There are one thousand and one stories of African captives forcefully taken to foreign lands and forced into manual labour. Slaves who were forcibly removed from their homelands, in their hundreds, hundred of thousands and millions. During the transatlantic slavetrade alone, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were forced above slave ships bound for the Americas between 1526 and 1867, with about 10.7 million surviving the Middle Passage. Across the Sahara, an estimated 7.4 million were transported northward between approximately 650 and 1900, according to estimates based on the work of historian Paul E. Lovejoy. Earlier estimates for the period 650-1600 alone put the number at about 4.82 million. We also hear stories of the gore, the torture, the deaths and the end of these captives turned salves.
What we don’t hear, however, are stories of their brave attempts at freedom — of violent struggles where captives fought back against their captors to regain their freedom. Despite extreme security, heavy shackles and brutal punishments, hundreds of documented uprisings did occur. The situation on these slave ships was hardly endearing. European sailors often loaded the ships until it was filled or it was simply time to sail. Men were usually separated from women and children who sometimes had a degree of freedom of movement unless they posed a threat to the crew. However, with time, ship crews began using chains, padlocks and manacles produced in Europe to shackle adult males who were often locked below deck.
Despite these living conditions, the African spirit stayed alive among captives. Whenever land was sighted, ships became more prone to slave resistance. Consequently, at least one in every ten slave ships experienced some form of resistance on such journeys. For instance, in 1764, a ship by the name Adventure, anchored off the coast of Africa was attacked by Africans who killed the crew and freed the captives. In 1735, an unsuccessful attack was documented by a Captain Moore of Mass who reported that his ship was attacked in the Western part of Africa, leading to the death of only one crew member. In April 1789, slaves aboard a ship called the Felicity rose against their captors, leading to the death of the Captain and three slaves before the uprising was quelled.
Then we have more famous uprisings such as that of July 1839 in which slaves aboard a Spanish ship — the Amistad — successfully attacked the ship they were aboard and piloted it safely to Long Island, New York where after a trial, they were set free and allowed to go back to Africa. Similarly, we have the October 1841 uprising in which Creole, a ship headed towards New Orleans with 135 slaves, was attacked by slaves aboard who seized the ship’s firearms and held its crew hostage until they were driven to an English colony, where most of them gained freedom.
These uprisings form part of a much longer history of resistance aboard slave ships. One of the earlier and lesser-known examples occurred on the 6th of June 1730, aboard a vessel called the Little George.
On the 1st of June 1730, a British ship, Little George, left the shores of the Bonnana Islands of Guinea with approximately ninety-six African captives destined for the slave markets of the North American colonies. Just like other slave captives that had sailed the Atlantic waters, these captives were shackled with heavy iron and locked in the lower deck of the ship. At half past four in the morning on 6 June 1730, about a hundred leagues off the West African coast, the ship was five days into its crossing. Her captain, George Scott, was asleep. He would wake to one of the most remarkable events in the history of the Atlantic trade.
For days the captive men had been working at their irons in the darkness of the lower deck. That morning several of them slipped free, forced their way through the bulkhead, and came up onto the deck. They seized weapons and killed the three men of the watch — by Scott’s own later account, the ship’s doctor, its cooper, and a sailor, all caught asleep or unaware. The captain of the ship, and the remaining crew attempted to fight back but some of the captives produced a bottle packed with gunpowder and threatened to ignite it. The threat was enough to force the crew to surrender; an explosion could have seriously damaged or even sunk the vessel.
With the crew subdued, Captain Scott and his men were confined to the cabin, leaving the captives in control of the ship.
The Course Home
Here, the story becomes even more interesting. The Africans now held a European sailing vessel, and not one of them had ever sailed one. They had no charts, training, or even a navigator. Yet they turned the Little George around and pointed her east, back toward the continent they had been torn from, and held that course for days across the open ocean. It was one of the most successful uprisings on record, but unlike the others, the hardest part was not the fighting but the sailing.
Somehow these men made land. The Little George reached the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, an estuary opening onto the Atlantic, and they ran her in. There both the freed captives and the surviving crew abandoned the ship. The Africans went ashore — home, or close enough to it to disappear into a coast they knew.
We know all of this for a strange and telling reason: the man they defeated wrote it down. As a matter of fact, historians believe many of such uprisings may very well have occurred on such journeys. However, in instances where revolts led to the death of entire crew men, who would be left to tell the tale of what happened to the ship after its abandonment?
This story, however, we know of, because the men it happened to were left alive to tell its tale. Captain George Scott was later rescued by another slave ship and penned a first-person deposition of the revolt. In his words, “I, George Scott, master of the sloop the Little George…” and it is only because of that record, left by the loser, that the captives’ victory survives at all. It would seem the lesson was not enough for Captain Scott however, as he continued in the same line of business soon afterwards and most likely died doing it. In the spring of 1740, George Scott sent what would be his last letter near the coast of Antigua and that was the last anyone heard of him.
Shipboard revolts were attempted often and almost always failed, because the sea itself was the slaver’s ally: even captives who overpowered a crew were usually left adrift, unable to work the ship or find their way. The Little George is remembered because it cleared that second, higher bar. Ninety-six people, no charts, no training, a single bottle of gunpowder — and a course held stubbornly east until the wind carried the smell of land.
