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More than 3 million African men, women and children are thought to have crossed the Atlantic on British slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British carried more Africans into slavery than any other people excepting the Portuguese, and between 1660 and 1807, when the British trade was abolished, every second slave entering the ‘New World’ arrived on a British ship.1 Since the 1960s, the history of Britain’s role in the slave trade has been explored in depth by economic and social historians and (increasingly) by archaeologists too. Yet despite all that has been written, huge gaps remain in our understanding. This is true even for ‘Middle Passage’,2 the initial sea voyage that took captive Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas.

I am an historical archaeologist, with a special interest in the archaeology of slavery from the Roman era to the nineteenth century. In 2001, I was awarded a Caird Senior Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, to initiate a project entitled Material Culture of the Middle Passage. This ongoing project seeks answers to two very basic questions about the material culture of the Middle Passage: what artefacts would be found on a ship making such a journey? And can examples of these be found in British museums?

I recently moved to the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and am now writing a book that takes its name from my Greenwich project. The present contribution sets out the aims and scope of my Middle Passage research, and describes the artefact categories identified in the course of my work on collections in London, Liverpool and Bristol. At the same time, this paper makes an appeal for information about similar materials in collections outside the major port cities of the slave trade. Any information on relevant material can be sent to the postal/email address at the end of this paper, and will be gratefully received.

What we know

Stowage plan of the Liverpool ship Brooks (1789), Repro ID E0406. This Liverpool vessel was named after its co-owner Joseph Brooks, Jr., a Liverpool merchant. The ship made four slaving voyages (Liverpool-Gold Coast-Jamaica) between 1781-6, and was one of nine vessels measured in 1788 for a Parliamentary enquiry into the British slave trade. In the spring of 1789, the year after an Act of Parliament was passed reducing the carrying capacity of slave ships, the London Committee of SEAST (the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade) published this engraving of the Brooks (mistakenly referring to the ship as the Brookes). Titled Description of a Slave Ship, this image was based on the measurements presented to Parliament, and also made use of an earlier plan of the Brooks produced by the Plymouth Committee of the SEAST in December 1788. The more detailed 1789 Description presents a series of diagrammatic plans and overviews of the slave decks to illustrate the point that, even under the new regulations, slave ships were desperately overcrowded. In all, 442 individuals are shown packed into the vessel’s hold. The Description quickly became the most widely disseminated, and most frequently reproduced, of all slave ship images. It was a key propaganda tool for the abolition movements in Britain, France and America. Ship models based on the Description were also made for two leading abolitionists, William Wilberforce and the Compte de Mirabeau. As the text accompanying this engraving pointed out, the number of slaves carried on the Brooks on the four voyages made before the 1788 Act far exceeded even the large number shown here. On each of those trips she carried over 600 people, and in 1785 the figure reached 704.3 This was achieved by stowing the slaves ‘spoonwise’ (head-to-toe in an extended foetal position)

'Sandown in the Floating Dock'. An illustrated page from the log of the slaver Sandown, by Samuel Gamble (1793-4) LOG M/21 Repro ID E0063. Detailed little paintings like this one adorn Gamble’s Sandown log. It is hard for the modern reader to reconcile what is in many ways a beautiful manuscript with its content, but the document itself is testimony to the pride Gamble took in his work as a slave ship master.

We do know a good deal about certain aspects of the Middle Passage. Recent important developments in the statistical synthesis and presentation of archive data mean that we know more now than we have ever done about where the human cargoes of slave ships came from, where they were taken, the mortality rates on board slaving vessels, and the overall volume of what was called the ‘Guinea trade’. In addition to the archive data, a large number of plans, paintings and scale models of slave ships survive today. Some of these, like the infamous stowage plan of the Liverpool slaver Brooks, are widely recognised images both of an iniquitous trade, and of the hard-fought campaign to abolish it.

Many more images (some rarely reproduced) can be found in libraries and museums throughout Britain. Finally, in addition to these images, many first-hand accounts of Middle Passage voyages have survived. As discussed, below, sea logs are the most important category of ‘eyewitness’ testimony for my purposes, but others include memoirs written in retirement, and accounts gathered by abolitionists. Many of the latter were collected before or during Parliamentary inquiries into the British slave trade conducted between 1788 and 1792. The official records of these proceedings are also an important source of additional evidence.4 

This wealth of data about the Middle Passage has found its way into publications on many different aspects of the slave trade. But (leaving to one side the important body of statistical work mentioned above), very few studies have treated the Middle Passage as a specific experience in the lives of both Africans and English sailors. Instead, the sea crossing tends to be regarded as a single chapter in a longer story: that of the African diaspora.5 Equally importantly, archaeologists and other scholars with an interest in the material culture of the slave trade (that is, in the material ‘things’ created by slaves, slave traffickers and owners, and all those touched by the trade in human beings) have virtually ignored slave ships themselves. Even more surprisingly, few attempts have been made to study the material culture of slave ships together with documentary and pictorial sources in order to develop a more rounded picture of the unique experience that was a Middle Passage crossing.6 In other words, nobody has attempted to write an historical archaeology of the Middle Passage. That is the ultimate aim of the present project.

Slave ships as social spaces

Any ship, once it puts to sea, becomes a world of its own: a mobile community bounded by water. For those on board, the ship becomes the world, if only until the voyage ends. Thus a slave ship was not simply a thing of timber and sails, it was also a social space. Those confined together within that space lived according to – and sometimes challenged and tried to resist – the routines and rules specific to it. The wooden world of the slave ship was a temporary one, of course, and its rules were hastily and unwillingly learned for the most part. But even so, it is possible to consider these vessels as social spaces, in which members of a community learned and practiced a specific way of living. Archaeologists sometimes employ the term praxis to describe the relationship between ‘social actors’ (people) and social practices (the things people learn to do as members of a specific community). My research aims to demonstrate that by better defining the praxis of the Middle Passage, we will have a much clearer understanding of what those on board slave ships – black and white – actually experienced.

Combining documents and artefacts

Pages from the log of the slave ship African, written by Captain John Newton (1752-53). LOG M/46. Repro ID E0066.

My project makes detailed use of selected contemporary accounts of slaving voyages. Sea logs are an especially useful source of information in this respect, because they provide very detailed information about daily routines and practices on slave ships. The manuscripts of two important logs (by slave ship masters John Newton and Samuel Gamble) are in the care of the National Maritime Museum, and I have located many further examples, both published and unpublished. Manuscripts can be hidden away in the most surprising places, however, and I would be eager to hear news of additional examples of unpublished slave ship logs.

Sea logs, compiled as a voyage progressed, are themselves part of the material culture of the Middle Passage: that is to say, they are artefacts7 of the trade in human beings. Important thought they are, however, logs are not the only surviving artefacts of the ‘triangular’ trade. Ships – along with their fittings and the many material ‘things’ they transported – are artefacts of the Middle Passage too. These artefacts have stories to tell about the past, just as the voyage narratives themselves do.

The London slave ship Henrietta Marie, wrecked off the coast of Florida in 1700. © Peter Copeland/Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society. Reproduced with permission.

Archaeologists specialise in the study of the material things left by past societies, yet very few have sought to identify the artefacts – from cooking pots to trade beads – specific to slaving voyages. One reason that archaeologists have been reluctant to engage with the Middle Passage is simply that no slave ship has survived, as Marcus Wood memorably puts it, ‘to become a site for memory’.8 Today, we can still walk upon the decks of Nelson’s flagship, and smell the tea that perfumes the timbers of the clipper Cutty Sark; but not a single slave ship has survived the sea. A small number of wrecks have been identified, and a flurry of activity in the last five years has brought several potentially important new sites to light. To date, however, marine archaeologists have explored very few of these wrecks in any detail and only two examples – the English Henrietta Marie (1700) and the Danish Fredensborg (1789) – were actively engaged in the slave trade at the time they were lost.9

Artefacts from ‘surviving’ slave ships like the Henrietta Marie speak to us about the transatlantic trade with a powerful voice, and for that reason alone, it is truly unfortunate that we do not have more wreck sites to work with. But there are other voices, and other ways in which we can study the material culture of the Middle Passage. At the simplest level, many of the artefacts used on slave ships were common to merchant ships in general, and many examples of these artefacts can be found in Britain’s maritime museums. More satisfactorily, contemporary images and documentary sources can help us to identify a range of material things – from trade goods to food supplies, from hold modifications to shackles and other restraints – more specific to slaving voyages. Using this approach, I have isolated a series of artefact categories that have the potential to improve our understanding of the social spaces of the Middle Passage.

From merchant ship to slave ship: the technology of ‘Guineamen’

The Capture of the Slaver Boladora, 6 June 1829. Repro ID BHC0624. Though barely visible here, the painting illustrates deck netting which was employed to prevent escape and suicide attempts by slaves.

It has long been argued that ‘slavers’ were simply regular merchant vessels with modified holds, and this rather simplistic view has stalled research into the changing appearance of slaving vessels in the course of their lengthy ‘triangular’ voyage. As a result, we know little about the personnel and skills required to make these adaptations, or about the impact of these changes upon shipboard living conditions. One aim of my work is to demonstrate that combined analysis of slave shipping legislation, voyage narratives, paintings and ship models can give us a better understanding of the routine series of modifications – mainly carried out as vessels lay off the coast of Africa negotiating for slaves – that transformed merchant ships designed to transport inanimate cargoes into slave ships designed to transport, under duress, cargoes of human beings.

Models of slaving vessels are, of course, an important strand of evidence here. I am attempting to compile a corpus of slave ship models in British museums, and would be grateful to know of examples (of any date) to be found beyond the major British port cities. I should also like to identify further examples of paintings of British slaving vessels depicting temporary modifications such as deck ‘slave houses’, netting, and ‘barricadoes’ (timber partitions stretching across the quarterdeck, thereby securing the area used by slaves brought up from the hold).

Slaves below decks. Lt. Francis Meynell served in HM Sloop Albatross and HM Brig Star, both engaged in anti-slaving operations off the coast of Africa. This painting depicts conditions below decks on the Portuguese/Brazilian vessel Albaroz, captured by HM Albatross in 1845. Repro ID D9317

Contemporary images of conditions and stowage arrangements on board slaving vessels are another important avenue of enquiry. Numerous examples survive, but the majority depict foreign vessels seized by British anti-slavery patrols after 1807. Lt. Francis Meynell’s well-known paintings in the National Maritime Museum fall into this category.

I should be grateful for information on additional paintings and sketches showing onboard conditions above and below decks on slavers, including foreign vessels.

The material culture of surveillance and fear

The fear experienced by those locked in the holds of slave ships may seem beyond our grasp today. Yet when we ask the right questions, we can do more than just acknowledge its existence. One question we can ask, for example, is this: why were full-scale revolts comparatively rare occurrences on slave ships,10 when on the ‘average’ slaver, the crew were outnumbered 10:1 by Africans? A host of factors played a part in discouraging active resistance, but perhaps the most significant of these was the ‘culture of fear’ cultivated through the daily routines of surveillance, discipline and punishment acted out as a slave ship made its way across the Atlantic. By combining an analysis of voyages with a study of the material culture of surveillance, discipline and punishment – from the layout of slave ships themselves to the design and use of whips and shackles – we can gain a better understanding of how this culture of fear was created and maintained, and indeed why it was sometimes challenged. Material things falling into this category include shackles, bilboes (double shackles), thumbscrews, whips and branding equipment (the latter being something I have yet to trace). Other items manufactured for slavers included the speculum oris, used to force feed slaves. In 1788 the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson purchased shackles, a thumbscrew and a speculum oris from a Liverpool shop,11 and placed them in the mahogany chest in which he collected items illustrative of Africa and the slave trade. The chest was presented to the Wisbech and Fenland Museum in 1870, but these specific items are no longer among its contents.12

Cultural interactions on the Middle Passage

Cauldron recovered from the wreck of the Henrietta Marie. One of two riveted, copper cauldrons discovered on the wreck site. Both were almost certainly used as cooking vessels aboard the ship. The smaller of the two (depicted here) is a rectangular, two chambered cauldron with two openings at the top. The second example is much larger, and has a single opening. The former was probably used in preparing meals for the crew, and the latter in making the simple ‘one-pot’ meals fed to enslaved Africans13. © David Moore/Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society. Reproduced with permission.

All too often, ‘interactions’ between Africans and sailors amounted simply to sexual and other physical abuses of the powerless by the powerful. And yet, a two-way transfer of cultural knowledge was also taking place between Africans and their captors on the Middle Passage. At the simplest level, captive Africans encountered and used a variety of European words and artefacts, often for the first time. Some artefacts were small, such as the wooden spoons handed out for use at mealtimes. Some were large, like the two cooking cauldrons recovered from the Henrietta Marie.14 

Some items, such as the tobacco and spirit rations provided on many English ships, were small things with global repercussions: the products of Africans and their descendants already labouring in the New World. Other, less obvious, cultural exchanges occurred too. For example, music of both European and African origin was frequently heard on slaving vessels. The work songs of the crew rang out on and above the decks at intervals throughout the day, and Africans brought up on deck for food and air sometimes drummed and sang.15  Similarly, craft skills were transferred between sailors and enslaved Africans. Ships’ masters were often allowed to retain ‘privilege slaves’ for private sale, and some saw to it that ‘their’ slaves were taught skills such as carpentry and sail making, in order to enhance the purchase price for these individuals in the New World. Conversely, it is also clear that an understanding of African foodways16 and medicines informed the dietary and medical regimes adopted by many experienced slave ship captains and surgeons. These interactions can be glimpsed through the study of sea songs and shanties,17 cargo lists, and medical treatises such as Aubrey’s The sea surgeon, or the Guinea man’s vade mecum, a 1726 ‘textbook’ for slave ship surgeons.18

On the bodies of Africans

Smoking pipe from Newton Plantation cemetery, Barbados. Newton Plantation is the most fully excavated plantation cemetery in the Americas. Found in association with the burial of a possible healer, this short-stemmed clay pipe is probably of Gold Coast origin.19 © Jerome Handler. Reproduced with permission.

Africans carried many non-material aspects of their culture onto slave ships, from languages to musical styles, from memories to stories. But did they sometimes transport artefacts too? New World plantations yield small artefacts such as shells, perforated coins, animal teeth and bones, and metal knives, either buried with the dead or collected together as minkisi (sacred medicine or charms). Many of these materials were acquired on the plantations themselves, of course, but some artefacts in New World settings are certainly of African origin, and a small percentage of these may have arrived on slave ships.

There were other ways in which slaves could – quite literally – bear African culture upon their bodies as they journeyed to the New World. Throughout history, people have demonstrated their membership of specific social groups by making permanent alterations to their physical appearance. At the time of the slave trade, many West African peoples practiced tattooing and body piercing. Others favoured dental modification (teeth filing) and scarification (the incision of patterns on the skin, causing permanent scarring). All of these practices mark the body indelibly, and bodies marked in these ways frequently crossed the Atlantic. I am particularly interested in the possible impact of these markings on the development of African-New World material culture, and have been attempting (with limited success) to trace documentary and pictorial references to captive Africans bearing such marks. Similarly, I have traced a small number of paintings showing Africans in slave ship settings wearing beads and other personal ornaments. Again, I would like to find more.

Slave ships and trade goods in West African art and thought

Slave ships, and the trade goods they carried, made their own impact upon material culture within West Africa. Thanks in no small measure to the abolition movement, slave ship images like that of the Brooks were much reproduced in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain. But images of European ships were an important feature in the African arts too. Even today, merchant ship models can be seen on masquerade regalia in some parts of West Africa, and it is highly likely that the image of the Igbo water spirit Mama Wata – a woman with light skin and flowing hair – was inspired by figureheads on European trading and slaving vessels.20 I have also located a small number of figurative carvings from the Niger Delta that appear to be modelled directly upon European prow figures. I know of two examples in British collections (in Bristol and Manchester) and would like to find more, if more exist.

Trade beads recovered from the wreck of the Henrietta Marie. The Henrietta Marie departed from London carrying 1758 lbs of glass trade beads. Some ten thousand beads have been recovered from the wreck site.21 © Dylan Kibler/Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society. Reproduced with permission.

Ships were not, of course, the only European things encountered along the coastline of West Africa. The human cargoes packed in the holds of slavers took the place of cargoes of trade goods, manufactured in England and Europe, for which they themselves had been exchanged. On their arrival off the coast of Africa, slave ships were laden with such goods, which had been carefully selected to meet the localised requirements of slave dealers on different parts of the coast. Successful ship masters would have exchanged most of their trade goods for a human cargo by the time the Middle Passage itself began, but I nevertheless regard trade goods as fundamental to my research into the transformation of material culture in the context of slaving voyages. Africans were very selective consumers of European goods, demanding artefacts in media, styles and colours that accorded with their own traditions and tastes. In some cases, preferences for specific goods – beads in particular colours and shapes, for example – were so strong that they continued among Africans in the New World.

Manilla, Repro ID D9623_1. The earliest Portuguese traders in West Africa observed that manillas (bracelets or anklets) were used as a form of ‘currency’, and began creating copies of these African artefacts for use as trade goods. Over time, as it was realised that the majority of imported brass manillas were being melted down and recast, rather than worn, foundries in European countries began to cast manillas in standard weights and sizes. In other words, manillas were now treated as metal ingots, rather than items of jewellery. In this way, they became an important ‘currency’ of the slave trade.

British manufacturers made conscious attempts to meet these cultural preferences, producing a variety of trade goods specifically tailored to West African markets. Glass trade beads and metal goods for the slave trade – the most durable among a wide range of British-made products that also included cloth and alcohol – can be found in a number of museums. The most common finds are manillas (brass ‘bracelets’), iron bars, and copper and brass ‘rods’. All were manufactured in standard weights and sizes, and served as the staple currency of the slave trade. Once they reached Africa, most of these objects, along with sheet brass ‘battery wares’ and pewter goods, would be melted down and reused. By selecting and reworking European goods (for example, by cutting down sheet brass and pewter vessels to make ornaments, or by creating jewellery from imported beads and shells), Africans were engaging in their own dialogue with European material things. Conversely, as we have already seen, European manufactures were recognising and meeting African cultural preferences. Out of this dialogue – a kind of complex ‘conversation’ using material things rather than words – emerged a unique repertoire of artefacts: the arts of the Middle Passage.

Many museums have small numbers of manillas in their collections (along with cowrie shells and trade beads) but I am always interested to hear of more examples of slave trade manufactures, particularly in cases where the accession histories of these items also survive. I should also like to find more examples of pre-nineteenth century African and European artefacts decorated with cowries and trade beads.

British sailors: trading ventures, ‘souvenirs’ and the idea of Africa

HM brig Black Joke served as a naval anti-slavery patrol vessel in the 1830s. She had originally been built as a fast-sailing slave ship, the Baltimore-based Henriquetta. The lid of the box is carved with a view of the ship fully rigged. Repro ID E9105.

My research also explores the impact of African cultures on the sailors engaged in the slave trade. What things – and what ideas about Africa – did these people take home with them at the end of their stay on the West African coast? How did these things in turn influence popular perceptions of Africa as a place, and of Africans as peoples? From the earliest years of the slave trade, a ‘souvenir’ market flourished in Africa. As early as the fifteenth century, Portuguese travellers were commissioning ivory copies of saltcellars, horns, spoons and other small items of tableware from African artisans. Many of these ivories found their way into the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ fashionable among the Renaissance aristocracy, and subsequently into the great private collections that formed the nucleus of major museum collections in the nineteenth century. In my view, it is highly likely that a similar ‘souvenir’ trade existed at the height of the transatlantic slave trade too. To date, however, the search for such ‘souvenirs’ has been one of the least fruitful aspects of my museum-based work. Part of the problem here is simply pinning down items to the slave trade in particular, rather than to the ‘African trade’ in general. I have as yet located only a tiny handful of items – of any sort – that can be stated with certainty to have arrived in this country on slave ships, and it goes without saying that news of more would be most welcome.

Some avenues of enquiry do suggest themselves in this respect. For example, most of the African collections in British museums contain some (often many) Akan gold weights, and it is surely possible that some early examples of these weights arrived in sailor’s pockets; small, portable reminders of voyages to the Gold Coast.

Documentary sources tell us that many African items, including timber, gold dust and ivory were shipped from Africa to Britain on returning slavers. Sometimes these goods were legitimate elements of return cargoes, but wills made by sailors, and accounts of possessions auctioned when men died at sea, sometimes hint that imports were also secreted amongst the possessions of sailors engaged in small, hidden trading ‘ventures’ of their own. Again, I would be please to obtain more information on surviving wills of sailors engaged in the slave trade. Similarly, I am attempting to track down examples of West African artefacts brought into Britain (by whatever route) before 1807, and subsequently acquired by museums. The vast majority of African artefacts in UK collections are of nineteenth century date, and were collected long after the abolition of the slave trade, but there are some exceptions to this rule.22

In summary, I hope that this contribution has given some idea of the wide range of material things associated with the Middle Passage, and the possibilities that are opened up by integrating documents, pictorial evidence and artefacts of the voyage that carried Africans to Britain’s ‘New World’ colonies. Readers who are able to offer information on any of the artefact categories discussed above (or indeed wish to comment on any aspect of my project) can contact me at The School of Historical Studies, Armstrong Building, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Newcastle (UK) NE1 7RU. Email j.l.webster@ncl.ac.uk.