The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Throughout the slave trade, women and children were less sought after than men in the prime of life. This was a contrast with the Arab trade in West African slaves across the Sahara, in which women were most important—as in some African slave markets (Benin in the sixteenth century, Senegambia in the late seventeenth), where women, because of their part in agriculture, as in bearing children, fetched a price double that of men.

  In Portugal the reverse was often true. A decree in Lisbon of 1618 sought to ban female slaves absolutely, as well as males less than sixteen years old. Two men to one woman was the proportion which the Royal African Company customarily sought. In the Dutch trade between 1675 and 1795, 18,000 women slaves seem to have been carried, compared with 34,000 men. The explanation is that planters preferred slaves whom they could work hard and then discard, or leave to die, without the trouble of having to rear their families. Most sugar plantations from the beginning to the end of the slave era were undertakings which, it was supposed, needed a constant annual replenishment to maintain the labor force.VIII

  The same judgment applies to slave children: only 6 percent of slaves shipped from Luanda between 1734 and 1769 were children, only 3 percent of those shipped from Benguela, and only 8 to 13 percent of those shipped overall by the Dutch West India Company. Probably a figure of 10 percent would be a generous estimate for all the slave centuries. In the late eighteenth century, more children were shipped to both North and South America, because of an increase in the demand for children as servants; and it later came to be thought that children, like women, were more efficient than men in cotton fields, in Demerara, for example.

  Thomas Tobin, a Liverpool slave captain of the 1790s, describes rejecting some slaves on the grounds that they were too young. Sir Robert Inglis, member of Parliament for Oxford University, an old-fashioned Tory, asked the then elderly Tobin, presumably with irony, before the Hutt Committee in the 1840s, “Notwithstanding all the advantages of the Middle Passage, with decks five feet four, and a surgeon on board, you have no reason to believe that any negro ever went voluntarily from the coast of Africa to the West Indies?” Tobin replied, “ . . . there was no objection on the part of the females and the boys; the stout, able men, might appear not to wish to go; but, if they were not taken by the captain of the ship, they knew they would not be at liberty, because they would come down for 100 miles or 200 miles, and they would . . . still be slaves. Besides, they could not know of the advantages . . . until they had been some time on board; and then they became reconciled.” Tobin said that he recalled that he “had known the young ones get hold of you by the knees and beg you to take them to your country.”29

  An important part in all these negotiations for slaves was played by interpreters: “these linguists [who] are natives and freemen of the Country, whom we hire on account of their speaking good English, during the time we remain trading on the coast; and they are likewise brokers between us and the black merchants. . . .”30 “Linguists” were often taken on board the ship and were in many ways more important than the sailors. Thus, Captain Joseph Harrison, on the Rainbow, belonging to Thomas Rumbold and Co. of Liverpool, found an excellent free African as linguist whom he named Dick. It later happened that a sailor named Richard Kirby (also called Dick) reported the African Dick to be “no better than a slave,” and recommended that he be sold as such in Barbados. Thereupon Dick the interpreter grew sulky. The captain found out what had transpired, and that Kirby was the culprit. Dick the linguist demanded satisfaction, but Captain Harrison said that he had no power to beat any white person; instead, though, fearing an insurrection of slaves, he desired Dick to take his own satisfaction. This he did: three- or four-and-twenty lashes. Kirby died soon after, and Harrison was not punished, since it turned out that the dead man had had a lethargic disorder, a flux or a dropsy.31

  Sometimes, during the shipment, the traders were attacked. For example, in 1730, unknown blacks assaulted Adrien Vanvoorn’s 150-ton ship Phénix from Nantes, while the captain, Laville Pichard, was negotiating the purchase of slaves, and set it on fire off Queta, at the mouth of the river Volta. The consequence, as on most other such occasions, was that numerous slaves died.IX Usually, everyone came off badly from such affairs. The snowX Perfect (Captain William Potter of Liverpool, bound for Charleston, South Carolina) was, in 1758, “cut off by negroes, in the river Gambia, and every man on board was murdered. . . .” Similarly, the Côte d’Or, a 200-ton vessel belonging to Rafael Mendez of Bordeaux, was stranded on a sandbank near Bonny in 1768. Over a hundred rafts approached, each with thirty to sixty blacks on board, most of them carrying sabers, knives, or rifles. These men boarded the ship and stole everything in sight. Only the appearance of two English ships saved the crew, who were taken to São Tomé.

  The RAC had many disasters in the early eighteenth century. For example, in 1703, Africans seized the company’s fort at Sekondi, on the Gold Coast, and beheaded the chief agent. The same year, an agent of the RAC, in Anamabo, was held prisoner for eighteen days, until he bought his freedom with “good words and a great deal of money.” In 1704, three agents of the same company were stripped naked and held prisoner on the Senegambian coast. In 1717, Captain David Francis reported, “My boats and people are seized at almost every port I send them.”32

  Then there was a famous massacre at Calabar in 1767, which had a different conclusion (and which was mentioned by William Wilberforce in his first speech in the House of Commons proposing the abolition of the traffic). The captains of five Liverpool ships, and one each from Bristol and London, lay in the Old Calabar River. A dispute was under way at that time between the rulers of Old and New Calabar. The English captains offered themselves as mediators, and suggested that the inhabitants of the old city should come aboard one of their ships. Nine canoes left Old Calabar, led by Amboe Robin John, a leader of that city, each canoe carrying nearly thirty men. When these craft approached the English vessels, the English captains fired and seized the canoes, arresting three leaders while, onshore, the warriors of New Calabar came out from behind the bushes and fell on those who were trying to swim to safety. Amboe Robin John was forced into a canoe and had his head cut off; his brothers were sold in the West Indies.33

  Once or twice slaves ready for embarkment also rebelled. Thus, in 1727, at Christiansborg, the Danish castle on the Gold Coast, a group of slaves seized the slave overseer and killed him. They escaped, but half were caught. The ringleaders were broken on the wheel and then beheaded. A harsh response followed a sale of Ashanti slaves in Elmina in 1767. These six captives had been personal servants of a recently dead director-general of the Dutch West India Company, and they would have been freed if the Asantahene had paid some debts which he owed the company. But he did not, and the Dutch decided to sell the men concerned to traders: “We put their feet in shackles,” the report goes on, “and, on the day that they were to be sold, the slave dungeons were thoroughly searched for knives and weapons, but apparently not enough. . . . The result . . . was that, when the company slaves were ordered into the yard to take hold of each, they [the personal slaves] retreated and, in a savage and inhuman manner, cut their own throats and, when they did not succeed the first time, they repeated the thrusts three or four times, the one who had used a knife giving it a comrade who was not provided with one. One negro even cut the throat of his wife and then his own. . . . The yard of the noble company’s chief castle was thus turned into a bloodbath. . . . The remaining Ashanti who were unharmed were brought up to the hall, sold in public, and then taken on board of a waiting English ship.”34

  Many more slaves died during the often long time of waiting for shipment than did so in such rebellions or protests. Sometimes, the time spent waiting to be shipped was as long as five months—perhaps longer than the voyage to the Americas. Thus, in 1790, Captain William Blake bought for James Rogers and Co. of Bristol (England) 939 slaves, of whom 203 died, “of natural causes,” while still on the West African coast.

  The embarkmen
t of the slaves was a complicated affair. Captain Thomas Phillips recalled in 1694 that, at Whydah, “when we had purchased to the number of fifty or sixty, we would send them aboard, there being a cappasheir [an official], entitled ‘the captain of the slaves,’ whose care it was to secure them to the waterside, and see them all off; and if, in carrying to the marine, any were lost, he was bound to make them good to us, the ‘captain of the trunk’ being oblig’d to do the like. . . . These are two officers appointed by the King [of Whydah] for this purpose, to each of which every ship pays the value of a slave in what goods they liked best for their trouble. . . .” There was, likewise, a “captain of the sand,” appointed “to take care of the merchandise [whom] we have come ashore to trade with, [so] that the negroes do not plunder them, we being forced to leave goods a whole night on the sea-shore for want of porters to bring them up; but notwithstanding his care and authority, we often came by the loss. . . .”35

  Willem Bosman reported that, to save extra charges by the sellers, he would send his slaves to the ships at the first opportunity, “before which their masters strip them of all that they have on their backs, so that they come aboard stark naked, as well women as men; in which condition they are obliged to continue, if the master of the ship is not so charitable . . . as to bestow something to cover their nakedness. . . .”36

  “When our slaves,” wrote, again, Captain Thomas Phillips, “were come to the seaside, our canoes were ready to carry them off to the long-boat . . . if the sea permitted, and she convey’d them aboard ship, where the men were all put in irons, two and two shackled together, to prevent their mutiny or swimming ashore. The negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of canoes, boat and ship, into the sea, and kept underwater till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved . . . they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbados than we have of hell though, in reality [this was a very frequent comment], they live much better there than in their own country; but home is home etc. . . .”37

  Some slave captains found that there were a few slaves, usually from “a far inland country, who very innocently persuade one another that we buy them only to fatten and afterwards eat them as a delicacy.”

  Captain Snelgrave tried to come face to face with these anxieties: he said, “When we purchase grown people, I acquaint them by the interpreter, ‘That now they are become my property.’ I think fit to let them know what they may [have been] . . . bought for, that they may be easy in their minds: for these poor people are generally under terrible apprehensions upon being bought by white men, many being afraid that we design to eat them; which, I have been told, is a story much credited by the inland Negroes.

  “So, after informing them that they are bought to till the ground in our country, with several other matters, I then acquaint them, how they are to behave themselves on board towards the white men; that, if anyone abuses them, they are to complain to the linguist, who is to inform me of it, and I will do them justice; but, if they make a disturbance, or offer to strike a white man, they must expect to be severely punished. . . . When we purchase the negroes, we couple the sturdy men together with irons; but we suffer the women and children to go freely about; and, soon after we have sailed from the coast, we undo all the men’s irons.”38

  At the end of the eighteenth century, an interesting account of slaves leaving home was given by the slave captain Joseph Hawkins of South Carolina. He had been trading in one of the great rivers which constitute the delta of the Niger. He set off for the sea, and “the slaves were out on board [deck] and necessarily in irons brought for the purpose. This measure occasioned one of the most affecting scenes that I had ever witnessed: their hopes, with my assurances, had buoyed them up on the road; but a change from cordage to iron fetters rent their hopes and fears together; their wailings were torturing beyond what words can express; but delay at this stage would have been fatal. . . . We were passing through a narrow part of the river, two of them found means to jump overboard, a sailor, who was in a small boat astern, seized one of them by the arms and, the end of the rope being thrown to him, the slave was taken on board, though not without some difficulty.

  “The others who had been at the oars, seeing their fellows, one of them seized, and the other struck on the head with a pole, set up a scream which was echoed by the rest below; those that were loose made an effort to throw two of the sailors overboard; the rest, except the one on the boat and at the helm, being asleep; the noise had now aroused them, and the scream impressed on them some degree of terror. They seized on the guns and bayonets of those that lay ready, and rushed upon the slaves, five of whom from below had got loose, and were endeavouring to set the rest free, while those we had to deal with above were threatening to sacrifice us to their despair. . . . We at length overpowered them; only one having escaped and one being killed, the rest were immediately bound in double irons and [we] took care from thence till our arrival at the ship not to suffer any of them to take the air without being made fast. Five of the sailors were considerably but not dangerously hurt. . . . We reached the ship in five days [where we found that] the officers had all provided themselves with three or four wives each. . . .”39

  Slave women sometimes benefited from the fact that the crew were unable to maintain themselves without women. Thus Captain Yves Armés of the Jeannette from Nantes in 1741 found an English ship off West Africa where “la coutume entre eux [est] d’avoir chacun leur femme.” Some captains tried to restrain this. Thus Captain Newton, the future clergyman, recalled, “In the afternoon, while we were off the deck, William Cooney seduced a woman slave down into the room and lay with her brutelike, in view of the whole quarter deck, for which I put him in irons.”40 But now the darkest time in the life of the slave and also of the sailor was about to begin.

  * * *

  IThe origin of this word, still used in West Africa, may be doação, the Portuguese for “gift”; medase, Akan for “thank you”; or dachem, a Portuguese corruption of datjin, a small Chinese gold weight.

  IIA hollow piece of iron in the shape of a sugar loaf, the cavity of which could contain about fifty pounds of cowries; a man carried this about, and beat it with a stick, making a small dead sound.

  IIIAn underground dungeon, usually damp, with nothing in the way of beds, not even wooden boards, without water, and rarely cleaned. Since slaves were often chained, they often had to lie in their own excrement.

  IVSee page 72.

  VThis bull was a product of the Fifth Lateran Council.

  VICodrington, a high-minded planter, had two plantations on Antigua, named “College” and “Society” respectively, of which the first was called after All Souls’ in Oxford, the second after the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, to which he left both plantations, to be used to finance a college on the island.

  VIISee chapter 30.

  VIIIThe one exception to these procedures was in the Bonny River where, uniquely in West Africa, only a little under half the slaves exported were women.

  IXStill, the vessel crossed the Atlantic with 326 blacks, of whom 182 died en route, or during the sale at Martinique.

  XA snow was a small sailing vessel resembling a brig, with a main- and a foremast, as well as a small third mast just behind the mainmast.

  21

  If You Want to Learn How to Pray, Go to Sea

  Portuguese proverb

  “It is perfectly impossible to make a slave voyage a healthy voyage.”

  Captain Denman to William Hutt’s committee in the House of Commons, 1848

  “Whether it was my ship or any other ship the whole of the officers and crew were employed altogether in endeavouring to keep the slaves in a healthy state and in good spirits.”

  Thomas Tobin, a onetime Liverpool slave captain, to the Hutt Committee, 1848

  THE CROSSING of what the Spaniards of the fifteenth century spoke of as “the great Ocean Sea” was the characteristic experience of the Atlantic slave trade
. Otherwise, the journey to the coast of a captive from his remote origin, in the interior of Africa, among the ruined cities of the Songhai empire, or in the Congo kingdom before the emergence of the ngola, for example, would have been much the same as if the slave was being carried to a Mediterranean port or an American one, to Elmina or to Brazil. It would have been as harsh. But it was the sea, the vast, mysterious, terrifying “green sea of darkness,” which gave the Atlantic slave trade its special drama.

  Few slaves, before 1750, left any description of what it was like to see the ocean for the first time after being taken on the long journey from the interior of Africa. But certainly many Africans thought that the Europeans were people who had no country, and who lived in ships. One slave who did tell his story was Olaudah Equiano, a remarkable slave captured by the British and carried to the West Indies in the 1760s. “The first object which saluted my eyes,” he wrote, “was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor. . . . These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up, to see if I were sound, by some of the crew, and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too, differing so much from ours, their long hair and the language they spoke . . . united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country.

  “When I looked round the ship,” Equiano continued, “and saw a large . . . copper boiling . . . I no longer doubted my fate. . . . I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered, I found some black people about me who, I believed, were some of those who had brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men, with horrible looks, red faces and loose hair. They told me I was not, and one of the crew brought me a small portion of spiritous liquor in a wine glass. . . . I took a little down my palate, which . . . threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor before. . . .”