The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  What could realistically be done? In 1827, Captain William Owen, of the West Africa Squadron, his eyes on both Brazilian and Cuban slave traders, argued that the only hope of bringing the trade to an end would be to establish a base on Fernando Po, in order to control the delta coastline. That island belonged to Spain, but had not been much used by her. Owen suggested that two British naval steamers should be stationed there, and a settlement founded. Acting quite illegally, Owen detained two Portuguese slavers south of the equator, and used the slaves on board to begin to build an antislave fortress—on the questionable ground that to send them to Sierra Leone would risk their lives.

  Owen’s successor, Colonel Edward Nicolls (as “Fighting Nicolls,” he had fought in over a hundred naval battles during the late war), thought a better approach was to make treaties between Britain and the African slaving monarchs. He often acquired property for the Crown without permission, and obtained a voluntary cession of the stretch of land from Bimboa Island to the Río del Rey, in the Cameroons, from King William of Bimbia: “The three little islands in the bay of Ambosey,” Nicholls reported, “may be made little Gibraltars with little expense.” He thought that Duke Ephraim, the leading chief at Old Calabar, would soon abolish the slave trade in his territory if he were asked to do so formally and paid a subsidy. But the British government had at that time no imperial ambitions on the West African mainland.4

  The fate of the slaves liberated (35,000 of them in the 1830s) by the British was also unfortunate, since most were sent to work as laborers near Freetown, while a few agreed to go to the British West Indies as free apprentices. Even there, the slave trade was continuing: indeed, opposite the new city of Freetown, on the right bank of the river Sierra Leone, a chief was always instructing his assistants to dart “across the river in canoes and make captures of one or other of the theoretically free blacks there.” The continual influx of “raw liberated Africans,” mostly males, also made for much instability in the colony which was to be the new “cradle of African civilisation.”

  The British navy, of course, had some triumphs: a signal one was the seizure of the Cuban slaver Veloz Pasajera, a big ship with 555 slaves on board, apparently owned by the major slave merchant Joaquín Gómez, by H.M.S. Primrose (Captain Boughton), after a challenge and naval action in which nearly fifty Spanish sailors and three British were killed. But such encounters were sporadic; nor did they always go well. In September 1831, for example, Captain Ramsay, in the Bight of Benin, on H.M.S. Black Joke, sent two tenders in chase of two suspected Spanish slavers, the Rápido and the Régulo, which he observed as they were emerging from the Bonny River. Both “put back, made all sail up the river and ran on shore. During the chase, they were seen to throw their slaves overboard, by twos, shackled together by the ankles, and left in this manner to sink or swim. . . . Men, women and children were seen in great numbers, struggling in the water, by everyone on board the tenders; . . . One hundred and fifty of these wretched creatures perished in this way.” Ramsay said that he and his men also saw sharks making for, and tearing apart, many of the struggling Africans. The Régulo was overhauled, with 204 slaves still on board, but the Rápido had none left, and only two slaves were saved from the river.5

  The treaties also seemed to be still inadequate. British captains could arrest vessels which carried slaves, but they could do nothing to a ship which merely planned to do so. Captain Joseph Denman recalled later: “We had no power over the [intercepted] ship, till the slaves were on board. The consequence was that, if a man-of-war lay in a port full of slavers, as I have seen in Whydah, with ten or a dozen . . . at one time, as long as the man-of-war was in port, they would not ship their slaves; directly the man-of-war was out of sight, they shipped their slaves, and every vessel in the harbour would weigh their anchor and set sail. The cruiser would probably chase the wrong ship and, after 100 miles, would be laughed at by the master of that vessel, who would say that he had only put on sail for a pasatiempo.”6 Nor had the British yet secured the right to search and capture Portuguese vessels south of the equator (though, in 1833, H.M.S. Snake stopped the Maria da Gloria outside the harbor of Rio and found her carrying over four hundred slaves from Luanda, mostly children under twelve). Then, once a ship was detained, the procedure was complicated and sometimes destructive, resulting, through delays, in the death of many slaves in theory freed.

  The eventual consequence was a new treaty with Spain which enabled the navies of the two powers to seize ships flying the flag of either of those countries if slave equipment were found on board—in effect, a license for the British navy to act more effectively against Spanish slavers. The “equipment” was carefully defined. The treaty also stated firmly, if extremely optimistically, that the Spanish slave trade was “totally and finally abolished throughout the world.”7, II

  The treaty had occupied British diplomats a long time: in 1835, it was nine years since Canning had first mooted the matter and defined the word “equipment.” Yet the remarkable further delay in promulgating the law—even in Spain, much less in Cuba—encouraged the slave traders and planters of the latter island to think that it would never be put into effect.8 Spain was then being torn apart by the First Carlist War; it was inconceivable that any government in Madrid should act in such a way as to distress their Cuban taxpayers and merchants. Slave merchants in Havana, learning from the practice of North Americans, or encouraged by Portuguese officials, carried Portuguese or United States flags for use at their convenience, or even assumed another nationality; and the British consul in Havana, Charles David Tolmé (the first such official), reported that the slave traders intended to establish more and larger factories on the African coast, to be sure that there was always a good supply of slaves ready for purchase and that ships with the right “equipment” was there to carry them across the Atlantic.

  The British navy was more effective after the treaty of 1835. From 1830 to 1835, the British West Africa Squadron captured ten slavers a year; from 1835 to 1839, the total was thirty-five, mostly bound for Cuba.

  The Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1835 also provided that the unfortunate emancipados should henceforth be assigned to the government by whose cruiser they had been freed. The British wanted to use this clause to permit the transfer to Trinidad or Jamaica of all these freed Africans. In Cuba, a protector of these liberated slaves was named, to ensure this. The first to hold this post was Dr. Richard Madden, an Irish journalist, doctor, and traveler, who had lived in Jamaica administering the changes necessary to ensure the effectiveness of the abolition of slavery. (He had denounced this as a farce in his A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies During the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship.) Madden spent most of his first years in Cuba seeking to recover the emancipados released before this new treaty of 1835 came into effect. Those whom he saved were thereafter in theory to be sent to British colonies. But Captain-General Tacón henceforth refused to allow newly emancipated slaves to land in Havana. So the British naval frigate Romney, launched in 1815, was sent to Havana from Jamaica in 1837. Its position in the harbor—“a bulwark of abolitionism in the heart of slavism,” in the phrase of Fernando Ortiz but also, so it seemed, an insult to Spanish national pride—was in addition a humiliating reminder to the British that their policies had failed. Tacón also forbade the largely black crew to land in Cuba; and the prosperous merchants of Havana would see the isolated ship every evening, when they walked, with their families, along the Alameda de Paula.

  The same year that Spain concluded her treaty with Britain, Portugal at last formally abolished the slave trade, a bill being introduced to that effect by the Marquês Sá de Bandeira, whose opposition to the commerce is to be explained by his wish to create for Portugal a new “Brazil in Africa.” The bill prohibited any Portuguese from importing or exporting slaves for profit.III In fact, though, this bill constituted just one more dead letter: the Portuguese flag would still be used to cover numerous illegal imports into Brazil and many slaves into Cu
ba.

  Three years later, in December 1838, Lord Palmerston, the intemperate and passionate British foreign secretary, infuriated by his failure to break the Brazilian slave trade, decided to “cut the knot” (as he put it) with respect to naval patrols, and determined to permit the British navy to seize all ships flying a Portuguese flag, wherever they were, if they were found carrying either slaves or even just the equipment for the trade.

  Contradictory, calculating, and often vulgarly nationalistic, bullying (above all of the weak), Palmerston was now the dominant influence over British foreign policy. He saw himself as the spiritual heir of Canning; and his support for the abolition of the slave trade was certainly dedicated (though he was equivocal on the subject of slavery itself). At the University of Edinburgh, he had listened to Adam Smith’s views on free trade, through the teaching of one of Smith’s followers, Dugald Stewart. He had traveled in Europe when a child and had even seen something of the French Revolution; but he never visited Spain and Portugal, the two countries of Europe whose politics he sought to influence (though he had apparently read Don Quixote in Spanish when still at school).

  First elected to Parliament as long ago as 1807, a few months after the passage of the bill abolishing the slave trade, Palmerston worked immensely hard and made his clerks and ambassadors do the same. A recent biographer insists that he was never concerned to lead a crusade about the slave trade, and that the naval patrol concerned to stamp it out was not the cover for a grand design of universal empire. Palmerston had, as it happens, a contemptuous view of both Africans and Portuguese. He believed that African kings were “half naked and uncivilised,” and could not be asked to keep to slave or any other treaties; and he thought that “the plain truth is that the Portuguese are of European nations the lowest in the moral scale.” Talleyrand, French ambassador in London in the 1830s, thought Palmerston’s defect was that he “feels passionately about public affairs . . . to the point of sacrificing the most important interests to his resentments”: a bad case of trop de zèle. Palmerston considered that “the Anglo-Saxon race will in process of time become masters of the whole American continent . . . by reason of their superior qualities, as compared with the degenerate Spanish and Portuguese Americans”; but he maintained that Britain ought to do all she could to prevent United States’ aggrandizement.

  The shortcoming of Palmerston’s policy with respect to the abolition of the slave trade was that he never realized that the governments with whom he was dealing—in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil—were weak and sometimes had to spend all such energy as they had staving off a civil war; or, indeed, winning one. In those conflicts the British, like the French, were sometimes engaged. That did not inspire Lord Palmerston to any tolerance of the countries’ difficulties. Nor did he ever see that, with every confession of weakness at home, the Spanish government became more and more dependent on the revenues of the “ever-faithful” isle of Cuba. Spain needed the investments at home of men such as Joan Guëll, who brought back his Cuban fortune to invest in Catalan industry. Santander became rich on the strength of supplying flour to Cuba. The queen regent, María Cristina, always had investments in Cuban sugar.

  Palmerston’s contemptuous ideas about other peoples were widely held by British officials: William Ouseley, British chargé d’affaires in Brazil between 1838 and 1844, believed the Brazilians were a “vain, mediocre and ostentatious people.” His successor, James Hudson (“Hurry Hudson,” as he was known from a phrase of Disraeli), spoke similarly of the Africans: “a little barbarian, speaking a monkey dialect,” could not be expected to send to Africa for proof that he had not been born a slave. He also assured Palmerston that Brazilian governments were all “equally vicious, corrupt and abominable.”

  Palmerston’s determination to promote his new, aggressive policy in 1838 was itself partly inspired by the arguments of a new school of Quaker abolitionists, who thought that the West Africa Squadron should be withdrawn as a failure. These Quakers, among whom was the dedicated Joseph Sturge, alderman of Birmingham and a man who had to good effect traveled in the West Indies and the United States, had in 1839 founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, intended to be a new and efficient organization to follow the emancipation of British slaves by the global abolition of slavery. The new body opposed the idea of force, thinking that “The extinction of the slave trade will be obtained most effectually by the employment of those means which are of a moral, religious and pacific character.”

  At much the same time, a new Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade was founded in London by Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Buxton—the pertinacious son of a Quaker, married to a Gurney of Norfolk, a brewer as well as a member of Parliament—thought that, since the naval patrols had been shown to be ineffective, they should be maintained only to guarantee legitimate trade. Buxton was not opposed to the use of force—he was only half a Quaker—but was primarily concerned to secure the regeneration of Africa through agricultural development. He thought that Britain should set up a series of trading posts on and near the Niger as an alternative to slaving. His influential The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy of 1838 was read by the British Cabinet. Like Macgregor Laird, he sought positive ideas for the moral recovery of Africa as part of the campaign against the slave trade: ideas which would eventually lead, through occupation, to a notion of empire far removed from the intentions of the first abolitionists.

  Both the prime minister, the relaxed Lord Melbourne, and the flamboyant foreign secretary, Palmerston, were irritated by Buxton, as they now often were by embittered men such as Lord Brougham, who brought his vast if mercurial powers to mock his old friends in the government: “We pause, we falter, and blanch and quail,” jeered Brougham, on one occasion, “before the ancient and consecrated monarchy of Brazil, the awful might of Portugal, the compact, consolidated, overwhelming power of Spain.”9 All the same, the Government accepted that Buxton’s scheme should be explored, and Palmerston offered Spain £50,000 for the island of Fernando Po as a start. The government also sent a flotilla of three steamers up the Niger in 1841 under a naval officer to stimulate the idea of legitimate trade, carrying over six million cowries with them as currency. Malaria and yellow fever, however, made the voyage a failure.IV

  Palmerston, arguing that the independence of Brazil rendered illegal any Atlantic slaving trade by Portugal, now put forward a high-handed bill in Parliament which would give the British navy the right to stop all Portuguese vessels, as well as those without a flag (vessels “not justly entitled to claim the protection of any state”), if they were found carrying “equipment” useful for slaving.

  The new bill was attacked but it did pass the House of Commons. The viscount of Torre de Moncorvo, the clever Portuguese minister (one of the few European diplomats in the nineteenth century to know anything of the life of ports, since he had been superintendant of customs and tobacco in northern Portugal before going to London), protested. Palmerston told him arrogantly that his government could declare war if it liked. Thanks to the opposition of the duke of Wellington (who had been approached by Torre de Moncorvo), the bill was defeated in the House of Lords. Wellington’s view was that the proposed legislation was an affront to an ancient ally, as well as a violation of international law.

  But the bill was then reintroduced, only slightly amended, in the next session of Parliament, and passed in August 1839, despite further opposition from Wellington (the duke now thought it better to declare war against Portugal than to proceed with a general right of visit; he said that that gave the bill “a criminal character”).10 The duke was correct in his legal appraisal, but he neglected to take into account that, as Commander Riley of the British navy would tell a House of Commons select committee in 1849, “anyone who has been on the coast for two months will know a slaver from her manouevres; a legal vessel will heave to for you”11; and a businessman, Francis Swanzy, told another such committee that even “an amateur could form an opinion [about what was and what was not
a slave ship] by the raking of the mast, the colour of the sails, the squareness of the yards, her tautness and low hull.”12

  The final form of the new law enabled British captains off Africa to send captured Portuguese ships (both those with slaves and those only with equipment) as well as those without nationality, whether north or south of the equator, in rivers as on high seas, to the nearest British viceadmiralty court; to land any liberated slaves at the nearest British settlement; and to hand over the masters and the crews of the ships concerned to be judged in Portugal. “Equipment” was defined in the same way that the previous act, covering Spain, had done so.V

  The government in Lisbon offered to sign a treaty along these lines, but only if Britain were to cease pressing for payment of her debts. Palmerston rejected that idea out of hand. He wrote to the British minister in Lisbon that he should “impress . . . that the conclusion of a slave trade treaty is a matter which now concerns Portugal only. . . .” So, he argued, Portugal was offering nothing.13 He arrogantly sent instructions to the navy to treat similarly, and capture, all Brazilian slave ships, and send them to the Anglo-Brazilian mixed court. He planned to increase again the West Africa Squadron: there would be thirteen ships in 1841. These included one fast, new ship, H.M.S. Waterwitch.

  The Waterwitch was responsible for capturing forty slavers: a record. The British navy were also now regularly assisted by a system of spies all along the African coast, “servants of the kings or the chiefs of the place who secretly . . . gave any information we wanted”—for payment, of course. Intelligent British naval officers, such as Captain Denman, thought that the slave trade “has diminished to one-half of what it was before,” he told a committee of inquiry in 1842.

  Brazilian or Cuban ships now had to use a United States flag if they wished to avoid the British navy. That recourse, admittedly, was easily available to them. President Martin Van Buren, “the little magician of Kinderhook,” who had briefly been minister to London in 1831, when he had met Palmerston, complained of this practice to Congress in 1839. He demanded a tightening of the law in order to prevent the state of affairs whereby twenty-three ships (belonging to Manzanedo, Zulueta and Gómez) left Havana that year flying United States flags. But Congress was reluctant to take any such step. The House of Representatives at that time was full of slaveholders, and they did not wish to talk about the issue of slavery at all. A financial panic in 1837 also precluded initiatives in almost every field. The lengthy debate as to whether the slave trade should be permitted in the District of Columbia had made it plain that, for the Southern members, anyone who talked of an end of slavery, such as John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, or William Slade of Vermont, was “a fanatic”—even when those men complained that, on their way to the Capitol, they had been “compelled to turn aside from their path, to permit a coffle of slaves, chained to each other by their necks, to pass on their way to the national slave market.” There were now nearly two and a half million slaves in the United States, seen by James Henry Hammond, of South Carolina, as “the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region” his colleague, “Waddy” Thomson, also of South Carolina, went so far as to insist that slavery was “essential to the maintenance of human liberty”; while William Cost Johnson, from Maryland, believed that it was a blessing for Africans to keep them in slavery. Abolitionists, even in the North of the country, were still a minority; in proper Boston, a leading enemy of slavery William Lloyd Garrison had recently been paraded bound through the streets in mockery of his ideals.14