BLACK CARGOES (306 pp.)—Daniel P. Mannix with Malcolm Cowley—Viking ($6.95).
There were two schools of loading. The "loose packers" held that more slaves survived in a ship's hold if they had enough room to lie on their backs. The "tight packers" insisted slaves should be jammed in "spoon fashion" on their sides because, even if a few more died that way, the extra bodies a ship could carry more than made up the loss.
For a slave-ship captain, how to pack the cargo was but one of many vexatious commercial calculations. Another was whether to throw ailing slaves overboard or not. If they had something really contagious, it was a good move. If not, it was a needless loss of one of the most profitable cash crops in history. Salable slaves were continually trying to starve themselves to death too. But for this at least, civilized man's ingenuity had a remedy—a caliperlike instrument called a speculum oris (i.e., mouth opener). Its pointed shaft was hammered between the teeth of the recalcitrant black, then its wings spread to pull open his jaw.
"Heathen Bondmen." Matter-of-factly presenting such homely details, Author Daniel Mannix has produced a carefully understated but chilling account of the whole 3½ centuries (1518 to 1865) during which 15 million Africans were snatched from their homes and delivered into slavery in the New World. This savage traffic began, ironically, as the result of one man's compassion. In 1517 a pious priest from Haiti interceded with the Spanish King to protest the treatment of the island's gentle Indians, whom the colonists were slaughtering in droves in a futile effort to make the rest work. Moved less by mercy than the practical need for cheap labor to work Haiti's mines and plantations, the King authorized the importation of 4,000 Africans, and the enduring Negro proved a much better worker than any West Indian. Soon England, France, Holland and Portugal joined the search for slaves to cultivate their newly acquired possessions in the New World. Nearly 3,000,000 Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in the 17th century, almost 7,000,000 in the 18th.
When conscience nagged, slave owners cited the Bible (Leviticus 25:44—"Thy bondmen shall be of the heathen") as justification. But the trade offered the chance of such fantastic commercial gain that few men could resist it. In the 1780s, when a man could live on £6 a year, the merchants of Liverpool with 87 ships working the African coast netted £300,000 profit in one twelve-month period.
Jettisoned Cargo. The white man did not invent slavery. For centuries the tribes along the Guinea coast (the 4,000 miles of West African coastline stretching from present-day Mali to Angola) had made slaves of one another. But the insatiable European slavers, trading in guns, powder and rum, set off an ever-widening wave of violence. Rival tribes raided incessantly and reached out into the interior for fresh supplies of victims.