy being sold. He would only bring down the average. His objection was allowed. It was a natural one. Therefore, the boy was kept on board, and not exposed for sale, but no provisions were allowed him, and the mate suggested he should be thrown overboard. No one would do this, however, though they could quite easily watch him starving to death before their eyes. And starve he did, and on the ninth day died, “having never been allowed any sustenance during that time.” And this in a tropical island where the fruits of the earth could be bought for the merest trifle. It seems impossible that men should have been so fiendishly cruel, but the evidence is overwhelming. The times were hard, and we know that Wilberforce, who championed so well the slave, turned a deaf ear to the sufferings of the British labourer. Still, two wrongs do not make a right, and, without doubt, the black people stolen away for slaves were treated by many with a whole-hearted callousness that is hard to believe in these times.

They had all sorts of means of coercion. Clarkson found openly exposed for sale, in a shop in Liverpool, the handcuffs and the leg irons with which one slave was shackled to another, also a thumbscrew, and an instrument like a brutal pair of scissors with screws at the end instead of looped handles. This was pushed in a mouth obstinately kept shut, tearing lips and breaking teeth, then forcibly opened and kept open with a screw, so that the unfortunate who wished to end his miseries by starvation might be fed.