Introduction: Seascapes and Caribbean Identity

           For much of their history, from the dawn of human settlement to recent times, the islands of the West Indian Archipelago have been peopled by the product of seaborne diasporas.  Beginning with the Amerindians over 5,000 years ago, the ebb and flow of human conflict and expansion has contributed to successive waves of inward and outward migration affecting the Caribbean basin, each of which has left an imprint on the land and on the societies which emerged here. Historically, the relationship between Caribbean people and the sea was profound. The sea was a source of livelihood and of food, a route for commerce and communication, a bringer of danger and of opportunity for the people of the islands. Politically, the Caribbean sea both unites and divides the people of the region, by turns tantalizing with the sense of shared space and frustrating with the reality of physical separation. Little wonder then that `that turbulent soil' is central to Caribbean culture, consciousness and identity.

           The sea occupies a particularly important place in Afro-Caribbean identity. The ocean crossing to the Americas severed connections with the African homeland and ruptured traditional networks of family and kinship. The sea thus became a barrier enforcing separation and symbolising loss. But the way home, spiritually and symbolically as well as physically, would always lie eastward across the Atlantic Ocean. So the sea also came to symbolise freedom and the hope of return.¹  Also, in the shared trauma of the Middle Passage were the seeds of new relationships. Thus, the term 'shipmate' would a became a familiar mode of address among enslaved Africans on the plantations in the Caribbean; for some the 'shipmate' bond even became a way of replacing kinfolk networks left behind in Africa.²

           This paper is concerned with one specific aspect of the relationship between Afro-Caribbean people and the sea, which, it will argue, has been of particular importance in the Black Atlantic world. It will examine the relationship between seafaring and Afro-Caribbean identity from the pre-Emancipation era to the first half of the twentieth century.

Seafaring and Slavery in Caribbean Societies

           The aggressive mercantilism of the north-western European powers during the seventeenth and eighteenth century which fueled the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the creation of the plantation economy in the Caribbean and the Americas,  was accompanied by a huge growth in international merchant shipping. The Atlantic became a bustling crossroads of international trade, of a volume and intensity unknown in human history.³ The great trading nations of Britain and France also acquired substantial fleets of warships to protect their rapidly expanding trading and colonial interests overseas, especially during the periodic wars which punctuated the period. The Caribbean was a focal point of much of this maritime activity as innumerable ships arrived carrying cargoes of slaves and departed carrying cargoes of sugar, cotton, tobacco, and other commodities. The close proximity of colonies belonging to rival powers in the region, as well as the frequent depredations of pirates, ensured that it was a major centre of naval activity too. All of this has significant demographic effects on the Caribbean. At peak periods, in the trading season or in time of war, strategic ports such as Bridgetown in Barbados and  Port Royal in Jamaica, and free ports open to ships of all nations such as St Thomas in the Virgin Islands, were swollen by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of 'maritime transients' - seafarers, traders, mercenaries, and adventurers of every type. In a region where few towns had populations exceeding 10,000 people, their presence was unmissable.⁴   

           The growth in military and merchant shipping made heavy demands on the international labour supply, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century (the period of the Seven Years War, the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars).⁵ The increasing use of the press-gang to round out the crews of navy ships during the eighteenth century was one sign that experienced British seafaring labour was in short supply.⁶ The reasons for the shortfall were not hard to find, quite apart from the sheer weight of numbers required. Relatively few men chose to go to sea  if they had any viable alternative in view of the low pay, bad food, heavy work, harsh discipline and dangers from disease and storms which were the lot of the seafarer.⁷ Seafaring labour was particularly difficult to obtain for long voyages since the death rate among the crew tended to climb the longer a ship was out of port. In the West Indies and on the West African coast, where fevers which afflicted Europeans abounded, crews were frequently decimated. According to one calculation, the death rate among seafarers on slave ships was often proportionately higher than that of the slaves crammed into the holds below their feet.⁸

           Inevitably, captains struggling to handle undermanned ships turned to whatever alternative supplies of labour were available in their various ports of call. In the Caribbean much of this labour was black, taken aboard to assist in loading and unloading cargo as ships moved from island to island, or to take the place of crew who had died or deserted. Experienced `Sailor Negroes' were often hired out by their owners in the Caribbean for these purposes.⁹ In addition, many young slaves were taken aboard ships to act as personal servants to ship's officers. This was the experience of Olaudah Equiano who was sold as a young boy to the Captain of a British merchant ship in Virginia.  He acted as the Captain's steward, and accompanied him when he was called up to serve in the Royal Navy during the Seven Years War. During battles at sea he acted as a powder monkey. Later he was sold to a merchant in Montserrat, who employed him as a cargo-handler and lighterman. As an experienced 'Sailor Negro' during the 1760s, Equiano sailed to ports throughout the Caribbean and along the Southeastern seaboard of Colonial America, even acting as captain on his Master's schooner on a couple of occasions.¹⁰

           In 1794, during the Revolutionary wars with the French, the British Government reimposed the requirement first included in the Navigation Acts in 1664 that the officers and three-quarters of the crew of all British ships engaged in foreign trade should be British subjects, and that all seamen involved in the home trade should be British. However, the importance of enslaved black seafarers as an additional source of manpower for Britain by this date is indicated by the fact that the Act stated that a person could be defined as British for the purposes of the Act by `birth, naturalisation, denization, conquest or service'. This definition would clearly include blacks resident in Britain's West Indian colonies, as well as African Americans, a number of whom had served with the British navy since the American Revolutionary war. The definition was explicitly extended to include slaves in clause 8 of the Act, which stated:

If black slaves from the West Indies had become an integral part of the crews of British naval vessels by the end of the eighteenth century, they were no less important on the wide variety of merchant vessels working in Caribbean waters by this date. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the number of black crew members was always much higher on merchant ships than on navy ships. An analysis by Barry Gaspar of a list of vessels and crews belonging to Antigua in 1720 gives some fascinating insights on this question. He concludes that black seamen in Antigua at this time  'were concentrated on small, open craft with an average carrying capacity of 2.14 tons, powered largely by oars and used mainly for coastal traffic and trips to nearby islands.'¹² Anecdotal evidence suggests that a similar pattern existed in many other islands of the Caribbean during the eighteenth century.

Free Black Seafarers in the Era of Slavery

           In societies in which enslavement was the norm for people of African descent, free blacks were an anomaly. Nevertheless, there was a small, but growing number of free people of colour in the Caribbean by the end of the eighteenth century. Many of these were able to make lives for themselves at sea, beyond the stultifying boundaries of plantation-dominated slave-holding societies. The possibility of shaping one's own destiny by earning a wage was obviously of critical importance, in a context in which economic opportunities for black people were few and far between. In addition, some black seafarers found that the hardships and dangers they shared with white colleagues at sea helped to promote an atmosphere of non-racial egalitarianism and mutual respect unknown ashore.¹³

           It should not be forgotten, however, that a free black seafarer in the era of slavery was always at risk. It was not unknown for a black seaman to sign on to a ship only to find at the end of the voyage that its unscrupulous captain had pocketed his pay and sold him into slavery. Fortunately, experienced seafaring labour was generally considered too valuable to waste in this manner. Probably a greater danger was presented by the press gang. This form of enforced enlistment in the Royal Navy was especially prevalent in Caribbean ports, and swept up seafarers of every hue and nationality, notwithstanding the restrictions laid down in the Navigation Acts.¹⁴ Equiano relates how as a free black seaman, he barely escaped the press gang while on a voyage to England, while the Jamaican-born black radical Thomas Wedderburn was press-ganged twice during his time as a seafarer in the late eighteenth century.¹⁵

           Moreover, if seafaring provided blacks with opportunities for economic and social freedom, it was freedom of a strictly limited sort. The traditional romantic image of the seafarer as a restless adventurer, divorced from the land and the concerns of land-based society, has often disguised the fact that the impulse of capital accumulation which lay behind the rapid expansion of merchant and navy shipping in the eighteenth century and the consequent 'mobilisation of huge masses of men for shipboard labor' meant that seafarers were in fact among the pioneers of industrial wage labour in the West. Indeed, the Georgian navy has been called 'by a large margin, the largest industrial organisation in the Western World.'¹⁶  As Rediker has pointed out, it was no accident that members of a crew were referred to from the late seventeenth century onwards as 'Hands';  as an 'absolutely indispensable part of the rise and growth of North Atlantic capitalism', seaborne labour was stripped to its essentials at a very early stage as a commodity to be bought and sold. As a result, superficially at least, there was often little to choose between the daily experience of free and unfree black labour at sea in these years.¹⁷

West Indian Seafarers after Emancipation

           The Emancipation Proclamation throughout the British Empire in 1834, although hedged round with qualifications to protect plantation owners from labour shortage, at last opened the possibility of a legitimate escape from plantation labour for many former slaves. Over the next several generations, while the islands remained largely monocrop economies, and became increasingly prone to cyclical bouts of economic depression, the sea continued to provide one of the few viable alternatives for black employment.

           A growing number of Afro-Caribbeans looking for work at sea coincided with the introduction of steam shipping from the 1840s onwards and a resulting increase in the demand for unskilled seaborne labour. Steam ships required few sailors of the traditional type, schooled in the intricacies of rigging and sail, but they needed many more new types of seafarers, such as firemen and stokers to feed the furnaces and trimmers to bring coal from the bunkers, as well as many more cooks and stewards to serve both more passengers and larger crews.¹⁸ Crew lists and census returns during the latter half of the nineteenth century indicate that the rise of steam was accompanied by a rise in the proportion of non-British seafarers, including West Indians, serving in British ships. This trend was facilitated by the final abolition of the Navigation Acts and especially the repeal of provisions restricting the number of foreigners  serving on British ships in 1851. As a Board of Trade Committee on the manning of British Merchant Ships commented in 1896:

Shipowners justified the switch away from British seafarers on more than cost grounds. A shipmaster for the company of Anderson and Anderson wrote in 1886:

By the 1890s more than one in five of Britain's seafaring labour force had not been born in Britain. It included a large number of Lascars, a variety of Europeans, Somalis, Arabs, West Africans, Chinese and North and South Americans, as well as West Indians.²¹

           Although black seafarers gradually infiltrated every position aboard merchant ships from cabin boy to captain during the nineteenth century, on sailing ships they were most often employed as cabin boys, servants, stewards and cooks, the jobs which were generally considered the lowest in the pecking order. The job of ship's cook, for example, was an unenviable one, given both the meagre amount and generally poor quality of the food served at sea. Inevitably the cook bore the brunt of the crew's anger when he failed to work the requisite miracle which would turn weevil- infested rations into edible meals. Black seafarers who filled these positions often suffered brutal treatment and other forms of victimisation from the officers and other crew members.²² It is perhaps indicative of the struggle they faced that several noted black boxing champions in Britain during the nineteenth century had first learned to defend themselves aboard ship.²³ Meanwhile, on steam ships, black seafarers found themselves in disproportionate numbers in the inhospitable surroundings of the stokehold as firemen and trimmers.

           Data from the UK census in 1901 reveals the general pattern of these years. Over a third of the West Indian seafarers found aboard British ships by that date were deckhands (596), but almost another third (463) were stewards and cooks (including four women). The bulk of the remainder (271) were to be found in the Engine Room Department as firemen and trimmers.²⁴

           It should be noted however, that in the Caribbean the time-honoured practice of ships engaged in trade between the Islands and along the American coast taking aboard additional crew to assist in handling cargo continued. Generally these did not appear on ship's articles at all, and were not counted in any official statistics. In 1896 the Committee on the Manning of British Ships heard evidence that Steam lines operating between North and South America via the Caribbean routinely took on extra men in the Caribbean who were not added to ship's articles:

           Often, the best opportunities for Afro-Caribbean and other black seamen were not on the large passenger and cargo liners of the major companies, but on tramp ships, whether sail or steam. 60 per cent of British merchant tonnage was made up of tramp ships by 1914. Tramps did not follow regular scheduled routes but moved from port to port in search of cargoes, discharging and picking up men as they went. Many men serving on such ships came from the Red Sea ports of Aden and Yemen, from the Somali coast and Zanzibar, as well as from the many ports of call in the Caribbean. Tramp shipping provided black seafarers with a degree of freedom and of opportunity which was seldom found in ships of the great steam ship lines. The story of the sailing vessel Pedro Gorino provides an outstanding example of this. Owned and skippered by the African American adventurer Harry Foster Dean, and with an all black crew, the Pedro Gorino operated out of Capetown at the turn of the century, taking advantage of trade opportunities available along the South African coast during and immediately after the South African War. Its crew included several West Indians.²⁶

           The seafarers who served in tramp ships were the flotsam and jetsam of the Atlantic trades, usually poorly paid, often isolated and rootless, eking out their lives ashore between voyages in hostels or in one of the hundreds of nameless boarding houses  which were to be found in every port on the Atlantic seaboard. They were joined by a slow accretion of men who had dropped out of the ethnic labour pools of the great steam ship companies for one reason or another. However,  for Afro-Caribbean seafarers dispersal along the international trade routes across the oceans of the world was simply their latest experience of diaspora. They were socially, culturally and ideologically prepared for this experience in ways which other groups were not. Thus they quickly established homes away from home. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Afro-Caribbean seafarers would intermarry with local women and father children in virtually every major port from Newfoundland to Valpariso in the Americas, and from Liverpool, Cardiff and London in the British Isles to Capetown on the Southern tip of Africa. They were joined in these communities by other black seafarers; Arabs from Aden and Somalis from North East Africa, Nigerians and Kroomen from West Africa, African Americans and even South Sea Islanders. Thus the seeds were sown of new socially and culturally distinctive black communities all around the fringes of the Atlantic.

The Black Atlantic: Seafarers, Political Consciousness and Afro-Caribbean Identity

           As noted earlier, seafarers were in the vanguard of the formation of the international working class. The result was that the task of pioneering methods of cooperation, association and collective struggle against capitalist exploitation fell largely to them. In this regard, seafaring labour had significant advantages; bonds born of close cooperation and community aboard ship could provide patterns for collective resistance ashore. In all this black, especially Afro-Caribbean seafarers took a full part, bringing with them the full repertoire of slave resistance to add to the arsenal of  modern wage labour. Throughout the eighteenth century episodes of popular struggle in ports all around the Atlantic world  were led by members of this 'multi-racial, multi-ethnic, international working class.'²⁷  Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave and seaman of twenty years standing who had lived in the Bahamas, is an outstanding example; he died at the head of 'a motley rabble' protesting against the Stamp Act in Boston Harbour in 1770.²⁸

           Not surprisingly, governments and shore-based elites on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century became concerned about the 'contagion' carried by seafarers - a contagion of ideas and strategies to promote resistance which might easily spread to workers ashore. This contagion might prove particularly virulent when the seafarers were black. In London, where a small free black population had become permanently settled,  including a number who had been seamen, the authorities resorted in 1787 to what would become the time honoured policy of offering 'repatriation' to these undesirables.²⁹ Despite such efforts, blacks continued to play a prominent part in the radical working class movement in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Apart from Equiano, who wrote and campaigned against the iniquities of slavery, the Jamaican Robert Wedderburn was a noted radical pamphleteer, while another Jamaican, William Davidson, was executed for his part in the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1819. All three had been seafarers. Of the three, it was probably Wedderburn, with his 'rough, salty language' and 'truculent libertarianism', who most exemplified the culture of the seafarer in his life ashore.³⁰

           In the slave-based societies of the Caribbean and the Southern States of America the authorities had particular cause to be concerned about radical black influences; the eighteenth century had seen numerous slave revolts, culminating in the Haitian revolution in the 1790s. Slave owners complained constantly of subversive ideas circulated by seamen and runaway slaves from neighbouring islands and colonies. As late as 1822 Denmark Vesey, the former slave of a sea captain from St Thomas in the Danish West Indies, was tried and executed for his alleged part in  planning a slave rebellion in South Carolina, after the prosecution claimed he had sought to stir up the local slave community with stories of the Haitian Revolution.³¹  In the ensuing panic a 'Negro Seaman's Act' was passed which required 'that free Negro employees on any vessel which might come into a South Carolina port be imprisoned until the vessel should be ready to depart'. If the captain of the vessel declined to pay the expenses for the detention or refused to take the seaman away, the seaman could be deemed an 'absolute slave' and sold. Similar laws followed in North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana and Florida. They persisted until swept away finally by the American Civil War.³²

           Throughout the Caribbean the ending of slavery was followed by the slow, painful emergence of black peasantries, struggling to break free from the dead hand of the old plantation economy. At the same time a burgeoning informal economic sector, which had begun as a mitigating feature of slave societies, became increasingly important during the post-Emancipation era in the creation of economic, social, ideological and political spaces in these societies. Deep water seafaring and associated activities such as fishing, whaling, piloting, ship-building and repairing, ferrying cargo and passengers in small boats, and loading and unloading on the wharves - not to mention illegal activities such as smuggling, wrecking and even small scale piracy - were all part of this sector. So also were services provided for seafarers in port by black women, such as boarding houses, rum shops and prostitution. Together they helped to shape the language, culture and idiom of freedom in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Caribbean.

           In many territories across the Caribbean the earliest Afro-Caribbean political associations were formed by seamen and wharf workers. These were the prototypes for the first popular political parties in the Caribbean, that would in turn lead the fight for political independence in the region in the mid-twentieth century.³³ Afro-Caribbean seamen were also key transmitters of radical political ideas and movements to other parts of the (black) Atlantic world in these years. The Garveyite newspaper, Negro World (founded by the Jamaican Marcus Garvey), and the Communist organ, Negro Worker (edited by the Trinidadian George Padmore), both relied on a network of black seafarers for their distribution during the 1920s. Similarly, wherever in the Atlantic world Afro-Caribbean seafarers settled, they posed a challenge to their host societies in social, cultural and political spheres, and were at times subjected to furious racial onslaughts by local authorities and governments in return.³⁴

           In Britain, West Indian seamen fought alongside whites for trade union recognition and higher wages in ports such as Cardiff, Liverpool and London in the early twentieth century. During the First World War they served and died in their hundreds on British merchant ships as they helped to keep Britain's maritime life-line open. After this shared struggle and sacrifice, many West Indians considered themselves British by any reasonable measure and expected wages and labour conditions on a par with native born English seamen. But any notion that they could join in common cause was quickly forgotten by their white comrades in the post-war scramble for jobs. For the first time both West Indian and African seafarers as a group found themselves being verbally and physically attacked on the street, with a venom which had previously reserved for the Chinese and Lascars. It was clear which way the wind was blowing when the British trade union movement proposed the institution of a British-first hiring policy, which conceded that many `coloured' seamen were indeed British and had a right to work, but called for preference to be given to white Britons. Meanwhile the government sought the means to repatriate West Indian seamen now considered surplus to requirements. Under the terms of the Alien (Coloured Seamen) Order of 1925, West Indian and African seafarers were required to register with the authorities as aliens, unless they could produce satisfactory documentary proof of British nationality. Even in cases where black seafarers had such documentation the local authorities often ignored it or tore it up and forced them to register as aliens. This racist onslaught on the part of both government and union continued until the late 1930s and drastically reduced the number of Afro-Caribbean seafarers in the British mercantile marine. It was only with the onset of the Second World War that the demand for their labour would revive.³⁵

Conclusion:

           The reasons for the often pivotal role played by Afro-Caribbean Seafarers in shaping political consciousness in black communities throughout the Atlantic World - as well as at home in the Caribbean - are complex. However, there is no doubt that the radical emancipatory traditions of black seafaring labour, going back to the era of slavery, played a part.  The relatively high literacy rate among the working class in the islands by the end of the nineteenth century - as against other parts of the world - was also important. Together this meant that Afro-Caribbean seafarers often had both the inclination and the skills to stand up for their legal and/or political rights in whatever context they found themselves.

           Most important, however, may have been the attitude or world view they carried with them. Afro-Caribbean seafarers tended to combine the internationalist, cosmopolitan perspective of the independent labour-migrant with a strongly localised feeling of rootedness in, and identification with, the Caribbean. Evidence of the latter may be seen in the fact that many sent remittances to families left at home in the Caribbean despite absences stretching into years, or dreamed of return to the islands at some future date.³⁶ In short they were conscious of themselves as being members of several different communities simultaneously, but never lost their over-riding sense of 'Caribbean-ness'. St Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott alludes to this sort of consciousness in his epic poem Omeros, as he ranges back and forward across the Atlantic Ocean to evoke and encapsulate the elements of Caribbean identity. 'Caribbean-ness' was a function of the diasporic condition - and especially of the experience of seaborne diasporas common to all Caribbean people. In the final analysis, then, culture, society and identity in the Caribbean islands cannot be understood without reference to the sea: