ANOTHER HEAD OF THE HYDRA?

Slave trade sailors and militancy on the

African coast

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Emma Christopher

This paper looks at the activities of the sailors on board British and North American slave ships on
the coast of West Africa. It argues that the West African coast was a central part of the Atlantic
arena, where seamen deserted from their ships, resisted the authority of their captain, and
occasionally took the more extreme action of taking their ships and turning pirate. They did this
not in isolation from local African workers, but rather in connection with them.

KEYWORDS

slave trade; West Africa; sailors; Atlantic history

Nicolas Owen, an Irishman who described himself as a common jack tar portrayed
his brother seamen as wild and rakeeshly inclind, turbilant.1 It is an image common to
historians since the publication of Marcus Redikers Between the Devil and the Deep Blue
Sea. What is far less accepted about this picture, however, is that Owen and his colleagues
did not halt this non-compliance while engaged on slave ships anchored in West Africa.
Owen visited that continent more than once in his career in the slave trade and, as we
shall see, deserted his ship while there, obviously preferring the uncertainties of Africa to
the mercilessness of his ship. The rhetoric he used to describe these events is telling.
After mistreatment from the ships captain, he and five of his crewmates who shared a
watch, he later wrote, were all of one mind to regain the liberty to which every Europain
is intitle to.2 Africa, therefore, neither caused Owen and his colleagues to forget ideas of
liberty, nor to postpone their demand for this right until they had sailed off to places
where freedom would more traditionally be considered to have prospered in the earliest
years of the nineteenth century.
Owens story is illustrative of a much larger point. A strange aspect of North Atlantic
studies is that the West African angle is so often omitted, as if Africa remains the dark continent of history, where reasoning, attitudes and objectives were so different from Europe
and North America that they cannot possibly be dealt with through the same approach.
West Africa remains a separate field of historical study, the implication being that it has
little to offer to students of the Atlantic arena. Most surprisingly, this absence of Africa
as an essential part of the Atlantic world extends to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redikers
book, The Many-Headed Hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners and the hidden history of the

1
2

Owen, Journal, 63.

Ibid., 236.

Atlantic Studies, Vol. 1, No 2, 2004

ISSN 1478-8810 print/1470-4649 online/04/02014513
# 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1478881042000278721

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EMMA CHRISTOPHER

revolutionary Atlantic. The writers are concerned with concerted resistance to capitalism, at
the forefront of which they posit seamen and those of African origin. Yet Africa itself remains
largely hidden from view, as if this subversion flourished elsewhere, in other environments.
This is particularly puzzling because if seamen were especially hostile to the rise of
capitalism, surely their work on board slaving vessels would be a focus of that antagonism.
The link between capitalism and the transatlantic slave trade has long been the source of
controversy, but with regard to its employees it is clear that it was one of the first trades to
pay monthly wages and to thoroughly challenge sailors liberty through the frequent use
of crimps to make up a slavers crew.3 Indeed, Rediker himself has been pre-eminent in identifying these issues. Yet Africa, a place central to the slaving experience and to the burden
the trade placed on seamen over and above that imposed by other branches of maritime
industry, is still strangely forgotten. This omission of Africa from the history of the radical
Atlantic is erroneous. When ships reached the slave buying ports and the work of slave
trading really began, sailors did not end their resistance but rather found more about
which to be dissatisfied. All along, the West African littoral seamen rebelled, deserted,
and refused to work. Clearly, Africa was a central part of the Atlantic world in this context.
Naturally, the reason that West Africa is seen as a separate case in this regard is
the perception that divisions of race in African slave trading ports were always paramount
over divides of class. Linebaugh and Rediker perhaps do not focus on West Africa
because this is the last environment where it would be expected to find a head of the
hydra, that is, a multiracial class of rebels attacking the authority of merchants. The slave
trading coast of West Africa is generally depicted as the scene of racial hostility with
little interaction, let alone unity, between European seaman and African native. Any
suggestion of multiracial tolerance is hard to find within the commonly told history of
the slave trade, where the dread middle passage saw black captive and white seaman
fight many bloody battles against each other.
Yet the history of slave trade seamen suggests a variant picture when the Africans
they were dealing with were not a part of their cargo. The idea that African slaving ports
were a distinctly different case because racial discord prevailed over all human interaction
there is not supported by the wider history of European seamen in West Africa. The slave
trade was founded on racial divisions but seamen did not in any way limit their political and
social fights when they reached Africa. Rather, and more surprisingly, they fought alongside
or in union with African maritime workers. It should not be assumed, furthermore, that this
rebelliousness was a European phenomenon imposed on African workers. On the contrary,
on occasion, Africans showed the way, bringing their traditional methods of resistance to
the collective defiance of the Atlantic. They had more reason than might be supposed to
unite in this way, for just as African slaving merchants shared common cause with European
slave ship captains and cooperated with them to control rebellious workers, the labourers
too found mutual reason to resist this domination.
Contrary to the received image that eighteenth-century Europeans considered Africa
inhospitable and populated by savages, desertion from slave ships all along the African

Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Emmer, Capitalism after Slavery; Christopher, Sons of Neptune, 357.

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coast was not rare at all. Perhaps running away was often a knee-jerk reaction to escape
the privations of the ship, withholding labour being the ultimate method of rejecting
conditions and treatment. It also, however, had relevance in the slave trade above and
beyond removal of labour if seen in the context that it affirmed the free in free wage
labour.4 As men who protested about their meagre food allowances, appalling working
conditions and physical punishments by contrasting their lot with that of slaves, where
desertion forcibly illustrated their rejection of such treatment. When a seaman ran from
a slaving vessel, he was not only protesting his treatment, but was doing so in ways that
showed his fundamentally different position in the economic system of the Atlantic world.
Desertion of the crew in Africa became one of the catastrophes that slaving merchants
feared, another common reason that voyages could fail to ensure the hoped for profit.
Before the Blooms 1787 voyage merchant, Robert Bostock wrote to Captain Peter Burne
warning him specifically of the danger of his men stealing one of the ships boats in
order to escape a danger, which, he claimed had overset many slaving voyages.5 While
it would be wrong to presume any solidarity with the native inhabitants in these actions,
nevertheless it is clear that for many sailors life among the Africans was considered infinitely
preferable to subjection to the cruel whims of their captain, even if most later joined another
slave ship to journey home. Sailors undoubtedly were sometimes dubious about the reception they would receive if they absconded ashoreand rightly so, given the trade they were
employed inbut their sense of the justice due to a free working man was evidently not
dimmed by such fears. The beacon of maritime rebellion shone along the African shores.
A group of crewmembers, rather than an individual seaman, were often behind an
escape attempt, but even when it was one lone man who fled there is evidence that the
spirit of such action was well regarded by his colleagues. After John Hawkins attempted
to desert from his slave ship, for example, he was caught and returned, whereupon he
recorded that, the captain received me with great coolness, but the Doctor, the mate,
and sailors all with the greatest cordiality.6 In 1750, three sailors named as Edward
Shiddefield, Daniel Lake and Sampson Hardy ran away with a long boat belonging to
the Antelope of Bristol, which, as Captain Thomas Sanderson later lamented at the Admiralty courts, was never recaptured. This action clearly had the support of other crewmembers, as they later took the ship, so ensuring that it never reached its American destination.7
Some groups of seamen who deserted in Africa comprised a significant proportion of
their ships crew, and acted as a unified company to make their escape. At least five men ran
from the Elizabeth, captained by John Steel, while at its African slave embarkation port. On a
75-ton vessel, this would have constituted a very severe loss of men.8 On one of surgeon
Alexander Falconbridges voyages, eleven of the best seamen deserted at Bonny from ill
treatment, where most of them died. Falconbridge could remember the name of only
one, a man named Surman, from Bristol.9 Nineteen men left an unnamed slave ship near
4

Rediker, Between the Devil, 105.

Letterbooks of Robert Bostock.
Hawkins, Voyage to the Coast of Africa, 16273.
7
High Court of the Admiralty (HCA) 1/58, National Archives, London; Eltis, CD-ROM, voyage ID 17198.
8
HCA 1/23, 38; Eltis, CD-ROM, voyage ID 24874.
9
Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade, 47; BT 6/9.
5
6

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the Rio Pongo and refused to rejoin until threatened with the naval press. Five chose this
option anyway.10 Nine men abandoned the Bell of Liverpool after their original captain died
and they were harshly treated by his successor. They left aboard only three men and their
officers, on a ship that already had two or three hundred slaves below decks.11 Captain
Daniel Darbys entire crew deserted him when his ship was forced back to the Isle de
Los after a slave revolt thirty leagues out.12
Nicolas Owen, whose story began this article, provided a first hand account of
deserting on the African coast when employed on board a slave ship from Rhode Island.
Leaving at four oclock in the morning, Owen and his co-conspirators left in the ships
longboat with some weapons they had stolen from the captain and steard WNW They
were followed by an armed boat but managed to get away and existed for some days in
the area around Cape Mount, occasionally putting into shore to trade for food to
supplement the exceedingly meagre amount they had misappropriated from the ship.
When Owen became ill the men calld a counsele of war . . . [and] concluded that we
should proceed to Sierelone and lay ourselves at the mercy of the English governour of
the factory. The men must have been united in aims and the desire to escape, as to
survive at sea in a small boat for some time in these conditions was a feat of endurance.13
Throughout the late eighteenth century, desertion from slave ships continued to be a
problem for Europes representatives in Africa. In July 1751 Thomas Melvil, governor of
Cape Coast Castle, complained that White men are gone & daily going to live among
the Negroes. Later that same year he protested that There are sometimes a Dozen of
worthless Sailors living in this Town getting Drunk and abusing the Negroes, these
fellows think themselves above all Law, if I restrain them, I should only get into the
Hands of some Wapping Solicitor, who in Guildhall would present me as the greatest
tyrant that ever lived.14
These problems reached new magnitude after the settlement of Sierra Leone for
Britains free blacks in 1787. One visitor to the area wrote that they were frequently
much pestered by renegade seamen, quitting ships employed in the Slave Trade, and
refuging here. While the writer was there, one ship, the Fisher of Liverpool, could not
leave the coast because so many of her crew deserted to the settlement.15 Only five of
this ships original complement of twenty-nine men would return with her to England.16
The nine seamen who deserted from the Bell at Rio Pongo took a boat to the settlement
in search of sanctuary.17 Zachary Macaulay wrote that during 1796 and 1797 they had at
times had as many as fifty or sixty extremely dissolute English seamen, mostly from
slave ships, in the colony. Many had run to escape their harsh treatment on board.18

10

Hoffman, Sailor of King George, 1968.

Macaulay, Journal, file 13, 26 July 26 September 1796.
12
Pennsylvania Gazette, 16 November 1774.
13
Owen, Journal, 23 6.
14
Treasury (T), 70/29, National Archives, London.
15
Falconbridge, Two Voyages to Sierra Leone, 11011.
16
Eltis, CD-ROM, voyage ID 81453.
17
Macaulay, Journal, file 13, 26 July 26 September 1796.
18
Macaulay, Journal, file 21, 7 June 1797.
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Two black men who ran from Captain Newells ship in 1794 at the settlement could
undoubtedly assimilate themselves among the population, but for white seamen too it was
not impossible.19 A number of whites had gone with the original black London settlers to
the colony, including fifty-four women who were married to African men, so the seamen
may have been able to hide among the settler population.20 These people, both white
and black, came overwhelmingly from the same social groups that the English seamen
themselves occupied in England, and could be said to have created an outpost of
welcome drawing disillusioned seamen from their slaving vessels. Certainly so many
seem to have been tempted that John Clarkson, Governor of Sierra Leone, felt compelled
to put up a notice in the settlement warning sailors that they would not be given shelter by
the colony. It was a decision that rather tormented Lieutenant Clarkson, for he had been
instructed to protect every man, and he felt that his pronouncement that this would
not apply to slave trade sailors rather dented the ideology upon which Sierra Leone had
been founded.21
Even when the seamen were ashore for legitimate reasons they caused grave problems to the nascent colony. Huge numbers of men were put ashore from slave ships
that had been taken as French prizes during the war. Those from the Speedwell of Liverpool
caused particular problems, behaving in a noisy and riotous manner. Offered work until
they had a chance to leave, hardly any took this opportunity, choosing instead to live off
what little money they had and bartering their clothes for rum. Zachary Macaulay believed
that few would survive for more than a few weeks. Typically they appeared to have elected
a captain from among themselves and when this man was sentenced to be whipped in
order to try and instil good behaviour in the whole gang, the men grouped together
to oppose his punishment.22
It was not just ashore that seamen from slave ships showed their militancy and
resisted the laws of maritime commerce. Seamen also took radical action against the
captain of their ship while anchored off the African coast. John Wynne (or Winn), who preferred to be known as Captain Power the Brave, attempted to take control of his ship, the
slaver Polly, in the 1770s. On the pretext of chasing a pirate vessel, he endeavoured to leave
the coast without giving the captain time to rejoin the ship. Seamen Jack Tomlyn, Robert
Fitzgerald, Jack Hughes, Charles Dee, Dick Thomas, and Jack Putt were also involved in the
rebellion, and armed themselves with cutlasses and pistols. Wynne attempted to unify the
crew by getting some liquor from the captains cabin, and forced them to take an Oath
upon a Book to be true to Captain Power of the Bravo meaning him the said John
Wynne. Wynne was thrown in the cabin by the other seamen for a while, supposedly
while they discussed the merits of turning pyrate and whether the man who called
himself Captain Power had navigation enough to conduct the said Ship. This mutiny
was betrayed by some of the men Wynne now commanded, one of whom was a

19

Macaulay, Journal, file 3, 19 July26 November 1794.

Byrd, Captives and Voyagers, 207.
21
Falconbridge, Two Voyages, 11011.
22
Macaulay, Journal, file 3, 19 July26 November 1794, file 13, 26 July26 September 1796.
20

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mulatto man. Wynne was returned to Britain where he was sentenced to death by hanging
in 1776.23
In 1791, Captain Samuel Kitson was relieved of command of his ship as he traded at
Anomabu and Tantumquerry. Later at trial, the accused perpetrators, John Slack and
Charles Berry, claimed that their reason for attempting to take the ship was that Kitson
had used them ill. Berry, a twenty-seven year old Swede, had declared to Kitson that he
was now the captain after an armed struggle. This was a short-lived attempt at piracy as
Kitson managed to get hold of Slack and threatened the crew that he would be thrown
overboard if they continued to resist. Briefly held at Tatumquerry fort, they were shipped
back to England, found guilty, and sentenced to hang. They met their demise at the
Execution Dock in Wapping at the time of the reflux of the sea just as countless
other mutineers had publicly been hanged by the neck until dead.24
Such extreme actions against a ships officers were not limited to seamen of European
descent, but could also unite those of African origin who had joined the ship as crewmembers. An African named Cudjoe joined the slaver Lovely Lass of Bristol, a ship that
also employed two other Africans known as Joe and Quow. Later gaol records describe
Cudjoe as around thirty years of age, 50 700 tall, and simply black, whereas his colleague
Joe was five years younger, had been born in the Anomabu area, and had shock hair.
These three men, along with two of their English crewmates, were accused of murdering
the second mate of the vessel, Robert Milligan. The notes of their trial before the High
Court of the Admiralty suggest that Cudjoe and one of the English men, John Owans,
were the ringleaders in the crime. The catalyst for the murder appears to have been the
mistreatment by Milligan of another of the Africans, Quow, the cook of the vessel, after
he had apparently answered only yes rather than yes, sir to one of his orders. It
would seem that the other men took against Milligan after seeing him beat Quow and
cut him on the head with a cutlass. Although the exact actions of the men are lost in
claim and counter-claim, two things that stand out from the trial records are the complete
and utter gory carnage, which reigned, and the fact that no-one considered it unusual that
black and white sailors would have joined together in revolt.
Cudjoe was truly an Atlantic African who was an experienced seaman, could speak
English, and earned wages for his labour. Presumably, of Akan origin, he had originally
sailed on the slave ship Mars from Africa to Grenada where it delivered two hundred
and thirteen slaves. He was discharged from this voyage in Liverpool where he would
have mingled with the men of many nationalities who lived and roamed among the dockside communities, inveigled into life on the edge of the Atlantic along with the trading
goods from around the world unloaded onto her quays. After his sojourn there, Cudjoe
returned to Anomabu in the Jane under Captain James Backope, where he worked for a
Mr Torrane for two years until he joined the Lovely Lass. He, Joe, Quow and their European
co-defendants were sent to London on board HMS Charon to stand trial in the Admiralty
Courts. After their acquittal due to lack of evidence, Cudjoe and Joe returned to Africa,

23

HCA 1/58, 106110.

HCA 1/25, 191, 205; HCA 26/1; HCA 1/61; HCA 1/85, 69 71; Rediker, Between the Devil, 247.

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so much pressure being exerted on Archibald Dalzel, governor of Cape Coast Castle, that he
anticipated a very serious Palaver if they were not returned in haste.25 Cudjoe was a rebel
born of Atlantic experiences, and his life was shaped by circum-Atlantic forces.
In another case that bears some similarities, on board the Wasp in 1793 was an
African seaman known as Jack who was accused of having united with some of the
other crew, and some of the captive slaves, to throw the surgeon of the vessel overboard.
There are parallels between Jack and Cudjoe, for after this revolt the Pennsylvania Gazette
described Jack not only as a yellow negro, of very stout make but also pointed out specifically that he spoke a good deal of English. He had shipped himself at the [African] coast
possibly at the Old Calabar region where the ship had loaded its human cargo. Like the case
of the Lovely Lass the crime allegedly committed on board the Wasp is both hard to discern
and seemingly improbable. Here it was alleged that Jack, along with the steward Joseph
Nees who appeared to be a man of colour [with] curled black hair, and a white cabin
boy named Thomas Beddo joined with some of the captive slaves and pelted the
doctor with stones . . . kept for scouring. Apparently, although Jack finally pushed the
doctor overboard, an interesting facet of this case is that one of the other crewmembers
alleged that Nees, Beddo and the captain had been abusing the doctor from the time
they left Bristol, the inference being that Jack and the accused slaves continued this work.26
Other examples of Atlantic rebellion involving European, American, and African men
on board slave ships happened further from the African coast. The revolt on the Amity in
the summer of 1785 certainly involved a motley crew of rebels. Two slaves known as
Dick and Will who were employed as seamen were involved and their fellow mutineers
represented many strains of Atlantic rebellion. There was a mulatto Bostonian named
Stuart who sported a cut on his nose and a scar on his forehead. John Mathew and
Alexander Evans were Irishmen, reported in stereotypes common to both their nationality
and their profession, to have a good deal of the brogue and to be very subject to liquor.
Richard Squire, possibly their leader, was an Englishman of about thirty years of age who
claimed to have been a lieutenant on board the USS General Washington. The last known
rebel was John Boadman, described as having a black complexion and being about
five feet seven inches high. Within the context of a slave ship, engaged in the practical
reinforcement of one of the most odious forms of racism the world has ever seen, all
these men apparently found common enough cause to form a rebellion as one body.
They rose up and took the ship, forcing Captain James Duncason and some of his officers
to make for the shore in the ships boats.27
This kind of united action is easier to understand in light of the relations that seamen
formed while in Africa with other maritime labourers. African seamen could, and did, have
an important part to play in the lives of English and North American seamen. Nicholas
Owen, on his third slaving voyage, utilised grumetas, as African seamen were known,
as a means of escape from other Africans. After having been captured by some men at

25

Home Office (HO) 26/3, 20, National Archives, London; HCA 1/25; HCA 1/64; T 70/33: letters from Archibald
Dalzel to the African Committee dated 8 August 1795 and 30 August 1796.
26
Pennsylvania Gazette, 3 April 1793.
27
Pennsylvania Gazette, 31 August 1785, 7 September 1785.

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Sierra Leone in retaliation against a Dutch ship that had carried off some free people as
slaves, Owen and his fellow crewmembers were held as prisoners. Doubtless showing
symmetry between crime and punishment not shared by the Europeans, they were
securd by the natives, put in irons, and hove down on the ground in a barbarous
manner and were stripped of all their clothes. The men were detained in irons for 4 or
5 days before being freed by a European named Mr Hall. Yet while it was a white man
who had secured their freedom, Owen, his brother and his captain utilised free African
seamen to make their escape. They put distance between themselves and their attackers
by voyaging from Sierra Leone to the Cape Verdean island of Brava, with a crew that
comprised of 10 or 12 black saylors, commonly known as gremetoes who agreed to go
with the white men for a small demand of wages, not above 2 crowns pr. Month.28
Grumetas definitely showed the same propensities to rebellion as their European
colleagues. The shared Atlantic nature of maritime resistance was displayed by a number
of grumetas who deserted from their ship at the Sierra Leone colony where they were
sheltered and armed by the settlers. They had heard of John Clarksons declaration that
any man who went to Sierra Leone would be free and absolved from all obligation to
serve his master. They also, as Zachary Macaulay noted in his journal, thought that in
the colony they would be paid for their labour, and had run to quit a situation when
they earned nothing but their Clothes & victuals. All other grumetas on the coast might
fellow suit, he felt, and wrote, I tremble at the consequence which may flow from this
incident.29 Here then were Africans who rebelled using the ideologies of the British
settlement and the sympathy of the settlersnot a small percentage of whom had been
maritime workers themselvesas the means by which to do so.
This image of radical African maritime workers, comprehensively affected by the
forces of the Atlantic world, was revealed decisively during the war between Britain and
France in the 1790s. When a number of African seamen were captured and made prisoners
of war, Zachary Macaulay fervently objected to the plan that they be shipped off to the
Caribbean to be sold into slavery. His objection was not merely ideological. As he wrote
to Governor Rickets of Barbados, in his opinion it would be very dangerous for that
island to import such a mass of jacobinical infection. The free Blacks at Goree, he
wrote, by all accounts are become down right Democrats, and they therefore seem of
all Men the least likely to submit to the yoke without wincing. The radicalism of the
French and Haitian revolutions was clearly present on the coast of Africa, and in this
case could have been shipped back across the Atlantic to the British West Indies.30
The Gold Coast canoe men seem to have been of similar mind to the grumetas. As
Peter Gutkinds research shows, the attitude of the high ranking Englishmen stationed
on the coast was highly ambivalent to these men, with words such as rascally impudent
ruffians outcasts and vagabonds frequently used to describe them. Such words are
analogous to those the same men used to describe the European lowly workers on
board slave ships. The criticism was the same because the canoe men of the Gold Coast
28

Owen, Journal, 37 9.
Macaulay, Journal, file 1, 16 June 15 October 1793.
Macaulay, Journal, file 25, 19 January May 22 1798.

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were also renowned for being peculiarly rebelliousa group of workers who early took
on a self-conscious identity bounded by their job and the status it brought. Canoe men
became notorious for being frequent protestors in both political and economic disputes.
They, like their European and North American fellow maritime workers, were regarded as
men likely to be rioters, known as agyesemfo, in disturbances along the African littoral.
They rebelled in smaller less cohesive ways too, such as stealing and ruining goods by
exposure to seawater. Most commonly, they rejected terms by withholding their labour,
striking just like their English visitors in an attempt to secure better pay or conditions.
Living in an era of embryonic class-consciousness just as European mariners were,
canoe men rejected being abused, beaten or starved because they were freemen, and
demanded better wages as a primary condition of making freedom tenable. Like their
paler skinned fellow seafarers, they too were at the forefront of labour protest.31 Fascinatingly, an early strike can be found in the annals of West African maritime labour
history that clearly pre-dates much of the subversion of European and North American
sailors. In January 1753, Fante canoe men ceased work for several days during the
British building of Anomabu fort. It was the final stage of a labour protest in which the
people of Anomabu had tried to make their British employers raise the wages paid for
building the fort. It did not prove successful as the British brought in workers from Cape
Coast, so eventually forcing the Fante to work at the old wage or not at all.32 Nevertheless,
there remains the possibility that strategies for rebellion, and even the spirit of rebellion
itself, were adopted from Africa by European seamen.
There is certainly evidence that seamen from slave ships had close enough relationships with African maritime workers to swap and share aspects of their working life and
ethos. Slave trade seamen interacted with the canoe men on an individual basis. Samuel
Robinson who went to sea on the slaver Lady Nelson in 1800 wrote an evocative memoir
of going to shore with the African canoe men. I liked it very much, he recalled. It was
very exciting to be perched on a puncheon of rum, or a bale of goods, while twelve
naked savages were driving the canoe along like a weavers shuttlekeeping time with
their paddles to a chant struck up by the steersman, in which, at intervals, all hands
would join. Robinson, who like many seamen could not swim, feared only the landing
as the canoe was overturned on the breakers approaching the beach, but soon came to
like the excitement of it the best of all. Robinson referred to the Africans that he worked
with as his motley crew.33
Other seamen seem to have had even closer personal relationships with canoemen.
Edward Rushton, who had joined a slave ships crew at the age of eleven and later would
become a prominent abolitionist, apparently taught one of his boatmen, Quamina, to read.
The African is reported to have repaid this favour with his life when their boat overturned,
saving Rushton at the cost of his own demise.34 Joseph Banfield, an Englishman who
made several slaving voyages, apparently owed his boatman his life too, sending him to

31

Gutkind, Trade and Labor, 2549; Gutkind, The Boatmen of Ghana, 123 66.
Priestley, An Early Strike in Ghana, 25.
33
Robinson, A Sailor Boys Experience, 76 7.
34
Williams, The Liverpool Privateers, 571.
32

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intercede when they were in great distress and challenged by armed Africans.35 Another
slave trade sailor, William Richardson, termed one of his canoe men known as Jack his
right-hand man. Jacks fellow workers, Richardson noted, were also a set of willing
fellows but Jack was the most useful because he had learned to speak some English.36
In this most amoral of settings, manifold tensions and dimensions grew in such relationships and developed in ways which both bred personal tolerance, and created hostility
in the wider picture. It is conceivable that rebellious tendencies could also be exchanged,
taking on a collective aspect.
This shared resistance is also made more likely in view of the fact that all maritime
workers, and to some extent slaves, were held in check by those who were part of the
slave-trading network. There are many examples of Africans in the employ of the major
slave merchants being used to return runaway seamen to their ship or to crush a crew
mutiny. In 1785, for example, the boatswain and others from the crew of the Thomas,
tried to escape while on the coast of Africa, but they were brought back by the Black
people.37 The six crewmembers of the Phoenix of Bristol who tried to escape in the
ships yawl were taken up by Africans. Captain George Bishop apparently ordered them
to be kept on shore chained by the neck, legs and hands, and to have only one plantain
a day to eat. They all died there, the boatswain, Tom Jones, having become raving
mad.38 When the crime was more serious, local Africans helped out too. The mutiny of
John Slack and Charles Berry was quashed with the help of locals who rowed out to the
ship to assist.39 Captain William Corren of the Gregson had to rely on similar defences
when Africans were needed to calm matters after his crew armed themselves against him.40
Sharing in the power of the slave-trading network over lowly seamen, African merchants and European rulers used many of the same tactics and structures against deserting
crewmembers as they did against slaves. Thus, the regular responsibility of the coastal forts
was to function as temporary prisons for sailors who were accused of some misdemeanour.
When the crew of the brig Garland ran from the ship, Captain McQuoid ordered the
Gentleman in Charge of Annamaboe to catch the Sailors [and] put them in irons. Nine
of the sailors were caught, whereupon McQuiod desired that they be held in Cape Coast
Castle until they could be sent home on a man-of-war.41 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.42 Captain
Arnold of the Hannah left a sailor named Darcy as a prisoner at Cape Coast Castle on 26
October 1800.43 On 10 September 1803, the captain of the Sally wrote in his logbook
that he had deliver[ed] the Boatswain Thomas Loren up to the Governor of Cape Coast

35

Banfield, Journal of a Life at Sea.

Richardson, A Mariner of England, 534.
37
HCA 1/25, 1479.
38
Account of the Evidence, 956.
39
HCA 1/61.
40
HCA 1/64; HCA 1/85, 68; T 70/33.
41
T 70/33.
42
Board of Trade (BT) 6/1, National Archives, London.
43
BT 98/62, 195.
36

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ANOTHER HEAD OF THE HYDRA?

Castle concerning a very serious case of Mutiny.44 The first mate of the Lady Nelson was
put ashore at Winneba Fort for alleged insubordination.45 Ten seamen from the Antelope
of Bristol managed to show their non-compliance in more than one continent. After
being imprisoned in Cape Coast Castle, they later succeeded in escaping from Newgate
gaol in London while awaiting trial.46
It is clear that the men who imprisoned sailors within the walls of Europes coastal
forts saw nothing ironic in this act. 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.47 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 trial.48 They were
regularly held in the forts for much longer than those being shipped to the Americas to
be sold as slaves, as naval vessels to collect the accused arrived much less frequently
than slave ships. Given the seamens rebellious nature, and the harsh conditions of slave
trading, such occurrences were not isolated events.
Seamen were locked in the slave forts because they resisted the authority of their
ships captain and the coasts rulers at every turn; they were locked in slave forts
because the rulers saw no hard-line division between black and white in terms of threats
to their authority. The suffering inflicted by slave trading was a nuanced range of woe,
like freedom it was measured in degrees rather than absolutes. White seamen held the
upper hand over those they loaded onto ships as captive cargo, and often that hand
held a whip or a chain, but with regard to other groups, including the African merchants
of the coast, slave trade seamen had little power. Typically, they fought back. Africa was
a place of rebellion, rebellion that was born of Atlantic conditions and Atlantic causes.
The same forces that sought to suppress their insubordination reached out from Europe
to Africa in an attempt at containment. Sailor and slave were both subject to the same
powers and their attempts at resisting subjection were not always antithetical.
Thus, it was that one of the hydras many heads could clearly be seen along the West
African littoral. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redikers thesis that sailors and Africans were
at the forefront of protest against Atlantic capitalism does not tumble in the context of
either Africa or this aspect of the transatlantic slave trade. Certainly, the merchants of
the trade saw both groups as malignant forces that had to be controlled and subsumed
to their system of power. More than this, lowly Africans not only fought the same rulers
and the same economic forces, they often fought alongside the European seafarers in an
attempt to improve their lot. Complicit in many seamens rebellions were Africans who
were as much a part of the Atlantic working class as their European visitors. Sometimes

44

Chancery (C) 108/214, National Archives, London.

Robinson, Sailor Boy, 53.
46
HCA 1/20 f.35; HCA 1/55.
47
T 70/33.
48
Akinjogbin, Archibald Dalzel, 6778; T 70/33.
45

155

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EMMA CHRISTOPHER

African maritime workers were at the forefront of protest, showing the way to their palerskinned colleagues. The West African context does not gainsay the idea of circum-Atlantic
sedition it reinforces the importance of not omitting Africa from Atlantic studies. The slave
trade may offer problems for the theory of a united radical force with both seamen and
slaves in its vanguard, but it suggests that the hard line racial animosities of the middle
passage may have been the exception to this image. In its wider history the slave trade
does not prove that multiracial radicalism did not exist at all, rather, it confirms that it did.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Emma Christopher received her PhD from University College London. Recently, she
was awarded a Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Currently,
she is completing research on a history of the British convicts that were sent to the West
African slave forts in the 1780s, as well as a history of the links between slave trading
and convict transportation to Australia.

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HIGH COURT OF THE ADMIRALTY

Emma Christopher, 53/6 Greenknowe Avenue, Elizabeth Bay, New South Wales, Australia
2011. Email: emma.christopher@telstra.com

157