An Essay Review of: "Pirates of the slave trade," by Angela C. Sutton
A Different Kind of Slavery
This classic pirate's tale just happens to be true. It is about the battle of Cape Lopez, an obscure skirmish that took place off the western coast of Africa on February 10, 1722. However, this author's version of the tale ends with a swift mule kick to the head of North American civilization.
No one could have imagined that this little battle on the high seas, would be the turning point in the transatlantic slave trade. Or that, its ripples would reverberate far across the Atlantic to the British colonies of North America.
During the early 1600s, when ships crossing the Atlantic were converging on the West coast of Africa like so many locusts, the slave traders were like Willie Sutton was about the banks he robbed: They simply sailed to where the money was. And the money was in gold, silver and Africans locked up in cages at the forts built specifically for that purpose, all along the west coast of Africa, from Benin, Dahomey, to the Gold Coast of Ghana.
"Might makes right," along with "daring" and "treachery," stood in as the operational laws of the sea.
When the pirates squared off against slave traders, it was a classical devil-eat-devil fight to the death. And for decades the pirate devils held sway. As this author tells the story, the pirates had the tactical upper hand. And, against the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and even the Prussians, they were winning battle after battle for decades.
But then somewhat belatedly, the British got into the transatlantic slave game. And they decided to put an end to the scourge of transatlantic piracy.
Britain sent an English Man O' War around the world chasing the one Pirate who had come to symbolize and monopolize the booty in the piracy game: One, Bartholomew Roberts, aka, Black Bart, alone had raided more than 400 ships and sailed away with nearly ten million dollars in gold, silver and slaves.
This author tells us why Bartholomew Roberts had the upper hand: Because, by night, he was a courageous but murderous and daring nihilistic risk-taker. And by day, a rum-drinking alliance-building charmer.
This instinct-based homicidal schizophrenia was just what the piracy game called for at the turn of the 17th Century. It served Black Bart well, and rewarded his brand of terrorism handsomely.
The ships he raided were little more than poorly armed Brink trucks of the sea. Loaded with extraordinarily valuable booty, they were heavily-laden sitting ducks waiting to be highjacked by any pirates with gumption enough, and wily enough to surprise them as he boarded their ships with a: "Drop your weapons and be calm! Your ship is now under new management!" Your Captain has been made an offer he cannot refuse: eight ounces of gold for the return of an empty ship. If he pays up, then this will all end well. Then, you too, like the slaves I will choose not to sell, may become a new member of my crew, and thus you will live. If he refuses my offer, I will burn the ship and you will all die. There is no need to lose your life trying to be a hero. You are paid to little to be brave. Plus these ships are insured. So follow my orders and this all will be over soon."
That is a facsimile of how Black Bart's script went as he boarded the ships he highjacked.
That is, until February 10, 1722.
On that fateful day, Black Bart met his match. A British Man O' war caught up with him, and blasted his ship "The Royal Fortune" to kingdom come. As British cannons ripped through the hull of his ship, Black Bart, in a final coup de grace, committed suicide, going down with his ship.
And now for the author's moral backstory to this very interesting tale.
Trading in human flesh was a complicated moral story that lived in the front of consciousness of every 16th Century human being, including those manning pirates ships full of slaves locked down head-to toe in their own filth in the hole of the ships they raided. No matter what historians tell us, there were no moral virgins when it came to the meaning of slavery from the 16th Century onwards.
And as defensive historians are wont to say: since the Romans, everybody practiced some brand of slavery.
In fact, the slightly more respectable slave traders of the era, did indeed follow some variation of the Justinian code adopted by the Catholic Church, which was inherited from the Roman practice of slavery. The code was distinguished by the fact that it sought to preserve just a "sliver" of the humanity of the slave.
Under the Justinian code, for instance, a slave was allowed to retain a modicum of his personhood, his moral agency and his humanity. He was accepted as a functioning human being who could eventually rise above his slave status. In fact, under the code, a slave could even become a Christian. In which case, the taint of slavery could be erased completely. If not in this life, then surely in the next.
All of the slave traders converging on the West African coast (save one), practiced some variation of the Justinian Code. And of course, the one slave trading nation that did not practice it, was none other than the very nation that had circumnavigated the globe to kill the moral beast and high seas terrorist, Bartholomew Roberts.
But as this story turns from the moral bestiality of the pirate class, to the moral bestiality of the slave traders class, one nation's lack of any semblance of a moral conscience stands out above all others: Great Britain. Who, after defeating Black Bart, engaged in and brought to North America, the worst version of slavery ever known to man called "chattel slavery."
Chattel slavery derived its name from, and mimicked the slavery that was imposed on all beasts of burden. However, those beasts had no humanity because they were not humans. They had no personhood because they were not persons. They did not own their own labor because they lacked human awareness to know how to do so.
Like cows, oxen, goats, horses, mules and sheep, chattel slaves too could not become Christians because they lacked moral agency -- except, that is, in cases where they violated their owner's laws. Then, and only then, they were held morally accountable for their conduct, and could be whipped, maimed and mutilated, imprisoned or killed for violations or disobedience.
Chattel slaves' bodies and minds, and that of all their progenies, were the property of their owners. They existed solely for the purpose of the owner's pleasure or profit. And this state of affairs existed in perpetuity for both.
The all-encompassing nature of chattel slavery created a new kind of objectified human being. And with it, a new kind of identity politics. A kind in which people of African ancestry, were "stamped from the beginning" as being no more than cattle, human beasts of burden.
In 1622, the state of Virginia (where I now reside), passed a law that enshrined the key principles of chattel slavery. It stated that "among tame and domestic animals the brood belonged to the owner of the dam or mother."
In one sweeping legal clause, this law eliminated the negative legal consequences of sexually assaulting enslaved women; guaranteed that everything an enslaved body was able to do, was for the pleasure or profit of the owner; and tied slavery to the politically, socially, and culturally constructed notion of race.
Both blackness and whiteness became artificial concepts deployed to arrange power in ways that benefited only white people. As the author points out on page 233, whiteness became a "made up category" defined simply as the complement of blackness.
As this story comes full circle, it was no accident that of the 5,000 slaves brought back from the western coast of Africa by a British slave trader named William Snelgrave, (who just happened to have been Black Bart's mentor), were sold to slave holders residing in the state of Virginia. Five stars
