As a graduate student in the history of the Atlantic World in the nineteenth century, I have read a lot of material dealing with the impact and brutality of the Atlantic slave trade. Although I have been reading this material for years, it never fails to shock or sicken me due to the sheer grotesquery of what is being described.
Recently, I stumbled across an account of a captured slave ship, the Pons, in a missionary's memoir, Land of Hope: Reminiscences of Liberia and Cape Palmas. The missionary in question, William B. Hoyt, was a white man and held the racial prejudices common to his time. (At times he even refers to the victims in the story as creatures and brutes.) However, when a captured slave ship was brought to shore at Cape Palmas in Liberia, where he operated his mission, even he could not help but be moved and disgusted by the suffering he saw.
In this diary, I will reprint sections of Hoyt's account, which takes you far deeper into the horror of the slave trade than any text will or could. What follows is disturbing, but should be read by anyone who wants to know the true history of this atrocity.
My Gut Reaction: What's most disturbing about the case I'm going to describe is that it was not a notorious or especially noteworthy. This was what went on everyday in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.
More below the fold...
The author of this account, William B. Hoyt, was a missionary from the United States on behalf of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was stationed in Cape Palmas, part of the Maryland colony which was eventually annexed to Liberia. The account which is about to be excerpted was published in 1852 and describes events which appear to have taken place in the 1840s.
An illegal slave ship operating out of Philadelphia, the Pons, had been detected off the coast of Cape Palmas. It initially eluded capture by a British war ship by flying the American flag, but this proved of no help when it encountered the U.S.S. Yorktown. The Pons immediately surrendered to the Yorktown and was found to have nearly nine hundred slaves on board. The conditions they were kept in were horrendous, as Hoyt learned after the captured ship arrived in Cape Palmas:
When taken, she had 893 slaves on board. We learned that she had shipped 913, but that 20 had died in the three days preceding her capture. She had been 14 days under the command of Lieutenant Cogsdell, the prize officer, in which time 150 had died. One of the miserable creatures jumped overboard, and thus terminated his earthly sufferings in a watery grave, as countless others would have done, if they had not been narrowly watched. I was on board by eleven o'clock, A.M., and found that ten dead bodies had been thrown into the sea that morning. The monsters of the deep swam to and fro about the vessels, with their black fins above the blue waters, drawn by their horrible feast of human flesh.
One important point to note is that for most of the time period described, the slave vessel had already been captured and was under the command of naval officers rather than the slavers. The conditions were so horrid that even after they were rescued, the enslaved people on the ship continued to die and commit suicide.
Hoyt proceeded to tour the captured slave ship and was aghast at what he saw:
I had been prepared to witness a scene of horror, by the account given by Lieut. Cogsdell; but I found the half had not been told me. Indeed, it is utterly impossible for language to convey an appropriate idea of the sufferings of that wretched company. The decks were literally crowded with poor abject beings, the living and the dying huddled together entirely naked, with less care than is usually bestowed on the brutes [animals]. Here and there they might be seen in the last agonies of expiring nature, unknown and unnoticed, with no offer of friendship to alleviate their misery, their companions being weighed down by their own sorrows. My heart sickens at the remembrance of the awful scene. As I came on the crowded deck, I saw directly in front of me, one much emaciated, worn down by long suffering to a mere skeleton, pining away, and apparently near death. I looked into the space between decks: the hot, mephitic [foul-smelling] air almost overpowered me. At the foot of the ladder lay two of the most miserable beings I ever saw. They were reduced by continual sufferings from want and disease...so that their bone protruded from the flesh, and large sores had been worn upon their sides and limbs. One, I thought, was death, until by a slight motion, I discovered that his agonies were not yet ended. The other lay with his face toward me, and such an expression of unmitigated anguish I never before saw. In another part of the vessel lay a little boy just in the agonies of death, with two others watching over him.
The desperation of the people on the Pons can be deduced from an incident after they arrived at Cape Palmas and the dehydrated captives got on land:
They were landed on the beach, under the superintendence of the United States agent for recaptured Africans, when small quantities of food were given to them, which they devoured with the greatest avidity. Some water was turned into a long canoe, and the poor famishing creatures knelt around it, to lap like starving brutes, the grateful beverage. Immediately back of the beach was a pool of stagnant water, covered with a green slime that had been accumulating for many days, under the heat of a vertical sun. Some of them discovered this, and plunged into it, eagerly swallowing the filthy liquid.
As mentioned above, this was not a particularly notorious slave expedition. If it were not for the presence of Hoyt when the ship landed, we might never have had an account of it passed down to us. Remember it next time someone tries to play down the horror of slavery.