“Going to Their Own Country”: Enslaved Maritime Labor and the Bahian Transatlantic Slave Trade

In the early nineteenth century, a British visitor to the South Atlantic observed with surprise that “a number of the Seamen, employed on board [Brazilian] Slave Ships, are themselves Negro Slaves, born in Africa; and though frequently going over to their own country, they do not leave the vessel [and escape] there.” The phenomena of enslaved Africans serving on slaving vessels appeared deeply counter-intuitive. But for centuries, Portuguese Atlantic merchants had been utilizing enslaved African maritime labor, the transatlantic slave trade was no exception. Comprising 65 percent of all crew members on ships travelling from Salvador to West Africa by 1775, enslaved men’s conscripted labor enabled both the growth of Bahia’s transatlantic slave trade and the social and physical mobility of individual enslaved mariners. As “subaltern cosmopolitans,” African-born, enslaved seamen procured necessary provisions—including food and medicine—on the African coast, and acted as interpreters, managing enslaved men, women and children held in cargoes. Drawing on extant legal petitions and ship manifests, this presentation argues that enslaved sailors drew on medieval Iberian precedents that permitted sailors to secure a caixa de liberdade or “liberty chest”—a unit of space within a ship’s cargo to house their personal trade goods which allowed them to engage in oceanic trade for their own benefit. Furthermore, enslaved and freed sailors forged temporary financial partnerships with fellow crew members and residents of Bahia, enlarging the number of investors in the transatlantic slave trade. Because ship captains often preferred African sailors to European ones because of their perceived linguistic and cultural expertise, these men utilized their mobility instrumentally, to earn wages and exercise a degree of self-determination uncommon for slaves.