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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ