G.L Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Studv o f Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and other parts o f the Empire (London: Faber and Faber, 1966) 43 Many o f

Governor M iles’ letters to the Company in 1782 concerned the convicts. In June he wrote, “We surmize Government will de disposed again to send out some o f the Convicts - in such case for God’s sake send us good Locks, for we have already experienced that those we now have here are not proof against the Villiany o f these Wretches... indeed unless a power is sent out to try the most Notorious o f them and to hang them, they must be kept always in Irons, for how in the name o f God can it be thought the Lives o f 8 or 10 Officers are safe among such a Crew o f Felons.” The convicts frequently ran away, and Africans sometimes returned them too, just as they did seamen. A year later the problem still existed, and Miles wrote, “They [British convicts] are landed as it were naked and diseased on the sandy Shore; the more hardy o f them probably will plunder for a living for a few Days untill the Climate stops their progress, and then shocking to Humanity, loaded with the additional Diseases incident to the Counntry, these poor Wretches are to be seen dying upon the Rocks, or upon the sandy Beach, under the scorching heat o f the Sun, without the means o f Support or the least relief afforded them.” Miles at this point was horrified about the fate o f some convict women who had been sent out on the Den Keyser who had turned to prostitution “among the blacks” in order to try and survive. T 70/33.

In this context then it is clear that the men who imprisoned sailors within the walls of Europe’s coastal forts saw nothing ironic in this act. Archibald Dalzel, governor of Cape Coast Castle for a decade from 1792, wrote that seamen were sometimes held there for up to a year awaiting a ship to take them home to stand t r i a l . G i v e n the seamen’s rebellious nature, and the harsh conditions of slave trading, such occurrences were not isolated events. It was a regular responsibility of the coastal forts to function as temporary prisons for sailors, and many instances can be found in the historical record. In April 1771 governor David Mill took two seamen from Captain Parkinson of Liverpool, and held them under the piracy act. They were taken back to England on HMS Weazel to stand trial.Captain Arnold of the Hannah left a sailor named Darcy as a prisoner at Cape Coast Castle on 26 October 1800.'°° On the 10 September 1803 the captain o f the Sally wrote in his logbook that he had “deliver[ed] the Boatswain Thomas Loren up to the Governor of Cape Coast Castle concerning a very serious case of Mutiny.” '°' More unusually it was the first mate of the Lady Nelson who was put ashore at Winneba Fort for alleged nautical

insubordination. '°^

In some cases the crimes these men were accused o f seem flimsy pretences, or at least within the usual range of behaviour at sea. Captain Corran sent some of his sailors, who were taken home on HMS Adventure, to be imprisoned at Dixcove, apparently merely for the crime of drunkenness.'°^ Others showed more propensity to real rebellion. The ten seamen from the Antelope of Bristol who were imprisoned in Cape Coast Castle later succeeded in escaping from Newgate gaol while awaiting trial.'°" Captain William Sims of the Hawk took three seamen to Cape Coast Castle in 1781 to be imprisoned on the charge of “piracy” and “plotting to steal his ship away”, but was later persuaded by the governor to take them back onboard his vessel. Other sources reveal, however, that the Hawk was captured by the crew and failed to make what her owners would have considered to be a successful voyage. '°^

^ I. A. Akinjogbin, “Archibald Dalzel: Slave Trader and Historian o f Dahomey” Journal o f African Historv viiil (1966) 67-78; T 70/33. 99 BT 6/1. BT 98/62 f . l 95. 100 '°' C l08/214.

'°^ Robinson, Sailor Bov 53. Robinson actual remembers the name o f the ship as the Lady Neilson, but Eltis, CD-ROM 82216, tells us that the correct name was Lady Nelson.

'°^ HCA 1/64; T70/33. '°'' HCA 1/20 f.35; HCA 1/55.

This case clearly reveals the vastly superior range of freedom that seamen enjoyed over those to be shipped as slaves even while both were incarcerated in the coastal forts. Sailors might be considered to be mutinous and piratical with little evidence, but they had recompense to protest their innocence, and on occasion, as on the Hawk, took advantage of this leeway for their own gain. Incarcerated seamen had infinitely more hope for liberation than the African men, women and children packed into the stifling dungeons. The men imprisoned by Captain McQuoid of the brig Garland, for example, were freed by the fort governor because he feared that the sailors would come after him for wrongful imprisonment if they were later cleared of the charges by the Admiralty courts.

Yet while the seamen enjoyed privileges that were undoubtedly dependent upon the fact that the majority of them were o f European origin, class still mattered to those who managed the forts. In 1788 so many seamen were held in Cape Coast Castle that governor Thomas Norris feared for the safety of the employees there, and hastened to send the prisoners home. “Accounts of their crimes attested on oath go with them” he wrote, which “will be sufficient to detain them in Prison untill the arrival of the Masters and Officers of the different Ships.”’°^ It seems most unlikely that Norris would have feared other groups of his fellow Englishmen in the same way that he feared the rebelliousness of the seamen. Additionally, it is worth remembering that African seamen employed in the slave trade, if accused of mutiny, were held in the forts as prisoners not as captive slaves, as the case o f Cudjoe, Quow and Joe revealed.'®* If race was the dominant factor deciding the freedom and treatment allowed those incarcerated in Britain’s African coastal forts, its divisions were not absolute.

At other places along the coast British authority lacked the focal point that Cape Coast Castle, looming on the rocks, so obviously provided on the Gold Coast. The web of fiscal allegiances, however, extended much further. Along the Slave Coast, around the English fort at Ouidah (of which, incidentally, Archibald Dalzel was also the director in the late 1770s) lay numerous small factories built and

sometimes fortified to protect their interests in the area.'®® The fort on James Island in the Gambia River remained the centre of British influence in that region, while all

106 107

T70/33. T 70/33. '®* See chapter 2.

along the coast between Senegambia and the Gold Coast were dotted small British concerns. At some places the representative of English trade was merely a lone man who had settled in the area with aspirations to a fortune. In the Rio Pongo area, for example, a man from Liverpool named John Ormond was the dominant slave trader during the later decades of the eighteenth century. Although these outposts lacked the powers of the major forts, nonetheless they were a part of the slave trade’s network of influence, and as such helped reinforce the structures necessary for its successful fulfilment. That task included seeing that sailors remained in their billets onboard ship, and subservient to the captain’s regime. Where there was insufficient established British power, ships’ captains and officers from other vessels acted to try and control seamen. As has been shown, sometimes this necessitated asking local Africans for help.

To sailors, therefore, the class and race-based aspects to their situation while they were in Africa definitively intersected, rather than the colour of their skin always being the decisive factor in their treatment and fate. English seamen did not shelter behind the privileges of European origin that the slave trade fashioned in the New World while they were at the African coast. Indeed they could not, for not only was overt racial stratification untenable in such an environment, the English merchants on the coast felt strongly that the class stratification they had been bom and bred into should be upheld. For the majority of seamen who were o f European origin, their ethnicity labelled them as foreigners in Africa, and in all probability as slave traders, with all the negative connotations this had inevitably come to have. To the European factors, merchants and captains who they came into contact with, however, their position was linked tenably to their lowly social status. Seamen, as has been argued, fell far outside the realm of respectable gentlemen. A certain dignity and respect had to accorded the captain o f a vessel, but for lowly Jack there was no such honour. The average English sailor cared little, for he had an alternative value system.

His ethics, instead, involved ties to his profession and a fondness for the spirit of rebellion. Seamen o f many nationalities interacted with African labourers, both slave and nominally free, while they waited for their ship to be loaded with its wretched human cargo. Some found temporary homes with Africans, others just

Law, “Here is no resisting” 55-6; Akinjogbin, “Dalzel” 70.

Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 78.

wanted to escape the rule of a callous captain and sought refuge among them. Doubtless each of the estimated 333,000 men who sailed to Africa as employees of slave ships had slightly different perspectives on their experiences there, and on the inhabitants of their ports of call. This contact had some notable results, though. From it developed the habit of employing free African seamen on slave ships. It also fostered seamen’s vaunted tolerance for men o f African origin, and imparted facets of African culture to the larger maritime understandings o f the world.'” The African seaboard was the scene of many distinct relationships and interactions which shaped part of the Atlantic frontier. They were infinitesimal aspects of the nature and meaning o f race that the slave trade made, and constantly remade.

Most tars, needless to say, were hardly sorry to leave the African coast. As they were largely illiterate, we will in this case let an American slave ship surgeon speak for them. He was so moved by his finally leaving the coast that he felt composed the following verse:

Safely departed Affic’s shore at last, I feel nor think on Dangers I have past. And hope in time, to reach my native shore. And never think of these dread voyages more.

William Chancellor, onboard the ‘Wolf,’January 175

' ' ' See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Manv-Headed Hydra: Sailors. Slaves. Commoners, and the Hidden Historv o f the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000); Bolster, Black Jacks; Julius S. Scott, “Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth Century” in Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.) The Lesser Antilles in the Age o f European Expansion (Gainsville: University o f Florida Press, 1996); Julius S. Scott, “Afro- American Sailors and the International Communication Network: The Case o f Newport Bowers” in Richard Twomey and Colin Howell (eds.) Jack Tar in Historv: Essays in the Historv o f Maritime Life and Labor (New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991); and Julius S. Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents o f Afro-American Communication in the era o f the Haitian Revolution” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1986.

Darold D. Wax, “A Philadelphia Surgeon on a Slaving Voyage to Africa 1749-1751” Pennsylvania Magazine o f Historv and Biography 92 (1968) 465-493, quote 490.

Chapter 5