by Hugh Thomas
As well as the trade to Brazil, there was also in Angola still a flourishing coastal slave trade with Guinea and São Tomé, and even from Luanda to the southern city of Benguela. Municipal councils in the different parts of Luanda, the governor, the bishop, and most government and ecclesiastical officials were paid indirectly in “black ivory”: it was in return for such services that the councilors were awarded a third of the available shipping space for themselves in 1716.
On the other shore of the Atlantic, travelers to Bahia, at the end of the seventeenth century, were astonished at the numbers of slaves, especially domestic ones, as they were amazed at the frequency with which black girls, lavishly adorned with jewels, but slaves all the same, became the mistresses or even wives of Portuguese settlers. For example, the French traveler La Barbinais noted, in 1729: “The Portuguese born in Brazil prefer the possession of a black or a mulatto woman to the most beautiful [white] one. I have often asked them whence comes such a bizarre taste, but they do not know the answer themselves. I believe that, being brought up and fed by these slaves, they acquire these inclinations with their milk.”15
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Scandinavians were also by then implicated in the slave trade from Africa. One initiative was taken by Louis de Geer, a financial genius from Liège, who had made a fortune from Swedish ironworks during the Thirty Years’ War. He was inspired to interest himself in Africa by Samuel Blommaert of Amsterdam. His first voyage returned to Gothenburg by way of West Africa and the Caribbean with a good cargo of tobacco and sugar, as well as ivory and gold; other journeys followed. Though Swedish in name, these expeditions were mostly led by Dutch captains, who had been rejected by their own Africa company, and the capital behind the schemes came from de Geer’s friends in Amsterdam. A company was formed in 1649, the charter being a copy of the Dutch West India Company’s of 1621 except that, so far as possible, the firm would use Swedish ships, crewed by Swedes, and built in Sweden. If forts were built in Africa, Swedish soldiers would man them.
The company commissioned Henrick Carloff, that restless captain originally from Rostock, in the duchy of Mecklenburg, on the Baltic Sea, to make African settlements. He indeed did begin to do so, at Cape Coast (Carlosburg), between Elmina and Nassau, the cornerstone being apparently laid by a Swiss, Isaac Melville. Some of Carloff’s subsequent adventures have been described earlier. The English, the Dutch, and the Portuguese had trading stations nearby and they, of course, protested at the newcomer’s arrival. Carloff cleverly renewed an old document which a Swedish predecessor had made with the king of Fetu, and built fortified trading stations at Anamabo and Takoradi, as well as, on a smaller scale, Gemoree and Apollonia. For several years, these settlements were successful, largely because the Dutch and English were at war with one another.
Next, following in the wake of Carloff, a Baltic aristocrat became concerned. This was the duke of Courland (Lithuania), then a dependency of Poland, though the duke descended from the grand masters of the Teutonic knights. In 1651, seamen acting for that faraway nobleman seized Saint Andrew’s Island in the river Gambia: that was the origin of Fort James (James Island) which, after 1658, fell first to the Dutch and, in 1660, to the English being conquered by that same Admiral Robert Holmes who would sweep so successfully through the Dutch forts on Guinea before turning aside to seize New Amsterdam. The duke of Courland had intended to trade slaves: one thousand, “or indeed more,” to be sold in America—more precisely, in Tobago, where the duke sought to set up a sugar colony in 1654. But there is no evidence that such a traffic ever began.
The year 1651 also saw the Danes committed to begin an adventure in Guinea which would last over two hundred years. The plan was conceived in Glückstadt, a fortified city of Holstein on the Elbe (then part of Denmark), which had been renowned for its generous reception of Portuguese Jews. These seem to have taken the initiative in launching the Danish African trade, Simon and Henrik de Casseres being the first to receive “sea passes” to go to trade at Barbados, from the patron of the city, Count Dietrich Reventlow. Danish ships were recorded in Africa from 1649, and a charter for the Glückstadt Company was drawn up in 1651. Jens Lassen, secretary to the exchequer in Copenhagen, went so far as to ask for a permission to enter the slave trade from Bernardino de Rebolledo, the astonished Spanish minister, and a ship owned by Lassen and some partners, the Neldebladet, was the first Danish vessel to carry slaves from Africa to the West Indies, bringing back sugar, ivory, gold, and palm oil to the Elbe. The success of this voyage stimulated further journeys.
In 1657, Carloff, who had by then quarreled with his Swedish employers, sailed from Denmark on a new ship, the Glückstadt, with a Danish force, and seized the Swedish establishments which he himself had founded at Takoradi, Ursu (Accra), and Anamabo. He even captured a Swedish ship, laden with gold and probably slaves, too, the Stockholm Slott. Carloff returned to Europe; the Swedes requested his arrest as a pirate; the Danish authorities allowed him to escape, with his stolen property; and war between Denmark and Sweden followed. Carloff, however, slipped back to Guinea and founded his own fort, Christiansborg, at what became Accra, and later also built Fort Friedrichsburg. The Swedes sent a naval vessel to Africa to reconquer what they had lost, but were unsuccessful. Henceforth, the Swedes, preoccupied by their ambitions in Poland, disappeared from the history of Africa, if not entirely from that of the slave trade. But Carloff remained, to desert the Danes in turn as he had deserted the Swedes, and then to act, as indicated earlier, as an agent for French slave labor in the 1660s.
The Danes, meantime, after several naval battles with the Dutch, carried on a modest slave trade from several of the forts that Carloff had won for them, as also from Friedrichsburg and Christiansborg. An average of a ship a year left the latter in the 1670s, carrying about four thousand slaves to the Caribbean in the twenty-five years between 1675 and 1700. (Carlosburg, however, beside Cape Coast, had by then been finally lost to the English.)
The Danish arrangements were far from regular. When Carloff died, his successor at Christiansborg Castle, Johann Ulrich, was murdered by a Greek butler in 1679, and Ulrich’s successor, Pieter Bolt, sold the place on his own responsibility to the Portuguese and the local Africans for a mere £36 in gold. It was not till 1682 that, with the help of the Dutch, the Danes recovered that castle; and they then lost it again to Africans in 1692. But they once more recovered it, and would hold it throughout the eighteenth century. Their main preoccupation was to send slaves to Saint Thomas, the tiny sugar-island colony which they had acquired in the Caribbean.
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Yet one more Northern European people entered upon the African scene: the Brandenburgers. Once again, as in the case of the Danish involvement in Africa, Dutch interlopers seem to have taken the initiative, in this instance to influence the Great Elector Frederick William. So the Germans entered African commerce with an expedition led by one of these men from Holland, Captain Joris Bartelsen, sailing under the Brandenburg flag. His idea was to carry slaves from Angola to Lisbon and Cádiz. He was also instructed to bring home to the Great Elector in Berlin “six slaves aged between 14 and 16, handsome and well-built.”16
Though nothing came of this journey, settlements in the name of Brandenburg were made by another Dutch interloper, Benjamin Raule, from Zeeland: at Gross Friedrichsburg, subsequently Princestown, near Axim; at Fort Dorothea, at Akwidah; and at a trading post at Takoradi. The Brandenburgers also established themselves in 1685 at the abandoned Portuguese post at Arguin, the first European commitment in West Africa, their hold on which was confirmed by the Peace of Ryswick (they carried on much contraband from there). From these bases, German captains were ready to sell slaves to São Tomé and to the Dutch Guyana colony on the Berbice River, and even to bring them back for use in Berlin. In the Caribbean, the Germans, who had no American possessions, carried most of their slaves to the Danish island of Saint Thomas in the West Indies.
These Brandenburgers came to Africa in substantial
strength—more so than the other Europeans. At their smallest forts, there was a captain and, under him, nearly a hundred men, sixteen six-pounder cannon, and fifteen hundred hand grenades. After a while, they sought a West Indian base: they tried for Tobago, as the duke of Courland had earlier done, but the Dutch opposed them, and they did not press the matter.
In consequence, no doubt, of this failure, the Brandenburgers soon tired of African adventure and, after some delays, sold out to the Dutch in 1720, when Gross Friedrichsburg became, more modestly, Fort Hollandia.
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By 1700, all the chartered national companies, ambitious “nationalized industries,” set up to trade with Africa and carry slaves to the New World, seemed to be financial failures. They were usually unable to attract sufficient capital, and so governments were continually forced to subsidize them; the officials on their payrolls could not prevent high costs, deriving from the maintenance and defense of forts in Guinea, as well as from their own salaries; they failed to secure employees willing (or able) to surrender their private interests; and their obligations—for example, to provide a specific number of slaves every year to a specific buyer—meant that they had to trade, whatever the conditions. They were constantly criticized—above all, by independent traders excluded from their monopoly, and by manufacturers, who objected to the terms according to which they exchanged goods for slaves, as by political opponents of monarchical power. Even the Dutch West India Company was outma-neuvered on every side by interlopers. The same was equally true in relation to its English, French, and Portuguese equivalents.
In consequence of these failures, the commanders of the settlements in Africa which depended on the companies were by 1700 beginning to adopt a policy of “live and let live” rather than conquest: born of weakness and exhaustion, not principle. The monopoly companies could not defeat the interlopers, any more than the English could annihilate the Dutch, or vice versa. What was true of nations was true of different groups within them.
At the end of the seventeenth century, there were in that region of Africa which had the largest number of foreigners, the Gold Coast, nearly four hundred Dutch citizens, about two hundred English, about eighty-five Danes, and the same number of Brandenburgers. There were some small Portuguese settlements on the rivers Cacheu and Bissau, between Cape Verde and the river Sierra Leone, as on the Cape Verde Islands themselves. The French and English had forts on the rivers Sénégal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Sherbro, as also at Gorée. The Dutch, Portuguese, and English also had trading stations at Whydah (Ouidah) on the Slave Coast (the kings there would only permit Europeans to establish mud forts at three miles inland from the shore). All the nations concerned except the Portuguese eschewed anything in the nature of real colonies. Most European governments even deplored the idea of their employees’ making gardens and plantations, on the ground that the land was leased, not owned. Thus, in 1678, the local chief agent of the RAC recommended that all trading for slaves should be conducted from sloops, offshore: “Once settled ashore, a factor is absolutely under the command of the king where he lives, and is liable for the least displeasure to lose all the goods he has in his possession, with danger also to his life.”17 (As late as 1752, the British Board of Trade would forbid the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa—a successor to the RAC, as will be seenVII—to introduce any kind of cultivation into the Gold Coast, since they “were only tenants of the soil which we hold at the good will of the natives.”18) The Portuguese African establishments south of the equator—in São Tomé, Congo, and Angola, as well as in Mozambique, where a steady flow of slaves for the Americas now derived—were more solid enterprises. Luanda was a real imperial outpost with a governor, a bureaucracy, and a bishop, each with appropriate public buildings.
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The last quarter of the seventeenth century had seen a great increase in the export of slaves from all these African ports. The best historian of the statistics of this matter thought that there might have been nearly 370,000 exported between 1650 and 1675, or a little less than 15,000 a year, and for the years between 1675 and 1700, his estimate was just over 600,000, an annual average of over 24,000. A majority of these slaves were now going to the islands of the Caribbean.19
The impact on West Africa was, of course, colossal, but it is not easy to give an impression of the consequences so far. For example, the ivory trade had for a long time been a rival of the trade in slaves in the European mind (in the seventeenth century, the region of the Rio del Rey, on the east side of the delta of the Niger, was exporting forty thousand pounds of ivory a year). But two centuries of uncontrolled hunting had greatly diminished the number of elephants. Gold, on the other hand, was still a real rival to slaving. Then, too, most European traders entered into several departments of African commerce: thus the Portuguese used kola nuts from Sierra Leone to buy slaves in Senegambia; the Dutch shipped beads and cloth from Benin to the Gold Coast. So it is hard to distinguish between the impact of European trade as such and the impact of the trade in slaves.
Yet there were obviously political changes in Africa because of the slave trade. Just as the medieval Arab trade in slaves had inspired new cities on the bend of the Niger, such as Timbuktu, so the Atlantic trade in slaves was consolidating new polities: for example, in Ashanti and Accra, on the Gold Coast, in Dahomey and Lagos, on the Slave Coast, as in the oligarchies of the delta of the Nile. In Senegambia, the region of the Wolofs, the Damel (ruler) of Lat Sukaabe would inspire reforms which led to the increase in the number of slave warriors; while the Bambara kingdom, founded about 1710, on the Middle Niger, would soon become an “enormous machine to produce slaves.”20 The decay of the kingdom of Congo was a good example of the impact of slaving on an indigenous monarchy.
The emergence of the Ashanti kingdom on the Gold Coast shows how hard it is to decide absolutely about the impact of the Atlantic commerce. The Ashanti, living about one hundred miles north of Elmina on the Gold Coast, also to the north of the gold mines of the Akan forest, had been for many years dependents of the Akans. By 1700, the Akans were conquered by their vassals who, led by Osei Tuti, the first “Asantahene,” or independent monarch of the Ashanti, using guns obtained from the English and Dutch, would soon establish his people as the dominant one on the Gold Coast. Osei Tuti’s new capital was Kumasi, a city built near the ancient trading town of Tafo, and the symbol of the power of the new empire was the famous golden stool. The Ashanti soon traded slaves extensively with the Dutch. Yet they would probably have become an important power even if it had not been for the slave trade. They were, after all, concerned with gold more than with slaves for a generation after their emergence from the Akan yoke. Between 1675 and 1700, three-quarters of the value of Dutch imports from Guinea was gold, and only about 13 percent slaves. Thereafter, slavery did play a big part: a director of the Dutch West India Company reported in 1705 that the Gold Coast was “changing completely into a slave coast, and the natives no longer concentrate on the search for gold, but make war on each other to acquire slaves.”21
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By 1700, it should have been evident that no chartered company had a future. But all staggered on, as state enterprises usually do, and new ones even came to be founded. It should have been obvious too to the Spanish Crown that the pursuit of the ideal monopoly contract (asiento) for trading slaves was as vain as the search for a Fountain of Eternal Youth; and it should have been evident to potential candidates eager to obtain that contract that it was an enterprise as unlucky as it was unprofitable. But not only were such new privileges granted, they were sought after ever more enthusiastically. Indeed, during the War of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1701, the issue of which nation afterwards would have the asiento was one of the most important questions at stake.
In 1700, the Portuguese still had the privilege of the asiento but, as has been seen, their control of it had been wracked by controversy. Further, most of the goods carried on the outward journey were, as
often as not, French, provided by powerful French merchants in both Portugal and Spain. So it was not surprising that, in 1701, the Cacheu Company should have been induced, by a handsome payment of a million pesos, to hand back the asiento to the Spanish Crown. The new French-born king of Spain, Philip V, grandson of the king of France, immediately gave the opportunity to France. Future profits were to be divided among the two Bourbon kings of Spain and France, and Jean-Baptiste Ducasse, the hero of Gorée, now governor of the amazingly successful sugar colony Saint-Domingue. He had been a French special envoy in Madrid, and was an experienced trader in Africa, for he had earlier worked for the Sénégal Company as a captain of slave ships as well as an effective administrator (his favor with Louis XIV was due to his actions in seizing both Cartagena de Indias and Jamaica during the wars of the 1690s).VIII In consequence of these arrangements, King Pedro of Portugal allied with England and the Habsburgs against the Bourbons, and Philip V immediately canceled all payments which he had agreed to make to his Portuguese colleague.23 This marked a real triumph for France: after all, one of the long-standing aims of Colbert had been to gain control of the Spanish markets.
The French, under the new arrangements, were to take their slaves from Angola and the island of Corisco, off Gabon. They were to enjoy a ten-year monopoly, from 1702 to 1712; 4,800 piezas de indias were to be delivered every year to any port in the Spanish Indies to which entry was not specifically prohibited. On nearly all the slaves, a duty of thirty-three and a third écus would be levied. Three thousand slaves would also be taken to the French Indies; and, whatever company performed these duties in France, it would have to pay the king of Spain six hundred thousand livres.
