[cure-news] Slavery: A Shark's perspective

[Ida Hakim]

Slavery: A Shark's perspective
A strange text sheds new light on the true roots of abolition


By Marcus Rediker

This year and next mark an important historical anniversary: Two
centuries ago, both the United States and Great Britain abolished the
African slave trade.

By the time they did, the trade had carried 9 million Africans to New
World plantations, where they would live under the lash and produce the
largest planned accumulation of wealth the world had yet seen. Abolition
followed a long and determined campaign waged by antislavery activists on
both sides of the Atlantic.

But who really brought the slave trade to an end?

In popular history, the people who abolished the slave trade are seen
virtually as saints. They were somber, often dressed in black; they were
devout, earnest, and good; they were the very embodiment of Christian
virtue. In New England, many were descended from Puritans and reflected
their austere and humorless ways. In England they were epitomized by the
aristocratic evangelical William Wilberforce, the voice of abolition in
Parliament. The recent movie "Amazing Grace" portrays him as a selfless,
somewhat sickly angel who loved animals, servants, Africans, and God.
Piety has long been seen as the hallmark of abolitionists on both sides
of the Atlantic.

If that were the full story, though, it would be exploded by this
document. While working in the special collections library of Bristol
University in England on a book on 18th-century slave ships, I found an
almost completely unknown broadside entitled "The Petition of the Sharks
of Africa." It looked like any other printed petition, elegant in its
composition, suitable for presentation, addressed "To the Right
Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of Great Britain, in
Parliament assembled."

It was, however, a vivid and harsh piece of satire. In fact it claimed to
have been written by the "Sharks of Africa," who declared themselves to
be a numerous and flourishing group thanks to the many slave ships that
visited the coast of West Africa. From these vessels, they explained,
they got "large quantities of their most favourite food - human flesh."

When the dead were thrown overboard, the sharks devoured the corpses.
Sometimes they got live flesh, when African rebels who preferred death to
slavery jumped overboard. When slave ships were "dashed on the rocks and
shoals" of the region, throwing "hundreds of human beings, both black and
white" into the water, it was a feast.

The sharks were writing to the British Parliament kindly asking them not
to end the slave trade. Taking a sensible conservative view, the sharks
denounced the abolitionists' "wild ravings of fanaticism," confident that
their benevolent lordships would not let His Majesty's loyal shark
subjects starve. The petitioners were sure that they could count on "the
wisdom and fellow-feeling" of the House of Lords. Sharks should stick
together, after all.

Nothing I had read had prepared me for such a document. Here,
unexpectedly, was a dark and daring kind of humor I had never known to
exist among abolitionists.

Further research revealed that it had been republished widely, in
Edinburgh, Philadelphia, New York, and Salem. I concluded that "The
Petition of the Sharks of Africa" had been written by a Scot named James
Tytler, who was a physician, poet, composer, an editor of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, and Britain's first hot-air balloonist. For his
radicalism, he was eventually arrested and charged with sedition, only to
flee into exile in 1793, first to Ireland, then to Salem. His
contribution has never figured in the histories of abolition - partly, I
am convinced, because it does not fit the enduring image of
abolitionists.

The document joins a long string of new findings that have changed our
understanding of who the abolitionists were. Working-class men and women
protested the trade through boycotts; sailors smuggled pamphlets and told
their horror stories to activists ashore. The front line of the war
against human bondage was occupied by the enslaved themselves, whose
resistance sent shock waves around the world, terrifying many and
inspiring some. Their names may be lost to the history books, but they
anchored a complex and diverse social movement.

Why do we need to know this today? First, it is important to understand
that the abolition of the slave trade, and of slavery itself, was not a
gift from on high. William Wilberforce did not abolish the slave trade,
as "Amazing Grace" might make it seem, just as a lone Abraham Lincoln did
not free the slaves. It will no longer do to pretend that a "great man"
did things that are more accurately described as a result of a complex
historical situation and a many-sided resistance.

Second, it is important to people demanding justice and reparations today
- whoever and wherever they may be - to know that their forebears played
an important role in bringing the slave trade and indeed the entire
institution of slavery to an end. We owe the end of the abolition of the
nefarious trade not just to aristocrats and Puritans, but to enslaved
rebels, to factory workers and sailors, and to at least one irreverent
Scottish daredevil.

Marcus Rediker is a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh.
His new book, "The Slave Ship: A Human History," will be published by
Viking-Penguin in October.