PIRATES--DAVIS, ROBERTS, AND OTHERS--BRITISH CRUISERS--SLAVE-TRADE
SYSTEMATIZED--GUINEAMEN--“HORRORS OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE.”
The second period is that of villany. More Africans seem to have been
bought and sold, at all times of the world’s history, than of any
other race of mankind. The early navigators were offered slaves as
merchandise. It is not easy to conceive that the few which they then
carried away, could serve any other purpose than to gratify curiosity,
or add to the ostentatious greatness of kings and noblemen. It was the
demands of the west which rendered this iniquity a trade. Every thing
which could debase a man was thrust upon Africa from every shore. The
old military skill of Europe raised on almost every accessible point
embattled fortresses, which now picturesquely line the Gulf of Guinea.
In the space between Cape Palmas and the Calabar River, there are to be
counted, in the old charts, forts and factories by hundreds.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were especially the era of
woe to the African people. Crime against them on the part of European
nations, had become gross in cruelty and universal in extent. From
the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean, in respect to their lands
or their persons, the European was seizing, slaying and enslaving. The
mischief perpetrated by the white man, was the source of mischief to
its author. The west coast became the haunt and nursery of pirates.
In fact, the same class of men were the navigators of the pirate and
the slaver; and sailors had little hesitation in betraying their own
vessels occasionally into the hands of the buccaneer. Slave-trading
afforded a pretext which covered all the preparations for robbery. The
whole civilized world had begun to share in this guilt and in this
retribution.
In 1692, a solitary Scotchman was found at Cape Mesurado, living among
the negroes. He had reached the coast in a vessel, of which a man named
Herbert had gotten possession in one of the American colonies, and had
run off with on a buccaneering cruise; a mutiny and fight resulted
in the death of most of the officers and crew. The vessel drifted on
shore, and bilged in the heavy surf at Cape Mesurado.
The higher ranks of society in Christendom were then most grossly
corrupt, and had a leading share in these crimes. There arrived at
Barbadoes in 1694, a vessel from New England, which might then have
been called a _clipper_, mounting twenty small guns. A company of
merchants of the island bought her, and fitted her out ostensibly as
a slaver, bound to the island of Madagascar; but in reality for the
purpose of pirating on the India merchantmen trading to the Red Sea.
They induced Russell, the governor of the island, to join them in the
adventure, and to give the ship an official character, so far as he was
authorized to do so by his colonial commission.
A “sea solicitor” of this order, named Conklyn, arrived in 1719 at
Sierra Leone in a state of great destitution, bringing with him
twenty-five of the greatest villains that could be culled from the
crews of two or three piratical vessels on the coast. A mutiny had
taken place in one of these, on account of the chief’s assuming
something of the character and habits of a gentleman, and Conklyn,
after a severe contention, had left with his desperate associates.
Had he remained, he might have become chief in command, as a second
mutiny broke out soon after his departure, in which the chief was
overpowered, placed on board one of the prize vessels, and never heard
of afterwards. The pirates under a new commander followed Conklyn to
Sierra Leone. They found there this worthy gentleman, rich, and in
command of a fine ship with eighty men.
Davis, the notorious pirate, soon joined him with a well-armed ship
manned with one hundred and fifty men. Here was collected as fruitful
a nest of villany as the world ever saw. They plundered and captured
whatever came in their course. These vessels, with other pirates, soon
destroyed more than one hundred trading vessels on the African coast.
England entered into a kind of compromise, previously to sending a
squadron against them, by offering pardon to all who should present
themselves to the governor of any of her colonies before the first of
July, 1719. This was equivalent to offering themselves to serve in
the war which had commenced against Spain, or exchanging one kind of
brigandage for another, by privateering against the Spanish commerce.
But from the accounts of their prisoners very few of them could read,
and thus the proclamation was almost a dead letter.
In 1720, Roberts, a hero of the same class, anchored in Sierra Leone,
and sent a message to Plunket, the commander of the English fort, with
a request for some gold dust and ammunition. The commander of the fort
replied that he had no gold dust for them, but that he would serve
them with a good allowance of shot if they ventured within the range
of his guns; whereupon Roberts opened his fire upon the fort. Plunket
soon expended all his ammunition, and abandoned his position. Being
made prisoner he was taken before Roberts: the pirate assailed the
poor commander with the most outrageous execrations for his audacity
in resisting him. To his astonishment Plunket retorted upon him with
oaths and execrations yet more tremendous. This was quite to the taste
of the scoundrels around them, who, with shouts of laughter, told their
captain that he was only second best at that business, and Plunket, in
consideration of his victory, was allowed to escape with life.
In 1721, England dispatched two men-of-war to the Gulf of Guinea for
the purpose of exterminating the pirates who had there reached a
formidable degree of power, and sometimes, as in the instance noted
above, assailed the establishments on shore. They found that Roberts
was in command of a squadron of three vessels, with about four hundred
men under his command, and had been particularly active and successful
in outrage. After cruising about the northern coast, and learning that
Roberts had plundered many vessels, and that sailors were flocking to
him from all quarters, they found him on the evening of the third of
February, anchored with his three vessels in the bay north of Cape
Lopez.
When entering the bay, light enough remained to let them see that they
had caught the miscreants in their lair. Closing in with the land the
cruisers quietly ran in and anchored close aboard the outer vessel
belonging to the pirates. Having ascertained the character of the
visitors, the pirate slipped his cables, and proceeded to make sail,
but was boarded and secured just as the rapid blackness of a tropical
night buried every thing in obscurity. Every sound was watched during
the darkness of the night, with scarcely the hope that the other two
pirates would not take advantage of it to make their escape; but the
short gray dawn showed them still at their anchors. The cruisers
getting under way and closing in with the pirates produced no movement
on their part, and some scheme of cunning or desperate resistance was
prepared for. They had in fact made a draft from one vessel to man the
other fully for defence. Into this vessel the smaller of the cruisers,
the _Swallow_, threw her broadside, which was feebly returned. A
grape-shot in the head had killed Roberts. This and the slaughter of
the cruiser’s fire prepared the way for the boarders, without much
further resistance, to take possession of the pirate. The third vessel
was easily captured.
The cruisers suffered no loss in the fight, but had been fatally
reduced by sickness. The larger vessel, the _Weymouth_, which left
England with a crew of two hundred and forty men, had previously been
reduced so greatly as scarcely to be able to weigh her anchors; and,
although recruited often from merchant vessels, landed but one hundred
and eighty men in England. This rendered the charge of their prisoners
somewhat hazardous, and taking them as far as Cape Coast Castle, they
there executed such justice as the place could afford, or the demerits
of their prey deserved. A great number of them ornamented the shore on
gibbets--the well-known signs of civilization in that era--as long as
the climate and the vultures would permit them to hang.
Consequent on these events such order was established as circumstances
would admit, or rather the progress of maritime intercourse and naval
power put an end to the system of daring and regulated piracy by which
the tropical shores of Africa and the West Indies had been laid waste.
This, however, was slight relief for Africa. It was to secure and
systematize trade that piracy had been suppressed, and the slave-trade
became accordingly cruelly and murderously systematic.
The question what nation should be most enriched by the guilty traffic
was a subject of diplomacy. England secured the greater share of the
criminality and of the profit, by gaining from her other competitors
the right by contract to supply the colonies of Spain with negroes.
Men forget what they ought not to forget; and however startling,
disgusting, and oppressive to the mind of man the horrors are which
characterized that trade, it is well that since they did exist the
memory of them should not perish. It is a fearfully dark chapter in the
history of the world, but although terrific it has its value. It is
more worthy of being remembered than the historical routine of wars,
defeats, or victories; for it is more illustrative of man’s proper
history, and of a strange era in that history. The evidence taken by
the Committee of the English House of Lords in 1850, has again thrust
the subject into daylight.
The slave-trade is now carried on by comparatively small and
ill-found vessels, watched by the cruisers incessantly. They are
therefore induced, at any risk of loss by death, to crowd and pack
their cargoes, so that a successful voyage may compensate for many
captures. In olden times, there were vessels fitted expressly for
the purpose--large Indiamen or whalers. It has been objected to
the employment of squadrons to exterminate that trade, that their
interference has increased its enormity. This, however, is doing honor
to the old Guineamen, such as they by no means deserve. It is, in fact,
an inference in favor of human nature, implying that a man who has
impunity and leisure to do evil, cannot, in the nature of things, be so
dreadfully heartless in doing it, as those in whose track the avenger
follows to seize and punish. The fact, however, does not justify this
surmise in favor of impunity and leisure. If ever there was any thing
on earth which, for revolting, filthy, heartless atrocity, might
make the devil wonder and hell recognize its own likeness, then it
was on any one of the decks of an old slaver. The sordid cupidity of
the older, as it is meaner, was also more callous than the hurried
ruffianism of the present age. In fact, a slaver now has but one deck;
in the last century they had two or three. Any one of the decks of the
larger vessels was rather worse, if this could be, than the single deck
of the brigs and schooners now employed in the trade. Then, the number
of decks rendered the suffocating and pestilential hold a scene of
unparalleled wretchedness. Here are some instances of this, collected
from evidence taken by the British House of Commons in 1792.
James Morley, gunner of the _Medway_, states: “He has seen them under
great difficulty of breathing; the women, particularly, often got upon
the beams, where the gratings are often raised with banisters, about
four feet above the combings, to give air, but they are generally
driven down, because they take the air from the rest. He has known rice
held in the mouths of sea-sick slaves until they were almost strangled;
he has seen the surgeon’s mate force the panniken between their teeth,
and throw the medicine over them, so that not half of it went into
their mouths--the poor wretches wallowing in their blood, hardly having
life, and this with blows of the cat.”
[Illustration:
_F. E. Forbes, delt._
_Lith. of Sarony & Co. N. Y._
THE LOWER DECK OF A GUINEA-MAN IN THE LAST CENTURY.]
Dr. Thomas Trotter, surgeon of the _Brookes_, says: “He has seen the
slaves drawing their breath with all those laborious and anxious
efforts for life which are observed in expiring animals, subjected,
by experiment, to foul air, or in the exhausted receiver of an
air-pump; has also seen them when the tarpaulins have inadvertently
been thrown over the gratings, attempting to heave them up, crying
out ‘kickeraboo! kickeraboo!’ i. e., _We are dying_. On removing the
tarpaulin and gratings, they would fly to the hatchways with all the
signs of terror and dread of suffocation; many whom he has seen in
a dying state, have recovered by being brought on the deck; others,
were irrevocably lost by suffocation, having had no previous signs of
indisposition.”
In regard to the _Garland’s_ voyage, 1788, the testimony is: “Some of
the diseased were obliged to be kept on deck. The slaves, both when
ill and well, were frequently forced to eat against their inclination;
were whipped with a cat if they refused. The parts on which their
shackles are fastened, are often excoriated by the violent exercise
they are forced to take, and of this they made many grievous complaints
to him. Fell in with the _Hero_, Wilson, which had lost, he thinks,
three hundred and sixty slaves by death; he is certain more than half
of her cargo; learnt this from the surgeon; they had died mostly of
the smallpox; surgeon also told him, that when removed from one place
to another, they left marks of their skin and blood upon the deck, and
that it was the most horrid sight he had ever seen.”
The annexed sketch represents the lower deck of a Guineaman, when
the trade was under systematic regulations. The slaves were obliged
to lie on their backs, and were shackled by their ankles, the left of
one being fettered close to the right of the next; so that the whole
number in one line formed a single living chain. When one died, the
body remained during the night, or during bad weather, secured to the
two between whom he was. The height between decks was so little, that
a man of ordinary size could hardly sit upright. During good weather,
a gang of slaves was taken on the spar-deck, and there remained for a
short time. In bad weather, when the hatches were closed, death from
suffocation would necessarily occur. It can, therefore, easily be
understood, that the athletic strangled the weaker intentionally, in
order to procure more space, and that, when striving to get near some
aperture affording air to breathe, many would be injured or killed in
the struggle.
Such were “the horrors of the middle passage.”