Hmmm – this looks like an interesting & IMPORTANT read – Check out this perspective of the slave ship‘s contribution to slavery not only in transporting slaves but also in establishing the tone of life in the new world – thru the dynamics of culture and the life of violence/abuse, racism and class that existed aboard the slave ship not only with the stolen Africans; but, also with the white poor and often criminal crew
…The Slave Ship Embodies the Whole Story of Slavery
Nirit Ben-Ari interviews Marcus Rediker, author of “The Slave Ship: A Human History”
…“The whole concept of race was created aboard the slave ships. The people who boarded the slave ships did not speak the same language and were often members of ethnic groups that were enemies on land. Many multi-ethnic Africans boarded the ships as Fante, Igbo, Mandinka, but were unloaded as members of the Negro race, so-called. That new entity was created under the pressure of violence and terror. I thought I could make a contribution by studying the slave ships, where this relationship was forged.”
The idea that the slave ships produced the notion of “race” is the book’s major contribution to the study of the period of slavery. “In producing workers for the plantation, the ship-factory also produced ‘race,’” Rediker writes. “At the beginning of the voyage, captains hired a motley crew of sailors, who would, on the coast of Africa, become ‘white men.’ At the beginning of the Middle Passage [across the Atlantic], captains loaded on board the vessel a multi-ethnic collection of Africans, who would, in the American port, become ‘black people’ or a ‘Negro race.’ The voyage thus transformed those who made it…”
…You describe the ships as a prison, a factory to produce slaves. Can they be thought of in terms of a floating Auschwitz?
…“The ship was a concentration camp, an enclosure of human bodies. Here’s the difference: The point of the slave trade was not to kill people. The point of the slave trade was to get as many living bodies as possible to the New World in order to use them to make money. The idea was not to kill people, even though there were millions of deaths of what we would call ‘collateral damage.’
“In addition, the slave trade went on for 370 years. That in some ways makes it not better, but worse. It went on forever, and its horrors were known to a great many people. The reason it went on is that it was so profitable, because slavery was a centerpiece of international capitalism of those days, and they had to have these bodies. I call slavery the ‘African holocaust.’ I think the millions who died deserve that word…
...To use Hannah Arendt’s term, do you think the evil of the captains and sailors was characterized by “banality”?
“I would be leery of making a moral category like evil primary to our understanding, because evil is a culturally relative term and there are many different ways to understand it. The larger question that Arendt raises is how individuals get caught up in that machinery, without necessarily knowing what the system actually is. I think a lot of people on slave ships did have a pretty good idea of the larger picture of the transatlantic slave trade. Especially the captains, who visited slave plantations in the New World and knew about the production of sugar for the world market. They loaded the sugar onto the same vessels and sailed back to their home port.
“As for the sailors, they died in roughly the same proportion as the slaves, and many of them were forsaken, hungry and sick. The primary causes of the slave trade were the wealthy merchants who owned the ships and organized the trade and made sure that the plantation owners had slaves to produce the sugar. You have to see the system. The sailors signed on for the ship because they had no other way of getting money. Some of them didn’t even sign on, they were taken straight from jail. They were forced laborers, shanghaied.”
Indeed, this is perhaps the most stunning discovery of Rediker’s study — that the drama of the slaves was not the only drama being played out on the ships. The fact is that there were not two but three classes of people on the slave ships. Whereas the captains were the agents of the owners of capital who owned the plantations and the ships, and raked in handsome profits from the slave trade, the ordinary sailors and deckhands were poor white folk from the lower classes. Often they were sold to the slave ships by their debtors, or taken straight from prison, forced to serve their prison term on a slave ship. Rediker found that control on the ship was based on violence meted out to the sailors with the same degree as it was wielded against the captives. In some cases, sailors and deckhands were beaten to death. They received paltry portions of food, their wages were low and their mortality rate high. When the ship arrived in the West Indies, the captain got rid of them, as they were not needed for the voyage back. Many were in a poor state of health, suffering from malaria, retinal diseases, worms, ulcers and parasites. Sick and incapable of working, they became beggars in the ports of the countries in which they were abandoned.
Does their victimhood absolve them of a charge of moral failure?
“Not at all. They are part of it. Their labor is part of the story. But we do have to understand that a slave ship captain, who by today’s standards made hundreds of thousands of dollars on a given voyage, was in a very different situation than a sailor who may have been a forced laborer or was dumped overboard…”
via Critical Legal Thinking.com
– Quest for the sunken slave ship which claimed 664 lives
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