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Ocean slave trade.

      In the first part of this chapter a historical discussion will present information from archival and secondary sources about the trade of slaves from Madagascar and their arrival in Virginia. In the second part, an example of a contemporary family narrative will be presented with a discussion about the possible meanings of a narrative apparently reaching back to the eighteenth century.

       The Historical Record

      The voyages that led to the deportation of captives toward Barbados and Virginia were exploratory; American investors hoped to acquire slaves and, under cover of this activity, trade with pirates for silver and India goods to which they previously had no direct access. They also hoped to find new sources of cheap slave labor. In the seventeenth century, slaves from Madagascar were selling for only ten shillings worth of goods each, while slaves from West Africa during the same period could sell for as much as three or four British pounds apiece. By the early eighteenth century, slaves from Madagascar were still cheaper than their West African counterparts, but the voyages to the western Indian Ocean were more expensive.⁶

      The instability of Robert Walpole’s South Sea venture (which eventually impoverished many British elite) led some Anglo-American colonists, such as Robert “King” Carter of Virginia, one of the wealthy great planters, to search for ways to offset the losses they anticipated from that fiasco.⁷ Though they knew they were taking a risk, they did not foresee that their access to the Indian Ocean trade would once again be closed by the British Parliament by the end of 1723. It was general knowledge that such a long trajectory was bound to be deleterious to slave cargo, but the trip offered the bonus of direct access to East India goods. The slaves became the “legal” commodity of that commerce, and their trade was justified by their relatively cheap price compared to West African markets.⁸

      Except for two short periods—between the 1670s and 1698 and from 1716 to the end of 1721—no goods (Negroes having also been classed as commodities) were supposed to come directly to the American colonies from east of the Cape of Good Hope during the period of colonial prohibition to the Indian Ocean trade.⁹ In spring 1721 Capt. Joseph Stretton, whom we encountered in the previous chapter, was suspected by members of Parliament of having traded with pirates while in Madagascar on a slaving voyage. These actions had a serious impact on their view of Anglo-American colonist activity in the Indian Ocean. This is evident in a letter sent from London to Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia, relating to “Joseph Stretton of the Prince Eugene” and “his being concerned with Pirates.” The letter suggested that Stretton would be called to England to go before British authorities.¹⁰ Though trade with pirates was suspected of Captain Stretton, by that time the sanctioned trade had already transported thousands of Malagasy slaves and India goods, and most of the pirates had been chased away from their settlements in eastern Madagascar. After 1718 it was not pirates but private ships belonging to Anglo-Americans and their British commercial partners that traded in captives.

       The Malagasy Middle Passage

      The Malagasy slave experience was at the nexus of the western Indian Ocean slave trade and the trade of the Atlantic Ocean. Their tragedy was at the intersection of those two worlds and is an example of the globalization that began with the birth of capitalism and its transnational networks. Their movement, along with that of captives from Mozambique, describes the beginning of the end of the pirate heyday and the emergence of the nation-state, with its huge maritime companies, and the private slave traders, who competed with or were contracted by national bureaucracies.

      North American planters contracted with British merchant houses in London and Bristol, such as that of Micajah Perry, in order to invest in the Madagascar slave trade and other enterprises.¹¹ From 1719 to 1721 roughly 1,450 slaves were brought from Madagascar to Virginia, and the average time for a voyage was well beyond the three months allowed for the West Africa trade; vessels bound for Madagascar were allotted about fifteen or sixteen months for the whole trip.¹² By virtue of surviving the traumatic experience of the Middle Passage together, captives were bonded by the terror and dislocation they experienced. The slave ship “was a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory. . . . The slave ship also contained a war within, as the crew (now prison guards) battled slaves (prisoners), the one training its guns on the others, who plotted escape and insurrection.”¹³ The length of the trip once leaving the coast must have made it especially grueling, although the fact that captives could speak with one another was an unusual luxury in the context of the overall conditions of the Atlantic slave trade.

      Historian Stephanie Smallwood eloquently states that “individual paths of misfortune merged into the commodifying Atlantic apparatus—the material, economic, and social mechanisms by which the market molded subjects into beings that more closely resembled objects—beings that existed solely for the use of those who claimed them as possessions.”¹⁴ Slave weight and the space they occupied had to balance silver, Indian cotton, and other pirate booty to assure a smooth and profitable voyage for ships traveling from the western Indian Ocean into Atlantic waters. Another scholar, Marcus Rediker, sees the slave ship as a factory that had as its mission the production of slaves; their transformation was from culturally grounded human beings to isolated, psychologically traumatized beings who would be manipulated by raw power. In his view, “sailors also ‘produced’ slaves within the ship as factory, doubling their economic value as they moved them from African based markets to those of the West, helping to create the labor power that animated a growing world economy in the eighteenth century and after. In producing workers for the plantation, the ship-factory also produced ‘race.’”¹⁵

      The production of race had its corresponding resistance from the object of its intentions. From the moment of their entry on the slave ship, we must imagine that the people who were captive began to plot their spiritual and psychic, if not their physical, response. As well, language undoubtedly played a critical role in sustaining a sense of personality for the captives.¹⁶ We can visualize this encounter, situated as it is at the crucible of modern capitalism, as a conflict between the emerging modern epistemology of race and disappearing Old World epistemologies of culture.

      One probable stopping place for ships leaving Madagascar was Saint Helena, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Descriptions of the conditions of slaves there give us an idea of the horror of the captive’s experience and the dehumanizing effects the slave trade had on the slavers themselves. Among the archival documents that survive the busy shipping era of that island, there is a journal written by the nephew of Robert Brooke, the island’s governor. In reading the journal, one is struck by the seeming stark loneliness and inhumanity of this place, which treated sailors only a little better than it did the slaves who were so unfortunate to end up there. Passages from the journal demonstrate that agricultural products from Madagascar were imported there along with slaves fairly regularly.

      That many of the slaves on Saint Helena were from Madagascar is evidenced by written documents that highlight the importance of navigation routes of the time, and Saint Helena was undoubtedly a transnational space where the two ocean trade networks, the Indian and the Atlantic commercial routes, converged. For example, in 1715 the directors of the New East India Company (a later iteration of the East India Company that was formed in 1698) required that along with the privilege of trade licenses for the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, licensees were required to deliver nine slaves at the company’s settlement on the island for every £500 worth of goods: “those delivered were to be between the ages of 16 and 30, two-thirds male and one-third female, all natives of Madagascar, sound and healthy, and ‘every way merchantable.’” This is corroborated by other scholars, who report that in 1676 all English ships trading to Madagascar that stopped at Saint Helena were required to leave one Negro, male or female, as the governor chose.¹⁷ If all licensed ships were required to stop there, then that would have included those carrying Malagasy cargo to Virginia between 1715 and 1721.

      In March 1716 licenses were taken out by Thomas White for three ships and a sloop, by Heysham and Company for one ship, and by Sir Randolph Knipe and Sir John Fryer for their vessel, the Hamilton Galley, for the Madagascar trade. The Hamilton Galley arrived in Barbados from Madagascar on July 23, 1717, carrying two hundred

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