|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||
The Series
Day 1, Sunday, March 12
Buying and Selling the Human Species: Newport and the Slave Trade
For more than 75 years, the Triangular Trade flourishes in Newport. Rhode Island rum is traded in Africa for slaves, many of whom are sold in the West Indies. Molasses is brought back to Newport so distillers can make more rum.
Day 2, Monday, March 13
Plantations in the North: The Narragansett Planters
The prosperous Narragansett Planters, operating plantations in South County, send food and livestock vital to the huge sugar cane plantations in the West Indies.
Day 3, Tuesday, March 14
Strangers in a Strange Land: Newport's Slaves
Newport slaves left few accounts to convey what they thought or how they felt.
Day 4, Wednesday, March 15
1 Boye Slave Dyed: The Terrible Voyage of the Sally
As Capt. Esek Hopkins found at the height of the trade, transporting slaves was dangerous and dirty work. The Brown brothers' first joint investment in a slave voyage is a financial disaster.
Day 5, Thursday, March 16
Brown vs. Brown: Brothers Go Head to Head
Providence brothers John and Moses Brown, one a slave trader and the other an abolitionist, square off.
Day 6, Friday, March 17
Living Off the Trade: Bristol and the DeWolfs
Although federal and state laws are passed to end slave trading, merchants find ways to evade them and continue to prosper. The DeWolfs of Bristol dominate the slave trade and the town.
Day 7, Sunday, March 19
When Kristin Hayes teaches slavery, she shows her students a colorful mural depicting a white man on a horse overseeing bare-chested slaves toiling in a field.
Monday, Mar. 13, 2006
Slave ships leaving Newport tended to be smaller than their English competitors, and manned by smaller crews.
Each was likely to have no more than a crew of 10, which included an older -- and better paid -- captain, a first and second mate, a cooper, a cook and about five young seamen.
The seamen came from farms where they had little status in the Colony's emerging mercantile economy.
"A life on the sea sounded romantic -- especially if you were getting up at 4 a.m. and pulling a plow for your dad," says Ray Battcher, director of the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society.
Jay Coughtry, the author of The Notorious Triangle, studied more than 400 slave voyages made between 1803 and 1807. Of those on board, 95 percent were Rhode Islanders; 75 percent lived in Newport, the Colony's first major seaport. "They were white, hometown boys," he says.
The average age of a seaman was 24, but some 14- and 15-year-old, and even 11-year-old, sailors signed on as "apprentices to the captain" or "boys."
Little is recorded about life at sea. But historian Howard Willis Preston imagined a typical seaman on a slave voyage in a state history published in 1932.
"Of course, the first twenty-four or thirty-six hours would be torment; he would be seasick and yet forced to work. When this was over, there would be the long days at sea, disturbed only by the long roll of the billows as the ship slowly forged her way across the sea to the coast of Guinea and Anamaboe."
On the African coast, the young sailor would see "the low shores lined with the mysterious stilted mangroves and at length, through the trees on firmer ground, the trading house and so-called castles ... or stockades where the slaves were imprisoned until a buyer came." Everything, including the "fetid pestilential" climate, was "strange to the New England boy," wrote Preston.
It was a world ruled by African chiefs and English traders, who dickered with the captains over prices, he said. Once purchased, the Africans were "crowded between decks, where a space of three and one-half feet square was allotted to each.
"Then ensued the horrors of the so-called middle passage, the voyage from Africa to the West Indies. Squalid and fetid were the quarters of the slaves on shipboard," although the crew sometimes scoured them with pails of vinegar while the slaves were on deck. "The boy would be forced to witness the scenes of agony and see the dead thrown overboard."
Once the slaves were sold, the young sailor could relax. The ship returned "escorted by flying fish and porpoises, across the gulf stream to the darker waters of the north and at last to Newport and home to the farm."
The young man would return with more than a seaman's wage. "The slave trade was the greatest educator Rhode Island ever had," Preston speculated. Even if the young man returned to the farm, "his whole outlook on life would be changed."
