| Throughout the history of slavery, the men and women held in bondage continually resisted. They ran away; intentionally broke equipment they were supposed to use; feigned illness, injury, or even pregnancy; established vibrant slave communities; and sometimes even rose up and attempted to reclaim their liberty by force. The historiography concerning slavery has increasingly incorporated this tradition of resistance into the general historical portrait of slave behavior. The myth of the humble, contented, and docile slave has lost its currency and continues to be replaced by more accurate depictions. Interestingly, however, the implication of much of the work done on slavery is that the tradition of resistance first developed into a coherent movement only after slaves reached the Americas, as if the Middle Passage had been so psychologically devastating that intensive shipboard resistance was unthinkable. As a result, shipboard resistance continues to receive relatively little attention. What few realize is that Africans, and in some cases African Americans, established a courageous legacy of shipboard revolt, the continual expressions of which were just as powerful and extraordinary as the resistance that later emerged in the Americas.;This dissertation yields evidence of some 474 cases of shipboard insurrection culled from 18th century newspapers, accounts of slave ship captains and crew members, records of slave trading firms such as the Royal African Company, and secondary histories of the trade. Impressively, many of these revolts resulted in freedom for some or all of the insurrectionists involved. From around the turn of the 16th century to the second half of the 19th century, thousands of slaves rose up onboard ships to reclaim their freedom. Revolt threatened every ship carrying slaves across the seas and caused captains, crew members, insurers, and owners to spend large amounts of time and money to prevent it. Bound not by time, nationality of vessel, or origin of slaves, shipboard revolt could explode whenever and wherever conditions were most favorable for success---and often did, changing the very structure and dynamics of the slave trade and providing a significant prelude to the tradition of resistance which subsequently occurred on the plantations. |
