Chapter Five: James Field Stanfield and the Floating Dungeon

This was an interesting chapter because the focus shifted to a crew member aboard the slave ship. After I finished reading it, I had a new perspective on those who worked on the ships. Going into the chapter I viewed the slaves as being the only ones to be treated poorly during the Middle Passage. However, this chapter gives you a whole new perspective. The focus of the chapter is a sailor named James Field Stanfield and he was the first to write about the slave ship from the perspective of the common sailor. Redicker tells his audience that "Stanfield's descriptions of the trade and the ship were among the very best ever written by a working sailor." The chapter begins at the beginning of Stanfield's life. We learn that Stanfield was well educated and that science had "opened his views of the world." He described himself as "a man of feeling" and wanted to search for the joys and beauties of nature and philosophy, which is what drew him to sailing. He also proclaimed that sailors did not like the slave trade, however they needed money in their pockets. Stanfield did not like most merchants, as they were the ones who lured sailors aboard to work in the Middle Passage. Despite the horrors of the slave trade, Stanfield could not deny the thrill ships and the open sea gave him, "the ship was a thing of beauty, with new sails and fresh paint, with colors flying, and banners streaming in the sea breeze." This is where I began to gain a new perspective…Redicker adds that sailors were extremely undernourished just like the enslaved, if not more. This was because the captain an economic incentive to feed the slaves and keep them alive during the Middle Passage. Stanfield thought that slaves were in certain respects better off than the crew. The captains violence was completely overpowering, and he inflicted that on both the slaves and the sailors. Before reading this chapter I had no idea how horrible the sailors lives were on the ships, which I believe is due to the abundance of publicized works from the enslaved drawing our attention more towards the slaves and not the crew. James Field Stanfield's account of the slave trade gave a new perspective of the ships to many of his readers. Redicker says it is, "more detailed, more gruesome, and more dramatic than anything that had yet appeared in 1788 (the year it was published).