Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The Abolitionist Who Infiltrated a Slave Ship: James Field Stanfield
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the enslaved experience of the Middle Passage, and about the legal and political fight against the slave trade. But there's one figure who gives us a completely different perspective — a white sailor who served on slave ships, then turned abolitionist and wrote the first detailed crew-level account of the trade. Luna: A sailor who turned against it? That's unusual — most crews were pretty complicit, weren't they? Lucas: Exactly. Most crewmen were poor, often coerced or tricked into service, but they rarely spoke out. James Field Stanfield is the exception. He was born in Dublin around 1747, went to sea as a young man, and between 1774 and 1776 he made at least two voyages to the African coast on slave ships — one called the Dolphin, another called the Earl of Liverpool. And crucially, he was on board the voyage that became the Zong massacre, though he'd left the ship before the actual killings. Luna: Wait — he was on the Zong before the massacre? That's a direct link to one of the most infamous events we've covered. Lucas: He was. But his real impact came later. In 1788, as the abolition movement was gaining steam, Stanfield published a pamphlet called Observations on a Guinea Voyage. It's a searing, visceral description of the Middle Passage from the perspective of someone who had to work among the enslaved. He describes the stench, the screams, the suicides, the floggings — but he also names specific captains, specific ships, and specific practices. Lucas: The pamphlet was dedicated to the Duke of Richmond and other abolitionist peers, and it was written in verse — it's essentially a long poem. And that format was deliberate: Stanfield wanted it to be read aloud and memorized, to spread the horror of the trade to people who couldn't or wouldn't read dry reports. Luna: So he's using poetry as propaganda. That's clever — and it worked? Lucas: It did. Thomas Clarkson, the great abolitionist researcher, met Stanfield in 1787 and immediately recognized the value of his testimony. Clarkson used Stanfield's detailed descriptions of slave ship conditions in his evidence to the Privy Council inquiry in 1788. And Stanfield himself appeared before the Privy Council — one of the few working-class witnesses ever heard. He gave specific numbers: how many enslaved people were crammed into a given space, how many died on each voyage, how captains falsified logs. Luna: Falsified logs — that's interesting. So the official records weren't reliable? Lucas: Not at all. Stanfield claimed that captains routinely underreported deaths to avoid insurance investigations or to look more competent to their employers. He said that on one voyage, the actual death toll was double what the captain recorded. And he backed it up with the names of crew members who could corroborate. Clarkson loved him because he wasn't just emotional — he was specific, and he was willing to testify under oath. Luna: That kind of firsthand, corroborated testimony must have been gold for the abolitionists. They had Equiano's narrative, but he was one man — Stanfield gave them a white crewman's account. Lucas: Exactly. And the slave trade's defenders tried to discredit him. They said he was a disgruntled former employee, that he'd been dismissed for bad behavior, that his poetry was exaggerating for effect. But Clarkson and the committee checked his claims. They interviewed other sailors, compared his account with ships' logs they could access. And enough of it held up that Stanfield became a key witness in the 1788 parliamentary debates. Lucas: One detail from his poem that really stuck with me: he describes the enslaved women being brought on deck to be 'danced' for exercise. The crew would force them to jump and move to music, supposedly to keep their circulation going. But Stanfield says the real purpose was to let the crew select women for sexual assault. He's remarkably frank about it — in verse, no less. Luna: He's writing about sexual violence on slave ships in a poem meant to be read in parlors. That took some guts — and it shows he understood that the horror of the trade wasn't just about death, it was about systematic cruelty. Lucas: Absolutely. And Stanfield didn't stop at the pamphlet. He became a professional actor and playwright — he performed on stage in London and wrote plays with abolitionist themes. He also wrote a book about slavery's impact on Africa, arguing that the trade corrupted African societies and made them dependent on violence. He was one of the first to make that argument in print. Luna: If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, exactly — if you've gotten something out of this deep dive, that's the easiest way to keep us going. No ads, no sponsors, just history. And it really helps. Luna: Anyway, back to Stanfield — he's not as famous as Equiano or Clarkson. Why do you think he's been forgotten? Lucas: Partly because his pamphlet went out of print, partly because he wasn't part of the inner circle of the Clapham Sect. He was a working-class Irishman, an actor — not a respectable London abolitionist. And his later career as a playwright didn't age well. But also, I think, because his account is so brutal that it was hard to fit into the narrative of 'respectable' abolition. The MPs who cited him focused on the statistics, not the poetry. Lucas: There's another reason, too. Stanfield's testimony was used in the 1790s when abolition was beaten back by the war with France. After 1793, the movement went quiet for a decade. By the time the Slave Trade Act passed in 1807, Stanfield was in his sixties and out of the public eye. He died in 1824, just before emancipation became a real possibility. Luna: So his moment was 1788, and then the political tide turned against abolition, and he faded. That's a hard arc. Lucas: It is. But his work didn't vanish. Clarkson preserved Stanfield's evidence in his own writings. And later historians, especially in the last thirty years, have rediscovered his pamphlet as one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of the Middle Passage from a white witness. It's now seen as a crucial piece of the abolitionist archive — not just for what it describes, but for demonstrating that the movement drew from all classes, not just elites. Luna: I want to circle back to something you said about captains falsifying logs. Can you give me a concrete example of how Stanfield proved that? Lucas: Sure. In his testimony to the Privy Council, Stanfield described a voyage on the Earl of Liverpool. He said that out of 450 enslaved people taken on board, 155 died during the crossing. The captain's log recorded only 76 deaths. Stanfield named the captain, the ship, the dates — and he named other crew members who could back him up. Clarkson tracked down one of those sailors, who confirmed Stanfield's numbers. That kind of cross-verification was devastating to the pro-trade lobby. Lucas: The pro-trade side argued that deaths were inevitable — disease, suicide, the 'seasoning' process. But showing that the numbers were being deliberately hidden undermined their claim that the trade was manageable. If you're lying about the death count, what else are you lying about? Luna: It's like a forensic audit of the slave trade. Stanfield wasn't just an emotional witness — he was an investigator. Lucas: Exactly. And he paid for it. After his testimony, he found it impossible to get work at sea. The Liverpool slave merchants blacklisted him. He had to reinvent himself as an actor and writer just to survive. That's another reason his story matters — he sacrificed his livelihood to speak out. Luna: That's a real cost. Most of the famous abolitionists were wealthy or had patrons. Stanfield had nothing to fall back on. Lucas: Right. And yet he kept writing. In 1789, he published a second edition of his poem with even more detail, including a preface naming the shipowners he was accusing. And he wrote a play called 'The Guinea Voyage' that was performed in London — though it wasn't a commercial success. The theater audiences of the 1790s wanted comedy, not a two-hour lecture on slavery. Luna: So he tried to use theater as a vehicle for abolition too. That's ahead of its time — we think of 'social issue' theater as a 20th-century thing. Lucas: It was. And it failed. But the pamphlet survived. And today, historians like Marcus Rediker and James Walvin have brought Stanfield back into the conversation. His account is now considered one of the most important sources on the Middle Passage from a crew member's perspective. It's not as polished as Equiano's narrative, but it's raw and immediate. Luna: I'm struck by the fact that someone with such a direct connection to the Zong could have been lost to history. If his pamphlet hadn't been rediscovered, we'd have a gap in our understanding. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's why I wanted to cover him. The Zong is famous, the abolitionists are famous — but the people on the ground, the sailors who saw the horror and chose to speak, they're often invisible. Stanfield gives us a bridge between the enslaved experience and the political movement. He shows that the abolitionist cause wasn't just a project of the elite — it was built on the testimony of people who had been there, even if they were imperfect witnesses. Luna: Imperfect how? Lucas: Well, Stanfield was a white man who participated in the trade before he opposed it. He wasn't a saint. He probably forced enslaved people to dance, he might have flogged them. He didn't oppose slavery on principle at first — it was the experience of the Middle Passage that changed him. So his conversion is messy, and that makes it more human. He's not a flawless hero; he's someone who did something terrible, then tried to make amends by telling the truth. Luna: That's a more complicated story than the usual hero narrative. And probably a more honest one. Lucas: It is. And it raises a question for us: how do we remember people whose moral journey isn't clean? Stanfield doesn't fit the mold of the virtuous abolitionist. But his testimony helped end the slave trade. So maybe the messiness is exactly what we need to sit with.