by Hugh Thomas
English ports such as Jamestown in Barbados, Charleston in South Carolina, or Kingston, by the late eighteenth century the main port of Jamaica, were less ceremonious and bureaucratic than their French or Dutch counterparts, but also apparently less careful of hygiene and less concerned to treat the slaves before sale. Thus sanitary arrangements seem to have been unknown in Kingston: “Dunghills abounded and, from these, the ruts in the streets and lanes were filled up after very heavy rain. In the early morning, negro slaves might be seen bearing open tubs from the various dwellings and emptying their indescribable contents into the sea.”10
After a sale in Kingston in 1773 of slaves intended (illegally) for Cuba, Thomas Dolbeare reported on the slaves, carried by the Ann, belonging to Aaron Lopez and Jacobo Rodrigues Ribera, of Newport, Rhode Island: “Fifty-seven were sold the first day averaging £63—clear of duty, fourteen the third day at £51, twenty-two the fifth day at £32, the remainder at £8 only. Had there been five times as many, and the negroes good, they would have sold at the price they did the first day, there were a number of old men, but the boys went off very high. . . . I have acted from principle, gentlemen,” Dolbeare concluded, in his letter to Lopez, “in the sale of this cargo and I hope it will be satisfactory. . . .”11
Slaves imported to Jamaica for subsequent sale in the Spanish empire were, however, normally treated more carefully. As usual, they would as a rule be fattened and acclimatized. The South Sea Company of London made elaborate arrangements to restore them to health after the voyage from Africa. At one time, it was thought best to bathe sick slaves in water in which the leaves of herbs had previously been soaked. These slaves might receive two meals a day, were sometimes given rum to drink and occasionally pipes to smoke. Then, after about a month, they would be sent by small ships to Cartagena or another of the great Spanish ports.
Occasionally, after these English journeys, the sale of slaves would be a “scramble”: Dr. Thomas Trotter, surgeon on the Brookes, recalled how “people who wish for slaves are ready, when the signal is given them, to open the sale to apply their tallies to the slaves [whom] they wish to purchase, by rushing all at once among them. This unexpected manoeuvre had an astonishing effect upon the slaves; they were crying out for their friends with all the language of affliction at being separated.” Equiano, the slave autobiographer, left a description of how this kind of sale was carried through. He was sold in Barbados “after the usual manner, which is this: on a signal given (as the beat of a drum), the buyers rush at once into the yard, where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of the terrified Africans. . . . In this manner, without scrupule, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see one another again.”12 Sometimes, though, merchants were much more considerate: Jean Barbot, for example, described how in 1679 he sold an entire family to a single master, “since he did not care to separate them.”13
Slaves who excited no interest, or were too ill to do so, “refuse slaves,” were often left to die unattended on the quayside of the port of entry into the Americas. James Morley, a gunner, a sailor in the trade in the 1760s, recalled seeing such captives “lying about the beach at St Kitts, in the market place, and in the different parts of the town, in a very bad condition, and apparently nobody to take care of them.”14
Sometimes, too, there were incipient rebellions among the cargoes at the port of arrival. Also at Saint Kitts, on March 14, 1737, one slave captain “found a great deal of discontent among the slaves, particularly among the men which continued till the 16th about five o’clock in the evening when, to our great amazement, above a hundred slaves jumped overboard, and it was with great difficulty we saved as many as we did; out of the whole, we lost thirty-three of as good men slaves as we had on board. . . . The reason (I have learned since) of this misfortune was owing to one of their countrymen who came on board, and told the slaves, in a joking manner, that they were first to have their eyes put out and then to be eaten. . . .”15, III
Charleston, South Carolina, was the biggest port of entry for slaves in North America (even if the merchants were established in Rhode Island or at Bristol, England). Outside the port, ships carrying slaves would have to wait at the pesthouse on Sullivan Island for ten days for clearance; and, if they turned out to be suffering from smallpox, they would have to wait a month or so in quarantine. The sales were usually in the open-air exchange behind the post office, at the foot of Broad Street, a short walk from the wharf where the slaves arrived; the women in blue flannel dresses, the men in blue cotton trousers. In winter, humane traders sometimes gave the slaves shoes and warmer clothing.
Henry Laurens, the most interesting of the slave traders of this city, described in 1755 how “our common method of selling slaves, arrive at what time they will, is for payment in January or March following. If they are a very fine parcel, purchasers often appear who will provide the ready money in order to command a preference. The engagements we enter into in the slave trade are . . . to load the ship with such rice as can be got, pay the coast commissions and men’s half wages, and to remit the remainder [to Bristol, for example] as the payments shall grow due.” Apropos of a sale in Charleston which did not do well, Laurens wrote to Samuel and William Vernon, his partners in Newport, Rhode Island, that, on June 29, 1756, he had put up for sale some slaves from Sierra Leone who had been brought in one of the Vernons’ vessels, the Hare (which he, Laurens, had insured): “We had as many purchasers as we could have wished for had we had three times the number for sale but, in taking a transient view of them, before they were landed, many of them became extremely angry that we should invite them down from eighty or ninety miles distance to look at a parcel of ‘refuse slaves,’ as they called them and, with some difficulty, [we] prevailed on them to wait the sale. . . . We were willing to believe that Captain [Caleb] Godfrey obtained the best [slaves] he could but, really, they were a wretched cargo, such a one as we would not have touched could we have been excused from it for three times our commission.
“We have this day sold forty-two to the amount of £7,455-12 shillings [in] currency,” Laurens went on, “in which are included that sold at vendue [auction] for only £35-12 shillings. They seemed past all hopes of recovery. God knows what we shall do with those that remain, they are a most scabby flock. . . . Several have extreme[ly] sore eyes, three very puny children and, add to this, the worst infirmity of all others with which six or eight are attended, viz. old age. . . . Poor Godfrey seems very distressed that he should not have been able to do better. . . . We had a sloop arrive with a hundred and fifty prime slaves from the factories at Gambia and Bance [Bence] island the evening before the sale of your negroes which would not have at all injured your sale had they been good, for we did not discover what a prime parcel they were till after the first day’s sale was over.”16 (These were the years when William Vernon and Abraham Redwood, also of Newport, were buying slaves in Africa at the rate of 115 gallons of rum a man slave and ninety-five gallons for women.)
In Charleston in 1755, most people thought that the new war—the Seven Years’ War—would dampen the prices of slaves. On the contrary, with respect to a cargo of slaves imported by Captain Robert Bostock of Liverpool, on the Prince George, “ ’twas so much the reverse that some of the buyers went to collaring each other”—so Laurens reported—“and would have come to blows, had it not been prevented, in contending for the choice which gave the seller an excellent opportunity to make them pay what price he pleased and, through them, he got £300 for some.”17 Still, a year later, Laurens would write to Richard Oswald, part-owner of the factory on Bence Island, off the river Sierra Leone, that he had not sold all the slaves whom he had sent: “We still have several remaining of your nine, two of them [from] Gambia which we would part with on very moderate terms could we find the person who would make the o
ffer, but nothing will tempt them but prime young people.”18
English slave traders, like their French counterparts, would by the eighteenth century usually have their representatives in the New World. For example, Isaac Hobhouse of Bristol, who sold so many slaves in Virginia, had agents all over North America, many of them deeply involved in the local tobacco trade, or perhaps indigo.
• • •
Many captains of slave ships looked on their task as, as a rule, complete when they had delivered their slaves to the West Indies. But it was often impossible to realize the proceeds of the sale of slaves fast enough to provide the ship concerned with a return cargo of sugar. Merchants and captains could not be certain of the prices which they would receive at home for goods taken on their own account. Planters might take several years to pay for the slaves. Sometimes, the European merchant preferred to have remittances from the West Indies in bills of exchange than to have sugar, indigo, cotton, or ginger in exchange for the slaves, because the prices of these goods in London were either unpredictable or low. Planters might prefer to give their own bonds for five years to pay for slaves, instead of bills of exchange for twelve to eighteen months. These could be used to make payments, but the planters sometimes were obliged to stop payment when owing considerable sums to suppliers (assuming they were English) in London or to manufacturers in Manchester and Birmingham. So, sometimes, the return journeys of many slave ships, belonging to all the major countries concerned, might be in ballast. Captains might be told by their owners that they should return quickly “unless a freight offers . . . worth staying a fortnight for.” But such return journeys were unusual: out of three hundred ships which left Jamaica in the last years of the eighteenth century, only twelve left in ballast.
North American and Caribbean planters mostly had bank accounts at home (whether that meant England, France, or Holland). They usually did one of three things when they made their purchases: they paid in cash for the slaves, in money “of the islands” (the French livre there was worth a third less than its equivalent in France); they asked for credit from the merchant, which might be a matter of up to two years (even ten years, exceptionally); or they might settle the bill in merchandise, rarely for the entire amount, frequently for a small percentage. This last might, according to the colony concerned, be sugar (first and foremost), semirefined or raw; indigo (in decline after 1750); cotton; and coffee (first mentioned in the Caribbean in 1730 and popular with captains of slave ships thereafter). Irregularly, there were reports of ginger, vanilla, tobacco, and skins. Snuff also played a part.
Full payment upon delivery of the slave was rare. Although the value of the debts was expressed in colonial currencies, payments were often made in commodities which had a clear value in Europe. Probably the most normal procedure in the 1780s was for 25 percent of the bill to be paid immediately, either in cash or cargo, with the rest to be paid over eighteen months. The planter would give the agent of the merchant a series of bills due on certain dates, usually at intervals of thirty, sixty, or ninety days. Portions of the bills were sometimes paid with receipts for earlier sales of slaves, the balance still owed in a bill of exchange drawn on a guarantor in Europe.
Payment for slaves brought to the Spanish colonies as part of the asiento was almost always in silver: pieces-of-eight.IV That was why the Spanish market had always been so attractive, and indeed why Havana would become a popular market for United States slavers once the trade was authorized there after 1789: “Get what hard cash you possibly can,” one Rhode Island captain was advised by his ship’s owner.
Portuguese sales in Brazil were complicated since the slaves themselves were, by the late eighteenth century, usually owned by Angolan merchants until their sale in Rio or Bahia or elsewhere. Payments in kind or in cash were made into the bank of the merchant concerned in Brazil. The transaction was, therefore, simpler than the practice of Northern European merchants.
The heart of the matter was the hunger of the colonists for slaves. They were always buying up to, or beyond, their limit, as if this transaction were their last chance of obtaining essential labor. Thus planters borrowed, and extended the system of agricultural credit beyond all bounds. Most slaves sold in Charleston and elsewhere in British North America in the eighteenth century were bought on credit. Many slave merchants, therefore, did not know when they would be paid. That eventually led them, especially those in Liverpool, to insist on “immediate remittance,” which caused a merchant’s colonial agent to send back on the slave ship a receipt for the purchase in the form of bills of long maturity drawn by the factors on their guarantors in England.
• • •
In the American port, however the bill for the slaves was settled, and whether the place concerned was part of the British, Spanish, French, Dutch, or Portuguese empire, the captain would reorganize his crew, for some sailors would not want to return to Europe, and few journeys would have been completed without several deaths among the ship’s company. Those sailors who planned to go home, having usually been away a long time, always wanted to do so quickly, as usually indeed did the captain.
The average return voyage from the West Indies to Europe across the Atlantic might take between two and three months. Then would begin the sale of such merchandise as had been brought home; and the reckoning of the profits, if there were any.
The question of profits is a complex one. Henry Callister, a Manx agent in charge of the warehouse of the Liverpool slave merchant Foster Cunliffe, on Chesapeake Bay in the 1740s, wrote to his brother, Anthony, on the Isle of Man, “The Africa trade is quite dangerous for life and health, though most profitable.” His neighbors, the merchants Thomas Ringgold and Samuel Galloway, disagreed: “There are more disasters in those voyages than any other whatsoever,” the former wrote to the latter in 1762. What is the truth of this matter?19
To put matters at their simplest: in 1783, the firm of Giraud et Raim-baud of Nantes sent its 150-ton ship La Jeune Aimée to Angola and obtained 264 slaves, whom it sold in Saint-Domingue. The price of the ship had been 6,000 livres; with other expenses (the crew, the cargo, the slaves at Mayombe), the initial costs came to about 156,000 livres. The slaves and some other goods were sold for a total of over 366,000 livres. The profit, then, was 210,000 livres, or about 135 percent. That was, however, the ideal voyage, the voyage of which merchants dreamed, the voyage which caused them to risk so much, in money and lives (including so many European sailors’ and captains’ lives). It was that kind of voyage also which inspired captains who themselves thought, with reason, that one day they, too, might become merchants; and it fired the imagination of younger officers who thought that they too one day might become captains. But when John Newton was asked in the House of Commons in 1790 if he thought that the trade was profitable, he replied: “My concern in it was not profitable to my employers [Joseph Manesty of Liverpool]: there were gainful voyages, but the losing voyages were thought more numerous. It was generally considered a sort of lottery in which every adventurer hoped to gain a prize.”20 Those who heard that the RAC was buying slaves in Africa for a little over £3 a head and selling them in the Americas for £20 often did not take into account that the company had to manage its forts in Africa, and transport its cargo from London to be exchanged there. Some slave merchants ruined themselves. For example, Noblet Ruddock of Bristol, after “managing” thirty slave voyages between 1698 and 1729—more than any other single merchant in that city except one (James Day)—was bankrupt by 1726 (he later became a mere slave factor in Barbados).
Sometimes, though, and despite the skepticism of Newton, “miracles” did occur. Thomas Leyland, thrice mayor of Liverpool, made a profit of £12,000 from a voyage of the ship Lottery, whose captain was John Whittle; in 1798, the ship carried 460 slaves, from the river Bonny to Barbados. Indeed, Leyland’s accounts suggest that he had repeated successes: Captain Cesar Lawson on the Enterprize in 1803,V Captain Charles Kneal on the Lottery in 1804, Captain Charles Watt on the Fortune in 1805
all performed very well, bringing back an average profit of about £40 per slave delivered.
For most of the history of the slave trade, profits were made by independent traders. National privileged companies, on the other hand, often made losses, because they were staffed at home, and in Africa, by officials who all assumed that they were there to make a private profit out of the enterprise. On the other hand, sometimes even privileged companies were fortunate. Accounts of the RAC’s journeys to the Windward Coast in Africa—between Sierra Leone and Cape Three Points—are available for 1680 till 1687. There were ninety-five voyages. In these eight years, three cargoes showed a net loss; the largest profit was 141 percent; the average was 38 percent. In the early eighteenth century, the South Sea Company also seems to have made a profit of nearly 30 percent on its trade with Buenos Aires; and no director complained then that the costs of the traffic were too heavy.
But the real profits at that time were made by “interlopers” who would usually sell slaves in the West Indies, or on the mainland of both North and South America, to New Englanders as to Brazilians, for more than twice what they cost on the Congo coast. These traders did make considerable profits, sometimes as much as 200 percent, as, for example, one ship from Nantes did. More usual figures for Nantes in the early eighteenth century ranged from 50 to 100 percent. The news of such great profits became well known; it is that which presumably led Humboldt to suggest that a profit of 100 percent was normal, and some polemicists to assume an average profit of 300 percent.VI
The prices on the two sides of the Atlantic at the end of the eighteenth century were drawing closer. The cost of slaves in Africa, as we have seen, was about the equivalent of £50 by 1780: ten times what it had been a hundred years before. It can hardly be surprising, therefore, that profits fell: in the second half of the eighteenth century, the merchants of Luanda who traded with Bahia sometimes found that slaves were “sold for less than they cost.” The accounts of Aaron Lopez in Newport, Rhode Island, suggest a remarkable change from earlier in the century: out of fourteen voyages which he financed to Africa between 1760 and 1776, only between four and seven of them made a profit. Reasonably accurate information survives for twenty-five slavers sent from Nantes in 1783-90. Ten made profits, six of them gaining more than 19 percent; six lost money; one expedition broke even; and eight were apparently about to lose money when payments ceased at the end of 1792, thanks to the revolution in Saint-Domingue.VII In the last sixty years of British slaving, the annual returns seem to have been less than 10 percent.VIII Another estimate for the British slave trade between 1761 and 1807 was a profit of 9.5 percent, with a high level of 13 percent achieved in 1791-1800 and a low one of 3.3 percent in 1801-7.21 John Tarleton of Liverpool told a British inquiry in 1789 that “10 percent ought to be the net profit in the African trade.” The average profit in the accounts of the Liverpool slaver William Davenport was 10.5 percent over seventy-four voyages, and his overall annual profit averaged 8 percent. In this connection, an analysis of the profits made by the London Scottish circle of Richard Oswald, Augustus Boyd, and Sir Alexander Grant, who, it will be remembered, traded extensively from Bence Island, off Sierra Leone, seems to suggest that their nearly sixty slave voyages made a profit of £30,000, a benefit of a mere 6 percent.
