African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic

POWER was nowhere more precariously held in the early modern Atlantic than aboard a slave ship. Because their cargoes were unwilling travelers, slave ships were distinguished by the unmiti gated contest between African captives and the European seamen charged to transport them to American, markets: between slaves with superior strength in numbers and sailors desperate to prevent rebellious uprising by any means necessary. Though it is true that "perhaps no more than one slave voyage in ten experienced an actual outbreak" of revolt, scholars accept as axiomatic Michael Craton's further suggestion that "few voyages were ever completed without the discovery or threat of slave conspiracy, and no slaving captain throughout the history of the Atlantic trade ever sailed without a whole armory of guns and chains plus as many white crewmen as he could recruit and keep alive to act as seaborne jailers." David Eltis's characterization of the slave ship as a place where "naked physical force determined who would be in control" and where "any relaxation of vigilance or reduction in the amount of force available would mean rebellion" seems squarely on the mark.1 Yet slave ships were more complex than the reliance on naked physical force sug gests. The dynamics of power aboard ship could also be affected by the use of African "guardians": slaves appointed to police fellow captives during the Atlantic crossing.

Slave ships were distinguished from other merchant vessels by their higher crew-per-ton ratios; nonetheless, crews were outnumbered by more than eight to one aboard English ships in the late seventeenth cen tury.If arms were a vital accompaniment to manpower aboard all mer chant vessels, they were especially so aboard ships carrying Africans as captive passengers."We always keep centinels upon the hatchways," explained Captain Thomas Phillips in the journal of his slaving voyage aboard the Hannibal in 1693, "and have a chest of small arms, ready loaden and prirnd, constantly lying at hand upon the quarter-deck, together with some granada shells; and two of our quarter-deck guns, pointing on the deck thence, and two more out of the steerage, the door of which is always kept shut, and well barrel.""As you have guns and men," the owner of the Caesar instructed Captain William Ellery, "I doubt not you'll make a good use of them if required."Another directive to an eighteenth-century slave ship captain read: "Let your Great Guns and small Armes be Loaded and in readiness for use and Service upon any occasion that may happen."2If naked physical force was a resource captains needed, it also was just as important that they minimize their need to ever put such force to direct use against their human cargoes.In 1750 slaving captain John Newton "fixed 4 swivel blunderbusses in the barricado" of his ship, the Duke of Argyle.Yet he expected that these muzzle-loading firearms together with "the 2 carriage guns we put thro' at the Bonanoes" would "make a formidable appearance upon the main deck, and will, I hope," he wrote, "be sufficient to intimidate the slaves from any thoughts of an insurrection."3Only by disabusing slaves of the notion that there was something to be gained by rebellion did captains get from Africa to the Americas without either the loss of investors' human property or casual ties among the crew.A slave captain's control resided as much in the depth and content of his symbolic power as in the real physical force at his command.The most secure slave ship was not necessarily the one with the largest crew or the biggest guns but rather that vessel where social relationships of power prevailed such that captives were effectively persuaded against ever challenging their captors to a physical contest.
For their part captives were quick to find opportunities to arm themselves with whatever objects they could seize, thereby aiming to subvert the dynamics of power aboard the slave ship.The guns strategi cally placed aboard Newton's Duke of Argyle, for example, did not pre vent the captives from obtaining "2 knives and ... [a] bag of small stones."Nor did they deter a young male slave from supplying other weapons to his fellow captives several weeks later.Let out of irons "first on account of a large ulcer, and since for his seeming good behaviour," the young man used his liberty to take a "large marline spike" and pass it "down the gratings" to slaves below deck.By the events it put in motion, this single act was sufficient to begin eroding Newton's command, as he well knew.In the hour the captives had the metal spike, they "made such good dispatch (being an instrument that made no noise) that this morn ing I've found near 20 of them had broke their irons," Newton wrote.
Two days later crewmen were reinforcing walls the slaves had begun to pry loose."Their plot was excedingly well laid, and had they been let alone an hour longer," Newton admitted, "must have occasioned us a good deal of trouble and damage."Aboard the Clare Galley, another eighteenth-century slaver, slaves "ma [de] themselves Masters of the Gunpowder and Fire Slavery, 119 (table 5-1), 125-27, 158-59;David Richardson, "Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 58, no. 1 (January 2001): 69-92, esp. 73-75. 3 John Newton, The Journal of a Slave Trader, 1750-1754, ed.Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell (London, 1962), 22 (quotation, Dec. 7, 1750); David Eltis et al., eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999), no.90350.This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Arms," prompting the crew to abandon the ship and bringing the cap tives' journey to South Carolina to a premature end.4If firearms were the definitive measure of power aboard the slave ship, every captain likewise understood that there was no limit to the range of items aboard an oceangoing ship that could become weapons.
Theophilus Conneau cited the danger wooden billets (used as pillows) could pose."This luxury is not granted," he explained, "till well assured of the good disposition of the Negroes, as in many occasions slaves have been tempted to mutiny only by the opportunity at hand of arming themselves with those native pillows?indeed a very destructive missile in case of revolt."Among the haphazard weapons devised by slaves aboard the Don Carlos in 1701 were "pieces of iron" the slaves "had torn off [the] forecastle door" and knives that had carelessly been supplied to them by the ship's crew members.The slaves also had "broken off the shackles from several of their companions feet, which served them, as well as billets they had provided themselves with, and all other things they could lay hands on, which they imagin'd might be of use for their enterprize.Thus arm'd," the first mate reported, "they fell in crouds and parcels on our men."5Nonetheless scholars should not assume that captives inevitably exploited any freedom or latitude granted to them aboard slave ships as an occasion to rebel.When circumstances dictated a need for assistance, captains frequently called on the aid of slaves.Though such overtures sometimes led to disaster, they just as often passed without incident.When all but "three white Boys" among his crew deserted in 1726, the captain of the Ark recruited six men out of his slave cargo to help sail the vessel.Off the coast of Bonny (present-day Nigeria) in 1797, fifteen slaves helped save the James after the vessel ran aground and sprang a leak while trying to clear the shallow waters of the Niger Delta.The "assistance of the blacks" in operating the pumps enabled the exhausted and dispirited crew to keep the ship from sinking.In another case, anticipating hostility from enemy vessels while en route to the Americas aboard the Will in 1799-1800, Captain Hugh Crow trained one of the slaves he had purchased on the African coast to operate the ship's artillery and praised the slave recruit's "courageous and expert" perfor manee in a protracted battle that ensued with a French vessel.Slaves made similar contributions to defensive efforts aboard the Mary, which Crow captained in 1806.As the ship approached the West Indies, where French cruisers were likely to attack, Crow put his crew to regular practice "to work the great guns and small arms" and "selected several of the finest of the black men to join them in these exercises, as well as in passing along the powder, and in other minor duties that might become requisite in the hour of action."For their service the men, "who were very proud of this preferment," received "a pair of light trowsers, a shirt, and a cap."6 African guardians aboard English slavers, however, did more than just help keep the ship afloat or protect it from attack.Regularly used aboard some (but not all) ships trading on behalf of the English Royal African Company in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, guardians helped discipline and control their fellow captives.The only detailed description of guardians comes from the published account of Captain Phillips's 1693-94 voyage aboard the Hannibal, where he men tions guardians in association with strategies for preventing shipboard slave insurrections.After describing the small arms, quarterdeck guns, and sentinels necessary for security, Phillips explained the role slave guardians played in his plans for defense against slave revolt aboard the Hannibal: "We have some 30 or 40 gold coast negroes," he wrote, "which we buy, and are procur'd us there by our factors, to make if they can discover any caballing or plotting among them, which trust they will discharge with great diligence."The guardians also "take care to make the negroes scrape the decks where they lodge every morning very clean," he continued, "to eschew any distempers that may engender from filth and nastiness."Finally, their service as spies and disciplinari ans came with a means to enforce their rule."When we constitute a guardian," Phillips explained, "we give him a cat of nine tails as a badge of his office, which he is not a little proud of, and will exercise with great authority."7 Additional documentation about the use of slave guardians aboard English ships comes from records produced by officials and employees of the Royal African Company: letters of instruction to ship commanders, correspondence between the company's London headquarters and agents stationed on the African coast, and the account books prepared by the lat ter.These documents confirm that guardians were bought, not hired, per sonnel who would be sold in the same American markets as their shipboard charges.The English use of slave guardians entailed something distinct, in other words, from the employ of free black sailors or slave mariners recruited in American or African Atlantic ports.8 The available records also leave no doubt that slave guardians were linked to the exigencies of social control within the confines of the slave ship.Associating slave guardians with shipboard safety, the records affirm the tenor of Phillips's account yet do not specify precisely what that safety entailed.With the company's employees having little reason to elaborate on a phenomenon whose rationale was self-evident (to them), the elusive figure of the slave guardian thus appears in these materials with sufficient regularity to confirm his or her existence but rarely in the kind of detail that would further enlarge understanding of his or her role aboard the ship., 1730-1830(Madison, Wis., 1988).Miller found that on ships plying the routes between Angola and Brazil in the eighteenth century, "captains customarily hired as nurses and surgeons African healers who could understand the slaves' languages and, no doubt, also act as spies" (ibid., 409-10 [quotation, 409]).Miller believes these African slave ship workers were not purchased as part of the cargo being shipped but rather were "enlisted in Brazil, either as slaves trained by the merchants/shippers, or hired on from the Afro Brazilian communities in the seaports there" (personal communication with author, September 2002).On the "unusual" Brazilian "use of slave sailors in international shipping," including ships plying the slave trade routes linking Brazilian and African  Slave ship guardians probably benefited from material perquisites that accompanied their status, perhaps receiving more food and water rations than their charges and enjoying other advantages in the daily rhythms of life aboard ship.In general practice, for example, male cap tives boarded slave ships with wrists or ankles bound by iron shackles that were removed only gradually once the ocean crossing was underway and the African coast disappeared from view; presumably, guardians were per mitted to forgo the pain and indignity of shackles once aboard ship, since their duties required that they enjoy freedom from physical restraint if not full freedom of movement within the ship.Guardian status perhaps buffered the most extreme poverty and deprivation during the Middle Passage, putting some distance between the guardians' degradation and the still-more-excessive suffering of the larger body of captives.
Entrusted to people who were themselves part of the slave cargo, the guardian's position could embolden those who held it and therefore could, and arguably should, have functioned as a springboard for subver sion aboard seventeenth-century English ships.Yet it appears that this practice, which could have produced rebel leaders, did not do so.The use of slave guardians as a regular custom and one explicitly associated with safety is indication enough that it was deemed effective.Indeed guardians apparently were not involved in any of the 383 revolts in a compiled data set documenting uprisings aboard slavers.9The confident presumption that guardians would be allies rather than adversaries for the duration of the ocean crossing was well founded.It seems that guardians used their position exactly as English traders intended: against other slaves and rarely if ever against their maritime captors.
Small advantages held large meaning in the impoverished setting of the slave ship.Something more than the material perquisites guardian slaves may have enjoyed, however, should have been necessary to foster the reliable support to shipboard security that would justify a captain's confidence in their loyalty.After all, at any moment during the ocean crossing people appointed to the role could choose to make alternate use of their position, transforming themselves into dangerous and deadly adversaries.As a planned and deliberate approach to shipboard social control, the use of slave guardians seems counterintuitive given what scholars think they know about the nature of power aboard the slave ship.
Eltis has outlined one approach to understanding slave guardians, focusing on the apparent deliberate mixing of ethnic groups achieved by pairing guardians from one African region with slave cargoes drawn from another, which in his view produced an effective political division.Eltis concludes that "these differences were important to Europeans pre cisely because they were important to Africans."10We should not assume an axiomatic relationship between ethnic plurality and a politics of eth nic difference.More specifically, one cannot assume that ethnic differ ence produced sufficient political division among the enslaved to guarantee the safety that the guardians were meant to secure during the Atlantic crossing.Tensions may indeed have prevailed between captives from the Gold Coast and others from the Bight of Benin, yet tensions among slaves, whether ethnically based or otherwise, do not explain the central relationship between the guardians and the ship captains and crews they served, on which the guardian system turned.To frame the issue this way begs more questions than it answers.Exploring the guardian system involves trying to understand both sides of the relationship at the heart of this unusual practice: how did ship captains who used slave guardians and the African captives who served in that capacity understand the role?Evidence suggests that the seventeenth century English guardian system had antecedents in the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Iberoatlantic system.The Royal African Company hired most of the ships it employed to transport slaves from Africa to the Americas, meaning most English slaving voyages in the late seventeenth century began with a contractual agreement (charter party) between the company and a syndicate of shipowners, which generally included the ship's captain.Perhaps in response to the accounting discrepancies identified in May 1687, the Royal African Company soon thereafter began to include reference to guardians in the summary "Instructions" delivered to captains hired for slaving voyages to the African coast.The first such reference appeared in the instructions prepared for Captain Robert Cowley in July 1687."Itt is for your safety that wee order you in Charterparty to take in 30 Gold Coast Negroes for Guardians," read the instructions delivered to Cowley at the outset of his voyage in command of the Hannah.Likewise he was ordered to "Signe bills of Lading att Cabo Corsoe [Cape Coast] for the 30 Negroes" he would receive as guardians, consigning these slaves to the company's agents in Barbados together with the four hundred slaves he was to buy at Whydah.The instructions presented to Edmond Bathurne, captain of the Elizabeth, in August 1687 ordered him to pur chase "twenty Negroes for Your Guards to the other Negroes," a direc tive explained again as a measure taken for the captain's "safety."Indeed this language linking guardians and shipboard security was a standard formulation in letters of instruction to captains who would be using slave guardians.Other phrases commonly found in these directives made the same point.At least a portion of these slaves referenced in the records as "Gold Coast guardians" were expected to come more precisely from the area of the Gold Coast "windward," or west, of Cape Coast Castle (see Figure I).When ship captain Abednigoe Strutt set out on a slaving voyage to the Bight of Benin aboard the Expedition in 1687, his instructions were to spend forty days to the windward of Cape Three Points, "where by contract with the Company," he reported, "I am allowed to buy 20 Gold Coast slaves, for Guardians, and 230 chests of corn.July 5, 1687, ibid., vol. 50: fol. 41;Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, no. 9832. On the Elizabeth, ibid., no. 9834. On the Mary, ibid., no. 14982.The charter party con tract outlined the mutual obligations of both parties and prescribed such details as "the size of the crew, the number of passengers, cargo to be carried on each stage of the voyage, places of lading and discharge and the time to be spent at each, and the freight charges."See Davies,Royal African Company,197 (quotation) Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms If captains were not able to buy the stipulated number of guardians before arrival at Cape Coast Castle, as was often the case, the company's agents there were to supply the difference.In a notice announcing his arrival on the coast, Strutt reminded agents that if he had not obtained his stipulated number of guardians when he reached the castle, "you are to provide me withall."Likewise in 1688 John Mascombe, captain of the Mary, had orders to purchase up to ten slaves "for guardians" while trad ing on the "Graine, Quaqua or Gold Coast" as far as Takoradi or to make up that number at Cape Coast Castle before continuing to Whydah for the rest of his cargo.James Crookshanke and Thomas Shirley received orders to follow the same itinerary in their commands of the Princess and the East India Merchant, respectively.Crookshanke was to receive sixty guardians on the coast west of Takoradi and at the castle, and Shirley was to obtain fifty.Both would then finish at Whydah and depart with completed cargoes of 550 slaves each, one des tined for Jamaica; the other, Barbados.16This trading pattern, which assumed guardians would come from the Gold Coast (and particularly from the western part of that coast) and would police captives obtained primarily from the neighboring Bight of Benin, must be understood in the broader context of the orga nization of English slaving voyages in the late seventeenth century.
Shipowners seeking to maximize their investment in a trading voyage to Africa often required more business than the slave trade alone could supply.K. G. Davies found that slave prices on the African coast before 1689 "[were] such that a ship from England destined to take in 450 negroes could carry the goods needed to purchase that number and still be much less than fully loaded."The Royal African Company addressed this concern by allowing shipowners to participate in the lucrative trade for malagueta pepper, ivory, and gold along the stretch of coast wind ward of Cape Coast Castle.Because the commodity trade for gold was by far the most lucrative branch of English commerce in Africa in the seventeenth century, this share in the windward trade compensated for the limited value of slaves relative to gold and accounted for a signifi cant portion of shipowners' earnings on voyages to Africa.17Sending slave ships to trade first along the portion of coast windward of Cape Coast Castle thus served to give shipowners a secondary revenue stream; not incidentally, the practice also supported the company's efforts to sustain the circulation of trade goods and information between London and its African headquarters at Cape Coast.
As a result most of the slave ships the company sent to Africa in the seventeenth century first visited the Grain Coast (in present-day Liberia), Ivory Coast, and westernmost area of the Gold Coast to dis pense windward cargoes for malagueta pepper, ivory, and gold, whether the procurement of their human cargo was to take place on the Gold Coast or, more likely, in one of the three major slaving regions further east and south: the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, or West-Central Africa.Vessels hired by the Royal African Company typically departed England laden with three distinct trading cargoes: a cargo of goods and provisions consigned to the agents at Cape Coast Castle, a slave cargo made up of trade goods required to buy captives at the ship's designated port of slave purchase, and a windward cargo of goods to buy pepper, ivory, and gold along some seven hundred miles of coastline between  , 200 (quotation).For shipowners the wind ward trade also compensated for the inconvenience of taking the major part of their freight payments in slaves.See Ernst van den Boogaart, "The Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World, 1600-1690: Estimates of Trends in Composition and Value," Journal of African History 33, no. 3 (1992): 369-85; David Eltis, "The Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic Trade of Seventeenth-Century Africa," Journal of African History^, no. 2 (1994): 237-49.
18 Instructions to Captain Thomas Woodfine, Dec. 10, 1685, in Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.61: fol. 3. The practice of sending slave ships to trade first on the Grain Coast, Ivory Coast, or western Gold Coast is clearly evident in the correspondence between the company's officials in London and their counter parts stationed at the castle.See for example Henry Greenhill, Cape Coast Castle, to Royal African Company, Jan. 15, 1683, ibid., vol. 16: fol. 53;Royal African Company to Cape Coast Castle, Mar. 22, 1687, ibid., vol. 50: fol. 35 Though the windward trade primarily focused on pepper, ivory, and gold, slaves began to appear for sale as ships approached the Gold Coast.For example Peter Blake, captain of the James, encountered traders sell ing gold, ivory, and also slaves when he reached Assini, on the western perimeter of the Gold Coast, in August 1675 after nearly three months of trading for ivory, camwood, and malagueta pepper along the Grain and Ivory coasts.While trading in the vicinity of Assini during the next ten days, Blake purchased seven hundred pounds of ivory as well as gold and at least eight slaves.19 The difficulties the English encountered in sustaining a regular flow of slave cargoes from the Gold Coast in the seventeenth century also help explain the specific geography of the guardian system.Slaves from the Gold Coast region had a favorable reputation among English Caribbean buyers, which was reflected in the market by the high prices planters were willing to pay for Gold Coast slaves.The Royal African Company therefore was eager to maintain a regular flow of slave exports from the region.The company's efforts were stymied, however, by the interplay of high prices and intermittent supplies.Local demand, com petition from other European nations, and the disruptive effect of war contributed to high prices as well as sporadic and unpredictable supplies of slaves on the Gold Coast.20 The opposite scenario held at the neighboring Bight of Benin, where slaves were cheaper and available in prodigious supply, which offered an economic rationale for putting contingents of Gold Coast captives aboard ships outfitted to complete their slaving at Whydah.Ordering ships to buy slaves on the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin was a second-best strategy that anticipated the difficulty of obtaining full preparing for the slaving stage of the voyage.There was also a gender dimension to the guardian system.Three of the ten guardians put aboard the Vine in 1679, for instance, were women.
Like the fourteen women received alongside sixteen "very good men" at Cape Coast Castle "for Guardians and Cankey women" aboard the Phineas and Margaret, the female guardians aboard the Vine probably assisted in food preparation.24It seems that guardians nearly always included a substantial number of women (Table I).In a sample of nine voyages, six captains received 50 percent or more of the company stipulated number of guardians while at Cape Coast.Women were included in all but one of the groups, and each of the four ships in the sample that received all or nearly all their guardians at the castle obtained groups that were 30 to 50 percent female.Even allowing for the women counted among those designated guardians, the stipulated numbers are significant, putting upward of a dozen men in position to enjoy special privileges and powers aboard English slave ships.
The decision to recruit captives as guardians aboard English ships in the seventeenth century probably resulted from charter party negotia tions between the Royal African Company and the owners of the ships the company hired for voyages to the African coast.Writing to Cape Coast Castle, officials in London explained that the company was "obliged" to supply fifty guardians for Captain Shirley's 1690 voyage aboard the East Lndia Merchant.In 1694 officials likewise wrote to inform the agent at Sherbrow (in present-day Sierra Leone) of the Royal African Company's "promise" to supply the captain of the Returne with twenty to thirty slaves "which he hath desired for Guardians ... in part of the complement he stands obliged to take in at the Bite [Bight of Biafra]."25It is not difficult to understand why English trading interests were happy to receive additional assistance in the form of guardians from the Gold Coast.The value of Gold Coast slaves in American markets made guardians commercially attractive.Indeed the problem for the Royal African Company was ensuring that the company, and not captains seeking private gain, benefited from the sale of guardians to American buyers.Moreover astute captains (and the larger body of shipowners they represented) knew that after trading on the Windward and Gold coasts for several months, disease and death threatened crew numbers by the time the major part of their slave cargoes came aboard at the Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, or Angola.In such circumstances the addi tional strength guardians supplied could be a worthwhile advantage.Captains sailing to the Bight of Benin in particular also k this region was notorious for its heavy surf and that time s would put a heavy burden on their crewmen, whether from ous demands of work in the rough waters or from time spent idly for unnavigable conditions to subside.When Captain Thom traded there aboard the Hannibal in May 1694, the ship had a on the African coast five months and passed two months mor Whydah.Much of that time, Phillips waited for good travel between ship and shore.Because it was the rainy season, the s to be one time so grown and exceeding boisterous, that our ca not able to bring us any goods ashore for 18 days."A similar explained the difficulties Captain Woodfine encountered there Sarah Bonadventure in 1686.The company's factor at Whyda telling Woodfine on his arrival that "if please God weather pe should have his slaves in 10 or 12 days at farthest."The weath cooperate and Woodfine was "everyday standing out on his q fretting that the slaves could not be gott on board."The dela enough that Woodfine succumbed to illness."If it had please sea would have permitted he had had all his slaves on board an sail by that time he fell first sick," the factor wrote.These advantages meant nothing, however, unless captains could feel assured of the safety they ascribed to slave guardians, especially since the strategy was never without great risk.Neither their value as com modities in Atlantic markets nor their service aboard Atlantic slave ships explains the special disciplinary role guardians from the Gold Coast were invited to play aboard ship during the ocean crossing.Because English captains recognized the potential risks involved and yet used members of slave cargoes as guardians, it is useful to try to better under stand how and when the role of guardian may have originated and what duties guardians performed.
Guardian had widespread usage in the early modern European maritime context.The term is found in Spanish maritime dictionaries, defined as "the individual who took care of the arms and hold of a ship."Guardian appears also in a sixteenth-century account of a voyage aboard a Portuguese East India ship, where it is equated with quartermaster, a title also linked to, among other things, the activities of the ship's hold.
Relatedly, maritime historian Pablo E. P?rez-Malla?na identifies the "guardi?n" aboard sixteenth-century Spanish vessels as a "boatswain's helper" whose position put him in charge of the ship's lowest-ranked crewmen, making the guardian a constant disciplinarian as well.The "guardi?n," writes P?rez-Malla?na, was responsible for "maintaining dis cipline among the apprentices and pages, the youngest, and therefore potentially the most turbulent, members of the crew," these latter being "the ones who most frequently received the 'caresses' of the boatswain and the guardianes, who were the fierce executors of orders from the superior officers."2727 "El individuo que cuidaba de las armas y bodega de un buque," the anti quated usage given in Timoteo O' Scanlan, ed., Diccionario Mar?timo Espa?ol (1831;repr., Madrid, Spain, 1974), 307, s.v."Guardian" ("individual who took care"); Pablo E. P?rez-Malla?na, Spain's Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, trans.Carla Rahn Phillips (Baltimore, 1998), 78 ("guardi?n"),82-83 ("maintaining discipline," 83), 204 ("most frequently received").Variant spellings are P?rez-Malla?na's.See also [Louis Marie Joseph] O'hier de Grandpr?, R?pertoire polyglotte de la marine, a l'usage des navigateurs et des armateurs . . .(Paris, France, 1829), 1: 386, s.v."Contre-Maitre" (quarter master), "C'est un officier charg?de l'arrimage de la cale, il prend rang apr?s le ma?tre et le second ma?tre"; Jos? de Lorenzo, Gonzalo de Murga, and Mart?n Ferreiro y Peralto, eds., Diccionario mar? timo espa?ol, que adem?s de las voces de navegaci?ny maniobra en los buques de vela . . .Nonetheless, their shared association with the tasks and personnel involved in the management of ships' holds and the care of cargoes therein merits attention because these concerns were universally impor tant to investors in all arenas of Atlantic maritime commerce.
Whether it carried captive people, gold, or other commodities, the merchant ship's hold was first and foremost a floating storehouse of property, its contents embodying the greatest part of the value of a trad ing voyage.The emergence of a maritime commercial arena in the Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was accompanied by the development of shipboard duties and personnel responsible for manag ing merchant property as distinct from the seafaring and navigational work of managing ships.In the specific context of maritime commerce, handling merchant property involved overseeing cargo stowage in the hold, operating the ship's boat, and supervising the skilled labor required in the lading and unlading of cargoes.
Shipboard responsibilities associated with handling cargoes also involved protecting, or guarding, merchant property during its time aboard ship, which usually meant controlling access to the hold.Aboard the caravels that carried trade goods and gold between Lisbon and the African coast in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, the Portuguese crown required the use of "guards" who went into the ships "before anything is put on board" to "conduct a thorough search below until nothing remains to be examined."Thereafter they were to "remain in the caravel, and they are not allowed to leave it either by night or by day," the "below deck" stowage space of the ship being, from that time, "entirely the responsibility of the guards."When shipping arrived at Sao Jorge da Mina Castle, "no matter what the provenance of the arriving (Greenwich, Eng., 1978), pt.2: 235.For quartermaster, the OED gives the following example of seventeenth-century usage: "The quarter Maisters hath the charge of the hold for stowage, rommageing, and trimming the shippe; and of their squadrons for their watch."The quotation comes from Capt.John Smith, An Accidence or The Path-way to Experience.Necessary for all Young Sea-men, or those that are desirous to goe to Sea, briefly shewing the Phrases, Offices, and Words of Command, Belonging to the Building, Ridging, and Say ling, a Man ofWarre; And how to manage a Fight at Sea . . .(London, 1626), 5. See also William Falconer, Falconer's Marine Dictionary (1780), A Reprint (1769; repr., New York, 1970), s.v."Quarter-master," 226; Charles A. Le Guin, "Sea Life in Seventeenth-Century England," American Neptune 27, no. 2 (April 1967): 111-34.Le Guin writes, "The quartermaster's job was to care for the hold, to keep it in order, and to prepare it for stowing" (ibid., 113).
This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsvessel, whether it was a provision ship from Lisbon or a slave vessel from the nearby island of Sao Tom?," a similar protocol accompanied th unlading of ships.28Slave ships shared with other merchant vessels a concern for protect ing merchant property.Surveillance aboard the slave ship was directed most immediately not to spatial logistics or the problem of theft but rather to the daily tasks associated with preserving perishable goods and maintaining control over those made desperate by their anguish and suf fering.If the greatest threat to the value of a cargo of gold or other goods was a sailor's thieving hands or careless stowing, the greatest threat to the value of a human cargo was disease and death.This cargo, furthermore, had the capacity for self-destruction; the slaves' own will could liquidate their value as property in an instant by a single act of rebellious self-assertion.In the context of the slave ship, the surveillance involved in guarding merchant property was a matter of social control.
Little is known about the management of human cargoes in the first 150 years of Atlantic slaving, and thus strategies for handling the threat of shipboard rebellion are a mystery.Nor is it possible to know whether per sonnel called guardians were responsible for social control aboard fifteenth-and sixteenth-century slave ships.Since Portuguese traders relied on the assistance of black maritime workers in all branches o commerce along the African coast, it would be surprising if tasks related to the management of human cargoes were not assigned to African per sonnel aboard ships in the carreira dos escravos, or slave route, in the lat fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.Aboard sixteenth-century slav ships, captains could not demand absolute subordination from their crewmen or rely on weaponry to make their crews equal to the strength of the slaves they held captive; therefore, African personnel arguably were better suited to disciplinary tasks in the slave holds than were their European counterparts.Presumably, a preventive strategy was not only the best defense against slave insurrection but also arguably the only reliable defense.Maintaining a minimum threshold of health among European crewmen 28 John William Blake, trans, and ed., Europeans in West Africa, 1450?1560 (London, 1942), 1: 99-100 ("before anything," 99); John Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 146?-1682 (Athens, Ga., 1979), 32-36 ("no matter what," 35).Vogt notes that in a 1508 crown document issuing revised orders about Portuguese trade t Africa and India, "the portion pertaining to the guarding of the Mina caravels was among" the document's "longest sections" (ibid., [34][35].See also Clarence Henry Haring's classic study of maritime relationships between Spain and the America colonies, describing in great detail the specialized offices that came to be associated with the "visitations or inspections" required before trading vessels departed Spain's Atlantic ports at Cadiz and San Lucar as well as on their return.(Haring, Trade an Navigation between Spain and the Indies [Gloucester, Mass., 1964 Supervision of African slaves must have been considered among the most degrading of shipboard assignments for Iberian seamen.Maritime labor relationships being more medieval than modern in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, "neither the shipowners nor those who repre sented them had entirely free hands in exercising an arbitrary discipline on the sailors for their own economic interests."30Iberian sea captains who coerced crewmen into work deemed unacceptably abusive of their health or their esteem did so at the risk of fomenting dissent and erosion of their authority. Most importantly, however, enough is known about the develop ment of weaponry in early modern Europe to conclude that Iberian sea captains in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries faced the challenges posed by human cargoes with more limited material resources than their counterparts in the late seventeenth century and beyond.A variety of weapons exploiting gunpowder technology's destructive power were in regular use aboard European ships by the commencement of Atlantic slave trafficking, and it is likely that large cannon may have been used aboard early slave ships to thwart rebellion by their ability to startle and frighten slaves in the same way large artillery would be used in the later period.But the "exchange of human energy for inanimate power" that guns afforded did not reliably transform the arming of men (as distinct from the arming of ships) in the maritime arena until the seventeenth century.Only with the development of guns that could be handheld, fired rapidly, and trained on fast-moving human targets with some measure of precision did gunpowder technology reliably enlarge the power of com batants engaged in man-to-man fighting in the enclosed terrain of a ship's deck.All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsants did not outmatch the number of crewmen available to fight.Such perhaps was the scene when slaves tried to overcome the crew of the Portuguese ship Fieis de Deus in 1509 during a voyage from Arguim (an island off the coast of present-day Mauritania) to Lisbon.A "note explaining the loss of thirty broken links of chain" that had been put aboard at Arguim offers the only known details about the incident.
"These links were thrown into the sea when the blacks on this ship rose and sought to seize the said ship and to kill the crew; and according to the testimony of the crew were lost as they were thrown by one side at the other during the quelling of the insurrection."Yet events aboard the Misericordia in 1532 demonstrated just how thoroughly a determined group of slaves could reverse the trajectory of a slaving voyage.En route from Sao Tom? to Sao Jorge da Mina Castle, members of the cargo of 190 slaves "rose up, seized the ship, and murdered the crew save for the ship's pilot and two mariners, who managed to escape in the ship's launch."These three sole "survivors" of the ship's crew somehow reached Sao Jorge da Mina and gave their account of the event, "but the Misericordia and her cargo of free Africans were never heard from again."32We cannot know the fate of the Africans, but the European outcomes related to the Misericordia are certain: loss of the crewmen's lives and its human cargo.
If it was not clear already, the fate of the Misericordia in the first decade of regular transatlantic voyages carrying slaves to American mar kets certainly confirmed the point.The prospect of a slave uprising meant shipboard man-to-man combat with an enemy whose superior numbers and immeasurable desperation might well be decisive.Crew numbers that did not even approach parity with those of the slaves and the absence of the kind of weapons that would even the imbalance meant shipboard control had to be more a social than material function.If captains and their men could not be wholly confident of their ability to defeat slaves in the event of a challenge to their control, social rela tionships of domination were necessarily the leading defense against the disaster of a slave uprising.33 If black personnel functioned as guardians aboard early Iberian slave ships, their tasks would have been cognate to those of African auxiliary personnel designated by the title grumete, another Iberian maritime term that acquired distinct meanings in the context of Afro-European trade.In broad usage aboard early modern European ships, "grummett" desig nated the ship's "boys," apprentice seamen, or other unskilled personnel to whom fell the most menial shipboard labor.But in the context of fifteenth-century Portuguese maritime exploration of the African coast, grumete came to designate Africans who served as "interpreters, auxiliary seamen, and compradors" in Afro-European commercial relationships.
"Once Portuguese caravels attained the Senegal River in the 1440s," writes George E. Brooks, grumetes "soon became indispensable to European navigators and traders."34 The assistance of African personnel likewise was essential to the func tioning of Sao Jorge da Mina Castle, the Portuguese fortress built on the Gold Coast in 1482.There Afro-European trade depended on two broad categories of locally recruited auxiliary labor.Canoe men, pilots, inter preters, and others drawn from the coastal towns of the region constituted the first group.Either freemen or dependents whose labor were owned by local elites, their hired services were vital to the daily operation of Afro European trade.The second category of auxiliary personnel was slaves attached to the castle.Imported from elsewhere (primarily from the Bight of Benin and the Grain Coast west of Cape Three Points) and directly controlled by the resident Portuguese traders, they supplied the manual labor required to maintain the fort and assist in tasks such as the lading and unlading of ship cargoes.35 All these categories of African labor were themselves involved in the enterprise of commercial slaving.In sixteenth-century Senegambia, African grumetes worked specifically in the arena of the slave trade, handling many of the tasks associated with collecting and housing human cargoes on the coast and transferring them to Portuguese shipping.Likewise, since European small craft were of limited use in the heavy surf of the African coastline, African canoe men must have been involved in the transfer of slave captives between ship and shore at Sao Jorge da Mina Castle.36 There would have been little basis for shared social identity between free shipboard personnel recruited on the African coast and the slave cargoes they helped supervise.More to the point, the complexity of sys tems of slavery in precolonial Africa meant there was no basis for such shared identification between enslaved African shipboard laborers and those designated for maritime export.Slavery in precolonial African societies was not a fixed or universal category of debasement but rather featured diverse and clearly delineated categories of dependent status.Skin color being no reliable or consistent index of status, African slave ship personnel would not necessarily have shared any kind of racial identity with other Africans held captive below deck.37 Portuguese traders also did not have reason to violate the noncaptive status of Africans recruited as shipboard workers.Their dependence on African personnel made such duplicity foolhardy.More importantly, there was no economic motive to push African noncaptives into the Atlantic market for slaves.In the fifteenth century, most African slave exports went to Iberian destinations where their labor was not economi cally determinative.The development of a sugar industry on Sao Tom? in the first half of the sixteenth century made that island the largest sin gle importer of African slaves in that period, but demand there and in Madeira, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands was con strained by limited land area for plantation expansion.Though the heavily on the labor of imported African slaves.38In the absence of an eco nomic motive, there was nothing to gain by reducing African auxiliary maritime personnel to the status of captives eligible for export and sale in overseas markets in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.P. C. Emmer has usefully argued for the importance of an analytic distinction between a "first" Atlantic system dominated by the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and a "second" sys tem dominated by Dutch and English actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Distinguished from the "advanced capitalist eco nomics" of the second system that emerged fully formed by the end of the seventeenth century, the first Atlantic system was characterized by uneven, incomplete, and "halfhearted" penetration of the market."The main differences between these two systems," he writes, "pertained to the location of their points of economic gravity, their demographic and racial composition, and their organization of trade and investment, as well as to the social fabric."39 By the time Thomas Phillips sailed in command of the Hannibal at the end of the seventeenth century, the dynamics of power in the con text of the slave ship had shifted, reflecting the priorities of the second Atlantic system and militating against the shipboard use of African slave personnel such as guardians.European maritime labor relationships had moved away from the late-medieval ethos still much in effect during the "Age of Reconnaissance" toward a modern economic regime in which seamen's labor was fully subordinated to the interests of merchant capital and its maritime representative (the captain)."No medieval law code," writes P?rez-Malla?na, "permitted what became common during the eighteenth century: the unrestricted power of the captain to treat his men with extreme cruelty, without the possibility of defense or reciprocity."The transition was felt with special force aboard the English and Dutch ships that came to dominate Atlantic commercial routes in the seven teenth and eighteenth centuries.Comparing Spanish and English mari time culture, for example, P?rez-Malla?na notes that, though sailors and masters were no longer comrades aboard Spanish vessels by the end of the sixteenth century, neither could the former be treated with impunity.Aboard English ships, however, the effect of merchant capital was powerfully felt."The courts of admiralty," P?rez-Malla?na writes, "served fundamentally to sustain the authority of the captains and mas ters, giving preference to the rights of shipowners and, in the back ground, to British industry and commerce?to the detriment of the sailors."Edward Barlow, a seventeenth-century seaman who spent a half century in English naval and merchant ships, concurred."Merchants and owners of ships in England are grown to such a pass nowadays that it is better sailing with any other nation," he observed.40 The introduction of substantially improved weaponry?mostnotably the small arms that greatly enhanced the power of the individual armed sailor?substantially distinguished the seventeenth-century slave ship from that of its fifteenth-and sixteenth-century predecessor.
Improved weapons technology gave ship captains and the merchant investors whose interests they served unprecedented capacity to main tain shipboard security without dependence on personnel recruited on the African coast and despite the continued inevitable loss of European crew during the course of slaving voyages.The portability and reliability of flintlock muskets available by the seventeenth century aided slave ship crews in two ways.Being able to handle guns easily and to reload and dis charge them quickly meant that seamen could train guns on human tar gets and shoot directly at slaves if needed with some measure of precision.(Berkeley, Calif., 1981), esp.123-24; P?rez-Malla?na, Spain's Men of the Sea, \<)7.("No medieval law code"), 196 ("courts of admiralty"); Edward Barlow, Barlow's Journal of His Life at Sea in King's Ships, East and West Indiamen and Other Merchantmen from i6$? to 1703, ed. Basil Lubbock (London, 1934), 1: 83 ("Merchants and owners").According to P?rez-Malla?na, "Spain was not a republic of merchants in the sixteenth century" and "for that reason, neither the shipowners nor the own ers of merchandise succeeded in having their interests defended in total disregard for the rights of the ships' crews."See P?rez-Malla?na, Spain's Men of the Sea, 196.See also William McFee, The Law of the Sea (Philadelphia, 1950), 49; Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 212 n. 19.Notwithstanding criticism of Marcus Rediker's insis tence that crewmen were thoroughly subordinated to the needs of merchant capital by the eighteenth century, there is little reason to question the expanded power cap tains held on behalf of merchant capital, the growing divergence of interests between captains and crews, and the increasingly sharp antagonism between the two groups.In her study of English merchant shipping, Dorothy Burwash notes that the greater equality between commander and crew that prevailed in medieval maritime culture continued to be felt in the early sixteenth century because "there was not as yet an unbridgeable gap between capital and labour."See Burwash, English Merchant Shipping, 1460Shipping, ?1$40 (1947;;repr., Devon, Eng., 1969), 65.The key point is that there was such a gap and it was growing steadily during the course of the seventeenth cen tury.See Daniel Vickers et al., "Roundtable: Marcus Rediker," International Journal of Maritime History 1, no. 1 (June 1989): 311-57.For a dissenting view, see Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge, 1991), 14, 62-83.This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Most importantly, seamen could make much more efficient use of guns to quell insurrection by scaring would-be rebels.When negligence gave slaves aboard the Thames a great opportunity to revolt while the ship was anchored on the African coast in 1776, for instance, muskets enabled the small number of crew members aboard to regain control of the ship."We only fired 2 masquets amongst them, one wt Powder only and one wt a little dust in it, had we fired more almost every one of them would have jumped over board, a few got cut wt cutlasses, but are geting well again, no white man excepting the boatswain got hurt."41 Whereas in the first Atlantic system slavery was not tied to the pro duction of unlimited supplies of bonded labor, New World demand for slave labor produced a second Atlantic system whose center of gravity followed the westward pull of European colonization in the Americas and whose social order was determined in large part by skin color.In this sense the economic geography of the second Atlantic system was accompanied by a political geography as well: it was an Atlantic arena dominated by Europeans who could not comfortably bear the idea of blacks moving freely between African and American settings.Put differ ently, it did not easily accommodate African subjectivity outside the nar row and homogenous category of racialized slavery.The second Atlantic system composed a world shaped by racial categories that superseded all others, where skin color was a marker that, by its fixity, confined all those possessing the dark skin of African descent to a category of chattel slavery from which there was no escape and for which there was no ame liorative remedy.Thus, for example, Dick, "a free negro man" hired to serve as a linguist aboard the Rainbow in 1758, was taunted by one of the crew who "told Dick he was no better than a Slave, and woud.be sold as such when they arriv'd at the West Indies."42 The broad pattern in the organization of the English slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then, was the enlargement of crew sizes relative to other sectors of maritime commerce, further expan sion of the captain's authority, and additional degradation and proletari anization of maritime labor.Unprecedented powers of domination 41 "John Bell to John Fletcher, 1776," in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of Slave Trade,323).See also "Captain Peleg Clarke to John Fletcher, 1776," ibid., 321-22;Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, no. 77218.The most measurable advance came with development of the flintlock mechanism in the sev enteenth century.On the significance of the shift from matchlock to flintlock tech nology, see H. A. Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn, "Technological Change, Slavery, and the Slave Trade," in The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, ?d. Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (London, 1978), 243-58, esp. 246-52.Though the Iberian Peninsula had played a leading role in pioneering the use of firepower both on land and at sea, northwest Europe was the regional locus of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century developments.
42 "Case of the Rainbow, 1758," in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of Slave Trade,371); Eltis et al.,no. 90466.This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsvested in Dutch and English sea captains made the opprobrious work of the slave quarters something more easily demanded of European seamen.The development of reliable handheld firearms gave European crews an unprecedented capacity to deter and if necessary overpower rebellious cargoes in the event of an attempted uprising.Slaving captains were now armed culturally with autocratic authority and materially with guns that supplemented the imposing appearance of naval cannon; all tasks associ ated with managing human cargoes fell to the hands of European sea men and black personnel were not needed.
From the vantage point of metropolitan investors, much more practi cable and universally reliable than the use of slave guardians was the fur ther exercise of coercion against the common seamen who manned slaving vessels.According to an English ship captain who testified before a British parliamentary committee late in the eighteenth century, "Seamen in gen eral have a great aversion to the Slave Trade.They are in general procured by crimps, who are so constantly on the lookout that a strange sailor is almost sure to fall into their trap.These get them into debt and then put them in Gaol, from which there is no escape but in the hold of a Guineaman."Another English captain testified that "Seamen in the African Slave Trade are treated with the greatest barbarity."Writing to his London superiors in 1707, the Royal African Company's chief agent at Cape Coast Castle advised that mariners employed aboard slave ships "must neither have dainty fingers nor dainty noses, [and] few men are fit for those voyages but them that are bred up to it.It is a filthy voyage," he warned, "as well as a laborious [one]."43After more than fifty years of sustained involvement leading to English dominance in the Atlantic arena of human trafficking, there were pools of English seamen bred to the unique terrain of the slave ship.More to the point, there were even larger pools of Englishmen available for consumption in the British slaving industry.The onerous tasks associated with management of an unwilling human cargo thus became part of the contest between capital and labor embodied in the shipboard relationship between captain and crewmen.It was a contest won by captains and the ownership interests they represented, as European sailors fell ever more deeply under the arbitrary and coercive exercise of power on behalf of the merchant elite and the state.Indeed the proletarianization of maritime labor and consolidation of captains' powers were developments without which England's rise to ascendancy in the slave trade would not have been possible.44The Gold Coast guardian in the seventeenth century is best under stood as the exception that proved the larger rule: shipboard roles in general and disciplinary roles in particular for black maritime lab receded aboard the slave ship from the seventeenth century onward black slave ship guardians were aboard Portuguese slavers in the first years of Atlantic human trafficking, they had become an all-but-obsol presence on slave ships during the seventeenth century.Making sense the use of slave guardians from the Gold Coast aboard English ships the seventeenth century thus requires that we try to understand why Gold Coast produced the exception.Was there something exceptional unique about captives from either the Gold Coast in general or the we ern part of the region in particular that made them useful as sl guardians, or could captives from elsewhere on the African coast hav provided the safety ascribed to slave guardians?What made capti from this region ideal candidates for disciplinary roles aboard the sl ship?On the other side of the equation, to understand how the practi worked we must also try to comprehend the choices of the slav appointed to the guardian's role.
We are accustomed to finding people in dualistic roles?entailing t abjection of slave status and the power of social authority or physic arms?in every kind of slaveholding society, from ancient Greece and imperial Rome to the Islamic territories of Africa and the Middle Eas from east Asian slave systems in dynastic Korea and imperial China to serf dom in early modern Russia, and even the oppressive slave societies of Americas.In these instances roles that empowered slaves with the tools tha might serve to undo their bondage shared an element necessarily missing in the setting of the slave ship: an extended personal relationship betw master and bondsman.The slave janissary in the Ottoman Empire, th slave eunuch in China's Ming dynasty, and the ubiquitous slave driver the American southern plantation were all the product of a historical r tionship grown thick with nuance and complexity over time.45 The core paradox of the guardian system, then, was the social rel tionships on which it rested: the use of guardians puzzles because turned on a relationship between captive and captor that had no app ent origin, where there appears no historical ground in which such relationship could take root.As David Eltis has quite rightly insisted "the relationship between those charged with carrying the slaves to t Americas and the African slaves themselves was among the most unc 45 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (N York, 1976), 365-88;Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparat Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 299-333.On slave drivers, whom Genovese ca "The Men Between," see Peter M. Voelz, Slave and Soldier: The Military Impac Blacks in the Colonial Americas (New York, 1993).
This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsplicated of all forms of human interaction" because "unlike the slaves and masters in the Americas (or in Africa) or master and servant in the rest of the early modern Atlantic world, the two groups had little opportunity to get to know each other."46Formed in the atomized space and compressed temporal frame of the Middle Passage, the guardian system complicated what was ostensibly an exceedingly simple relationship.Bringing members of the slave cargo into alliance with ship captains and sustaining that rela tionship for the duration of the ocean crossing, the guardian system pro duced complex social relationships in a setting where they should not have existed.It triangulated what presumably should have been an unambigu ous and fixed binary between African and European, black and white, captive and captor.It was one thing for slaving captains to turn to slaves for assistance in emergencies at sea.It was something quite different to plan slaving voyages with the expectation that members of the slave cargo empowered with resources and liberties that could support rebellion would reliably and predictably agree to align their interests with those of the captain for the entirety of the voyage.
The paradox unravels, however, when scholars remember that since the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Iberoatlantic system, those from the Gold Coast (and the other regions from which guardians were recruited: Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast) were accustomed to categories of Atlantic slavery that put them in the service of mercantile elites and often in positions of authority and superiority in relationship to people held captive and designated for Atlantic export.Shifting perspective to an African view of the Atlantic arena and its history, it thus becomes possible to explain why the Gold Coast in the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries was a region where Europeans could safely enlist Africans to occupy a role such as slave ship guardian.If such a figure were to continue to find a niche in the second Atlantic system, it could only be in a region where such roles were already suffused with mean ings consistent with European intentions.From the vantage point of the Gold Coast, guardian status aboard the slave ship appeared to be an opportunity to enter into some other, less oppressive category of enslave ment in the Euroatlantic system.It held close resemblance, that is, to the multiple and overlapping categories of slavery that had shaped Afro European social relationships on the Gold Coast since their fifteenth century beginnings in the first Atlantic world.
When English traders established their presence on the African coast in the second half of the seventeenth century, they and their Dutch com petitors followed the Portuguese example of dependence on local hired labor of free people and locally owned slaves ("gromettoes," the English derivation of the Portuguese term "grumete") as well as bondspeople  For those already consigned to the slave ship, the opportunity to become a guardian appeared to be, like the opportunity to become a cas tle slave, a chance to enter into a different, less oppressive category of enslavement.Guardian status appeared to cement a master-slave rela tionship similar to the dynamic that had prevailed between Europeans and Africans since the fifteenth century: master-slave relationships bound by ties of mutual interdependence and obligation.On the Gold Coast, English ship captains found slaves primed by the social relation ships of power that governed the first Atlantic system to interpret the perquisites of their shipboard status exactly as was hoped.Here European ship captains could recruit slaves likely to recognize some thing familiar in the guardian's role and likely therefore to respond favorably, to regard what was in fact only temporary amelioration as something lasting on which to stake their hopes for an opportunity to improve their lot.In this sense giving guardian slaves power and privi leges that could just: as easily be turned against ship captains was not considered an undue risk.
The cat-o'-nine-tails was perhaps one of the most important means by which captains affirmed guardians' expectation that theirs was a different category of maritime enslavement, since there is good reason to suspect the guardians' onshore corollaries, the castle slaves and gromettoes, were asked to carry arms at least on occasion.50Particularly in the context of their social connections and allowed to join the ranks of the castle slaves, movement in the opposite direction rarely occurred.All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the slave ship, there was arguably no more effective strategy to loyalty of slave guardians than this bold gesture.By armin slaves with a weapon to wield against other captives, captain pulled guardians into the orbit of their own power.Having thing by entrusting a measure of their power to slave guard gave them reason to interpret the gesture as evidence that t ment was and would remain distinct from that of their subo giving slave guardians a measure of power in the slave hold an of freedom within the slave ship, captains created a group of and women for whom the very resources that empowered t were those they dared not sacrifice for an uncertain outcom collective rebellion.
If it served their interests, European captains occasionally a the superior social rank implied by the guardian title.When of the Mary withheld two "lusty men negroes" from deliv African Company agents for sale in Barbados in May 1681, that the two were "freemen that he tooke for Guardians a sent back to Guynie."He likely intended to defraud the surreptitiously selling the two men for his own private ga Walter Johnson writes, "anyone who has ever told a lie [kn best way to make a story seem true is to build it out of pi truth."51The lie this slaving captain probably crafted is tell affirms the argument the guardians would make, could directly through the documentary record.The guardians s have agreed that their title should hold the same mean Americas that it had held on the African coast and ther exempt them from sale into plantation slavery.
When the Atlantic crossing had ended, so too had gua board social status.The sales of Royal African Company sla the English American colonies in the late seventeenth c extremely well documented, not just in the corresponde company officials and agents in the colonies but more sign 51 Edwyn Stede, Barbados, to Royal African Company, May 1 Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.1: fol.106 ("lusty m Walter Johnson, "Time and Revolution in African America: Tempo History of Atlantic Slavery," in Rethinking American History in a Thomas Bender (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 148-67 ("anyone," 155).Inde ety about dishonest ship captains that prompted the company's May to keep better record on the purchase of slave guardians at Cape Coas officials in London issued new orders requiring that the chief factor Castle demand signed bills of lading for guardians put aboard ship All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the ledgers the agents prepared for every slave cargo they received on behalf of the company.In sharp contrast to their visibility in the letters of instruction and bookkeeping records produced on the other side of the Atlantic, guardians appear nowhere in the records produced when the ships reached the Americas.The eerie silence in the archival record hints at the remarkable effortlessness with which captors swiftly and summarily returned guardians to the status of captives available for sale in the market along with the rest, a status they in fact had never shed.
With the end of the Royal African Company's monopoly on English slave trading at the close of the seventeenth century, the systematic nota tions of guardians in the documentary record disappeared, perhaps reflect ing the end of the practice or the more fragmentary nature of the documentary record of the eighteenth-century trade.Scattered references suggest that practices similar to the English guardian system continued at least sporadically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.An account of a nineteenth-century voyage, for example, describes a role strikingly similar to that of guardians for slaves recruited from among the Kru peo ples of the Grain and Ivory coasts.52What became of guardians once they entered the American landscape of plantation slavery?It is difficult to imagine that guardians did not come to regret their shipboard cooperation, yet perhaps this presumption goes too far.If what was at stake for guardians was not their captivity but rather the conditions of their Atlantic captivity, perhaps scholars should discard notions about guardians' shock of betrayal.As John Thornton has suggested, slaves who understood one of the Atlantic cre?le languages were likely to become leaders in the plantation setting.Perhaps the same was true of people who arrived having served as guardians in the slave ship.In this sense the particularly prominent role men from the Gold Coast played as rebel leaders in the English Caribbean may represent a more nuanced cultural continuity than some historians have assumed.Though the second Atlantic system insisted that all Africans brought to the Americas be reduced to chattel slavery, that mandate did not mean the first Atlantic system's accommodation of stratification within Atlantic slavery could not continue beyond the reach of the slave ship.
52 Edward Manning, Six Months on a Slaver (New York, 1879), excerpted as Six Months on a Slaver in i860, in George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (1927;repr., Mine?la, N.Y., 2002), 281-317, esp. 295-96.On Kruan history and involvement in the maritime world, see Brooks,Landlords and Strangers,[4][5]21,24,291;Bolster,Black Jacks,[49][50]  This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsSome who served captains reliably as guardians aboard the ships that carried them into American slavery probably were among those who were slaveholders' worst nightmare, the dreaded Coromantee rebels.Now fully attuned to the disjuncture between African and European Atlantic worlds, they continued their battle to get "out of the history of [Atlantic] slavery."In this new arena, their tactics were different but the agenda remained the same.Trapped at the epicenter of Europe's second Atlantic system, they tried to remake the plantation world in accordance with the Atlantic his tory they knew, in which soldiers made war, not sugar.53 For African guardians at least, the history of the Atlantic arena was perhaps best characterized not as an orderly temporal progression from first to second Atlantic systems but as the very subject of contested debate over competing "historical and temporal narratives through which Africans and Europeans understood what was happening on the coast, in the slave ships, and in the slave markets of the Americas."It is generally the winners who get to write history, and in that version of Atlantic his tory the guardians figure as naive subjects duplicitously caught in a story whose end had already been written before they ever boarded a slave ship.That narrative's understanding of guardians as unwitting relics from the Atlantic arena's past makes it difficult to see them as intriguing or impor tant historical actors in any way.But as Johnson notes, "a historical account of the African experience of 'the slave trade' necessarily has a dif ferent shape from an account of the European experience."54What was at stake for the guardians was an Atlantic history whose shape charted the contours of an unfinished story: that of a fifteenth-and sixteenth-century system figuring in historical time not as a first system now dead and gone but rather as a tradition whose ongoing salience was precisely what they struggled to uphold.
53 Johnson, "Time and Revolution in African America," 158 (quotation).On Akan warrior culture reconstituted in the Americas, see esp.John Thornton, "The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean," Journal of Caribbean History 32, nos. 1-2 (1998) guardians and overseers of the Whidaw negroes, and sleep among them to keep them from quarrelling; and in order, as well as to give us notice, This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

9
Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 229; Richardson, WMQ 58; Stephen D. Behrendt, David Eltis, and David Richardson, "The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World," Economic History Review 54, no. 3 (August 2001): 454-76.This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms " After the company put aboard the ship "Severall Cargoes of Goods which you are to deliver & dispose of as hereafter Directed," Strutt was ordered: Therefore with the first oppertunity of Wind that God Shall Send Sett Sail & apply as nere to Cape Mount on the Coast of Africa as your Shipp can conveniently come where & att all places of Trade on the Graine Coast Quaqua [Ivory] Coast & Gold Coast except att our Factorys before you arrive att Cape Tres Pontes you are to use you best Skill and endeavors to Dispose of the Cargoe of Goods here laden for our and your Owners Accounts . . .for Gold Elephants Teeth Mallagetta & what elce is Vendible in Europe & 20 Negroes for your Guards to the other Negroes & when you have Disposed of your Cargoe of such part thereof as you shall find will sell in the Time Agreed for your stay in those parts then Sail to our Factory att Cabo Corsoe Castle and render our Three Cheife Merchants there a true account of the Disposall of the Said Cargoe.15you meet").On the Hannah, see also Royal African Company to Cape Coast Castle, , 201; Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), 166-70.No copies of the Royal African Company's charter party contracts have survived in the documentary record.The Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.61, includes instructions for twenty-one voyages that mention guardians.Instructions for voyages undertaken in the years 1700-1719 are col lected in vols.62-63; 1 have not found specific references to guardians anywhere in these later volumes.For other examples of language identifying guardians with safety, see instructions to captains in command of the Dolphin, Dragon, Sherbrow, Henry and William, Princess, Princess Ann, and East India Merchant in Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.61: fols.46, 48, 49V, 51-51V, 53V, 61, 63V, 68v.15 Abednigoe Strutt, aboard the Expedition, to Cape Coast Castle, Feb. 20, 1688, in Rawlinson MSS, C747, fol.183V, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Eng.("Gold This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on 26 26 Phillips, Journal of a Voyage, 226 ("chanc'd to be"); John Carter, Why Coast Castle, Mar. 16, 1676, in Rawlinson MSS, C747, fols.20V-21 ("if plea This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

(
Madrid, Spain, 1864), 293, s.v."Guardian."For definitions that equate guardians with quartermaster, see the Oxford England Dictionary, s.v."guardian": "The Guardian, that is the quarter master hath 1400, reyes the month."The quotation is from Jan Huygen van Linschoten, lohn Huighen van Linschoten.his Discours of Voyages into ye Easte and West Indies Deuided into Foure Bookes (London, 1598), bk. 1, chap.3, 4. Information on the Linschoten volume comes from David W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times, 2d ed.This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsThese scattered references are not sufficient to suggest a specific his torical relationship linking use of the title guardian across time and varied Atlantic maritime settings.They do not, in other words, demonstrate an etymological chain connecting seventeenth-century usage aboard English slave ships to more generic fifteenth-and sixteenth-century antecedents.
40 J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement i4$o to i6$o

49
Cape Coast Castle Accounts, May 5, 1686, in Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.371: fol.38.50 There are numerous examples of officials at Cape Coast Castle supplying guns to castle slaves, largely for their use in defending the castle as well as to Africans aligned with English interests from other African groups and European competitors, namely, the Dutch.See Cape Coast Castle Accounts, ibid., vols.365-75.This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 explained that it was "for want of [such] separate Bills of Lading for negroes the late Commanders have had some pretences to Conseale us & we feare to deceive us greatly" (Royal African Company to Cape July 5, 1687, in Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.50: This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 : 161-78; Thornton, "War, the State, and Religious Norms in 'Coromantee' Thought: The Ideology of an African American Nation," in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed.Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 181-200.54 Johnson, "Time and Revolution in African America," 149.This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Evidence of the use of guardians is available for twenty-four voyages undertaken by the Royal African Company from 1679 to I7?5-ln aU DUt one case, guardians came aboard while ships traded on the Windward and Gold coasts (present-day Liberia and Ivory Coast and present-day In an Atlantic world dominated by the seventeenth-century emergence of a Caribbean market demand ing unlimited supplies of slave labor, guardians were This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsLeone.On the varied uses of the phrase, see Adam Jones and Marion Johnson, "Slaves from the Windward Coast," Journal of African History 21, no. 1 (1980): 17-34, esp.21.This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

"If you meet with Stout Negroes," read instructions to the captain of the Mary, for example, "you may buy to ye Number of
Instructions to Capt.Edmond Bathurne, Aug. 30, 1687, ibid., fols.40-41V ("twenty Negroes"); Instructions to Capt.John Mascombe, May 8, 1688, ibid., fol.59V ("If content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ; Royal African Company to Cape Coast Castle, July 17, 1688, ibid., fol.69.The account books for Cape Coast Castle also frequently note receipt of the remains of windward cargoes from ships This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms See Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vols.365-74.See also Davies, Royal African Company, 200; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 294-95.19PeterBlake, "A Journall of my Intended Voyage for ye Gold Coast kept by mee Peter Blake Commander of ye Royall African Companys ship James in ye searvis of ye Royall African Company of England," 1675-76, in Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.1211: fols.32V-34.Blake's windward trade was inter rupted by orders to sail directly to Cape Coast Castle to assist in the defense of the fort against an impending attack by local Africans (ibid., fol.35V).See also Phillips, Journal of a Voyage, 198; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 170.Jean Barbot noted that "from Isseny [Assini] onwards, you no longer find anything to trade other than gold and slaves" (Hair, Jones, and Law, Barbot on Guinea, 2: 337).20 Walter Rodney, "Gold and Slaves on the Gold Coast," Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 10 (1969): 13-28; Kwame Yeboa Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600?1720:A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade (Oxford, Eng., 1970); Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, 1982); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).on the Gold Coast within the limited time available to complete the task."Couldyouhave given us encouragement we would have sent before now severall ships only for Gold Coast Negroes, but you never give us encouragement to depend on any number except they have alsoe a Ardra Cargoe," read a missive to the company's agents at Cape Coast Castle.In another piece of correspondence from London, company officials plainly declared that Whydah "is onely our remedie for want of Gold Coast Negroes to fill up such ships, who [would] have beene with you could you otherwise supply them altho at higher prizes."Presumably, the company was willing to entertain the higher cost of slaves from the Gold Coast if only the agents there could produce enough captives to fill their ships in a timely fashion.21Ratherthanrun the risk of losing crew and slaves to mortality and accrue expenses that came with prolonged time spent on the African coast, captains and investors preferred to receive the fewer, readily obtainable Gold Coast captives and quickly continue to the neighboring Bight of Benin to fin ish their slaving.Limitations of the documentary record make it impossible to know how many captains recruited these Gold Coast slaves to be shipboard guardians.Of fifty-four voyages dispatched with orders to trade on the Gold Coast or in the Bight of Benin in the years 1686-99, one-third included instructions to obtain guardians on the Gold Coast.In someThe Gold Coast trading centers west of Cape Coast Castle were involved primarily in the export of gold in the late seventeenth century, whereas the region's growing exports of slaves flowed through ports east of the castle.The number of slaves purchased while ships traded wind ward of the castle was not large.Agents at the castle noted in February 1686, for instance, that the captain of the John Bonadventure had pur chased two men and seven women during his windward trade, and the captain of the Mary reportedly obtained eleven men and five women during windward trade.Significantly, their recruitment from among slaves purchased on the western part of the Gold Coast meant guardians came from communities distinct from those that supplied most slave cargoes obtained on the Gold Coast, the latter coming predominantly from points east of Cape Coast.Moreover captains were not unwilling to obtain additional portions of their slave cargo on the Gold Coast before sailing to Arda or Whydah.After agents at the castle put This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termscargoes entirely cases captains received instructions to buy Gold Coast guardians and pro ceed directly to the Bight of Benin to finish their slaving.Alternately, ship captains sailed with instructions to seek a full cargo of slaves on the Gold Coast and with a proviso: if the agents at Cape Coast Castle were unable to supply a ship's full complement in a timely manner, they were to sup ply Gold Coast slaves as guardians, adjust the ship's cargo of trade goods accordingly, and promptly send the vessel on to the Bight of Benin.The company hoped the China Merchant would be dispatched from the Gold Coast fully slaved, for example, but if agents at Cape Coast Castle antici pated difficulty supplying the ship's intended cargo of 450 captives, they were to give the captain "a speedy dispatch for Whydah" and "for what Negroes you supply him with for Guardians &ca.take from him a pro portionable part of his Negroe Cargoe."22This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsguardians aboard the Phineas and Margaret in November 1680, they sent the captain to continue his slaving on the Gold Coast with instructions to "buy any along the Coast as he goes along till he comes to Arda."In November 1690 Captain Shirley's orders aboard the East India Merchant were to get "50 Negroes as Guardians" at Cape Coast Castle "and as many more as they have or can procure towards compleating your com plement of 650 Negroes."23 24 Nathaniel Bradley, Cape Coast Castle, to Royal African Company, Nov. 8, 1680, in Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.1: fol.98 (quotation); Cape Coast Castle Accounts, ibid, vol.365: fol.iiv (regarding the Vine)."Cankey" was the Akan term for the boiled corn mush that was a common food staple in Gold Coast communities.See Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 44.For other references to women's shipboard employment as food preparers, see Cape Coast CastleAccounts,  October 1686, ibid., vol.371: fol.87;Cape Coast Castle Accounts, November 1686,  ibid., vol.372: fol.70;Cape Coast Castle Accounts, April 1687, ibid., fol.106.25 Royal African Company to Cape Coast Castle, Nov. 11, 1690, in Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vol.50: fol.113 ("obliged"); Royal African Company to Thomas Corker, York Island, Oct.16, 1694, ibid., fol.157 ("promise").

Table I Guardians
Put Aboard Royal African Company Ships at Cape Coast Source: Records of the Royal African Company, T70, vols.61, 659.
of enormous proportions throughout the era of Atlantic slaving.Beyond the inevitably substantial loss of able-bodied men to the unfamiliar disease environment of the tropics, the Africa trade's reputa tion as a death trap for European seamen made it a challenge to recruit skilled sailors.Voyages to the Niger Delta region were "unpopular among the Portuguese sailors because of the health hazards involved," for example, and their disdain meant that the demand for slaves at Sao Jorge da Mina was handled mostly by small caraveloes stationed on the African coast; captains of full-size caravels based in Lisbon preferred to avoid this branch of Atlantic commerce.29Moreoverthe inglorious manual labor associated with the ordinary seaman's life gave sailors extremely low status in sixteenth-century Iberian culture.Menial tasks such as "clean[ing] the deck" or guarding convicts and slaves were the most despised of all, the former deemed appropriate only for lowly grumetes and ship's boys and the latter bring ing low regard to the sailors assigned to such duties aboard galley ships.
], 287-92 [quota tion, 287]).This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termswas a challenge 31In the first 150 years of Atlantic slaving, crews confronted with rebellious slaves had recourse only to the conventional hand arms?knives, cutlasses, bills, and other edged weapons?typically found on ships (missile weapons such as the crossbow being the tools not of sailors but of specially trained soldiers).The prospect of slave rebellion put crew men already weakened in number and force by the inevitable ravages of sickness and death in a close contest with those they held captive.Armed with cutlasses and other edged weapons, a ship's crew might well put down a shipboard uprising, particularly if actual slave combat content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 to coastal trade forts in regi[30][31][32][33][34][35]st, [37][38]shore European settlements wer37,rimary sites of commercial exchange.Local canoe men ferried goods and passengers, including slaves, to and from English and Dutch shipping, and supervision of captives des ignated for export was among the tasks assigned to "castle" or "company" slaves owned by Dutch and English trade forts on the African coast.47Justasguardiansapparentlycarried out their role exactly as slave ship captains intended, so too were castle slaves and gromettoes unlikely to rebel, whether on their own or in collaboration with the chain slaves des ignated for export aboard European ships.In fact, writes Eltis, they "were more likely to betray than foment rebellion."Castleslavesworkingat English settlements in the seventeenth century received a cash allowance for their subsistence, clothing, and periodic gifts of brandy or rum, particularly at times of holiday celebration.Most importantly, castle slaves knew that, barring serious criminal offense, their status ensured protection from export.Their positions protected them from the slave ships that would inevitably arrive to carry the chain slaves away.4847MennePostma,The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-181$ (Cambridge, I99?)' 7I_73 ("castle," 72, "company," 71); Davies, Royal African Company, 242-43;Gutkind, "Trade and Labor,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery,37,[41][42] 94.As with Portuguese predecessors, the common practice was to import slaves to be employed at the trade forts from other parts of the African coast.The Dutch brought such trainslaven to the Gold Coast from the Bight of Benin or Bight of For slaves in chains on the Gold Coast, the misfortune of Atlantic cap tivity was a foregone and largely irreversible condition and quite possibly an unanticipated one for those recruited from west of Cape Coast Castle, an area not otherwise involved in the large-scale production of slaves for export.But there was good reason to expect and seek opportunities to nego tiate the condition and ameliorate the outcome of their captivity.The region's long history of Afro-European labor relationships in which slavery held multiple meanings and outcomes authorized the expectation that the seventeenth-century slave ship ought to accommodate multiple categories of dependent status.Moreover, in the seventeenth-century castle slaves and gromettoes, chain slaves had living evidence of current Afro-European labor relationships that accommodated plural categories of slave status.In May 1686, for instance, agents at Cape Coast Castle paid wages to Arno, an African maritime worker identified as a "guardian & sayler" aboard one of the sloops the Royal African Company employed on the coast.49 This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsattached directly content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms examples of slaves functioning like guardians, see Crow, Memoirs of the Late Captain Crow, 34-38; Conneau, Slaver's Log Book, 84; Jean Mettas, R?pertoire des exp?ditions n?gri?res fran?aises au XVIIIe si?cle: Ports autres que Nantes, ?d. Serge Daget and Mich?le Daget (Paris, France, 1984), 2: 340, 372-73.See also E. Arnot Robertson, The Spanish Town Papers: Some Sidelights on the American War of Independence(New York, 1959), 131.My thanks to Philip D. Morgan for bringing this last reference to my attention.