by Hugh Thomas
Black slavery was thus now the characteristic form of labor in Brazil, in both the rural and the urban scene, even if the mining of both gold and diamonds was in decline, and if the old gold province of Minas Gerais was being turned over to agriculture. Sugar and tobacco were Brazil’s most important crops, and both began to seem as valuable as exports of precious metals. Large concentrations of slaves, mostly from the Gold Coast, seemed essential in plantations: for example, as always at Recôncavo (near Bahia), at Pernambuco, on the coast near Rio (Baixada Fluminense), and soon at São Paulo.
The Maranhão Company imported twenty-five thousand slaves between 1757 and 1778 (twenty-eight thousand loaded), nearly fourteen thousand to Pará, nearly eleven thousand to Maranhão, about half deriving from Bissau, half from Cacheu, and the exports carried to Africa to pay for these included many new products from the Amazon region: sarsaparilla, for example, a berry whose juice was believed falsely to cure syphilis, and coffee, as well as cotton and hardwoods. The peak year of that company was 1764, when there were nearly two thousand “chegados vivos” (live captives).
The Pernambuco Company, on the other hand, brought into Brazil, between 1761 and 1786, nearly double what was sent by the Maranhão Company. Nearly all were landed at the city which gave the firm its name. Here the peak year was 1763, when about four thousand slaves were imported. Most of these derived from Angola. In 1781, José da Silva Lisboa wrote from Bahia: “The African trade is of great importance here and is directed to the supply of slaves, yet nevertheless the profit which should accrue to it is seldom realized. Its staples are tobacco, either waste or second rate leaf, and strong spirits. More than fifty cargoes a year depart from Bahia in corvettes and smacks; eight or ten corvettes go to Angola with European goods while others go to the coast of Guinea [both] to buy slaves. . . . The investment risked in entering this business is small. . . . A cargo may consist of sixty slaves. . . . If few die . . . the voyage is lucrative. . . . More than 25,000 slaves have arrived for use in agriculture this year, 15,000 entering Bahia alone and 10,000 at Rio. . . .”15
The Brazilian slave trade accounted for about 160,000 slaves between 1760 and 1770. The viceroy, the count of Arcos, wrote in 1757 to Pombal in Lisbon that he thought slaves the most important merchandise in the Americas: “Without them, the colonists would receive irreparable damage to a commerce which is already in a state of decay.”16 But this was still a bad period in Brazil, with prices of commodities low, and it is at first sight surprising that the figures for imports were as high as they were. The explanation is that traders from Rio took many of the slaves whom they had bought for sale (illegally, of course) to Buenos Aires, a city which, to Lima’s disgust, was becoming the largest port in the Spanish empire; or to other harbors on the river Plate. The payment which they received was, above all, in silver, so much desired in eighteenth-century Europe. The French naturalist Bougainville, on his way to the South Seas in 1766, thought that thirty of the coasting ships which he saw in the bay of Rio were about to take slaves south to Buenos Aires in return for silver or hides.17 The coming of a final peace between Portugal and Spain in 1777 (which settled the frontiers of Brazil to the Portuguese satisfaction) legalized this traffic.
The position in Angola was transformed by permissions in 1758 and 1762 to merchants in both Luanda and Benguela to trade freely inland. Further, an energetic governor of the colony, Francisco Innocêncio Sousa Coutinho, a protégé of Pombal, tried, in the true spirit of enlightened despotism, to diversify the economy of the place, even to reduce the colony’s reliance on the slave trade. He set up an iron foundry and a leather factory, and gave money for numerous agricultural schemes aiming to establish plantations in Africa, instead of in Brazil. He tried to arrange that ships returning to Portugal from Goa would automatically call at Luanda, to sell Indian goods: satin, dinner services, enamel vases. He also persuaded the government in Lisbon to abolish the arrangements by which the slave trade was indirectly administered, the duties being collected by inefficient and easily corrupted tax farmers. That contract had, in the past, accounted for 20 percent of the taxes received from the trade.
Yet a single governor, however energetic, could not hope to change habits which had persisted for two hundred years. In 1780, too, there were twelve or so influential slave merchants in Luanda (whose population was probably four thousand), and about four or five in Benguela (whose population was then about two thousand). These traders were among the most important individuals of the places concerned, and they operated in well-known internal marketplaces, such as Dondo, buying from African merchants who would assemble their captives, usually by now from the far interior, and march them down in “coffles” of about a hundred. There were about eleven slaving establishments at Dondo by the 1790s. These men were difficult to outmaneuver, much less restrict.
These merchants of Angola operated a transatlantic system, buying goods in Rio de Janeiro or Bahia with the money from the sale of their slaves, and carrying them across the South Atlantic for further slave purchases. Benguela was a pioneer in this practice. By the end of the century, about twenty slave firms were active there, the directors being usually rich enough to live in the beautiful, melancholy houses, facing the sea on the south side of the city, known as sobrados. Portugal, meantime, was playing less and less of a part in all this commerce, and her statesmen knew it: Martinho de Melo Castro, secretary of state in Lisbon, wrote in 1770, “One could not without great sorrow see how our Brazilian colonies have absorbed commerce and shipping on the African coast to the total exclusion of Portugal; and what the Brazilians do not control, foreign nations do.”
Spain, at that time also modernizing after her fashion, had still not lost all belief that a magic property was communicated by the grant of the famous asiento. The first new contract after the peace of 1763 for importing slaves to the empire was that by the new captain-general of Cuba, the count of Ricla, to Martín José de Alegría, of Cádiz, allowing him to bring in seven thousand slaves to Cuba, of whom one thousand had to be sold to the Crown (whose officials in Havana had embarked upon a lavish program of public works). “The prosperity of this island depends mainly on the import of African slaves. . . . The King [too] will derive much more revenue from the import duties on slaves . . . ,”18 General O’Reilly, who was responsible for overseeing the new defenses, wrote from Havana in a letter to Spain in April 1764.
Then came the concession of a new large-scale asiento in the old style, to the Cádiz Slave Company, a society directed by an imaginative and persistent Basque, Miguel de Uriarte, of Puerto de Santa María, supported by numerous fellow Basques resident in Cádiz. Uriarte wanted a ten-year contract, to sell slaves at three hundred pesos a pieza, wherever he thought desirable. His scheme was traditional in structure. Ships would be sent from Cádiz full of European goods to West Africa, where the goods would be exchanged for slaves. He suggested that neither his ships nor his goods should incur taxes. He proposed taking all his slaves first to Puerto Rico, whence they would be distributed to other Caribbean ports, just as Walsh had thought of assembling all his slaves in Saint-Domingue.
Much discussion followed, Uriarte being forced to admit that he would have little chance of obtaining slaves direct from Africa, given that the coast between the river Sénégal and the Cape of Good Hope was so well covered by competing Europeans. All the same, a report was prepared in Havana which sought to explain how the innovative English procured and sold their slaves. It seemed desirable to learn from the leaders in the profession.
Arguments about these and other requests took a long time in Madrid. At one moment the issue was confused by the presentation of a request to carry slaves to the Spanish empire by the immortal Beaumarchais, at that time in the Spanish capital gaining material for his incomparable plays, looking for business, seeking to avenge the honor of his sister, and making love to the marquesa de Croix, the wife of the enlightened Spanish viceroy in Mexico.19
Yet, in the end, Uriarte triumphed over his com
petitors, including Beaumarchais, though with the numerous bureaucratic conditions always associated with the asiento. He was obliged to carry fifteen hundred slaves a year to Cartagena de Indias and to Portobelo, and a thousand to Havana; though Havana could have taken more and Cartagena been satisfied with less; six hundred each to Cumaná (near Caracas), Santo Domingo, Trinidad (the island), Santa Marta (Hawkins’s old market near Cartagena), Puerto Rico, and the pearl mart of Margarita; and, finally, four hundred each to Honduras and Campeche. The slaves would be obtained by sending Spanish ships to the Cape Verde Islands, to the river Sénégal (even though it was in English hands), or to Gorée, the French fortress. But they could also be carried in foreign ships for distribution from Puerto Rico. The absence of Veracruz from this list showed that the need for labor in New Spain was already being filled by the growing indigenous population there.
The company was then formed and, in 1767, the Venganza was duly from Cádiz sent to Africa. Though it sought to buy 600 to 700 slaves, it only managed to find 250, at a high price, almost all in the Cape Verde Islands. The failure was repeated a year or two later, with another vessel, the Fortuna. The company then decided to change its tactics and obtain from the Caribbean all the slaves that it could, assemble them in Puerto Rico, and then sell them off. This system was put into practice; Puerto Rico became for a few years a major slave center and, in the first seven years of the new asiento, from 1765 to 1772, nearly 12,000 slaves were sold. But about 1,500 died, either en route to, or waiting at, Puerto Rico, and the price obtained (and previously fixed) often did not even cover the price of purchase.20
The company survived into the 1770s, but it never made money. The Spanish planters throughout the empire, and especially Cuba, wanted to trade directly with Jamaica, legally or illegally: ill-paid colonial officials were far too used to receiving presents from smugglers to permit Uriarte anything like a real monopoly.
Later, one more asiento was drawn up, in which Uriarte’s partners Lorenzo de Ariosteguí and Francisco de Aguirre formed a new company after 1773. But by then it was almost impossible to maintain any such monopolistic arrangements. They were out of date. Jamaica was, as a later witness—Philip Attwood, the first English merchant to be established in Havana, a representative there of the Liverpool firm of Baker and Dawson, shipbuilders and slave traders—reported in 1787, responsible for at least three-quarters of the slaves sent to Cuba in the 1770s; and Cuba was by then the main buyer in the Americas on a large scale.21
Cuba was making headway as a sugar producer as well as a receiver of slaves. Production there in the 1770s was seven times what it had been before the English occupation of 1762-63. This change was simply the result of more plantations being cut out of the wild, more land being planted to cane, and therefore, of course, of more slaves being imported for the harvesting and for the clearing of virgin land: which in turn meant more capital being invested, and more money being borrowed, usually from those merchants in Havana who were themselves interested in sugar.
There was also expansion in North America, where a direct slave trade from Africa had opened in 1766 to Florida, a new colony for Britain after 1763, a development of which slave merchants soon took advantage. A note in the Massachusetts Gazette of December 24, 1767, reads that Captain Savery had just arrived in London “from St Augustine, on the brigantine Augustine, having carried there seventy negroes from Africa, the first ever imported directly from thence into that province. . . . Upwards of 2,000 were contracted for, by the noblemen and gentlemen in Great Britain . . . to be imported there from Africa the ensuing summer.”22 This ship was probably owned by Richard Oswald, the outstanding member of a circle of traders of London, already touched on,VI who had also established plantations in Florida, to the south of Saint Augustine on the Atlantic coast (near Ponce de Leon Bay) in 1765: he was the main slaver among those early settlers, and spoke of the place as a “paradise” and “a new Canaan.” It was, however, a Canaan from which no milk and honey would flow for many years, despite Oswald’s slaves, for the land produced almost nothing.
Richard Oswald was the Glaswegian merchant based in London with whom Laurens had often traded slaves. The intimate adviser of Lord Shelburne to whom he had been introduced by their mutual friend, Adam Smith, Oswald had been a commissary of the British armed forces in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (“Oswald’s loaves” were famous there). He was a prominent dealer in slaves, selling them from Bence Island, in the Gambia River, which he had bought in 1747 with several London mercantile associates.VII He also tried to breed Africans in Florida, where he speculated in land with Benjamin Franklin. The size of his fortune, however gained, is clear in that, with an offer of £60,000, he was much the largest single contributor to the government loan of 1757 (the next-largest was the cotton-check merchant Samuel Touchett, with £30,000).
Originating in Caithness, Oswald had spent some years in the 1730s and early 1740s on the Chesapeake Bay, dealing in tobacco for his cousins, the founders of the firm which he himself came to dominate. He married an heiress in Jamaica, also of Scottish origin, Mary Ramsay. The most obvious symbol of his achievement was the large property which he bought in 1764—Auchincruive, near Ayr, where the Adam brothers built him a fine rural palace. By the time of his death in the 1780s, Oswald also owned two plantations in Jamaica and several commercial tracts alongside the James River in Virginia. He died leaving £500,000, as well as a name as a “truly good man,” in the phrase of Franklin.23
The American war, like all conflicts of the eighteenth century, had an adverse effect on the trading of slaves. Between 1771 and 1780, Britain carried fewer than two hundred thousand slaves—the figure being down from the 1760s precisely because of the fighting which, beginning in 1774, had a disastrous effect on Liverpool, as on the British West Indies. The trade to Barbados almost ceased, as did that to Antigua. The French, on the other hand, shipped only a little less than a hundred thousand slaves in the 1770s. The traffic of neutrals also kept up well, the Dutch Leeward Island of Saint Eustatius becoming again, as it had once been in the 1720s, a “golden rock,” where slaves were always available, and where the colonists of the British West Indies bought the food needed for their slaves and themselves alike. Saint Eustatius (“Statia” to the English) also supplied the rebel North American colonies with food till it was captured by Admiral Rodney in 1781. Other neutrals, the Portuguese or Brazilians, carried about 160,000 slaves in these years.
In this war, as had occurred on other occasions, many slave ships on both sides were turned into privateers. As in the Seven Years’ War, ex-slavers often preyed on slavers as well as other privateers. But though that did not help the planters, it saved the merchants and the captains. There were some curious incidents. For example, Captain Clement Noble, on the Liverpool slaver Brookes, armed fifty of his slaves to fight the French off Barbados; they fought “with exceeding spirit,” the captain reported, before proceeding to Montego Bay, Jamaica, to sell them.24
One alarming foretaste of the future—alarming to the merchants, that is—was also to be observed in the city of Liverpool during this war. Many merchants were unable to maintain old levels of employment. So there were riots in Liverpool over wages, inspired by crews of slave ships, an unheard-of development for those days. We hear how “the crew of the Derby, given only 20 shillings when offered 30, rioted, and were sent to jail. But that evening, 3,000 sailors assembled, broke open the jail, released their friends, and stopped all ships [even the slave ships] from sailing. In the meantime, constables fired—seven were killed and 40 wounded. The sailors this morning again assembled, upwards of 1,000, all with red ribbons in their hats, and . . . about one of the clock assailed.”25 In this attack, four persons were killed; the house of Thomas Ratcliffe, a prominent slave merchant, was wrecked, and those of Thomas Yates, John Simmons, and William James (a member of Parliament, who had twenty-nine vessels engaged in the slave trade) were also damaged. The rioters found the black page of the last-named hiding in a g
randfather clock.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there were different kinds of upheaval. At Newport, Rhode Island, two thousand citizens, including the most effective trader, Aaron Lopez, left the city during the prolonged British occupation, and died soon after. The magnificent house of the leading slaver, William Vernon, abandoned by its owner, was used first by the English and then the French as their headquarters, the Vernons themselves having taken a major part in protesting against the British policies before the war.
Yet these disturbances seemed temporary. The long-term prospects for the slave trade appeared excellent in, say, 1780, provided only that the nations could live in peace. Thus, on April 12, 1775, David Mill (governor of the British fort at Cape Coast, a member of an influential West Indian planters’ family) wrote: “The trade has rather fallen off in the last six weeks, attributed in great measure to the Fantees being down to Leeward settling a dispute between the Accras and Akims. It is, however, likely to be equally as good as last year; a good number of slaves having already been shipped for the West Indies.”26 All the commanders of the British forts—John Dixon in Commenda, Thomas Trinder in Fort James, Accra, and Lionel Alson in Fort William, Whydah—reported that trade was bad because of difficulties among the Africans, not because of the war; and Richard Miles, Mill’s successor at Cape Coast, reported that “a greater number of slaves” had been purchased there in 1780 than ever before and that “the present prospects looked good.”27
In the 1780s, the slave trade, indeed, was not only restored, but attained its highest levels, even if, to begin with, the extension of the Navigation Acts to ban trade between the West Indies and the new United States adversely affected the economies of the British West Indies. The French and Spanish empires were also excluded from trading with the new country. All the same, all these colonies recovered their poise; the increase in Jamaican sugar production, for example, continued steadily in those years, after a steep decline at the end of the 1770s.28
