Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the paradoxes of slave-trade history is that while we now know a lot about the gut-wrenching process of turning Africans into slaves and the hazards of trafficking on tropical coasts, we know relatively little about the sailors who manned the ships. To be sure, historians have dredged the smattering of life writings that refer to slave ships, many of which reveal graphic accounts of the brutality of captains and mates and a seaman's induction into the trade. Yet precisely who the sailors were, from what ports they hailed, how they were recruited, remains elusive if not opaque. This has not stopped historians generalizing about slave-ship sailors: they are said to be ‘multiracial’, a ‘motley crew’ from different quarters of the globe. One exception to this trend is Mike Breward who has made use of the detailed muster rolls of Bristol at the end of the eighteenth century to offer a portrait of slave-ship crews. The muster rolls earlier in the century did not have a lot to offer the historian, which typically record the pay due to sailors for months at sea and the last ships the seamen entered. These rolls were designed to assess the contribution seamen made to the hospital fund, legislated in 1747. In Bristol, the task of tracking the levy and its administration was put under the jurisdiction of the Merchant Venturers, which is why the muster rolls are in its archives. The early rolls tell us little about the social provenance of the seamen beyond noting the port from which they typically sailed, and because captains were sometimes lax about their entries, this information is not always reliable. The differential payments allotted seamen do reveal the number who died or ran during the voyage, those discharged at the port of delivery and the sailors who were impressed or even elected to enter men-of-war during wartime. This information is vital to assessing the volatility of crews. The one other advantage of the mid-century muster rolls is that the more regular ones list the last ship on which the seaman sailed, giving historians a chance to measure persistence, an issue that maritime historians have seldom addressed.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.002 |
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".