In an attempt to defend the slave trade prominent merchant James Baillie commented that sailors are not also free, given that many o f them were stolen away to sea. He stated, “have we not also heard. Sir, even in this country o f boasted liberty, o f seamen’s being kidnapped and carried away, when returning from distant voyages, after an absence o f many years, and that even without being allowed
There was a larger context to these issues as sailors had long been considered to be “bondsmen of the sea”. The term ‘galley slave’, which originally referred to enslaved oarsmen on Greek or Roman galleys had come to symbolise any person condemned to drudgery, so closely tied were seafaring and moil in the view of contemporary society. This linguistic linkage of seafaring and slavery was so ubiquitous as to be hackneyed—sailors had long called their time on shore ‘liberty,’ their time at sea, by implication, being seen as a period of bondage. The term master referred to both captain and slaveowner. Even during the parliamentary inquiry into the slave trade, this rhetoric was common. Naval man Sir George Young, for example, reported that slaver seamen repeatedly asked him for refuge “from their owners.” '^’ Slaver captain and surgeon John Knox claimed that ‘landsmen’ died more frequently than seamen on a Guinea voyage because they were “unseasoned”. H i s comment had some truth behind it, but it is his choice of language that is particularly evocative of the practice of seasoning slaves in the West Indies.
What is indisputable, however, is that waged labour set sailors decisively apart from the captive Africans they would forcibly transport by placing them on a different level in the fiscal landscape— merchant sailors were not commodities in themselves. Sailors, whatever the violence and brutality pervading their working lives, were basically free men, with a wealth of choices beyond those enjoyed by slaves.
Critically, their lowly position did not, of course, threaten to thwart their posterity in perpetuity as was the fate o f those they transported as slaves. Yet sailors did face both the pull factor of wages paid, and the rather more direct means o f compulsion and naked force. They were ostensibly free men whose working conditions were compared in contemporary language with bonded labour. Seamen were paid to administer the whip while their backs often proudly bore the marks o f this particular correctional aid themselves.
The fact that the European men whose own freedom was most in doubt understood the nature o f true slavery through first-hand contact profoundly affected the nature of freedom in the Atlantic world. Sailors were rhetorically labelled slaves
the comfort o f seeing their wives and families.” James Baillie, The Speech o f James Baillie. esq.. Agent for Grenada, in the House o f Commons, on the Question o f the Abolition o f the Slave Trade (London, 1792) 5.
ZHC 1/84 201-10.
ZHC 1/82 84: Evidence o f John Knox. This was probably true because new arrivals on the African coast died at the very high rate o f between 300 and 700 per thousand per annum. Philip D. Curtin, “’The White Man’s Grave’: Image and Reality, 1780-1850” Journal o f British Studies 1 (1961) 94-110.
and the same language used to express their state with that of plantation slaves. Those who had worked on slave ships knew it was inappropriate. They had scraped the blood, vomit and faeces o f true incarceration from the holds o f their ship, the men being too tightly bound to be allowed the most basic of dignities. They had held a cat-o’-nine-tails over those too melancholy and despairing to eat. They had loaded human cattle onto their ships and disgorged the survivors from the rancid holds to be sold into ceaseless bondage. They had moved men and women from lands where to have black skin was universal to places where its stigma was ingrained in society. Those who had lain with captive African women knew that any children so conceived would be slaves in perpetuity. Slave ship sailors, even if they cared little for these matters, knew them to be true.
Unsurprisingly these men expanded their tenuous links to freedom at every opportunity. They had plenty of scope, for these most well travelled and worldly- wise of men not only encountered the realities of African enslavement, they also saw its antipodal creation up close. As liberty took on new tenure and became an
increasingly racialised phenomenon, seamen onboard slave ships were uniquely placed to process this information, as they were quite literally in the eye of the storm of this transformation. What they never forgot, and indeed could not forget given the circumstances of those they transported below decks, was that payment that allowed a decent standard of living was central to ideas of liberty. Political and social rights were, and are, essentially meaningless without the economic resources to back them up.
So the argument comes full circle, back to the protesters on the streets of Liverpool and Boston for whom fair pay and liberty were indivisible parts o f the larger idea of justice, while the spectre of racism loomed ever larger on their horizon. The transition to capitalism theoretically ensured the primacy o f labour that was both free and waged, but seamen felt that they were badly treated on both counts. What is more, those employed on slave ships worked in a trade in which the importance of both of these benefits were the fundamentals which separated them from those they transported. The racialisation of freedom and waged labour was also tightly tied to the trade in slaves, as each slave ship arriving in the Americas fuelled the menacing, repellent appetite of western racism ever more. The issues that compelled men to march the streets of the major port cities around the Atlantic rim demanding better pay and freedom from all kinds of oppression, were central implications o f the slave
trade. Seamen’s radicalism, as shown by the 1775 Liverpool strike, was the result, at least in part, o f their employment in this most hated of trades. The reasons why sailors’ fights were often alongside men o f African origin, in defiance o f the larger ethics of the trade, will be examined in the next chapter.