The Enslaved Mariners on the Crews of Brazilian Slave Ships

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. In modern day Brazil, the fourth most populous of its 26 states is Bahia, along the Atlantic coast. The capital of Bahia is Salvador, founded in 1549 as the colonial capital of Brazil, which had first been explored by the Portuguese just five decades earlier. The early export of Brazil wood didn't yield sufficient tax revenue for the colony, but the introduction of sugar cane cuttings proved much more promising. The work of sugar refining, though, required an immense labor force, which the Portuguese supplied through the importation of enslaved individuals from the West African coast. So invested in this strategy was the Portuguese government that they decreased importation taxes to 1/3 the normal rate for any sugar mill owner who trafficked 120 enslaved Africans to Brazil. At the Royal Shipyard in Bahia, which opened in 1550, enslaved laborers helped construct the vessels that would sail the Atlantic to Africa, and the crews aboard the ships also included enslaved mariners. By the beginning of the 19th century, a third of the mariners in Bahia's transatlantic slave trade were themselves enslaved, and with freed Black sailors, nearly a half of mariners in the slave trade were of African descent. Enslaved mariners, whether owned by the ship's captain or ship owner, or whether hired out, were an inexpensive form of labor; but they were also valued for their linguistic skills, many of them knowing one or more of the languages of the West African coast, in addition to Portuguese, and for their geographic knowledge and cultural acumen, which helped them calm the captives who were taken as cargo when they reached the African coast. The majority of the enslaved crewmen labored as sailors, but some worked as coopers, cooks and even medical practitioners. Unlike the captive cargo they were transporting, the enslaved mariners were not kept in the hold of the ship, and they could not be chained. They needed freedom of movement to accomplish their work. Thus they could, and occasionally did, escape from the ships. However, even when the possibility presented itself, most of the enslaved mariners did not attempt to escape. One reason for that was that they could often work toward legal manumission. Captive sailors could be granted access to so called liberty chests, physical spaces in the ship in which they could store their own goods for trade. By engaging in trade, they could, over time, earn modest profits which could help them purchase their freedom. One individual who was captured and enslaved as an adolescent, would go on not just to purchase his own freedom, but to become a slave trader himself. The boy, re-christened Joao de Oliveira when he was sold to a Brazilian slave trader who was headed north of Bahia, became a Catholic merchant and diplomat after purchasing his freedom. Although his trajectory was by no means typical, it was a possibility, and one that some of the enslaved mariners may have aspired to. Some enslaved sailors looked for a quicker path to legal emancipation, petitioning the Portuguese crown for freedom under a 1761 Free Soil Law, which at least in theory, granted freedom to any enslaved individual who arrived in Portugal from outside its borders, though not to those already living in Portugal. In practice, of course, the law was heavily regulated, and its purpose was not to spread abolition, but rather to encourage Portuguese enslavers to keep their enslaved laborers in the colonies, rather than bring them to Portugal. Enough mariners had sought their liberation via this Free Soil Law that the law was amended in 1776 to exclude professional sailors from gaining their freedom as long as they had been registered as part of the crew before leaving the port of embarkation. The amendment did not, however, stop mariners from seeking to invoke the law to gain their freedom. Soon, though, Portuguese and Brazilian slave traders had larger concerns. In 1807, Britain passed the Abolition of Slave Trade Act, which prohibited the slave trade in the British Empire, although it did not immediately outlaw slavery itself in the British colonies. The British Royal Navy, in enforcing the law, captured not just British ships, but Brazilian ships as well, taking them to Freetown, Sierra Leone for adjudication. By 1815, the Portuguese had agreed to stop slave trading north of the equator, although the Bahian slave traders continued to flaunt that prohibition, attempting to mask the ports at which they had stopped to take on human cargo. Between 1836 and 1842, Portugal enacted a series of laws, finally outlawing the transatlantic slave trade. But by then, Brazil was its own country, having declared its independence in 1822. In 1828, Brazil passed a law, under pressure by the British, to outlaw the slave trade two years later. However, many in Brazil saw the law as "Uma Lei Para Inglez Ver," a law for the British to see, and it was widely ignored until the Queiros Law was passed in 1850, which finally put a stop to the practice. In May, 1888, Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil, signed the Lei Aurea, or Golden Law, fully abolishing slavery in Brazil. Slavery had been in decline in Brazil already and previous laws had freed children born to enslaved parents and enslaved people who had reached the age of 60. Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery.

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:20  
Joining me in this episode is Dr. Mary E. Hicks, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and author of, "Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery." First, though, I have a programming note. This is episode number 200 of Unsung History, and after this episode, the podcast will be on hiatus for a few months while I work on another project. You can find more information soon on our website, in our email newsletter, and on our social media about that new project, and when you can expect to see Unsung History episodes back in your podcast feed. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:32  
Hi, Mary, thanks so much for joining me today. 

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  10:35  
It's great to be here. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:37  
Yeah. So I want to start by hearing a little bit about how you got interested in this topic and decided to write this book. 

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  10:45  
So it was a little bit of an accident. I started my research path as a graduate student, as many people do, and I initially proposed a project to my advisors about enslaved women in urban areas in 18th century Brazil. I was really interested in their interactions with the urban economy, with street vending, specifically. But I was really hoping to do a project about the gender nature of commercialized slavery in Brazil. And then I, as many people do, went to the archive, and I didn't find the materials that I wanted to find. And so I had to kind of do an about face, you know, shocking and in many ways, probably disturbing my advisors. And I found other materials that were so compelling. So for instance, I began in Lisbon, actually my research, where a lot of the colonial records for Brazil are housed, and I found a petition from 1797, it's in the book, from four enslaved men who were basically asking the royal government to return what they called their natural liberty. And they were African born. They had been serving in the royal Armada. And they made this claim based on two grounds. One was that that they were valuable members of the Portuguese Empire as sailors, even though they were African born, even though they were enslaved. And the second grounds for their for their claim was that they were appealing to a Free Soil Law from 1761, which basically provided any enslaved person who stepped foot on Portuguese soil conferred freedom upon them. And as I go into detail in the book, that's actually not an abolitionist, humanist measure, but it's, in fact, it was an effort to prevent slaveholders from bringing their bonds people to Lisbon, where they would be less economically productive, and keeping them in Brazil, Africa, and other places where they would presume to be more economically productive. And so that document really set me on a different trajectory. I found other, you know, books and works by many Brazilian scholars who had kind of looked at this question of maritime slavery from slightly different perspectives than I ended up taking. So an early work by Jamie Rodrigues was looking at sailors on the slave trade in Rio de Janeiro, right? And that was a very multi racial, crews were multi racial. And so I ended up following up on some of the records he used and I built out this project about enslaved mariners, their role in not only territorial expansion, maritime expansion for the Portuguese Empire, but really for transatlantic slaving during the 18th and early 19th centuries, from there, from that starting point. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:32  
Can you talk some about the records you were able to find then? So obviously, most of these enslaved mariners do not keep their own archives, aren't keeping journals while they're on these ships. So what are the records that you're able to tap into? 

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  13:48  
Yeah, that's a really good question. So I do think that even though these men are what we would consider manual laborers, right, not received any sort of formal education, apprenticeship played a huge role in shipboard life, but that's a different kind of applied education than reading formal texts to learn, as we tend to associate with education. But that doesn't mean they weren't literate in particular kinds of ways, and they were literate in the sense that they understood the political lay of the land, and they understood the kind of human geographies that span the Atlantic world, the Black Atlantic world, stretching from Lisbon to Salvador de Bahia, which is in the northeast of Brazil, the city I write about, to Luanda to the MENA coast, which is the other region I write about, which is basically the modern day Bight of Benin. And so they understood how to appeal at times to administrative authorities, legal authorities, so using the 1761 law I just talked about, a lot of people, a lot of mariners, fled to Lisbon and then showed up at the Customs House, asked the agent of the Customs House, "Can I be free?" And they would just sort of like perform a just stamp stamp and say, "Yes, okay, you're free." You know, and that's really shocking for us, because we don't, we tend to think that, you know, those kinds of legal openings and avenues aren't available to enslaved people in certain times and places. But for here, here, in this time and place they were. They also knew how to write wills, inventories, go to notaries, and record relationships of debt that they had with other people if they lent someone money. And it's through these records that I really got to understand the economic and in some cases, the family life of these men, because if they had wives that they had financial relationships with, if they had children, heirs, you would learn about that in these records. Another place I really looked is slaving ship records, which it's a very challenging corpus of documents to work with, as you can imagine. There's horrific stories, just things that you would not expect to be sort of casually noted about the unbelievable levels of violence and sort of degradation that are happening in these spaces. But then also, on the margins, you have, you know, these very dry financial records that are part of ships, ships record keeping practices. And they would know who invested on a slaving ship, what was the laboring composition of the ship. So each sailor, their biographical data, you know where they were from, so what part of Africa they were from, which forms a huge part of the study, because it ended up, I ended up discovering that basically, in the first three decades of the 19th century, about 50% of all mariners on these slaving ships are of African descent, either African born or Black, but born in Brazil, and about a quarter are enslaved, right? So it's through these muster rolls, right, right, the British would call muster roll that we, that, I was able to establish that. And then the other sort of big corpus of documents is just administrators in the Portuguese Empire writing about these men. And you would think, you know, why is it important to the governor of Brazil or the viceroy to write about enslaved mariners? But they were seen as so important to commercial life in the colony that they were written about, right? And their appeals to these authorities were written about as well. So it ended up being a sort of surprisingly archivally rich project, even though they're about people that we sort of would imagine as being very marginal and very hidden in the shadows.

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:25  
What did life look like on these ships? So these are men who are largely working on slaving ships, and these are ships that are going from Brazil over to Africa. And you talk in the book about how this isn't the sort of triangular trade that we might think of in the North Atlantic. This is just sort of a back and forth trade. So they're going over to Africa, so they themselves are enslaved, but they're part of the crew and not going to be down in the hold. What does their life look like as part of the crew?

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  17:57  
Yeah, it's their life is complicated. That's the long and short of the book. And I even coined the term captive cosmopolitan to kind of tease out this paradox, this paradoxical existence. Because I do think it's a really existential question, what you just asked about daily life, because on one hand, being part of these crews allows them to see the world in a kind of way, because they're traveling. A lot of the voyages are traveling between Salvador and, let's say what is now Lagos in the Bight of Benin. Some are traveling to Lisbon. Some are traveling to Luanda, which is in Angola, a port in Angola. So they're really worldly, cosmopolitan spaces. They're multi ethnic, including African men from various different parts of the West African coast, as well as Portuguese sailors, as well as a handful of indigenous seamen as well. So they're cosmopolitan spaces where you would hear all different sorts of languages, all different sort of you know, cultural life being expressed. But they are spaces of incarceration, of violence, of commodification, which entails dehumanization. And so these men are not only doing the kind of labor of of what we think of seafaring, entailing, you know, hoisting sales, you know, bailing out water, scrubbing holes, all that sort of traditional kind of maritime labor, they're also managing enslaved people held in these cargos, right? And because they are, many of them are African, born themselves, they're able to act as cultural intermediaries, right, and even to the degree that ship captains write about them as being best able to quell rebellion and to quell, you know, descent, basically, among people held in in cargos who are being, you know, trafficked from West Africa to Brazil. So their cosmopolitanism ends up being, you know, weaponized in the terminology of of young people today. It ends up being instrumentalized and commodified by ship captains and ship owners. And also, they understand that the work they're doing is is violent. They understand, I think, that the work that they're doing is is quite deadly and dangerous. But they then use the kind of opportunities presented in seaborne travel to achieve certain objectives, I argue. Legal manumission is one that I already mentioned. They also trade between West Africa and Brazil. So these ships become sites not only of slaving traffic, but also commerce in West African goods, textiles and palm oil specifically, but also other things. And they also draw on West African precedents for medical techniques, including bloodletting and applying certain botanical remedies to ailing people on these ships, in order to create this kind of dialog in knowledge, medical knowledge, between West Africa and Brazil. And so the slaving ship is a brutal working space, but it's also a place of cultural exchange, which I think is it's a little bit counter intuitive for us to understand. We I think we tend to think of these places as spaces of kind of annihilation in a certain kind of way, because in some ways, they are annihilating something. They're annihilating people's identities and connections to their communities and their sort of value as human beings, in some ways; but they also become spaces where certain things can be reconstituted because of the intensity of the traffic between West Africa and the Northeast of Brazil.

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:27  
And in a really what seems odd way, some of these captive cosmopolitans can be almost upwardly mobile. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  21:38  
Yeah. So I found that essentially, for those mariners who I was able to track their ages, a lot of, I shouldn't say men, a lot of young adolescents, basically, when they began their careers as mariners, they would be trained in certain aspect of seafaring, be it, you know, being a cooper, being it, a carpenter, a sailor, a common sailor. Some of them were trained as barbers or medical practitioners, and through that training, they would become skilled enough that they then could secure wages. Sometimes they would be able to keep a portion of their wages that depend on the kind of arrangement they had with their with their owner. Many of their owners were actually residents of Salvador, so you would just kind of allow your enslaved person, you know that you owned, to go across the Atlantic for several months and then come back right, which is a different kind of arrangement of slave holding than we're used to thinking about. So these could secure a certain portion of their wages, sometimes if their owners agreed, if their enslaver agreed, and then they could also trade. And so they used the benefits, the monetary, you know, profits from this trade in West African goods, to purchase their own freedom sometimes.They could also run away, right? That's another, you know, avenue of social mobility. We know a little bit less about those figures because, you know, they didn't tend to go to authorities to claim like, "This is why I ran away, or this is why I deserve my freedom," as people who used legal avenues to do it did. So it really becomes the case that physical mobility becomes an avenue towards social upward mobility. And some of these men that I'm able to track, usually it's the medical practitioners that I'm best able to track, because their position is the most lucrative of all those held by Black sailors on these ships, they establish households. They marry. Some of them have children. Some of them have enslaved individuals of their own, right. They become slave holders, and then they train those enslaved individuals in other sort of artisanal trades, right, like bloodletting, and they use the profits from the labor of their own slaves to buy property, other things. So it's a complicated portrait of basically how individuals are forced into a kind of role, right of laboring on these ships, and then they come to use that role to their own advantage for their own individual ends, and really not, in most instances, disturbing the overall structure of the transatlantic slave trade. Some people, some mariners, openly rebel against these slaving ships and their captains. But overwhelmingly, they sort of decide that cooperation, in a limited sense, can open up these kind of avenues for social mobility that you're talking about, freedom, property holding, marriage, establishing your own social network. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:29  
Even to the point where if there's a slave revolt on the ship, they might side with the captain.

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  24:35  
Yes, yes, exactly. Or that they can report on a revolt before it happens because they speak the languages of the captives, or that they're actively trying to suppress it right through, you know what some observers of the time called more gentle treatment, right? More favorable treatment that we see on, let's say, British ships, which at the same period, I mean, we can kind of track it this way. During the time on British ships, we see many times more slave revolts, right, happening on in ships going British ships going, for instance, to the Caribbean, than we do on on Portuguese and later, Brazilian vessels going to some place like Salvador. You know, it's, it's kind of complicated to track some of these instances of revolt, because they're not always reported, you know, they went the way they're talked about. You know, it's obviously very subjective, but in terms of sort of identified, named instances of revolt, we have fewer recorded instances in the in the South Atlantic. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:31  
You mentioned earlier, these enslaved individuals who go to Lisbon, who tried to tap into the the legal mechanisms for freedom, and part of the way they do that is to tap into the Catholic brotherhood. Can you talk some about the importance of the Catholic faith and the Catholic networks, the social networks that are built up, both in Portugal but also back in Brazil, and the ways that they're able to use those networks? 

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  26:00  
Yeah, and this is one of my favorite parts of the book, and in some ways the most surprising for me, because I didn't go into the archives expecting to find this connection between Black Catholic religiosity and fugitivity and also seafarers. And I'm, you know, in part, following up on the work of other scholars like Didier Lahon, who's written about these Catholic brotherhoods as a site of legal activism and mutual aid in Portugal. And basically from the 16th century, so when these brotherhoods are first sort of ratified, you know, you have to appeal to the king to recognize your your your religious brotherhood, your Catholic brotherhood. These organizations are trying to actively free enslaved people in the city of Lisbon, and they're also getting in arguments, because oftentimes these, you know, religious organizations, there are mutual aid societies that are based on common religious observance. So they would have a home, usually in a Catholic church, and they're sort of dotted all over the Lisbon cityscape. And they would often have white patrons, at least in the in the early period in which they're first established. And they would even be kind of at loggerheads with these white patrons, because the white patrons are like, "Why are you trying to use this religious space that's about worshiping? Why are you turning it into an activist space that's about freeing enslaved members or enslaved people who are appealing to it?" So, you know, there's all these instances of people arriving in Lisbon, and it's not just mariners. I think mariners are really key, because they spread knowledge of this Free Soil principle beyond just Portugal itself into the entire empire, but individuals arrive in Lisbon, and they're obviously meeting these brothers, you know, in the street somewhere, you know, or coming about this, they're happening upon this knowledge that if you need help, you run away to these religious spaces. So they would physically run to these churches, you know, and they would meet Black brothers there, who would then offer legal advice. And they would also, in some cases, it appears, fund these legal challenges to people's enslavement, and they would help them craft arguments, right? Because we see the same kind of logic playing out over different cases, which leads me to believe that there is this internal kind of discussion happening among the Black community in Lisbon, but also enslaved fugitives who are arriving there about how to best appeal to freedom, what would be the most attractive kind of argument to the crown and to to its authorities. And so, you know, I use this term, jurisdictional consciousness. And it's through this act of running away, of talking to people about legal ideas, about creating these vernacular legal ideas together with Black Catholic brothers, that people are become aware of the idea of jurisdiction, right, that your slave stat and enslaved status might be legal in one place, but not in the other. And so it's interesting, because these spaces are about, you know, religious observance. They have beautiful baroque chapels. I've seen some of them that they erect in Lisbon. But they're really about more than that. They're about there's, like, intellectual spaces as well, and these bases of political activism. And, you know, one of the interesting things, things for me is there's a brotherhood, Nossa Senhora do Rosario, dos Omen Pretos that has a chapel that I visited in Lisbon. And in this chapel are four Black saints, but also the Archangel Michael, right? Sort of signifying this idea of justice and protection. So I think that they actually were aware of what these religious symbols meant, right? And they were kind of making a statement in this chapel, which is really interesting to me. I would love to see some art historians or somebody who knows a lot more about this kind of topic of Catholic symbolism follow up and what they make of that. But, I mean, I know there are lots of scholars right now who are working on Black Catholic religiosity, but that particular altarpiece was, like, really impressive to me. So seeing it in Lisbon, it still survives today. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:13  
But then that doesn 't lead to a greater adoption of abolitionist sentiment by these Black mariners. They don't, as we move into the 19th century, and there is across the globe a larger, or at least across the Atlantic, a larger abolitionist sentiment. They are not part of that. 

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  30:34  
No, no, and it's, it's, that is part of the paradox that I was talking about the beginning of of of our discussion, which is that you would expect them to be sort of all in with British liberal abolitionism. So by really 1810, the British, because they have adopted their own sort of suppression of their own slave trade, began attacking ships of other nations, other empires, including Brazilian ships. And the interesting thing is, in this moment, you would expect men who have themselves been victims of the trans Atlantic slave trade, had been carried to the Americas in chains, who understand that kind of you know, social death, that natal alienation, that captives are experiencing, to be aligned, right, to be allied with the British abolitionist effort. But a couple things happen, right? One is, unlike the Portuguese example, the British I guess, way of freeing people, liberating them as they would use in their terms, emancipating them, was to force them into indentured servitude after their, yeah, I mean, it is kind of, yeah, it's kind of counter into, I mean, to us, is sort of ridiculous. To them, they see this as a sort of enlightened, benevolent way of of treating formerly enslaved people. So they force them into an indentured servitude. So sometimes when Black sailors are captured and they are enslaved themselves by these British naval forces part of the suppression, they are themselves taken to Sierra Leone, to Freetown, the colony, and forced to be indentured servants there. Right? So this is not the kind of freedom, really, that they are desiring, right? It doesn't mean you can go back to Brazil, where you may have established a household already. It doesn't mean you can be at Lisbon. It doesn't mean you have legal rights in the Portuguese empire that a freed person does, which, you know, I should be clear, are, are less than a freeborn person would have. But for them, it's just not as appealing, really, I argue in the book. And the other thing is that British abolitionism is a quite violent process, right? It requires the capture, search and seizure of ships, and then they would navigate these ships to be tried in Freetown. And during this whole process, enslaved sailors, and even freed sailors, are subjected to the kind of dangers right of this way of doing abolition. They could be taken with their ships, they could be incarcerated, they could be shot at. Their ship could sink, which happened, and that's to say nothing of the enslaved people who are held in the cargos, who are really in kind of a legal limbo while this is happening. They're not yet freed because their cases haven't been adjudicated, and so that really opens them up to lots of dangers in terms of disease transmission as they're held on these ships. All sorts of things there can be. I talk about mutinies, right? So one, one ship is captured, and there's a mutiny by Brazilian seamen aboard that ship against the British, sort of captains and seamen who had taken over it. And you know, in this mutiny, Black Brazilian sailors are participating, which might confound us to some degree. Why don't they sort of identify the British as liberators? Well, it's a more complicated world than that for them, right? Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's again, this is another place where these, these historical actors, are confounding what we expect to see them doing. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:55  
Toward the end of the book, you write about the ways that these, these mariners are bringing back and the the ships are bringing back African culture to Brazil, are bringing back religion, are bringing back clothing and food. So what are the ways that that this trade, then is, is remaking this part of Brazil. We talked about Salvador, which is the the city that you're specifically looking at, and and there's a thriving trade. And again, this sort of upsets, maybe the notions of what we think about as slavery, that the people in the marketplace are themselves enslaved, the people who are selling goods, the people who are possibly buying goods, that this is a an ongoing trade that is happening, and the the people who are participating are both free and enslaved. 

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  34:49  
Yeah. So it's really interesting, if you read travelers' accounts of Salvador of this time, and they constantly, I mean, of course they mean, mean it in a derogatory sense, but they constantly say, "Oh, Salvador, it's like a New Guinea," which is another term for Africa, right, a certain part of West Africa, or, "This place, is all Black, right?" And so I think we have to wrap our mind around one of the largest cities in the early modern Atlantic being a Black space, right? And what does this mean? It's a cosmopolitan space, it's a commercial space, but it's also a Black space. And, you know, I argue in the book that one of the roles these sailors play is making it an Africanized space, and beyond just sort of an argument about demographics, because we know that the slave trade Salvador has the second most prolific slave trade in the entire Atlantic world, behind Rio de Janeiro. So we know numerically, demographically, it is a very African space in terms of having a lot of African born people there. There are different estimates, you know, in the period I'm looking at it's around, you know, it's somewhere around 50% probably people who are born in Africa and are either enslaved or freed. But that being said, one of the things I try to get across in the final two chapters of the book is that this kind of flowering of African derived cultures in Brazil is a choice. It's not just a kind of mechanistic response. People are just going to do what they've always known, but they really see various sort of African ideas and cultural forms as resources in this new, really inhospitable space. And so I talk about material culture as a as a site of knowledge transfer from West Africa to Brazil in these liberty chests that sailors are carrying with them. Then they then pass these goods off to, you know, their wives, their lovers, to sell in the marketplace. And then West African buyers begin to wear these clothes, and they begin to construct new meanings of them in Brazil, right? So one of the things that we know happens at the end of the 18th, early 19th century. We don't have a, you know, a perfect pinpointed origin date, but people of African descent begin to create a religion, which is called Candomble. And in these religious spaces, these early religious spaces, you would have altars to various deities, or orixas, and these altars would be home to West African goods, right that are coming across on these liberty chests. There's also some evidence that men who were working on these ships as barbers become early practitioners of this religion because the power that they wield over the human body to transform people from sickness to health. You can imagine how that's read as a kind of spiritual potency, right? A spiritual power and a social power, and that people would actually sort of look to them as intellectual leaders in that community. And so these men use various elements of West African culture. There's certain strategies or techniques of blood letting that they begin to incorporate into healing in Brazil as well. And so these ideas about the body, how it can be transformed through certain manipulations of the blood of the head, right? Cutting is certain incisions, making incisions in the head is was thought to have certain metaphysical power to transform, you know, people's lives and fortunes. So all these ideas are being transplanted very intentionally, I would argue, because people see these West African sort of precursors as useful right as as useful in their new context. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:24  
Could you just talk a little bit about, history is obviously always nuanced, but this is, I think, a particularly nuanced story because of the position of these historic actors, these, yeah, captive cosmopolitans that they occupy such an interesting space that they are both obviously enslaved, and we have to remember everything that that means, but they also have certain privileges that other enslaved people don't have. So what is it like to to do that research, to do that writing, and to have to wrestle with all of these ideas?

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  39:03  
Yeah, I would like to say that I was immediately just an expert at doing that. And I just, it was like a fish to water, you know, I just had this facility. But, I mean, it was really hard, and it was also hard to find a way of writing about them that I personally found ethical, and that I thought an audience would find ethical. And also we have to think, you know, the descendants of these people, you know, in these communities, are still there, and they're still really important and central to Salvador's history. And you know, when I when I'm, when I'm in Brazil, I love talking to people about history. And you know, just like local and vernacular forms of knowledge, I think are really powerful and beautiful. But also I've had the experience of speaking to people, and when I would talk about how I write about slavery, they would always say, "Well, there were so many quilombos in this area," which is true, runaway slave communities. There were many, you know, they were dotted all over the landscape. And I think for some people to remember slavery, is to remember resistance. And that can kind of become the total story that we tell. And in a way, that's a beautiful story, right? I mean that that captures our sort of human imagination about the kind of world we want, which is that when people are faced with oppression, they rebel and they try to transform the world into it can mean completely different place. But I think as human beings, we understand that people don't always respond to oppression that way, right? Or they don't always respond to violence or dehumanization that way, and that sometimes, you know a dear colleague of mine, Adriana Chita, you know we were, we were discussing this, and she said, "Your actors are pragmatic," and I think that's exactly right, which is a register of politics that I think is a little bit harder for us to enter, you know, as retroactive observers, just because it's not fulfilling our kind of desire of what we want the past to be, even though we know perfectly well that in our current moment, we're not just sort of like fighting tooth and nail every injustice we encounter. We oftentimes are strategizing a kind of third path, right, which I think is what these people are doing. That being said, I didn't want to write something which I felt minimized, you know, there was an earlier version of this when I was a graduate student, where I was just sort of all about their agency. And I was, like, very polemical, and I was sort of, you know, is writing against, you know, going back to Dubois and his depiction of the Middle Passage, like I'm writing against all this, which we tend to do when we're grad students, right? We tend to have this sort of more polemical view of the historiography. But I don't want to underplay the violence that they're facing, because they're not only facing intimate, interpersonal violence, which I write about in the book as well, but also just sort of structural violence, right? Like, what do people, how do people, how are they forced to navigate these systems of oppression, systems that are trying to commodify them, dehumanize them, to turn them into bare instruments, which is what I sort of raise in the very first pages of the book. How do you then try to become something else within the confines of the world in which you're existing, and you know, many of them turn to not only sort of African cultural practices, but really like systems of patronage in which they are, you know, the dependents, the clients, the enslaved people early on, but they hope to become the patrons, right? And even the slaveholders in some cases. So it's not so much a story about systemic transformation, at least the end of slavery. It's a story about how individuals sought to remake themselves within this context, right? And I use the end of the book, I use Plato's, you know, discussion of Proteus, that you are always shape shifting, and you are always alluding my grasp. And I think that's a great sort of image that encapsulates what I think the people I'm writing about are trying to do. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:43  
How can listeners get a copy of your book?

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  42:45  
 Yeah, so it is published by University of North Carolina Press through their Omohundro Institute series. So you can just go to the website and find it there. Also, if you want to look elsewhere, bookshop.org, all these other book providers and physical copy. I mean, I don't know, ask your your local library or your local bookstore to please, you know, furnish you with a copy. But those are definitely places. I know they are.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:12  
 Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about? 

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  43:15  
I guess I would just like to end this by saying, you know, we're in a very tenuous political moment where I feel like the stories that I'm trying to tell have been politicized in certain kinds of ways, but I think within that, I've seen so many scholars continue to craft these really beautiful, empathetic, analytically challenging and powerful studies of enslaved life. And I'm just really grateful that I get to be part of that and then also have conversation with peers who are outside of that field, and they see some sort of relationship between what I study and their sort of fields of study as well, which is really, you know, it's really meaningful to me as well, because I think, yes, these people are enslaved, but I think their lives have a lot to tell us about just sort of the world at large, right? So I'm really grateful for those conversations as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:05  
Well Mary, thank you so much for speaking with me.

Dr. Mary E. Hicks  44:08  
 Thank you.

Teddy  44:08  
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