From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775–1807

3. “We took man, woman, and child”

3 “We took man, woman, and child” The very mechanics of slave trading meant that no segment of African society was completely spared from its horror and trauma. According to the eyewitness account of Isaac Parker, a sailor who in the 1760s was invited to go on a slave raid in the Biafran hinterland, at the moment of capture enslavers “took man, woman, and child as they could catch them in the houses.” Parker (who had absconded from his employer’s ship the Latham while on the African coast and was resident in Africa for five months and under the protection of Dick Ebro, a member of the African elite) described the enslavement process: we paddled up the rivers in the day-time . . . when night came we put the canoes ashore, leaving two or three Negroes in each canoe, the rest flying up to the village, taking hold of everyone we could see; and as we took them we handcuffed them, and brought them down to the canoe; after we had done so we quitted the place and went farther up the river, and so during the second time; and we got to the amount . . . of 45 Slaves at that time.1 Parker’s account, which is drawn from his testimony at the 1790 inquiry into the slave trade, clearly illustrates the difficulties enslavers would face if they chose to discriminate by age and sex as they went after their victims.2 Nor is Parker’s description the only one that suggests this. In another account of slave trading in the Biafran region, it was noted that searches for captives were made upriver, the raids were made at night, and enslavers “seized men, women, and children promiscuously.” The capture of women and children in sizeable numbers during slave raids occurred in all slaving regions, no doubt because they were more vulnerable and more likely to be overpowered by enslavers. In contrast, able-bodied men would fight to defend their community, and if all seemed lost, they were more capable of fleeing the site of capture. In fact, the effects of slave raiding were so all- Plate 3.1. The Slave Trade. Engraved by John Raphael Smith, 1791. Widely circulated in Britain and France. Based on George Morland’s painting The Execrable Human Traffic, 1788/89. Companion piece to African Hospitality (plate 1.1). By permission of the National Maritime Museum , London. 52 · From Africa to Jamaica pervasive and indiscriminating that even pregnant women who were “big with child” were captured and sold on the coast.3 The mechanics of slave trading also meant that the elderly and weak were easy prey for enslavers. According to the British slave trader Captain Hall, the captives available for sale were generally “from Children up to [age] thirty,” though sometimes African traders would try to sell “an Old Man, or Old Woman.” He also reported that it was unusual for the old to be brought to the coast for sale, as they were generally rejected by ship captains. This is not surprising, as the elder captives were not the preference . Yet, as made clear in chapter 2, there were numerous complaints by Jamaican merchants about slave ships arriving with too many “old slaves” and, in fact, ship captains on the coast of Africa were sometimes willing to purchase elderly captives in order to leave the coast with as many captives as possible in the shortest possible time. If ship captains did refuse to purchase a captive because of “age, illness, deformity, or any other reason,” it was likely that these poor captives would be put to death. If they could not be sold in either the trans-Atlantic or the local trade and were deemed as having no other purpose to their captors, there was little reason to keep them alive. These were the circumstances of one unfortunate man who was considered “too old” for purchase. He was brought on board a slaving vessel by an African trader called Lemma Lemma. When it was realized that there was no hope of selling him, “his head was laid upon one of the thwarts of the boat, and chopped off,” and his body was thrown overboard.4 Captives who were rejected by British slave traders might also be used for ceremonial sacrifices by Africans living on the coast. According to Jerome Weuves, who acted as governor on the Gold Coast and lived in the...