Atlantic Studies

ISSN: 1478-8810 (Print) 1740-4649 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjas20

History from below the water line: Sharks and the

Atlantic slave trade

Marcus Rediker

To cite this article: Marcus Rediker (2008) History from below the water line: Sharks and the
Atlantic slave trade, Atlantic Studies, 5:2, 285-297, DOI: 10.1080/14788810802149758

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810802149758

Published online: 27 Sep 2008.

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 Atlantic Studies
Vol. 5, No. 2, August 2008, 285
297

History from below the water line: Sharks and the Atlantic slave trade
Marcus Rediker*

This essay explores the role of sharks in the Atlantic slave trade. It draws on the
testimony of ship captains, officers, sailors, and passengers to assess abolitionist claims
that sharks followed slave ships across the Atlantic and feasted on human remains
thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The essay concludes that the abolitionists
were essentially right and that the shark functioned as an integral part of a system of
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terror utilized by the slave ship captain. The abolitionist image of the marine predator in
turn added effective horror to what would become a successful public agitation against
the slave trade.
Keywords: Abolition; sharks; slave trade; violence; terror

For the past 30 years, I have been studying deep-sea sailing ships and the workers who
made them go. During this time, I have learned that people around the world are engaged
in a fierce romance with these tall, beautiful, majestic vessels, which were the most
sophisticated
and perhaps the most important
technology of their day. These ships
allowed Europeans to conquer the world, and indeed they were a marvel, if not a terror,
wherever they sailed.
Recently I have been studying one kind of tall ship: the slave ship. During this time I
have discovered the limit of the romance. It extends to all tall ships except the most
important one. The slave ship is so far from romantic that we cannot bear to look at it,
even though it was one of the two main institutions of modern slavery. The other, the
plantation, has been studied intensively, but the slave ship hardly at all. The rich historical
literature on the slave trade has much to say about origins, timing, scale, flows, and profits,
but little to say about the vessel that made it possible, even though the slave ship that was
the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, for an entire phase of globalization,
an instrument of ‘‘commercial revolution’’ and the making of plantations, empires,
capitalism, industrialization. If Europe, Africa, and Americas are haunted by the legacies
of race, class, and slavery, the slaver is the ghost ship of our modern consciousness.
As I worked in maritime archives over the years, I too had a hard time facing the slave
ship and its horrors. It took me a long time to see that it had a history of its own, and
longer still to accept the gruesome challenge of trying to write it. When I finally did so, I
discovered that the slave ship was a factory that manufactured two related products: labor
power and ‘‘race.’’ It made labor power for the world market by helping to create that
lucrative commodity called ‘‘slave.’’ In the process of doing so, it helped to produce
categories of ‘‘race.’’ Essential to the production of both was terror. Indeed, the slave ship
was an instrument of terror, and crucial to the making of modern capitalism. We must
remember, with Walter Rodney, that in the slave trade, ‘‘capitalism paraded without even a
loin cloth to hide its nakedness.’’ Moreover, we must remember that extraordinary violence

*Email: marcusrediker@yahoo.com

ISSN 1478-8810 print/ISSN 1470-4649 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14788810802149758
http://www.informaworld.com
 286 M. Rediker

has always been central to the making of modern capitalism. Toward these ends, I offer
this study of sharks and the Atlantic slave trade.1

The slave ship and the shark

The slave ship and the shark are connected in popular and historical memory largely
because of the efforts of those who sought to abolish the slave trade. John Wesley, the
founder of Methodism, wrote about sharks in his famous essay, Thoughts Upon Slavery,
published in 1774. During the 1780s, Thomas Clarkson and other abolitionists seized upon
the image of the ferocious marine predator devouring the bodies of dead Africans thrown
over the side of the slave ship; they used it in their poetry, prose, and propaganda of all
kinds, to make vivid the horrors of the trade. They made the shark an important character
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in the drama of life on the slave ship, indeed a symbol of the violence and the terror of the
trade.
The poet James Thomson wrote in 1783:

Here dwells the direful shark. Lur’d by the scent

Of streaming crouds, of rank disease, & death,
Behold! He rushing cuts the briny flood,
Swift as the gale can bear the ship along;
And, from the partners of that cruel trade,
Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons,
Demands his share of prey; demands themselves.
The stormy fates descend: one death involves
Tyrants and slaves; when strait, their mangled limbs
Crashing at once, he dyes the purple seas
With gore, and riots in the vengeant meal.

The image of the predatory shark in the slave trade reached its apotheosis in the
famous painting of 1840 by J.M.W. Turner (Figure 1). Sharks thus played a role not only in
the slave trade but also in the increasingly heated metropolitan debate about it.2
Were the abolitionists telling the truth? Did sharks follow the ships and dye the sea with
gore as they ate the bodies of those thrown overboard? Did sharks truly follow ships all the
way across the Atlantic feasting on the dead as was alleged? Was the propaganda based in
fact, in actual history?
As I attempted to answer these questions I learned that the shark and the slave trade
had gone together from the beginning. Indeed, one the prevailing theories about the origin
of the term ‘‘shark’’ in English can be traced back to the first English slaving voyages to
West Africa, led by Captain John Hawkins during the 1560s. When someone captured,
killed, and brought to London one of the huge creatures in 1569, the people of the city
stood amazed but knew not what to call the ‘‘marueilous straunge Fishe.’’ According to
sixteenth-century ballads and broadsides, ‘‘sertayne men of Captayne Haukinses doth call
it a sharke.’’ ‘‘Shark’’ thus seems to have entered the English language through the talk of
slave-trade sailors, who may have picked up and adapted the word ‘‘xoc,’’ pronounced
‘‘choke,’’ from the Maya in the Caribbean. ‘‘Shark’’ would soon take its place in the lexicon
of class description, a cant term signifying a worthless fellow who made a living by his wits,
sponging, swindling, cheating, and scamming. Sailors might invert the class meaning by
saying of sharks, ‘‘we call them ‘Sea Lawyers.’ ’’3
 Atlantic Studies 287
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Figure 1. J.M.W. Turner, ‘‘Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying
typhoon coming on.’’
Photograph # 2008, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The historical record provides abundant evidence that sharks actually swarmed around
the slave ships. Proof comes from the testimony of ship captains, officers, sailors, and
passengers, many of whom were decidedly opposed to abolition. Such people routinely
mentioned sharks in their logs, diaries, memoirs, and travel accounts.
Slave ships sailing toward Africa began to encounter big sharks around the Madeira
and Canary Islands, and then with greater frequency near the Cape Verde Islands and
Senegambia, then south and east, all along the Windward, Gold, and Slave Coasts, on to
Congo and Angola. As Samuel Robinson recalled of his voyage aboard a slaver in his
youth, the shark was not always visible to the crew: ‘‘He is never seen except in calm
weather, when the ship is going slowly through the water
oftener still in a dead calm.’’ He
also noted what attracted the sharks (as well as other fish): ‘‘there are few hours [aboard a
ship] in which there is not something thrown overboard,’’ whether human waste, offal, or
rubbish. The shark, said Robinson, ‘‘ensconces himself under the ship’s bottom and misses
nothing.’’ He also recalled the terror that he and others felt as they looked down on the
‘‘ugly, long, black monster.’’ ‘‘The very sight of him slowly moving round the ship,’’ he
explained, ‘‘with his black fin two feet above the water, his broad snout and small eyes, and
the altogether villainous look of the fellow, make one shiver, even when at a safe distance.’’
The distance would not always be safe. Indeed some sailors were afraid to reach from a
boat to the water to wash their hands. It comes as no surprise that a collective grouping of
sharks is known as a ‘‘shiver.’’ (Figure 2)4
 288 M. Rediker
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Figure 2. ‘‘Shark Caught off the Mud Bank, Rio Ponga, 1853.’’ # National Maritime Museum.

For three centuries and more passengers described the creatures that circled and
menaced the slave ships as soon as they arrived on the coast of Africa. As one wrote in
1716: ‘‘The Shark is a very voracious fish, & some of them grow to a vast bigness; I have
seen ye Jaw of one taken out, which when open’d forms an exact circle like an Hoop, &
would easily take in ye body of ye biggest man we had on board, they are great lovers of
man’s fflesh, & will make no more than a mouthful or two of a man. Their jaw is set with
several Rows of Teeth, and they say they have a new Row every year; their teeth are small,
& edg’d like a Saw.’’ In 1802, John Wells peered over the rail of the Bruce Grove, recently
arrived on the Windward Coast, and saw ‘‘Numbers of Sharks about the Ship of an
amazing large size.’’ The following day he saw a ‘‘Large Shovell nos’d Shark.’’ What kind
of sharks were these, with their huge jaws, serrated teeth, and shovel noses?5
There are roughly 350 species of shark in the world today, and about a quarter of these
 83 positively identified and another five listed as possible
can be found in the waters
off West Africa.6 The sharks of this marine region are as various and colorful as their
names: the Bramble Shark, the Leafscale Gulper, the Longnose Velvet Dogfish, the
African Lanternshark, the Shortspine Spurdog, the Sawback Angelshark, the African
sawtail catshark, the Barbeled houndshark, and the Atlantic weasel shark. These and
many others, however, are not likely to have been the ones described by people like Samuel
Robinson and John Wells, for some of these are small, some are non-aggressive, and some
live far below the surface.7
Of the many sharks that circled the slave ships on the coast of Africa, two attracted the
most attention, posed the most danger, and created the most terror: the Bull Shark and the
Tiger Shark. An occasional White Shark (or Great White Shark) may have been spotted,
or so suggested British naturalist Thomas Pennant, who drew upon the report of a slave
ship captain in writing in British Zoology (1768
1770), of the light ash-colored ‘‘white
shark,’’ which measured 20’, weighed 4000 lbs, and had a ‘‘vast greediness after human
 Atlantic Studies 289
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Figure 3. Hammerhead shark.

flesh.’’ Hammerhead sharks were also to be found off the coast of Africa (Figure 3). These
species are responsible for an overwhelming percentage of recorded attacks on human
beings in recent years. If we had a full documentary record of shark attacks in the slave
trade in the eighteenth century, a time when the shark population was much greater,
modern numbers would be dwarfed.8
The Bull Shark was (and is) a large, stocky grey shark, eight to ten feet long, with a
short, blunt, rounded snout, small eyes, massive jaws, and serrated triangular teeth. It was
common in tropical and subtropical zones, from Senegal to Angola. It is well known for its
travel into brackish and freshwater bays, lagoons, estuaries, and rivers (the Gambia, for
example), into waters clear or muddy and shallow, a mere three feet deep. It appears heavy
and sluggish in the water until prey appears, whereupon it becomes surprisingly quick and
agile. It is said to have an ‘‘indiscriminate appetite,’’ which includes everything from fish to
antelopes to people. John Atkins wrote in 1735 of the sharks he encountered in the Sierra
Leone River: ‘‘In short, their Voracity refuses nothing; Canvas, Ropeyarns, Bones,
Blanketing, &c.’’9
The Tiger Shark was probably the most common predator of them all around the slave
ship. This bigheaded, strong-swimming shark was slender of body and bluish-green to grey
with vertical tiger-stripe markings that faded as the creature aged. It moves in slow, sinuous
motions, prowls coastlines, and inlets, especially at night, swimming in and around jetties
and wharves in the harbors, close to human populations. Larger than the Bull Shark at
twelve to fourteen feet, and a powerful scavenger-predator, this ‘‘sea hyena’’ is known to be
aggressive and indiscriminate, in short omnivorous, in the pursuit of food. Naturalist Jean
 290 M. Rediker

Figure 4. Jean Barbot, detail, 1678.

Barbot, who visited West Africa coast in the late seventeenth century, drew an image of the
Tiger Shark (Figure 4), and published it when he returned to France in 1678.10
West Africans had their own extensive local knowledge about sharks, and their own
relationships with them. The people of New Calabar were said to consider the shark
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sacred, but not so the Fante, who called it samya and ate it with zeal, as, apparently, did
many other seaside peoples. Thomas Winterbottom, a physician who lived in Sierra Leone,
noted that the coastal Kru, who were knowledgeable and skillful in all things maritime,
had no fear of sharks in their own waters, permitting their children to swim and play in
waters they were known to frequent, but when the Kru ventured south, to Cape Mount,
they were ‘‘afraid of going into the water lest they be devoured by sharks.’’ Some Africans
had a method of killing sharks that shocked the Europeans who witnessed it: a lonely
hunter swam out to the shark with a knife, waited for it to charge, dodged when it neared
him, and plunged the knife into its underside, killing the creature and taking it back to the
village for a feast.11 Supporters of the slave trade often emphasized that Africans used
sharks in their own systems of social discipline. In addressing the Jamaica legislature a Mr
Shirley claimed that one of his Fante slaves told him that ‘‘an adulterous woman, if she be a
slave’’ in his society, might be taken to sea and thrown to a shark. Captain James Fraser
made a more sweeping judgment. Slaves who committed crimes against an African king
were ‘‘thrown into the river or given alive to the sharks.’’12
The Europeans arriving on the slave ships knew less of sharks and feared them more.
They saw sharks as especially dangerous where trade was carried on in boats and canoes, in
high surf, between the slavers anchored offshore and the trading forts or villages on land.
The shark was considered ‘‘the dread of sailors’’; ‘‘like a greedy robber, he attends the
ships, in expectation of what may drop over-board. A man, who unfortunately falls into the
sea at such a time, is sure to perish, without mercy.’’ In 1744, Royal African Company
official William Smith recalled the great waves that pounded his canoe as he was rowed
ashore in Whydah. He arrived without accident, ‘‘thereby disappointing the huge Train of
our Attendants, I mean the Sharks, who swarm’d about us, and waited with Impatience to
see the Bottom of our Canoe turn’d upwards. These voracious Animals often follow the
Canoes, thro’ the Breakers, quite ashore, in Hopes of Prey.’’ John Atkins reported a similar
experience. A shark in the Sierra Leone River lunged out of the water and snapped in half
an oar being used to row a boat ashore. Captain Fraser, an experienced mariner who over
20 years ranged the entire Guinea Coast, noted that sharks made it difficult, if not
impossible, to retrieve trade goods that were lost when canoes overset in the turbulent
surf.13
Sharks also figured in the horror of the slave ship experience for both sailors and slaves,
both of whom died on the African coast and became food for the ever-hungry creatures.
Sailors often sickened rapidly and died once they crossed pathogenic ‘‘barrier reef’’ on the
coast of Africa. Their captains sometimes made efforts to bury them ashore. On one of his
voyages to Bonny, Dr Alexander Falconbridge, an experienced slave ship surgeon, noted
 Atlantic Studies 291

that the corpses of sailors were buried in shallow graves on a sandy point about a quarter
mile from the main trading town. But when the tidal river rose, the current washed the
sand away from the bodies, causing a noxious stench and exposing the bodies to the sharks.
This is why coastal Africans buried their dead ‘‘at such a distance from the sea that the
sharks cannot smell them.’’14
When slavers had no burial rights, as would have been the case on many parts of the
African coast, the results might be what Silas Told saw happen to a former comrade in the
harbor of Sâo Tomé around 1735: ‘‘the first [shark] seized one of his hind-quarters, and
wrenched it off at the first shake; a second attacked the [other] hind quarter, and took that
away likewise; when a third furiously attacked the remainder of the body, and greedily
devoured the whole thereof.’’ In an effort to escape the ravages of omnivorous sharks, a
sailor’s corpse might be ‘‘carefully sewed up in the hammock, into the foot of which is put
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a weight of shot,’’ in the hope that it might get to the bottom uneaten. The failure of this
burial strategy was noted by John Atkins: ‘‘I have seen [sharks] frequently seize a Corpse,
as soon as it was committed to the Sea; tearing and devouring that, and the Hammock that
shrouded it, without suffering it once to sink, tho’ a great Weight of Ballast in it.’’15
No such efforts were made to bury or protect the bodies of the enslaved who died on the
coast. Falconbridge wrote that ‘‘The river Bonny abounds with sharks of a very large size,
which are often seen in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with
great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes as they are thrown overboard.’’ The same
had been the case earlier in the century as William Smith noted in 1744: ‘‘And whenever the
Dead are committed to the Sea, which happens almost every Day, while Ships are in this
Road, the Sharks give such due Attendance that the Corps can no sooner touch the Water,
than it is immediately torn to Pieces, and devour’d before our Faces.’’ The destruction of
the corpse by sharks was a public spectacle and part of the degradation of enslavement.16

The shark and the middle passage

What happened when the slave ships left the coast and commenced the infamous Middle
Passage? According to abolitionists, sharks followed the slaver all the way across the
Atlantic, feasting on body parts all the way. Thomas Clarkson, not surprisingly, appears to
have been the first to make the claim.17 Here Clarkson related a story taken ‘‘from a little
manuscript’’ about an officer of a Guinea ship who whipped an enslaved man to death and
ordered the others
. . . to carry the dead body to the water’s side, where without any ceremony or delay, being
thrown into the sea, the tragedy was supposed to have been immediately finished by the not
more inhuman sharks, with which the harbour then abounded. These voracious fish were
supposed to have followed the vessels from the coast of Africa, in which ten thousand slaves
were imported in that one season, being allured by the stench, and daily fed by the dead
carcasses thrown overboard on the voyage.
Anti-slavery writers of all kinds repeated the claim, and indeed the shark became a
major symbol of the horrors of the slave trade. Did sharks actually follow the ships all the
way across the Atlantic?18
The modern study of the behavior of sharks suggests a group might have followed a
slave ship from the African coast to the American. Both the Tiger and Bull Sharks are
capable of long migrations, and indeed this is proven by their existence in almost all parts
of the world. These two species are wide-ranging in temperate climates and adaptable to a
wide variety of marine habitats. The Tiger Shark in particular is known, according to
 292 M. Rediker

leading ichthyologist Leonard J.V. Compagno, to take long voyages, even on occasion to
‘‘swim across the open ocean.’’ Both are considered versatile and opportunistic feeders.
Appropriately, for our subject, both are called ‘‘requiem sharks.’’19
More likely, however, a variety of sharks followed the ships, in many cases continuously,
from the eastern Atlantic to the west. Many Bull and Tiger Sharks, trained for months to
regard the ship as a source of food, would have followed a vessel for a distance out to sea,
and then turned back to their more familiar coastal habitat. The Dutch Guinea merchant
Willem Bosman noted that sharks followed ships departing the Gold Coast ‘‘three Weeks
or a Month, waiting for more Slaves to be thrown over-board.’’20
Once the vessel was sailing in deep oceanic waters, it attracted, as a big floating object,
a ‘‘moving reef’’ of sorts, fish of many kinds and sizes, which would congregate under it
and travel with it, especially since ships sailed at a moderate speed. For its fellow travelers
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below, the ship provided shade, which was important in the tropics, but more importantly
it provided food, and this in a place, the open ocean, where resources are more limited than
on the coast. The fish and sharks beneath the ship in turn represented a constant food
source for the slavers, as they could be caught almost all the way across the Atlantic. As an
anonymous passenger wrote in 1723: ‘‘we caught plenty of ffish almost every day, especially
Sharks, which wee salted, & preserv’d for ye Negroes.’’ He added, ‘‘They are good victuals,
if well dress’d, tho’ some won’t eat them, because they feed upon men; ye Negroes fed very
heartily upon them, which made us salt up several of them to save ye Ship’s provisions.’’
For this reason, most all slave ships would have had what was found in the hold of the
Affrican Galley in 1702: a ‘‘shark hooke and a small chaine.’’21
Most of the sharks now swimming with the ship would likely have been different species
than those seen on the coast, although to the untutored European eye this would not have
been obvious. Now the attendants would have been the Blue Shark, the Silky Shark, the
Shortfin Mako, and the Oceanic Whitefin Shark. These sharks are thinner, faster, and
dwell in deeper waters, engage in long migrations, and they are known to eat human beings.
They followed the vessels for long distances, for the sake of food, which in the more fatal
voyages would have increased with time and distance.
It was part of the folklore of the slave trade ‘‘that a Shark will never follow a Vessel not
having on board sick people,’’ but of course they followed most every ship. The greater the
mortality and the number of dead bodies going overboard, the greater the crowd of sharks
would have been. Observers who wrote of the large numbers of sharks swarming around
the vessel were not likely exaggerating. Moreover, the assemblage of hungry predators
would have grown when the ship reached American coastal waters, from Virginia south to
the Caribbean to Brazil, as the Tiger and Bull Sharks of the western Atlantic would have
joined the red wake. Sharks followed the ships in something of a relay.
Some deep-water sharks therefore appeared in American ports, as suggested by a notice
from Kingston, Jamaica, which appeared in various newspapers in 1785: ‘‘The many
Guineamen lately arrived here have introduced such a number of overgrown sharks, (The
constant attendants on the vessels from the coasts) that bathing in the river is become
extremely dangerous, even above town. A very large one was taken on Sunday, along side
the Hibberts, Capt. Boyd.’’ It is of first importance that this evidence comes not only from
a slave society, and was published before the rise of the abolitionist movement. It both
corroborates and illuminates the crossing of the sharks with the ships. More proof comes
from Captain Hugh Crow, who made ten slaving voyages: sharks, he wrote, no doubt from
personal observation, ‘‘have been known to follow vessels across the ocean, that they might
devour the bodies of the dead when thrown overboard.’’22
 Atlantic Studies 293

If the shark helped to create the horror of the slave ship and its trade, it also helped to
create terror, and this was by conscious design of the captain at almost every stage of the
voyage. Captains counted on sharks to prevent the desertion of their seamen and the
escape of their slaves to a naval vessel anchored nearby or to the shore itself. This was
especially important because treatment was rough and stays could be long, several months,
on the coast of Africa, during which time discipline had to be maintained. These kinds of
experiences intersected in the life history of a man from Cape Coast who was brought to
Jamaica by a Liverpool Guineaman and who managed to escape slavery and find a berth
on a man-of-war in the mid-1780s. He apparently employed traditional African skills in
shark hunting at a moment when sailors could not swim or bathe around their vessel for
fear of a shark that had likely followed a slaver to the West Indies. Therefore, the man
‘‘jumped into the sea, and with a long knife, dispatched a large shark.’’ He might have been
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a hero to his mates, but the commanding officer took a different view. As it happened, that
shark had ‘‘prevented a number of desertions,’’ so the African sailor ‘‘got a merciless
flogging’’ for killing it. Naval officers were even known to feed sharks to keep them around
their vessels.23

The shark and terror

So well known was this conscious use of terror by the captain to create social discipline
that when Oliver Goldsmith came to write the natural history of sharks in 1774, he drew
heavily on the lore of the slave trade. He recounted two instances. The first he drew from
another naturalist, Thomas Pennant:
. . . the master of a Guinea-ship, finding a rage for suicide among his slaves, from a notion the
unhappy creatures had, that after death they should be restored again to their families, friends,
and country; to convince them at least that some disgrace should attend them here, he
immediately ordered one of their dead bodies to be tied by the heels to a rope, and so let down
into the sea; and, though it was drawn up again with great swiftness, yet in that short space, the
sharks had bit off all but the feet.
This terror, it must be noted, was in direct response to resistance among the enslaved.
The second instance was even more gruesome:
A Guinea captain was, by stress of weather, driven into the harbour of Belfast, with a lading of
very sickly slaves, who, in the manner above-mentioned, took every opportunity to throw
themselves over-board, when brought up upon deck, as is usual, for the benefit of fresh air. The
Captain, perceiving among others a woman slave attempting to drown herself, pitched upon
her as a proper example to the rest: as he supposed that they did not know the terrors attending
death, he ordered the woman to be tied with a rope under the armpits, and so set her down into
the water. When the poor creature was thus plunged in, and about half way down, she was
heard to give a terrible shriek, which at first was ascribed to her fears of drowning; but soon
after, the water appearing red all around her, she was drawn up, and it was found that a shark,
which had followed the ship, had bit her off from the middle.

Some slave ship captains practiced a kind of sporting terror, using human remains to
troll for sharks: ‘‘Our way to entice them was by Towing overboard a dead Negro, which
they would follow till they had eaten him up.’’24
The use of the shark as a means of spreading terror did not always work. Sailors still
jumped overboard and swam through shark-infested waters to escape brutal captains.
Naval officer Thomas Bolton Thompson explained that seaman John Bowden ‘‘swam from
the ship Fisher, Richard Kendal Master, between two and three cables lengths, to the
Nautilus, at a time when there were a number of sharks about the ship, to claim my
 294 M. Rediker

protection from the ill usage he had received on board the Fisher.’’ The enslaved did the
same, sometimes to escape, sometimes to commit suicide in order to return in spirit to their
homelands. James Micklejohn, surgeon of the Onslow, wrote a brief but chilling note in his
medical journal on March 1, 1799: a man slave ‘‘Jumped overboard & by Sharks
drowned.’’25

The shark makes history

Much of this lore and information was summarized, in a most unusual form, in an
abolitionist broadside, addressed ‘‘To the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and
Temporal of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled’’ (the House of Lords) and printed in
1792. It was a wicked, well-informed satire entitled ‘‘The PETITION of the SHARKS of
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Africa,’’ written by the Scottish radical James Tytler, who was variously an abolitionist and
a fierce polemicist, a physician, a founder of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Britain’s first
hot air balloonist. Tytler had studied the sharks that circled the slave ships.26
The petition began by assuring his Lordships that the petitioners were a ‘‘numerous
body’’ in ‘‘a very flourishing situation.’’ This they owed to the constant visitation of slave
ships to their home waters. These ‘‘floating dungeons’’ supplied your petitioners ‘‘with
large quantities of their most favourite food
human flesh.’’ Meals arrived in various ways.
Some came as a result of sickness and death, after which the corpses of the enslaved were
thrown over the rails of the Guineamen. Others appeared as suicides: Africans jumped
overboard, and the sharks were more than happy to complete their design. Sailors were
tasty fare when the roiling surf capsized trading boats and thereby afforded ‘‘your
petitioners . . . many a delicious meal.’’ The biggest feasts of all materialized when large,
crowded vessels were dashed upon the rocks, disgorging ‘‘hundreds of human beings, both
black and white.’’ This led to a great ‘‘gnawing of human flesh and the crashing of bones,’’
which affords the petitioners ‘‘the highest gratification which their natures are capable of
enjoying.’’
The sharks were upset, indeed indignant; to hear that there were people in Britain who,
‘‘under the specious plea of humanity,’’ were trying to abolish the slave trade. This would
result in the ‘‘destruction of this highly beneficial commerce,’’ which meant that ‘‘the
prosperity of your petitioners will inevitably be destroyed, and their numbers, by being
deprived of their accustomed food, rapidly diminished.’’ Worried that baleful and
misguided philanthropy, indeed the ‘‘wild ravings of fanaticism,’’ had gained undue
influence in the House of Commons, the sharks took comfort in the ‘‘wisdom and fellow-
feeling of the Lords,’’ knowing that their interests were one. They felt they could trust the
Lords to be ‘‘truly benevolent,’’ and not to ‘‘sacrifice one part of animated nature to the
preservation of another, that they will not suffer sharks to starve in order that negroes may
be happy.’’ The sharks concluded their petition with a final plea that the Lords should
‘‘preserve this invigorating trade from the ruin that now seems to await it,’’ assuring them
that ‘‘your petitioners and their wide-mouthed posterity, as by nature urged, will ever, ever
PREY, &c.’’
The gory reddened sea and the crunching of human bones allowed sharks to make
history in two closely related and contradictory ways. On the one hand, they helped to
create terror, which was manipulated by slave ship captains to useful effect among both
sailors and slaves, which in turn allowed the gruesome trade to flourish and profits to fill
the pockets of merchants and slave-owners. On the other hand, they helped to create
horror among metropolitan readers during the anti-slave trade agitation, thereby allowing
the trade to be abolished. In writing ‘‘The PETITION of the SHARKS of Africa,’’ Tytler
 Atlantic Studies 295

was far from the slave ship and its terrors, but it is a sign of a powerful, multi-faceted social
movement that he could look into the shark’s bloody maw and laugh
not at the Atlantic
shark but at the pro-slavery ruling-class sharks of England.

Acknowledgements
The author extends special thanks to George Burgess, Coordinator of Museum Operations, and
Director, Florida Program for Shark Research, Florida Museum of Natural History, and
Department of Ichthyology, University of Florida, for helpful discussion of the history and behavior
of sharks. The author thanks to Isaac Curtis for research assistance.

Notes on contributor
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Marcus Rediker is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of five

books including (with Peter Linebaugh) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press
and London: Verso, 2000) and The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking
Penguin and London: John Murray, 2007).

Notes
1. This essay draws on material presented in Rediker, The Slave Ship.
2. ‘‘Summer,’’ in Thomson, The Seasons, 77
8.
3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘‘Shark,’’ citing Ballads & Broadsides (1867) 147, British Library;
Broadgrin, The Merry Fellow’s Pocket Companion, 18; Castro, ‘‘On the Origins of the Spanish
Word ‘Tiburón’ and the English Word ‘Shark,’’’ 249
53. On Hawkins, see Hazelwood, The
Queen’s Slave Trader.
4. Robinson, A Sailor Boy’s Experience, 29
32; Crow, Memoirs, 264. It is not clear what species of
shark Robinson was describing, as no large black sharks are native to the coast of West Africa.
He most likely saw a grey Bull or Tiger Shark, which looked darker beneath the water, or perhaps
grew ‘‘blacker’’ and more ominous in his memory of the slave trade.
5. ‘‘Voyage to Guinea, Antego, Bay of Campeachy, Cuba, Barbadoes, &c.’’ (1714
1723), Add. Ms.
39946, British Library; [John Wells], ‘‘Journal of a Voyage to the Coast of Guinea, 1802,’’ Add.
Ms. 3871, Cambridge University Library; Ship’s Log, Vessel Unknown, 1777
1778, Royal
African Company, Treasury Papers 70/1218, National Archives, UK.
6. For a survey, see Fowler, ‘‘The Marine Fishes of West Africa,’’ 23
92. See also, Cadenat and
Blache, Requins de Mediterranée et d’Atlantique.
7. On sharks in the various rivers of Africa, see Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 28
(Gambia); Matthews, A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone, 50 (Sierra Leone); Falconbridge, An
Account of the Slave Trade, 51
2, 67 (Bonny); ‘‘A Battle Between a Tiger and an Alligator; Or,
wonderful instance of Providential Preservation, described in a letter from the Captain of the
Davenport Guineaman,’’ Connecticut Herald, 28 June 1808 (Congo).
8. Pennant, British Zoology, Vol. III, 82
3. See also ‘‘Natural History of the Shark,’’ 231
3.
9. Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West Indies, 46.
10. Barbot, ‘‘A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea.’’
11. Adams, Sketches taken during Ten Voyages to Africa, 67; Winterbottom, An Account of the Native
Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, 256; ‘‘Natural History,’’ 233.
12. ‘‘From a speech given by Mr Shirley to legislature of Jamaica,’’ City Gazette and Daily Advertiser,
19 Dec. 1788; Testimony of James Fraser, 1790, in Lambert, House of Commons Sessional Papers,
vol. 71, 18.
13. Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea, 239; Testimony of Fraser, in Lambert, House of Commons
Sessional Papers, vol. 71, 24.
14. Falconbridge, Account of the Slave Trade, 67.
15. Told, An Account of the Life, 40. Told does not say whether the man was a sailor or a slave.
I assume it is the former because the story is told in the context of dangerous work performed by
the crew.
 296 M. Rediker

16. Falconbridge, Account of the Slave Trade, 67; Smith, New Voyage, 239.
17. Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce,
18. Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce, 90.
19. Compagno, Sharks of the World, part 2, 478
81, 503
6. The white shark was less likely to follow a
vessel for a great distance. This species is also less common in the tropics as it prefers cooler
waters.
20. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 282.
21. ‘‘Voyage to Guinea,’’ Add. Ms. 39946, 9, 12; ‘‘Accompts submitted by the Plaintiff in the Court of
Chancery suit Capt. James Westmore, commander, v. Thomas Starke, owner of the slaver
‘Affrican Galley’ concerning expenses incurred by Westmore on a voyage from London to
Virginia via St Thomas’ Island, Gulf of Guinea, and back, 20 Apr. 1701
4 Dec. 1702,’’ Add. Ms.
45123, British Library.
22. Norwich Packet or, the Country Journal, 14 April 1785; Crow, Memoirs, 266.
23. The Connecticut Gazette, 30 Jan. 1789. For an account of a shark attack in the West Indies in
1704 as recounted by a man who was at the time a sailor deserting a naval vessel, see A narrative
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of the wonderful deliverance of Samuel Jennings. For an account by another sailor who insisted
that a shark had followed his vessel for hundreds of miles, see ‘‘Some Account of the Life of Mr
THOMAS PAYNE: in a Letter to the Rev. Mr WESLEY,’’ Arminian Magazine, consisting of
extracts and original treatises on universal redemption 4 (1781), 582
3.
24. ‘‘Natural History,’’ 222
3.
25. Testimony of Thomas Bolton Thompson, 1790, in Lambert, House of Commons Sessional
Papers, vol. 73, 170; ‘‘Log-books, etc. of slave ships, 1791
7,’’ Main Papers, 17
19 June 1799, HL/
PO/JO/10/7/1104, House of Lords Record Office, London.
26. ‘‘The PETITION of the SHARKS of Africa,’’ unsigned, undated printed broadside in Special
Collections, Bristol University Library. The petition was first published in May 1792, in the
Historical Register, or Edinburgh Monthly Intelligencer, a magazine founded by Tytler the
previous year. The petition was republished in The Bee, or Literary Weekly Intelligencer
(Edinburgh) in July 1792 and again in The Diary or Loudon’s Register (New York) on 9 Sept.
1797. Tytler’s irreverent attack on the House of Lords was indicative of the seditious tone of his
writing in 1791
1792, for which was arrested and charged, only to flee into exile to Salem,
Massachusetts in 1793.

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