A Slave Trader
Describes the Atlantic Passage
During 1693 and
1694, Captain Thomas Phillips carried slaves from Africa to
► Who are the various people described in this document who
in one way or another were involved in or profited from the slave trade? What
dangers did the Africans face on the
voyage? What contemporary attitudes could have led this ship captain to treat
and think of .his human cargo simply as goods to be transported? What are the
grounds of his self-pity for the difficulties he met?
Having bought my complement of 700 slaves, 480 men and
220 women, and finish'd all my business at Whidaw [on the Gold Coast of Africa], I took my leave of
the old king and his cappasheirs [attendants], and
parted, with many affectionate expressions on both sides, being forced to
promise him that I would return again the next year, with several things he
desired me to bring from I England. . . . I set sail the 27th of July in the I
morning, accompany'd with the East-India I Merchant,
who had bought 650 slaves, for the
We spent in our passage from St. Thomas II to Barbadoes two months eleven days, from the 25th of August
to the 4th of November following: in which time there happened such I: sickness
and mortality among my poor men and Negroes. Of the first we buried 14, and of
the last 320, which was a great detriment to our voyage, the Royal African
Company losing ten pounds by every slave that died, and the owners of the ship
ten pounds ten shillings, being the freight agreed on to be paid by the
charter-party for every Negro delivered alive ashore to the African Company's
agents at Barbadoes. . . . The loss in all amounted
to near 6500 pounds sterling.
The distemper which my men as well as the blacks
mostly died of was the white flux, which was so violent and inveterate that no
medicine would in the least check it, so that when any of our men were seized
with it, we esteemed him a dead man, as he generally proved. . . .
The Negroes are so incident to the smallpox
that few ships that carry them escape without it, and sometimes it makes vast havock and destruction among them. But tho'
we had 100 at a time sick of it, and that it went thro' the ship, yet we lost
not above a dozen by it. All the assistance we gave the diseased was only as
much water as they desir’d to drink, and some
palm-oil to anoint their sores, and they would generally recover without any
other helps but what kind nature gave them…
But what the small pox spar'd,
the flux swept off, to our great regret, after all our pains and care to give
them their messes in due order and season, keeping their lodgings as clean and
sweet as possible, and enduring so much misery and stench so long among a
parcel of creatures nastier than swine, and after all our expectations to be
defeated by their mortality…
No gold-finders can endure so much noisome slavery as
they do who carry Negroes; I for those have some respite and satisfaction, but
we endure twice the misery; and yet by their mortality our voyages are ruin'd, and we pine and fret ourselves to death, and
take so much pains to so little purpose.
Thomas Phillips, ';Journal, " A Collection of Voyages an_ Travels, Vol, VI, ed. by Awnsham and
John Churchill
(
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), pp. 85-87.
