The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  “The three captive captains . . . received the following information from several English and Irish men of that [sixty-strong] crew: viz, that ‘the said ship belonged to the Governor . . . of Cuba, that she was called the San Francisco de la Vela, that the captain is Don Benito . . . that he is a knight of one of the Spanish orders, that the ship is a Bristol-built galley, first taken by the Sallee Orders [the Moroccan pirates], retaken from them by a Spanish man of war, sold at Cales [Cádiz?] by some merchants and by them freighted to the West Indies . . . and hired to Benito . . .’ Captain Jones, it appears, lost ‘his scripture, about £350 sterling in gold dust, 1000 gallons of rum, about £200 worth of the remains of the Guinea cargo, together with 38 of his choicest slaves. . . .’ ”44

  Occasionally slavers themselves turned pirate. In 1723, for example, the RAC noted, “Our merchants have advice that the ship Baylor, Capt. [William] Verney, having been slaving on the coast of Guinea, and thence set sail for Virginia, turned pirate, the negroes being thrown overboard.”45

  This long voyage, known to history as “the Middle Passage,” with its innumerable tragedies, did, however, in the end reach its term.

  * * *

  IThe Vigilant sailed for Bonny, picked up 344 slaves, and was intercepted by the British naval vessels Iphigenia and Myrmidon on her way to Cuba.

  IIThere is a reproduction of one of these, with other such things, in Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

  IIISee page 146.

  IVA chalop, or shallop, was a small open boat propelled by oars or sails and used in shallow waters.

  VSee page 341.

  VISee page 392.

  VIIThat river’s estuary was important in the slave trade to Virginia.

  22

  God Knows What We Shall Do with Those That Remain

  “God knows what we shall do with those that remain, they are a most scabby flock . . .”

  Henry Laurens, c. 1756, Charleston

  “On avait pourtant réussi le miracle de ne perdre que vingt noirs. Mais le cargaison était en piteux état.”

  René-Auguste de Chateaubriand

  “On Thursday last arrived from the coast of Africa, the brig Royal Charlotte with a parcel of extremely fine, healthy, well limb’d Gold Coast slaves, men, women, boys and girls. Gentlemen in town and country have now an opportunity to furnish themselves with such as will suit them. . . . They are to be seen on the vessel at Taylor’s wharf. Apply to Thomas Teckle Taylor, Samuel & William Vernon. . . .”

  Newport Gazette, June 6, 1763

  AFTER FORTY TO FIFTY DAYS AT SEA, or in some cases, as we have seen, many more, the appearance of birds, or perhaps of grass smelling of marsh, would suggest to the captain of a slaver that he was near the Antilles; or, after a different length of time, by different routes, the coast of Brazil or of Virginia. Then, according to the nationality of the vessel, familiar ports might come into view.

  The attention of those harbors would be caught by firing a gun, and that would attract a pilot and the visit of the doctor. The distant, but all the same vile, smell of vomit, sweat, stale urine, and feces wafting over the port concerned would let it know that a slave ship had arrived.

  As usual, the arrival of the slaves in the fifteenth century in Portugal set the tone for what happened next. Once a ship carrying slaves had anchored off Lisbon, in the old days, several officials (the director of the Casa da Guiné, the treasurer of the port, a magistrate, a collector of taxes, and their guards and clerks) would be carried out to the ship to inspect the cargo; the slaves would be assembled on the deck and listed. They would then be taken to the Casa dos Escravos, where they would be divided into lots for the purpose of deciding the taxes due. The director and the treasurer would carefully examine each slave, who would be naked. A price would be fixed. This would be hung round the slave’s neck, on parchment. Buyers would then also make their inspections, much as the ships’ surgeons or others had made on the coast of Africa. Slaves were then sold as the merchants who had financed the expedition thought best, though sometimes they would ask the director of the Casa da Guiné to undertake the sale. Most slaves were sold through a broker, who would take 2 percent of all payments. Then there would be taxes to pay, and perhaps a present to the officials of the port, which sometimes amounted to a tenth of the value of the slaves carried.

  That was the pattern. But every port in the Americas, from Brazil to New England, as well as in Lisbon, had its different way of marking this “ceremony of arrival.” Nearly everywhere, in contrast to Lisbon, the slaves were assembled onshore in a camp (not on board ship), where they would be fed, cleaned, and otherwise looked after, in such a way that they would lose all trace of the “fatigues” of the journey. Meantime, the vessels themselves would be disinfected or fumigated (by slaves, of course).

  • • •

  The main Brazilian port for slaves from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth was Rio de Janeiro, “the most magnificent harbour in the world,” as it appeared to travelers who approached it by sea. Bahia, the old capital, was only half as prosperous and, by 1750, was beginning to be overtaken by Pernambuco, Recife, and Maranhão. All the same, slaves were sold there: “Who would believe it?” Amadée-François Frezier, a French engineer who traveled to South America in the early eighteenth century, in order to look at Spain’s and Portugal’s imperial fortifications, wrote of Bahia. “There are shops full of these wretches, who are exposed there entirely naked, and bought like cattle.” The traveler added, “I cannot think how they can combine this barbarity with the sayings of religion, which give [the slaves] the same soul as the whites.”1

  “There being no difference between negroes and goods,” in the words of a Portuguese official in 1724, the sale of slaves in all these harbors was methodical, simple, and well organized.2 Few slaves went on from these ports to remote distances, for the sugar plantations of the northeast and even the gold mines of Minas Gerais were close at hand. In Rio, at the end of the eighteenth century, most slave dealers lived and dealt in large houses in a long street, the Rua Vallongo, which ended in a beach in the northeastern part of the city. The site was pretty, and travelers noticed red-tiled houses wedged between the tree-covered Livra-mento and Conceiçao hills. But every house seemed to have a large “ware-room,” in which three or four hundred slaves were “exposed for sale like any other commodity.” The merchants would live on the first and second floors, while the slaves would be lodged on the ground floors, in large rooms opening onto patios often kept fresh by sea breezes. There the slaves would be prepared to be sold, being shaved, fattened and, if necessary, painted (to give the illusion of health), often by slaves of their own nation. Food in African style (pirão, or manioc stew, and angu de fubá, cornmeal mush) might be prepared, in an effort to make the slaves feel at home. Some religious instruction might casually be available. Tobacco and snuff were sometimes given to slaves who behaved well, or to cheer them if they seemed melancholy. Slaves would also be made to dance and sing, in order to raise their spirits, in the same way as aboard the ship which had brought them from Africa.

  Buyers would again patiently examine the wares, feeling the Africans’ limbs and bodies much as butchers handled calves. The slaves were often asked, as they had been told to do before leaving Africa, to show their tongues and teeth, or to stretch their arms. A “guide for the plantation owner” published in the nineteenth century (Imbert’s Manual do Fazendeiro) insisted that it was important to pay attention to the slave’s penis in order to avoid acquiring an individual in whom it was underdeveloped or misshapen and, therefore, bad for procreation. The slaves would be ranged according to sex, age and, sometimes, provenance. Often, slaves would be sold at auction by one or another of the houses which specialized in the business, the bidding being at the door of the customshouse. Occasionally, the merchants would seek to sell their slaves by hawking them, chained, from house to house. Usually, the purchase in Rio meant the slave was rebranded with the name of the
new owner, and a 5-percent tax, the siza, was paid by the buyer to the government.

  But in these showrooms the deaths due to heat, overcrowding, or illnesses contracted on the ships were just as frequent as in African prison trunks or on the ship, so that quite distant neighbors complained incessantly about the smell. Numerous huts were soon put up on the swampy shore; there, however, even more slaves would die in the next fifty years, of “scurvy, scabies, buboes [syphilis] and dysentery.” It remains curious that, leaving aside questions of common humanity, merchants who had gone to such trouble and expense to find and transport their captives did not take better care of them.

  This avenue of tears, the Vallongo, now the Rua Camerino, had been allocated to the slave merchants by a philosophically minded viceroy, the marquis of Lavradio (he also brought rice for the first time to Brazil), in 1769; previously, he wrote, the slaves had done “everything which nature suggested in the middle of the street where they were seated on some boards that were laid there, not only causing the worst kind of stench on those streets and their vicinity, but even providing the most terrible spectacle that the human eye can witness. Decent people did not dare to go to the windows, [and] the inexperienced learned there what they had not known and should not know.”3

  The counterpart of Rio de Janeiro as the main port for receiving slaves in the Spanish empire was Cartagena de Indias which, in “its best days,” in the early seventeenth century, received at least three thousand slaves a year, in about twenty ships. When a slave ship arrived there, it would undergo an elaborate (but nevertheless ineffective) inspection to ensure that there was no contraband. The log of the ship would be checked, and there would be a visit to the vessel by the royal health inspector, the protomédico, to see if there were diseases on board. If there were, the ship would be quarantined. But since slaves were always in such demand, the common procedure was that the obviously sick slaves would be held on land, in barracoons outside the walls of the city, and the healthy slaves would be received by the chief constables of the place, and by a representative of the Spanish government or even, according to the circumstances, by the governor. There were, in Cartagena, many documented instances of kindly behavior at the point of arrival, by priests and others: above all, by the Catalan-born Jesuit Fray Pedro Claver, the “saint of the black slaves” who, in the early seventeenth century, made a point of greeting affectionately the slaves at Cartagena, embracing and welcoming them, as well as assuring them that the colonists did not intend to boil them down for oil or for anything else.I On innumerable occasions, Claver entered the infested holds of the ships where the slaves were kept, and not only brought the captives spiritual comfort but bandaged their wounds and sores; sometimes he carried out the sick on his own shoulders. He also baptized slaves who had not been so welcomed into the Church before leaving Africa, as were most who left the Gold or the Slave Coast. Perhaps he christened as many as a hundred thousand slaves during his ministry, which lasted from 1616 to his death in 1654.4 Some Spanish priests also made noble efforts to bring dying slaves into the Church; others still tried to make up for the ineffectiveness of the baptisms which had been carried out in Africa by rechristening the captives, and giving them medallions to put round their necks.

  Disembarcations also had their terrible side at Cartagena; for the barracoons in which the slaves were held were often “veritable cemeteries.” Fray Alonso de Sandoval, a Jesuit who was one of the inspirations for Fray Pedro Claver, described how he entered a patio in Cartagena to find two dead slaves, “stark naked, lying on the bare ground as if they had been beasts, face up, their mouths open and full of flies.”5 Sometimes slaves were held in estates outside Cartagena especially prepared to receive those who had been fraudulently disembarked on the coast before the ships entered the harbor, in order to avoid the port dues. Smuggling was, of course, at the heart of all American commerce, and in no region was this more true than in the territory of New Granada. But even smugglers wanted their merchandise to seem at their best, and so they would expect slaves to be well fed before sale. Physical defects which had escaped the eagle eyes of ship surgeons in Africa (eye defects, for example, or skin marks) lowered the price, but moral ones (a disposition to drink, thievery, or flight) did not seem to do so.

  Before sale, slaves were usually submitted to yet another palmeo—that is, another careful examination, including a measuring and grading—and were also, as in Brazil, branded again by a carimbo, a silver iron designed to show that the slave had been legally imported.

  Many buyers in the seventeenth century would come to the slave market in Cartagena, some from as far as Mexico, others from Lima. Cartagena was a stepping stone to both—above all, to Lima via Portobelo. Another long journey would then begin for the slaves, much of it by sea, followed by a long march by land if the destination was the City of Mexico. Subsequent resales must have seemed almost merciful affairs, such as those held in the Zócalo in Mexico City, the main square, under the arcades. Here, and in similar places far removed from the original dock, prices greatly varied: a prime male slave in the early seventeenth century might cost 250 to 275 pesos in Cartagena, 370 in Mexico, 500 in Lima, and as much as 800 in Potosí. Specialized slaves—bricklayers, agents of estates, dressmakers, cooks—would naturally cost more.

  Buenos Aires by 1750 had become one of the most important slave harbors of the Spanish empire. It was a deposit for Córdoba, itself a center of distribution for Potosí, and upland Peru. At least 7,800 slaves carried by the South Sea Company to Buenos Aires were taken by that enterprise’s local agents to Chile, Bolivia, or Peru between 1715 and 1738, the caravans of walking slaves being conducted by Englishmen on horseback (who had, most unusually, been given permission to travel in the Spanish empire), accompanied by some Spaniards, one of them a surgeon. These terrestrial extensions of the oceanic Middle Passage added the new horrors of cold to those of excessive heat encountered on the way from Africa: in one caravan of 408 slaves dispatched in 1731, thirty-eight men and twelve women died of cold before they reached Potosí.

  Curaçao and Saint Eustatius were the two main Dutch harbors of the Caribbean at the turn of the eighteenth century. Tiny though they were, they were much frequented by private merchants, interlopers, and independent traders, of all nationalities, who sold to planters in the English, the French, and above all the Spanish islands. Curaçao had its golden age in the seventeenth century; a hundred years later, Saint Eustatius had its turn to act as the “golden rock,” selling annually two to three thousand slaves. In both places, smuggling was as important as legitimate trade. Another important Dutch port was Berbice, New Amsterdam, in what was then the Dutch colony of Surinam. Here Dutch servants might often be seen inspecting the slaves before the auction. The Africans would be obliged “to go through every kind of motion, as if their limbs would be pulled out of joint, or their jaws cracked open. . . . One lady was not satisfied till she had forced a wench to screetch by squeezing her breast cruelly.”6

  French journeys were concluded in much the same way as those of other countries. A vessel from Nantes or Bordeaux, or Honfleur or La Rochelle, bound for the El Dorado which Saint-Domingue seemed to be after 1750, would pass by the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico. There would then appear the northern coast of Saint-Domingue, the luxurious capital, Cap Français, “Le Cap,” where the merchants’ local agents would often hire a large field with some huts. There, as elsewhere in the slaving world, a combination of a few days’ idleness and good food would make the slaves ready for sale. The captives in Saint-Domingue were usually given strong drink to enliven them. The checking of captives seems to have been more rigorous in the French colonies than elsewhere; in Louisiana, an agent of the importing company (the Compagnie des Indes) might examine the assets of the planter to determine whether he could pay.

  Saint-Domingue was a relatively new colony. Other customs prevailed elsewhere. Father Labat described how, on arrival at Fort-de-France, in Martinique, slaves would be ordered to bathe in the sea,
and have their heads shaved. Their bodies would be rubbed with palm oil, and they would be persuaded to eat often, and little: “This good treatment, together with the clothes which they are given, and along with a certain kindness [douceur] which is showed them, makes them affectionate and causes them to forget their own country, and the unhappy state to which slavery has reduced them.”7 Sometimes, in Saint-Domingue, sales were effected on board the ship (it was easier to prevent flight there), sometimes in the field hired by the merchant where the slaves would have been “refreshed.”8

  Then there were taxes. In 1715, Achille Lavigne, captain of the Grand Duc de Bretagne of Nantes, owned by the Bertrand family, complained that he was obliged, on his arrival in Martinique, to pay not only 2,750 livres to the governor, Abraham Duquesne, but 3,000 too to the intendant, Monsieur Caucresson, and 1,000 livres to Monsieur Meunier, the commissaire, “which sums they forced him to pay, without which he would not have been able to make his sale of blacks in the said isle. . . .”9, II

  The best way for a captain to ensure a good sale was to have a subsidiary office in the American port and use a good agent there. This technique was well developed by French traders. Thus Jacques-François Begouën-Demeaux, probably the richest slave trader of Le Havre in the second half of the eighteenth century, was represented by his brother-in-law, Stanislas Foäche, in Port-au-Prince; and the Nantes firm of Riedy et Thurninger had a subsidiary company at Cayes Saint-Louis in 1791. The Charauds of Nantes were ill-served in the New World till they bought a fifth share in Guilbaud, Gerbier et Cie of Cap Français.

  Ten to twenty days were needed at Saint-Domingue to dispose of five to six hundred slaves. Since fifty négriers arrived each year at Saint-Domingue in its prosperous days, the slave markets must have been continuous.