A.T Hall, “Maritime Maroons: Grand Maroonage in the Danish West Indies” William and Mary Quarterly 92 (October 1985) 476-498 Neither rules and regulations, nor the pleas o f slaveowners was

enough to deter resolute runaways, however, as slaver captain Jacob Loran was to discover. A man who had already been shipwrecked on one o f his slaving attempts, Loran later recalled how a “Negro stowed him self away in my ship” and was not discovered until three days after they had sailed. Loran claimed that he took the man back to London with him and fed and clothed him, but if he did this as an investment rather than out o f humanity— as seems most likely— it provided an exceedingly poor return. Not only did the man run away after four weeks in Loran's home, he allegedly had to pay the man’s calculated value, £84 pounds, to his dispossessed former master the next time he sailed to St. Kitts. ZHC 1/82 .

Cornwall Chronicle and General Advertiser 22 February 1777, 12 April 1777. [Kingston, Jamaica] Royal Gazette 29 December 1792— 5 January 1793.

during the middle passage, while they were being transported as captives. Jeffrey Bolster writes “every new slave came face to face with European seafaring

technology during the ordeal of the Middle Passage.”^^ There are indeed many cases when captives had to help man a ship, but most were simply put to the exceedingly arduous, repetitive work of assisting with the pumps if the ship was taking on water. Aboard the Charlestown, an American ship captained by Charles Harris, the crew took “some o f the ablest men out of irons” when the ship “became so extremely leaky as to require constant exertion on the pumps.” In this case the male slaves were “worked beyond their strength” at this gruelling task.”^^ In 1797 the crew of the James “determined to let a dozen o f [the slaves] come on deck” after the ship grounded on the sandbar at Bonny. The Africans “went to work.. .at the pumps.”^"* Similarly, onboard the Phoenix in the early 1760s when the ship started leaking during a gale and a lightening storm, the crew was “under Necessity of letting all our slaves out of Irons, to assist in Pumping and Baling.”^^ The crew of the Mary required the help of her captives when the “Ship sprung a Leake” and they were in “very bad condition” struggling against the odds to “keep the Ship above Water.” They, like the other ships, let some of the men out o f their shackles to help at the pumps.^^

Bolster, Black Jacks 57.

Mungo Park, Travels into the Interior o f Africa (London: Eland, 1983) 275-277; Eltis, CD-ROM 25406.

Hugh Crow, Memoirs o f the late Captain Hugh Crow, o f Liverpool: comprising a narrative o f his life, together with descriptive sketches o f the western coast o f Africa: particularlv o f Bonnv (London: Frank Cass, 1970) 63-4; Eltis CD-ROM 81973.

Pennsvlvania Gazette 11 November 1762; Gentleman’s Magazine January 1763.

Gentleman’s Magazine July 1737. Many other examples can also be found in the sources. Robert Barker recalled that the crew o f the Thetis was “so reduced thro’ death, sickness, and desertion, that we had no more than three who were able to perform duty” even before they sailed from Africa. Even though they were able to get some help from a Bristol slaver that was at Calabar at the time, they nevertheless needed “the assistance o f our slaves, there being no possibility o f our working the ship without them.” Robert Barker, The Unfortunate Shipwright, or Cruel Captain. Being a faithful narrative o f the unparallel'd sufferings o f Robert Barker, late carpenter on board the Thetis Snow, o f Bristol, in a voyage to the coast o f Guinea and Antigua (London: Printed for, and sold by the Sufferer, 1760) 19-21. Likewise, on the Wolf'm. 1750, one o f the captive slaves “during a strong wind was put to holding the gaff.” Darold D. Wax, “A Philadelphia Surgeon on a Slaving Voyage to Africa, 1749-1751”

Pennsvlvania Magazine o f Historv and Biography 92 (1968) 465-493; quote 491. In another incident, Samuel Robinson’s ship had safely reached Barbados when so many o f the crew deserted that there were only nine men left to sail the ship onwards to St. Vincent or Jamaica, where they had been instructed to sell the slaves. Robinson related, “as there were only the officers and the other boy and I who could steer the ship, and as my ankle was still weak, I was placed in a chair, with a stout slave at the lee side o f the wheel to turn as I ordered him.” Robinson, Sailor Bov 97-8. An American

newspaper report told o f an equally sorry tale. “By Letters from Capt. Hopkins” it related, “we learn That soon after he left the Coast, the Number o f his Men being reduced by Sickness, he was obliged to permit some o f the Slaves to come upon Deck to Assist the People”. Pennsvlvania Gazette 28

Evidence suggests, however, that other African captives did assist more with the sailing of the ship than simply working the pumps. Seaman James F. Stanfield recalled how as disease, mistreatment and death drastically reduced the crew of his ship, “all idea of keeping the slaves in chains were given up” and a large number of the captives “were therefore freed from their irons and they pulled and hauled as they were directed by the inefficient sailors.”^^ In this case they were clearly being

instructed in basic seafaring tasks. When the Mermaid approached Grenada in 1792 it was reported that, “Capt. Taylor [had] lost all his Hands to four, & these together with himself, were in so weakly a state” that he only succeeded in getting the ship into port with “the assistance o f a few Negro Boys, who the Capt. had wise precaution to train a little to the Business o f working the Ship.”^* The Benson must have trained some of her captives as she had “only two white men upon her yards handling the sails, the rest were black boys, slaves.”^^

Even more incredibly, African captives were also used to fight o ff attack from pirate or privateer vessels. This might seem incredible since the reluctance to arm Africans and African-Americans lasted well into the era o f the American Civil War precisely because o f the hugely increased risk o f

insurrection. Yet slave ships could be desperate enough to resort to such tactics, as being attacked by privateers was a far more common event than is often recognised. One calculation suggests that about two thirds o f all British slave ships that failed to return were lost as the result o f capture by an enemy nation. Joseph E. Inikoiri “Measuring the unmeasured hazards o f the Atlantic Slave Trade: Documents Relating to the British Trade” Revue Français D ’Histoire D ’Outre Mer 83 (September 1996) 53-92. There are numerous examples. James Penny alleged that on the ships he had captained slaves had been “entrusted with powder and Ball.” BT 6/9. Peter Whitfield Branker, who made ten slaving voyages as mate and then master, recorded that on one o f his voyages, “in the course o f the last war” he “put arms into their [the slaves’] hands”. He claimed to have trained them with “both with the small arms and great guns” so that they could assist him make the trip from Antigua to Jamaica safely, despite only having twelve seamen to defend the ship. ZHC 1/90 38. In a celebrated incident in 1758 Captain William Boats, known as “Billy Boates”, armed the slaves onboard the Knight and successfully fought o ff a French ship. Daniel P. Marmix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A Historv o f the Atlantic Slave Trade 1518-1865 (New York: Penguin, 1962) 131-2. In 1777 a black “boy” was killed helping the Jane to try and repulse an attack o ff the coast o f Barbados. Gomer Williams, Historv o f the Liverpool Privateers (London: Heinemann, 1897) 560-1. Similarly, in 1781, when fighting against a French ship. Captain Stevenson o f the Rose reported that he had “fifty men, black and white, on deck at great guns and small arms, halfpikes, boathooks, boat oars, steering-sail-yards, firewood, and slack ballast, which they threw at the Frenchmen in such a manner that their heads rattled against one another like so many empty callibashes.” One white man and one black were killed in this battle, and many more were wounded. Ibid 564-5; Eltis CD-ROM 83406. (Although it does not explicitly state that the black men fighting in this case were slaves, it is most likely that they were, given the number o f them onboard ship and the fact that we are told they were more badly burned than the white men “having no trowsers on them.”)

It is not hard to see why slave men would fight valiantly in these circumstances. Their only alternative, after all, was to just wait out the battle helpless below deck, where they could easily be maimed or killed. During a battle with a French ship in 1800, for example, a “nine pound shot went through the mens’ [sic] room and wounded 12 slaves, two o f whom died the next day, and two have their thigh bones broke.” Gore’s General Advertiser 17 April 1800.

Quoted in Thomas Howard (ed.) Black Vovage: Evewitness Accounts o f the Atlantic Slave Trade (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971) 65.

C l07/13: Letter from Munro MacFarlane to James Rogers, 18*** November 1792. ZHC 1/85 521: Evidence o f John Ashley Hall.

However runaway slaves had learned the skills that secured their position onboard a ship to England, most found when they arrived there that their options for future employment were severely curbed. For those not in servitude to a wealthy family, career choices were extremely limited— one recent writer has summed them up as “going to sea.. .begging and c r i m e " . T h e lack of alternative employment can be seen in the fact that, as a rough estimate, more than one in twenty seamen working out of Britain was of African origin by the 1770s.^' Many of these men in fact seem to have been reduced to both seafaring and petty crime, as seventeen o f the fifty-two black men transported to Australia as convicts prior to 1830 listed their occupation as seaman or ship’s cook.“ Moreover, fully twenty-six per cent of black men recorded in England’s Old Bailey records in this period worked as seamen.®^ A committee founded to help Lascars in London found that in fact more black than Asian seamen were in desperate need.

For many of Britain’s black men the necessity o f going back to sea was pressing, whatever the potential risks. This meant some had little choice but to sign onboard a slaving vessel. We can only surmise what led a man named James Blue, who presumably had found his way to the relative freedom of life as a seaman in Britain, to sign on the slave ship Blanche in 1802. Whatever his motivation he paid dearly for it, for his freedom was curtailed when he was “taken out of the ship May 1803 by his Master at Barbados being a runaway negroe.’’ (It is an interesting footnote that he would almost certainly have lost his freedom soon after even without this unfortunate circumstance, for the ship was captured on its way home by the French.)^^ Although it is perfectly possible that some men of African origin who joined slave ships as sailors did so because it was their only chance to see their home

continent, or their ancestral homelands again, the majority doubtless made a

pragmatic choice between a slaving voyage or penury. Others, forced onto ships just like their white counterparts by crimps or unholy alliances between unscrupulous

^ Ty M. Reese, “Toiling in the Empire: Labor in Three Anglo-Atlantic Ports, London, Philadelphia and Cape Coast Castle” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University o f Toledo (1999) 110. For the approximately twenty per cent o f black people in Britain who were female, prostitution could more accurately be substituted for seafaring in this unholy list o f choices.

Shyllon, Black People 101-2.

Ian Duffield, “From Slave Colonies to Penal Colonies: The West Indian Convict Transportées to Australia” Slavery and Abolition 7 (1986) 25-45.

Myers, Black Past 67.

Alexander X. Byrd, “Captive and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth Century World o f