Maritime slavery

Slavery and Abolition
Vol. 31, No. 3, September 2010, pp. 311 – 326

INTRODUCTION

Maritime Slavery
Philip D. Morgan

Think of maritime slavery, and the notorious Middle Passage – the unprecedented,
forced migration of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic – readily comes to mind.
This so-called middle leg (from Africa to the Americas) of a supposed trading triangle
linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas naturally captures attention for its scale and
horror. After all, the Middle Passage was the largest forced, transoceanic migration in
world history, now thought to have involved about 12.5 million African captives
shipped in about 44,000 voyages that sailed between 1514 and 1866. No other
coerced migration matches it for sheer size or gruesomeness.1
Maritime slavery is not, however, just about the movement of people as commod-
ities, but rather, the involvement of all sorts of people, including slaves, in the trans-
portation of those human commodities. Maritime slavery is thus not only about
objects being moved but also about subjects doing the moving. Some slaves were
actors, not simply the acted-upon. They moved commodities, not merely represented
commodities. They were pilots, sailors, canoemen, divers, linguists, porters, stewards,
cooks, and cabin boys, not forgetting all the ancillary workers in port such as steve-
dores, warehousemen, labourers, grumetes, washerwomen, tavern workers, and pros-
titutes. This attention to the seafaring community is part of a general movement to
explore oceans as arenas of interaction, to reverse the precedence usually given to
land over water. There is now a ‘maritime turn’ to rival the ‘linguistic turn’ in
¨
recent historical scholarship. As Karen Wigen notes, ‘the sea is swinging into view’
2
as never before.
The articles in this special issue reﬂect this current interest in maritime spaces. The
Mediterranean, the ﬁrst stretch of water to be colonised by networks of routine,
round-trip exchange, the ‘ur-sea’ as it has been termed, is referenced in David
Wheat’s essay. The Caribbean, like the Mediterranean, is ‘a space between continents’,
and Wheat shows that the linkages between the two seas were direct, with

Philip D. Morgan is Harry C. Black Professor, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
21218, USA. Email: pmorgan@jhu.edu

ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/10/030311– 16
DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2010.504537 # 2010 Taylor & Francis

312 Philip D. Morgan
Mediterranean galleys and several hundred oarsmen from North Africa and the
Ottoman empire ending up in the Spanish Caribbean. Molly Warsh’s essay also
focuses on the Spanish Caribbean and the combination of Indian and African
divers whose exploitation produced a short-lived boom in pearl production near Mar-
garita and Cubagua Islands. Most of the other essays in this issue focus on the large
body of water that the Turks and Moors crossed to reach the Caribbean. The Atlantic
world has received much attention of late, although studies of its ocean are still in their
infancy. Thus, the Atlantic-based essays in this volume probe specific areas and topics
– whether Portuguese or Brazilian slave ships, Gold Coast castles, or Anglo-American
privateering voyages – as ways of approaching this vast area and much less venerable
field of scholarly endeavour than that of the Mediterranean.3
By the late eighteenth century, the incursions of Europeans into the Indian Ocean
grew apace and indigenous responses intensified. The Sulu Sultanate in Southeast Asia,
as James Warren elucidates, engaged in long-distance marauding to increase its supply
of slaves. Its slave raiders regularly travelled further than Southeast Asians had ever
gone before and established a vast network of raiding bases and forms of communi-
cation over great distances. The terror and trauma that these slave raiders visited
upon Philippine and Indonesian coastal communities cannot be underestimated,
although captives and slaves were often assimilated into the raiders’ societies – to
the point that some slaves could even organise raids of their own, eventually own
slaves, and earn their freedom. Another response occurred in the north-western
sector of the Indian Ocean, where East African men, slaves and freedmen alike,
played vital roles in shaping a maritime world. As steam vessels gradually supplanted
sailing ships, Janet Ewald notes, Africans worked almost exclusively in the engine
room, in part because other mariners disliked that work and already monopolised
deck crew positions, in part because even stokehole work on a vessel provided oppor-
tunities, in part because men freed or escaped from bondage naturally gravitated to the
mobility of maritime life, and in part because loading coal in port could easily lead to
working with coal below deck.4
With the inroads of whaling vessels and steamships in the nineteenth century, the
Pacific became a place of dense, criss-crossing connections. If to this point Africans
and slaves were comprised of the least favoured maritime workers, now the Chinese
vied for that dubious honour, as John Grider explains. Prejudice against the
Chinese stemmed in large part from the overcrowded ships transporting contracted
Chinese labourers, reminiscent of slave ships. In addition, as the Chinese entered
the seafaring labour market, they proved a direct threat to white sailors’ livelihoods
from their willingness to work for low wages. Steamships, as Grider notes, ‘devalued
sailors’ traditional skills and labor’. Grider tells a declension story: whites, blacks,
and Pacific Islanders served together on sailing ships in the first half of the nineteenth
century, but the latter half ushered in a new era of racial intolerance and exclusion.
Whether the Atlantic, Indian, or Pacific oceans, the maritime sphere was in some
ways a world apart. Life afloat – cocooned in a complex machine, a ‘wooden
world’ – was distinct from life ashore. Seamen can seem marginal figures, dwelling
on the fringes of settled society, speaking an argot unintelligible to outsiders,

Slavery and Abolition 313

wearing a distinctive garb, sporting particular hairstyles and bodily markings, and
even walking with a noticeably rolling gait. The Greeks, N.A.M. Rodger notes, hesi-
tated to count sailors among the living or dead; many Africans thought that the sea
was the realm of the dead. Seafaring is often thought to be the province of extremely
humble, desperate people. The ‘smell of tar’, one scholar notes, ‘did not ennoble
anyone’, and the risks associated with seafaring were palpable; people had to be in
dire straits, it is commonly assumed, to work in such a hostile environment. The low-
liness of jobs at sea explains why Jack Tar often likened his fate to slavery. The lot of the
‘common seaman’, one New Englander pointed out, was ‘noe better than commane
slauerye’. Or as, Edward Barlow, the seventeenth-century English mariner pungently
explained, ‘all the men in the ship except the master’ are ‘little better than slaves’. Con-
templating naval service, the young George Washington heard that it would ‘cut him
and staple him and use him like a Negro, or rather, like a dog’. Mariners can be con-
sidered a breed apart, and their profession for many was not an honourable one.5
At the same time, as Daniel Vickers astutely observes, the majority of sailors ‘spent
most of their lives – perhaps even most of their working lives – on land’. In that sense,
mariners could never be a breed apart; for many, seafaring was an extension of terres-
trial existence, and an occupation quite honourable, highly skilled, in fact. In any case,
the maritime world, and the focus of its historians, is as much on the intersection of
sea and land as on the sea itself. Intermediate zones – littorals, beaches, coastlines,
ports, and harbours – the environment of ‘saltwater peoples’, those living within
easy walking distance of the sea or growing up within earshot of surf, now hove
into view. Maritime history thus pays considerable attention to the lives of sailors
ashore; all the ancillary personnel and institutions that supported life afloat – the mer-
chants, shipping agents, crimps, stevedores, longshoremen, lighter-men, dockworkers,
artisans, as well as the shipyards, ropewalks, cooperies, boarding houses, taverns, and
brothels – require examination. In Bermuda’s whaling industry, for example, twice as
many slaves worked ashore processing the animals as toiled afloat catching them.
Sailor towns became as important as sailors.6
The maritime world was masculine in many ways, but women played significant
´ ´
roles. Pablo E. Perez-Mallaına has noted how mulatto women seemed to be ‘especially
attractive’ to Spanish mariners. Ports were generally places of female majorities,
because of the economic opportunities they presented to women. Throughout the
Caribbean and North America, free black women operated small businesses such as
inns, taverns, shops, boarding-houses, and bakeries, forming key parts of the maritime
service economy. In Charleston, South Carolina, some white women lived off the
income generated by their hired-out slaves who hawked and peddled goods on city
streets, were seamstresses, and washerwomen. So-called ‘Negro washing houses’
were commonplace. As floating sojourners, sailors needed services provided by local
residents to satisfy their daily needs ashore. Local African and Afro-Creole women
– innkeepers, laundresses, and sexual companions – found a niche. Women could
even be mobile in ports. In 1688 a Sephardic Jewish woman and four women of
African descent – perhaps her slaves or companions, for she apparently comman-
deered the boat – lost their lives when their vessel was shipwrecked between the

ˆ
Dutch entrepot of Curacao and Coro, a town on the northern coast of mainland
¸
Spanish America (now Venezuela). In Africa and the Caribbean alike, incoming
ships were met by canoe-borne slaves – ‘bumboats’ in local parlance – offering pro-
visions and other services (a ‘charcoal seraglio’ was one contemporary term for the
phenomenon).7
Maritime labour had its obvious attractions for slaves. If plantation labour was the
alternative – as it was in many places – life at sea was generally preferable. Thus,
impressment did not hold the same fears for blacks as it did for whites, because
naval service, as Denver Brunsman puts it, ‘signified a step up’ from slaves’ everyday
lives. White sailors could view impressment as tantamount to slavery, but Samuel
Barber, Dr Samuel Johnson’s impressed manservant, was reluctant to leave the navy
because it improved his lot. As cribbed, confining, and dangerous as shipboard life
was, seafaring offered mobility and the opportunity to broaden horizons. Usually
the first to hear of major events, maritime slaves became valuable conduits and infor-
mants within their communities. Maritime slaves were the most cosmopolitan of men.
No wonder so many of the earliest black leaders ‘rolled out of the forecastle’, as Jeff
Bolster notes, rather than the pulpit. Furthermore, life afloat generally afforded
better treatment than plantation labour. Yes, the lash was still ubiquitous, but oppor-
tunities were greater too – the chance of cash wages, the ability to engage in private
ventures, and even exposure to literacy and book-reading were all more likely.
Sailors were not just wage workers, but traders, and they wrote the earliest black auto-
biographies. Letters from African American sailors, while rare, do exist; and such
letter-writers, impressed by the Royal Navy, avoided the metaphor of enslavement
so popular among white sailors; rather, they proclaimed their American citizenship.
On board ship, skin colour often mattered less than skill. The camaraderie of being
‘in the same boat’, working as part of a collective team, sharing food and accommo-
dations, had its allure.8
Whites testified to black maritime skills. In 1758 one white observer declared Ber-
mudian black sailors ‘the best in America, and as useful as the whites in their naviga-
tion’. Some Bermudian slaves were so adept at trading that they acted as informal
supercargoes, managing the purchase and sale of a cargo. A French visitor to
Jamaica in 1765 praised the ‘intelligence’ of these ‘black managers’ as they negotiated
with the rich island planters, revealing ‘the punctuality with they carry out the business
of their Masters, and bring back their vessels’. Experiencing a transitory inversion of
the typical racial order, the white captain who turned over the helm to a black pilot
had to trust in the man’s abilities. No wonder black pilots had a reputation for
being self-confident men. A Bermudian ‘colored boy’ in his teens (no doubt
exposed to the maritime world) taught the 9-year-old George Tucker how to count
and to multiply as far as his 12 times table.9
African-Americans no doubt contributed to the technology of seafaring in the age of
sail, but, so far as is known, only two concrete examples have come to light. First,
about the time of the Seven Years War ‘a happy expedient was hit upon for making
a ship ride easy in a storm at sea, which was affected by launching overboard a
spare boom made fast to the end of a hauser’. This technological improvement, a


simple form of sea anchor or ‘floating anchor’, used in deep waters when a regular
anchor would not reach the bottom and there was a pressing need to keep the
ship’s head pointed into the wind, was credited to ‘a negro seaman’. In 1848, Lewis
Temple, an African-American blacksmith in New England created the toggle iron
harpoon, which became standard in American whaling for at least half a century.10
The camaraderie of sailors sometimes trumped race. Seafaring involved, as Bolster
notes, one of ‘the most racially integrated labour forces in eighteenth-century
America’. The linking of sailors and slaves in the public mind is nicely captured in
the erection of a cage in Belize to ‘confine disorderly Seamen and Negroes’. Similarly,
in Charleston the workhouse became a ‘House of Correction’ for ‘fugitive Seaman &
Slaves’. Placed on the same plane, white sailors could befriend blacks.11
Nevertheless, despite the camaraderie and practical attractions of seafaring, mari-
time life was often brutal for blacks. Two incidents, centuries apart, can illustrate
the point. In 1583 on board the flagship of the New Spain fleet, a white sailor called
his fellow tar ‘a black dog’ whereupon the two scuffled, with the black sailor stabbing
his white compatriot in the ribs. That they later reconciled is remarkable, but surely the
black sailor never forgot the racial epithet. Similarly, in 1812, in English Harbour,
Antigua, Humphrey Clinker, a black sailor (perhaps a reader of Tobias Smollett),
was quietly minding his own business on the naval vessel Amaranthe’s deck when
his shipmate performing guard duty, abused him, calling him a ‘black bugger’.
When Clinker told the man to move along, the sentry ran his ramrod into Clinker’s
eye. Deprived of his sight in one eye, Clinker learned the dangers of provoking
white men, even if he could take consolation in the sentry’s guilty verdict when
tried for maiming a shipmate. Evidently racial prejudice was hardly absent on board
ship. The degree of abuse that fell on black sailors in New England vessels in the
early nineteenth century, Vickers notes, was ‘remarkable’. Cooks and stewards,
mostly black and composing just about one seventh of the crew, received over a
third of all punishments.12
Privateering exemplifies the risks and hardships that slaves ran at sea. Admittedly,
some enslaved sailors serving on privateers gained a significant share of the prize
money in recognition of the personal risks they ran and to motivate them in battle.
Slave mariners on privateering vessels often fought alongside white sailors and were
entrusted with weapons. Some masters even freed such slaves to safeguard them
from sale if captured; and Massachusetts during the American Revolution became
the one state that would not routinely sell captured slaves as commodities.
However, as Charles Foy emphasises, enslaved sailors faced greater hardship than
white sailors should their ship be captured. Generally, they were sold as prize goods
rather than jailed and exchanged as prisoners; the Massachusetts exception was
largely circumvented. Privateering was thoroughly ‘compatible with slavery’, as
Jarvis notes; and blacks almost always suffered the harshest fate if captured by
privateers.13
A major thrust of recent scholarship on the maritime world has been to show its
variations. Maritime slavery could never be a singular phenomenon. The experience
varied enormously, depending on whether slaves resided in big or small ports, were

bluewater or coastal sailors, went on long or short voyages, boarded large ships
or small sloops, fished or whaled, were privateers or naval hands. Where the scale
of operations was large, crews tended to be heterogeneous, life was riskier, tensions
more severe, discipline stricter, and the hierarchy of command more elaborate.
From outports and in smaller vessels, crews tended to be more cooperative, often
family-, household-, or neighbourhood-based. Deep-sea work was isolating whereas
boatmen, Bolster notes, ‘slept ashore, ate local foods in season, had more regular
contact with relatives, and avoided the clock-time regimentation of seafaring
watches’. Even the vessels engaged in the transatlantic slave trade – ranging from
the 1,269-ton ship Charles in 1857 to the 10-ton schooner Little Sally in 1763 –
suggest the extremes, the one with scores of sailors, and the other with just a
handful. Although maritime life could be cosmopolitan and international, it was
often intensely regional, local, even parochial. Paul Gilroy’s vision is of an integrative,
international, countercultural ‘Black Atlantic’, but deeply researched colony studies
show how important local identities were to ‘black Atlantic denizens’. Daniel
Vickers has complained of a tendency ‘to treat seafaring in general as a single
species of activity best illustrated by its most extreme varieties’, by which he means
‘vessels of the British Navy, the East India Companies, the long-distance whaling
industries’, and most extreme of all, the slave trade. Many other trades – coastal
and short-haul – were organised quite differently.14
Mapping the hierarchy of ports and the size of respective fleets would be a useful
exercise; only parts of the overall are known. In the eighteenth-century British Atlantic
world, London was the dominant hub, with 3,000 annual clearances by mid century,
and home to about 12,000 seamen. At about this time, approximately 75,000 mariners
were employed in the British Atlantic. Perhaps the busiest port in the eighteenth-
century Caribbean was Oranjestad, St Eustatius, with 2,000 clearances a year in the
early 1770s. This number almost matched the number of vessels clearing Boston, Phi-
ladelphia, and Rhode Island ports combined. Slaves would have formed a large pro-
portion of the crews coming in and out of Statia. Enslaved sailors, for example,
comprised more than two thirds of berths on mid-eighteenth-century Curacaon ¸
vessels trading with Venezuela. Similarly, slaves must have dominated port life in Char-
lotte Amalie on Danish St Thomas, because two thirds of the island’s slaves lived in the
town. On sugar islands, perhaps 3 to 4 per cent of slaves were involved in maritime life,
but on non-sugar islands, the proportion rose to at least 15 per cent, sometimes much
more. The tiny Cayman Islands, with admittedly a small slave population to match,
had an almost total maritime orientation. Its enslaved population engaged in turtling,
fishing, trading, and wrecking. When in 1781 a transatlantic slave ship en route to
Jamaica was wrecked on the Caymans, apparently many of the enslaved Africans
were sold to pay salvage.15
The African coast gave rise to different maritime opportunities. The Gold Coast was
home to some of the most skilled canoe men in Africa; Europeans took these Fante
men to other coastal regions because of their expertise. As Ty Reese demonstrates, a
hybrid form of slavery emerged along this coast, melding European concerns about
property with African notions of rights in persons. In other coastal regions, the


French preferred Lebou and Wolof mariners; by the late eighteenth century the Kru
were seen as highly desirable auxiliary seamen in Sierra Leone. According to one
knowledgeable white observer, the Kru preferred ‘task work, or working by the
piece’, rather than a monthly wage; they then exerted themselves ‘exceedingly when
the reward is proportioned to the labour’. The ‘Kru mark’ was a broad blue or black
stripe running from the forehead down the bridge of the nose, sometimes extending
to the chin, with arrow marks on each temple. More conventional nautical tattoos
depicting boats, anchors, stars, and the like also came to decorate some Kru bodies.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, as Janet Ewald notes, so-called ‘seedies’
(deriving originally from ‘sidis or ‘sayyids’, Africans in northern India but coming
to denote sailors and dockside workers from the Swahili Coast) became ‘the Indian
Ocean equivalent of Atlantic krumen’.16
Maritime work varied greatly by task. A skilled mariner looked down on an ordinary
seaman, even more so on stewards, cooks, and cabin boys, some of the lowliest occu-
pations afloat, and for that reason often the preserve of slaves, people of African
descent, and later the Chinese in the Pacific. The slave trade involved specialised
work. Slave trade vessels often employed interpreters to calm captives, relay infor-
mation, and prevent insurrections. The 16-year-old cabin boy Antonio on the
famous Amistad acted as interpreter between crew and predominantly Mende speak-
ing African rebels who seized the ship, even though he claimed to have been born in
Cuba. The use of African guardians to police and intimidate their fellow captives seems
to have been common in the early slave trade. The Royal Africa Company certainly
engaged in the system for a while, but it was obsolete by the end of the seventeenth
century. The degree to which Portuguese ships followed suit is not wholly clear.17
A major variation in the Atlantic was between its northern and southern sectors.
Although slave sailors were found throughout the Atlantic basin, the southern Atlantic
saw far more slave sailors than the northern. In the most authoritative study, Stephen
Behrendt found that black mariners from Africa, the Atlantic Islands, the West Indies
or America comprised at most 3 per cent of all crewmen in the late British slave trade.
Given that on average, mariners in the British trade made about three slaving voyages
(because of high mortality and significant desertion, less than half of a slaver’s crew
usually returned to a British port), many white crew members in the North Atlantic
slave trade spent their whole career without serving with a black slave crew
member. By contrast, instructions to a captain sailing to Benguela in the South Atlan-
tic to ‘get rid of white sailors’ and ‘substitute them with black sailors’ (as revealed by
Marianna Candido) were probably commonplace. In ships setting out from Portugal,
the number of slaves in the crew was rarely more than a fraction, but most interest-
ingly, as Candido again demonstrates, captains tended to recruit Africans from the
coastal region they planned to visit. Presumably, their linguistic skills would be invalu-
able. In ships setting out from Brazil, slave sailors sometimes comprised as many as a
half, but frequently at least a sixth, of the crew. Thus, Brazilian slavers represent the
polar extreme in the recruitment of slave sailors – although of course they represented
nearly half of the transatlantic slave trade – and provide a most marked contrast with
slavers shipping out of Britain, France, or Portugal.18

Maritime slavery also waxed and waned over time. Wartime, for example, expanded
some kinds of maritime opportunities – privateering and naval service, most
obviously – while restricting the regular merchant marine. In some colonies large
transformations occurred over time. In 1700, white sailors outnumbered their black
counterparts 6:1 in Bermuda, and only about one sixth of the island’s slave men
were sailors; but on the eve of the American Revolution, about two thirds of the
men sailing Bermudian vessels were slaves. During the early nineteenth century,
North American shipping expanded, employing more than 100,000 men per year,
with black men filling about a fifth of sailors’ berths. In early nineteenth-century
Salem, approximately 10 per cent of crews were African American, and crews were
markedly more heterogeneous than they had been before. By the mid-nineteenth
century, however, opportunities for black sailors had contracted heavily in North
America. Similar expansions and restrictions occurred elsewhere, as Ewald and
Grider show, in particular.19
It is all too easy to romanticise maritime life. As Peregrine Horden and Nicholas
Purcell note, ‘sea history allows landlubber historians to indulge a taste for the
romance or the frisson of seafaring’. Perhaps no sphere is more prone to exaggeration
than piracy. On the one hand, Marcus Rediker argues that ‘Africans and African Amer-
icans both free and enslaved were numerous and active on board pirate vessels’. Alleg-
edly, black crewmen comprised a key part of the pirate vanguard, their ‘most trusted
and fearsome’ members – presumably because they had most to lose by being returned
to slavery. More than half of some pirate crews were supposedly black; thus, in 1718, 60
of Blackbeard’s crew of 100 were said to be black. Kenneth Kinkor goes further than
Rediker. For him, pirates were ‘united in a common enterprise transcending national-
ity, religion and race’. He believes that pirates displayed remarkable tolerance. The
shared experience of oppression was supposedly a solvent of racism. White crews
even elected blacks to positions of command: a quartermaster of fame, Captain
Kidd, was black. On the other hand, Arne Bialuschewski is deeply sceptical of such
claims. For him, pirates ‘usually saw little worth in’ slaves, and were much more inter-
ested in bullion and other valuables. He cites the brutalities inflicted on slaves by
pirates. He quotes a sailor captured by Blackbeard, describing his company as
‘about 130 Men all Stout Fellows all English without any mixture’. Perhaps his most
dramatic example concerns the mutineers of the slave ship Baylor who in 1722
‘threw about 100 slaves overboard’ – an incident that recalls the numbers involved
in the Zong atrocity some 60 or so years later. Bialuschewski punctures the romantic
aura surrounding piracy.20
The complexities of maritime slavery are encapsulated in specific stories. Especially
compelling is African seaman Gorge’s choice, as Walter Hawthorne relates it, to remain
a slave sailor rather than becoming nominally free. Gorge clearly identified as a
‘mariner’ and thought of himself as Portuguese, even as he acknowledged his
African heritage. Such choices complicate the stark polarities of slavery and
freedom. This individual story is similar to the tale of the 70 enslaved sailors of the
Bermudian privateer, the Regulator, who, when offered freedom in Massachusetts,
chose instead to return to Bermuda, even if it meant returning to slavery. There, at


least, they would rejoin families and friends ‘and a familiar, profitable seafaring life’.
Just as Gorge thought of himself as Portuguese, so these enslaved sailors thought of
themselves as Bermudian; indeed when being transported home, they cried ‘Huzzah
for Bermuda’ and seized the ship, which was later condemned as a prize. A more con-
ventional narrative occurred in 1747 when three Afro-Spanish mariners, who had been
victims of British privateers, sailed from New York on the Polly. Near Jamaica they
seized the sloop, killed the five crewmembers, and sailed for Santo Domingo. There,
they claimed that they had been enslaved by the crew and had rebelled to regain
their freedom.21
Gorge’s story can also be replicated in other tales of notable individual mariners.
The most famous black seaman in the eighteenth century was Olaudah Equiano.
Whatever the truth of his origins (whether the Bight of Biafra or South Carolina),
he unquestionably laboured as a slave for more than 10 years on merchant ships cross-
ing the Atlantic and Mediterranean. His complicated relations with white sailors who
both befriended and exploited him are telling. He purchased his freedom in 1766 and
continued to work as a seaman, travelling widely to Central America, the Caribbean,
the Arctic, and North America, before settling in England. In 1789 he published his
autobiography, much of it about his seaborne exploits.22
Equiano was the most famous enslaved mariner, but he was far from being the only
such fascinating individual. Another was the mulatto of Portuguese origin, Lope Mar-
´
tınez de Lagos, who in the 1560s acted as a pilot on three voyages between Mexico and
the Philippines. Discovering on his last trip that he was secretly condemned to death
for defrauding the royal treasury, he organised a successful mutiny, murdering all the
officers. From 1629 onward a Spanish mulatto, perhaps a Tortugan or Cuban (there
´ ´
was conflicting testimony), Capitan Diego Martın, alias Diego el Mulato, was a
notable pirate, working with French and later Dutch sea-rovers, taking prizes and pris-
oners from Campeche to Veracruz. In 1638 he proclaimed his Catholic faith and
offered his services to Spain, promising that no enemy ship would stop along
Cuba’s coasts, in the knowledge that ‘I am here very few would dare pass on to the
Indies, for they certainly fear me’. Havana officials recommended acceptance of the
offer, with Diego receiving a royal pardon and a salary equivalent to that of an
admiral. Thomas Jeremiah was an enslaved harbour pilot in Charleston, South Caro-
lina, who gained his freedom probably in the 1760s and branched out into the fishing
and salvage businesses. He became a slave owner and ‘one of the wealthiest men of
African descent in British North America’. His dizzying ascent either led him to envi-
sage a role for blacks in the coming American Revolution or made him a target for
patriot forces who wanted to intimidate black harbour pilots. Either way, he was a
victim of his own success and was hanged and then burned for allegedly plotting a
slave insurrection. As a last example, consider the enslaved 17-year-old Yoruban,
who arrived in Bahia, in 1822. Thirteen years later he bought his freedom, took the
´
name Rufino Jose Maria, and became a cook on a slave ship. In 1841, after a
number of voyages, he was captured by a British anti-slaver and taken to Sierra
Leone. He managed to return to Brazil, but was soon back in Sierra Leone attending
Quaranic classes. In 1845 he settled down in Recife where he became a fortune teller

and healer. His wide travels exposed him to many worlds, and he spoke several
languages – Portuguese, Yoruba, Arabic, and probably slave-trade pidgin. These
four individual examples taken from successive centuries illustrate the opportunities
and dangers of maritime life.23
Not just individual biographies but illustrations can illumine the maritime world in
which slaves were a part; and a fair number of which are set in Europe. One of the ear-
liest is a depiction of black waterfront workers in Venice in 1495. About 30 years later,
Christoph Wieditz depicted black slaves ﬁlling water barrels for a vessel in a Spanish
port. In the 1570s a striking waterfront scene in Lisbon, Chafariz d’El Rey, where
perhaps about 10 per cent of the population was black, is notable for its depiction
of black life. In the painting, scores of individual blacks make an appearance, and
the range of activities is remarkable: blacks ﬁlling water vessels from a fountain; exten-
sive head-carrying of large jugs of water; two constables arrest one black man; another
black man dances with a white woman; one freed black, wearing a cape bearing the red
cross of the Order of Santiago, rides a horse; one black man in a small boat is rowing
while another is shaking a tambourine, as a white couple appear about to kiss. In 1745
William Hogarth famously created a picture of a slave playing a pipe and tabor to
mimic the pose of Captain Lord Graham in his cabin. Maritime veterans such as
Billy Waters, the one-legged busker, or Joseph Johnson with a model ship on his
head, graced London streets. In 1815 John Downman drew a sensitive portrait of
Thomas Williams, a black sailor from Liverpool. In the early nineteenth century a
drawing of Captain Robert Lawrie’s ‘servant’ (probably slave) Tom has him speaking
in dialect with the words reproduced in a bubble from his mouth. The watercolour
Drunken Sailor by John Locker shows a black sailor helping an obviously drunk
white compatriot. Their arms are symbolically linked.24
Naturally, Africans and their descendants populate African, Caribbean, and to a
lesser extent North American maritime scenes. African coastal illustrations, particu-
larly along the Gold Coast, regularly feature manned canoes of all sizes and dimen-
sions. One of the earliest New World equivalents (from the 1660s) is a group of six
blacks in a canoe turtle hunting in the French West Indies. Between 1774 and 1777,
Gabriel Bray painted about 70 watercolours of places and people he visited while on
the naval vessel the Pallas: particularly notable are a possible portrait of three
kroomen of Sierra Leone, three Gold Coast canoemen standing upright and paddling
vigorously, various West African coastal scenes, a remarkable delegation of Africans
on his ship, and a breaming of a naval vessel with about seventeen blacks at work,
probably in English Harbour, Antigua. In 1778 John Singleton Copley’s Watson
and the Shark was inspired by an event that took place in Havana, Cuba, in 1749,
when 14-year-old Brook Watson was attacked while swimming in the harbour.
Copley portrays nine of Watson’s shipmates, one of whom was black, coming to
his rescue. From the 1770s onwards, illustrations of tent boats or plantation
barges, usually manned by six to eight oarsmen and a black helmsman, shows
them navigating Surinamese rivers. In the same decade, Nicholas Pocock drew a
boat seemingly transporting slaves to a larger vessel off the Pitons, St Lucia,
perhaps part of an inter-Caribbean slave trade. In 1800 Pocock painted a view of


English Harbour, Antigua, with a group of blacks setting sail in a small boat. In 1823
William Clark famously depicted slaves rolling sugar hogsheads onto lighters for
transport to ocean-going vessels. ‘Bum Boat in Carlisle Bay’, shows a boat being
rowed by a man (on right) and woman; the boat is loaded with fruits and vegetables,
and a monkey is sitting on the gunnel. The bumboat, a term used in England for this
kind of vessel, was employed to bring provisions and commodities for sale to larger
ships in port or offshore. The appearance of an Iranun maritime raider, with three
banks of oars, under full sail, as illustrated in James Warren’s essay, was a much
less benign, indeed fearsome and frightening, sight.25
The lives of enslaved mariners exhibited paradoxes and contradictions. Living cheek
by jowl with free sailors could produce camaraderie but just as probably hostility. Mar-
itime slaves travelled widely, but were subject to collective isolation in a machine
resembling a wooden prison. The crew could act as one and yet was highly differen-
tiated by rank and function. The maritime world both blurred and rigidified the
spheres of freedom and slavery. A globalised labour force became a segmented
labour force, with particular racial groups confined to the lowliest positions. Some
mariners were highly cosmopolitan; others had highly localised identities. The ship
could be a ‘forcing house for internationalism’ but parochial attachments remained
strong. From a slave owner’s perspective, sending slaves to sea seems highly risky,
courting fate, but apparently familial ties and the autonomy of seafaring encouraged
slaves to return back to a home port. According to one study, slaves deserted far more
infrequently than whites. Similarly, in cases of smuggling, slaves were far from a liab-
ility, for their testimony was inadmissible in court, making them especially valuable to
owners. Maritime mobility was both a blessing and a curse; it could broaden horizons
and offer trading opportunities; but it posed significant risks. Ironies thoroughly bede-
villed the experiences of maritime slaves.26

Acknowledgements
I thank all the contributors for their essays, and Gad Heuman for his patience and
encouragement.

Notes
[1] See online Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/
estimates.faces. Mortality rates for African slaves seem to have been by far the worst, much
higher than for indentured Indian labourers, which in turn were higher than for free white
labour: Shlomowitz, ‘Mortality of Indian Labour’. See also Christopher et al., eds, Many
Middle Passages.
[2] Wigen, ‘Introduction’, 717. See also Klein and Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes; Bentley et al.,
eds. Seascapes; Bethencourt and Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion.
[3] Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, 64 –93, esp. 82.
[4] Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea’. For other studies of different parts of this ocean, see Fisher,
‘Working Across the Seas’; Hooper, ‘An Island Empire’; and Eltis and Hooper, ‘The Indian
Ocean’.

´
[5] Rodger, The Wooden World, 15; McGaffey, ‘Dialogues of the Deaf ’, 249–67; Perez-Mallaına, ´
Spain’s Men of the Sea, 36; Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 107; Wiencek, An Imperfect God, 59.
[6] Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 3, 17, 112, 181; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 248–9. These two
recent books are impressive, and along with Bolster, Black Jacks, are indispensable. For other
work that stresses the connections between land and sea: Pearson, ‘Littoral Society’; Land,
‘Tidal Waves’; and his War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor.
´ ´
[7] Perez-Mallaına, Spain’s Men of the Sea, 166 –7; Wheat, ‘Nharas and Morenas Horras’; Hartigan-
O’Connor, The Ties That Buy, 20, 45 –7; Kennedy, Braided Relations, 150– 3; Rupert, ‘Waters of
Faith’, 151 –64; Shelford, ‘Sea Tales’.
[8] Brunsman, ‘Men of War’, 15, 30; Scott, ‘The Common Wind’; his ‘Afro-American Sailors’,
37– 52 and ‘Crisscrossing Empires’, 128– 43; Bolster, Black Jacks, 2; Vickers, Young Men and
the Sea, 239; Bolster, ‘Letters by African American Sailors’; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade,
107– 8, 135, 137 –8, 368; and ‘The Binds of the Anxious Mariner’, 88.
[9] Jarvis, ‘The Binds of the Anxious Mariner’, 90; In the Eye of All Trade, 152, 283.
[10] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, III: 374; Frost, ‘Lewis Temple’, 803–4.
[11] Bolster, Black Jacks, 45; Finamore, ‘Pirate Water’, 3 –47. esp. 44; Harris, The Hanging of Thomas
Jeremiah, 119.
´ ´
[12] Perez-Mallaına, Spain’s Men of the Sea, 39; Morgan, ‘Black Experiences’, 105 –33, esp. 119;
Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 240.
[13] Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 241, 246 –7.
[14] Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 94 –5, 129; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 80, 369; his ‘On The
Material Culture of Ships’, 51 –72, esp. 54; Bolster, Black Jacks, 19; http://www.slavevoyages.org/
tast/database/search.faces, voyage ids 4252 and 36269 (using standardised tons); Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic; Vickers, contribution to ‘Roundtable’, 325–6.
[15] Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade 123, 165, 252, 356–7; Rupert, ‘Contraband Trade’, and ‘Marro-
nage, Manumission, and Maritime Trade’, 367; Hall, Slave Society, 87, 90; Bolster, Black
Jacks, 18 –19; Smith, Maritime Heritage, 51, 171.
[16] Brooks, The Kru Mariner, 3, 5, 34 –5, 38; Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea’.
[17] Fayer, ‘African Interpreters’; Sweet, ‘Mistaken Identities’, 298–9; Smallwood, ‘African
Guardians’.
[18] Behrendt, ‘Human Capital’, 66 –97, esp. 77 – 81; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 85 –6; Rodrigues,
De costa a costa, 186– 7; Crespi, ‘Negros apresados’; Sweet, ‘Slaves, Convicts, and Exiles’,
193 –202; Eltis, contribution to ‘Roundtable’, 294–9.
[19] Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 106, 149; Bolster, Black Jacks, 2; Vickers, Young Men and the Sea,
177.
[20] Horden and Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean’, 724; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 53 –6; Kinkor,
‘From the Seas’, and ‘Black Men under the Black Flag’, 195–210; Bialuschewski, ‘Black
People under the Black Flag’, 468. See also Bolster, Black Jacks, 13 –15 and Williams,
‘Nascent Socialists’, 31– 50, esp. 42 –3.
[21] Jarvis In the Eye of All Trade, 445– 6; Zabin, Dangerous Economies, 137–8.
[22] Sweet, ‘Mistaken Identities?’; Byrd, ‘Eboe, Country, Nation’; Carretta, Equiano the African.
´ ´
[23] Perez-Mallaına, Spain’s Men of the Sea, x, 40 –1, 213–15; Landers, Black Society 21; Wheat, ‘A
Spanish Caribbean Captivity Narrative’, 198; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 71; Harris, The
´
Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah; Reis et al., ‘Ruﬁno Jose Maria’, 65 –75.
´ ´
[24] Bugner, ed., The Image of the Black, vol. 2, part 2, 191; Perez-Mallaına, Spain’s Men of the Sea,
40; Levenson, ed., Encompassing the Globe, 78 –9; Earle and Lowe, eds., Black Africans, 29 –31,
41 –2, 159 –60; Hamilton and Blyth, eds., Representing Slavery, 95, 217, 236, 252, 293, 304; J.T.
Smith, ‘Joseph Johnson’,; John Downman, Thomas Williams, Oct. 13, 1815, Tate Liverpool. See
also Quilley, ‘The Face of the Sea’, and his From Empire to Nation.
[25] Transatlantic slave trade and slave life in the Americas, http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery,
BRY01, BRY07, 2-589a, LCP-54, DAP6, VILE-60, 3-246, 229, Allen06 (egs of African canoes);


JCB_15102-3 (French West Indies); NW0264, JCB_04050-3, BEN5a (Surinam); NW0066
(Clark); NW0007 (bum boat); Pocock, View of English Harbour, Antigua, PAD0940, National
Maritime Museum; Hamilton and Blyth, eds., Representing Slavery, 32, 54, 121– 2, 172, 236,
252. For other North American and Caribbean maritime illustrations, see Bolster, Black
Jacks, illustrations following p. 112.
[26] Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 151; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 150, 176, 365.

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