The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Louis XIV, on the advice of his astute chancellor Louis Pontchartrain—another hero of Saint-Simon—assigned the prize of the asiento to the Guinea Company (at that time one of three surviving French African companies, the others being the Royal Company of Sénégal of 1696, and the Royal Company of Saint-Domingue).IX

  The treaty was unpopular in Spain. France had been mocked continually during the seventeenth century, and it seemed that now the imperial economy was being handed over to the object of the national derision. Any dandified courtier in Madrid might be seized by the townspeople and asked if he could pronounce “ajo” (garlic) or “cebolla” (onion); if he could not, he ran the risk of being beaten for the crime of being French. The Council of the Indies thought that the treaty would make it easy for the French merchants to import all manner of goods into the empire, as well as slaves, and thought that “Spanish national interests”—the modern phrase was used—would undoubtedly suffer. The king made a mild effort to mollify the offended commercial leaders of his new country by prohibiting the Guinea Company’s ships from docking at Pacific ports and reducing the number of slaves to be landed at Buenos Aires. Those provisions had little effect: and Spanish officials both at home and in the Indies did all they could to impede the new contractors. Even the Council of the Indies, in 1702, forbade the import of slaves from the Gold Coast or Cape Verde Islands into the empire, on the specious ground that they were barbarous, difficult to convert to Christianity, and liable to eat human flesh “with voracity.” When one of the company’s vessels, the Gaillarde of La Rochelle, reached Cartagena in 1703, with thirty-six ill among 103 male slaves on board, the governor there, Díaz Pimenta, charged the full duty. There were other minor vexations which the Spaniards delighted to devise in order to humiliate or to obstruct their new patrons.

  At the same time, the illegal trade continued. The Guinea Company later claimed that, in its years of privilege, it carried a total of ten or twelve thousand slaves, but the real figure imported at that time into the Spanish empire approached forty thousand. Demand seemed greater than ever in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession. The new gold mines of El Choco in New Granada, if never so significant as those in Brazil, used up slaves at a high rate. Though Holland was at war with France, the Dutch West India Company sold many slaves to the Guinea Company at Curaçao, and knew that they could have sold more, had they had them: representatives of the French asentistas (Gaspar Martin, Jean Chourra, Louis Chambert) visited them with that in mind. (The accounts of the Dutch West India Company show that almost twenty thousand slaves were sold in Curaçao to Spanish buyers between 1700 and 1729.)

  Jamaica, the main entrepôt of France’s most important enemies, the English, was at this time even busier, dealing both direct with the asiento company, and through interlopers. Yet there was English indignation (especially among the directors of the RAC) that France should have secured the great contract. After all, Britain was by then more important as a slaving nation than France was. In 1701, the slave population of Martinique, Saint-Domingue, and Guadeloupe was a mere forty-four thousand, many of whom must have come from Jamaica or Barbados. Over twice as many were imported into the British colonies in the first ten years of the century alone.

  In May 1702, an infuriated RAC suggested to the British Admiralty that, if the French could only be prevented from obtaining slaves to fulfill their contract, the Spanish colonists might be forced to buy from England. The African Company’s factor in Jamaica, Lieutenant-Governor Peter Beckford (a sugar planter, of Gloucestershire origin, then at the beginning of his family’s rise to vast wealth), wrote to the secretary of state, James Vernon, suggesting that the English should station frigates off Portobelo and Cartagena de Indias, and on the African coast, in order to “constrict the French trade.”24 English merchants, he thought, should also be prevented from making contracts with the French or from delivering slaves to them. Next year, the RAC itself, in the same vein, suggested to Vernon’s successor, Lord Nottingham, that, since French slave ships spent about two months on the African coast collecting slaves, a mere three British ships of war and one fire ship could spoil their entire traffic.

  The British government did not pursue this tactic, but the war did mean fighting between British and French ships. Thus a new lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, Handasyd (an enemy of Beckford, whom he accused of murder), wrote in 1703 to the Board of Trade and Plantations in London: “We have a dismal account of the great losses of the merchant ships by [French] privateers of Martinico [Martinique] which, as I have been informed, are twenty-eight in number and have taken seventy odd sail of ships and sloops. Some of them are laden with negroes.” He added: “Our number of slaves augments daily but, to my great grief, the number of white men daily decrease.”25

  The British and the French were in competition everywhere, even for the trade of Loango Bay. With the Dutch in retreat from those harbors, the French desired to destroy all their rivals in the region and establish their own monopoly. For they had been informed that, given proper supervision, two thousand slaves could be bought annually at Loango, and the same number again in the two nearby small ports of Cabinda and Malemba. The rivalry of great powers was, however, destructive for the trade there; and, in 1706, a Dutch captain reported that, though there were many slaves available in those ports, no one was there to buy them.

  In 1707, the British government, largely to satisfy the RAC, drew up a draft contract between Queen Anne and the Archduke Charles, the British candidate to be king of Spain, to supply slaves to the Spanish empire, this being sent to James Stanhope, their minister in Spain. The British would pledge themselves in ten years to find the 48,000 slaves which the French had undertaken to carry but, thanks to the war, had been unable to deliver. Advances would be paid, rather like a modern contract for a book (“The contractors are to advance by way of anticipation 200,000 pesetas [in pieces-of-eight] or £45,000 English money, to be paid in two payments, the first two months after his Catholic Majesty’s approbation of this contract, the second two months after the first, which sum the said contractors shall not be reimburst”). But those were matters for the peace to resolve.

  The French themselves had more ambitious plans. That same year, Louis XIV sent an emissary—a rich young official, Nicolas Mesnager—to Holland to propose a collaboration of all the maritime powers to provide slaves for the Americas. A similar plan was proposed by King Philip V: Spain, Britain, Holland, and France were to have each a fourth part. This remarkable idea for a European Common Market in selling slaves failed: since the Dutch refused to think of making common cause with the French, nothing was done.

  The British maintained their pressure on Spain. By 1710, they were selling well over ten thousand slaves a year to the Indies, the Spanish empire included; the French sold fewer than thirteen thousand in the twelve years 1702-13. The former were obviously in the dominant position. The Spaniards and the French were also falling out. For example, in 1712, the Guinea Company asked the Crown of Spain for five million pesos in debts, interest, and damages. Many colonists in the Spanish empire and several officials in Spain were coming to think that recourse to England (Britain, as the United Kingdom had officially become in 1707) was the only way that their empire could be properly stocked with African labor. At the same time, in London, “this abstruse trade” now seemed “the most beneficial of all others to the nation.”26 There were innumerable petitions to the House of Commons from gunmakers, cutlers, dyers, sailmakers, weavers, and tuckers, manufacturers of wrought iron from Birmingham, serge makers, merchants from Edinburgh and from Chester, not to speak of manufacturers of Welsh flannel, at the horrible thought that the government might, as a result of the forthcoming peace, limit rather than extend their participation in the trade to Africa, and hence in the traffic of slaves.

  The consequence was that, when the Treaty of Utrecht came to be drawn up in 1713, to conclude the War of the Spanish Succession, the British were able to insist on taking over the asiento. Tho
ugh a Bourbon ruled in Madrid, British ships would carry Africans to the Americas to work in the haciendas, the palaces, the mines, and the tobacco and sugar farms of his great empire. A new French Company of Sénégal, run by merchants from Rouen, could do little more than complain. It was a victory for British diplomacy beside which the concurrent acquisition of Gibraltar and Minorca seemed modest.

  * * *

  IThe most prominent of the businessmen who took advantage of this opportunity were Juan Rodrigo Calderón, Juan de Salcedo, and Jacinto Núñez de Loarca.

  IIWalrond was marquis of Vallado, an obscure mountain hamlet near Oviedo.

  IIIA pieza de indias was a male slave in the prime of life and in good health; two children could make up one pieza de indias, and two or even three old women could also.

  IVCapuchin friars, mostly Italians, had reached Congo, precisely the Sonyo community, in 1645, to embark on a determined effort at evangelization which continued till at least 1700.

  VThis was not the first Portuguese privileged company; the Companhia da Costa de Guiné had had a short-lived and obscure existence for a few years after 1664, organized by the brothers Lorenzo and Manuel Martins.

  VITomas Figueira Bultão and Diogo Sanches Caraçe, then Antônio da Gama Nunes and Jeronymo Teixeira da Fonseca.

  VIISee page 265.

  VIIISaint-Simon, in his memoirs, reserved for this son of a seller of hams in Bayonne some of his most respectful sentences: “gentle, polite, respectful,” he was also possessed of “much fire and vivacity”; he was “never false to himself.”22

  IXThe king would pay a bounty of thirteen livres per slave delivered live to the Americas, in order to encourage the traffic. The company was relieved of paying any duty on any goods carried. Two hundred thousand pesos would be paid to the Spanish Crown for the contract, and it would pay a duty per slave of thirty-three and a third pesos, which was 4.5 percent lower than the one levied on the Portuguese. Further, 17 percent of the duty was to be deducted per head of four thousand eight hundred slaves actually delivered: an enticement which suggests how little the expectation was that the contract would be fulfilled. The company would not, actually, have a complete monopoly, for trade to Cayenne and to the Windward Isles was to be allowed to other French traders. All merchants of the Breton port of Nantes might also go to Guinea, if they paid the company twenty livres per head on the slaves whom they took to Saint-Domingue, and ten livres if they went to the other French islands. Merchants from Martinique might import four or five hundred slaves a year, provided that they paid thirteen livres to the company and sent a hundred slaves to Guadeloupe. A final section of this exceptionally complicated understanding provided that the two kings, Louis XIV and Philip V, grandfather and grandson, would take a quarter each of the stock in the company, while the rest would be available for French investors. The company also agreed to give King Philip a loan to buy the stock which he had reserved to him.

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  Book Three

  APOGEE

  13

  No Nation Has Plunged So Deeply into This Guilt As Great Britain

  “No nation in Europe . . . has . . . plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain.”

  William Pitt the Younger, in the House of Commons, April 1792

  IN 1713, THE TREATY OF UTRECHT, a Dutch name for a Latin peace, presented several gifts to Britain: two places from which to command the Mediterranean, Gibraltar and Minorca; Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, two deserts of ice, as Voltaire would later describe Canada; and, the greatest prize, the El Dorado of commerce, as it then seemed, the endlessly sought-after contract (asiento) to import slaves, and a few other goods, to the Spanish Indies. No knowledge of the financial failure of earlier contractors dimmed the satisfaction now felt in Britain.

  The architect of this British triumph was Lord Lexington, the British ambassador in Madrid, on the advice of a commercial expert, a friend of the Jacobite Bolingbroke, Manuel Manasses Gilligan, who was, henceforth, to receive 7.5 percent of the profits, almost certainly for the benefit of his patron. Lexington, who was also a Jacobite, would no doubt have played a part in a new Stuart regime had one succeeded in 1714.

  The government in Britain sold the new privilege, as expected, for seven and a half million pounds to the South Sea Company, an enterprise which had been formed only two years before, as a Tory reply to the Whiggish Bank of England, precisely to export merchandise in perpetuity to the Spanish empire. The “South Sea” of the title signified generally the Pacific but also the Atlantic face of South America. Robert Harley, then chancellor of the Exchequer, in effect prime minister, was the new company’s first governor. South Sea House was eventually established in the heart of the City of London, at the corner of Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. The hope was that the national debt would be wiped out by the abundant Spanish trade; thus nine million pounds’ worth of unfunded government securities were compulsorily exchanged for shares in the South Sea Company.1

  The genius behind this company, “the earl of Oxford’s masterpiece,” was a financial adventurer, John Blunt, son of a Baptist shoemaker from Rochester, who had made a fortune from manufacturing sword blades, conveniently married a daughter of a director of the RAC, Richard Crad-docke, and was said to live with his prayer book in his left hand and a company prospectus in his right, without letting either know what the other held. Daniel Defoe wrote a powerful pamphlet in favor of setting up the company. “There has not been in our memory an undertaking of such consequence,” he said, though he did not mention the main purpose of the enterprise once in his forty pages. (It has been suggested that the idea of the company originated in his brain.)2

  A torchlight procession through London greeted the news of the grant. Happy days had, it seemed, come again! The moment had been foreshadowed in Queen Anne’s speech to Parliament of June 6, 1712: “I have insisted and obtained that the asiento or contract for furnishing the Spanish West Indies with negroes shall be made with us for thirty years.”3

  The occasion was a special triumph for London, with its hundred joint-stock companies, its stockjobbers, its two hundred coffee houses, its five thousand or so traders, with their handsome counting houses, its large foreign communities (Huguenots, Dutchmen, Germans, and Scotchmen), its eighteen newspapers, its unnumerable pamphleteers, its inventiveness, and its curious disposition to catch speculative fever.

  The South Sea Company had the same kind of obligations which had been assumed by other asentistas: in addition to its requirement to carry 4,800 slaves annually for thirty years, it had to pay the Spanish king thirty-three and a half pesos in silver for each captive delivered safe and sound, and also to pay him an advance of 200,000 pesos. All the ports of the Spanish Indies made available to France in 1701 were to be open to the company’s ships. In addition to taking slaves, the company was to be allowed to send one “permission ship,” of five to six hundred tons, every year to Portobelo, Cartagena, and Buenos Aires, carrying British goods. But the slaves constituted the most important item of the planned commerce.

  Spain ensured that she did well out of the affair: officials in Madrid, such as the president of the Council of the Indies and the five members of the Junta de Negros, all received handsome fees. King Philip V was allocated 28 percent of the stock in the company, and Queen Anne in England 22.5 percent but, as in the arrangement made ten years before with the French Guinea Company, the company would lend the king of Spain one million pesos with which to buy his shares.

  The scheme was not universally popular in England; and the planters of Jamaica opposed it, since they thought it likely to ruin their thriving illegal trade to the Spanish empire (before 1713, Jamaica had provided the Spaniards, as even Robert Harley admitted, “one year with another, with three or four thousand negroes, in return for which, and for flower [sic], woollen and other goods, there has been received of them in gold and silver and the produce of New Spain 200,000 or 250,000 pounds yearly”). The youthful but skillful new British envoy in Madri
d, George Bubb, thought the same: “I have perused the Asiento treaty,” he wrote to the secretary of state, “and I do think it one of the worst that I ever saw and the most calculated for captiousness and chicane.”4 (This individual, who, when he inherited money from an uncle, took the name of Dodington, later became known as the most unctuous English place-hunter of the mid-eighteenth century.) The merchants of Bristol were also far from pleased by what they thought of as a confirmation of London merchants’ privileges.

  But the plan went ahead. The South Sea Company agreed to buy in Africa the slaves required from the old RAC; take them to Jamaica, where the weakest, the “refuse” slaves, would be eliminated (left to die uncared for on the dock, in many cases); and then carry the prime slaves to Spanish markets. A second contract specified how the RAC would provide the 4,800 slaves. In the event, these rules were not observed: a third of the company’s ships would go to Loango Bay, a quarter to the Gold Coast, a little less to Dahomey, and the rest mostly set off for Senegambia. Some ships went as far as Mozambique and even Madagascar.

  The new South Sea Company established factories at Barbados (directed by Dudley Woodbridge) and at Port Royal, Jamaica (controlled by John Merewether), for the shipment of slaves onwards to the Spaniards; slaves for Buenos Aires (now, for the first time, a port to reckon with) were carried direct across the South Atlantic in a trade amounting to two or three ships a year. In the entrepôts of Barbados and Jamaica, the slaves would be “refreshed” and made to look healthy after their Atlantic voyage. The company would hire sloops or packet boats locally in Jamaica or Barbados for the short onward journey to the Spanish ports. The enterprise also had agencies in Cartagena de Indias, Panama, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, Havana, Santiago de Cuba and, after 1735, Caracas. Each of the factors in these places was free with his presents to Spanish officials. Instructions to the one in Havana, for example (this was Richard O’Farrill, whose parents hailed from Longford, in Ireland, though they had established themselves in Montserrat), included the provision that he was “to take special care of what Negroes come to your hands for the Company’s account. . . . You are to sell for ready money as much as possible. But, where you are under an absolute necessity of trusting, you are to make strict enquiry after the ability and honesty of the parties, taking such security as you think will be punctually performed and to be very cautious and circumspect that the Company may not Sustain any losses thereby. . . . You are to keep a regular and exact account of what negroes come by each ship, how many Men Women Boys and Girls and their ages and how they are disposed of to whom and at what price. . . .”5