by Hugh Thomas
Still, there were in the eighteenth century many years of renewed success for the Atlantic trade from the Cape Verde Islands, particularly after the creation of the two Portuguese monopoly companies, founded on the recommendation of Prime Minister Pombal; even in the 1780s, after the collapse of those enterprises, slaves exported each year to Brazil may have amounted to about 2,200, all of them probably originally from far up the river Sénégal.
Uninhibited friendships between Portuguese and blacks from the earliest days had resulted in a mulatto population on the Cape Verde Islands, though there remained families who considered themselves white (few visitors shared that opinion). The families of most of the mulattoes, morgados, had long before broken free of direct Portuguese control, even if formally they remained Catholics, and under the political direction of the enfeebled (unpaid) Portuguese governor, who was in titular control of all the Portuguese possessions in northern West Africa. But that relative independence did not lead to economic success. In the early seventeenth century, Praia, the main town on Santiago, was described by its own governor as the “charnel house and dung heap” of the Portuguese empire; while in 1804, a North American trader would report that he found “nothing but beggars from the Governor down to the lowest Negro.”2 Spanish trading here for slaves as well as for local dyes was continuous, even though successive Portuguese decrees forbade it. Those Spanish illegal traders were popular because they had better goods to offer than did the Portuguese.
Just to the south of Cape Verde itself was a bay which Ca’da Mosto had looked on as beautiful, probably because, in his day, the palm trees came down almost to the beach. Here lay Gorée, a long island with two forts, Fort Saint-Michel and Fort Vermandois (later Saint-François), built on a gloomy basalt excrescence; in the eighteenth century, it was an entrepàt as well as a center of supplies so important that it gave its name to the main quay in Liverpool’s new harbor, and to a poor parish in Bristol, Rhode Island, for a time one of the most prosperous United States slave ports. Gorée had been much prized by European captains from the seventeenth century onwards, for there they could find water from good wells, as well as food for the slaves, not to speak of an interpreter and information about the state of the markets, from European or mulatto traders living in fine houses, surrounded by mulata “signares,” pretty black girls. Dr. Wadström said that, in 1788, one of these mulattoes told him that the slaves of Gorée held in captiveries below these fine houses numbered nearly twelve hundred, but the Swede thought, “I have reason to believe that it was not so many.”3 Among the permanent residents, there were eccentrics: for example, the chaplain in the 1780s, Father Demanet who, under the cover of founding a sisterhood of the Sacré Coeur, had at his disposal the prettiest mulattoes of the region.
Sheltered by the curve of the northern coast of Cape Verde above it, Gorée was easy to approach; there were no difficulties at the bar, the climate was pleasant, and the rainy season short. The sea nearby abounded in fish. Its history was similar to that of Arguin. Thus it was first occupied by the Portuguese. The Dutch seized it in 1617, and built a fort. The Portuguese took it back, after a siege, only to lose it again to the Dutch, who refortified it in 1647. The English captured it in the first Anglo-Dutch war during the reign of Charles II, the Dutch won it back, and it was then taken by Marshal d’Estrées and a French expedition. After this, France held Gorée, except for a period after 1693 when the English captured it, and for a few years during the Seven Years’ War, when the same occurred. But Britain returned it to France in 1763.
The French made Gorée into the most spacious of all the West African European establishments after Elmina on the Gold Coast. They had room to build the zigzag “lines of fortification” recommended by great fortress architects in Europe, such as Vauban. Gorée was the first slave harbor of West Africa to use a real currency as opposed to iron bars or cowries: in this case, the silver dollar, or the Dutch twenty-eight-stuiver piece. The mercantile house of David Gradis et fils of Bordeaux was well established at Gorée, but so were others from the same city.
The large river Gambia was barely a hundred miles south of Gorée. By 1780 it had enjoyed for many generations a most varied character. It was lined, like most of those nearby, by mangroves, at least to the limit of the tides. It had a much smaller alluvial plain than the Sénégal but, all the same, was tidal for at least 150 miles upriver, as far as the Barkunda Falls; so the salt had a bad effect on agriculture on the floodplain of the lower river. The river had for a long time been fancied as likely to lead to an African El Dorado because, at the market town of Cantor, two hundred miles inland, Mandingo merchants would exchange gold found farther inland still, at Bambuk; but the early promise disappointed. After 1586, no Portuguese ship seems to have sailed up to Cantor, the sale of gold being thereafter in the capable hands of Moorish middlemen, who would gauge whether it was worthwhile selling to Europeans on the coast, or to merchants from the Maghreb.
The lower part of the river was in 1780 largely in the hands of Afro-Portuguese settlers, lançados, as they had been called in the fifteenth century, some of them deriving from the Cape Verde Islands. In the eighteenth century, these adventurers still managed several towns on the Gambia, particularly Tankula and Sika, which served as the headquarters of a far-reaching trade, in slaves above all. The farthest place inland where they were established was Cantor. Jean Barbot described dining lavishly but primitively here with one of these traders, a Senhora Catarina, in 1680. The 1730s constituted a peak in their trade. Then the central part of the river began to be controlled by Mandingo merchants, who had impressed the early Portuguese explorers with their intelligence and their energy; while the upper river was dominated by traveling Muslim scholar-merchants, known as “marybuckes” (marabouts).
The low-standing, previously uninhabited Saint Andrew’s Island at the mouth of the Gambia was, in 1651, bought from the local Ñomi chief by Baltic Germans sent by James, duke of Courland. These representatives of the ancient Hanseatic League thought that possession of this place would give them control over the river, and so enable them to levy tolls on all those, European and African alike, who used the waterway. A fort was built out of local sandstone, a Lutheran pastor appointed, and cannon on the island were placed so as to command both channels to the north and south. The plan, as indicated earlier,I was to sell slaves to the duke’s colony in Tobago, but the scheme did not prosper.
The Dutch bought out the duke of Courland in 1658, and the Baltic governor left for Jamaica, “with his goods and slaves,” but the island was seized in 1661 by the English, who renamed it Fort James, after the duke of York, the future James II, then lord high admiral. Thereafter, the mouth of the river remained under the influence of Britain, though the French three times captured the island, devastated it, and then abandoned it, lacking the will to occupy it permanently. A Welsh pirate captured the island in 1715 and traded extensively; afterwards the RAC strengthened the fort considerably.
Fort James was lost by the British to the French in 1779. They did nothing with it and, even at the coming of peace in 1783, left it unoccupied. So the English resumed their control, and a governor was appointed by the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (subordinate to the governor of Cape Coast). The English had founded two factories a considerable way up the river, at Joar and Cattajar; the French, determined to keep a foothold on this waterway, had one at the Mandingo town of Albreda, begun in 1681 on the estuary. It was a constant source of annoyance to the British, for it took a lot of the trade of the river.
The whole of the region roughly known as Senegambia, which includes the modern Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, as well as Gambia and Sénégal, may have exported about sixty thousand slaves in the course of the eighteenth century, carried in about 175 ships, so averaging about 217 slaves per vessel and six hundred a year. This was probably a little less than the exports of the late sixteenth century.
Next in the slaving journey from north to south down the west coast of Africa came a
series of rivers, the Casamance, the Cacheu, and the Gebo, much used by the Portuguese from the fifteenth century onwards. At almost every estuary there was a trading center for slaves, sometimes in direct contact with the Cape Verde Islands, sometimes acting as a clearing house for the bigger places, such as those on the two rivers, Cacheu and Gebo, both estuaries being guarded from the incursions of foreigners on the ocean by the offshore Bissagos Islands. This region remained Portuguese throughout the era of the Atlantic slave trade, though many Spanish ships came down here to buy slaves illegally. The French also were trading slaves quite successfully here by the late seventeenth century. There were two crumbling forts, praças, in the 1780s: one, built in 1591 at Cacheu, on the river of that name, was originally established by the lançados, and its defense in the eighteenth century seemed merely to consist of a wooden palisade, garrisoned by ragamuffins; the second, on the estuary at Bissau, on the mouth of the modern river Corubal, founded in 1587, had been formidably restored in 1641, and refortified by the Maranhão Company in 1766 at the cost of many lives and of continuing enmity from the local Pepel people. Cacheu in its time “bustled as the center of the Hispano-Portuguese slave trade,” and had a population of about five hundred Europeans and a thousand blacks in various degrees of dependence. There were a few dependent garrisons (presidios) elsewhere, mostly staffed by Cape Verdians, convicts from Portugal, or lançados. Cacheu was, for a time in the seventeenth century, also a major boat-building place, since the local cabopa tree yielded planks said to resist shipworm; and even the despised mangrove had a fiber which could be used for caulking. When Barbot visited this river in 1680, he found that it was healthier than the Gambia, and that there were about four hundred huts or houses, mostly made of “clapboards in the Portuguese style,” as well as four Catholic churches.
When the Portuguese started trading slaves from the river Cacheu, in the fifteenth century, the mixture of peoples on the river (Balanta, Pepel, Djolas, Casangas, Banhuns)—some Muslim, some not—made the area a slave traders’ paradise, for wars were frequent and could easily be stimulated. Slaves were still being traded in the late eighteenth century, as they would be in the mid-nineteenth.
In contrast to Cacheu, which always remained Portuguese, Bissau fell more and more under the influence of the French in the eighteenth century: but, in 1755, the new Portuguese company formed for the development of northern Brazil, the Company of Grão Pará and Maranhão, began to export slaves on a large scale. The company was well endowed and could afford to devote much effort to the construction. This enabled Bissau to enjoy a bout of prosperity, which continued even when the monopoly company, having carried twenty-eight thousand slaves out of the two rivers in a little over twenty years, lost its license in 1778.
Offshore, the Bissagos Islands had always been a good source for slaves, since the military-minded indigenous people there had long experience in raiding the mainland, twenty-four men using seventy-foot canoes (almadias) hewn from silk-cotton trees. After a while, however, the shore peoples whom these islanders had been wont to seize, such as the Beafadas or the Pepel, became themselves skilled slave traders. Indeed, the Beafadas gained such a reputation for slaving that they were fancifully accused by their neighbors of introducing the idea into the world.
By the eighteenth century, the Bissagos Islands were dominated by mulattoes or octoroons, and they customarily retained there a substantial store of slaves, always ready for sale when a slave ship should come. Since the European demand at that time was overwhelmingly for men, and since the peoples on the islands raided one another indiscriminately, the islands had a large female majority, almost as if here at last were the famous islands of the Amazons so much sought by the early Spanish conquistadors. Much of the actual trading on these islands was done by women.
The two rivers Pongas (Pongo) and Núñez—the “rivers of the south,” between Bissau and what became Sierra Leone, in what is now the state of Guinea—were also reliable slaving harbors from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries; in the latter era, they may even have been responsible for a tenth of the total African exports of slaves, the best trading year apparently being 1760, at the time of the consolidation of the theocratic Muslim state of Futa Jallon, in the mountains inland, which sent thousands of refugees fleeing to the coast. But, then, the zone had always been a major slaving territory. On this river there was once a rare example of an African ruler seeking to prevent or at least to resist the slave trade; but the alliance of a few villages formed by this individual—Tomba, a Baga—failed, and he was himself swept into slavery.II
In the eighteenth century, several European companies or individuals owned islands at the mouth of one or another of these rivers. For example, in 1754, Miles Barber of London bought one of the Los Islands (Idolos), close to the mainland (off what is now Conakry), planted rice, and built a trading post, with “deux captiveries,” on the east coast. The water was good, and the fish abundant. Barber had another eleven establishments on the west coast of Africa, and probably himself was selling about six thousand slaves a year to the New World in the 1780s, four thousand from the Los Islands, as well as beeswax, ivory, and some dye-wood. His establishment was sacked by Americans during the War of Independence but, immediately after the peace, his company started selling slaves again, a French captain, Rousseau, being the biggest buyer, on behalf of the Sénégal Company. Three thousand slaves were packed off from here to the French West Indies annually in the 1780s. In the late eighteenth century, when ships from North America began to come often to Africa, Barber’s establishment was one of their favorite ports of call.
Only a short way south of the Los Islands lay the river Bereira, where a most remarkable woman, Betsy Heard, had established herself. She was the daughter of a Liverpool-born entrepreneur who had come to the Los Islands in the mid-eighteenth century, and an African (the daughter of a slave) and, after a conventional English education near Liverpool, Betsy returned to the town of Bereira where she remained the unofficial queen of the river till the end of the century. Her success as a dealer in slaves was due to the Islamic jihad in Futa Jallon. Bereira itself was seized by an Islamic people, the Morians, who sought to force the population to convert to Islam. This did not affect Betsy Heard’s commercial success—after all, Islam never shrank from business—and, in the 1790s, she was known as one of the most successful traders. Next to her, to the south, was the river Scarcies, where a Mande-speaking people, the Susu, who had fled from the upper Niger in the late Middle Ages, had set up a series of trading stations principally concerned with the salt trade to the Niger. But they had slaving interests also.
Another example of a private exploitation of an island in this region was Bence Island, called after a squire Bence of the late seventeenth century, one of several islands in the estuary of the river Sierra Leone, which had been an English post for several generations. Most of these islands were for many years infested by pirates. In the 1670s, though, Bence Island was established as the local headquarters of the RAC. Its buildings were destroyed in 1728 by Africans, led by a Luso-Senegambian, and the site was then maintained for a few years by slavers from London. One of these, George Fryer, sold the island in 1748 to the London Scottish syndicate of Sir Alexander Grant, Augustus and John Boyd, father and son, and Richard Oswald, all of them, as we have seen, rising, internationally active merchants from Scotland who had become established in London—alongside John Mill and John Sargent, both of London; Sargent was one of London’s largest buyers of East Indian goods and, therefore, one of the largest providers of cargoes to the slave traders.
The fortification of Bence Island was a square enclosure, with all the guns facing the sea, but the English traders relied for security on a “good understanding with the natives.” Grant and Oswald gave the island a luxurious central building with “a very cool and convenient gallery,” even establishing nearby a golf course, served by African caddies dressed in kilts especially woven in Glasgow, on which waiting captains could play an
unusual version of their national game. About thirty or forty white clerks, and their assistants, mostly Scotch and some of them relations of the owners, managed Bence Island in its heyday, under the direction of another Scot, James Aird. The place was easily captured by the French in 1779, who reduced it to “a heap of ruins.” It was returned at the Peace of Paris (Richard Oswald was a British negotiator in Paris, but he seemed to be uninterested by then). After Oswald’s death, in 1784, his nephews, Alexander and John Anderson of Philpot Lane, London, ran the island till the early nineteenth century, selling slaves on a large scale at least till 1800, Danish buyers figuring prominently among the clients in the last days.
Bence Island was a “general rendezvous” of slaving from the 1760s onwards. The captives were bought from African kings with no difficulty, most of them being obtained some miles up the river Sierra Leone, and held for a time in “outfactories” established on the Banana Islands, on the Los Islands, and near the Sherbro River. In these places European or mulatto middlemen were often found: not only descendants of Portuguese lançados but English versions of them. There was, for instance, James Cleveland, who had settled on the Banana Islands, to the south of Sierra Leone, and Harrison and Matthew who, like Miles Barber, were to be found on the Los Islands. Cleveland ruled ruthlessly in his little kingdom in the late eighteenth century, with many Africans terrified of being seized by him in compensation for some unpaid debts and then sold as slaves.
