‘I Asked How the Vessel Could Go’: the Contradictory Experiences of African and African Diaspora Mariners and Port Workers in Britain, c. 1750-1850

Abstract

Olaudah Equiano described the trauma of his first experience of the sea and the ship about to carry him on the middle passage. As Peter Linebaugh has stated, using Equiano as an exemplar; 'Shipboard communication was decisive to the formulation of eighteenth-century pan-Africanism'. 'I asked how the vessel could go?' is a trope in the sense that black seafarers in Britain 1750-1850 remain substantially obscured from us, and indicating the paradoxes and contradictions of the period's black mariners' experiences. Nevertheless, in many British ports, especially London, blacks from across the Atlantic would have found the reassuring presence of other black people. At that time, 'when Englishmen wanted to employ men of African origin, they first looked for them in the docks'. Like all other Atlantic Diaspora Africans, black seamen were at the very rough end of the historical processes of the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonial slavery all right, but they were not mere victims of those processes.