The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  A captain was sometimes a man who would become an owner, as has been mentioned, and that was often his ambition. After a few voyages as captain of another merchant’s ship, he might have made enough money (by, for instance, the sale of his privilege slaves) to invest in other men’s voyages, or to buy a ship of his own. Occasionally, of course, a captain was an owner already, and sailed as such. Robert Champlin of Newport sailed as captain on ships owned by his brothers Christopher and George.

  All the same, to be a slave captain was not really a profession: even experienced captains rarely went to Africa more than three or four times. Deputy captains would always have to be ready to take over command, in case, as sometimes happened, their masters died; that happened about once in every ten voyages, at least in the Dutch West India Company’s experience.

  Captains made even more statements of what they thought about the trade than did the merchants. For example, Hugh Crow, who captained several voyages of slave ships owned by the Aspinalls of Liverpool, thought that “the abstraction of slaves to our colonies [was] a necessary evil.” He seems to have been sincerely convinced that the African slaves in the West Indies were happier than when they lived as slaves in their own country, “subject to the caprices of their native princes.” Had he been a slave, Crow said, he would have much preferred to have been a black slave in the West Indies than even a free man at home in England—than, say, a fisherman, a coal miner, or a factory worker, or a man sent to jail “for killing a paltry hare or a partridge.” “Think of the wretched Irish peasantry! Think of the crowded workhouses,” he amiably concluded his memoir.16

  Joseph Hawkins of Charleston, South Carolina, went to Africa as a slave captain in 1793. Though initially dubious, he confessed, when he reached a slave barracoon, where many slaves had been kept waiting for sale, that he became “fully convinced [that] the removal of these poor wretches, even to the slavery of the West Indies, would be an act of humanity, rather than one exposed to censure. . . . The slaves [whom] I had purchased were young men, many of them being eager to escape from their bondage in Ebo, [and] preferred the evil ‘they knew not of’ to that which they then felt; but,” he admitted, “the majority were evidently affected with grief at their approaching departure. . . .”17

  Both Captain Thomas Phillips of London, at the end of the seventeenth century, and Captain William Snelgrave of Bristol, at the beginning of the eighteenth, felt some remorse about their activities but, like some merchants in the same frame of mind, continued nonetheless in the business, both writing accounts of what they did. The comments of Phillips, a Welshman, are remarkable for their time. Speaking of the slaves, he said: “Nor can I imagine why they should be despised for their colour, being what they cannot help. . . . I can’t think there is any intrinsic value in one colour more than another, that white is better than black, only we think it so, because we are so, and are prone to judge favourably in our own case. . . .”18

  John Newton, captain of the Duke of Argyll (belonging to the Manesty brothers of Liverpool), the future vicar of Saint Mary’s Woolnoth, thought a great deal about his old trade but, unlike Crow, did not seek to justify it. On the contrary, he explained that he knew of “no method of getting money not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense. . . .” All the same, Newton only abandoned the trade because of bad health. He had a vision which led him to become a clergyman but, when he was still a slave captain, he was already a Christian: he wrote to his wife, on leaving Africa on the Duke of Argyll for the West Indies with a cargo of slaves, of “innumerable dangers and difficulties which, without a superior protection, no man could escape or surmount, [and which] are, by the goodness of God, happily over.” He had to face a slave rebellion two days after he wrote that sentence. He added that he overcame the emergency “with the Divine Assistance.” Newton would customarily read prayers twice a day to his slave crews. He was an autodidact: he taught himself Latin and read Virgil, Livy, and Erasmus while still captaining a slaver. That did not prevent him from sometimes putting the “boys . . . slightly in the thumb screws to obtain a confession.” Newton was still a slave captain when he wrote his best hymn, “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds.”19

  Some interesting reflections were made by Captain Crassous on the Dahomet of La Rochelle, as, in 1791, he touched at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, and pitied the poor Spaniards who, unlike the French, still lived under a violent and arbitrary government. He hoped that one day the example of “the French Revolution would awake poor Spain from its slavery [sic] and lethargy.” He then set off for Mozambique to buy Africans for Saint-Domingue.20

  The surgeon on the slave ship was in charge of all matters relating to health, carrying with him such supposed medicaments as gum camphor, pulverized rhubarb, cinnamon water, mustard, and bitters, and was always involved in major decisions about the voyage. Several surgeons, such as Alexander Falconbridge, or Thomas Trotter on the Brookes, or William Chancellor on Philip Livingston’s sloop Wolf in 1750 (he found Africa beautiful but despised the Africans), contributed priceless information as to how the slave trade worked. The surgeon, a most important member of any ship’s company, would receive the same income as a first mate or carpenter, £4 on an English ship.VI But it was not legally necessary to carry a surgeon, and many slave ships economized by neglecting to have one: including most of those flying the flag of the United States.

  Some lesser officers on slavers recalled their experiences; one such was Jean Barbot, who traveled on slave ships from La Rochelle in the 1680s. He hoped that officers tempted to be brutal would “consider [that] those unfortunate creatures [the slaves] are men as well as themselves, though of a different colour and pagans.”21 Edward Rushton, second mate in a ship belonging to Richard Watt and Gregson of Liverpool, had his life saved by a slave, and then went blind, after treating slaves suffering from ophthalmia, when bound for the island of Dominica. He subsequently became an abolitionist, a poet, and a bookseller. His West Indian Eclogues included the line “Oh, for the power to make these tyrants bleed!”: a sentiment which endeared him to reformers, even if it caused difficulties for him in his native Liverpool.

  Ordinary seamen on slave ships were usually young men of low achievement and aspirations, primarily because of the poor pay, the vile conditions, and the danger. The names of sailors on North American or English ships indicate nothing except dour Anglo-Saxon ancestry: for example, on Frederick Philipse’s Margaret in 1698, we find sailors called Burgess, Lazenby, Powell, Ransford, Harris, Dorrington, Upton, Herring, Dawson, Whitcomb, Whore, Oder, Laurence, and Crook. Members of Parliament would have had much the same surnames.

  Sometimes, sailors such as these were lured on board slave ships by “crimping”: that is, being plied with drink at an inn until, penniless as well as intoxicated, they could be carried off as part of a bargain between innkeeper and captain. A carpenter in the navy, James Towne, told a House of Commons committee on the slave trade: “The method at Liverpool [to obtain sailors] is by the merchants’ clerks going from public house to public house, giving them liquors to get them into a state of intoxication and, by that, getting them very often on board. Another method is to get them in debt and then, if they don’t choose to go aboard of such guinea men then ready for sea, they are sent away to gaol by the publicans they may be indebted to.”22

  John Newton was convinced that the slave trade ruined the sensitivities of all crews: “The real or supposed necessity of treating the Negroes with rigour gradually brings a numbness upon the heart and renders those who are engaged in it too indifferent to the sufferings of their fellow-creatures.” He also thought that “there is no trade in which seamen are treated with so little humanity.” Officers certainly treated sailors as badly as, or worse than, they treated the slaves. Thus James Morley, once a cabin boy on the Amelia of Bristol, in answer to a question at a House of Commons inquiry, “How have the seamen been generally treated on board the Guinea ships in which
you have sailed?” replied, “With great rigour and many times with cruelty.” He recalled how he once accidentally broke a glass belonging to Captain Dixon: “I . . . was tied up to the tiller in the cabin by my hands, and then flogged with a cat, and kept hanging there some time.” Most seamen, Morley thought, slept on the deck: “They lie on deck and they die on deck.”23 Many witnesses in these inquiries testified that the crews were atrociously treated. In 1761, on board the Hare, Captain Colley of Liverpool killed the carpenter, the carpenter’s mate, the cook, and another man with a handspike. “I have been on a number of ships,” remarked one sailor, “and always found the same treatment as we had on board our own, that is, men dying from want of provisions, from being hard worked and from being inhumanly beat. . . .”24 A French novelist, Edouard Corbière, would, in Le Négrier, point out that a slaving voyage was a colossal challenge to the patience and endurance of the crews: “How many wounds were caused in the characters, the customs, and even the passions of these men so often so diverse who find themselves gathered together in the middle of so many perils in this narrow space we call a ship.”25 Chancellor, the surgeon on Philip Livingston’s ship Wolf, doubted, on returning to New York, whether he could ever “have satisfaction for the misery I have undergone on this voyage.”

  Deaths were rarely less than a fifth of the crew, sometimes more: the Nymphe in 1741 lost twenty-eight out of forty-five; the Couéda arrived at Cap François in 1766 with only nine crew members. Perhaps the record was the Marie-Gabrielle of Nantes, which in 1769 lost thirty-one sailors out of thirty-nine. The Deux Pucelles of Nantes lost all her officers in 1750. Analysis of the Dutch slave trade suggests that about 18 percent of crews died on their recorded voyages—in comparison with 12 percent of the slaves. Something like the same statistic must have been true of the English trade: for example, over 20 percent of English crews died on Bristol and Liverpool slavers even in the 1780s. But the crews had a longer time on board the ships than the slaves did.

  • • •

  Slave ships had to be armed. Both the Gulf of Guinea and the Caribbean were infested with pirates. So the average armament of a two-hundred-ton French slaver of about 1700 might have been fifteen to eighteen cannon. Some ships, such as those belonging to the Montaudoins, had even more weapons. Later, the risk of pirates became less and, in the 1730s, ships of two hundred tons might have only eight to twelve pieces. Slave ships which sailed in time of war would be more heavily armed, but they would often have military commissions and be technically corvettes or auxiliary frigates.

  All ships were insured, often internationally. Insurance seems first to have been undertaken in Antwerp, but Amsterdam, London, and Paris soon followed, and then the slaving ports themselves would develop their own companies on the initiative of merchants who might have small stakes in the business themselves. English companies would usually insure the few United States ships. French traders at Nantes and La Rochelle estimated that insurance averaged 7 percent of the cost of the ship in time of peace, but the percentage would rise to 35 percent in tense international conditions, even if the ship concerned traveled in convoy. In La Rochelle, the slave ships were often insured in other cities: Nantes, for example, or even Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London. At least one insurer—Duvivier, of La Rochelle—himself became a major dealer in slaves. An important London marine insurer, Hayley, of Hayley and Hopkins, explained in 1771 to Aaron Lopez of Newport that “the premium for a winter voyage from Jamaica is never less than 8 percent and upon vessels not known in the trade can seldom be under 10.”26,VII Still, some North American insurers (Tench Francis, for example, the leader of the bar in Philadelphia) did business before 1774 and, after the revolution, many merchants turned to Boston. Samuel Sanford founded the Newport Insurance Company. When that enterprise became infiltrated by opponents to the slave trade, the Bristol Insurance Company was founded, and that was followed by the Mount Hope Insurance Company, founded by the de Wolfs, themselves large-scale slavers. Rates varied from 5 to 25 percent.

  • • •

  Slave captains would usually receive precise instructions from their owners as to what to do, and where to go. A characteristic instruction was that to Captain William Barry of Bristol, who was told in the 1730s: “As the wind is inclining to be fair, you are ordered with your men (which we allow to be twenty in number, yourself included) to repair on board the Dispatch, brigantine, of which you are . . . Commander and to lose no time but to sail directly . . . to the Coast of Africa: that is, to that part of it called Andony [on the Bight of Biafra, north of Fernando Po] (without touching or tarrying at any other place), where you are to slave . . . The cargo of goods are of your own ordering and, as it’s very good in kind and amounts to £1,330-8s-21/4d, we hope it will purchase you 240 choice slaves, besides a Quantity of teeth [of elephants] . . . provided they are large. . . .”27

  A ship such as this would be expected to be at least a year abroad, to cover twelve thousand miles in the voyage, and to anticipate hurricanes in the Caribbean, tornadoes on the coast of Guinea, and almost everywhere rot and pirates, barnacles and leaking. An average voyage, throughout the era of the trade, varied from between fifteen and eighteen months. The fastest journey in the classic era of the trade, in the mid-eighteenth century, was probably that of Michel and Grou’s Sirène from Nantes, which took only eight months and thirty-two days, carrying 331 slaves from Sénégal to Léogane in Saint-Domingue in 1753; only two slaves died.

  Each trading port had its peculiarities. Thus merchants from Liverpool often bought provisions in Ireland, so that they could tell the authorities on the Liverpool dock that they were merely leaving for Kinsale. Sometimes, Bristol ships would pick up the spirits for their cargoes in Jersey, a big smuggling port. London ships might go for that purpose to Rotterdam. The captains of Dutch ships from Middelburg or Amsterdam would usually join them when they were already in the open sea. Many French ships would stop for water, wine (sometimes to be used in barter), and fresh food in Portugal (say, Lisbon) or Spain (say, Cádiz). Some French slave ships also put in at Madeira or Tenerife, more often at Praya, in the Cape Verde Islands. Hugh Crow wrote that, in his experience, English slave ships also usually made for the Canary Islands “in the first instance.”

  Ships would usually leave with live turkeys, chickens, and even cattle on board, for future killing. A year and a half’s supply of biscuits would perhaps be taken, four or five tons of them. Captains would also try to carry enough wine to provide the crew with a liter and a quarter a day per man. Water would, of course, also be embarked, but no more than necessary to reach Africa. Flour would be available to be made into bread by the ship’s baker. Smoked meat was Ireland’s chief contribution to these voyages, as hard cheese was one of Holland’s. Some fishing would be done to supplement the rations.

  There were two classic passages for slave ships to West Africa from Northern Europe: first, in French terminology la petite route—that is, via the Cape Verde Islands—after which the captain would stay close to the coast. La grande route entailed the captain’s keeping well out into the Atlantic before striking east-southeast to Angola or the Congo. La petite route was customary in winter and was, of course, always used when the vessels were making for the Gulf of Guinea. Most of this journey was in sight of the coasts. La grande route was more prudent between March and August, when the southeast trade winds could cause many difficulties, and that itinerary was, of course, normal when the destination was primarily the Congo or Angola. Ships on their way to Mozambique, or other ports in East Africa, would also naturally follow this second route, but would try to avoid any wind or current which would make it hard to clear the Cape of Good Hope.

  Portuguese ships bound for Angola would always take la grande route, or a variation of it, which meant that, after touching at the Cape Verde Islands, they would pick up the winds blowing down the coast of Brazil—much as Cabral had sailed on that first extraordinary journey in 1500. They might then touch at Pernambuco or Rio, but most did not;
rather, they would head back into the open sea north of the Brazilian mainland, and make for Angola.

  North American traders, of course, made quite different voyages, for a journey which would usually take from seven to twelve months, from home in New England to Africa and then to market, which might often be the West Indies, or perhaps Charleston, South Carolina, and rarely New England itself.

  Ships leaving Europe were sometimes seized by pirates off the northwest coast of Africa, especially the terrifying ones of Salé. So, in the early eighteenth century, sensible slave captains would try to carry a “Turkish pass.” This was bought from pirates in Algeria to enable captains to pass without molestation. But there were often captures of slave ships. In 1687, for example, a large Dutch slave ship en route for Africa was sunk because the captain did not have a pass. It was because of those perils, as well as the dangers of disease and rebellion, not to speak of enemy action, that captains and crews usually forbore to think of the slaves themselves.

  * * *

  IYet Livingston Road in Brooklyn survives to point the modern traveler in the direction of the old manor.

  IIThe firm of Gradis in Bordeaux was founded by Diego Gradis, a Portuguese immigrant, in 1695, and it was later run by his son David. In 1728, they had capital of 162,000 livres. David left four hundred thousand livres when he died in 1751, but his business, by then directed by his own son, Abraham, was worth four million livres in 1788. (Abraham gave sixty-one thousand livres to the Bordeaux synagogue in 1777.) The Gradises had about half their fortune invested in Saint-Domingue or in Martinique. By 1788, typically, since they were among the richest families of Bordeaux, their interests were moving towards viticulture instead of commerce.