Slavery and Capitalism at Sea

Race, it seems, is a topic of new light in recent American discussions. Some reading that I was doing recently suggested some important implications for the subject as a whole. In an enlightened account, Emma Christopher writes Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes as an analysis of race and class aboard the ships helped to synthesize racial divisions in Northern America. An historiographical argument, the book is a persuasive demonstration of the complexity and introversion of the relationships forged out of necessity on the 18th Century Atlantic. While her's is an impressive story of the dynamics of racial politics in miniature, Christopher does not sufficiently reject race as a means of analysis.

The economic structures of the era made slave ships selective towards men with an inclination towards brutality, perversion and pain. Not only the lowest of the low on the economic ladder of society, slave ship sailors were also likely to be socially deviant. Like in any horrid enterprise, the utility obtained by the slave ship sailor was not that by his captain. On the contrary, Slave sailors frequently came out of their transatlantic trips worse off then they went into them. Some of the men on these ships were literally slaves, chartered from their owners. As Christopher shows in the text, the sailor was in many cases the man "who had no other option."

Yet there was likely another trend in the capitalism of slavery. Those men who were the most willing to accept the conditions of slavery had a selective pressure towards employment in the trade. Yet who were these men who would be willing to endure the lowest of the low, but men whose liberty was already consumed by the western economic condition. After all, slavery is only the most extreme example of a long list of human offenses that really goes back as long as human history. Surely Christopher subscribes to the notion that, as she hints many times in the book, the emergence of "Freedom" in American society was in some ways a result of the nation's entanglement with the biggest unfreedom. Here we can get beyond the normative question of about the ethics of slavery.

I challenge you to find two people who would argue on that point. What rather we should ask is a question of the norms - in contrast with the normative values - in society at the time. In many ways, the slave ship sailors were the victims of social structures of oppression. Be they white, black or Queequeg, sailors were classed as an inferior group throughout the world. The men were renegades, but they were also castaways. Castaways of a global capitalist development. Slave ship sailors were like the abused children who go on to violate future generations. They were the product of the wrong of man; it is no wonder that they were particularly good at it.

We find in Christopher the interesting observation that the slave ship sailor was often treated like a slave. But what needs to be asked is whether these men were pathologically altered by the abuse. The horrid conditions on ship must have been enough to make sane men mad. So if a slave ship sailor were of any pathological character, it seems little of a stretch to say that the conditions at sea could push him over the edge into full insanity. Like any large group of people, the sailors had to have among them some insanity. This is a statistical truth. But i argue that the profession itself may have attracted people who were willing to endure abuse from above as long as they could reciprocate it on people below.

We already know that ships and the sea attracted those of unstable inclination. Who said it better than Ishmael when he tells us that "whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral that i meet; and especially when my hypos gets such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from stepping in the street and knocking people's hats off - then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

Clearly Melville's version of the ocean is the kind of place that makes men go insane. But on page one, we find the direct notion that men go to sea precisely because they are insane. Next to a slave ship, Ahab's Pequot seems like a bastion of level headedness and social ethic. The sheer conditions on slavers were so foul that they must have made men crazy. But the men themselves must have been somehow tolerant of the horror.

Just like Ishmael seeks the truly insane to comfort his depression, many of these men were in a subtle way seeking the ultimate unfreedom to overshadow their own oppression. But I hold both of these are the same. The insanity and the slavery, the economic structures of control and the sailors fetish for whip and shackle, these were all part of a unified social structure that in this particular case, put the most unstable at the helm of an economic construction of the category of race.

It is little mystery that slave ship sailors divided their consciousness so between their attachment to black members of their crew, and their participation in the oppression of African slaves. Their place in the capitalist system made them both strangely resistant to and the ultimate product of the capitalist ideology.

Slave ship sailors seldom made free contracts to set away to sea. Rather, they frequently came to their start in the industry by waking up to its stench when it roused them of a hangover. As Christopher notes in the book, many slave sailors were crimped onto their first voyage by gangs of pimps and gamblers who sold the men to the captains of ships. At times, black men from all corners of the Atlantic made up to 1/5th of the slave ship crews. But even men whose skin color did not preclude them from the pursuit of liberty and happiness, these white sailors were also slaves to their profession. Their captains were also captains of a capitalist industry devoted to oppression.

But to stay competitive, a slave ship captain knew he had to pick his crew wisely. Just like Ahab knew that the best way to maintain control over his men was allow his own madness to its self consume them, slave ship captains chose to make their ships ripe with perversion. Christopher notes that even in an epoch that normalized abuses that would be prosecuted today, an even in an industry whose brutality was ritual, slave ships stood out as uniquely disturbing. As hoards of captured Africans suffered in the hold below, the sailors on deck remained in a cacophony of exploitation. Murders were common, rape was rampant, and each man lived in such a fear of his comrades that it surpassed the exhaustion of life at sea.

One prevalent trend that Christopher observes in the history is that slave ship sailors had no intrinsic reason to believe themselves different from the blacks in their crew. But these men, selected for their perversion and brewed into insanity, were convinced to draw a line where none existed before.

These were the men who chose "race" as a discourse in America. Slave ship sailors were the victims as well as the ultimate perpetrates of oppression. These men were socialized to be monstrosities by an ideology of domination. It is little wonder that these men, oppressed by the perversions of a Capitalist society, were themselves perverse. But why do we today subscribe to a category developed as an ideological project and implemented by men on a course of insanity. Slave ships may have only been a microcosm of early American society, but even if "race" had origins other than the sea, it is nonetheless a construct of mania.

The madness has corrupted American history, and I do not deny that it is still at work today. Many take this as reason to reinforce the importance of racial discourse in modern society. But why do we continue to subscribe an insane designation that descends from the very oppression we wish to overcome?

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