Shipmates as Family Members

The slave ship was often the site where family separation was eventually completed. Still, during several weeks of their dreadful journey to the Americas, when enslaved men, women, and children were forced to share the crowded, asphyxiating, and filthy holds of slave ships, they created bonds with their shipmates.

These bonds help explain the connections that began in the holds of slave ships and survived long after disembarkation in the Americas, depending on where the shipmates were sold.¹³ Shipmate bonds are also related to the notion of groups of provenance. This concept, introduced in chapter 6 and developed by historian Mariza de Carvalho Soares, highlights how Africans who were embarked in the same region and over a given period tended to belong to groups sharing the same or similar languages, cultures, and religions.¹⁴ The emphasis on these slave ship families is also a response to erroneous assumptions that the human cargoes on board slave ships were composed of heterogeneous groups of random and unrelated enslaved individuals, which some scholars argue is why their connections only emerged during the Middle Passage.¹⁵ Yet regardless of whether these bonds emerged during the journeys to the coast, inside the coastal trading structures, or aboard slave vessels, the traumatic experiences of enslavement and deportation created special ties among African captives that were maintained during the period they lived under slavery in the Americas.¹⁶

During the era of slavery, the Portuguese, Spanish, and French crowns controlled the Roman Catholic Church in their specific territories, and the church was in charge of recording births, deaths, and marriages.

Although tracing connections among African captives that predated the deportation to the Americas or which emerged on board the slave ships proves to be difficult, marriage records in the Spanish Americas allow us to track these early links among African shipmates.¹⁸ Historian Herman Bennett shows that as early as 1584, Francisco, an enslaved man, went by himself to Mexico City’s cathedral to petition to marry Catalina, an enslaved woman who shared with him the same owner. In the petition Francisco and Catalina, as well as Victoria, one of their witnesses, identified themselves as “from the land of Biafara.”¹⁹ The use of this term, which in Iberian societies of the time referred to the West African region inhabited by the Biafada peoples in today’s Guinea-Bissau, suggests that the three African-born enslaved individuals valued ethnic links that in one way or another predated their forced transportation to the Spanish Americas.²⁰ Other enslaved men and women born in West Central Africa maintained similar long-lasting connections even though living in different households and neighborhoods of Mexico City during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.²¹

Another scholar, historian Alex Borucki, has explored dozens of marriage petitions of enslaved people transported to Montevideo, in present-day Uruguay, showing that African-born and American-born shipmates continued to stay connected many years after being transported to the Americas.

Formerly enslaved men and women shipmates also married each other. Take the example of the Africans transported to Brazil on board the schooner Emilia. In 1820, the vessel left Bahia to trade in Malembo, a West Central African port located south of the equator, on the Loango coast. But instead the vessel sailed to Lagos, in today’s Nigeria, north of the equator, a region where since 1815 an international treaty had made the Portuguese slave trade illegal. When the Emilia left Lagos transporting 392 men, women, and children, the British naval frigate Morgiana intercepted the vessel and established that the Africans on board were acquired illegally. Probably many of these captives had never met one another before boarding the Emilia, but some of them may have been relatives, whereas others certainly shared previous experiences in Yorubaland. After several stops and changes in trajectory, the Morgiana and Emilia arrived in Rio de Janeiro, where the 354 surviving Africans were kept for months in a warehouse.

According to Brazilian legislation, captives who were illegally introduced in the country after 1831 had to be freed and assigned the special status of “liberated Africans” (africanos livres), which will be discussed in chapter 16. But despite their emancipation, these Africans still had to serve as so-called apprentices for fourteen years, often under dreadful conditions. Existing records show that a few individuals transported on board the Emilia not only nurtured connections acquired during the Atlantic crossing but also married each other during the weeks they spent in a Rio de Janeiro’s warehouse waiting to be liberated.²³ Moreover, despite having been separated during the apprenticeship years, these Africans kept bonds of friendship and affection, and together they petitioned the state to be freed earlier. At the end of the apprenticeship years, approximately sixty of the liberated Africans from the Emilia returned together to Lagos. One of these individuals was actually able to amass wealth during the apprenticeship years and paid the way back of his comrades’ to West Africa.²⁴