The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The governor was himself far from hostile to the slave trade in Africa; he merely had instructions to bring the international traffic to an end. Thus, when approval for his great road (which he wanted to prolong to Timbuktu) was slow in coming, and when his envoy, Huydecoper, was delayed in his return from Kumasi, Daendels sent the Asantahene a request for “twelve stallions, fifty oxen and bulls, and one hundred Donko slaves, with three cuts on both cheeks, including not more than twenty-five girls”—for use on his plantation, Orange Dawn. So he seems to have been far from convinced of the desirability of abolition. He wrote a letter to a Spanish slave captain whom he had met at Tenerife, on his way out from the Netherlands: “My dear friend, it was with great but very pleasant surprise that I learnt that your ship has anchored off Apam, and that it is doing slave trade there. This means that the English are complaisant enough to furnish you with a cargo that you would never have obtained on this coast.”36

  After Daendels died, Niezer went to Amsterdam to plead his case. He won, and returned in triumph to Elmina, but his fortunes never recovered from the abolition of the trade in slaves. All the same, in 1817, about thirty Spanish or Portuguese slave ships were identified off the Gold Coast, and Niezer must have helped to load them. The next year, an English merchant, James Lucas Yeo, wrote: “I find the trade almost as active in the neighbourhood of our forts as at any time.”37

  By 1840, British commanders were established at seven points on the Gold Coast, Cape Coast still being the main one; Elmina and Axim, with some other old fortresses, remained Dutch (they were sold to the British in 1872); while Christiansborg in Accra and its dependent forts were Danish (till 1850, when they sold out to Britain).

  Most of the coast between Cape Three Points and the Volta River was by then free of slaving, the decisive reason being the assertion of Dutch, Danish, and British sovereignty in the ports.XIV Yet Joseph Smith, an African merchant examined in 1848 before the British House of Commons, spoke of going on board a North American slaver, the John Foster, off Cape Coast; and at least one Dutch ship carried slaves to Cuba from Accra in 1830. In 1835, twenty-three ships suspected of being concerned in the slave trade stopped off at Cape Coast Castle, and others were found there in the next five years. The governor of the Danish zone, to the east of the Gold Coast, Edward Carstensen, wrote in 1845: “The slave trade found the country beyond the Volta too narrow. Gradually, among the blacks themselves, there grew up a lot of petty slave trade agents and commissioners who roamed the country in all directions in order to bring numerous heads to the market. . . . It came about that a great number of consignments could take place right from the fort of Elmina . . . [while] Dutch Accra has for a long time been the residence of several British trade agents, especially immigrated Brasilian negroes who have correspondents in Popo and Vay.” The same official wrote a year later: “The Aquapim mountains, on the banks of the river Volta, has made it a staple place for the salt trade . . . but also a residence for slave trade agents.” Even British subjects, on the Gold Coast, sometimes held liberated slaves as “pawns”—very little different from holding them as slaves.38

  More important, the port of Popo, in what is now Togo, was still an active slave-trading harbor, as were many ports along the lagoons stretching from Dahomey to what is now Nigeria: in particular, Whydah and Lagos, short of the mouth of the river Benin. A British captain in the palm-oil trade, Captain Seward, gave evidence to a House of Commons select committee that to cover the Slave Coast from the river Volta to the Calabar adequately (for naval patrol) would really require the permanent attention of fifty cruisers. This territory, another British captain pointed out, had “water communication entirely round it, and by that . . . slaves [can be] . . . transferred from point to point and shipped anywhere on the beach, not just from Lagos, not just from Little Popo, but from any point, according to the position and arrangements of the slaves. . . .”39

  Whydah, site of about six large slave barracoons in 1846, was the fief of yet one more opulent slave dealer, Francisco Félix de Souza, “Cha-Cha” to the Africans, a Brazilian from Ilha Grande, near Rio, who had first been employed in Dahomey, about 1803, as a clerk at the Portuguese fortress. He stayed on when others left and, after some disagreeable adventures with the new King Adandozan of Dahomey, gained the favor of Adandozan’s brother, Gezo who, when he came to the throne, gave him the monopoly of the slave trade of the kingdom, on condition of paying a substantial tax on each slave exported. “A little old man with a quick eye and an expressive manner,” according to the prince de Joinville, the son of King Louis-Philippe (who later would escort the body of Napoleon from Saint Helena to Cherbourg), Souza bought slaves extensively from the nearby Aros. Like the governor of Bissau, he had several slave ships of his own—for example, the Atrevido, a brig built in the United States which, in the 1830s, would often make several journeys a year across the Atlantic, with slaves on board. He treated the captains who bought slaves from him with an eccentric but iron hand. He sold to Cuba as well as to Brazil. Surrounded by a staff of Maltese, Spaniards, and Portuguese, living in a palace which he had contrived in the old Portuguese fort, speaking several Dahomeyan languages well, Souza seemed an anachronism, yet he was generous, well mannered and, according to most visitors, humane and good company. When he went out, he was customarily attended by a band, a guard, and a buffoon. Those who dined with him were impressed by his fine China tea set, his silver plate, and his gold spoons and forks. Joinville was told that Souza had two thousand slaves in his barracoons, a thousand women in his harem, and that he had fathered eighty male children: “forts beaux mulâtres,” very well brought up, and dressed in white suits and panama hats.40 As early as 1821, Commodore Collier of the British West Africa Squadron described him as living “in prodigious splendour.” Souza had good relations with the British: he brought out from England the frame of a wooden church in October 1841.

  Helped by Souza, King Gezo established military suzerainty over much of the Slave Coast. Captain Broadhead said that Gezo thought he could raise “5,000 or 6,000 men if he chose it to oppose any force that might be sent against the place.”

  The political reality behind this region was that, by 1830, the once-powerful Yoruba empire of the Oyo had collapsed, and Dahomey, a tributary of that power since the 1720s, had become a free sovereign state. The Oyos’ control over all the smaller principalities and towns had also failed. This was largely due to an internal rebellion, in effect a Muslim jihad, in 1817, in which insurgent slaves played an important part. Dahomey’s own rebellion in 1823, was directed by King Gezo (“a good king as kings go, and rather particularly good for an African,” a North American naval officer commented). The final eclipse of the old empire, responsible for carrying so many slaves to European traders in the late eighteenth century, occurred about 1836.

  An English businessman, Thomas Hutton, traveled the forty or fifty miles inland, with Souza, to see Gezo in Abomey in 1840. Like all visitors, Hutton was much impressed by Gezo’s armed guard of tall, strong women, who were themselves sold as slaves if they rebelled. He observed the sacrifice of seven men who were torn to pieces by a mob who “rushed upon them like bloodhounds, the throats of the poor wretches were severed and their misery quickly ended.” The same year, Captain Winniett of the United States squadron was told by Gezo that he disposed of about 9,000 slaves annually. He sold about 3,000 of these on his own account, and gave the rest away to his troops, who also sold them. Taxes paid on each slave exported afforded him a total income of about $300,000—a significantly smaller income, it may be said, than that received by his ancestor Tegbesu. The king said that he was ready to do anything which the British government would ask of him “except to give up the slave trade,” for “he thought that all substitute trades were pointless.” He said: “The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to
slavery. Can I, by signing . . . a treaty, change the sentiments of a whole people?”41

  British naval officers made several attempts to persuade Gezo of the benefits of the palm-oil trade, bringing umbrellas and red silk tents as presents from Queen Victoria, but neither he nor his successor, King Gelele, could be convinced that it would be worth his while to abandon slaving. One reason was that the subsidy offered was too little: “If instead of dollars [we] . . . could have offered pounds . . . ,” Dahomey might have accepted in 1848 the suggestions of the chief justice of Cape Coast, Judge Cruikshank. King Gezo’s return offer of two slave girls to do the queen of England’s washing seemed an inadequate reply.

  When the naval blockade eventually made the shipping of slaves difficult from Whydah,XV Dahomey did turn over successfully to trading palm oil. The old social organization sustained the new business. In the past, the despotic king traded slaves through a class of noble merchants. The palm-oil commerce was easily introduced into this arrangement: the old nobles became landholders and used slaves whom they would previously have sent across the Atlantic to cultivate the palms. With this arrangement, Lagos and Badagry succeeded Dahomey as the chief slaving base in the region. Unlike the king of Dahomey, whose slaves were mostly obtained from war, the king of Lagos bought his captives from Yoruba merchants who, in turn, had obtained them from the most remote places.

  Lagos and the other ports of the region were protected, from the British navy, by a large sandbar. There were numerous interconnected lagoons there, making easy the transport of slaves from one creek to another by canoe. Admiral Hotham wrote in 1848, “At certain times of the year, when the fresh breezes set into the Bight . . . a well-equipped slave vessel will escape even from a steamer.” One of the trading peoples there were the Muslim Filatahs, whose center was the town of Rabba. The English Captain Allen said of them, after a journey up the Niger: “Their whole occupation is slave-catching and selling; they make excursions every year during the dry season into the neighbouring states to take slaves. . . . All the tribes have to pay a certain sum [as tribute]. . . . Frequently the sums are so great that they cannot pay, and then they seize the [people as] slaves.” Rabba became an important city for slaving, for those gathered there were sold not only to Portuguese or Spaniards to take to the Americas, but to Arabs who would take them to Tripoli.”42

  Quite a part was played in the slave trade at Lagos by Italians who carried their cargoes to Brazil, and whose ventures were backed by the Sardinian consuls in both Bahia and Rio. The dominant trader in that port, however, was Domingos José Martins, born more hispanically in Cádiz as Diego Martínez. He maintained an important commerce to Bahia in the 1840s, and his headquarters was first at Badagry, then at Porto-Novo. He lived less lavishly than Souza: his house at Porto-Novo was small, if with a large European garden. Usually dressed unpretentiously, in a blue calico shirt and trousers, he provided slaves, for many years, fast and efficiently, for the swift modern schooners of the slave king of Bahia, Joaquim Pereira Marinho. Like Souza, he had ships of his own, which he also used to carry slaves to Brazil. At the end of the 1840s, he was explaining that it was “so expensive to keep up his factory [of slaves] that he had now cleared away a considerable part of the country, and is forming a large farm [for palm oil], with the intention, as he says, of giving up the slave factory, which costs him so much and pays so little.” He retired to Brazil, found himself ostracized, and returned to Africa, this time to Lagos, where he became concerned in the legitimate trade in palm oil.43

  The river Benin, as opposed to the Bight of Benin itself, was not much of a slaving waterway in the nineteenth century. It had always been a slow business to buy slaves there and, after the British abolition, delay was risky, even to the adventurous Portuguese slaver. The dangerous bar had always been difficult for European traders and, when it became necessary to cross it secretly, because of fear of British interference, the business declined rapidly. Only fifteen slave ships were to be found there between 1816 and 1839; by the 1840s, the trade was at an end.

  The rivers Calabar and Bonny or, rather, their creeks and mangrove swamps, on the other hand, continued to be the scene of much trading of slaves, particularly by French captains, most of the captives being Igbos or Ibibios. Captain Leeke, on a British frigate, was told in 1822 that, in four months, 19 cargoes of slaves had been sent to the Americas from the Bonny, 16 from Calabar. The British navy started visiting the rivers regularly at that time, however, and they afterwards became the scene of numerous heroic affrays. For example, in 1821, Captain Leeke, on H.M.S. Myrmidon, decided to enter the Bonny by a back channel, the so-called Antony River, and explore the position. He sent Lieutenant Bingham in with small boats. He found six French slaversXVI busily stocking up but, thought that he could do nothing in respect of them (because of Anglo-French rules since Scott’s decision about the Louis). But one French captain told him that, higher upstream, there were two Spanish slavers. After some fighting, in which Leeke brought the Myrmidon into the main river, he seized the two slavers, with 154 and 139 slaves respectively. In 1822, Lieutenant Mildmay captured five Brazilian slavers in this river with remarkable courage; one of them, the schooner Vecua, had been abandoned by its crew, with 300 slaves chained in the hold. The departing crew left a lighted fuse over the magazine in the hope of destroying the British boarding party (as well, of course, as the slaves).44

  How slaves were made here in the nineteenth century was vividly explained by a boy who lived to tell the tale: “We came out into the street and when we walked about 50 yards from our house, we saw the city [Itokui, Erunwon, or Oba, in Nigeria] on fire, and before us the enemies coming in the street. We met with them and they caught us separately. They separated me from all my brethren, except one of my father’s children born to him by his second wife. I and this brother were caught by one man. By the time we left the house of our father, I saw my father’s mother pass the other gate. She, I had no hope of seeing again in the flesh, because she was an old woman. Doubtless they would kill her. . . . I was brought the same day that the city was taken to Imodo, that is, the place where they made their residence when they besieged us. . . . When I came to that place, the man who took me in the city took me and made a present to the chief man of war . . . for the custom was, when any of their company went with war bands, if he catches slaves, half of the slaves he would give to his captain.”45

  An English trader in Fernando Po, John Beechcroft, was found complaining in 1830 that at Old Calabar British merchant ships were outnumbered by nine French slave-trading vessels, whose captains laughed at his protests, knowing that he “was not in a condition to enforce them, the French being nine to one against me, the smallest vessel having double the number of men that I had.” One of these captains was “Gaspar, a Frenchman [from Guadeloupe on the Heureuse Étoile who] arrived at Old Calabar and carried away hundreds of slaves in ships both well-armed and numerously manned.” All legitimate commerce ceased on his arrival, “and a general scramble of robbery and plunder commenced to supply him with slaves.” British palm-oil ships were “obliged to remain there, in expensive and sickly indolence, until the slavers and pirates are supplied with their unhappy victims.” The traffic in slaves was prospering in the 1840s. But a wreck of two ships at the mouth of the Calabar, and the capture of two others, weakened the local enthusiasm for the traffic; in 1841, a “trifling present” was indeed made (five annual payments of two thousand Spanish dollars) to the kings of Calabar, and the commerce came to an end.46

  High up these rivers—for example, at Aboh—in the 1840s, there were slave barracoons. The English explorer John Duncan saw one at Egga. Slaves were brought there from different parts of the interior. Duncan asked how soon he could lay his hands on 600 slaves. He received the answer: “The day after tomorrow.” Yet by then the overseas slave trade had run its course in the Bight of Biafra. Several witnesses testified in the 1840s in London that, twenty years before, they would see sixteen to twenty slave vessels in the r
iver at a time, and they would sooner trade in slaves than with palm oil; “but on my last voyage I was in the river three months, and there was not a slave vessel in the river.” One explanation was that the British allied with the new king of Bonny, Dappa Pepple, against the regent, Alali, who had shown himself a typical old-fashioned autocrat, in alliance with French, Spanish, and Brazilian-Portuguese slave dealers. After several encounters between the British naval commander, Captain Craigie, and the regent, the old order was overthrown, Alali resigned, and the king, henceforth a British puppet, signed a treaty in 1839. By this, the British promised to pay £2,000 a year or half the revenue which they had derived from the slave trade. But the British paid nothing in the first year, and King Pepple in 1840 returned to the slave trade. Still, Old Calabar and Bonny were both easily observed by British patrols, so they both began to turn over to palm-oil. The newer ports of New Calabar and Brass were less conspicuous and still did much slaving in the late 1840s.

  Brass, in particular, hidden in the recesses of the delta and approachable only by creek, with no direct outlet to the Atlantic, became the center, in these years, of an important clandestine traffic. The controller of the network, with the king of Bonny and the chiefs of Brass in support, was Pablo Freixas, a Portuguese partner of Diego Martínez, who was remembered a long time locally for his exploits in defeating the “English busybodies.” Still, the chief at Brass, “King Boy,” was also active in the traffic. Commander Tucker, writing in the 1840s, reported, “A constant supply of slaves are sent by canoe through the creeks to the rivers Nun and Brass for shipment, 360 slaves having been taken by a Spaniard previous to my arrival in the river.” Tucker reported King Pepple as saying that he himself sold 3,000 slaves in the years 1839 to 1841, that he would continue to deal with Freixas, and that “dollars and doubloons are plentiful in Bonny, which is always the case, after the arrival of a slaver in the Nun or Brass river, as most of the slaves shipped off from there are purchased at Bonny.”47