By now you should have read the article by Lorenzo Greene entitled "Mutiny on the Slave Ships." Previously I described the horrific conditions of Middle Passage. This was a shocking, wrenching, traumatic experience for anyone who survived it. It was a brutal and dehumanizing experience, (by dehumanizing I mean that the captives were treated as if they were less than human). And as we would expect, the captive Africans resisted despite the fact that they were chained, and unarmed, and virtually powerless.

What we know of the uprisings on the slave ships comes from the diaries and reports and newspaper accounts left by white captains, crew members and survivors. The African captives would have left few records of the uprisings, and their reports wouldn't be here in America. The stories of the African captives might survive as oral traditions among their people in Africa, but would not have been recorded in America by the slaveholders.

It is important to understand why our knowledge of this topic is so scanty. If the African captives revolted on a ship off the coast of Africa, killed all of the crew, and piloted the ship back to Africa and then ditched it, who in America would know? What record of the event would there be? All the crew are dead. They couldn't tell what had happened. The home port would realize the ship had not returned, and was missing, but no one would know why it was missing. Maybe it was lost in a storm or a hurricane. It would simply be a missing ship. Thus, we do not know and never can know how many of these revolts occurred.

And again, for the revolts that we do know about, we know about it from the accounts of the white captain of the ship or crew members who survived, and their diaries or reports to the newspapers, and so forth. Typically the slave ships had a crew of 10-20, armed. There are at least 45 documented cases of uprisings on the slave ships known to English and American sources. This does not include incidents for the Spanish or Portuguese or French or Dutch. The uprisings are usually known by the name of the ship on which it occurred, or sometimes after the captain of the ship.

In the American colonies, the most important centers of shipbuilding were in New England, in places like Boston, Salem, (MASS), Newport, Providence, Bristol (RI) and Hartfort and New London (CT). The good Puritans of New England did not own as many slaves as the landowners of Virginia and Maryland, but the New Englanders built and manned the slave ships. They carried the Africans across the ocean in their ships, and profited from the sale of other human beings as slaves.

Typically they took iron bars, rum, trinkets to Africa to trade for "Negroes," and carried the captives to the West Indies or the South. It was not only the Southerners who were guilty of involvement in the slave trade. Southerners bought the slaves, but it was most often Northerners and Englishmen who brought them here.

SOME OF THE UPRISINGS

In 1764 a ship called the Adventure lay at anchor off the coast of Africa. Africans attacked the ship, killed the crew and liberated the captives.

Also in 1764 the slaves aboard the ship Hope revolted. in the uprising 2 crew members and 8 slaves were killed.

In January 1731 an English newspaper reported that Captain Jump, and all but 3 of his crew, had been killed in a slave uprising off the coast of Africa.

in 1735 a Captain Moore of Mass. reported that on the night of June 17 his ship was attacked by Africans on the Gambia River in West Africa. The battle lasted half the night. One crew member was killed and at dawn the Africans were driven off. Their attack was not successful.

In 1761, aboard a Boston ship called the Thomas, the slaves revolted and tried to kill the crew.

In March 1742, slavers aboard the Jolly Bachelor were loading captives onto the ship in the Sierra Leone River. Africans attacked. Captain Cutler and two of his crew were killed. The Africans stripped the ship of its rigging and sails, liberated the captives in the hold, and abandoned the ship. This was a successful attack. However we should note that rescues and uprisings were more successful if they occurred right away, on the coast. The further the ship got away from the coast of Africa the less the chance of being able to successfully get back to Africa.

In April 1789 35 slaves aboard the Felicity rose up against their captors. Captain William Fairchild was killed, and three slaves were killed before the uprising was crushed.

In June 1730 Captain George Scott sailed from the Guinea coast with a cargo of 96 slaves aboard the ship Little George. Six days out to sea the slaves revolted. They broke through the bulkhead of the ship and onto the deck. The crew retreated to a cabin and tried to make a bomb (gun powder in a bottle). The bomb went off, and the explosion nearly destroyed the ship. The captain and some of the crew remained imprisoned in the cabin for several days while the slaves steered the ship back to the coast of Africa, and successfully escaped when they came within sight of the coast. This is one of the more successful uprisings. Apparently the captain lived to tell about it.

In December 1753 one Captain Bear was loading captives onto his ship at Coast Castle in West Africa. The slaves rebelled and killed the captain and all the crew except for 2. These two crewmen escaped by leaping overboard to escape, and swimming ashore. This uprising seems to have been successful, and we only know about it from the 2 crew members who jumped overboard. (Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, Volume III, 82-83).

In 1765 nearly the entire crew of a ship from Bristol, RI was killed in a slave uprising off the coast of Africa. The lone survivor was a Mr. Dunfield, who was out in a small boat when the uprising occurred, and it is only from him that the incident is known.

In 1776 there was an unsuccessful uprising aboard the Thomas. There were 160 slaves on board. The crewmen were armed and retreated behind a barricade. The captives were unable to overpower the crew, and many of them jumped overboard. This was suicidal, and 33 drowned. But these people preferred to take their chances in the sea rather than submit to whatever fate awaited them.

There were two famous uprisings aboard ships in the United States, though in the 1800s. These are the incidents involving the Amistad (1839) and the Creole (1841).

In July 1839 slaves aboard a Spanish ship called the Amistad revolted and won control of the ship. The leader of the revolt was Joseph Cinque (the name given to him by the Spanish). (In English sometimes called Cin-que). The captives spoke Mende (a west African language). They piloted the ship to Long Island, New York. There was a trial to determine what to do with them, since in 1808 the external slave trade had ended. Former President John Quincy Adams defended them, and the Supreme Court ruled that they should be set free and allowed to return to Africa. Sadly, when some of them returned to Africa, they found their home villages destroyed. Everyone was gone. They had been raided and carrid away in warfare.

In October 1841 a ship called the Creole sailed from Hampton Roads, VA, toward New Orleans, with 135 slaves. En route, Madison Washington and Ben Blacksmith led an insurrection. On November 7th, as the ship neared the Bahamas, the slaves revolted. They seized all the firearms, and threatened to throw the crew overboard if they were not taken to an English colony. England had emancipated its slaves in 1833. The ship landed at Nassau, in the Bahamas, and the slaves escaped. The US government, under pressure from Southerners, lodged a formal complaint. It demanded that Britain return the fugitive slaves (Harding, p. 113). Britain told the US to get lost.
 

In conclusion, black people did not just passively surrender to Middle Passage. They were carried here in chains kicking, screaming and fighting back. As the black historian Vincent Harding says, these ships were prison-ships. They were death ships. Carrying black people to a prison-state called slavery in America. Even though the odds were stacked against the captives on those ships, they tried to revolt anyway. Sometimes their efforts were successful. Sometimes they were not. But the idea that black people did not try to resist is absurd. Black people resisted, and were subdued by superior power and force of arms. And as Greene and others point out, the captive women also played a role in these uprisings, too. The uprisings aboard the Jolly Bachelor and the Little George, and the Amistad and the Creole are the best known.