Black West Indian Seamen in the British Merchant Marine in the Mid nineteenth Century

Figure 1.

Seaman's Ticket issued 1848 for Henry Sinclair, cook, born 1773 in Kingston Jamaica, who first went to sea aged six. Board of Trade Records. Public Record Office.

West Indian Seamen and the 'Black Atlantic'

The Emancipation Proclamation throughout the British Empire in 1834, although hedged around with qualifications to protect plantations from labour shortages, opened up the possibility of a legitimate escape from the plantations for many former slaves. Although the islands remained highly-stratified societies with largely mono-crop economies, deep-water seafaring was an option which promised economic, social and—perhaps—psychological, independence. Thus, it became an important alternative to plantation labour for thousands of Afro-Caribbean men during the nineteenth century.

A merchant seaman's wages were never especially attractive, and hardly showed any improvement in the course of the nineteenth century.¹ Yet notwithstanding low rates of pay seafarers had one enormous advantage over the generality of wage labourers ashore: they routinely received food and board in addition to their cash wages, which were generally paid as a lump sum at the end of the voyage. This circumstance made it possible for them to accumulate a small nest-egg to meet their material needs in (frequent) periods of unemployment, or to support a family. In some cases, it provided capital with which a thrifty seaman could purchase property, or even set himself up in business in a small way. Many an old sea-dog whiled away his retirement as proprietor of one of the innumerable 'rum-shops' that could be found in the narrow back streets of Caribbean ports, or dotting the Caribbean countryside.²

However, the significance of Afro-Caribbean seafaring was much more than economic. As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have shown, seafarers in the Atlantic World were in the vanguard of the formation of a 'multi-racial, multi-ethnic, international working class'.³ The task of pioneering methods of co-operation, association and collective struggle against capitalist exploitation fell largely to them, perhaps because the bonds born of close co-operation and community aboard ship could provide patterns for collective resistance ashore. Afro-Caribbean seafarers played a pivotal part in this, bringing with them the full repertoire of slave resistance to add to the arsenal of modern wage labour. It is no surprise that radical working-class movements around the fringes of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were replete with black leaders, such as Crispus Attucks, Olaudah Equiano, Robert Wedderburn, William Davidson and Denmark Vesey. All of them had begun their working lives as seafarers in the Caribbean.⁴

Within the Caribbean itself, in many territories the earliest Afro-Caribbean political associations were formed by seamen and wharf workers. These were in turn the prototypes for the first popular political parties in the Caribbean, that would lead the fight for political independence in the region in the mid twentieth century. In addition, Afro-Caribbean seamen were key transmitters of radical political ideas and movements to other parts of the (black) Atlantic world in these years. The Garveyite newspaper, Negro World (founded by the Jamaican Marcus Garvey), and the Communist organ, Negro Worker (edited by the Trinidadian George Padmore), both relied on a network of black seafarers for their distribution during the 1920s.⁵ It can be said, in short, that black seafarers provided the sinews which bound together the conceptual space which Paul Gilroy has called 'the black Atlantic'. It was for this reason that—wherever in the Atlantic world Afro-Caribbean seafarers settled—they posed a vital challenge to their host societies in social, cultural and political spheres, and were at times subjected to furious racial onslaughts by local authorities and governments as a consequence.⁶

Using the records of the Office of the Registrar-General of Seamen, which recorded information on seamen of all nationalities aboard British ships in the mid nineteenth century, this article presents a profile of this important segment of the international working class as it emerged immediately following Emancipation...