by Hugh Thomas
Other slave merchants in Cuba included Pedro Martínez, who moved into the shipment of sugar in the 1840s but retained slaving interests until the late 1850s. (In Africa, he had agencies at both Lagos and on the Brass River.) He was said then to be the owner of “thirty ships engaged in the traffic.”28
Only a little less powerful and almost as rich were two merchants originally from Bordeaux, Pierre Forcade and Antonio Font, of Forcade y Font (Cádiz), of whom the first owned the sugar mill Porvenir, near the town of Colón, and the latter Caridad, near Cienfuegos, a city founded by the recent captain-general of that name, on the south coast of the island. Forcade had owned the slave ship L’Orthézienne, which had been among the first to leave France for Africa after the Napoleonic Wars, before he moved to Havana where, according to the protagonist in Pío Baroja’s brilliant novel, Los Pilotos de Altura, he lived grandly with two houses and two families “one with a Spaniard to whom he was married, the other with a very pretty Cuban.”
The roll of merchants in Cuba who financed slave voyages is thus long. It should include Antonio Parejo, who came from the mother country about 1840 with a “very immense capital,” apparently the portfolio of María Cristina, the queen mother of Spain, on whose behalf Parejo invested in the large San Martin plantation. Nor should we forget Manuel Pastor, founder of the Banco Pastor.
Occasionally in the 1840s, a change in prices for slaves in Brazil in comparison with those in Cuba would cause the slave traders of the two lands to collaborate. Thus Forcade in Cuba made common cause with Manoel Pinto da Fonseca in Rio de Janeiro. Francisco Rubirosa, a well-known dealer in slaves in Havana in 1840, moved to Rio in the late 1840s, became known as Rubeiroza,XIV and then returned to Havana in the 1850s.
Many leading merchants in Havana, including slave merchants, had close connections with London firms, several of which, as in Brazil, saw no reason why they should not supply goods for the slave trade, even if they seem to have hesitated before concerning themselves very directly. One or two enterprises, such as Thomas Brooks, which established their agents in Havana in the 1840s, to their profit included slave merchants in the ample credits which they extended. Samuel Dickley of London lent 12 million reales to Francisco Martí, the Catalan merchant, in 1834, enabling that pirate of finance to buy a new oceangoing vessel, which he surely used for the slave trade; and the same firm provided 10.6 million reales for Salvador Samá, Zulueta’s father-in-law. Dickley’s biggest loan in Cuba, for sixteen million reales, was to Rafael Torices who, though an experienced slave merchant, was, at that time, interested in the traffic in Chinese from Macao. Then Hudson Beattie of London lent to both Manuel Pastor and to Tomás Terry, a substantial merchant of Venezuelan origin, “the Cuban Croesus,” established in Cienfuegos. Both concerned themselves with slaves at different periods of their long and prosperous lives. Lizardi of Liverpool included Julián Zulueta among their creditors, and so did the firms of Simeon Himely and Aubert Powell. Other London firms, such as Barings, Kleinwort and Cohen, and Frederick Huth (the London banker, incidentally, of the Madrid land speculator, the marquis of Salamanca, as well as of the queen mother) were chiefly interested in sugar from Cuba, especially after 1846, when the tariff against foreign-produced sugar was abolished by Sir Robert Peel. Kleinwort had a special relation with the Cuban family of English origin, the Drakes; while Barings were close to the Aldamas, who sought, in 1840, to use nonslave labor on their plantations, without much success.29
Some of these London firms, however, had a Spanish or a Cuban origin: for example, Murrieta, great wine producers which began as a business exporting wine from Cádiz to London; the Ayalas from Santander, who were sugar planters in Cuba, sugar importers in England, champagne makers in France, and stockbrokers in Madrid; and, perhaps above all, the firm of Pedro Juan de Zulueta, already mentioned in connection with Julián, which did for a time concern itself in slaves in Havana; this became evident at the trial of the founder’s son and heir, Pedro José, for slave trading, partly in collaboration with his cousin Julián in Havana. (He was fortunate to be acquitted.XV)
These London connections make it understandable that over half of the Cuban capital invested abroad in the mid-nineteenth century was placed in England. This included some fortunes of slave traders, such as that of the brothers-in-law Gabriel Lombillo and José Antonio Suárez Argudín, who began to invest in textiles in Manchester and coal mines in Wales after 1830 (the year when the first of these two onetime slave merchants was poisoned by the second, a crime of which he appears to have escaped the consequences, spending only a most modest spell in prison). In Spain, the investments of these Cuban entrepreneurs were so substantial that the banking system of the country was really their creation. There was no bad conscience about the investment of such slave-based fortunes in Spanish concerns, any more than there had been in England and the United States a half-century before.30 The British minister in Madrid in 1836, George Villiers—subsequently, as Lord Clarendon, foreign secretary under Gladstone—wrote in that year to his brother: “All those Spaniards who are not absolutely indifferent to the abolition of the slave trade are positively averse to it. We think that an appeal to humanity must be conclusive. The word is not understood. . . . Cuba is the pride and hope and joy of Spain . . . the place where revenue comes, and whither every bankrupt Spaniard goes in order to rob ad libitum.”31
• • •
In 1835, John Eaton, the United States minister to Madrid (previously a controversial secretary of war under Andrew Jackson), told the Spanish foreign minister, the liberal count of Ofalia (Narciso de Heredia), that the United States had no need to worry about British abolitionist activities, since slaves in North America were well taken care of, the proof being that they multiplied as fast as whites.
Slaves were certainly traded within the United States. Firms such as Franklin and Armfield made money by buying slaves in Virginia and dispatching them by sea, just as in the old transatlantic slave trade, to New Orleans, for possible subsequent shipment to Natchez or other places up the Mississippi. The same firm sent hundreds of slaves a year overland to the South. It was once suggested that the profit obtained by selling slaves gave the capital for westward movement. That cannot be true since slave movements from Eastern to Western states were on too small a scale for that to have been the case. All the same, some slaveowners in the American South, especially in the border states and in states along the Atlantic coast, did breed slaves “systematically,” and for sale, thus encouraging polygamy and promiscuity, the progeny being usually sold to the Southwestern states.
It was in the international trade, though, above all the trade to Cuba and Brazil, in which United States sea captains were still chiefly engaged during the first half of the nineteenth century, rather than in a clandestine traffic to the United States. Probably most United States administrations desired to stop this commerce, but slaving interests remained strong in Congress, and no government in Washington could accept that a British ship could capture a United States ship and condemn the master to death for slaving.XVI
Britain in the 1830s carried through a complete emancipation of slaves in her empire, as had most states of the United States and of the new independent South American nations. This occurred partly as a result of renewed agitation by the antislavery movement headed in Parliament by Thomas Fowell Buxton; partly because of the destructive Jamaican slave revolt of December 1831; and partly because the Whig government was ready, after the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832, to turn its attention to something new. Between 1830 and 1832, the antislavery movement held thousands of meetings. Even so, the Whigs were only willing to act when certain of Tory support; which in turn was forthcoming only when the leaders of that party knew that the planters of the West Indies (who still included many members of Parliament such as the elder Sir Robert Peel and Gladstone’s father) were satisfied with the terms.XVII
The ambiguities and the consequences of this famous measure have been amply discussed. Suffice it to say tha
t the immediate consequence was to cause disillusion among the adult slaves: if they were to be free, why did they have to wait five years? The long-term effect was to cause the decline of British West Indian sugar: the number of sugar plantations in Jamaica, for example, fell from 670 in 1834 to 330 in 1854; and there was no compensating improvement in production, as would occur in similar circumstances in Cuba. Indeed, the amount of land devoted to sugar fell in those twenty years by nearly 170,000 acres on that island.
Though the end of slavery in the British dominions had an effect on international opinion, it did not inspire the final abolition of the international traffic, which Wilberforce and his friends had begun to attack a generation before. The abolitionists—with antislave societies in every big British town, distributing 35,000 items of propaganda every year, collecting innumerable sums of up to £50 each, organizing petitions—did not have precise figures any more than a historian does. But it seems that, even in the 1820s, slaves shipped from Africa to the New World totaled about sixty to seventy thousand a year, or well over half a million in the ten years: close to the late-eighteenth-century peak. Gross profits per slave delivered were in these days above the levels of the eighteenth century: perhaps between three and five times higher than the past. Prices went down in Africa, and the interference—as it seemed to be—of the British raised prices in the Americas.
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I See page 725.
II This palace is now the Secretariat of Education and Public Health in Bahia.
III Dom Pedro, emperor after 1831, was a minor till 1842.
IV Citizens of the United States may wish to remind themselves that the people of Brazil and the Spanish empire, too, all regarded themselves as living in “America.”
V The tobacco plantations of the west of the island, which produced Cuba’s famous cigars, were usually worked by free black labor.
VI Slaves could buy their freedom by the system of coartación: they had to make an initial payment to their master, and then buy freedom by installments, recovering a percentage of the original payment at each step. For that reason, said the Spanish abolitionist of the 1860s, Rafael Labra, “the position of the free Negro is much better than elsewhere, even among those nations which have for ages flattered themselves as being the most advanced in civilization.”9
VII The last slave ship to arrive in Puerto Rico was apparently in 1843.
VIII A priest in the excellent novel of the 1880s Cecilia Valdés asked why there were so many more slave rebellions on steam-powered sugar mills. The answer is that such modern institutions were more inhumane.
IX See page 602.
X One had to be careful what was performed: to play “Suoni la tromba,” from Bellini’s Puritanic risked condemnation, because rousing words about freedom accompanied it.
XI She was daughter of that count of Jaruco who had been the first to put a steam engine on his sugar plantation, and a descendant of that cubanized Richard O’Farrill who, after the Treaty of Utrecht, had been the South Sea Company’s factor on the island.
XII See page 687.
XIII Presumably the ship was named after the mistress of King George II of England.
XIV See page 701.
XV See Appendix 2.
XVI When a United States brig bound for Cuba was brought into Boston Harbor in 1841 by a British naval vessel, the outcry was such that the owners might have been heroes, not criminals.
XVII The act of 1833 provided for the emancipation of 750,000 slaves. Children under six were to be free from August 1, 1834; while adults and older children were to be apprentices for six years and then be free, though all would be legally free from August 1, 1838. The promise of £20 million in compensation gained the support of the planters.
31
Active Exertions
“The Brazen is still cruizing to leeward in the Bight of Benin, waiting the arrival of messengers from the interior. During her stay there she has succeeded in detaining, after a chase of 46 hours, the Spanish schooner Iberia with 423 slaves, and also the English palm-oil ship, for a slaving transaction, the master having, by depositions from his crew, disposed of four female negroes . . . to the master of a Spanish vessel lying in the river. . . .”
Commodore Bullen to the Admiralty, London, January 28, 1826
THE SYSTEM OF INTERNATIONAL LAW which Britain sought to inspire, and with which some other nations collaborated without enthusiasm, in the hope of bringing the slave trade to an end, was an unusual affair. There were, by 1830, four mixed courts of arbitration in Sierra Leone, Havana, Paramaribo, and Rio. At the first of these places, a British judge sat beside Spanish, Brazilian, and Dutch colleagues; in each of the other ports, there was a British judge and one from the appropriate nation. In the case of a difference between the judges, the court would turn to two commissioners of arbitration, again one British and one from the country concerned. These would draw lots to decide as to which of the two the matter should be referred for final decision.
Since France and the United States did not recognize any English court, cases which the French wished to bring were taken to a court at Gorée, while all cases affecting United States citizens were heard in the port of the United States from which the offending ship had come.
Finally, the very few Englishmen accused of trading slaves were usually tried not by a mixed commission but a Court of Vice-Admiralty, which was also held at Sierra Leone. But the only instance of a trial of an established merchant, Pedro de Zulueta, was in London.
Ships seized by the British or indeed any other navy under the laws condemning the trade in slaves were looked on as prizes, to be sold to the highest bidder. Half the profit of the sale of the ship went to the government under whose flag she had been sailing; and half, after expenses were paid, went to the prize’s captors, the admiral of the fleet concerned receiving one-sixteenth, the captain an eighth of the remaining five-sixteenths, the rest being divided.I
Such was the bureaucratic and legalistic structure of the immense system of international philanthropy now so remarkably mounted.
Given the size of the vast territories which the British West Africa Squadron were supposed to cover, and the unwillingness of other powers to make more than a token contribution to the crusade (or, as was the case with France, a refusal to do other than act against suspected French slavers), the British West Africa Squadron was increased: Sir Francis Collier, an officer who had been with Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, had by 1823 under his command the Tartar (thirty-six guns), the Pheasant (twenty-two), the Morgiana (eighteen), the Myrmidon (twenty), the Snapper (twelve), and the Thistle (twelve). This force had many functions: it was supposed to be ready for combat at sea, to blockade ports anywhere between Cape Verde and Benguela, to seize foreign slavers, and also to protect legitimate traders.
The British were weakened by the fact that, even with Collier’s reinforcement, this West Africa Squadron was still composed of old ships, with tall, easily detected masts, all left over from the Napoleonic Wars. Lord Palmerston, in 1862, would complain that “no First Lord and no Board of Admiralty have ever felt any interest in the suppression of the slave trade,” and added: “If there was a particularly old, slow-going tub in the navy, she was sure to be sent to the coast of Africa to try and catch the fast-sailing American clippers.”1 Though Palmerston exaggerated, the truth was that the vessels of the world’s most powerful navy were, as a rule, easily outdistanced by the slavers’ “small, fast-sailing pilotboat schooners.”
The British began to introduce steamers into the navy as early as 1822, but they were slow to be adapted to West Africa, for there were only three possible coaling stations: Sierra Leone, Fernando Po, and Luanda. If the navy’s first paddle steamer on the station, the Pluto, was faster than most, she was an exception. In the 1820s and 1830s, Captain Denman recalled, “dull-sailing ten-gun brigs” were all that were available—“the model of which might have been taken from a haystack.”2
The contrast with the slavers was
indeed laughable. George Coggeshall, a United States traveler, described slavers on the Danish island of Saint Thomas as being usually “armed with great guns.” The only British naval ships which were effective in the 1830s were in fact captured exslavers, the Black Joke and the Fair Rosamond. The quality of these ships alone might have shown to the governments of the United States and France that the British maritime activities off the coast of Africa were scarcely a grand design for world domination.
The only parts of the West African coast which were in practice regularly patrolled were the Bights of Benin and Biafra. Even there, British frigates mostly cruised forty miles offshore between well-known slave ports and, because of the shortage of ships and of money, were constrained to neglect other harbors. Thousands of miles were open to the slave traders. An indication of the inadequacy of the patrol was given by the captain of a slaver captured in the river Gallinas, in 1833. He told the mixed court in Sierra Leone that he had previously made thirteen voyages without difficulty. Captain Vidal, on the river Bonny, in 1826, wrote home that “there were [often] twelve sail of slavers even there, and twelve British merchant ships, at the same time taking on palm oil.” From 1827 to 1834, the great entrepreneur Macgregor Laird thought that the famous old slave mart of the delta was, at “the lowest calculation,” exporting over 28,000 slaves a year.3
