by Hugh Thomas
With this contract, a long-standing British ambition was fulfilled, although, as is often the case, no sooner was one aim achieved than another took shape. On December 15, 1713, at a meeting in the Board of Trade, London, Colonel Cleland, that body’s agent for Barbados, suggested to the Lords Commissioner of Plantations (in effect the administrators of the colonial empire) that “we should endeavour to exclude all other nations from the negro trade etc on the coast of Africa. . . . Mr Kent replied that [that] . . . would be of extraordinary benefit, were it to be practicable. . . .” There was some discussion about the desirability of supplying Brazil, but “these gentlemen all agreed that our carrying negroes to the Brazils would be prejudicial to the British plantations in America.”6 The Portuguese trade was, of course, as they all knew, a considerable undertaking, for, in those days, the slave-powered mines at Minas Gerais were exporting a larger quantity of gold than anywhere else in the world.I
Apart from the mysterious Manasses Gilligan (for whom read, surely, Bolingbroke), among those who stood to gain by all these arrangements was, first and foremost, Queen Anne, with her substantial portfolio. When that monarch died in 1714, her successor, King George I, took over her shares, and bought more, as did his heir, the prince of Wales, who became governor in 1715, after Harley’s impeachment. After a family dispute, the king made himself governor in 1718: “You remember how the South Sea was said to be Lord Oxford’s brat,” the duchess of Ormonde wrote to Swift, who was also a shareholder, “now the King has adopted it and called it his beloved child.”7 (Swift’s “most prudent investment,” his biographer says, was £500 in South Sea stock.) In 1720, an imaginative scheme was also devised whereby the king’s two illegitimate daughters by his German mistress, Melusina, the duchess of Kendal (known as “the Maypole” because of her spare frame), would be allowed £120 for every point the stock increased.
The directors of the South Sea Company who would gain substantially included John Blunt, the instigator of the whole enterprise, politicians such as Bolingbroke, and later, the duke of Argyll and Edward Gibbon, grandfather of the historian. Another director was the fascinating Sir John Lambert, a Huguenot exile financier who traveled between England and France with apparent ease, and who had interests in the slave trade from Nantes as well as that from London. Shareholders with over ten thousand pounds’ worth of stock included the earl of Halifax, the founder of the Bank of England; the politician James Craggs; the master of the rolls, Sir Joseph Jekyll—and, after 1719, the duke of Chandos, a scandalous financier but a good administrator, who had organized the supplies for the army in Marlborough’s wars. Smaller stockholders included Swift, Defoe, Sir Godfrey Kneller (the portraitist of all his fellow investors), and Sir Isaac Newton.8
The South Sea Company was not as great a success as had been hoped. First, its capacity as “a shield for illicit trade”—in the words of Bolingbroke—was exaggerated. The executive directors of the company were always interested in that side of the matter. Ships of the company regularly did arrive at Cartagena and at Buenos Aires with not only slaves but goods of all sorts, for which, instead of paying duties, the captain paid a present to the governors. A Frenchman living in London, the androgynous malouin Guillaume Eon, the king of Spain’s representative on the board of directors of the company, was paid a thousand pounds, plus an eight-hundred-pound pension, to ensure that he avoided seeing such irregularities. The viceroy in Mexico also expected to receive similar agreeable douceurs. But the “permission ships,” the annual authorized vessels with English goods, encountered many difficulties, since they were only entitled to go to the New World when a fair was held at one of the two main points of reception of slaves, Mexico and Portobelo (for transit to Lima); and these fairs were held irregularly, nothing like so often as once a year.
Another trouble arose because the Jamaican Assembly, a more independent body than foreigners could believe, imposed a local tax of one pound on every slave exported from Jamaica, that to include even those intended to be transshipped to the Spanish world. The Council of Trade and Plantations in London tried to pronounce against any duty on slaves merely landed for “refreshment.” But the Jamaican Assembly maintained its opposition, since its members thought that they were being robbed of the profits from their old illegal trading to Spanish ports. The company had begun to consider trading direct to the Spanish empire without the much-needed stop in the British West Indies.
The company was also imprudently slow in replying to the numerous requests from private traders for special licenses: Neil Bothwell, for example, who wished to export English-carried slaves from Santo Domingo; William Lea, who hoped to do the same in Guatemala; a certain Durepaire, who desired a similar trade to Puerto Rico; and Antonio Francisco de Coulange, who wanted to sell a mere twenty slaves a year bought in Danish Saint Thomas.
Another difficulty still was that private, independent and, even by English law, illegal trade continued. Naval officers indulged themselves in this business, and the company confessed, in 1723, that they could do nothing about the matter: “As to what you write concerning our men of war protecting and carrying on the private trade,” the directors wrote to their man in Portobelo, “we are not insensible, [for], however beneficial it may be to the nation in general, it is a great damage to the Company in particular, but it is not in our province to complain of it.” Between 1738 and 1745, even sailors made complaints: for example, “This deponent, at his arrival at Anamabo [on the Gold Coast] in February . . . on board [H.M.S.] Spence, saw there negro slaves of both sexes to the number of seventy and upwards at one time, together with diverse sorts of trading goods, lying on deck and in the captain’s cabin, that were, as this dependent verily believes, bought on the said coast in order for trade.”9
All the old contractors—the Dutch, Portuguese, and French—also continued, where and when they could, to carry slaves to the Spaniards. Thus Captain Goldsborough, who took a company ship to Buenos Aires in 1731, complained that, because of Portuguese interlopers, it was “impossible to sell fifty negroes in six months.” The company’s agents did seize many illegally introduced slaves, as it was in their power to do: 231 at Portobelo in the three years 1716 to 1719. But those agents were often too fearful to act, and some of them were also interested in the illegal traffic.
The main suppliers to the South Sea Company, the RAC was also troubled by the old problem of independent traders. In 1714, Gerrard Gore, the company’s man in Cape Coast, reported, “The English interlopers continue to infest that Coast. . . . Anamabo is Seldom without Five or Six of them, and Shidoe constantly frequented by them. . . .”10 These ships were mostly from Bristol, whose merchants much resented the monopoly companies, dominated as they were by London investors. Their costs were, of course, less than those of the company, for they did not contribute to the upkeep of the forts, though they believed themselves to be more sensitive to the desires of the African monarchs than the RAC’s men were.
Then there were pirates—among whom the worst was a Spaniard, Miguel Enriquez, who made his headquarters in Puerto Rico and who preyed on both English and French shipping, with “the greatest cruelty,” often marooning the crews of slave ships on uninhabited islands, to die of thirst and hunger while he stole the slaves.
War again interrupted trading in 1718, and the asiento was closed till 1721. The company’s property was seized in the Indies. When peace came again, the contract was revived (to the fury of the Spanish prime minister, Cardinal Alberoni, who hated the Treaty of Utrecht), and the confiscated property restored, though Spaniards made new difficulties for the South Sea Company, stipulating now that all the slaves imported had to come direct from Africa; otherwise they would be tainted with heresy. In 1727, another short war with Spain again interrupted the trade, and again the company’s properties were seized for two years.
Finally, as a correction to any swift triumph in the history of the new slave-trading company, there was the speculation in shares of 1720. Change Alley, the center of Londo
n’s gambling for stocks, saw its wildest days. For the historian of the slave trade, the affair is chiefly interesting for the fact that the list of shareholders for the so-called Third Money Subscription in 1720 reads like a directory of contemporary Britain. Most of the House of Commons (462 members) and a hundred members of the House of Lords (out of its total of two hundred) were included. So were Alexander Pope, Sir John Vanbrugh, John Gay, and all the royal family, including the bastards. The speaker of the House of Commons, Black Rod in the House of Lords, and the Lord Chancellor were all on the list; and some distinguished names from France were introduced by the sophisticated Sir John Lambert. The Swiss canton of Berne had a large holding of South Sea stock—an unusual investment of that people in the slave traffic. So had King’s College, Cambridge, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Whether all these shareholders realized that the main purpose of the South Sea Company was to carry slaves to the Spanish empire is far from obvious. But all would still have thought, had they considered the matter, with Kings Charles II and James II, that it was better for black slaves to be given work by Christians in the Americas than by godless princes in Africa.
Several investors made money before the collapse of the company. One of these was the king’s mistress, the duchess of Kendal; and another was the bookseller and philanthropist Thomas Guy who, in 1720, had as much as £45,000 of the original stock. When the price of shares rose to £300, Guy began to sell, and he sold his last share at £600. With the fortune so accumulated, Guy was able to leave money for his hospital for “the poorest and sickest of the poor.”
But most people were less fortunate, for the price of a share rose to £1,000 in June 1720 and fell to £180 in September. Banks, directors, great insurance companies, statesmen, noblemen saw their imagined fortunes collapse. Some of the most powerful men in the country were ruined; at their head, the duke of Portland, son of William Ill’s favorite, who was afterwards forced to seek a colonial governorship. His move to Jamaica, the main South Sea slave entrepôt, seemed a suitable dénouement to this affair. Britain’s other main slaving center, Barbados, equally appropriately, went to another lord who had lost a fortune: Lord Bellhaven who lost his life, too, when the South Sea ship the Royal Anne, taking him to his new office, sank off the Scilly Islands. Sir Isaac Newton lost £20,000 and, it is said, could not bear to hear the words “South Sea” for the rest of his distinguished life. The playwright John Gay and the fashionable portraitist Kneller were also hard hit. Given the connection between the company and the national debt, as well as the royal implication in the business, the country itself would have faced bankruptcy had it not been for the cool head of the new first minister, Sir Robert Walpole, the intelligence of his banker Robert Jacombe, and the admirable new governor of the Bank of England, who rejoiced in the forbidding name of John Hanger.
Still, the South Sea Company survived and, between 1715 and 1731, sold altogether about 64,000 slaves: Portobelo-Panama receiving most, with about 20,000; Buenos Aires rather surprisingly coming next; while the old great port of the trade in the Spanish world, Cartagena de Indias, was third, with about 10,000 slaves. Most of these slaves came through Jamaica. A Spanish captain, Antonio de Cortayre, wrecked off that island in 1718, was obliged to live there for nearly a year, and saw over 200 small ships leaving Port Royal, most of them going to the Spanish empire, carrying from 30 to 50 slaves, as well as, to be sure, other, illegal, goods.
• • •
Britain and France had, in these early years of the golden eighteenth century, comparable experiences. Whereas the former lost her head over the South Sea Company, the latter did so with respect to the Mississippi Company. It is hard not to think that the two countries were affected by the same virus of self-deception. In both instances, too, the slave trade was an unacknowledged actor in the crisis.
In 1708, the financier, Antoine Crozat, had obtained a monopoly of commerce in the huge French dominion of Louisiana, a territory which then stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to what is now Illinois. That concession allowed him to bring in a cargo of blacks from Africa every year—which seemed quite an adventure, since, when he began to trade, there were apparently only ten slaves in the province. But Crozat, who had taken the precaution of going to India and the Middle East though not the Antilles, lost 1.2 million livres on his investment and gave up his interest to John Law’s Mississippi Company—formally the Company of the West, though the old name remained.II John Law was a brilliant Scottish adventurer. He had fled to the continent from London to avoid the consquences of a conviction for killing a certain Beau Wilson in a duel in Bloomsbury Square. In Amsterdam, he acquired a knowledge of finance as well as a fortune from gambling. Having impressed the Regent Orléans, he was permitted to found a bank which transformed the French economy by offering loans at a low rate of interest; he also issued paper money, which greatly prospered in contrast to the old French metallic currency. In 1718, Law, established magnificently in the Place Louis-le-Grand (the Place Vendôme), bought the privileges of the Company of Sénégal (formed in 1709 from the ashes of the company of the same name of 1696), to which he added, in 1719, the French East India Company, the China Company, and the Company of Africa trading into Barbary. These, together with the Company of the West, were combined into a “New Company of the Indies [Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes],” which was floated as “a mighty salvation” for the French people. As a consequence, Louisiana enjoyed a short reputation as being a new El Dorado, the site of fabulous riches, and the company was, formally at least, in possession of an empire—though only five hundred slaves were introduced into the vast colony in 1719. In the Rue Quincampoix, the French equivalent of Change Alley, multitudes seethed in an orgy of speculation, much as they had in London. All Frenchmen of foresight wished to make themselves “Mississippians”: “I must say,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “I saw nothing in France that delighted me so much as to see an Englishman (or, at least a Briton) absolute in Paris: I mean Mr Law, who treats their Dukes and Peers extremely de haut en bas.”11
In 1720, Law added to his conglomerate the Company of Saint-Domingue and also the Guinea Company. The Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes was by then the largest commercial organization which the world had yet seen, and even now must be seen as one of the largest undertakings of all time. At one moment in 1720, Law’s company had sixty-two ships at sea, as well as a monopoly of coining money, and it also managed the French national debt. Shares issued at five hundred livres reached ten thousand and, as in London, great fortunes were made overnight. Law was allowed to introduce a complete reform of the fiscal system of the country. The Royal Bank was even merged with the company. But as soon as people began to wish to realize their gains, Law’s paper money collapsed in value, and Law himself fled to Brussels, passing from being the hero of France to the villain in a matter of days.
For a time, Law’s extraordinary mergers seem to have galvanized the French slave trade. Though the founder had fled, the company remained. A monopoly of trading Guinea-coast slaves was granted to it. It was required to deliver thirty thousand slaves in the next twenty-five years, on each of whom it would receive a bounty of 143 livres from the Crown.
Law’s company, though it had its headquarters in the new city of Lorient, also had close ties with Nantes. The private traders of the latter city, in theory opposed to monopoly, in practice gained from it, for they obtained licenses from the privileged company. The new multiheaded company was still sending four slave ships to Africa in 1740, mostly large: about three hundred tons on average.
• • •
Despite the disappointments caused by the South Sea Company, the British slave trade grew immeasurably in the early eighteenth century. In 1720, nearly 150 ships were engaged, mostly from Bristol and London, but a few also set out from Liverpool, Whitehaven, and lesser ports, such as Lancaster, Chester, and even Glasgow.III Even the fortunes of the old RAC revived, thanks to the interest of the duke of Chandos, struggling to recover his wealth after losing heavily
in the South Sea Bubble. This nobleman, who received his title in 1719, was a patron of Handel, and the builder of a colossal house, Canons, at Edgware. Swift said of him, “All he got by fraud was lost by stocks. . . .”12,IV
At a committee meeting of the RAC in 1728—attended by the duke and the subgovernor, Edward Acton—Sir Robert Davers, the new government agent for Barbados, and himself an independent trader to Africa, “agreed . . . that he should be furnished with sixty adult negroes from 14 to 30 years of age, half men and half women; as also 30 boys and girls, or as many more as his agent shall desire to have, from 10 to 14 years of age and this to be done between December and July . . . that they be Negroes of Cape Coast, Whydah or Jaquin,V that they be delivered to Sir Robert Davers’s agent at Barbados out of the first three ships of the company’s which shall arrive . . . all merchantable negroes to be approv’d of by his agent . . . that the sums to be paid for each Negroe be in sterling money . . . for each Man £23, for each Woman £22, for each boy and girl £21. . . .” A later report of the RAC, on the state of the slave trade, included the unusual recommendation “that all endeavours be used to teach the Negroes to read and write. . . .”13
