The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  These imports of iron did not have much effect on African production, for the interior empires had learned the art of smelting, not long after the Europeans had done so. These products, therefore, did not destroy an African native tradition of metallurgy. But nails from Spain, iron from Sweden, copper from Hamburg, Ostend, or London made the mineral dimension of the slave trade an international undertaking in its own right.

  Gold played a modest part in the slave trade. Yet Brazilian gold—in dust or bars—was carried by Brazilian traders to the Bight of Benin from the late seventeenth century onwards. They exchanged it for slaves. They had no legal right to do this, so it was a contraband trade, even if it was tolerated. These traders even exchanged gold for slaves with the English at Cape Coast, thus performing the unusual feat of carrying gold to the Gold Coast. Some of the slaves bought with Brazilian gold were taken to Brazil to mine that very commodity in Minas Gerais. At the end of the eighteenth century, other Brazilians, from the colony’s northern cotton-growing regions, also took gold to Angola.

  A few coins from either Europe or the Americas made their way to Africa. The Mandingos particularly liked Portuguese silver coins, or Spanish copper coins called patacas, which they made into bracelets or necklaces. Then the French Sénégal Company carried pieces-of-eight to Bissau, and the Royal African Company took guinea coins to the river Gambia. Dutch twenty-eight-stuiver pieces, as well as Spanish dollars (thalers), were used on a small scale as a medium of exchange on the Gold Coast in about 1700. But paper money and credit notes were never acceptable in Africa: Captain William Snelgrave, in Dahomey in the 1720s, reported that the agents there “did not like a bit of paper for their slaves, because the writing might vanish from it, or else the notes might be lost, and then they should lose their payment.”6

  Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shells, especially cowries (commonly known as “bouges,” from the Portuguese búzios) from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean but also conch shells, were to be specially reckoned with in the slave trade—above all, the standard cowrie, Cypraea moneta. Cowries (the word derives from the Hindi kauri) had been adopted as a common, though not a single, currency throughout much of the Indian subcontinent by the tenth century A.D., and began to be carried across the Sahara to West Africa in the eleventh, when they were in use in markets in the valley of the Niger. Cowries were to be found in Venice. In the fourteenth century, there are several references to cowries in use as currency in the Mali empire: one of them, in 1352, by the astonishing traveler Ibn Battuta, who, in 1344, had even been to the Maldive Islands, where he had married four wives. Cowries were already in Arguin when Ca’da Mosto arrived. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese penetrated the Indian Ocean, and were themselves taking the shells from the Maldives by 1520. They even had a small fort there in 1519. The Dutch reached the Maldives in 1602, the English in 1658.

  In the early sixteenth century, slaves were sometimes sold for cowries alone. The standard price for a male slave destined for São Tomé in the river Forcados in 1520, for example, was six thousand cowries and though, thereafter, traders demanded many other things, cowries always played a part in the trade in that region—sometimes a third, sometimes even a half. Often prices of slaves were reckoned in terms of cowries, in the 1770s perhaps 160,000 cowries per slave.

  In the eighteenth century, while these shells were still being used as currency in India, they had the same role in much of West Africa, especially at Whydah, the biggest importer of cowries in the eighteenth century. Between 1700 and 1800, over twenty-five million pounds of cowries seem to have been imported into West Africa by European traders. The peak year was probably 1722, when over 700,000 pounds of cowries were taken to West Africa by English and Dutch captains alone. The RAC found that cowries were essential for trading for slaves in certain places, particularly at Whydah and in the Bight of Benin. African dealers might insist that a quarter, and sometimes as much as a half, of the cost of slaves was paid in this way.

  Cowries in West Africa were often strung in forties, which were known as “tockies” (from the Portuguese toque). Five tockies made a galinha, a chicken, and 125 tockies made a cabess (from cabeça, a head). In the mid-seventeenth as in the mid-eighteenth century, one cabess, or five thousand cowries, seems to have equaled in value one iron bar.

  Cowries had many virtues as money. They made possible a genuinely international currency, which circulated in the markets of large and small polities, while a single shell had the virtue of having a very low value indeed (the least valuable coin in Britain, the farthing, was equivalent to between twenty-five and thirty-two cowries in the delta of the Niger about 1780). Cowries are attractive to look at and to handle, they are hard to break, and they neither fade nor wear. They are impossible to counterfeit, as King Gezo would tell the explorer Richard Burton, hard to hoard, and can be put to no other use. The only disadvantage to cowries as a unit of account was that they were cumbersome to transport; all the same, the camels, the donkeys, and the slaves of West Africa became accustomed to carrying them hundreds of miles over the centuries.

  • • •

  After cloth, metals, and shells, weapons of various kinds, including swords, were probably the most important goods in the trade, though not before the middle of the seventeenth century: the Portuguese (and the Brazilians) were forbidden by law to export them. The Portuguese had done their best to avoid the exchange of any such arms for any African product (except for horses in the fifteenth centuryIV), and officials had been posted in the harbor of Lisbon to check against infringements. This rule was in keeping with one of the strictest rules of medieval commerce, which was not to sell weapons to any heathen or infidel. Early in the eighteenth century, in 1718, a new Portuguese royal decree repeated the prohibition on the export of arms “because these people are pagan.” Yet the Afro-Portuguese lançados liked to have good German swords to accompany their antiquated taste in dress, and some of these—cutlasses from Söllingen, near Düsseldorf, for instance—made their way to Africa. (Tradition had it that the art of making swords reached Söllingen from Damascus.) By the late sixteenth century, handguns were reaching West Africa along the caravan routes from the Maghreb. One could obtain not only muskets but Turkish musketeers in Bornu, in what is now northern Nigeria, by the 1570s, and the great Moroccan army successfully sent south in 1591 to conquer the gold-bearing territories of the central valley of the Niger also included musketeers.

  The Portuguese maintained their prohibition until the end of their participation in the slave traffic. They also banned the export of paper to Africa: for they realized that the pen could be mightier than the cutlass (who in their senses wanted Africans who could write?). But the arrival in West Africa of the Dutch, and even more of the English, altered matters. So did the fact that the then new flintlock musket was both a more effective and a more easily transportable weapon than the arquebus.

  From 1650 onwards, West Africans developed a taste for, and a habit of using, muskets. The “Angola gun,” a long-barreled flintlock musket, dominated the market between Cabo Negro and Benguela. Short French guns with iron ramrods, “decent sham Dane guns with wooden ramrods,” and cheap “Bonny guns” were all to be found in eighteenth-century African palaces. Willem Bosman wrote, about 1700: “For some time, we have been selling many weapons. We are obliged to do this in order to remain at the same level as the foreigners and interlopers [that is, presumably, the English and the French], but I would prefer that this commerce had never started here and that, in the future, it would not be carried on.”7 It was too late. By 1780, many African monarchies looked on muskets as necessary for self-defense, knowing that they could only be obtained by trading slaves.

  In the eighteenth century, the cargo of the Dutch Middelburgische Kamerse Compagnie was usually 14 percent gunpowder and 9 percent guns per slave. Perhaps six to seven thousand guns were imported into Luanda alone every year in the 1780s, but many more were exchanged for slaves on the Loango c
oast. London and Birmingham gunmakers both contributed substantially. Lord Shelburne, then secretary to Pitt the elder, even thought in 1765 that 150,000 guns had been sent to Africa from Birmingham alone, thus enriching such businesses as the Quaker firm of Farmer and Galton in Birmingham, and Thomas Falkner and John Parr in Liverpool, not to speak of Richardson and Co, gunpowder makers at Hounslow, and Samuel Banner of Birmingham, who made swords as well as firearms. The total number of guns exported from Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century approached three hundred thousand a year. A Liverpool merchant with the appropriate name of Henry Hardware declared, in 1756, that gunpowder and arms were a “necessary part” of the cargoes of ships trading to Africa. It was often said then that a slave had the value of one Birmingham gun, just as, in the fifteenth century, a horse had bought a dozen slaves. But three guns per slave was a more normal equivalence; and in some places it was as high as five or six. The fact was that the price of slaves trebled between 1680 and 1720, while that of guns fell, so that several large well-armed states were able to develop along the Gold and Slave coasts: Ashanti and Dahomey above all.

  Of course, the Africans had preferences, and it would appear that, among the guns offered by English traders, “tower guns” were much the favorite, followed by round muskets, Danish guns, and “Bonny muskets.” Further, the Bonny River area was probably the territory most anxious for guns in exchange for slaves: the Vili traders in Loango were also very interested, and it seems possible that as many as fifty thousand guns arrived every year in those ports in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to be dispersed throughout Central Africa.

  No doubt these guns were often employed to protect agriculture, as decoration, and for trade, but their use in enabling the Africans who obtained them to gain more slaves was also considerable.

  Many of the guns were inferior: King Tegbesu of Dahomey once complained that a consignment which he had bought from the English burst whenever they were put to use, and hurt his soldiers; and he made a similar complaint about French guns. After a visit to the Farmer and Galton factory in Birmingham in the 1760s, Lord Shelburne made the considerate comment, “What is shocking to humanity is that above half of them, from the manner they are finished in, are sure to burst in the first hand that fires them.”8

  Gunpowder was also popular: “an article on which there is the greatest gains of any in the trade,” reported the captain of a Liverpool ship in 1765. In the 1770s and 1780s, the quantity of gunpowder imported to Africa from Britain exceeded a million pounds annually, and in 1790 it would exceed two million.

  • • •

  Alcohol was also a great attraction for the slave trade, though, as happens in “Western culture,” it was also used to promote good bargains. West Africans had their own palm wine. Some peoples made wine from honey, or a kind of beer from millet. But palm wine became “sour so that it cannot be drunk after ten or twelve days,” Jean Barbot wrote, and, after 1440, most Africans, especially those in the Gambia region, came to prefer Portuguese wine, of which muscatel—sold in pipas, two hogsheads each and carrying five hundred liters—was the chief attraction of the sixteenth century. Large casks of Madeira and port were also features of early slaving journeys. “The Wolofs are great drunkards,” Valentim Fernandes noted in 1510, “and derive great pleasure from our wine.”9 Wine continued to be provided by the Portuguese and, when the Spaniards re-entered the slave trade in the late eighteenth century, barrels of wine figured largely on the lists of the Cádiz Company, to be exchanged for slaves in Africa. The slave merchants of La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Nantes always sent wine to Africa as part of their cargoes, La Rochelle being then a great producer, and known as the “city of Bacchus.”

  But by the seventeenth century, the distilling process, that great invention of Catalan Benedictines, came into its own. Spirits were especially sought after on long voyages. French “brandies” played a great part, being often carried on Dutch and English ships. Bordeaux and La Rochelle were especially well placed to send wonderfully strong eaux-de-vie. Brandy was specially made, in Porto, for African sale. Barbot recalled that three “anchors” of brandy would buy a young male slave. The Brazilians made themselves popular, too, in Africa, with the sale of gerebita—a cane brandy, made from the foam skimmed off the second boiling of cane juice which, being 50 or 60 proof, seemed superior to all other liquors. Alcohol constituted a fifth of Portuguese cargoes at the end of the eighteenth century; and each pipa of this Brazilian spirit might buy ten slaves. This liquor, the product of a hundred or more small stills in Rio or its surroundings, was Brazil’s largest export to Angola. The records of the Middelburgische Kamerse Compagnie in the eighteenth century show that alcohol constituted over 10 percent of the cargoes for slaves.

  On the African side, we hear of many rulers such as the king of Barsally (Gambia), of whom it was said, “It is to that insatiable thirst of his after brandy that his subjects’ freedoms and families are in so precarious a situation: for [being intoxicated] he very often goes, with some of his troops, by a town in the daytime, and returns in the night, and sets fire to three parts of it, and sets guards to the fourth to seize the people as they run out from the fire; he ties their arms behind them, and marches them to the place where he sells them, which is either Joar or Cohone [both were markets on the river].”10

  In the late seventeenth century, Anglo-Saxon rum began to replace brandy as a slave cargo, at least on English and North American ships. Rum was cheaper than brandy and was held to be less destructive to the liver. This era began when English interlopers, principally from Bristol, began to carry the new cargo direct from Barbados. Jean Barbot wrote that, on his return to Cape Coast on the Gold Coast in 1679, he found “a great alteration: the French brandy, whereof I had always had a good quantity abroad, being much less demanded, by reason that a great quantity of spirits and rum had been bought on that coast . . . which obliged them all to sell cheap.”11 Frederick Philipse of New York stocked his ship Margaret with sixteen casks of rum, among other things, in 1698. In 1721, the RAC’s factor at Cape Coast told his masters in London that rum had become the “chief barter,” even for gold. In 1765, two refineries were established in Liverpool specifically to supply slave ships with rum. There were also by then distilleries in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

  Once a direct slave trade began from North America to Africa, these last and other, distillers began to see rum as one of their most important products. In 1770, just before the American Revolution, rum represented over four-fifths of New England’s exports. About eleven million gallons of Rhode Island rum were exchanged for slaves in Africa between 1709 and 1807, with about 800,000 gallons being the annual average marketed in the last few years before 1807. Each slave ship might carry fifty to a hundred hogsheads. A specially strong “Guinea rum” was distilled in Newport for the Africa market. The rum trade on the coast of West Africa was by then a “virtual monopoly of New England.”12 In 1755, Caleb Godfrey, a slave captain from Newport, Rhode Island, bought four men, three women, three girls, and one boy for 799 gallons of rum, two barrels of beef, and one barrel of pork, together with some smaller items; and, in 1767, Captain William Taylor, acting for Richard Brew of Cape Coast, bought male slaves at 130 gallons each, women at 110, and young girls at eighty. By 1773, the price was higher: 210 to 220 gallons per slave was paid by the captain of Aaron Lopez’s Cleopatra.

  When the American Revolution interrupted the slave trade, the shortage of rum on the west coast of Africa caused as much heartache among the European factors and governors as among the African dealers. Governor Richard Miles of Cape Coast had to make do with Caribbean rum for some years, but it was not the same thing. Richard Brew was equally distraught. The Africans with whom Rhode Island captains had traded, especially along the Gold and Windward coasts, had also become addicted to North American rum, a fact which gave captains from Rhode Island a definite advantage when the traffic recovered in the 1780s.

  Rum was also used to pay Afric
an workers; in 1767, Captain William Pinnegar paid canoemen who took the slaves to their ship one and a half gallons each for their services.

  Gin, cider, and beer also played their part in the slave traffic. Bristol merchants, for example, had for a time specialized in trading gin for slaves in the eighteenth century; the captain of the Bance Island, leaving Charleston for the river Sierra Leone in 1760, carried cider and “Vidonia” (Canary Island) wine. Beer and cider, indeed, may have been traded more in the slave trade than the records suggest, especially in ships from Bristol.

  • • •

  Tobacco was another product with a long life in the slave business. The main producer of the tobacco which the Africans liked had been Bahia in the sixteenth century: “Bahia had tobacco, and wanted slaves; the coast of Mina had slaves and wanted tobacco”—“in rolls, not in leaf,” wrote Captain Dampier, in 1699. From 1644, this trade was authorized by Portuguese royal decree to be direct: a commerce which escaped the control of Lisbon. The governor of Bahia in 1779, the marquis of Valença, said, “The truth is that the tobacco of Brazil is as necessary for the trade in slaves as those same slaves are for the maintenance of Portuguese America.”13 This gave the Brazilians a near monopoly of the Portuguese trade with West Africa in the eighteenth century.

  The reason for the permission was that this tobacco was not even of second-best quality, but of a poor grade, third-class, as it appeared to the Portuguese; they called it “soca.” This tobacco’s charm was accidental: it had been treated with molasses, to prevent it from crumbling, and the Africans found it to their taste.