by Frank Sherry
(One of the guests at Plantain’s party, it was said afterward, was the deposed Captain Edward England. Reduced to penury and in declining health, England was now in the last months of his life. According to contemporary witnesses, he spent these last days drifting from place to place, begging the white men of Madagascar for subsistence. It was also reported that England “seemed very penitent…and hoped that God would forgive him his sins and [he] desired his companions to leave off that [piratical] course of life.”)
During his stay with Plantain at Ranter Bay, Commodore Mathews apparently took the opportunity to purchase from the pirate king—at cut rates—a quantity of luxury items that Plantain had plundered during his career.
Eventually Commodore Mathews, convinced that the Madagascar outlaws were in fact gone, as Plantain had told him, sailed for home. Plantain resumed his war against King Dick.
When Commodore Mathews reached England again he came under severe fire from critics who felt his behavior in Madagascar had been less than exemplary. Pointing out that he had failed to capture even one pirate, his critics charged that Mathews had not exercised sufficient enterprise in hunting down the Madagascar outlaws. Many felt that he could—and should—have kept pirate captains such as Taylor, La Bouche, and others from escaping the net.
Mathews also came in for much censure when it was revealed that he had traded privately with Plantain and other pirates. Eventually Mathews was relieved of his command for “neglect of duty.”
But in spite of Commodore Mathews’s alleged shortcomings as a commander, he did accomplish his mission: the suppression of piracy in the Indian Ocean. The mere presence of Mathews and his Royal Navy squadron in the waters around Madagascar had been sufficient to disperse the pirates there and to ensure that there would be no resurgence of the old-time outlaw nation.
In reality, of course, there had never been any serious chance that the pirates could reestablish themselves on Madagascar in the 1720s. Despite the huge depredations of Condent, England, Taylor, and others who had returned to the Indian Ocean from the West, the pirates of the 1720s were much diminished in both number and in effect upon trade when compared to their predecessors. In the 1720s the brotherhood of the black flag lacked the economic base it had enjoyed in the 1690s.
In 1720 there were no big traders like Adam Baldridge on Madagascar to buy pirate booty, no big brokers like Frederick Philipse of New York to deal in plunder and to finance pirate expeditions—and there were no colonial governors like Benjamin Fletcher to sell privateering commissions for a fee and to look the other way while pirate contraband was unloaded in their ports.
The merchants who dealt in pirate plunder in the 1720s were—generally speaking—free-lance operators, small businessmen who had to do their trading clandestinely, keeping themselves one jump ahead of the navy and the police forces of the large trading companies.
Without the substantial economic support provided by large brokers and by hungry markets, the outlaws of 1720 could not defy the authority of London or of the East India Company, as had the pirates of the 1690s.
There were other factors that also militated against reestablishment of any extensive pirate presence in the Indian Ocean. In 1721 Parliament had declared that anyone who trafficked with pirates, or furnished them with supplies, was himself guilty of piracy. This law greatly reduced outlets where pirate captains could obtain necessary provisions. At the same time, Parliament enacted regulations that called for rewarding merchant sailors who resisted attacks by pirates and for punishing any who failed to do so. The effect of these laws was to give ordinary sailors, for the first time, substantial incentives for remaining in honest service.
These changes in the law—together with the eradication of colonial economic support of piracy—seemed to many observers of the day to herald the end of the sweet trade. Commodore Mathews’s squadron had driven the pirates from the East, and the indomitable Woodes Rogers had made them unwelcome in the West Indies. The outlaw brotherhood—what was left of it—seemed finished.
But those who thought so soon found that they had been premature in their assessment. For there was one last stretch of coast and ocean where freebooters might survive—and even thrive: the west coast of Africa, the Guinea Coast as it was called.
Here—along this feverish shore—slave dealers conducted their cruel but lucrative traffic with the powerful black tribes of the mysterious continent.
Here European trading companies milked the wealth of Africa.
Here outlaw traders still bought stolen goods—and sold contraband supplies to brigand sailors.
And it was here that a dwindling number of pirate captains—as fierce and as resourceful as any who preceded them—fought the final battles of the pirate war on the world.
17
Where White Men Die
The Guinea Coast—as it was called by white men—is the curving western seaboard of tropical Africa, stretching some 2,800 miles from Senegal in the north to Cape Lopez just south of the Equator in present-day Gabon.
For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Guinea Coast was not only a place of oppressive heat, it was also the home of fearsome mysteries, brutal customs, and deadly diseases. It was a place where white men came to win wealth—and where they often died broken in body and spirit.
All along this vast stretch of low-lying shoreline, the pale green waters of the Gulf of Guinea and the darker swells of the deep Atlantic rolled and crashed against narrow beaches of brownish sand. Beyond the foaming surf and the thin strip of sand stood the endless jungles—dark, damp, silent, and forbidding.
In some places the tapestry of surf, sand, and jungle parted to disgorge great rivers—among them the Niger, the Volta, and the Gambia. In other places the rivers formed deltas of swamp, with the huge mossy trees rising out of briny shallows.
All along the coast a fiery tropical sun sucked vapor from the sea and the rivers into the air, making the atmosphere so humid that even the slightest movement drenched a man in his own sweat—and the skin was never free of its film of moisture.
Everywhere the heavy air stank with the mixed smells of the forest, the sea, and human occupation. The vapors from rotting vegetation and fish, the odor of salt spray, the smell of cook fires and of human offal—all were broiled into a ripe miasma beneath the equatorial sun.
The coast stank of fever too. Mosquitoes and flies swarmed out of the swamps and jungles, spreading virulent disease. Men trembled with dengue fever, sweated and shivered with malaria, and died of “fevers that had no name” and seemed to exist nowhere else on earth.
“This land is a hell,” one Dutch trader to the Guinea Coast wrote home in the 1660s. Yet for all its hellishness, this coast and its hinterland supported a thriving population of indigenous black tribes.
In the jungle that stretched away for hundreds of miles into the unknown heart of the continent, powerful black kingdoms flourished. Among the most famous were the realms of Benin, Dahomey, and Ashanti.
In addition, populous tribal groups—all with complex and distinctive cultures—prospered here. The three dominant tribal peoples were the Ibo, the Fanti, and the Mandingo. These tribes generally supported themselves by fishing, by farming, and by carrying out some limited trading into the interior.
All the peoples of the Guinea Coast and its hinterland were fierce warriors. Many of the tribes and kingdoms of the region were also wealthy. All had highly developed political systems.
For many centuries Europeans had shied away from this coast of darkness, leaving it not only unexplored but virtually untouched.
Because the coast lacked suitable anchorages for ships, few Europeans visited it—unless driven ashore by necessity. Further, the rivers of the region appeared to be unnavigable—either pouring precipitously out of the jungle into the ocean, or oozing through a maze of swampy channels to the open water.
Clearly such rivers could not be usable pathways for the exploration of the unknown interior of the vast continent, and Europe
an adventurers passed them by.
Moreover, the handful of Europeans who had, by some mischance, been washed ashore on this dank coast and who had later returned to civilization had brought back tales of fierce, xenophobic African tribes, and of diseases that weakened and killed.
Yet, though unexplored, the Guinea Coast began to take shape on European maps sometime in the fourteenth century when western geographers adapted information from Arab sources for their own use. It was also about this time that the name Guinea Coast came into use. Applied first by the Portuguese, the name was derived from the Berber word aguinaw—meaning “black man”—which the Portuguese rendered as guiné.
In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, who had earlier founded a colony in Angola, south of the mighty Congo, began to hear reports that this dark land they called the Guinea Coast produced goods that the white man coveted: pepper, ivory, and gold that was purer than any other in the entire world.1
Late in the fifteenth century the Portuguese became the first Europeans to attempt to establish themselves there. Portuguese traders constructed an outpost approximately fifteen hundred miles north of their Angola colony, in what is now Ghana.
Called Elmina, the post was actually a fortress since, in addition to being a trading center, it also had to serve as a bastion of defense in case of attack by local black tribes—and as a deterrent to European interlopers.
The Portuguese soon followed the establishment of Elmina with other fortress trading posts. Throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Portuguese trade with the local tribes flourished, as European manufactured goods, such as guns, cloth, and metals, were exchanged for African gold and ivory.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Although the Portuguese prospered on the Guinea Coast and although they managed to make fruitful contacts with many of the black tribes in the region, their attempts to expand their trading footholds into the interior ended in dismal failure. This was due primarily to the inhospitable terrain and to the prevalence of disease. Portuguese expeditions sent into the jungles to “pacify” and to “bring civilization” to the indigenous peoples disappeared, wiped out by “fever.” Even expeditions aimed primarily at exploration of the interior were defeated by swamp, jungle, hostile tribes, and malaria.
The Portuguese experience on the Guinea Coast taught later European traders the futility of attempting to conquer and control the country—which was their usual method when dealing with “lesser” peoples. Instead, European traders followed the Portuguese example, contenting themselves with building fortified enclaves on the coast in which they could live and work safely and from which they could trade on a more or less equal basis with the powerful local black kings and chieftains.
In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese monopoly of Guinea Coast trade was decisively broken when the Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and Swedish all began constructing their own trading forts in competition with the Portuguese and with each other. By the mid-1650s there were dozens of European trading enclaves, from Senegal in the north to Cape Lopez in the south.
Throughout the seventeenth century, as European maritime nations fought each other for ascendancy in Europe and on the sea-lanes of the world, the Guinea Coast was a theater of war. Reflecting the ebb and flow of the worldwide struggle, trading forts were besieged, captured, lost, recaptured, and lost again. It was an age of ferment and turmoil in that area.
It was also an era that saw a drastic change in the nature of the trade between Europe and Africa. For it was in the late 1600s that slaves became the prime commodity bought and sold on the coast.
Although the Portuguese had in the past carried on a limited trade in Guinea Coast slaves for the New World, the trade had never become a major component of Portugal’s commerce.
In the seventeenth century, however, with the establishment of plantation colonies—especially by the English—in the Caribbean and in North America, cheap labor to cut the sugar cane and to pick the cotton became a sought-after commodity.
Soon black human beings, captured and enslaved by black kings and black chieftains and then sold to white traders for transport to America, became the most profitable “product” on the Guinea Coast, replacing gold, ivory and spices.
It is estimated that by 1700, approximately 25,000 slaves were being shipped annually from the Guinea Coast to New World markets.
The trade in human beings, with all its moral and social consequences for the white men who took part in it and for the future of the Americas, also gravely marked and distorted the development and history of the black African nations that so willingly participated.
So frenzied was the demand for slave labor, and so lucrative did the trade become, that by the early years of the eighteenth century, many African kings along the coast had banned traditional pursuits in commerce, agriculture, and culture in order to devote themselves and their people completely to the task of supplying captives for purchase by European traders.
This policy led to brutalization of the people of the region, depopulation of the hinterland, loss of cultural values and skills—and severe economic dislocation when the trade came to an end. In essence, the Africans involved in the slave trade sold not only their people but their future to the white slavers.
But in spite of their involvement with, and dependence upon, the European traders, the black rulers of such powerful local kingdoms as Dahomey and Ashanti still maintained political and military control over the coast and over the trading forts in their territory. Both the Europeans and the Africans realized that while these well-armed forts could protect European interests for a time, they could not be held indefinitely if local chiefs turned hostile.
Most of the Europeans established on the shores of Black Africa still remembered that in 1637 the Dutch—after taking Elmina from the Portuguese—had tried to subjugate the tribes around this formidable fort. But they had been soundly defeated, with much loss of life, by the local kings. Similar efforts by whites to dominate various areas along the coast had also failed.
In the eighteenth century, with the slave trade thriving as never before, white traders acknowledged their vulnerability to the local black kings and did all that was demanded of them to secure the goodwill of the surrounding tribes and kingdoms. For example, white traders almost invariably paid a tribute, or a rent, for the right to maintain their forts on the coast. In addition, the traders usually had to recognize local chiefs and kings as the sole agents supplying slaves to the white men. White traders were forbidden to purchase their “merchandise” from any other source, although the chieftains themselves were free to get the best price they could from other European bidders for their slaves. The white traders were also required to pay homage to local kings and to acknowledge their sovereignty in many public ways. For example, ships arriving to trade at coastal forts had to fire salutes in honor of the local monarch. Any captain who failed to do so was subject to arrest and fine.
In Whydah, a major English slave-trading station on the coast, the local king insisted upon acting as arbiter if any dispute arose among the European traders who visited his little realm. His decisions were final and there was no appeal. Any European—English or otherwise—who made any objection whatsoever to the king’s decision on disputes within his dominion, was summarily expelled from the coast.
In the court of the king of the Fanti, all European traders were required to remove their hats in the royal presence and to execute an obeisance to the king—exactly as if he had been a European autocrat. The king of Dahomey would shake hands with a European only as a “very uncommon mark of royal condescension.”
Europeans may have smarted at the necessity for bowing before rulers whom they regarded as little more than barbarians, but they did whatever was required of them, for the commerce that was enriching them depended entirely upon the goodwill of such “savages.”
In the first quarter of the eighteenth century the booming slave trade along the Guinea Coast w
as largely in the hands of the British—thanks primarily to British maritime supremacy. But British ascendancy had not been achieved overnight.
During the 1600s the English, like other European trading nations, had built a number of powerful forts on the coast. They had also seized others from rival nations. But the English government, unlike its rivals, found a way to maintain these important installations without draining its manpower reserves or its national treasury: It turned them over to the Royal African Company, a trading enterprise founded in 1672 along the lines of the powerful and successful East India Company.
In exchange for manning and maintaining English forts along the seaboard, the company received a monopoly over all trade, including the slave trade, on the Guinea Coast. In this way the Royal African Company became not only the largest single commercial enterprise on the coast but also the military and political surrogate of the British government. When the slave trade boomed, the Royal African Company was well placed to dominate it.
By 1713, when the War of the Spanish Succession ended and England stood supreme over her rivals, the Royal African Company controlled the trade in slaves, gold, ivory, and any other commodity from Senegal to Angola.
The company held forts at the mouth of the Gambia River; at Cape Coast Castle in what is now Ghana; at Whydah and Anamabu in present-day Benin; and at half a dozen other locations. Through these heavily fortified trading centers flowed the wealth, and the blood, of Africa.
To places like these also came white men, usually young and poor, intent on making their fortunes. They lived lonely lives in an oppressive climate, and in an alien culture. Surrounded by damp black forests, always fearful of treachery, they had to endure long empty days under the blinding sun and sticky nights of boredom. Engaged in the inhuman slave trade, subservient to brutal African tribal leaders, they soon became hardened to anguish—their own and that of the victims of their enterprise. Almost always these white fortune seekers sickened—spiritually as well as physically. Many died of the fevers that seemed to live in the very air. Many turned to alcohol and to native women for solace. More than a few went mad.
