The Empire of Necessity Read Online Free PDF Page A

but in the breach he has the strength of heroes.” 7
    The Neptune was owned by John Bolton, one of the largest backers of the city’s mercenary fleet and an outfitter of a private anti-Jacobin squad of nearly six hundred men he named Bolton’s Invincibles, armed to protect Liverpool from enemies within and without. Born the “poor boy” son of a village apothecary, he started his career as an apprentice clerk in the West Indies, and legend has it that he parlayed a sack of potatoes and a brick of cheese into the start-up capital of what became a slaving empire. Leaving his “coloured” wife and children behind penniless in the Caribbean, he returned to Liverpool, splitting his time between the bustle of his Henry Street counting house and Storrs Hall, a country mansion built in the middle of an ornamental grove on a wooded promontory overlooking Windermere Lake, where he entertained Tory politicians and Romantic poets, including his friend William Wordsworth.
    Bolton might have come into life humble, but the wealth produced by at least 120 slave voyages let him leave it in a fine coffin shrouded in black velvet and studded with silver nails. His funeral cortege included:
eight gentleman abreast, three hundred boys from the Blue Suit School six deep, two hundred and fifty Gentlemen on foot, six deep, sixty gentlemen on horseback, thirty gentlemen’s private carriages in a line. Several gigs.… Four mutes on horseback. Three mourning coaches, each drawn by four horses. Mr. Bolton’s private carriage, drawn by four, beautiful blood horses, bringing up the rear.
    It was a Scouser send-off to remember, and observers thought the bells of St. Luke tolled with exceptional beauty the day Bolton was laid to earth. 8
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    As they made ready to sail across the Atlantic, the Hope and the Neptune were floating contradictions of the Age of Revolution. On board one ship were enslaved Africans understood to be property, which meant that according to some interpretations of natural-law liberalism they could be bought, sold, and traded as cargo. On board the other, a multihued crew lived the French Revolution’s promise of liberté , égalité , and fraternité . Europeans, mostly French and Spanish, worked alongside dark-skinned Portuguese mulattos and black Africans and Haitians who served as gunners and musketeers. They assigned no title to skin color and spoke an egalitarian patois sounding sort of like French but with traces of Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, and old langue d’oc, along with words picked up from around the Caribbean and the coasts of West and East Africa. Mordeille himself, born on the Mediterranean, not far from Marseilles and a short sail from North Africa, was once described as “black as an Ethiopian.” 9
    The color line did not, strictly speaking, divide the Atlantic between masters and slaves. In the navies and merchant fleets of all the seafaring empires and republics at the time, men of color—among them, Africans, South Sea islanders, Arabs, Indians, Chinese, and freed American blacks—worked on ships, including slave ships, as cooks, cabin boys, sailors, and even, in a few instances, captains. Nor did white skin protect against the kind of arbitrary rule over body and will associated with chattel slavery. Press gangs roamed the wharves and piers of port cities throughout the British realm on the hunt for men to fill the ships of the Royal Navy, looking nothing so much as like the slave gangs that stalked the coasts and rivers of Africa. 10
    In Liverpool, the vanguard of merchant reaction, savage fellows patrolled the streets, often led by a “dissipated, but determined-looking officer, in a very seedy uniform and shabby hat.” Men would flee and children scream upon catching sight of them. Word quickly went out that there were “hawks abroad.” Pity the poor sailor who didn’t keep his door bolted and shades drawn: “he was seized upon as if he were a common felon, deprived of his