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CAPTIVES
AND VOYAGERS
Antislavery, Abolition, R.
J.
M. BLACKETT
and the Atlantic World
AND JAMES BREWER STEWART,
Series Editors
CAPTIVES |
s VOYAGERS
K
BLACK MIGRANTS ACROSS THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH ATLANTIC WORLD
Alexander X. Byrd
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
BATON ROUGE
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright
©
2008 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured
United States of America
in the
First Printing
DESIGNER: Amanda McDonald
Scallan
TYPEFACE: Minion TYPESETTER:
J.
Jarrett Engineering
PRINTER AND BINDER: Thomson-Shore,
Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Byrd, Alexander X., 1968-
Captives and voyagers
:
black migrants across the eighteenth-century British Atlantic World
/
Alexander X. Byrd. p.
cm.
—
(Antislavery, abolition,
and the Atlantic world)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8071-3359-0
(cloth: alk. paper)
1.
Blacks—Great Britain—History—18th century. Sierra
Leone—History.
I.
Slavery—Great Britain—History—18th century. 3.
Slave
trade—Nigeria—History—18th
century.
2.
4.
Title.
HT1161.B97 2008 306.3'62094109033—dc22 2008018831
The paper
in this
book meets
tion Guidelines for
the guidelines for
permanence and durability of the Committee on Produc-
Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
‘or Jeanette
.
.
a
Acknowledgments
ix
INTRODUCTION |
Black Migrations
PART
1
I.
CAPTIVES ONE The
Slave Trade
from the Biafran
Violence, Serial Displacement,
and
the
Interior
Rudiments of Igbo Society
17
TWO The
Slave Ship
and the Beginnings of Igbo
Society in the African Diaspora 32 -
THREE
White Power and the Context of Slave Seasoning in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica 57
FOUR Routines of Disaster and Revolution 86
PART |
II.
VOYAGERS
FIVE Movement and Imagining Freedom :
Social
in the British Capital
125
SIX Migration and the Impossible
Demands
of Leaving London 139
SEVEN From
Slaves to Free Subjects in British
North America 154
viii
CONTENTS
EIGHT Black Society and the Limits of British Freedom 167
NINE The
Effects of Exodus
Afro-Maritime Society in Motion 177
TEN Arriving in Sierra Leone Catastrophe and
Its
Aftermaths 200
CONCLUSION Migration and Black Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic
World 244
Notes 253 Bibliography 313
Index 333
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I
have accumulated a great
many debts
in researching
about transatlantic black migration across the ish empire.
They
are debts
I
late
and writing
this
book
eighteenth-century Brit-
can never discharge, but
it is
a great pleasure to
have the opportunity to acknowledge a few of them here. I first
seriously grappled with the questions
book
of this
as a history graduate student at
and concerns
Duke
at
the heart
University. In
Durham, |
Janet Ewald, the late John Cell, Bill Chafe,
Raymond
Gavins, Barry Gaspar,
Lawrence Goodwyn, Sydney Nathans, Richard Powell, Julius
Wood, among
Peter
others,
pushed
me
to read
more closely, When it came time
Scott,
to write
and
more
to take
exams of Jack, committee consisting and to write the dissertation, Jan chaired a Ray, Julius, and Peter. These five were demanding and generous in ways that will continue to benefit me, I am certain, for as long as I write and
and
clearly,
to think
more
imaginatively.
teach history.
lam especially grateful
whose tenures
at
Duke
co-
had the great fortune of arriving in Durham at a time whenalively group of slavery scholars, Afro Americanists, and students of early America were also there. So I benefited enormously from the company of Herman Bennett, Rod Clare, Matthew Countryman, Kathryn Dungy, incided with mine.
|
to graduate students
I
Karen Ferguson, Charles McKinney, James A. McMillin, Jennifer Morgan, Celia Naylor, Ifeoma Nwankwo, Paul Ortiz, Kara Miles Turner, and others. Luckily, I also first met Vincent Brown, Stephanie Smallwood, and Claudio Saunt since.
to
me, I
Duke. They have remained great friends and interlocutors ever don’t have words for what Annie Valk and Leslie Brown have meant
at I
my family,
and
this project over the years.
I
am
simply thankful.
and the ensuing book as a member of Rice University. John Boles, Carl Caldwell,
finished both the dissertation
the department of history at
Edward Cox, Rebecca Goetz, Ira Gruber, Atieno Odhiambo, Paula Sanders, Allison Sneider, and Kerry Ward read parts of the manuscript (and some those listed read all of it). I appreciate their feedback very much.
among
|
x
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
|
As department chairs, Gales Stokes, John Zammito, Carl Caldwell, and Martin Wiener were each remarkably generous and supportive. Caroline Levander, Michael Emerson, Anthony Pinn, Maarten Van Delden, and other participants in Rice’s Americas Colloquium have encouraged
work |
a great deal. Beatriz Gonzalez-Stephan
my
and Juan Carlos Rodriguez
provided a welcome opportunity to present some of the book’s findings as they concern the idea of el gran Caribe. Paula Platt, Rachel Zepeda, and Anita Smith deserve special recognition.
Beyond
Rice,
I
am
grateful to scholars
who have
shared their work, en-
gaged mine, and encouraged me along the way, among them, Nancy Hewitt, Mark Smith, Vincent Carretta, G. Ugo Nwokeji, Carolyn Brown, Ray Kea, Philip Morgan, Paul Lovejoy, Nell Painter, David Gutierrez, James Stewart, Hasia Diner, and Gautam Ghosh. Over many years, Richard Blackett and Colin Palmer have been especially helpful in this regard.
As
a dissertation in progress
and
later as a
book manuscript,
has benefited from fellowship assistance that allowed research
and writing
for
extended periods of time.
It
me
gives
this project
to concentrate
on
me great pleasure
acknowledge the generous support the book and its author have received from The Graduate School at Duke University, the Center for Documentary to
Studies, the Ford Foundation,
The
national Migration Program, the
(through the
Andrew W. Mellon
Cullom Davis Center
American Council of Learned
Societies
Fellowship for Junior Faculty), the Shelby
for Historical Studies at Princeton University,
Woodrow Wilson
the
Social Science Research Council’s Inter-
and
National Fellowship Foundation (through a Career
Enhancement Grant).
I
am
particularly grateful to John
and Paula Mosle
for their support of assistant professors in Rice’s School of Humanities. I
am
indebted to the librarians and archivists
listed in the bibliography,
tional Archives,
Kew; the
and
am
at all
of the repositories
especially grateful to the staff at the
Na-
British Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the
Manuscripts Department of Cambridge University Library; the National __
Archives of Nigeria, Enugu; the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth;
Duke
and Fondren Library cious in allowing Library.
I
am
especially
I
at
me at
Rice University.
make use of material on deposit at the Bodleian to Sir Edward Dashwood for permission to make
to
grateful
use of documents
who
and Special Collections Library; Lord Clarendon was especially gra-
University’s Rare Book, Manuscript,
the National Library of Wales.
The
staff at
LSU
Press,
Rand Dotson have been tremendous. Working with Derik Shelor,
copyedited the manuscript, wasa
joy.
explored some of the issues raised in Captives and Voyagers in two
previously published essays: “Violence, Migration, and
Becoming Igbo
in
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xi
Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative,” published in Constructing Borders/ Crossing Boundaries: Race, Ethnicity,
and Immigration, and “Eboe, Country,
Nation and Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative,” which appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly. 1am grateful for permission to draw on material
from those essays
here.
The support of family, the book’s completion.
O’Gradys, the
Scatliffs,
I
and community have been critical to terribly grateful to C. T. Woods-Powell, the
friends,
am
the Molinas, the Nelsons, the Arches, the Poduskas,
the Blythes, the Simmonses, the Buckners, the Princes, the Prices, the Fra-
on and below Ditney Hill. I have benefited enormously from the stimulation and Memorial inspiration provided by the men and women comprising Lincoln Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina; Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church in Houston, Texas; and:Grant Chapel AME Church in Trenton,
Bowmans, Nancy
ziers,
the
New
Jersey.
Byrd, and the wonderfully loving folks
|
The
barisiti at Salentos, especially in the last
months of the
book’s coming together, fueled large chunks of the project. My mother never asked too many questions about this book, though she inquired about helping
many
me keep
fortune.
Once
I
took to sending
other things (which was very useful
arrived in graduate school,
me
clothbound books
and
my children know anything
pleasure). years, has
Still,
it
came
to
things in perspective). Being born her son
grateful for the ensuing library that
when
they encouraged
been exactly what
I
for birthdays
I
and Christmases.
their unflagging confidence.
about this book (which
me beyond
needed (and
Before getting under way,
my
was my greatest stepmother and late father
want
to
all
words. that
I
I
|
|
am
doubt write with some
My wife,
I
these
many
ever wanted).
acknowledge a point about the
book’s nomenclature in referring to some of its black subjects. In the pages that follow,
I
tend to avoid the phrase African American.
against the term in general,
and
I
happily use
it
I
have nothing
in other writings
and
in
everyday speech to refer to blacks in the United States in the modern period. But this particular political, geographic, and temporal connotation is precisely
why I mostly
avoid the term in Captives and Voyagers.
|
CAPTIVES
AND VOYAGERS
INTRODUCTION
BLACK MIGRATIONS
On
an overcast afternoon in the wet season of 1787, three trading ships working in the Sierra Leone River were interrupted in their business by
war sloop andaleash of creaking transports, announce its arrival. The traders already in the
the approach of a lone British the sloop firing
cannon
to
estuary—some, no doubt, Guineamen awaiting their human cargos—had just been joined bya floating complement of free settlers. Here, where the French, the English, the Portuguese, and the Danes had long depended on the river for a steady flow of African slaves, a small reversal
The
was under way.
HMS Nautilus had just escorted the Belisarius, the Atlantic, the Vernon,
and some four hundred
colonists, the majority of them
Londoners, to take possession of a
sliver
impoverished black
of land along the peninsula at
Sierra Leone. After almost a year of being readied for sea
and
a
month en
route, the just arrived “black poor,” as they were called in the British capital,
were suddenly the founders of what would
later
be styled “free English
territory in Africa.”
The same summer
that the Belisarius, the Atlantic,
and the Vernon ap-
proached Sierra Leone, but an ocean away, ships bearing black cargo were few and far between on the more established British colony of Jamaica. It
was foolish
to risk a slaving venture during the hurricane
as foolish as
it
was
months
(indeed,
to plant a colony in Sierra Leone during the wet season). .
But when the trade picked up, in the time between the end of summer and the end of the year, at least seven Guineamen slouched into Jamaican harbors. Four of these ships—the Emilia, the King George, the King Pepple,
and the Preston—had arrived from the Bight of Biafra, a mainstay of British slaving south and east of the fledgling Province of Freedom. The nearly hundred Africans on board had embarked mostly at Bonny and Calabar in what is now southeastern Nigeria.* Thus they had been
twenty-five
New
from some of the busiest slaving ports in eighteenth-century western Africa to what was then the largest slave entrepét in the North Atlantic. Unforced
like the
who were
émigrés from London
out lives as free
men and
arriving in Jamaica
free
women
at the
time
still
in western Africa, these
from the Bight of Biafra had
a very different
make lives
as
American
slaves.
thousands kind of en-
doomed to spend the Either that or flee. Or die.
counter ahead. The congeries aboard these ships were season learning to
struggling to carve
2
INTRODUCTION The conventional image of transatlantic migration empire
is
rarely cast so darkly, yet
made through
much
across the British
of the British colonial world was
just these kinds of black migration. In the years
1630 to 1780, more than two and a half times
Great Britain’s Atlantic possessions as did
many Africans
as
Europeans departed their homelands
the transatlantic
movement of people was concerned,
who made
explores the social
many
for British colonies.’
critical
Africans
As
far as
the late eighteenth-
century British empire was overwhelmingly black. This the migrants
arrived in
Europeans, and in the
near century from 1700 to 1780, more than four times as as
spanning
is
a
book about
examines the nature of their movements, consequences (personal and corporate) of their dislocait
so. It
more than anything else, scrutinizes their lives as people in motion across a European New World empire. The book focuses on the two largest streams of free and forced transtions, and,
oceanic black dislocation across Great Britain’s western empire: the slave trade
from the Bight of Biafra
Sierra Leone.
When
to Jamaica,
human
pondering the
and
free black
migration to
articulation of Great Britain’s
eighteenth-century Atlantic empire, admittedly, these two migrations
New England’s
hardly leap to mind.
Great Migration and the demographic
catastrophe that was early Virginia, for instance, are no doubt
commonly thought
of when the subject
much more
movement of people to, from, and within Great Britain’s Atlantic empire. The pairing at the heart of the book is not iconic, but it should be. A primary burden of the pages that follow
is
is
the
to naturalize the coupling, to underline
how important
the experi-
ences of black migrants are for grasping the shape and texture of the British
from other parts of the eighteenth-century British colonial world by the sheer vastness and sheer blackness of migration across and between it).
Atlantic world (a world set off
That the are not
slave trade to
Jamaica and
now commonly braced,
deal separated the
though,
free black is
migration to Sierra Leone
certainly understandable.
A great
two movements. The difference in magnitude between
them was enormous. In contrast to atlantic movement to Sierra Leone,
the intermittent trickle that was transthe slave trade from the Bight of Biafra
was a torrent involving hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of people. In the five years coinciding with the initial colonization of Sierra Leone (1787-1792), a little
when just two convoys
under 2,000
of fewer than twenty ships transported
free blacks to the west African
surviving ship records
than 78,000 African too great for words).'
document
that nearly 250
Province of Freedom,
Guineamen loaded more
slaves along the Bight of Biafra (a difference
almost
INTRODUCTION
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