Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807 (review)

This study of the crews of English slave ships addresses significant gaps in the history of maritime labor and the history of oceanic slave trade. In contrast, the merchants and captains of slaving voyages have received close attention, and an academic industry focuses on the quantitative data about the captives who comprised the cargo. Rediker includes slave ship crews in his analysis of maritime workers in the early days of capitalism; this work develops an original perspective out of the details.¹

Christopher centers her study on the ironies and complexities of these mariners' work. Often crimped and impressed into service on this least desirable of all types of ship, the sailors also served as the instruments of oppression of their captive charges, transforming them into commodities to be sold—yet again—in the New World. The loyalties and actions of sailors in the slave trade, Christopher argues, "defy any easy classification." Her task, then, is that of "unraveling some of these complexities" (18–19).

The study, while demonstrably central to the understanding of maritime labor, is not made any easier by the available data. The sources with which the author works center on the testimonies and journals of sailors and of ships' officers, the notes collected by the redoubtable Thomas Clarkson in his documentation of the evils of slave trade, and records of the High Court of the Admiralty.² The book addresses the years 1730 to 1807, but focuses in practice on the last three decades of that period, both because of the greater density of documents and because the numbers of slave ships and sailors at that time were twice that of the preceding half-century. In addition, the author cites the secondary literature on maritime life broadly, situating her evidence and outlook in the issues and debates.

The book conveys an interpretive tension: Most of it focuses on the processes, repeated from year to year, of the recruitment and labors of the sailors, as well as their struggles with captains and captives. Part of it, however, seeks to elucidate a pattern of historical change. Most centrally, Christopher amplifies Davis' vision of slavery and freedom.³ She argues that sailors contributed to the Atlantic call for liberty in the late eighteenth century by emphasizing their difference from slaves (227–228. Thus, the slave trade created ideologies both of blackness and whiteness, in which those identified as white, though demeaned as sailors, gained a badge of their superiority and a demand for their liberty in the accident of their birth. Christopher writes elegantly, but the sparseness of documentation means that these issues of long-term change require more study.

For the repeated travails of each voyage, meanwhile, Christopher pieces together insightful observations about the recruitment of seamen, the multicultural composition of the mariners, the lives of sailors in the months of their service on the African coast, the complex range of sexual relations among sailors and African women (both slave and free), the transatlantic voyage, and the delivery of slaves—followed by the discharging of many sailors in the Caribbean. This monographic study will ensure greater attention to the hundreds of thousands of sailors who served on slave ships.