Free The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker

than the crew. At least the captain had an economic incentive to feed them and keep them alive during the Middle Passage. He wrote, “The slaves, with regard to attention paid to their health and diet, claim, from the purpose of the voyage, a condition superior to the seamen.” But he was quick to qualify the statement: “when the capricious and irascible passions of their general tyrant were once set afloat, I never could see any difference in the cruelty of their treatment.” He also argued against the standard proslavery refrain that “interest” would cause the captain to treat the “cargo” well. The “internal passions, that seem to be nourished in the very vitals of this employ, bid defiance to every power of controul.” The Demon Cruelty routinely battered and bested rational concerns.
    The ship was now full of its “sad freight.” Stanfield offered a powerful view of the enslaved jammed belowdecks at night:
     
Pack’d in close misery, the reeking crowd,
    Sweltering in chains, pollute the hot abode.
    In painful rows with studious art comprest,
    Smoking they lie, and breathe the humid pest:
    Moisten’d with gore, on the hard platform ground,
    The bare-rub’d joint soon bursts the painful bound;
    Sinks in the obdurate plank with racking force,
    And ploughs,—dire talk, its agonizing course!
     
Stanfield was conscious of the sounds of the slave ship—the “long groan,” “strain of anguish,” cries, death songs, “shrieks of woe and howlings of despair!” All in this instance were heard in the midnight hour. Sickness was a big part of the experience. Breathing “infected air” amid “green contagion,” the fevered lie “strew’d o’er the filthy deck.” Stanfield followed abolitionist surgeon Alexander Falconbridge in saying that the slave ship was “like a slaughterhouse. Blood, filth, misery, and disease.”
    Stanfield noted individual responses among the enslaved to this grim reality, which ranged from sad defeat to fiery indignation:
     
Look at yon wretch (a melancholy case!)
    Grief in his eye, despair upon his face;
    His fellow—see—from orbs of blood-shot ire
    On his pale tyrants dart the indignant fire!
     
Stanfield chronicled another horror of the Middle Passage, the opening, in the morning, of the grates and the emergence of the enslaved from sixteen hours of darkness belowdecks. Stanfield imagined the aperture as a “noisome cave,” even a monster’s mouth: from belowdecks the “rank maw, belched up in morbid steam, / The hot mist thickens in a side-long beam.” In “fetter’d pairs” the “drooping crowd” emerged. He described two men in particular who were “close united by the fest’ring chain.” They had to be lifted up from below. One had died overnight; one was still living. Once unshackled, the dead man would be “to the sea consign’d”; the corpse the “briny monsters seize with savage force.” Sharks, Stanfield understood, were part of the ship’s terror.
    The daily routine began, and “a joyless meal the tyrant-whites prepare.” For those who refused to eat, “stripe follows stripe, in boundless, brutal rage.” The pain of the whip caused some to faint. For those who were lashed and still refused to eat, the dreaded speculum oris was brought on deck:
     
Then: See the vile engines in the hateful cause
    Are plied relentless in the straining jaws
    The wrenching instruments with barbarous force
    Shew the detested food th’ unwilling course.
     
Two women, who were among “the finest slaves on the ship,” watched the violence and took rebellious action. They poignantly folded themselves in each other’s arms and “plunged over the poop of the vessel into the sea.” As they drowned, the other women “cried out in a most affecting manner, and many of them were preparing to follow their companions.” They were locked belowdecks immediately to prevent mass suicide.
    Stanfield recalled a night when the slaves on the lower deck were already