Discipline, it was thought, was the only way to keep slaves in line on a plantation. Discipline grew excessive, becoming cruelty, and was used as a tool of exploitation and extortion. The sheer awfulness of the rape, torture, and murder of plantation slaves catastrophically shaped their lives and those of their descendants for generations to come.
Enslaved Africans being Carried to a Slave Ship, Gold Coast, late 17th cent.
The enslavement of Africans was atrocity from the very first. Olaudah Equiano, captured by slave traders in Guinea, described boarding a slave ship: “The blacks who brought me on board went off, and left me abandoned to despair...I was soon put under the decks...I became so sick and and low that I was not able to eat...I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands...and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely…” This all in the first day₁.
The claustrophobia of a slave ship is hard to conceive, but this print of the Brookes may help. No movement was was possible, and the holds were awash with human filth, often carrying dysentery. The dead would sometimes go unremoved for days, the corpse set upon by rats, who would with equal enthusiasm attack the living₂. Perversely, this was the Brookes carrying its regulated cargo of 454 slaves. It had previously sailed with 609₃. This was the fate of 12.5 million Africans over the course of the Atlantic slave trade. Well, not exactly. About 2 million died en route. 10.5 million reached their destination. For 4.5 million of them, this was the West Indies₄.
Thomas Thistlewood, born March 16, 1721
Thomas Thistlewood had one job: to be the most terrifying overseer possible. That duty was driven home early in observing the punishment of a runaway slave. The slave first was whipped until his back was covered with sores, gashes, scrapes, and wide-open wounds. Then, to intensify the slave’s agony, salt, pepper, and line were rubbed into his wounds. Thistlewood’s word for this was “pickling.” He often used it himself. Unsatisfied with existing brutalities, he tried to get creative. Once, in his own words, to punish a slave, he “gagged him; locked his hands together; rubbed him with molasses & exposed him naked to the flies all day, and to the mosquitoes all night.”
Whipping of a Fugitive Slave, French West Indies, 1840s
Disobedience, it is clear, was made unthinkable. It was by this intimidation that Thistlewood, by his own reckoning, sexually exploited 138 slave women₅. One of the most common causes of death among Thistlewood’s slaves was suicide₆. Tragically, this behavior is far from unusual. An English officer in Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century reported that planters had no qualms about killing their slaves, “dogs and they being in one ranke.” Barbadian punishments would have impressed Thistlewood: for stealing a pig, one master whipped a slave until he was completely covered in blood, then severing the slave’s ear, roasting it, and forcing him to eat it₇.
Revenge Against French Soldiers, Saint Domingue (Haiti), 1805
Besides brutal punishments, slaves were quickly killed by working conditions. From 1650-1750, the British West Indies imported about 800,000 slaves; less than 300,000 were alive at the end of that period, so overwhelming was the death-to-birth ratio. The population was enormously skewed towards adults in their twenties or thirties. Anybody younger was likely to die of malnutrition, and anyone older probably couldn’t stand the work. These working adults, however, were not healthy: lacking the vitamin or caloric intake to maintain a field labor diet, at any given time, twenty percent would be deemed “unhealthy” by the planters, who were hardly known for their medical compassion. The Jamaica Assembly reported fifteen thousand slave deaths due to “scanty and unwholesome diet” from 1781 to 1786₈.
This lithograph by German artist Friedrich Campe perfectly captures the divide between master and slave. The slave cowers before the master, bound, almost naked, powerless, muscular, and recognizably human. The master towers over the slave, free, richly clothed, invulnerable, slender, and almost spectral in his rigid stance, pale face, and unsympathetic gaze. Do these two people look as if they even come from the same world? Is their rift one that can ever be healed?
