Читать книгу Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic - Wendy Wilson-Fall - Страница 12

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Shipmates

THIS CHAPTER BEGINS an inquiry into histories of Virginia slaves and family stories by and about slave descendants, stories that echo a sense of separation and displacement. Through historical records we gain some idea of what happened to Malagasy slaves who were brought all the way from the Indian Ocean to the Americas, and through family oral narratives we get a glimpse of how families perceive a Malagasy descent that shapes their identities. These are families of African descent who also claim Malagasy descent, as well as Anglo-American and in some cases Native American ancestors. The term shipmates is a fitting description of the social attachments that occurred during the middle passage,¹ meaning here not only the crossing of the Atlantic but the larger idea of the period between when people were forced from their villages in Madagascar and when they were led off of boats plying the York and Rappahannock Rivers onto plantation docks.

The transatlantic slave trade created multiple sites of tragedy, of transformation, and loss, as it also created riches. Hardship and bereavement occurred on the level of national territories on the African continent and in Madagascar, as well as among individuals and families.² That is to say, kingdoms suffered and were reduced, and noble classes or commoners were variously bereft as the anarchy that the slave trade engendered increased over time. Some slaves came from centralized polities, and some kingdoms thrived precisely because of their role in the trade; other slaves were from loosely centralized, clan-based communities that fled their homelands or created elaborate ritualized customs to mark the impact of slavery on their societies.³

Disjuncture, Transformation, and Loss

There were several important sites of importation of Malagasy slaves in the Americas (see chapter 1). These included La Plata in Argentina, Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Brazil, Massachusetts, and Virginia. In eighteenth-century Virginia, an unusual number of captives, more than one thousand, arrived from Madagascar within a short period of time (three years) to a geographically and socially limited space in the Tidewater region. It is worth noting that of the 1,466 who arrived in Virginia during this short period, a little over a thousand were landed at the York River.⁴ Such a large infusion of one language group during a short period would have made a noticeable impact on Tidewater slave communities. Over the subsequent century, Malagasy, continental Africans, and their descendants adjusted to a life of forced labor in Virginia, where their survival depended on their personal and community resourcefulness.

The Virginia planter families were proud of their heritage and power, and from the mid-eighteenth century on their descendants engaged in what I call hyperhistoricity, creating a society where family history, pedigree, and wealth were the currency that bound them together as the planter class. Partly in pride as Anglo-Americans, partly still identifying with elite families and individuals in England, the Virginians took the question of family social standing very seriously.⁵ These preoccupations no doubt reverberated with their slaves, who were the children (and victims) of kingdoms, emirates, and chieftaincies. The planters’ displays of power and pomp constituted a symbolic language that their slaves would have recognized. Like their captives, the elite Virginians of the eighteenth century also engaged in reinvention of their identities as Anglo-Americans on one hand and inheritors of a “homeland” culture, in this case British practices, on the other. Dutch, German, Huguenot, and Irish settlers were in the minority at this time, and few were part of the elite planter class in Virginia.

Historical records do not by themselves transmit the sense of loss and trauma that slaves experienced, but they do inform us of where slaves were, and when. Unfortunately, though the written record tells us where the “blacks” were, or where the “slaves” were, they do not tell us who those people were. They rarely refer to the captives as individuals and give little information about the lives of the slaves. Oral and written narratives produced by slave descendants may provide a means of adding texture and depth to the story told by statistics, but we cannot say for sure that these families are direct descendants of those Malagasy captives who arrived between 1719 and 1721. Their narratives do, however, fill a particular gap—What do American descendants of slaves think today? How do they feel?—and thus provide a new perspective on a shared story of America’s involvement in the Indian Ocean slave trade.

In the first part of this chapter a historical discussion will present information from archival and secondary sources about the trade of slaves from Madagascar and their arrival in Virginia. In the second part, an example of a contemporary family narrative will be presented with a discussion about the possible meanings of a narrative apparently reaching back to the eighteenth century.

The Historical Record

The voyages that led to the deportation of captives toward Barbados and Virginia were exploratory; American investors hoped to acquire slaves and, under cover of this activity, trade with pirates for silver and India goods to which they previously had no direct access. They also hoped to find new sources of cheap slave labor. In the seventeenth century, slaves from Madagascar were selling for only ten shillings worth of goods each, while slaves from West Africa during the same period could sell for as much as three or four British pounds apiece. By the early eighteenth century, slaves from Madagascar were still cheaper than their West African counterparts, but the voyages to the western Indian Ocean were more expensive.⁶

The instability of Robert Walpole’s South Sea venture (which eventually impoverished many British elite) led some Anglo-American colonists, such as Robert “King” Carter of Virginia, one of the wealthy great planters, to search for ways to offset the losses they anticipated from that fiasco.⁷ Though they knew they were taking a risk, they did not foresee that their access to the Indian Ocean trade would once again be closed by the British Parliament by the end of 1723. It was general knowledge that such a long trajectory was bound to be deleterious to slave cargo, but the trip offered the bonus of direct access to East India goods. The slaves became the “legal” commodity of that commerce, and their trade was justified by their relatively cheap price compared to West African markets.⁸

Except for two short periods—between the 1670s and 1698 and from 1716 to the end of 1721—no goods (Negroes having also been classed as commodities) were supposed to come directly to the American colonies from east of the Cape of Good Hope during the period of colonial prohibition to the Indian Ocean trade.⁹ In spring 1721 Capt. Joseph Stretton, whom we encountered in the previous chapter, was suspected by members of Parliament of having traded with pirates while in Madagascar on a slaving voyage. These actions had a serious impact on their view of Anglo-American colonist activity in the Indian Ocean. This is evident in a letter sent from London to Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia, relating to “Joseph Stretton of the Prince Eugene” and “his being concerned with Pirates.” The letter suggested that Stretton would be called to England to go before British authorities.¹⁰ Though trade with pirates was suspected of Captain Stretton, by that time the sanctioned trade had already transported thousands of Malagasy slaves and India goods, and most of the pirates had been chased away from their settlements in eastern Madagascar. After 1718 it was not pirates but private ships belonging to Anglo-Americans and their British commercial partners that traded in captives.

The Malagasy Middle Passage

The Malagasy slave experience was at the nexus of the western Indian Ocean slave trade and the trade of the Atlantic Ocean. Their tragedy was at the intersection of those two worlds and is an example of the globalization that began with the birth of capitalism and its transnational networks. Their movement, along with that of captives from Mozambique, describes the beginning of the end of the pirate heyday and the emergence of the nation-state, with its huge maritime companies, and the private slave traders, who competed with or were contracted by national bureaucracies.

North American planters contracted with British merchant houses in London and Bristol, such as that of Micajah Perry, in order to invest in the Madagascar slave trade and other enterprises.¹¹ From 1719 to 1721 roughly 1,450 slaves were brought from Madagascar to Virginia, and the average time for a voyage was well beyond the three months allowed for the West Africa trade; vessels bound for Madagascar were allotted about fifteen or sixteen months for the whole trip.¹² By virtue of surviving the traumatic experience of the Middle Passage together, captives were bonded by the terror and dislocation they experienced. The slave ship “was a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory. . . . The slave ship also contained a war within, as the crew (now prison guards) battled slaves (prisoners), the one training its guns on the others, who plotted escape and insurrection.”¹³ The length of the trip once leaving the coast must have made it especially grueling, although the fact that captives could speak with one another was an unusual luxury in the context of the overall conditions of the Atlantic slave trade.

Historian Stephanie Smallwood eloquently states that “individual paths of misfortune merged into the commodifying Atlantic apparatus—the material, economic, and social mechanisms by which the market molded subjects into beings that more closely resembled objects—beings that existed solely for the use of those who claimed them as possessions.”¹⁴ Slave weight and the space they occupied had to balance silver, Indian cotton, and other pirate booty to assure a smooth and profitable voyage for ships traveling from the western Indian Ocean into Atlantic waters. Another scholar, Marcus Rediker, sees the slave ship as a factory that had as its mission the production of slaves; their transformation was from culturally grounded human beings to isolated, psychologically traumatized beings who would be manipulated by raw power. In his view, “sailors also ‘produced’ slaves within the ship as factory, doubling their economic value as they moved them from African based markets to those of the West, helping to create the labor power that animated a growing world economy in the eighteenth century and after. In producing workers for the plantation, the ship-factory also produced ‘race.’”¹⁵

The production of race had its corresponding resistance from the object of its intentions. From the moment of their entry on the slave ship, we must imagine that the people who were captive began to plot their spiritual and psychic, if not their physical, response. As well, language undoubtedly played a critical role in sustaining a sense of personality for the captives.¹⁶ We can visualize this encounter, situated as it is at the crucible of modern capitalism, as a conflict between the emerging modern epistemology of race and disappearing Old World epistemologies of culture.

One probable stopping place for ships leaving Madagascar was Saint Helena, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Descriptions of the conditions of slaves there give us an idea of the horror of the captive’s experience and the dehumanizing effects the slave trade had on the slavers themselves. Among the archival documents that survive the busy shipping era of that island, there is a journal written by the nephew of Robert Brooke, the island’s governor. In reading the journal, one is struck by the seeming stark loneliness and inhumanity of this place, which treated sailors only a little better than it did the slaves who were so unfortunate to end up there. Passages from the journal demonstrate that agricultural products from Madagascar were imported there along with slaves fairly regularly.

That many of the slaves on Saint Helena were from Madagascar is evidenced by written documents that highlight the importance of navigation routes of the time, and Saint Helena was undoubtedly a transnational space where the two ocean trade networks, the Indian and the Atlantic commercial routes, converged. For example, in 1715 the directors of the New East India Company (a later iteration of the East India Company that was formed in 1698) required that along with the privilege of trade licenses for the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, licensees were required to deliver nine slaves at the company’s settlement on the island for every £500 worth of goods: “those delivered were to be between the ages of 16 and 30, two-thirds male and one-third female, all natives of Madagascar, sound and healthy, and ‘every way merchantable.’” This is corroborated by other scholars, who report that in 1676 all English ships trading to Madagascar that stopped at Saint Helena were required to leave one Negro, male or female, as the governor chose.¹⁷ If all licensed ships were required to stop there, then that would have included those carrying Malagasy cargo to Virginia between 1715 and 1721.

In March 1716 licenses were taken out by Thomas White for three ships and a sloop, by Heysham and Company for one ship, and by Sir Randolph Knipe and Sir John Fryer for their vessel, the Hamilton Galley, for the Madagascar trade. The Hamilton Galley arrived in Barbados from Madagascar on July 23, 1717, carrying two hundred slaves, and continued on to Virginia.¹⁸ It is possible that the “dangerous distempers” described in the text on Saint Helena were the cause of the “distemper of the eyes” that plagued a cargo from Madagascar that Virginia planter Robert “King” Carter complained about a year later (see below).¹⁹ In 1758 two ships, the Mercury and the Fly, arrived at Saint Helena after having bought slaves in Madagascar. In all, twenty-six men were landed at Saint Helena from these two ships—sixteen men and ten boys.²⁰ In the Saint Helena archives another ship is mentioned that we earlier noted continued on to Virginia on at least one voyage, the Prince Eugene.

The ships that departed from eastern Madagascar were probably loaded with slaves from there, rather than slaves from Mozambique transshipped eastward across the north from Majunga (which occurred later). By this time the Betsimisaraka were already trading in slaves from the eastern regions (see chapter 1), and in fact some slaves were being transshipped in the opposite direction, westward by land, to the Bay of Boina. Ocean-bound Madagascar slaves were probably from the same or contiguous regions, and the ships almost, if not exclusively, filled with captives from Madagascar. These slaving vessels were not filled with people from starkly different ethnicities and nations, as was the case for most slave ships who packed in slave cargo from several ports along the West African coast.²¹

It is probable that at least some of the Malagasy destined for the ports of Virginia also were offloaded at Saint Helena for a short break. I have not been able to verify that all slaves on the five ships that arrived between 1719 and 1721 were actually disembarked there. However, it is likely that they were, because this was a chance to clean the lower decks, wash them down, and improve the health, however marginally, of the captive cargo. Further, the trajectory was a long one, and a stop at Saint Helena’s was a way to keep valuable slave cargo alive. From the slaves’ point of view, it is likely that some friends and relations were lost to each ship’s captive community at this juncture. We do know that the Prince Eugene and the Mercury disembarked some slaves at Saint Helena. We can extrapolate from this that long before arriving in the Americas, the captives experienced many dislocations, losses, and tragedies that included but were not limited to death on the high seas. Indeed, death and loss lurked everywhere along the trajectory they followed.²²

Arriving in Virginia: The Other Middle Passage

The shipmates’ fragile communities were fractured again upon their arrival on the shores of Virginia and its inland rivers. Many authors have written about the trauma of this fourth great fracture for enslaved captives. The first trauma was the site of capture or initial sale—the moment when the slave was separated from family, familiar landmarks, friends, and an imagined future in his or her community. In fact, recent research has also shown that it was not uncommon for shipmates to find relatives and neighbors who were caught up in the same raid, although these would usually be a small group within the larger cargo.²³ The second great trauma was the slave factory—the holding pens where slaves from various origins within a region and even beyond were pushed together to become one strange, polyglot, frightened, and powerless community. For the captives of eastern Madagascar, small offshore islands were sometimes used to lodge women and men separately.²⁴ The next stage of the ordeal was the forced descent into the slave ship itself. This was the experience of the below decks, where suffering was great, people were disoriented, and sickness and death were as intimate company as the living bodies and the odoriferous wood to which people were chained. This situation, perhaps more than any other, gives proof of the resiliency of human beings. For in this floating prison, as Rediker rightly calls it, new relationships were built on the basis of shared suffering, shared witness, and shared survival.²⁵ The consequent disruption of these new and fragile relationships caused by ensuing sales at arrival points was another cause of trauma for shipmates arriving in the New World. Despondency, despair, and even “torpid insensibility” were common descriptions of the condition of the enslaved when they first came aboard a slave ship or arrived at their first American port.

We can thus imagine the Malagasy ancestors wrenched again from a newly familiar community, only to enter into other smaller boats, or to remain aboard the big ships, as people were dropped off at river ports, such as the docks along the James, Pamunkey, York, and Rappahannock Rivers that belonged to the great Virginia planters.

Thus came another round of painful separations, and it is easy to imagine the dislocation and shock that must have continued to settle into the psyche of these unfortunate travelers. Planters and ship captains alike saw this “melancholy” that afflicted slave cargoes as a management issue that had to be considered along with other slaving risks if one was going to make a go of the venture. Many slaves were thought simply to “pine away” or to go mad. If there was an advantage for those slaves who disembarked at Saint Helena, it must have been that they would find themselves in creole communities much marked by a Malagasy presence, which would not be the case for their fellows who continued on to Virginia.²⁶