Crew Members on Slave Ships

The profiles of crew members of slave ships operating in the North and South Atlantic systems bear a few similarities. The typical age of crew members of eighteenth-century British slave ships could vary between fifteen and forty-two, but the average age was midtwenties.

The average age of crew members aboard vessels transporting African captives to Brazil between the two last decades of the eighteenth century until the end of the slave trade was similar to that of eighteenth-century British slave vessels.²⁴ Only a few crew members on these ships came from other parts of the world, such as India, Macao, Cambodia, Chile, Uruguay, and Cuba. According to Jaime Rodrigues, based on a limited sample of 179 crews of vessels transporting enslaved Africans to Brazil between 1780 and 1863, 70 percent of the crew members were born in Portugal, especially in Lisbon. This same study suggests that during this period, sailors born in Brazil, who were either Black or white, enslaved or free, made up approximately 12 percent of the crews.

Likewise, enslaved Black seamen outnumbered free white seamen on Portuguese slave vessels.²⁷ For instance, another sample of 230 enslaved sailors in Portuguese slave ships between 1760 and 1825 shows that approximately 80 percent of the crew members were born in Africa, mostly in Angola, followed by the Bight of Benin and Benguela. Overall, the regions of origin of these mariners suggest that, most of the time, ship captains hired African-born mariners from the regions where they conducted their slave-trading activities.²⁸ In the case of Portugal, and consequently its colony Brazil, this trend shows the two regions’ deep connections with African slave-trading ports such as Luanda, Ouidah, and Benguela, whence the vast majority of enslaved Africans sent to the Americas were boarded. As Portuguese and Brazilian vessels transported the largest number of enslaved Africans to the Americas, they needed more crew members to conduct a greater number of slaving voyages. African-born crew members knew the regions where these slave ships were trading. They also knew the local agents, their languages, and their customs, and consequently they were also familiar with the languages and cultures of enslaved Africans they transported in these ships.

Jorge, a man born in Ouidah in the late eighteenth century, was one of these sailors. When he was a young man, he was captured, transported, and sold into slavery in Bahia, Brazil.

On the slave-trading route connecting Salvador (Bahia) to West Africa, most mariners were enslaved and freedmen, born either in Africa or in Brazil.³¹ Ads in one early nineteenth-century newspaper of Salvador show announcements selling enslaved sailors both locally born and born in West Central Africa and West Africa.³² An even larger number of ads announce enslaved sailors for sale in Rio de Janeiro’s newspapers during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. For example, an ad announced the sale of an enslaved sailor born in West Central Africa, identified as Benguela, who wanted to be sold to be employed in the slave trade.³³ Moreover, several other announcements searched for enslaved mariners who ran away. Therefore, crews of slave ships of all nations transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas included African-born and American-born Black sailors, either enslaved or free, even in small numbers.³⁴

Freedmen also worked aboard slave ships. Consider the case of Antônio Narciso Martins da Costa. He was born in the Bight of Benin and sent into slavery in Salvador (Bahia). Once emancipated, he became a slave ship captain. At least one of his voyages is well documented. In 1813, he traveled from the Bight of Benin as a captain of the vessel Pistola that transported 366 enslaved Africans to Bahia.³⁵ Likewise, João de Oliveira, an enslaved sailor and Yoruba speaker, was captured when he was a boy in the early eighteenth century and sold into slavery to a slave merchant in Recife, Brazil.

In the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic system, freeborn and freed Africans also boarded slave ships as free travelers, sometimes alone and sometimes with their former owners. Their voyages as free passengers in slave vessels show that the connections between Africa, Europe, and the Americas during the era of the Atlantic slave trade also made possible the circulation of free African-born individuals who kept personal and commercial ties with both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.³⁷ For example, Marie Baude, an African woman, boarded the French frigate GalathĂ©e as a passenger to meet her husband in Louisiana. The vessel departed from GorĂ©e Island in Senegambia carrying 400 enslaved men, women, and children, but as disease hit during the voyage, only 260 arrived alive in New Orleans in 1728.³⁸

Most slave merchants were men born in Europe and the Americas. However, there were white women deeply involved in the trade of enslaved Africans. In the French port of La Rochelle, Marguerite Bouat, Marguerite Boucher, Anne Busquet, and Marie-Madeleine Denis represented slave-trading companies during the eighteenth century.³⁹ In the early nineteenth century Margaret Schutt in Charleston, South Carolina, and a woman known as “Mrs. Johnson” from Philadelphia both organized slaving voyages to the coasts of Africa.⁴⁰ There were a few cases of African-born women among slave merchants and shipowners, especially in Luanda and Benguela.

The number of crew members, including ranked officers, petty officers, and sailors, in a slave ship varied according to its size. Each officer usually had one or two mates to replace him in case of death and disease. Typical slave ships had a captain. Other members included a first and second mate, a surgeon (or ship doctor), a carpenter, a boatswain, a gunner or armorer, a cooper (barrel maker), a cook, ten to twelve seamen, a few landsmen, and two shipboys. Larger ships would have additional mates, mates for the doctor and various skilled workers (especially carpenter and gunner), and additional seamen and landsmen. The carpenters oversaw the ship’s structure and transformed ordinary merchant vessels into vessels to transport human cargo. During the voyage from American or European ports to the coasts of Africa and while anchored in African ports, carpenters built the main deck’s barricade, along with the bulkheads and wooden platforms of the lower deck, where enslaved men, women, and children spent the night.⁴³ Carpenters also built temporary structures ashore, in regions such as the Loango coast, where Europeans were not allowed to establish permanent trading buildings.