The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The Cape Verde Islands were often visited by slavers on their way to market. They were usually denounced as bleak: “One might believe that, after the formation of the world, a quantity of useless surplus stones was cast into the sea,” wrote Dr. Theodor Vogel, a British member of the Niger expedition of 184114; and another participant of that fantastic undertaking, the master-at-arms, John Duncan, thought that “the meanest pauper in England is a king compared with the best and most opulent of them [the inhabitants].”15 All the same, a slave trade persisted in the islands. Slaves were brought from the mainland and then shipped to Brazil or Cuba, a Portuguese merchant, Brandão, and a French one named Antoine Léger being the outstanding operators in the place in the 1820s.

  Gorée, the “green, ham-shaped island” (in the words of the most intelligent of French governors, the chevalier de Boufflers), below the hook of land south of Cape Verde itself, was no longer a slave port by 1835, though it remained a place where North American slavers would pick up interpreters. After it was made a free entrepôt for certain non-European goods in 1821, United States rum and tobacco were available in great quantities.

  A little below this island were several rivers whose slaving needs, in the early part of the century, were still provided for by the Wolofs, as had been the case almost continuously since the sixteenth century. One of the little ports here was Joal, where the disgraceful transactions described so acutely by Mérimée, in his Tamoango, are said to have occurred.

  The British had been for many generations loosely established in the estuary of the river Gambia. But in the Napoleonic Wars, they withdrew from it, as did the French from their old trading port of Albreda. That left the river for some years at the mercy of North American slavers, who used it extensively to take slaves to Cuba. After 1815, the British returned, and established their main post not at Fort James but on Saint Mary’s Island, at the mouth of the river. By 1840, the settlement there, Bathurst, had become “a very pretty little town,” as Colonel Alexander Findlay, one of the governors, put it. British influence stretched at least 140 miles up the river, as far as Macarthy’s Island, in a valley which had for generations been a valuable source of slaves. Slaving by, or at least for the benefit of, the French and Spaniards continued on the river in the 1820s. There were also frequent United States vessels. The French traders took to carrying their captives, from an assembly point at their old headquarters at Albreda, overland north to the river Salloum, which was outside British jurisdiction. They took other slaves from the Gambia at Vitang Creek, about fifty miles up the river, and marched overland south to another French trading post on the river Casamance, where in the 1820s a black Portuguese governor, with a barracoon at Zingiehor, was active in the slave trade. Slaving had, however, almost ceased by 1840, the presence of a detachment of British troops at Bathhurst playing an important part in securing this.

  To the south of the Casamance, the picture changed greatly, for a large network of slave dealers were still gathered in the labyrinth of creeks, islands, and mudbanks of the estuary of the rivers Cacheu and Bissau. This territory had been only a modest base for Portuguese slaving in the eighteenth century, but it grew spectacularly for that purpose in the first part of the nineteenth, though some hides and beeswax were also traded. The multitude of waterways, and the Portuguese control, made it difficult for the British navy to interfere in the place, though for a time they had a base on the fertile offshore island of Bolama, lying at the mouth of the rivers Jeba and Grande. (Bolama was later abandoned on the grounds that it was unhealthy.)

  It was said that the factories in the Cacheu River were “principally supplied by British vessels,” and there is even a possibility that some London merchants (Forster and Co., for example) were indirectly concerned in the slave trade here in the early part of the century. In 1828, “the currency of the place, and in fact the representation of value . . . was according to the value of the slaves. The slave trade was the all engrossing object of the people there,” reported an adventurous English businessman John Hughes, who was obliged to flee because of threats to his life after the British detention of a Portuguese vessel.16 Nor was the slave trade confined to large enterprises. Here, the petty black or mulatto slave trader would often “get into his canoe, with goods to the value of $100, and go up the rivers Cacheu and Jeba . . . and bring down his two or three slaves.” A “quite considerable” United States commerce was also reported by the consul of that nation, Ferdinand Gardner, in Cacheu-Bissau in 1841; and the evidence for legitimate trade is missing.

  The Fulbe and Mandingo traders were the most indefatigable providers of slaves in these years. They succeeded in restricting the Europeans to river traffic, and North American firms, such as Charles Hoffman, Robert Brookhouse and William Hunt, all of Salem, and Yates and Porterfield, of New York, were the chief beneficiaries.17, VII

  The Portuguese still maintained third-rate garrisons at the two fortresses at Cacheu and Bissau, half the soldiers being Cape Verdeans. Disease, underpayment, and inactivity rotted the lives of all who worked here. The governor in the 1830s, Caetano José Nozolini, was, however, a remarkable official. Son of an Italian sailor who in the 1790s married a Cape Verdean heiress on the island of Fogo, Nozolini became a major slave trader at Bissau; he would send ships to Cuba as well as Brazil, perhaps buying goods from the British on the Gambia River, paying with bills drawn on such respectable London houses as Baring Brothers, and then exchange them in his own territory for slaves. When Captain Matthew Perry on the United States sloop-of-war Orbel seized $40,000 worth of property at Bissau in 1844, he found that most of it had been advanced by North American traders to Nozolini.

  Nozolini was helped to reach his position by an alliance with the dominant merchant in Cacheu-Zingiehor, Honorio Barreto, a mulatto who succeeded him as governor in 1850. (He, too, traded in slaves.) But the strongest influence on Nozolini was his African wife, Mãe Aurélia Correia, “the queen of Orango,” the largest island of the Bissagos Archipelago, a tyrannical nhara (that is, senhora) of these rivers. By 1827, though not yet in control, Nozolini was strong enough to deceive the British navy by shipping sixty-one slaves as members of his own family; it was some time before the governor of Sierra Leone, Sir Neil Campbell, realized who these “Nozolinos” [sic] were. Nozolini was strong enough to resist a demand from the French that he be charged for the murder of a French trader named Dumaigne, killed by some of his guards in 1835; and in the 1840s, he was already cultivating peanuts on the island of Bolama, as well as assembling slaves there.18 (The brig-of-war Brisk liberated 212 slaves from there in 1838.) At Nozolini’s death, his family succeeded him in the business: his son-in-law, Dr. Antonio Joaquim Ferreira, was a pioneer of planting coconut palms at Ametite.

  Just offshore in this zone lay Hen Island, previously uninhabited, which had been turned by Nozolini’s predecessor as governor, Joaquim Antonio Mattos, into “a perfect receptacle, a nest, for the slaves.” These slaves were held in round houses, twelve to sixteen together. The place was raided in 1842 by the British Captain Blount, who felt free to act because it belonged, as it seemed to him, neither to Portugal nor to a native chief: just to Mattos, one of whose mulatto daughters was killed in the fray.19, VIII

  On the Rio Grande, just to the south of the colony of Bissau, some curious scenes would unfold in 1842. Commander Sotheby, of H.M.S. Skylark, received news that a Spanish slave ship was in the river. This information was denied by a local chief, who insisted that the Spanish merchant living there, a certain Tadeo Vidal, alias Juan Pons, traded only in groundnuts. Sotheby inspected eighteen creeks, and only when he offered a reward of $100 was he told where the slave ship was. He found her, equipped for slaving but hidden in the mangroves. There was no sign of the crew. Sotheby thereupon blew up the ship. He was then informed that the chief was hiding slaves, ready for shipment, and some of them escaped and joined Sotheby. Sotheby sent the chief an ultimatum and said, “Unless the slaves are brought down tomorrow, I will blow up the town.”20
They were accordingly produced, and the mysterious Vidal was also brought in as a prisoner. He turned out to be the supercargo of the Spanish ship. The rest of the crew were visiting other creeks in search of slaves. Sotheby took both the Spaniards and the slaves to Freetown for trial and for liberation, respectively.

  The next slave harbors to the south were the fever-ridden rivers Núñez and Pongas. The first of these was the favored market of Fulbe slave caravans from the theocratic inland empire of the Futa Jallon, a sophisticated enterprise judged by Captain Denman, at least, as “far superior” to any other African entity. The British established a trading post fifty miles up this “exceedingly unhealthy” river, at Kacundy, but their presence did not seem to affect slaving unless there was a man-of-war there, though they did found some coffee farms. A local monarch named Sarah (according to John Hughes, “one of the greatest barbarians. . . . He thinks nothing of tying a stone round a man’s neck and throwing him in the river”) once threatened a British trader, Benjamin Campbell, with death, on the ground that his presence was preventing slavers from going up the river.21

  At the mouth of this river Núñez, a mulatto family, the Skeltons (Elizabeth Frazer Skelton, “Mammy Skelton,” and her husband, William Skelton), established a new fort, which they named Victoria, in 1825. Elizabeth’s father was a North American mulatto who had gone to Sierra Leone in 1797. Zachary Macauley had refused to allow him to remain, since he knew him to be a slaver. The Skeltons sold their slaves on the nearby river Pongas. By 1840, the traders of the river Núñez had mostly changed to cultivating peanuts, and were apparently responsible for half the production of the region. The remarkable Mrs. Skelton, a heroine to feminists if a villain to abolitionists, still dominated the upper river after her husband’s death, when she was busy with nuts, not slaves.22

  The Rio Pongas maintained its ancient importance in the slave trade because its estuary consisted of five separate waterways, separated from the sea by bars of sand and mud, behind which the commerce could be secretly carried on, protected by currents which made the place dangerous to inexperienced pilots. The headwaters of the river, like those of the nearby Núñez, were in the highlands of the Futa Jallon and so served very well as a commercial waterway for ivory, gold, and rice, as well as slaves. On the Pongas, about twenty interesting European or mulatto slave traders were established. The most powerful of them in the 1820s had been John Ormond, “Mongo John,” the word Mongo indicating “chief,” perhaps the son of a French slave captain named Hautemont, or possibly that of a sailor, Ormond, of Liverpool, by a local girl. He began his working life as a mate on a ship belonging to Daniel Botefeur of Havana and then worked on Bence Island with Richard Oswald’s nephews before abolition. At the riverside village of Bangalang on the Pongas, Ormond had built a fine house furnished in European style, as well as a large fortified barracoon where his slaves would be chained while he awaited the arrival of ships from the Americas. With his brother, he dominated the slave trade in the region for a generation. He lived well, drinking to excess, with a harem, and his warehouses were full of gunpowder, palm oil, and gold, as well as alcohol. Ormond founded a secret society to protect himself, using young initiates as warriors. He would lend European goods to his subchiefs and, if they did not pay the interest, he would raid their villages and sell the captives. He committed suicide in 1828, when he had begun to lose control.23 For a long time the slave trader Theodore Canot worked as Ormond’s secretary, being paid “a negro a month.” Another family of traders on the Pongas were the brothers Curtis, who were found in 1819 dealing with a French captain, François Vigne, of La Marie, from Guadeloupe, exchanging 306 slaves for 24,063 iron bars. (The ship was seized by H.M.S. Tartar.)

  Another trader on this waterway was Paul Faber, a North American, established at Sangha in 1809, at first a protégé of Ormond. With his black wife, Mary (a survivor of the Nova Scotian free blacks sent to Sierra Leone), and his mulatto son, William, he was still selling slaves in 1850 to Brazil, according to the British naval patrol, at an average of $65.50 each. The Fabers, like Mongo John, had a small slave army capable of fighting full-scale battles with rivals. Paul Faber was a slave captain as well as a trader, and would sometimes sell slaves in Cuba, cargoes which his wife had negotiated in Africa. Other traders here included, at Faringura, a Portuguese widow, Bailey Gómez Lightburne (Nyara Belí), her son Styles Lightburne, and her manager, Allen, a mulatto.24

  Most of these adventurers produced local agricultural products, too, legitimate after their fashion. Thus John Ormond is said in 1827 to have had five or six thousand slaves at work on his coffee farms, the Fabers were interested in rice and ginger, the Lightburne heirs had about six thousand slaves in 1860 working on groundnuts as well as coffee at Faringura.IX

  These traders organized their businesses more intelligently than their African predecessors of the eighteenth century: instead of a slave captain’s traveling along the coast picking up slaves here and there from a diversity of African harbors, he would more likely go to a single place and buy all he needed from a mulatto- or European-owned barracoon in one transaction.

  To the south of the Rio Pongas there were the Iles de Los, known to the English as William (Tamara), Crawford’s Island (Roume), and Factory Island (Kassa). North American slavers of the early part of the century might pick up a pilot from here to help them through the confusing Bissagos Islands. In the eighteenth century, there had been barracoons for slaves here, but they had been abandoned, for they were easy prey to British cruisers. Instead, stores of goods used in the slave trade were held, while three slave merchants of English origin ruled on Crawford’s Island as little monarchs: W. H. Leigh, Samuel Samo, and a certain Nickson. They obtained their cargoes from the mainland coast opposite, where the city of Conakry, capital of Guinea, then only a village, now stands.

  Farther south lay the curious British colony of Sierra Leone, a green oasis at first sight, and a place which had not yet extinguished memories of the time when there had been important slave markets, including those of Bence and Banana islands. Unhealthy though it seemed to be for the Europeans who went there, Freetown, in Sierra Leone, was the capital of the British crusade against the slave trade. Up till 1840, 425 slave ships had been escorted there by British warships, of which 403 had been condemned by the Mixed Court.X All the same, Freetown in those years was much frequented by North American traders, seeking both slaves and conventional goods; in 1809, the governor even complained to the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, that “this has hitherto been an American and not a British colony.”

  If a slaver were captured anywhere north of the equator, she would be taken to Freetown under a prize crew. The crew would usually arrive exhausted, because so few hands were available to sail the prize, guard the captured crew, and attend, with some pretense of humanity, to the needs of the liberated cargo. Even if, by sleeping on deck, the crew escaped the prevalent dysentery or ophthalmia, they exposed themselves to mosquito bites. Having handed over their slaves to the prize authorities at the port, the sailors would then themselves go ashore happy. Within an hour or two, most of them would be drunk on local spirits. To sleep off the effects, they would lie all night in the gutters. By the time that they returned to sobriety, they would probably have been infected with malaria, if not yellow fever. If they had to stay in the town till they were drafted to another ship, the chance of death from one of those diseases was great. The danger of such proceedings became apparent in the 1820s, and henceforth leave ashore at Sierra Leone was prohibited to seamen, though not to their officers. But those regulations were not strictly followed.25

  At the same time, the mortality of the slaves on board these prize ships en route to Sierra Leone was probably as high as when they were being taken across the Atlantic. There were many reports by captains describing tragedies, such as that referring to the Rosalia from Lagos in 1825: “From extraordinary length of passage to Sierra Leone, lost 82 slaves and, with the exception of 10, by actual starvation.” />
  After a slaver had been escorted to Sierra Leone, and condemned by the court of mixed commission, and while the naval officers were talking to the proctor about their prize money, the slaves would be taken to an office in Kings Yard, and registered as British citizens. They would then be offered the alternative of going to the West Indies as apprentices, signing up with a regiment of black soldiers, or establishing themselves on a property in Sierra Leone, where they would be allocated a quarter-acre of land to cultivate under the care of a usually neglectful supervisor. The authorities in Sierra Leone would provide these men with only a small cloth to wear, a pot for cooking, and a spade.