[Reviews] Spirits of the Passage

Madeleine Burnside, edited by Rosemarie Robotham, with a foreword by Cornel West, Spirits of the Passage: The Transatlantic Slave trade in the Seventeenth Century (published by Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, 2003; reprint of 1997 edition published by Simon & Schuster), 192 pages, $35.00.
Madeleine Burnside, executive director of the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society since 1991, has written a compelling and thought-provoking review of one part of human history’s most barbarous episodes: the four-century agony of the transatlantic slave trade. Ambitious in her effort to present, in less than 200 pages, a world context for the forcible, mass transport of African slaves to America, Burnside succeeds in giving us a readable, compelling book that will appeal to almost any student or general reader. The book’s usefulness is greatly enhanced by unobtrusive endnotes, identification of the source for each illustration, and a detailed index.

The author’s purpose is to “put a human face” on the slave trade in order to transcend the stereotyped villains and victims so often depicted in accounts of this abominable business, and thereby to constructively address racism, which she calls “the most destructive legacy of that trade” (p. 18). Rather than merely compile a catalog of horrors, Burnside raises questions about human nature, human motivations, sensibilities and interpersonal relationships: above all, “Why do good people do cruel things to others?”

Burnside’s chosen vehicle for delivering the “human face” is the Henrietta Marie, a slave ship wrecked off the Florida Keys in 1700. To Burnside, this ship represents the transatlantic slave trade at its chronological midpoint – when European and African traders had well-established the practices and character of the triangular slave trade route, but “just before it emerged as a full-blown world commerce” (p. 19) and before the trade had so devastated sub-Saharan Africa’s population as to plunge local economies into irrecoverable decline. By tracing the brief slaving career of the little vessel, Burnside introduces us to some investors who financed the voyages, some of the craftsmen who made the trade goods, the sailors who crewed the ship, the Africans who traded with the ship on the Calabar River in Guinea, and the dealer who took delivery of most of Henrietta Marie’s human cargo in Barbados. The story is fleshed out with examples from primary and secondary sources that document the transatlantic slave trade from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.

In necessarily few pages, the book neatly lays out the European and African world at the beginning of what would become the transatlantic slave trade. Burnside introduces us to late medieval Europe, as its peoples, emerging from serfdom and feudal vassalage, began to explore continents far beyond their own known world. She takes us to the Mediterranean Sea where Moors of the Barbary Coast traded and fought with western Europeans and the Turks, where Arab traders were the brokers for ivory and slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, and where the enslavement of captives from all nations was the norm. She takes us down the west coast of Africa to highly cultured and accomplished kingdoms and nations who had traded for centuries with the outside world through Arab intermediaries. She takes us deep into the African west coast, introducing us to the ethnic groups, art, industry and agriculture of several African kingdoms. Along the way, Burnside shows that slaves in African and Mediterranean countries endured forms of bondage that were (on average) far less cruel, less debilitating, and less lethal than the American slavery invented for Africans.

Burnside takes us to the island nation of England, a latecomer the bustling explorations begun by Portugal and Spain, but eager to participate in the riches of the New World and to profit from the new routes to old Africa. She takes us into London’s commercial world and guilds of the latter seventeenth century, and uncovers the oft-brutalized lives of apprentices who, like slaves, were “virtually without personal rights or individual freedoms” (p. 61). While comparing the use of violence to compel work in both apprentices and African slaves in America, she carefully contrasts the two conditions: the apprentice was under contract for a limited number of years, while the slave was a chattel for life. The apprentice could hope to attain mastery in his trade, but the slave who did not escape remained enslaved until she or he died.

Why did English people, who had no domestic slavery, and many of whose sailors had suffered enslavement at the hands of enemy nations and pirates, join the slave trade? Burnside argues that familiarity with Mediterranean slavery “blunted rather than sharpened English sensibilities” to the inequities and suffering of slaves (p. 41), and that the prevalence of compulsion, violence and poverty in the lives of lower-class Englishmen blurred the contrast with the conditions of slavery. “[R]ather than impart an empathy for human suffering, harsh treatment as an apprentice seemed to inure the European slave owner to the emotional and physical anguish felt by the Africans” (p. 61).

Burnside explores comparisons and contrasts between colonial indentured servants and slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations. Both classes experienced over-work, cruelties and high mortality, but the indenture was a document that provided some legal recourse to the servant who (like the old-world apprentice) served a limited number of years, and was nominally a citizen with the same rights as fellow-countrymen in Europe. Slaves suffered under a different set of laws and remained slaves for life (pp. 156-8).

Burnside enlivens an already vivid text with diverting vignettes such as the story of Njinga, the powerful “Queen-King” of Angola; excepts from the letters of a twelve-year-old French boy describing to his mother some of the horrors he witnessed as a passenger on a slave ship; and a sketch of the conversion of John Newton from slave ship captain to Christian minister. The vignette, “A Cultural Exchange,” describes the mutual influence of African and European artists on each others’ work in the Renaissance and includes a tantalizing pictorial glimpse of Benin bronze and ivory sculpture.

Burnside writes that the slave trade originated in “the basest of human instincts: . . . mortal greed and indifference to suffering,” and that, “In the matter of slavery, humanity was compromised by greed” (pp. 94 and 133). Spirits of the Passage is filled with enough monstrous ship captains and crews to show the basest sides of human nature, but Burnside observes that the sadistic slavers, owners, or ship captains who killed their human property through deliberate cruelty or willful neglect did not prosper in the African slave trade; rather it was the relatively decent men whose humanity extended far enough to provide adequate food, water and health care for the Middle Passage, who made their voyages profitable, and thus nourished the trade.

The book repeatedly challenges readers to consider how good people could do such bad things. She describes folks who, were they living in your town today, you might embrace as members of your church or appreciate as your neighbors: people like Anthony Tournay, a rich London merchant who invested in slave voyages, but who habitually and personally gave alms to the poor and who endowed a hospital and schools for his less fortunate countrymen; or like French slave trader Guillaume Grou who left his entire fortune to charity (pp. 66, 71); or perhaps like the King of Sestos, a West African ruler whose court is depicted negotiating with European slave traders (page 79).

Burnside offers evidence that Barbados and Jamaica, the two ports of call for Henrietta Marie, were peopled by the dregs of English society, but what about those presumably more cultured and civilized persons in Europe or Africa whose financial exchanges and marketplaces served the trade far away from the miserable conditions of Africans’ slavery in America? Burnside hints at a common link between European slave-merchant-investors, African slave-trading kings, and absentee owners of West Indies plantations: a geographic distance from scenes of brutality that left them in ignorance – whether deliberate or naïve – of the true depth of suffering their businesses caused. She contrasts relatively benign slavery on some owner-managed plantations with the horrors often perpetrated on plantations managed by overseers for absentee landlords (p. 154). She includes a journalist’s account of a 1994 “Ghanaian ceremony of apology” – in which chiefs and priests apologized for their ancestors’ part in the transcontinental slave trade, saying that “their ancestors had not understood the barbarity of slavery as it was practiced in America” (p. 169).

There are striking parallels in Spirits of the Passage to other times and places in American slavery. For example, when a seventeenth-century slave captain, who believed himself a humanitarian, told his human cargo that he was not to blame for their condition because “they were already enslaved when he purchased them, and that the decision to ship them away had had been made by the sellers not himself,” (p. 139) he was anticipating by a hundred years the identical arguments used by American traders and owners in the South’s interstate slave trade: it was never their fault that they bought or sold slaves.

When the book occasionally touches on issues of human racialism, it is on shakier ground. Although, in his foreword, Cornel West characterizes “race” as a modern construction designed to “control, confine, discipline, and dishonor Africans,” Burnside seems to be projecting modern racial categories onto peoples of the past when she calls Africans “a significant new race of people” who joined “Europeans and native inhabitants” in building the New World (pp. 8, 28). In trying to cover the origins of race and the nature of racism in only four paragraphs (pp. 61-2) the author inevitably oversimplifies. When addressing the role of race in the cruelties of American slavery, she is wrong to say that denial of dignity came from “failure . . . to recognize a captive’s humanity” (97-8). On the contrary, denial of dignity was a deliberate tool of oppression used by slave masters who recognized that dignity was a very human attribute incompatible with the subordination required by their brand of slavery. To consciously deny dignity was to recognize (in a perverse way) the slaves’ humanity. Lastly, on page 62 Burnside includes the worn-out and historically unsupportable canard that the U. S. Constitution counted a black slave as “two-fifths less of a human being than his white master.”

The book is rich in black-and-white and full-color illustrations. Some of them will be familiar to most readers (example: the loading plan for slave ship Brookes on page 123), but many more of the pictures are from fresh and uncommon sources. Probably because there are fewer pictorial records of the seventeenth century slave business, Burnside relies on images dating as late as the nineteenth century to illustrate her text. In most cases the illustrations work well, although I question the use of an 1886 magazine drawing - showing men working the boiler room of a sugar mill - to represent seventeenth-century slave sugar processing (p. 152).

The weakest parts of the book are the foreword and introduction, one for its style and the other for relevance of content. The title of Cornel West’s foreword, “The Ignoble Paradox of Western Modernity,” gives readers ample warning of the academic jargon with which West vents his usual bitter condemnations of American society.

Rosemarie Robotham’s introduction – in contrast with the authentic and documented episodes in the rest of Burnside’ book – offers an imagined “silent revolt,” a scene at the debarkation of slaves in Georgia. Following a young woman – “She is their leader, a mystic perhaps” – the chained slaves wordlessly march in step off the ship into the ocean and disappear beneath waters, leaving “their spirits dancing in the Atlantic.” Robotham writes that “I am told that it is true, that this silent revolt took place in the Georgia Sea Islands in 1803” (pp. 11-2); if so, then told by whom? Told where? If true as Robotham tells it, this tale is important evidence of an African mysticism not evident in the rest of the book, but if pure fantasy, then such myth-making belongs elsewhere than in a serious attempt to invoke the lives of the enslaved dead.

I highly recommend Spirits of the Passage to the casual reader or the specialist historian. It is well-written, sumptuously-produced, and offers thought-provoking insight into one of history’s worst works of human nature, the implications of which we and each future generation cannot afford to ignore.