The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  IIIThe word almost certainly derives from the Portuguese barraca, meaning shed.

  IVSee chapter 24.

  VSee page 521.

  VIAt least at the end of the eighteenth century, if he was on board a Liverpool ship, a ship’s surgeon might have been trained at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary: the medical school from which the University of Liverpool developed. The fact that so many Liverpool ships carried trained doctors led to the growth of tradition of tropical medicine there, which in turn led eventually to the Liverpool school of that science, and therefore, indirectly, in the late nineteenth century, to Sir Ronald Ross’s nomination of the mosquito as the agent of malaria.

  VIIThat Hayley married Mary, a sister of the orator of constitutional liberty John Wilkes, another of whose sisters, Sarah, was the inspiration for Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations.

  16

  Great Pleasure from Our Wine

  “The Wolofs are great drunkards and derive great pleasure from our wine.”

  Valentim Fernandes, c. 1500

  THE CARGOES FOR THE SLAVE TRADE changed over the centuries, depending on the character, the purse, and the imagination of the European supplier who responded to a great variety of constantly changing African demands. Although the cargo must always have cost about two-thirds of the total outlay of a slave voyage, there were many differences as to how goods for the trade were carried and financed. For example, by the late eighteenth century, because of the exceptional nature of the Angolan-Brazilian commerce, Portuguese merchants would carry goods to Angola and return with some African product as ballast, leaving the Luso-Africans who ran the Angolan side of the Brazilian business to exchange the European goods for slaves as and when seemed best. In the early days, when the Portuguese were still carrying slaves from Benin direct to Portugal, or to Elmina, the royal factor in São Tomé would instruct captains bound for Ughoton, the port of Benin, that, even for the best slaves, they should not pay more than fifty manillas (bronze leg bracelets). But, by the next century, such an all-or-nothing approach would have been inconceivable: thus, in 1628, no fewer than 218 different types of goods for trading were to be found in Elmina. In the late eighteenth century, a bill of lading from Newport, Rhode Island, might run: “Shipped by the Grace of God, in good order and well-conditioned, by Jacob Rod[rígues] Rivera and Aaron Lopez, on their joint account, . . . upon the good ship called Cleopatra, whereof is master under God for the present voyage James Bourk, and now riding at anchor in the harbour of Newport, and by God’s grace bound for Africa, to say, two hundred and thirty-four hogsheads New England rum; two barrels wine, six barrels tarr, six barrels pitch, six barrels turpentine, two half barrels [gun]powder, sixty-four kegs water bread [water biscuits], six casks Indian corn, one tierce [a large cask] gammon, one thousand hogsheads’ hoops, six hundred and seventy-feet white oak boards, three hundred and thirty red oak boards, eleven hogsheads and one small cask calavants [chickpeas], two hogsheads’ black-eyed peas, six tierces and two hogsheads rice, twenty barrels common flour, ten barrels superfine flour, thirty sheep and provender, eight casks common ships’ bread, six hogsheads and four tierces hard-baked bread, twenty-eight barrels beef, twenty-four barrels pork, one firkin [a small cask] butter, and two cases window frames and shutters, two masts and two pieces timber, one bundle sailors’ clothes, twelve pounds chocolate; and, half a hundred weight sugar . . .”1

  A surgeon in the British navy, John Atkins, reported, following an expedition in 1721 whose purpose was to destroy pirates such as the murderous Captain Roberts: “The windward and the leeward parts of the coast are as opposite in their demands [with respect to slave goods] as is their distance. Iron bars which are not asked for to leeward are a substantial part of windward cargoes. Crystals, oranges, corals, and brass-mounted cutlasses are almost peculiar to the Windward coast; as are brass pans from the Rio Sethos to Apollonia [the Gold Coast] and cowries . . . at Whydah, [and] copper and iron bars at Callabar; but arms, gunpowder, tallow, old sheets, cottons [that is, Indian cottons] . . . and English spirits [whiskey] are everywhere called for. Sealing wax and pipes are necessary in small quantities, they serve for dashees [tips]. . . .”2

  These reports show how varied the business of trading slaves was. As for the nature of the exchange, at Whydah, Dahomey, in 1767, a slave might be bought for sixteen anchorsI of brandy; or twenty cabess of cowriesII; or two hundred pounds of gunpowder; or twenty-five guns; or ten long cloths; or ten blue bafts (lengths of coarse blue cotton made in India); or ten pattern chints (chintz); or forty iron bars.

  On the coasts of Malemba and Cabinda (semi-independent ports in what is now Angola), “the negroes, before striking a bargain, go and mark off . . . in the captain’s store, which is on the sea side, the pieces of stuff they choose to take; & he who has sold four slaves at fifteen goods a head goes to receive 60 pieces of the stuffs marked off. . . . It is customary to give for each slave . . . the ‘over and above,’ for example, 3 or 4 guns and as many swords, 15 pots of brandy, 15 pounds of gunpowder, and 12 knives. . . .”3

  In places such as Loango Bay, when slaves were said to cost “thirty,” it did not mean thirty pieces of stuffs, but “30 times the ideal value which they fix on, and call a piece. So a single piece of stuff is sometimes estimated at 2 or 3 pieces, and sometimes several objects must form a single piece. . . .”4

  Overall, the cargo carried by most slave traders, and most sought after in Africa, reckoned in terms of cost in Europe, was cloth: woolen and, later, cotton cloth, made in Europe, in India, or just possibly elsewhere. The typical exchange for a slave in the sixteenth century between Congolese and Portuguese merchants was a piece of textile large enough to clothe a single individual, only about two yards of stuff. One type of cotton cloth, guinée cloth, une pièce de guinée, was once a currency on the river Sénégal, as cloth had been in ancient Mexico before the coming of the Europeans. An African-made cloth was also for a time similarly used in Angola, and the cloth of the Cape Verde Islands, especially the large blue “barafula,” was also for a time a currency in the exchanges of settlers there with the mainland. But normally the cloth was worn, since most men in Africa dressed in some kind of loincloth, and all but the poorest women in Africa wore an upper garment, as well as a cloth of about one and a half to two yards long wrapped round the waist. Rich men had even larger loincloths.

  West Africans had cloth of many different kinds before the Europeans arrived in their harbors, and early Portuguese visitors admired its quality. The dyes, especially the indigo dyes from the river Núñez, were excellent. Most West African communities had a tradition of spinning and weaving, and so the European products were merely added to an existing industry. Some cloths used in the slave trade were indeed African: for example, the “high cloths,” woven in the Cape Verde Islands by the Afro-Portuguese settlers (or their slaves), cloth from Benin and elsewhere in what is now southern Nigeria, as well as “Quaqua” cloths from the Ivory Coast, were exchanged for slaves by European traders on the Gold Coast. Sometimes, as in the case of the cloth of Allada (Dahomey), the Africans merely treated European cloth with their own dyes to make the bright products which European traders were able to sell in, for example, Barbados.

  But there was too little African cloth, and the choice offered by the Europeans was attractive. People in the region of Guinea preferred white cloth, those in Angola blue.

  In the earliest days, when the slave trade was controlled by the Portuguese, the most popular items were lambens, which were full-length cloaks bought in North Africa. They had armholes and an opening in the center for the head, comparable to a Peruvian poncho. Sometimes, they were striped: red, green, blue, white. One good lamben from Algeria might be exchanged for a prime male slave. These were known to West Africans before the arrival of the Portuguese caravels, because the Sahara trade had brought many desirable objects from the Mediterranean, though never enough to satisfy demand.

  During the two centuries when they dominated the slave trade
, the Portuguese carried to Africa many different textiles from Europe, including, long before those nations entered the traffic, woolens from England and Holland.III

  A manifest of the ship Santiago, which set out in 1526 for Sierra Leone and Cacheu (the river Sao Domingos, as it was then known) and brought back to Lisbon 125 slaves, included as its most important items 1,600 cubits of vermilion or yellow cloth, 357 varas of handkerchief material, 24 from the Portuguese province of Alentejo, 8 varas of hemp for sacks, and 120 bells, as well as 2,345 brass manillas and 1,240 bracelets of tin.

  The northern protestant countries, entering the slave trade in the seventeenth century, each had their special textile to offer to the Africans. Thus the English specialty was, in the early days, woolen cloth, then and now a protection against the fierce cold wind of the Gulf of Guinea, the harmattan (when “the sharpness of the air . . . obliged all persons whatsoever, white or black, without exception . . . to keep to their houses or chambers”), and for use as blankets during those harsh nights of shivering known to the English as “rigours.” So woolens were always a staple in West Africa: particularly serges and “says,” a fine woolen cloth, sometimes mixed with silk, originally produced in the villages near Lille, Arras, Valenciennes, and Armentières, but using wool from Spain, Scotland, Germany, or Friesland. Later, says were made by the English, who also produced perpetuanas (a tough cloth like tweed, woven in Devon), bays (baize), bridgwaters (from Bridgwater, in Somerset), or “Welsh plaines” (a simply woven cloth made in the Midlands as well as in Wales).

  Each of these products has its own history, and in England their manufacturers were to be found among those who protested first against the exclusion of “interlopers” from the legal slave trade towards the end of the seventeenth century, and also against the idea of abolition, at the end of the eighteenth. Perhaps 85 percent of English textile exports went to Africa before 1750, and over 40 percent during the following twenty years. In the 1780s, the percentage was much lower, varying between 11 and 32 percent because of the much-increased European market. But England, after the Methuen Treaty of 1703, dominated Portugal and its empire, being able to export cloth there without paying duty, in return for the much more modest Portuguese right to carry their wine similarly freely (that really meant port wine). Much English cloth went to Lisbon, to be traded in turn for slaves by Portuguese merchants.

  Though the Germans played a tiny part in the Atlantic slave trade as principals in the business, their cloths were important in it, just as their brass manillas had been earlier on. German linen goods were specially in demand in the harbors of the Bissagos Islands, and the African trade as a whole was an important outlet for all German textiles, made in Westphalia, Saxony, and Silesia.

  Dutch woolen goods for the slave trade were mostly made in Leiden or Haarlem. Linen also played an important part in the Dutch trade, particularly secondhand linen sheets which were sold for clothing. Barbot noted that everyone on the Gold Coast seemed to wear a cloth from Holland which passed between the thighs, and “whose ends hung down to the ground behind and before. . . . When they go through the streets, they take a length of Leyden serge or perpetuana two or three ells in length, which they pass over their necks . . . like a mantle.”5 Noblemen and merchants alike were often seen on the same stretch of land wearing Chinese satin, taffeta, or colored Indian cloths—apparel made possible since, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch began to take with them to Africa such exotic offerings as Japanese silk dressing gowns or other silks from China or India. The Dutch East India Company brought back many such things from the East, especially from India, and many of them were immediately transferred to the slave trade.

  In the beginning, English and French merchants bought these Indian textiles from Holland for their slave cargoes. Ships from London, for example, might make a special detour to Rotterdam on their outward journey, if they had not bought the goods in London. Ships from La Rochelle would also plan to pick up at Le Havre all their supplies from Holland, England (knives and forks), Sweden (iron bars), Rouen (handkerchiefs), Honfleur (cider), and Amsterdam (sheets), as well as Dutch chains and razors.

  For a long time, Indian goods were banned from the English and French home markets. But, obtained through the Dutch, and then the British, East India companies, they were much appreciated in West Africa: partly because of their bright colors, partly because of their durability. In good years in the late seventeenth century, twenty thousand pounds’ worth or so of East Indian goods would go to Africa on British ships alone, principally as fabrics. The merchants of Bristol gave a special emphasis to these goods: they accounted for over a quarter of the value of all goods shipped from England to Africa between 1699 and 1800. Among the most successful of these textiles were bafts or, in French, guineés bleues. Baft was originally made in southeastern India, in the neighborhood of Madras and Pondicherry, the two main English and French trading points in old India. This heavy cloth was dyed a dark, almost indigo, blue. It became a favorite of the Muslim traders on the river Sénégal who, indeed, would sometimes downright insist on it.

  East Indian cloths all had, of course, their special traders: among them in London, Peregrine Cust, of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa in 1757, and John Sargent, member of a circle of trading partners which included the protean Richard Oswald (though he also traded extensively in the Baltic and Germany for linen). Sargent found his original opening through the well-connected Huguenot émigrés, the Aufrère family. He had his equivalents in Lisbon and Nantes, and even in Bremen and Copenhagen.

  In the second half of the eighteenth century, as has been shown, manufacturers in Manchester and Rouen tried to copy the Indian products. But English and French dyeing, even at Rouen, was at first inferior to that of the Indians, and could not achieve the bright colors of the latter. In the end, however, Mancunian manufacturers, in particular, showed themselves very clever with cotton checks (“Guinea cloths”), a local imitation of an Indian cotton which enjoyed a greater success in Africa every year. In Lancashire, in the 1750s, the largest of the early manufacturers (William and Samuel Rawlinson, Samuel Taylor) did specially well in this line of business. After 1760, coarse annabasses, made in Manchester, became specially sought after on the West African coast. Many loads of this fabric were bought by the Portuguese and the French for use by their captains. Such European cloths often kept their Indian names (“nicanee” or “cashtoe”), or a variant of them, even if they were made in Lancashire. Rouen had a good line also in Simaoises as well as indiennes, which stocked ships at Le Havre or Honfleur as well as at Rouen itself.

  New England, too, produced coarse cottons, though that commodity was never so successful in the slave trade as rum.

  • • •

  After cloth, metals played the most important part in the European slave traffic in Africa.

  In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, copper and brass objects were welcome in Africa in every shape and type: particularly brass bowls, but also chamber pots, cauldrons, jugs, or mere sheets of copper. West Africans had some knowledge of metalworking, and many of the objects were melted down by the natives. Thus the bracelets, manillas, often made in south Germany especially for the trade, bought by Portuguese or their Genoese representatives in Antwerp, and used as anklets, were often exchanged in Africa for slaves and, like some cloths, they were also sometimes used as a currency in the neighborhood of Whydah, on the Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and also in the delta of the eastern Niger. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, German metal traders were established at Lisbon, so that the Portuguese could buy direct from them, rather than have to buy at Antwerp.

  Copper was the chief metal attraction for West Africa till about 1520. Thereafter, an age of brass lasted till about 1630, when iron began to establish itself, as Northern Europeans, in touch with the Swedish iron foundries, embarked on the slave trade. But brass remained popular: brass pots, kettles, and pans, made in Birmingham, Liverpool (the Holywell works), and
North Staffordshire (the Cheadle Company), were still being used until well after 1700. Other brass objects, such as wire made by Baptist Mills of Bristol, “Guinea rods,” also had their day.

  In the eighteenth century, iron bars (usually nine inches long) became not just an article of trade but a trading medium too, at least in the Gulf of Guinea (in Congo and Angola they never enjoyed the same appeal as they did in the north). For a time, one such iron bar in Guinea was reckoned as equal to four copper ones. In 1682, the English Royal African Company was exporting to Africa about ten thousand iron bars a year. Most of these came from Sweden, the rest from Germany. In 1685, all but six of thirty-five ships dispatched to Africa by the RAC carried iron bars as part of their cargoes. The people of the Gambia had a particular interest in these cargoes: a quarter to a half of the RAC’s exports to the territory were of that commodity, though few went to Angola in the company’s day. In 1733, at the height of the slave trade, an English ship from Bristol to Bonny stocked up with £1,226 worth of goods to buy 250 Negroes at Bonny, of which iron was the most expensive item. Much of this was transformed in Africa for use in agriculture: as hoes, for example.

  The demand for these bars naturally meant profits for those who carried them from Scandinavia to the slaving ports. Some of these merchants themselves became interested in the slave trade in consequence; one such was Anthony Tourney (Tournai), who enjoyed a most fruitful association with the London slave merchant and banker Humphrey Morice. The same occurred in the case of George Aufrère, the Huguenot trader who made his first fortune selling East Indian cloths to London merchants. Tourney and Aufrère later invested in slave ships.