“Crimes Committed by the Captain and Crew”: Race, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Culpability on a Nineteenth-Century Illegal Slave Ship Voyage

Recent slavery scholarship has moved well beyond conceptualizations of the Atlantic slave trade with European villains on one side and African victims on the other.  Yet there remains a widespread perception of Atlantic slave trade crews as problematic bad actors, mostly of European descent, who were either active participants or acquiescent witnesses to regularly horrific behavior committed against enslaved Africans. The groundbreaking work of Emma Christopher, Stephanie Smallwood and others has encouraged more in-depth probing of shipboard communities and shipboard relationships. The present paper is one such exploration. Drawn from a micro-history of a single slave ship which departed the Canary Islands, bound for the Spanish Caribbean, this paper explores testimonies about and testimonies by the multi-ethnic and multi-national slave ship crew after it was seized by a British naval vessel engaged in slave trade suppression.  This slave ship drew particular attention after activist British officials decided to investigate accusations of sexual and other assaults committed "by the captain and crew" during the Atlantic voyage. This language--binding the crew to the captain and framing them all as "criminals" (both for illegal trading and other acts of violence)--is repeated as an accusatory refrain throughout the legal and diplomatic correspondence around the case. However, in-depth exploration of these testimonies and related diplomatic texts illuminates much more complicated narratives of both identity and culpability.  Exploration of these narratives seeks not to absolve individuals of culpability or to compare different actors with one another in macabre calculations of relative guilt, but rather to gain a fuller understanding how the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade were lived by all involved.