Yes, Let's Have a Talk about Slavery

Since we are all in the middle of being carefully taught to hate the 400 years of slavery and oppression suffered by African Americans, let us just review a curious tale of slavery, in the naval novel, The Privateersman, by Captain Marryat.

Captain Marryat, all you wokies will know because you are all so well-read, is the chap that invented the naval novel genre, that we now enjoy with Patrick O'Brien and a host of others. Marryat was an actual naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane, the inspiration for all the heroes of O'Brien and the others.

In The Privateersman, our hero works for a shipowner in Liverpool -- a port that you scholars will know was a notorious slave port. The shipowner, father of the most perfect girl in the world, used to make lots of money in the slaving line, but now prefers the less abominable trade of privateering.

Privateering, all you scholars will know, was a second-tier thing in the Napoleonic Wars, where ship captains with "letters of marque" were licensed to prey on the King's enemies for loot and plunder.

Our hero is the captain on a couple of privateering voyages but then, partly influenced by the daughter, he tells his boss that he's not going to go a-privateering again.

One thing leads to another, and he goes down to West Africa and gets captured by West Africans and made a slave -- to the lovely concubine of a West African chief. But eventually the Brits come and free him.

Then he makes another trip to West Africa, this time to trade goods -- for gold dust and elephant tusks -- but one thing leads to another and his ship gets taken over by a villainous Portuguese who puts him in irons and exchanges the tusks for slaves. When the ship arrives in Brazil with its African slaves, our hero gets imprisoned and sent as a white slave for life to the Brazilian diamond mines.

Hmm. I wonder what Captain Marryat means by that.

One thing leads to another and our hero gets freed after a couple of years, and sets sail in a xebeque for North America, on the way home to Britain and the most perfect girl in the world. But the ship gets wrecked on the coast of North America and our hero gets captured by Indians and forced to marry an ugly old Indian squaw.

One thing leads to another and our hero escapes and presents himself at a small tobacco plantation in the wilderness run by a six-foot woman and two indentured servants, criminals branded on their hands, and forced to work as virtual slaves. She decides she wants to marry him and puts him in chains until he agrees. Well, but soon enough the Indians attack their log cabin and set fire to it. But our hero manages to escape in all the smoke.

One thing leads to another and our hero climbs on board a pirate ship, and is more or less forced to become a crew member because if he didn't agree to become a pirate the crew would kill him.

But one thing leads to another and the pirate ship gets captured by a Royal Navy ship, that just happens to be commanded by our hero´s younger brother. Everything ends happily ever after, including getting the most perfect girl in the world.

Now I don't know exactly what Captain Marryat was trying to say, but I'd guess that he was trying to make the point, in 1846, that there was a whole lot of slavery going on back in the day. And just about everyone was doing it, from Liverpool merchants to West African chiefs to Portuguese colonial regimes to native Americans to white women running tobacco farms in tidewater America. And anyone could be taken into slavery. For the rest of their natural life.

Now, I'm bound to admit that the slavery of African slaves on North American plantations was a particularly villainous kind of slavery, because the capitalist plantation owners made it pay, as capitalists are wont to do. Usually, slavery was a muddle, a sign of status, rather than profit, for you either were a slave or you owned slaves. Back in the day.

But soon enough lots of people, including many of the most perfect girls in the world, got to feeling that slavery wasn't really Christian. Even William Wilberforce, the son of a merchant in Hull, England, agreed.

Well, one thing led to another, and the Americans of 1860 decided to have a war over it.

Then one thing led to another and the socialists of the world decided to give slavery another try in the two biggest slave states in history. Guess which states I am talking about.

Then our progressive friends decided to go half way to slavery with neo-feudal welfare states in which about 40 percent of peoples' incomes are extracted from them by force for the ruling class to give out as free stuff to the supporters of the progressive regime.

I wonder what our progressive friends will come up with next. In the slavery and feudal line.

To Be Continued.