American Merchant Ships and Sailors

by Willis J. Abbot

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.

"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.

When a slaver was overhauled after so swift a chase that her master had no opportunity to get rid of his damning cargo, the boarding officers saw sights that scarce Inferno itself could equal. To look into her hold, filled with naked, writhing, screaming, struggling negroes was a sight that one could see once and never forget. The effluvium that arose polluted even the fresh air of the ocean, and burdened the breeze for miles to windward. The first duty of the boarding officer was to secure the officers of the craft with their papers. Not infrequently such vessels would be provided with two captains and two sets of papers, to be used according to the nationality of the warship that might make the capture; but the men of all navies cruising on the slave coast came in time to be expert in detecting such impostures. The crew once under guard, the first task was to alleviate in some degree the sufferings of the slaves. But this was no easy task, for the overcrowded vessel could not be enlarged, and its burden could in no way be decreased in mid-ocean. Even if near the coast of Africa, the negroes could not be released by the simple process of landing them at the nearest point, for the land was filled with savage tribes, the captives were commonly from the interior, and would merely have been murdered or sold anew into slavery, had they been thus abandoned. In time the custom grew up of taking them to Liberia, the free negro state established in Africa under the protection of the United States. But it can hardly be said that much advantage resulted to the individual negroes rescued by even this method, for the Liberians were not hospitable, slave traders camped upon the borders of their state, and it was not uncommon for a freed slave to find himself in a very few weeks back again in the noisome hold of the slaver. Even under the humane care of the navy officers who were put in command of captured slavers the human cattle suffered grievously. Brought on deck at early dawn, they so crowded the ships that it was almost impossible for the sailors to perform the tasks of navigation. One officer, who was put in charge of a slaver that carried 700 slaves, writes:

"They filled the waist and gangways in a fearful jam, for there were over 700 men, women, boys, and young girls. Not even a waistcloth can be permitted among slaves on board ship, since clothing even so slight would breed disease. To ward off death, ever at work on a slave ship, I ordered that at daylight the negroes should be taken in squads of twenty or more, and given a salt-water bath by the hose-pipe of the pumps. This brought renewed life after their fearful nights on the slave deck.... No one who has never seen a slave deck can form an idea of its horrors. Imagine a deck about 20 feet wide, and perhaps 120 feet long, and 5 feet high. Imagine this to be the place of abode and sleep during long, hot, healthless nights of 720 human beings! At sundown, when they were carried below, trained slaves received the poor wretches one by one, and laying each creature on his side in the wings, packed the next against him, and the next, and the next, and so on, till like so many spoons packed away they fitted into each other a living mass. Just as they were packed so must they remain, for the pressure prevented any movement or the turning of hand or foot, until the next morning, when from their terrible night of horror they were brought on deck once more, weak and worn and sick." Then, after all had come up and been splashed with salt water from the pumps, men went below to bring up the dead. There was never a morning search of this sort that was fruitless. The stench, the suffocation, the confinement, oftentimes the violence of a neighbor, brought to every dawn its tale, of corpses, and with scant gentleness all were brought up and thrown over the side to the waiting sharks. The officer who had this experience writes also that it was thirty days after capturing the slaver before he could land his helpless charges.