Stephanie E. Smallwood

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Stephanie E. Smallwood | African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic

POWER was nowhere more precariously held in the early modern Atlantic than aboard a slave ship. Because their cargoes were unwilling travelers, slave ships were distinguished by the unmitigated contest between African captives and the European seamen charged to transport them to American markets: between slaves with superior strength in numbers and sailors desperate to prevent rebellious uprising by any means necessary. Though it is true that "perhaps no more than one slave voyage in ten experienced an actual outbreak" of revolt, scholars accept as axiomatic Michael Craton's further suggestion that "few voyages were ever completed without the discovery or threat of slave conspiracy, and no slaving captain throughout the history of the Atlantic trade ever sailed without a whole armory of guns and chains plus as many white crewmen as he could recruit and keep alive to act as seaborne jailers." David Eltis's characterization of the slave ship as a place where "naked physical force determined who would be in control" and where "any relaxation of vigilance or reduction in the amount of force available would mean rebellion" seems squarely on the mark.¹ Yet slave ships were more complex than the reliance on naked physical force suggests. The dynamics of power aboard ship could also be affected by the use of African "guardians": slaves appointed to police fellow captives during the Atlantic crossing.	1
Slave ships were distinguished from other merchant vessels by their higher crew-per-ton ratios; nonetheless, crews were outnumbered by more than eight to one aboard English ships in the late seventeenth century. If arms were a vital accompaniment to manpower aboard all merchant vessels, they were especially so aboard ships carrying Africans as captive passengers. "We always keep centinels upon the hatchways," explained Captain Thomas Phillips in the journal of his slaving voyage aboard the Hannibal in 1693, "and have a chest of small arms, ready loaden and prim'd, constantly lying at hand upon the quarter-deck, together with some granada shells; and two of our quarter-deck guns, pointing on the deck thence, and two more out of the steerage, the door of which is always kept shut, and well barr'd." "As you have guns and men," the owner of the Caesar instructed Captain William Ellery, "I doubt not you'll make a good use of them if required." Another directive to an eighteenth-century slave ship captain read: "Let your Great Guns and small Armes be Loaded and in readiness for use and Service upon any occasion that may happen."²	2
If naked physical force was a resource captains needed, it also was just as important that they minimize their need to ever put such force to direct use against their human cargoes. In 1750 slaving captain John Newton "fixed 4 swivel blunderbusses in the barricado" of his ship, the Duke of Argyle. Yet he expected that these muzzle-loading firearms together with "the 2 carriage guns we put thro' at the Bonanoes" would "make a formidable appearance upon the main deck, and will, I hope," he wrote, "be sufficient to intimidate the slaves from any thoughts of an insurrection."³ Only by disabusing slaves of the notion that there was something to be gained by rebellion did captains get from Africa to the Americas without either the loss of investors' human property or casualties among the crew. A slave captain's control resided as much in the depth and content of his symbolic power as in the real physical force at his command. The most secure slave ship was not necessarily the one with the largest crew or the biggest guns but rather that vessel where social relationships of power prevailed such that captives were effectively persuaded against ever challenging their captors to a physical contest.	. . .

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