by Hugh Thomas
In addition, the French agreed to a treaty whereby the right of search was granted mutually with the British between certain essential latitudes. The two countries also gave each other warrants to inspect each other’s merchant ships if slaving was suspected. There was, admittedly, no equipment clause, as there had been with respect to the Dutch-British arrangements. All the same, this era of collaboration began well, with the French in 1832 receiving fifteen licenses by the British, and giving the English twenty-two such warrants.
Certainly, the ships intercepted by France were to be brought not before mixed tribunals, but national ones. Some kind of French slave trade continued. But it was on a negligible scale. Perhaps twenty ships set off for Africa from the mainland of France between 1832 and 1850. The French navy was always represented as showing “little cruising zeal,” in the words of a British naval surgeon, Peter Leonard. But in fact, between 1832 and 1838, the French fleet “visited” thirty-two foreign ships: five North American, one Brazilian, one Sardinian, four Spanish, ten English, and eleven Portuguese.
The relations between Britain and France continued, however, imperfect. For example, if a British captain were to ask a ship to halt, and a French flag were then hoisted, the British naval vessel could still exercise no slightest control: “At most . . . she may exercise the right to speak with [the French ship], and demand answers to questions addressed to her through a speaking trumpet . . . but without obliging her to alter or impede her course.” The British could check whether the suspect ship had the right to carry the French flag: “A boat might be sent to the suspected vessel, after she had first been hailed to give notice of the intention. The verification shall consist in an examination of the papers establishing the nationality of the vessel. Nothing can be claimed beyond [that]. . . . Any search or inspection whatever is absolutely prohibited.” These arrangements would, of course, give rise to many misunderstandings in the years ahead.47
* * *
IIn qualified terms: slave children were to serve their mothers’ owners until they grew up; boards would decide on the freed slaves’ occupations; and, the emancipation of adults depended on the payment of compensation to the owners, such sums being raised from taxes.
II “Los esclavos que por tantos caminos nos hacen falta para la reproducción de la especie negra.”
III See page 587.
IVWhat most angered Ramírez was when United States vessels used the Spanish flag: as, for example, they did in the case of a schooner built in Bristol, Rhode Island, in 1816. That led to a protest to Ramírez of thirty Spanish merchants.
VAt that time, the General Peace had been sold to George de Wolf. His uncle by marriage, Charles Collins, was still collector of the customs in Bristol, and was a frequent visitor at his plantation in Cuba: no doubt to arrange the details of the illegalities, so that the chances of prosecution were modest. All the same, George de Wolf was ruined in 1825, and dragged much of the town of Bristol down with him. He escaped to pass his last years in Cuba.
VIHe was also the pioneer of the first railway in the Spanish world which extended from Havana to Güines, built in 1830 making use of a loan from Alexander Robertson of London, of £450,450.
VIIThis statesman, a scientist and traveler in the mold of Humboldt, had studied under Volta and Lavoisier, had visited France as well as Turkey, and had built canals in Portugal before returning to a political life in Brazil in 1819.
VIIISome, such as the statesman Van der Oudermeulen, had wanted to revive the trade in slaves at that time to Surinam (Oudermeulen was a son of the famous governor of that colony).
IX The case was repeated when the Portuguese judge ruled out of order the action of H.M.S. Myrmidon in arresting a Portuguese vessel, San Salvador, with only one slave on board. On that occasion, the court found that the slave, who was sent back to the mainland when the Myrmidon came in sight, still belonged to the seller, the formidable merchant of Havana, Joaquín Gómez.
X See page 596.
XIThough not West Florida, which had been cavalierly absorbed by the United States in 1803.
XIIThis official, grandson of a James Hyde who had fled Scotland after Culloden, was a strong monarchist and would later become Minister of the Navy.
XIIIOther places returned to France included various other African “comptoirs,” such as Arguin, Gorée, Rufisque, Joal, Portudal, Albreda on the river Gambia, the island of Gambia in the estuary of the Sierra Leone, and one or two trading posts on the islands of Los and Bissagos, as well as some on the river Casamance.
XIVBeginning, admittedly, with her family and friends. Jean-Michel Deveaux has pointed out that the abolitionist movement was headed by Constant, an ex-lover; Auguste de Staël, her son; and the duke of Broglie, a son-in-law.
XV Ourika, a sad story of a love affair of a black girl with a French aristocrat (and is based on truth), is one of three brilliant stories by the duchess about impossible loves: one was Olivier, about a love for an impotent; and Edouard, about one for a person of inferior position.
XVIHowever, there was a modest slave trade in Sumatra, or off it to the west, on the island of Nias, in which some French merchants participated, taking a thousand slaves from there every year to the Ile de Bourbon, as was testified by a Captain Rogers, a commander of a Dutch ship.
XVIIThe law was passed in the chamber, 220 to 64, and friends of the trade made the same kind of speeches which had been made in the House of Commons fifty years before, though many speakers could not refrain from adding that England’s apparent philanthropy was a ruse to ruin France.
30
Only the Poor Speak Ill of the Slave Trade
Comment at a luncheon in Havana in the 1830s, reported in a letter of Domingo del Monte
“When we were in the barracoon, the country people said that the reason of our being stopped . . . was that the Spaniards said that the ships of war belonging to the English kept us from going to the Spaniards’ country.”
James Campbell, once a slave, afterwards a mason in Sierra Leone, to Hutt Committee, 1848
IN THE 1830s, four substantial societies of the Americas depended on black slaves: first and second those of a coffee empire, Brazil, and a sugar colony, Cuba, whose reliance on the slave trade was absolute, and where slavery itself lasted another three generations, till the late 1880s (Puerto Rico should be considered with Cuba, though its wealth was far less); third, that in the cotton republic in the South of the United States, which was scarcely involved in the transatlantic trade, though its slave population was essential to it; and finally, that in the British and French West Indies, where the slave trade had ended, in 1808 and 1831 respectively, where slavery itself would disappear, in 1838 in the British islands and in 1848 in the French, and where the old sugar eminence was now in precipitous decline.
Of these slave societies, Brazil, with her long history of reliance on slaves from Africa stretching back to the mid-sixteenth century, would take pride of place. For two years after 1831, when the slave trade had formally been abolished, few Africans were brought in, because of the earlier heavy import when planters thought that slavery would end forever. But then, in the mid-1830s, the trade recovered and was reorganized, on an illegal basis, to serve plantations of cotton, though they were stagnating; of sugar, especially in new plantations near São Paulo and Campos; and, increasingly, of coffee in Rio, Minas Gerais, São Paulo and, above all, in the valley of the river Paraíba. Coffee was the great new Brazilian product. Brought to Pará in the north as long ago as 1727, it became the dominant slave crop in the 1830s. The slave was needed—or at least used—for clearing and laying out the new plantations, weeding and cultivating the coffee plants, and then harvesting them.
Some of these coffee plantations were the result of investment by new European immigrants. They were places where slavery implied harder work than that encountered by the domestic slave in Rio, or even than in many of the old sugar plantations, where (as in the Soledada, in Minas Gerais) a captive might be asked to spend h
is time in an orchestra, playing the clarinet or the violin.
The transition from legal to illegal trade in slaves in Brazil was curious. A nineteenth-century Brazilian wrote that “the date for the cessation of the slave trade approached, and then the planters, and the whole population, saw that no preventive measures whatever were being taken or attempted; the slave traders, therefore, wanted to take advantage of the time still left to them and they filled up their ships again and again with immense cargoes of slaves.”1 The idea of continuing the slave trade in this semisurreptitious manner distressed a few anglophiles, including the royal family, but most of the officials of the new country, and all the merchants, recalled that Britain had been until recently the monarch of the trade, and knew that most of the British merchants who had recently established themselves in Rio sympathized with them. Indeed, there continued to be collaboration between slave dealers and British businessmen who often, even now, provided what they knew would be used as “trade goods” for the exchange of slaves in Africa. There were also in Rio de Janeiro English slave merchants who became naturalized Brazilians. Thus the terrible slave warehouses of the city had a renewed trade; and so did the cemetery in the nearby Misericórdia hospital.
In these years, most Brazilian slaves seem to have come from the now forbidden territory of Dahomey or Lagos, north of the equator, despite the presence of the British navy: three-quarters, according to the long-serving British consul in Bahia, William Pennell, because, said his colleague Robert Hesketh in Maranhão, the slaves from the north (Dahomey, Benin, Bonny) “were accustomed to hard work in their homeland.” All the same, Rio remained a good customer for slaves from Angola, especially Benguela.
The new slave trade included several interesting new procedures. There was, for example, the technique of sending two ships to Africa. One, slow and old, would carry the merchandise, and perhaps some money, which the slave dealers used to exchange for slaves. The other (and there might be two or three of them) would be fast and small, well equipped to carry the slaves, who would have been assembled beforehand in Africa, to avoid any delay between the arrival and departure, as had always prevailed in the past. Indeed, the stay in the African port might now be a matter only of hours.
Another technique was to discharge the merchandise and then prepare the return voyage with some worthless slaves paraded ostentatiously. The slave merchants hoped that the nearby British naval vessel would be drawn to that place, supposing that they would there catch the malefactor (as they saw him) red-handed. But the captain himself would return swiftly to where most of the good slaves had been assembled.
The reception of slaves in Brazil also differed in the nineteenth century from in the eighteenth. Rio remained the most important port, but Bahia declined, its place being taken by Pernambuco, Maranhão, and Pará. Ships left Rio with ostensible cargoes of tobacco or rum for the legitimate African trade, or for another Brazilian port, but they returned with illegal cargoes of blacks. These boçal slaves were then kept in camps where an attempt would be made to teach them Portuguese, so that they could be easily sold alongside already acclimatized ladinos and locally bred crioulos: but “again and again,” wrote a traveler, “I have seen troops of slaves of both sexes who could not speak a word of Portuguese . . . from twenty to a hundred individuals . . . marched inland for sale.”2
Rio de Janeiro, like Bahia, had long been both a slave-receiving and a slave-seeking port. The most prominent dealer in slaves in the 1820s in the first of these handsome harbors was Joaquim Antonio Rio Ferreira, who must have brought over 15,000 slaves across the South Atlantic between 1825 and 1830. Running him close was Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos. Others from that city who each carried over 5,000 slaves in those hectic years were Miguel Ferreira Gomes, João Alves da Silva Porto (he specialized in slaves from Mozambique), Lourenço Antonio do Rego, and Antonio José Meirelles. These men were great merchants in their own right, dealing in all kinds of goods, as well as slaves. They were not merely the representatives of Angolan merchants, as had tended to be the case in respect of slaves in the eighteenth century.
In the 1830s, when the business became formally illegal, ships no longer sailed direct into the harbors of Rio or Bahia to unload their live cargoes in the middle of the city. They made their deposits some way outside, and the slaves had often to endure a rough march—perhaps as much as fifty miles—to the markets, to prepare for which they were usually accommodated not in the old slave streets, such as the Rua do Valongo, but in new depositaries in, for example, the Rua da Quitada, the fortress of São João, or the Ponta do Cajú. Unpleasant though the Valongo had been, it was as nothing to the hardships in these new improvised quarters. Despite the introduction of vaccination against smallpox, deaths were still frequent, and the hospital of Santa Casa da Misericórdia seems to have buried seven to eight hundred every month in the early 1830s. There was thus much to be said for the view that the illegalization of the slave trade created worse conditions than ever.
Another change was that the buyers in the coffee plantations of the nineteenth century preferred young slaves to full-grown men and women. Such statistics as survive suggest that between two-thirds and three-quarters were boys.
As in the past, many captives were sold by auction. An American traveler, Thomas Ewbank, recalled an “auction store at the corner of the [Rua dos] Ourives and [Rua do] Ouvidor,” which he found full of “cheeses, Yankee clocks, kitchen utensils, crockery-ware, old books, shoes, pickles etc.” These were sold every day, but once or twice a week slaves were sold. Once Ewbank saw eighty-nine persons for sale. He saw the black-whiskered auctioneer: “A hammer in his right hand, the forefinger of his left pointing to a plantation hand standing confused at his side, he pours out a flood of words. [The slave] had on a canvas shirt, with sleeves ending at the elbows, and trousers of the same, the legs of which he is told to roll above his knees. A bidder steps up, examines his lower limbs, then his mouth, breast and other parts. He is now told to walk toward the door and back to show his gait. As he was returning, the hammer fell. . . .”3 A similar sight was observed in the late 1820s by an English clergyman Robert Walsh: “The slaves both men and women were walked about and put into different paces, and felt exactly as I have seen butchers feel a calf. [The overseer] occasionally lashed them, and made them jump to show that their limbs were supple, and caused them to shriek and cry, that their purchasers might persuade themselves that their lungs were sound.” These auctions were legal, for no one questioned the internal trade in slaves, and officials did not as a rule interfere to demand the provenance of the person who had been put up for sale.
The illegal trade to Brazil seems to have been begun by Portugueseborn merchants, such as José Maria Lisboa, who, in the early 1830s, began to use old ships which were destroyed soon after landing the slaves. Even so, the profits of these merchants seem to have been much greater than they had been in the eighteenth century.I Lisboa bought slaves in Africa for twenty or thirty thousand reis each, and sold them in Rio for as much as ten times that. Another Portuguese to take advantage of the new opportunity was José Bernardino de Sá, who made a point of always using English goods—cotton textiles, especially—for his traffic, and who was among those who established a system of permitting payment for slaves by installments. But the slave merchant in Brazil who carried through most changes necessary in the new era was José de Cerqueira Lima. He, too, had been born in Portugal but, by 1830, was already the owner of a luxurious palace in the Corredor da Victoria, in Bahia which, before independence in 1821, had been the residence of the governor of the province.II This building had been adapted to communicate, by an underground passage, with the beach where new slaves were landed. Cerqueira was known for the variety of his business interests, as for the grandeur of his way of life. His most successful ship, the Carlota, named after his beautiful wife, made at least nine voyages to Africa in the 1820s. The fact that several of his vessels were captured by the British and taken to Sierra Leone (the Cerqueira in 1824
, the Independencia, the Bahia, and even the Carlota in 1827, as well as the Golfinho in 1839) made no difference to his social standing in Bahia.
Almost as important during the illegal days in Bahia were João Cardozo dos Santos, the master and owner of the swift-sailing Henriquetta, Domingos Gomes Bello, Antonio Pedrozo de Albuquerque, and finally Joaquim Pereira Marinho (a grand seigneur who became baron, viscount, and finally count in Portugal). The latter was interested in the sale of dried meat, as well as of slaves, and was a director both of the Joazeiro Railway and of the new Bank of Bahia. He was responsible for about half the slaving journeys from Bahia between 1842 and 1851. He sent at least thirty-six voyages to Africa for slaves, and would die—prosperous, locally philanthropic, admired, and envied—only in 1884.
A more curious figure in the oligarchy of slave merchants of Bahia was Francisco López Guimarães, whose son married the sister of the poet Castro Alves, who was famous for his passionate verses against slavery; when López Guimarães died, his widow married the poet’s father. These unusual relationships interrupted neither the flow of the slave trade nor the production of verse directed against it.
In Rio, the equivalents of Cerqueira and Marinho were Manoel Pinto da Fonseca, a Portuguese merchant who was a specialist in providing slaves from Mozambique; Antonio Guimarães; Joaquim dos Santos; Joaquim and José Alves de Cruz Rios (father and son); and Francisco Godinho. Though most of these men had begun life humbly, they were, in their last years, largely because of their success in trading African slaves, able to live like kings. Pinto da Fonseca was a leading figure in society in Rio, the intimate friend of ministers and officials, especially of the chief of police in that capital.
