Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Wendy Wilson-Fall

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ