If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (review)

Eric Robert Taylor has written a book that is long overdue. He provides the first authoritative and comprehensive examination of shipboard revolts in the Atlantic Slave Trade. A product of indefatigable research, Taylor challenges the conventional wisdom that shipboard revolts were "minor, rare, and relatively insignificant" (p. 13). Indeed, the eighteenth century witnessed at least 400 revolts on slave ships. The prevalence—and relative success—of these revolts helped minimize and end the slave trade, according to Taylor, by providing a powerful challenge to the slave trade's hegemony and also by limiting the trade's profitability.

Taylor identifies a number of patterns for the revolts. Three out of four rebellions took place within sight of the African coast, primarily because tropical diseases and last minute preparations depleted the white crews. Africans carefully, patiently, and secretly planned their revolts and female slaves and children often proved crucial to success since they had more access to the upper decks. While slaves were surprisingly successful in securing firearms on the ships, they could turn almost any material into a potential weapon. Many revolts were initially successful before the crew rallied or another ship intervened to quash the uprising. For those revolts that "succeeded" (a term that Taylor admits is problematic), slaves typically did not engage in wholesale retribution against the white crew. The chances of any revolt ending in the freedom of one or more Africans were quite small, but Taylor argues that the effort is more important than the result.

A book of this type necessarily creates a number of difficulties for the author since most of the evidence is tantalizingly fragmentary. One account from a London newspaper tersely noted that the Scipio "was blown up on the Coast, occasion'd by an Insurrection of the Negroes" (p. 9). Other accounts provide more information, but Taylor is often forced to make a number of educated guesses. For instance, that Africans carefully monitored the sickness levels of the ship's crew is certainly plausible but there is no specific evidence to that end. Skeptics might be put off by the speculation, but Taylor's conjectures are eminently reasonable.

Taylor tries to connect the resistance to larger themes in African American history, and here he achieves mixed success. He argues that resistance forced slavers to hire larger crews, increased insurance costs, reduced the number of slave trading voyages, and deterred some men from getting into the business. Rebellion also provided anti-slavery writers with ammunition for their fight to end the Middle Passage. This is convincing, if tersely argued, but Taylor is less able to connect shipboard revolts to the framework of slave resistance within the Americas. As part of his argument, Taylor includes slave rebellion directed towards the domestic U.S. trade. The argument here feels somewhat forced, especially since the Atlantic material is well researched and yields patterns, but the account of domestic uprisings feels like one extended example after another. This chapter is not coherently integrated into the rest of his narrative and the connection between trans-Atlantic resistance and domestic uprisings defies a simple explanation.

Despite the somewhat disappointing ending, this is an excellent book that should command the attention of any scholar of slavery. The research for this book is truly impressive; Taylor must have pored over thousands of ship's records and read through hundreds of reels of microfilm. He conveniently summarizes the information for 493 revolts in a useful appendix. Even a casual glance through the appendix gives the reader a sense of the frequency of revolts. What emerges from Taylor's careful prose is how "shipboard revolt was an assertion of humanity" and "humanity is the antithesis of slavery" (p. 176).