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Though the seafaring English came to dominate the trade, England was the first country to try to suppress it. In 1782 the British public was aroused by an incredible court case: an English captain who had thrown 132 slaves overboard tried to collect insurance on them as "jettisoned cargo." In the parliamentary investigations that followed, slavers vied with one another in painting the slaves' happy life aboard ship. "When sailors are flogged," one piously testified, "it is always done out of hearing of the Africans so as not to disturb them." What shocked Britons almost as much as the treatment of slaves was the lot of white seamen. One captain force-fed a member of his crew on live cockroaches, and floggings regularly resulted in death. Proportionately, almdst twice as many crewmen died as slaves—their mortality rate ran to more than 20% per voyage.
In 1807 Britain outlawed the slave trade, and Royal Navy squadrons cruised the African coast.'But these watchdogs were eluded or defied by the ships of the newly independent American colonies. Southern planters needed slaves to maintain an expanding economy. To meet the demand, Northern shipowners sent ever bigger and faster ships to Africa loaded with New England rum, as well as guns, to exchange for slaves. "Worter yr. Rum as much as possible," one owner counseled his captain, "and sell as much by the short mesuer as you can." In the 1840s, so many Yankee ships from Salem traded on the island of Zanzibar (which specialized not only in slaves but made-to-order eunuchs) that the natives believed Salem was a country.
Tied to the Anchor. British law stipulated that a ship could not be held unless caught with slaves actually aboard. If chased, hard-pressed slavers often ran just long enough to kill and jettison their human cargo. One British slaver, Captain Homans of the brig Brillante, was caught at nightfall. Reportedly he tied 600 slaves to the links in his anchor chain, which was loosely lashed alongside. When, at dawn, he saw that escape was impossible, the anchor—and the human evidence—was sent rattling into the deep.
The Civil War, increased international cooperation and the force of public opinion finally combined to cut off the trade. As the author points out, this barbaric trade, like the cruelty of the Pharaohs, left its monuments: an accumulated wealth in Europe that helped spur the Industrial Revolution, a labor supply in the U.S. and South America that helped build a continent. But for the U.S. it also left a legacy of black hatred and white guilt—both far from final expiation.