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The year is 1727, aboard the English slave ship named the Loyal George. Captain Timothy Tucker is trying to force one of his prisoners to eat. He’s brought him up to the deck, having just lashed the man from his neck to his ankles. But this slave will not relent, and his refusals only enrages Captain Tucker further. To punish this man for trying to starve himself, Tucker now threatens to kill him - an irony only one of them appreciates. “Udoma,” (so be it) says the prisoner.
The captain leaves the man in chains and in shocking agony while he breaks for dinner, and then the torture resumes. Tucker approaches the hunger striker with two loaded pistols. With a malicious grin on his face, he holds one up to the man’s head, repeating that he will kill him if he does not eat. “Udoma,” comes the reply once more. Maddened, Tucker pulls the trigger. The man who was trying to starve himself now drops dead.
If Tucker thought this was the end of the matter, he was badly mistaken. This outrageous slaughter soon stirs the rest of the Loyal George’s male captives to vengeance. As the slaves break the hatches and climb up to the main deck, Captain Tucker and his crew have to scramble and take cover behind the barricado, a defensive barricade near the munitions store built for precisely this possibility.
The captain now gives orders to turn the ship’s swivel guns towards the black mutineers filling its deck. Some fall dead, some retreat to the hold from which they had sprung, and others jump overboard as the crew rakes the quarterdeck with fire. The insurrection is crushed before it can engulf the crew, but at great cost. When they take to the boats to try to recapture the prisoners that jumped overboard, the Africans concerted efforts to drown themselves rather than be retaken, thwarts the crews efforts. Many black captives die this way, a terrible sort of freedom.
This is what it looks like to fight slavery in the Middle Passage. An individual act of resistance, the simple act of refusing to eat, a protest, a martyrdom maybe. It, in-turn, galvanizes something larger - a collective revolt aboard the Loyal George. An attempted insurrection, putting slaves against sailors. And then when it fails, a mass suicide - a surrender to the sea.
. . .

Shipboard Rebellions on the Middle Passage:
(Disclaimer: Graphic detail)

Over four centuries, more than 12 million African souls set out on the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World. During these journeys, 1.8 million men, women, and children would die. These numbers do violence by abstraction - behind them are human lives. Indeed, each shipboard act of resistance - whatever form it took - marked an assertion of personhood, a challenge to the process of objectification and commodification that the Middle Passage was designed to achieve.
. . .

Suicides took place with striking frequency onboard slave ships. This was the product of the horror of displacement and unbearable uncertainty surrounding their final destination. Depression and hopelessness often quickly set in as the sense of loss and separation grew more intense. Emotionally traumatized, and often laboring under the belief that they were destined to be sacrificed or eaten by their white captors, many slaves looked for ways to end their ordeal permanently. Some refused to eat or drink, hoping to die in a matter of days.
The only way to escape slavery, short of suicide, was to revolt - that is, to initiate a violent collective action against ship captains and their crews. According to surviving shipping records, 10 percent of all slaving voyages experienced a revolt at some point along the Middle Passage. That is more than 388 slave ship mutinies, more than 350 of which fell between 1698 and 1807.
Far more tried to drown themselves, usually in ones and twos but occasionally, as aboard the Prince of Orange in 1737, en masse. Fearful that this ship’s crew intended to pluck out their eyes and eat them, more than 100 slaves jumped overboard together. One in three was never recovered. It seems that proportionally more African women than men succeeded in jumping overboard. Because they were physically smaller and perhaps weaker than most of the male crew, they enjoyed greater freedom of movement onboard ships than black men, and that freedom afforded them greater opportunities for self‐harm.

More often than not, we know precious few details about the precise causes, course, or consequences of these revolts. Royal African Company sources are noticeably terse. The immediate purpose of each revolt was to seize control of the ship. This required at least three bodies of knowledge: first, how to get out of one’s chains; second, how to find and use weapons to subdue the crew; and third, how to sail and navigate the ship. Breaking chains was not simply a question of determination. It was usually a matter of luck. If the crew had mistakenly fitted one’s irons too loosely, then perhaps with lubrication, effort, and pain, it might be possible to squirm out of them. Another route was to steal a tool to smash or pick one’s locks.
Revolt-minded individuals needed to be able to communicate. They also needed trust in each other and the element of surprise. The hours of 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning and whenever crews were sick or busy with meals or repairs were peak times for revolts to begin.

To gain control of the ship required mutineers to capture or kill the crew. Usually, they did both, throwing the most dangerous men overboard or running them through. Slaves usually knew better than to kill every white person on board: Doctors and navigators could be useful in ensuring their safe passage to shore. In fact, shore was usually relatively close at hand. More than half of all revolts occurred when ships were still moored off the African coast, loading up. These coastal mutineers hoped to simply run the ship aground or steal its smaller boats and row to safety before they could be stopped.
However, precious few revolts were successful. Fewer than one in four, perhaps 120 revolts in all, resulted in the liberation of some or all of the slaves aboard.
. . .

Preserving the balance of power between slavers and slaves was paramount to the slavers. Captains knew to feed their crew well to cultivate their energy levels and to provide just the bare minimum to their human cargo, in hopes of sapping their strength and will to fight. Sailors were placed on constant guard. In fact, captains hired many more crew than were usually needed on ships this size to ensure that there were always enough hands on deck to suppress a revolt. They also tried to separate slaves who spoke the same language to maximize linguistic barriers.
Crews worked to minimize risk. Captains gave strict orders to carpenters, coopers, cooks, and anyone else who used iron tools in the course of their daily work to keep them under lock and key. Gun cabinets and gun rooms were locked and often guarded. Captains also employed spies and informants among the slaves themselves, a practice that drove a wedge of silence and mistrust among the captives. Crews also knew to avoid bringing male slaves up to the main deck unless absolutely necessary, a strategy that meant bathing was rare, and personal hygiene and sanitation below decks deteriorated rapidly.
Every daily activity was an opportunity to demonstrate the crew’s absolute power over their human cargo. Sailors yelled at, pushed, tripped, and beat their charges, sometimes cutting slaves’ flesh with knives and rubbing pepper or vinegar into wounds to subdue the recalcitrant. When such measures failed and a revolt began, sailors typically had the upper hand. Crews were armed to the hilt with muskets, rifles, axes, cutlasses, and swords, and captains readily gave orders to their men to train the ship’s swivel guns and cannon on the hatches.
Captains and crews could also usually count on assistance from any nearby vessel. Even out at sea, slaving crews knew that the sound of three cannon blasts or a flag flying at half-mast on a distant ship was a mayday call. For these reasons, most revolts were quickly quelled and most mutineers killed. The punishments for those who survived were brutal, sadistic, and designed to deter any repeat attempt.

Captains and crews dealt with slaves’ attempts at suicide with similar focus, determination, and creativity. To break life-threatening hunger strikes, sailors took to force-feeding the captives, using a funnel and a jaw-breaking pincer-like screw known as a speculum oris to ratchet open their mouths. Others were beaten or burned until they could be made to choke down some food and water. To prevent slaves slashing at their own throats, crews would trim their fingernails. To prevent their valuable human cargo from drowning themselves, most crews lashed wide nets to the sides of their ships. Whenever male slaves were allowed on the main deck, crews made sure they were chained together and to a ringbolt driven into the floor. If any slaves managed to evade these precautions and make it into the water, they could expect the captain to dispatch rescue parties to catch them and return them to the ship. To deter imitators, one captain even ordered the public decapitation of the corpse of a man who had drowned: a warning to survivors that neither they nor their spirits would ever succeed in returning to their homelands intact.
. . .

Far fewer saltwater slaves died from successful suicides or in failed revolts than died of disease. Angolans called the slave ships tumbeiros, or floating tombs, because of the gastrointestinal and airborne pathogens that claimed so many victims in these cramped, fetid holds. Allotted just four foot of space on British slavers, slaves’ humanity was in constant risk of obliteration. Only as the ships approached their New World destinations would the crews wash their now-filthy cargoes to spruce them up for sale. However, the toll taken on the slaves’ bodies by the Middle Passage was often difficult to disguise. In such miserable maritime conditions, it is remarkable that resistance of any form ever took place, but it did. The threat of suicides and shipboard insurrections haunted the imaginations of slaving companies, ship owners, their captains, and their crews. Slavers poured time, mental energy, and manpower into minimizing the ever present threat of saltwater resistance. The historian Ira Berlin has estimated that the cumulative financial cost of all these anti-resistance efforts - most notably the cost of hiring so many mercenary sailors - measurably reduced slave traders’ budgets for buying slaves from Africa. Berlin has calculated that without shipboard resistance and the costs that accrued to prevent, suppress, and deter it, the number of slaves trafficked from Africa to America would have been 9 percent higher. To put this another way: Saltwater suicides, shipboard revolts, and the ever-present threat of them saved at least 1 million Africans from ever experiencing the Middle Passage in the first place.
. . .

“The holds of slave ships were perhaps the sites where the long tradition of African American resistance first developed into a coherent and somewhat unified movement. After all, men and women drawn from across Africa could not help but notice that everyone in chains was black and everyone responsible for keeping them enslaved was white.” (Berlin)

. . .

Book Sources:

    - “Generations of Captivity: A History of African- American Slaves” by Ira Berlin

    - “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves” by Adam Hochschild

Picture:
- “Mutiny on the Amistad” oil on canvas painting by Hale Woodruff (1939)
- The Zong Massacre of 1781 by artist French, A. M. From the book The Port Royal Mission. (published 1862), New York, W.M. French, 1862. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division.

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