Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle. Paula Byrne
do not know whether Dido’s mother was bought in Africa, then captured by Lindsay while on the way to the Caribbean, or whether she had already been working on a plantation when she came into his hands. In the eighteenth century about six million slaves were carried across the Atlantic to the New World. Fifteen per cent – almost one million Africans – perished during the ‘middle passage’, the notorious journey from Africa to the Americas.
The triangular trading system saw ships departing from Europe for African markets with manufactured goods such as guns, ammunition, copper, cloth and trinkets, which were traded for purchased or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves; the slaves were then sold, or traded for raw materials such as sugar, rum and tobacco; which would be transported back to Europe to complete the voyage.
Purpose-built slave ships were built in Liverpool and Bristol. Typically two- or three-masted vessels, their average size was two hundred tons. Ventilation holes in the sides of the ship below the level of the upper decks were a tell-tale sign of a slaver. Nets were installed around the sides of the ship, to prevent the slaves from throwing themselves overboard.9
If Dido’s mother was indeed sold to a Spanish trader, we may gain an idea of what Captain Lindsay encountered when he first saw her from a slightly later account by the Reverend Robert Walsh, who was present when a British naval patrol intercepted an illegal Spanish or Portuguese slave ship, the Feloz, commanded by Captain José Barbosa, bound for Brazil. Walsh described the ship, with its enormous swivelling gun, and large kettles for cooking – ‘the usual apparatus of a slaver’ – and witnessed the scene of horror when the vessel was boarded. They found 562 slaves, ‘branded like sheep with the owner’s marks of different forms … as the mate informed me with perfect indifference, “burnt with the red-hot iron”’.10 Walsh was horrified by the stench, the heat and the cramped conditions. He could scarcely believe
how it was possible for such a number of human beings to exist, packed up and wedged together as tight as they could cram, in low cells three feet high, the greater part of which, except that immediately under the grated hatchways, was shut out from light or air, and this when the thermometer, exposed to the open sky, was standing in the shade, on our deck, at 89 degrees. The space between decks was divided into two compartments 3 feet 3 inches high; the size of one was 16 feet by 18 and of the other 40 by 21; into the first were crammed the women and girls, into the second the men and boys: 226 fellow creatures were thus thrust into one space 288 feet square and 336 into another space 800 feet square, giving to the whole an average of 23 inches and to each of the women not more than 13 inches. We also found manacles and fetters of different kinds, but it appears that they had all been taken off before we boarded.
The Reverend noted that all of the slaves on board the Feloz were naked.
From the moment the female slaves set manacled foot on ship, they were marked out as sexual fodder. Their naked flesh incited the lust of the sailors, who groped them and made choices as to their favourites. The slaver turned abolitionist John Newton recalled how, ‘naked, trembling, terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue and hunger’, the women and girls were ‘exposed to the wanton rudeness of white savages’. ‘The poor creatures,’ he saw, ‘cannot understand the language they hear, but the looks and manners of the speakers are sufficiently intelligible. In imagination, the prey is divided, upon the spot, and only reserved until opportunity offers.’11
On British slave ships, the women were kept in separate quarters from the males. ‘From the women there is no danger of insurrection, and they are carefully kept from the men; I mean, from the black men,’ noted freed slave turned abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano. But ‘it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies’.12 It was not true that women did not ever rebel against their lot. As we will see, female slaves had their own methods of insurrection.
John Newton noted the actions of a sailor called William Cooney, who ‘seduced a slave down into the room and lay with her brutelike in view of the whole quarter deck’. The woman (number 83) was already pregnant. Cooney was put in irons as a punishment. ‘If anything happens to the woman I shall impute it to him, for she was big with child,’ Newton wrote.13 It was for raping a pregnant woman so brutally that Cooney was punished. In general, the sexual abuse of female slaves aboard ship was simply part of the institutional violence of the Guineamen. Rape was used as a means by which to humiliate African men, who were powerless to protect their wives, mothers and daughters. Women were treated as property by sailors and captains. Sexual compliance was expected of them, and they conformed to expectations. The white males justified their abuse by expressing their belief that black women were promiscuous. If they refused sexual advances they would be flogged, or their children would be punished. Female slaves had to deal with the repercussions of their harassment, and many ‘mulatto’ children were born aboard the slave ships.
Caricatures of the late eighteenth century conform to racial stereotypes. African women are almost invariably drawn with large, pendulous, naked breasts, protruding bottoms, thick lips. On the one hand African women were dehumanised, herded naked like animals. But on the other they were clearly also sexually desirable, the objects of unbridled lust.
One of the most compelling eyewitness reports of the slave ships came from the abolitionist campaigner and writer Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave whose Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African was first published in 1789. He had been bought by Michael Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy who renamed him ‘Gustavus Vassa’, after King Gustav I of Sweden. Though doubts have been cast on its veracity, his autobiography remains one of the most important ‘slave narratives’.14 He gives a graphic account of the treatment of slave women on internal voyages between the colonies:
I used frequently to have different cargoes of new negroes in my care for sale; and it was almost a constant practice with our clerks, and other whites, to commit violent depredations on the chastity of the female slaves; and these I was, though with reluctance, obliged to submit to at all times, being unable to help them. When we have had some of these slaves on board my master’s vessels to carry them to other islands, or to America, I have known our mates to commit these acts most shamefully, to the disgrace, not of Christians only, but of men. I have even known them gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old; and these abominations some of them practised to such scandalous excess, that one of our captains discharged the mate and others on that account. And yet in Montserrat I have seen a negro man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut off bit by bit, because he had been connected with a white woman who was a common prostitute: as if it were no crime in the whites to rob an innocent African girl of her virtue; but most heinous in a black man only to gratify a passion of nature, where the temptation was offered by one of a different colour, though the most abandoned woman of her species.
From the other side of the racial divide, James Stanfield was perhaps the first ‘common tar’ to write about the horrors of the slave trade. In 1788, just as Equiano was preparing his Interesting Narrative for the press, Stanfield wrote Observations on a Guinea Voyage, in a Series of Letters Addressed to the Rev. Thomas Clarkson. A year later he published The Guinea Voyage, A Poem in Three Books. In both the prose work and the poem, he vividly and compellingly described the terrors of the slaver ships, coining the phrase ‘floating dungeon’.15 Stanfield’s writings were serialised in newspapers in Britain and America, and shocked their readers. His evidence that the slave trade was extremely destructive of the morals of English sailors as well as the lives of African slaves gave an additional argument to the abolitionist cause.
Stanfield’s accounts are striking for his depiction of the suffering of the female slaves. Time and again his poem re-enacts the particular abominations heaped on the women. He vividly describes a woman in childbirth, and her sorrow in giving birth to a baby born into slavery; two women