4 - The Unfortunate Shipwright, or, the Trials of Robert Barker

Summary

The Unfortunate Shipwright is an important primary source for the slave trade but one that is used sparingly. David Richardson did not use it in his research on the Bristol slave trade; Marcus Rediker cited it twice in The Slave Ship; and Emma Christopher deployed it selectively to detail the poverty of seamen and one fleeting episode of sailor-slave amity. The tract has surfaced in Bristol, where it is noted in the Port Cities website as one of three first-person accounts of the Bristol slave trade, and it is mentioned in a number of local histories. Even so, the larger story has not been told, despite the fact it is a valuable eye-witness account of a slave voyage by a literate artisan, and one that he subsequently fleshed out in a much larger version. Many of the life writings of seafarers in this period come from people of a somewhat higher station, déclassé mariners who went to sea for youthful adventure, men like Robert Stanfield or William Butterworth. It is unusual to find a perspective from a labouring man. There are very few of them for the eighteenth century. The Unfortunate Shipwright is important not simply because it throws insider light on shipboard tensions and chains of command, but because it reveals quite graphically the difficulties of seamen getting legal redress for wrongs committed on the voyage. It links the power dynamics of the ship to the power dynamics of the port and its courts of law. The Unfortunate Shipwright belongs to a strain of travel literature in which adventures overseas are discussed to edify the public about exotic lands and peoples. As a genre it could be traced back to the picaresque novel of Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, first published in 1593, although it is not as jocosely satirical as that account since it was designed as a prelude to a legal suit and fired by a strong sense of personal grievance. It was also a narrative of life on the high seas and, in the spirit of Defoe, of ‘extraordinary Events, unexpected Accidents and miraculous Deliverances’. There was a spate of these productions in the 1740s when Britain engaged first Spain and then France to protect colonial possessions and promote freer trade in Atlantic waters.