Bibliographic record
Abstract
What port awaits us, Davy Jones’ or home? I’ve heard of slavers, drifting, drifting, playthings of wind and storm and chance, their crews gone blind, the jungle hatred crawling up on deck. Robert Hayden, ‘Middle Passage’ ‘Everyone that enters upon it’ wrote Henry Laurens of the slave trade, ‘should fortify themselves against misfortune.’ There were many who would concur. William Snelgrave, a London-based slaver of the 1720s, alert to the dangers, zoned in on African mutinies aboard slave ships, which he designated the ‘chief subject’ of his Account . Seventy years later, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson addressed the same issue in a letter to one of the early leaders of the French Revolution, the Comte de Mirabeau. There was an ever-present threat of rebellion aboard ship, he told this progressive aristocrat, and all too frequently the insurgencies of slaves were ‘industriously consigned to oblivion, that not a Trace, if possible, may be found’. Clarkson cited the case of the Britannia, a Bristol ship skippered by James Bruce, where shackled slaves besieged the ships’ barricade and overran the quarterdeck only to be suppressed by superior firepower. Confronted by defeat, some of the militants ‘cast themselves into the Sea, with masks of Joy in their Countenance, and of the most perfect Contempt for their oppressors.’ Or, so it was reported. Of the 190 slaves who boarded the vessel on the Windward coast, only ninety reached Barbados. The revolt on board the Britannia was far from exceptional. A seaman who had sailed on three Bristol slave voyages during the 1760s told Thomas Clarkson that the predicament of capture was ‘so very intolerable and grievous’ that Africans ‘will do anything to extricate themselves from it’. Historians who have trawled through the relevant sources for the long eighteenth century have discovered roughly 500 acts of collective violence by Africans caught up in the British, Dutch, and French slave trades: nearly 100 by free Africans who attacked boats and vessels from the shore, often as reprisals against malicious trading; and about 400 shipboard mutinies. These are conservative estimates, for Clarkson was right to note that slaveship captains were reluctant to chronicle many intended revolts because they would reflect badly on their reputations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".