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said that they “should pitch on some motherly Woman [among the enslaved already on board] to take care of this poor Child.” The sailor answered that “he had already one in his Eye.” The woman “had much Milk in her Breasts.”
    As soon as Snelgrave and the sailors came aboard, the very woman they had been discussing saw them with the little boy and ran “with great eagerness, and snatched him from out of the white Man’s Arms that held him.” It was the woman’s own child. Captain Snelgrave had already bought her without realizing the connection. Snelgrave observed, “I think there never was a more moving sight than on this occasion, between the Mother and her little Son.”
    The ship’s linguist then told the woman what had happened, that, as Snelgrave wrote, “I had saved her Child from being sacrificed.” The story made its way around the ship, through the more than three hundred captives on board, who soon “expressed their Thankfulness to me, by clapping their Hands, and singing a song in my praise.” Nor did the gratitude end there, as Snelgrave noted: “This affair proved of great service to us, for it gave them a good notion of White Men; so that we had no Mutiny in our Ship, during the whole Voyage.” Snelgrave’s benevolence continued upon arrival in Antigua. As soon as he told the story of child and mother to a Mr. Studely, a slave owner, “he bought the Mother and her Son, and was a kind Master to them.”
    William Snelgrave could thus think of Africans as “fierce brutish Cannibals” and think of himself as an ethical, civilized redeemer, a good Christian with qualities that even savages would have to recognize and applaud. He could think of himself as the savior of families as he destroyed them. He could imagine a humane outcome for two as he delivered hundreds to a plantation fate of endless toil and premature death. His justifications in place, he could even invoke the golden rule, which would soon become a central saying of the antislavery movement.

Captain William Watkins
    As the Africa, a Bristol Guineaman captained by William Watkins, lay at anchor in Old Calabar River in the late 1760s, its prisoners were busy down in the hold of the vessel, hacking off their chains as quietly as they could. A large number of them managed to get free of the fetters, lift off the gratings, and climb onto the main deck. They sought to get to the gun room aft and the weapons they might use to recover their lost freedom. It was not unusual, explained sailor Henry Ellison, for the enslaved to rise, whether because of a “love of liberty,” “ill treatment,” or “a spirit of vengeance.” 11
    The crewmen of the Africa were taken entirely by surprise; they seemed to have no idea that an insurrection was afoot, literally beneath their very feet. But just as the mutineers “were forcing open the barricado door,” Ellison and seven of his crewmates, “well armed with pistols and cutlasses,” boarded from a neighboring slave ship, the Nightingale. They saw what was happening, mounted the barricado, and fired above the heads of the rebels, hoping to scare them into submission. The shots did not deter them, so the sailors lowered their aim and fired into the mass of insurgents, killing one. The captives made a second attempt to open the barricado door, but the sailors held firm, forcing them to retreat forward, giving chase as they went. As the armed seamen pressed forward, a few of the rebels jumped overboard, some ran below, and others stayed on deck to fight. The sailors fired again and killed two more.
    Once the crew had regained control of the situation, Captain Watkins reimposed order. He selected eight of the mutineers “for an example.” They were tied up, and each sailor—the regular crew of the Africa, plus the eight from the Nightingale —was ordered to take a turn with the whip. The seamen “flogged them until from weariness they could flog no more.” Captain Watkins then turned to