African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic

Abstract

POWER was nowhere more precariously held in the early modern Atlantic than aboard a slave ship. Because their cargoes were unwilling travelers, slave ships were distinguished by the unmiti gated contest between African captives and the European seamen charged to transport them to American, markets: between slaves with superior strength in numbers and sailors desperate to prevent rebellious uprising by means necessary. Though it is true that perhaps no more than one slave voyage in ten experienced an actual outbreak of revolt, scholars accept as axiomatic Michael Craton's further suggestion that few voyages were ever completed without the discovery or threat of slave conspiracy, and no slaving captain throughout the history of the Atlantic trade ever sailed without a whole armory of guns and chains plus as many white crewmen as he could recruit and keep alive to act as seaborne jailers. David Eltis's characterization of the slave ship as a place where physical force determined who would be in control and where any relaxation of vigilance or reduction in the amount of force available would mean rebellion seems squarely on the mark.1 Yet slave ships were more complex than the reliance on naked physical force sug gests. The dynamics of power aboard ship could also be affected by the use of African guardians: slaves appointed to police fellow captives during the Atlantic crossing.