When the ship's hold was full the voyage was begun, while from the suffering blacks below, unused to seafaring under any circumstances, and desperately sick in their stifling quarters, there arose cries and moans as if the cover were taken off" of purgatory. The imagination recoils from the thought of so much human wretchedness.
The publications of some of the early anti-slavery associations tell of the inhuman conditions of the trade. In an unusually commodious ship carrying over six hundred slaves, we are told that "platforms, or wide shelves, were erected between the decks, extending so far from the side toward the middle of the vessel as to be capable of containing four additional rows of slaves, by which means the perpendicular height between each tier was, after allowing for the beams and platforms, reduced to three feet, six inches, so that they could not even sit in an erect posture, besides which in the men's apartment, instead of four rows, five were stowed by putting the head of one between the thighs of another." In another ship, "In the men's apartment the space allowed to each is six feet in length by sixteen inches in breadth, the boys are each allowed five feet by fourteen inches, the women five feet, ten by sixteen inches, and the girls four feet by one foot each."
"A man in his coffin has more room than one of these blacks," is the terse way in which witness after witness before the British House of Commons described the miserable condition of the slaves on shipboard.
An amazing feature of this detestable traffic is the smallness and often the unseaworthiness of the vessels in which it was carried on. Few such picayune craft now venture outside the landlocked waters of Long Island Sound, or beyond the capes of the Delaware and Chesapeake. In the early days of the eighteenth century hardy mariners put out in little craft, the size of a Hudson River brick-sloop or a harbor lighter, and made the long voyage to the Canaries and the African West Coast, withstood the perils of a prolonged anchorage on a dangerous shore, went thence heavy laden with slaves to the West Indies, and so home. To cross the Atlantic was a matter of eight or ten weeks; the whole voyage would commonly take five or six months. Nor did the vessels always make up in stanchness for their diminutive proportions. Almost any weather-beaten old hulk was thought good enough for a slaver. Captain Linsday, of Newport, who wrote home from Aumboe, said: "I should be glad I cood come rite home with my slaves, for my vessel will not last to proceed far. We can see daylight all round her bow under deck." But he was not in any unusual plight. And not only the perils of the deep had to be encountered, but other perils, some bred of man's savagery then more freely exhibited than now, others necessary to the execrable traffic in peaceful blacks. It was a time of constant wars and the seas swarmed with French privateers alert for fat prizes. When a slaver met a privateer the battle was sure to be a bloody one, for on either side fought desperate men— one party following as a trade legalized piracy and violent theft of cargoes, the other employed in the violent theft of men and women, and the incitement of murder and rapine that their cargoes might be the fuller. There would have been but scant loss to mankind in most of these conflicts had privateer and slaver both gone to the bottom. Not infrequently the slavers themselves turned pirate or privateer for the time — sometimes robbing a smaller craft of its load of slaves, sometimes actually running up the black flag and turning to piracy for a permanent calling.
In addition to the ordinary risks of shipwreck or capture the slavers encountered perils peculiar to their calling. Once in a while the slaves would mutiny, though such is the gentle and almost childlike nature of the African negro that this seldom occurred. The fear of it, however, was ever present to the captains engaged in the trade, and to guard against it the slaves — always the men and sometimes the women as well — were shackled together in pairs. Sometimes they were even fastened to the floor of the dark and stifling hold in which they were immured for months at a time. If heavy weather compelled the closing of the hatches, or if disease set in, as it too often did, the morning would find the living shackled to the dead. In brief, to guard against insurrection the captains made the conditions of life so cruel that the slaves were fairly forced to revolt. In 1759 a case of an uprising that was happily successful was recorded. The slaver Perfect, Captain Potter, lay at anchor at Mana with one hundred slaves aboard. The mate, second mate, the boatswain, and about half the crew were sent into the interior to buy some more slaves. Noticing the reduced numbers of their jailors, the slaves determined to rise. Ridding themselves of their irons, they crowded to the deck, and, all unarmed as they were, killed the captain, the surgeon, the carpenter, the cooper, and a cabin-boy. Whereupon the remainder of the crew took to the boats and boarded a neighboring slaver, the Spencer. The captain of this craft prudently declined to board the Perfect, and reduce the slaves to subjection again; but he had no objection to slaughtering naked blacks at long range, so he warped his craft into position and opened fire with his guns. For about an hour this butchery was continued, and then such of the slaves as still lived, ran the schooner ashore, plundered, and burnt her.
How such insurrections were put down was told nearly a hundred years later in an official communication to Secretary of State James Buchanan, by United States Consul George W. Gordon, the story being sworn testimony before him. The case was that of the slaver Kentucky, which carried 530 slaves. An insurrection which broke out was speedily suppressed, but fearing lest the outbreak should be repeated, the captain determined to give the wretched captives an "object lesson" by punishing the ringleaders. This is how he did it:
"They were ironed, or chained, two together, and when they were hung, a rope was put around their necks and they were drawn up to the yard-arm clear of the sail. This did not kill them, but only choked or strangled them. They were then shot in the breast and the bodies thrown overboard. If only one of two that were ironed together was to be hung, the rope was put around his neck and he was drawn up clear of the deck, and his leg laid across the rail and chopped off to save the irons and lease him from his companion, who at the same time lifted up his leg until the other was chopped off as aforesaid, and he released. The bleeding negro was then drawn up, shot in the breast and thrown overboard.
The legs of about one dozen were chopped off this way. When the feet fell on the deck they were picked up by the crew and thrown overboard, and sometimes they shot at the body while it still hung, living, and all sorts of sport was made of the business."