by Hugh Thomas
The export was among the most long-standing in the history of the Americas: it began in the late sixteenth century, and was still popular in 1800. Many Northern European captains bought this tobacco from Brazilian ships offshore to add to their own cargoes. French captains from La Rochelle or Nantes might even stop off at Lisbon to buy supplies of the tobacco for their own trading, though in theory the harbormaster in Lisbon was supposed to refuse entry to them.
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Even in the rum-laden vessels from North America, the gerebita-stocked ships from Brazil, and the textile-heavy vessels from Liverpool, there were always other items in a typical slave cargo: for example, handkerchiefs, codfish, pots and kettles, silk hats, and shaving bowls. Traders in Bristol, Rhode Island, would customarily obtain these and other things from general merchants in Boston, such as Samuel Parkman. These miscellaneous items—such as beads from Venice (or Dutch copies), silver bells, pewter, pretty bits of glass, and bracelets—were much in demand in Africa. The ships of the Cádiz Company often carried porcelain made in Seville in their cargoes to Africa in the 1770s: for example, “3,200 docenas de loza de Sevilla” (that is 3,200 sets of china) were carried in the San Rafael, one of the first slave ships to leave Cádiz after the end of the asientos, in 1766, under Captain Juan Antonio Zabaleta. In 1757, the slave ship from Nantes Jeune Reine carried twelve large rosaries, forty-eight chaplets, and 108 reliquaries.
Beads were probably the most important of these trivia. Yellow and green glass beads were desired by the Sapes in the sixteenth century, and so were red carnelians by the people of Calabar in the seventeenth. Daniel and Claude Jamineau—Huguenots in London in the eighteenth century, the most successful dealers in beads—perhaps did best out of this business. One slave merchant reported receiving a prime Negro in return for thirteen beads of coral, half a string of amber beads, twenty-eight silver bells, and three pairs of bracelets. In a good year in the late seventeenth century, about three thousand pounds’ worth of beads and glass would be carried by the RAC: bought in Amsterdam, and made in Venice. The Dutch soon began to make beads themselves, in more colors, sizes, and qualities than those from Venice, some loose, some threaded, white, large and small, crystal, garnet, some amber or coral, and speckled white. Beads made in Venice were, however, still being sent by the Portuguese to Angola in the late eighteenth century. Different parts of the African coast, of course, had different tastes: the rulers of the river Gambia wanted amber beads; in Whydah and the Niger Delta, small Venetian beads were required.
Some beads had always been known, and even made, in Africa. For example, the aggry bead of hard glass had apparently been made, from an early date, at Ife in the territory of the Yoruba.
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In the earliest days of the Portuguese slave trade with West Africa, Pacheco Pereira spoke of horses as if they had been the main item of cargo. The French traveler Lacourbe mentioned Arab horses being sold for twenty-five slaves each at the end of the seventeenth century. Barbot thought that horses sold for twelve to fourteen slaves; and the official Pruneau de Pommegorge, at the end of the eighteenth century, claimed to have seen an African buy a horse for a hundred slaves and a hundred oxen. At that time, horses were still often almost a currency, and a historian of Islamic Africa wrote that slaves and horses were the gifts most favored by Muslim kings in the interior.
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Nonslave transactions, of course, accounted for much of the income of traders to Africa: two-fifths in the case of the RAC in the late seventeenth century: redwood from the banks of the rivers Sierra Leone and Sherbro; ivory, wax, hides, gum; and gold turned into guineas by the mint. These shipments were usually carried out by a direct trade to Africa and back. But in the late eighteenth century, slaves dominated all the European nations’ West African commerce. One English trader settled on the Gold Coast, Richard Brew, explained (from his fortress, Brew Hall) in 1771: “Formerly, owners of ships used to send out double cargoes of goods, one for slaves, one for gold. . . . How strangely things are reversed now. . . . We scarce see a ship go off without her complement of slaves. . . .”14 Brew spoke, of course, as a self-confident trader of Anglo-Saxon stock at a time when Britain and North America still happily constituted a single and powerful Atlantic polity.
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IA measure of eight and one-third imperial gallons.
IIA cabess was five thousand cowries.
IIIThey brought not only cloth but a new vein of cotton from the Americas, Gossypium barbadense. African cloth was made from this on a large scale on the upper valley of the river Sénégal.
IVExchange of slaves for horses reappeared in the eighteenth century, according to the books of Nicholas Brown of Providence. Thus, in 1765, his firm exchanged forty horses in Surinam for rum, sugar, molasses, and “one negrow garl.”
17
Slave Harbors I
“Friends who meet occasionally remain better friends than if they are neighbors—on account of the nature of the human heart.”
King Caramansa to Diogo da Azambuja, builder of Elmina, 1482
THE ANCHORAGES where slaves were obtained in Africa over the centuries extended from opposite the Canary Islands, all the way down the west coast of Africa, then round the Cape of Good Hope, to include Mozambique and Madagascar. These harbors all had eras of aggrandizement and of decline but, from the beginning of the trade to the Americas, in the sixteenth century, to the end of it, in the nineteenth, slaves from most regions could always be found. For example, in a list given in the will of Hernán Cortés in Mexico in 1547, slaves from both Mozambique and Senegambia were present. The same were among those at work on the steam-powered sugar mill, Alava, belonging to Julián Zulueta in Cuba in 1870.
To a great extent, the Atlantic slave trade was an affair of rivers: those vast, marvelously beautiful waterways, which often rose in the very heart of the continent, and which fascinated travelers from Ca’da Mosto in the 1450s to Livingstone four hundred years later, were the means of transport by canoe of millions of black captives to the Atlantic, at the sight of which the slaves were, of course, usually as surprised as they were fearful.
The northernmost zone of Africa used as a slave harbor was the stretch of five hundred or so miles facing the Canary Islands between Agadir and Cape Bojador, which the Treaty of Alcaçovas of 1479 between the Spaniards and the Portuguese had allocated for commerce and fishing to the former. Here the Spanish colonists on the Canary Islands carried out numerous raiding expeditions in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as well as some negotiated purchases of slaves; and from there, several thousand Berber slaves were taken, either to work thereafter on the Canary Island plantations or to be shipped to Spain herself. But the Spanish fort near Cape Juby, the nearest point to the Canary Islands, had been overrun in the 1520s by the Berbers and, by the late eighteenth century, the ancient traffic which it had assisted was scarcely a memory.
The first zone of intensive trading for slaves was well to the south of this, at Arguin, in the bay beyond Capo Blanco. It was from here that Portugal first took slaves, mostly Azanaghi, in the 1440s. The Portuguese Crown built ten years later a polygonal fortress above a two-hundred-foot cliff and, in the 1560s, it was still profitable to Portugal. Between 1441 and 1505, anything between twenty-five and forty thousand slaves were carried from there to Portugal, many of them being first exchanged two hundred miles inland, at the oasis of Wadan, on the westernmost caravan route from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco. The Portuguese, as it were, diverted these slaves from their regular route northwards.
The Spaniards took over Arguin when, in 1580, they merged their empire with that of Portugal, only to lose the trading post in 1638 to the French, who demilitarized it, for the caravan route now ran much farther to the east than Wadan, and the place had ceased to be the golden market which it had seemed in the days of Prince Henry the Navigator. In the late seventeenth century, the least important of European slave traders, the Brandenburgers, seized Arguin a
nd established a garrison of twenty to serve as an intermediate trading post on the way to their headquarters at Princes Town, on the Gold Coast. When the German interest waned, the Dutch bought Arguin but, in 1721, they too lost it to the French, with whom it unprofitably remained. Such vicissitudes, with no consideration of the local people, in what is now Mauritania, were common among European settlements in West Africa.
The French until about 1720 concentrated on expanding their trade, in ivory and gum as well as slaves, well to the south of Arguin, along the Sénégal. That river had seemed for a long time to be a West African Nile, because of the way the waters of the river rose, as a result of the heavy rains in the interior between June and October. The current appeared to carry the river a long way out to sea. The French trading port was protected by a large, mud-built, badly designed fortress, Saint-Louis, built on an island of that name at the mouth of the river. Around that edifice lay a cemetery, a hospital and, of course, a church, as well as a few brick houses for the small white or mulatto population, and also numerous huts in which Africans lived. There were about 1780 six hundred French officials and soldiers and a few European-born residents, as well as an undefined number of mulattoes: especially mulatas, “les signares” (that is, senhoras), descendants of Portuguese settlers of the old days, whose combination of good looks and commercial enterprise made Saint-Louis an attractive place to the visitor. Here the French governor did all he could to ensure the effectiveness of the trade in slaves as in that of gum, which his countrymen obtained from the acacia forests along the north side of the river, and which was required as a dye in the French calico-printing industry. He issued austere regulations: for example, a provision stipulating that no brandy be issued to those who did not attend evening, as well as morning, prayer. The charm of this region for trading slaves was not only that it faced the Atlantic, but that it was also connected, by good waterways and savanna country, to more ancient caravan routes to the Maghreb than could be easily tapped at Arguin. There were also both artificially constructed and natural salt pans. The Bambuk gold fields were accessible by water, three hundred miles inland. The tropical forest did not begin till about five hundred miles to the south, and so the valley of the Sénégal was well north of the tsetse-fly zone. Thus cattle could be bred there, and meat dried, for use on Atlantic journeys. At one time in the early seventeenth century, the cattle imported did so well in this region that the export of hides brought in more money than slaves did. The Portuguese, it may be remembered, had looked on the river Sénégal as the dividing line between the Moors and the blacks and, as early as 1506, the German printer and traveler who took the name Valentim Fernandes noted that, though “one exchanges here very little gold,” there are “plenty of black slaves.”1 The statement could have been repeated at the end of the eighteenth century.
The first slaves sold here were said to be Wolofs (Jolofs), the people who dominated the territory. But, as in the case of most names in Atlantic Africa, many who were called “Wolof” in America would originally have come from the far interior, from places well beyond the head of navigation on the Sénégal. The Wolof kingdom itself had probably been created in the fourteenth century, and it had a nobility which was Muslim, with a capital between the rivers Sénégal and Gambia. The Wolofs for a long time dominated the first of these rivers and its banks, and their tributaries included a few monarchies on the coast (Walo, Cayor, Baol, Sine, and Salum), as well as the more numerous Serers, their kinsmen, to the south. The Portuguese made an unsuccessful attempt to place a Christianized Wolof, Bermoi, on the throne of his ancestors, but already in the sixteenth century the power of that kingdom was in decline; power, such as it was, had passed to the subordinate princelings. Later, a number of rebels from the Songhai empire on the Niger, the Mande and Fulani, made their way towards the coast and established themselves in the hills of Futa Toro, just to the south of the Sénégal where previously the Wolofs had been all-powerful. Many of the slaves traded in the middle of the sixteenth century were originally captured by these people, whose monarchy came to be thought of as a new empire. By 1600, this “empire of the Grand Foul,” as the English liked to refer to it, seems to have extended over the whole of the upper Sénégal, including the gold fields of Bambuk.
Other Fulani, known as the Mane, carried out similar advances, but from the southeast, establishing themselves in the sixteenth century in numerous little kingdoms along the coast which had previously, and immemorially, been ruled by monarchs from the places concerned rather than by interlopers.
These political changes took place without overt European influence; rebels from the Songhai empire would probably have sought power by the use of force and prosperity through the slave trade whether or no there had been buyers of Africans for the markets in the Americas.
The river Sénégal was difficult to ascend before the days of steam because of the current and a downstream-flowing wind. The most reliable way of traveling upstream was by cordelling, pulling the ships by tow from the shore or by kedging, taking an anchor ahead in a canoe and pulling the ship up by windlass. Usually this work was done by African laborers, the so-called laptots, the word being a Gallicized form of “Wolof” but coming to mean any African who worked with Europeans.
Like most European forts, Saint-Louis changed hands often, being captured by the English in 1693, then regained at the subsequent peace by France. The English captured it again during the Seven Years’ War, but lost it once more to the French in 1779. The English, when they were formally in control, left much trade on the Sénégal in the hands of Afro-French boatmen. Several ports on the river, such as Podor, a hundred miles inland, had, from the early eighteenth century, belonged to French privileged companies, such as Law’s Compagnie des Indes, which established what was intended to be a monopoly there—not just for slaves (the Compagnie des Indes ceased slaving after 1748) but also for gum. To serve these interests, the French had an islet at Saint-Joseph, a mud-built fort on the upper river which could hold 250 slaves at any one time in its captiverie. This was a curb to the slave trade, for it set a limit for buying slaves during the dry season: to enlarge the prison would have been expensive; and to hold slaves without a prison was inconceivable. Slaves arriving in the “high season” might, however, be shipped directly downriver to Saint-Louis, whose cellars could hold a thousand slaves. Dr. Carl Bernard Wadström, chief director of the assay office in Sweden, who visited Africa in the 1780s to “make discoveries in botany, mineralogy, and other departments of science,” thought that at least that number of slaves was shipped annually down the Sénégal. Several French independent traders had by then set themselves up in Saint-Louis on a permanent basis. Typical was Paul Benis, an illiterate sailor who learned Wolof and was a prosperous merchant by the mid-1780s. The Nantes-based firm of Aubrey de la Fosse had a permanent manager in Saint-Louis, responsible for exporting three hundred slaves each year.
The interior of this region, the Senegambia, was relatively stable throughout most of the era of the slave trade. Most people spoke the Fulbe language. English witnesses to the Privy Council’s court of inquiry in London in 1788-89 described the absolute governments of this zone as being largely under the influence of the Moorish merchants inhabiting the desert on the north side of the river Sénégal. In the late eighteenth century, though, the old stability seemed to be breaking up, and there was frequent combat between the ancient coastal monarchies and the Muslims, the latter seeking to expand, or consolidate, their power, as a means of avoiding their own enslavement, though in no way opposing the enslavement of infidels.
Few Senegambians saw Europe, or Christianity, as constituting a political threat between 1440 and 1780: especially in the first part of the eighteenth century, the external danger was from the Moroccans, with their powerful slave army and, after 1750, the Bambara, a black Muslim people on the middle Niger. Islam had been encroaching for centuries since, before the Portuguese had arrived, Senegambia had been a frontier region—not as Spain had been be
fore 1492, since there were Muslim rulers who ruled traditional peoples. Enclaves of powerful and rich Muslim merchants still lived in the center of cities attached to ancient deities.
Crops from the new American continent, such as peanuts, tobacco, manioc and, above all, maize, had been grown here since the sixteenth century, but the irregular rainfall had prevented them from being cultivated in any but a piecemeal fashion. Various kinds of millet, therefore, remained the staple food; cotton was grown, too, and cattle, sheep, and goats were plentiful.
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The trader in slaves sailing south along the West African coast would, a hundred miles south of the estuary of the Sénégal, and before reaching the river Gambia, come upon a peninsula of high land rising gradually to two conical hills known as the Paps (like the Paps of Jura). This was Cape Verde, after which, to the south, the coast of Africa begins to turn slowly to the southeast, the observation of which caused the Portuguese at first to think that their long-desired circumnavigation of the continent would be easier than it turned out. The place was green enough in the rainy season, but otherwise yellow and dry. In the early days of the traffic, this territory, on which Dakar was built in the nineteenth century, was a big source of slaves for the Portuguese, and for some Spanish smugglers also.
In the archipelago off Cape Verde, the main island, Santiago, was for hundreds of years a depot for slaves. There were also large natural deposits of salt (on the island of Sal), as well as orchilla, a lichen, for dyes. In the early sixteenth century, cane, indigo, and cotton were grown, and cattle bred. The islands had greatly benefited from the fact that, in the early days, the coast of the mainland opposite had been looked on by the Portuguese Crown as a dependency of the archipelago. In 1582, the combined populations of the two most important islands, Santiago and Fogo, comprised over 1,600 Europeans, 400 freed slaves, and nearly 14,000 slaves. But the islands declined in the seventeenth century, as did all this region, principally because the Islamic affiliations of the coastal peoples made slaves from there distrusted by both Spanish and Portuguese potential buyers. Nor were those berberiscos, or slaves, of “the Levante” very dark, and Spanish planters preferred their slaves pitch-black. Berberiscos’ introduction into the Spanish empire was repeatedly prohibited for religious reasons.
