The Slave Ship Read Online Free Page B

an instrument called “the tormentor,” a combination of the cook’s tongs and a surgeon’s instrument for spreading plasters. He had it heated white hot and used it to burn the flesh of the eight rebels. “This operation being over,” Ellison explained, “they were confined and taken below.” Apparently all survived.
    Yet the torture was not over. Captain Watkins suspected that one of his own sailors was involved in the plot, that he had “encouraged the slaves to rise.” He accused an unnamed black seaman, the ship’s cook, of assisting the revolt, “of having furnished them with the cooper’s tools, in order that they might knock themselves out of irons.” Ellison doubted this, calling it “supposition only, and without any proof of the fact.”
    Captain Watkins nonetheless ordered an iron collar—usually reserved for the most rebellious slaves—fastened around the neck of the black seaman. He then had him “chained to the main mast-head,” where he would remain night and day, indefinitely. He was to be given “only one plantain and one pint of water per day.” His clothes were nothing more than a pair of long trousers, which were little “to shield him from the inclemency of the night.” The shackled seaman remained in the foretop of the ship for three weeks, slowly starving.
    When the Africa had gathered its full cargo of 310 slaves and the crew prepared to sail away from the Bight of Biafra, Captain Watkins decided that the cook’s punishment should continue, so he made arrangements with Captain Joseph Carter to send him aboard the Nightingale, where he was once again chained to the main top and given the same meager allowance of food and water. After ten more days, the black seaman had grown delirious. “Hunger and oppression,” said Ellison, “had reduced him to a skeleton.” For three days he struggled madly to free himself from the fetters, causing the chains to rub “the skin from several parts of his body.” The neck collar “found its way to the bone.” The “unfortunate man,” said Ellison, had become “a most shocking spectacle.” After five weeks in the two vessels, “having experienced inconceivable misery in both, he was relieved by death.” Ellison was one of the sailors charged to throw his body from the foretop into the river. The minimal remains of the black seaman were “immediately devoured by the sharks.”

Captain James Fraser
    When Thomas Clarkson visited the slave-trading port of Bristol in July 1787 to gather evidence for the abolitionist movement, he sought the advice of a man named Richard Burges, an attorney opposed to the commerce in human beings. Their conversation turned to the captains of slave ships, which prompted an impatient Burges to howl that all of them deserved “long ago to be hanged”—except one. That one was Captain James Fraser of Bristol, a man who spent twenty years in the slave trade, voyaging five times to Bonny, four times to Angola, and once each to Calabar, the Windward Coast, and the Gold Coast. Nor was Burges the only abolitionist to praise Fraser. Alexander Falconbridge, the physician who penned a searing indictment of the slave trade, sailed with Fraser, knew him well, and said, “I believe him to be one of the best men in the trade.” Clarkson, too, eventually joined in the chorus of praise. 12
    Captain Fraser ran an orderly ship with a minimum of coercion, or so he claimed when he testified before a parliamentary committee in 1790: “The Angola slaves being very peaceable, it is seldom necessary to confine them in irons; and they are allowed to go down between the decks, and come up on deck, as they find the weather warm or cold.”
    They were, as a result, “cheerful” on board. He added that he treated the Bonny and Calabar slaves differently, as they were more “vicious” and inclined to insurrection. But here, too, he was moderate by the standards of the day: “As soon as the ship is out of sight of land I