Ship Captains and Surgeons

There was a hierarchy, and wages corresponded to these various ranks of crew members. The captain represented the merchant, and he hired the crew, procured provisions, attended the loading of the cargo, and conducted all business of the voyage, including purchasing the captives in Africa.

In the eighteenth-century British slave ships, few captains seemed to have owned shares of their vessels or the human cargos they transported.⁴⁵ When the French slave vessel Le Diligent left the Bight of Benin in 1731, its captain Pierre Mary personally owned twenty-six captives on board.⁴⁶ In the South Atlantic system, ship captains were often also slave merchants, who outfitted their ships and also owned most of the African captives they transported.⁴⁷ In the first half of the nineteenth century, experienced Brazilian and Portuguese ship captains sailing between Bahia and the Bight of Benin became the owners of slave vessels. Inocêncio Marques de Santa Anna, for example, owned the vessels Juliana, Santa Anna, Flor d’África, and Flor d’AmĂ©rica. João Cardozo dos Santos, also based in Bahia, was the captain of the brigantine Henriqueta in six voyages to the African coasts and also of the schooner Terceira RozĂĄlia, and he later became the owner of the schooner Umbelina.

In general, ship captains had one or two mates. In Portuguese and Brazilian vessels, these officers were called pilotos (pilots), whereas in French slave vessels, the mate of the ship captain was referred to as seconde capitain (second captain). Ranked just below the captain, they assisted and replaced him in case of death. One of the mates commanded a watch. Mates were also in charge of the security, making sure that the enslaved persons were under control, that they were fed, and that they stayed healthy. In Britain, sailors boarded slave ships for a variety of reasons, and several mariners reported having been recruited by crimps, deceitful labor agents.⁴⁹ Forced or not to work on board these vessels, they were submitted to mistreatment, physical punishment, and exposure to fatal illnesses. Being a relative of a slave merchant or having served as a surgeon aboard a ship offered the best chances to become a slave ship captain in British vessels.⁵⁰ For example, John Newton started his career when he was still a boy, accompanying his father, who was a shipmaster in the Mediterranean trade. He later became a foremast man and then a ship captain when he was twenty-five years old.⁵¹ Most captains of French slave ships from La Rochelle, for example, belonged to the middle bourgeoisie, including sons of ship captains and master artisans.⁵² After completing a few voyages, several French slave ship captains became very prosperous individuals, who acquired opulent townhouses, plantations, and enslaved people in the French West Indies during the eighteenth century.⁵³

During the eighteenth century, smaller and faster slave ships did not carry a surgeon or ship doctor, who in European slave ships were usually men born in Europe. Only after 1788, all British ships were required to have a doctor on board.⁵⁴ In addition to assisting in the purchase of captives, the surgeon oversaw the enslaved captives daily to identify any illnesses.

Some of these health professionals left accounts of their journeys on slave ships. For example, in 1693, Johann Peter Oettinger, a twenty-seven-year-old German barber-surgeon arrived at the seaport of Ouidah in the Bight of Benin aboard the Friedrich Wilhelm. The slave ship was owned by the Brandenburg African Company (which was also known by other names), the short-lived Brandenburg-Prussia charter company created in 1682. From there he was brought inland to the town of Savi, the capital of the Kingdom of Hueda, where European slave merchants conducted business before the kingdom was conquered by the Dahomey.⁵⁶

In seventeenth-century Europe, in contrast with physicians, barber-surgeons were craftsmen. Whereas physicians received university training and performed internal interventions, barber-surgeons were only allowed to perform external interventions, including bloodletting, dressing wounds, and stitching cuts, as well as treating fractures, ulcers, and burns. Barber-surgeons also removed teeth and provided the regular services that barbers did, such as shaving and giving haircuts.⁵⁷ Similar to other manual workers such as tailors, butchers, shoemakers, and smiths, barber-surgeons were organized in guilds, associations of artisans that were awarded special advantages by cities and monarchs. Starting in the eighteenth century, surgeons, barbers, and bleeders could appear as separate categories in muster rolls of British slave ships. Yet, in dozens of eighteenth-century French crew lists, there was usually one surgeon, and sometimes a second surgeon.⁵⁸

Brazilian and Portuguese vessels rarely carried health professionals and practitioners, but when they did, enslaved and free African-born and Brazilian-born individuals often appear performing the roles of surgeons, barbers, and bleeders.⁵⁹ Vessels that sailed from Europe and the Americas to the coasts of Africa to purchase enslaved captives were adapted to transport the human cargo.