Read Ebony and Ivy for Free Online

Livingston’s investments is instructive. On May 13, 1751, the
New-York Gazette
announced that children, women, and men were to be sold from the
Wolf
at the Meal Market at 10:00 A.M. the following Friday. The sloop’s arrival, the advertisement, and the customs records obscure frightful events. The
Wolf
left New York City in September 1749 and reached the African coast in mid-November. Competition between Dutch,English, Portuguese, French, and American slavers and shortages of healthy captives prolonged the journey. Captain Gurnay Wall patrolled the shore for fourteen months, hopping from port to port, trading rum and other goods for small numbers of people. Dozens of human beings were imprisoned belowdecks as Wall tried to fill every space. “We know we are destined to stay till we do purchase a full complement,” sighed Dr. William Chancellor, the ship’s surgeon. 30
    A ship was a moving jurisdiction. Besides setting terms with owners and investors, captains had the administrative tasks of hiring sailors, fixing wages, taking on provisions, establishing daily routines, and maintaining order. Piloting ships into waters patrolled by pirates and filled with other risks tested technical skill and nautical knowledge, employee management, and personal courage. Captains established regulations, judged infractions, and imposed punishments. In the first week of his 1709 voyage to Barbados, the captain of the
Thomas and Elizabeth
instructed the young Harvard graduate and historian Thomas Prince to write a code of conduct for the ship. Prince assigned corporal punishments for infractions that included missing religious services, drunkenness, dereliction, and profanity. Disease could destroy a journey, and captains either needed the services of skilled surgeons or acquainted themselves with the medical arts. At times they presided at the funerals of their crewmen or officers. In the summer of 1733 a Captain Moore lost his Harvard-trained surgeon to a fever during a return from Guinea. On the African coast, slave ships became jails with hundreds of people incarcerated on board. A successful voyage required guarding against innumerable external threats to the endeavor while constantly taking the pulse of the crew and the slaves to protect against mutinies and insurrections. 31
    As the
Wolf
approached the Gold Coast, Dr. Chancellor’s fears overwhelmed him. “I am now got into a most shocking part of the world,” he entered in his diary upon seeing Africa. “Merciless wretches” were hiding on shore, and the sailors were certain that if they left the ship they would “be immediately cut up, broil’d on the coals, and devour’d.” The Africans, the surgeon added, “often eat their own children,” and all disputes on shore ended in oneperson digesting another. Members of the crew took turns hiding with arms belowdecks to protect against an attack. 32

    Merchants packed their human cargoes tightly into the
holds of slave ships. Diagram from 1808

SOURCE: The Granger Collection
    Merchants increased cargoes by laying enslaved people on their sides, chest to back, with little more than a couple of feet of vertical space. Makeshift platforms were built between the floor and deck to expand capacity. Stripped nude to make them easier to wash down and secure, shackled in pairs, and often branded for identification, these prisoners spent long periods in rat- and insect-infested bowels of ships, interrupted only by a regimen of feedings, airings, and exercise under threat of whips, blades, and guns. A ship’s surgeon protested that the intolerable stench and heat during one voyage limited his visits belowdecks, where the floor was so covered in blood and excrement that “it resembled a slaughterhouse.” While in Britain training to fill a chemistry professorship at Yale, Benjamin Silliman observed conditions that “equally disgust decency and shock humanity” when a