The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker

Africans in a variety of ways. Black slave traders such as the Joe-men were pictured straightforwardly as ruthless predators, like their white counterparts. The Fante, who worked aboard the ship and were no less central to the slave trade, were strong and courageous, perhaps ennobled by the dignity of seafaring labor as opposed to body snatching. Based on his experience in Benin, Stanfield depicted free Africans as full of “friendship, tranquility, primitive independence.” Abyeda was a “happy maid” until captured. Such people lived more or less as “noble savages” in an Edenic state until European barbarians intruded, destroyed, and enslaved. The “fetter’d crowd,” taken aboard the ship, appeared primarily as victims, with an occasional act of resistance. Belowdecks they did nothing but suffer. On the main deck, other possibilities appeared, as for example when the collective power of the enslaved women reared its head on several occasions. At the point of sale in Jamaica, everyone was wretched, terrified, and lifeless.
    Stanfield says nothing to suggest that he actually got to know any of the African people on his voyage (unless perhaps Abyeda), nor does it appear that he tried to free anyone. He apparently considered himself powerless in the “floating dungeon,” at the time and in retrospect. He might have shown compassion to various individuals, as for example when he dressed the wounds of the slave woman lashed by Captain Wilson. He certainly showed compassion after he left the ship, suggesting that while he experienced revulsion at his experience in the slave trade, it took a social movement to agitate and activate him in purposeful opposition. He also resisted the vulgar racist stereotypes of the day and wrote about the slave trade with an antiracializing rhetoric. All people were, for instance, “of one blood.”
    In the end, Stanfield appealed to the immediate, visceral experience of the slave ship, over and against abstract knowledge about the slave trade, as decisive to abolition, and indeed he helped to make it so. He explained, “One real view—one MINUTE absolutely spent in the slave rooms on the middle passage, would do more for the cause of humanity, than the pen of a Robertson, or the whole collective eloquence of the British senate.” Real enlightenment began not with a Scottish philosopher or a member of Parliament, but rather in the meeting of a sailor and a slave amid the “instruments of woe” on board the “vast machine,” the slave ship. 28

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    I could never have written this book without family, friends, colleagues, and no small number of helpful strangers. I thank the staffs at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Bristol Record Office (especially Pat Denney, archivist of the Society of Merchant Venturers); Bristol University Library; Bristol City Museum; Merseyside Maritime Museum (Tony Tibbles and Dawn Littler in particular); Liverpool Record Office; St. John’s College Library and Cambridge University Library; National Archives; House of Lords Record Office; Royal College of Surgeons; Friends House Library; Bristol (RI) Historical Society; Newport (RI) Historical Society; John Carter Brown Library; Providence Public Library; Baker Library, Harvard Business School; New-York Historical Society; Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center; Charleston County Public Library; Avery Research Center and Special Collections, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston; South Caroliniana Library; South Carolina Historical Society. I am also grateful to the wonderful staff at my home library, Hillman, at the University of Pittsburgh, especially Phil Wilkin, who helped me to get essential research materials.
    Thanks to the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies for fellowship support. My research has also been facilitated in various and generous ways at the