The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Commander Tucker eventually succeeded in negotiating another slave-trade treaty with King Pepple of Bonny. The latter was now promised £10,000 a year for five years. Pepple looked on the matter as concluded, but the British Parliament had to ratify the scheme. Palmerston, however, who had inspired the treaty, had now been replaced by Lord Aberdeen, who did not think the treaty wise. He wanted to go back to the treaty of 1839, which talked of only £2,000 a year. So it seemed to the Africans that the British did not wish to go through with the plan. They renewed relations with their Brazilian slave clients, only too pleased to revive the old traffic. Captain Midgley, of Liverpool, told a select committee of the House of Commons in 1842 that, unless the British government acted with more energy than they had thitherto, they would do well to “keep out of the River [Bonny] altogether. [For] first comes a captain and makes a Treaty and then another comes and says the Treaty shall be null and void and tears it up.”48

  Some other treaties were signed, and ratified, by the British in these years. In 1842, Eyo and Eyamba, rulers of the two leading towns of Old Calabar (Creek Town and Duke Town), made a treaty abolishing the slave trade in return for £2,000 for five years; a similar treaty was eventually made with Bimbia (Cameroons), where the subsidy was only £1,200 a year. The obi Osai of Aboh declared, too, that he was willing to abandon the slave trade “if a better traffic could only be substituted.” The obi had been impressed by a Sierra Leone interpreter who put the case for the abolition, and who concluded a long speech by saying, “Do you not see that it is harder to continue it than to give it up?” The obi agreed.49

  The obi, impatient of contradictory European professions, put one part of the African case to the members of the Niger expedition in 1841: “Hitherto, we thought that it was God’s wish that black people should be slaves to white people; white people first told us that we should sell slaves to them and we sold them; and white people are now telling us not to sell slaves. . . . If white people give up buying, black people will give up selling.” All the same, there was suspicion: when Britain concluded the treaty against selling slaves in 1841, King Pepple of Bonny inserted a clause in the document stating: “If, at any future time, Great Britain shall permit the slave trade, King Pepple and the chiefs of Bonny shall be at liberty to do the same.”50

  West Africa, or “Guinea,” largely as a result of British naval power, was thus very slowly, in the mid-nineteenth century, changing from an economy which was predominantly slave-trading to one based on commerce in raw materials. The discovery in 1830 that the river Niger entered the Atlantic in the Bight of Benin opened “a great highway into the heart of Africa, coinciding with the invention of the steamship, which made journeys, and so [legitimate] commerce, up it possible.”

  The internal slave trade, however, continued, and indeed probably expanded. Macgregor Laird went to Bocqu, above Ida, on the Niger, where there was a slave market every ten days; from here he supposed that “8,000 or 10,000 were sold annually”—the captives being mostly from the far interior, if still sometimes for “onward shipment to Europeans.” Laird remembered seeing that “the canoes were constantly passing by, with from four to six or eight slaves in them.”51 The traveler Waddell described how King Eyo of Calabar “did not employ men to steal for him; nor did he knowingly buy those which were stolen. He bought them in the market, at the market price, without being able to know how they were procured. . . . He admitted that they were obtained in various objectionable ways . . . but said that they came from different far countries of which he knew nothing. . . .”52

  • • •

  Perhaps two-thirds of the slaves carried to the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century came from south of the equator or from East Africa. Even just north of the equator, the trade flourished at Sangatanga, at the mouth of the river Gabon, as well as on the island of Corisco, at the mouth of the river Mooney.

  At the mouth of the Gabon, in 1842, the local king ceded some territory to the French and, in 1843, Captain Montléon landed soldiers to establish a fortified post. In 1849, his successor founded Libreville, the French answer to Freetown and Monrovia, with some slaves rescued from the slave ship Elisa.

  Offshore, of course, lay Fernando Po, Principe, and Säo Tomé. The first was now used, because of its calm waters (what a contrast with the surf on the coast of Guinea!), as a coaling station by British steamers. It was common enough to find there the crew of a slaver which had been deposited by an English captain, after the capture of their ship, waiting for transport to Calabar, and being well treated on an island generally considered to be “the most healthy of any part on the station.” Palmerston offered Spain £50,000 for the place in 1841; but the offer was refused. Thereafter Spain tightened her control over the island, and it became a base of operations for Julián Zulueta, of Havana, and his London partners, including his cousin Pedro José. Many emancipados were later sent to Fernando Po from Cuba and Pedro José de Zulueta was responsible for ensuring their food: a task which he seems to have fulfilled with neither efficiency nor generosity even though in 1843, the Spanish government curiously named John Beechcroft, the English merchant, as acting governor.

  São Tomé still had its slave-powered Portuguese sugar plantations, as it had had ever since the fifteenth century. The island of Principe, meantime, in the midcentury seemed to be the private colony of the Portuguese governor, José María de Ferreira, whose wife, a woman of vast girth, had invested deeply in Souza’s interests in Whydah.

  Some miles to the south of São Tomé, on the mainland, lay Cape Lopez, a great landmark, for from there the African coast turns southeast. The creeks here harbored a number of traders. Beyond, everyone agreed that the character of the slave trade changed. Sir Charles Hotham, commander of the British squadron, thought that here “the speculation on the part of the Brazilian, is founded on the principle of employing vessels of little value, to be crowded to excess with slaves. . . . Here it is, therefore, that the traffic assumes its most horrid form. At this moment, the Penelope [the vessel which he commanded] has in tow a slaver, of certainly not more than 60 tons, in which 312 human beings were stowed. The excess of imagination cannot depict a scene more revolting.”53 Among the traders with posts here about 1850 was one who had connections with Havana, and directed by José Pernea; one belonging to the Portuguese-Brazilian, José Bernardino da Sá; and a third belonging to the Cuban, Rubirosa.

  There were many political entities on this coast, most of them now involved in slaving. First, there was Cape Lopez itself, where the French explorer, Paul du Chaillu, found, in the years after 1810, a drunken and unpredictable monarch, Bongo, and his successor, Arsem, who quickly adapted to the need to camouflage his slave barracoons against British observation. These places were well arranged, slaves being chained together six by six, a method which, du Chaillu was assured, best avoided the possibility of escape: “It is rare that six men are sufficiently in agreement to make any attempt,” he was assured. Arsem was in the habit of persuading captains who negotiated with him for slaves to drink blood before negotiations began. Captain Lancelot, who traded there in 1815 on La Petite Louise, of Nantes received a slave boy as a present, as did his officers. The slaves here, du Chaillu reported, came from the far interior of Africa, well beyond the point to which he had penetrated.54

  Mayumba developed for the first time into a trading center for slaves about 1815, after the legal abolition of the Portuguese traffic north of the equator. By 1840, this little port, with a population of no more than about a thousand people, had some seven or eight barracoons for slaves in the hands of Spanish, Portuguese, or Brazilian traders. To the south, there were one or two other small new slave harbors, such as Banda and Chilongo, and then the well-established Vili harbor of Loango, the city of Malemba, and the smaller port of Cabinda (Kabinda), for long a preserve of French and British. The withdrawal of the last-named from the trade after 1808 left the way open to Spaniards and North Americans interested in the Cuban trade—and some Portuguese or Brazi
lian traders who were pleased to sell slaves to Havana, even if their ships were registered as sailing for “Pernambuco.”

  In Loango Bay during the nineteenth century, the political power of the Vili was in full decline. When German travelers visited the place in the 1870s, they found the body of the last maloango—the king of the Vili—Buatu, still unburied since 1787, because no successor had emerged to initiate the funeral ceremonies. Independent slave dealers seem to have almost assumed sovereign authority: many of them began to place “Ma” in front of their names to indicate the possession of land, and to wear such signs of princely status as animals’ tails, and shoulder decorations.

  Cabinda, on its “high, bold coast,” not unlike “the appearance of the land about Dover,” in the imaginative phrase of assistant surgeon Peters, of H.M.S. Pluto, became the biggest slave port in this region in the early nineteenth century. The people of Cabinda themselves were known as admirable sailors and good carpenters. So far as slaves were concerned, the place could draw on the facilities made available by the river Congo, on whose banks, in 1845, near the mouth there were about thirty barracoons—most of them the property of Cubans or Spaniards who had interests everywhere on the coast and whose luxurious houses and gardens on the riverbank excited the admiration of British officers. One of these was Pedro Maniett who, “so far as regards his communication with Englishmen, who have been even blockading and preventing his vessels coming there, has behaved in the kindest manner”; he even looked after English seamen wounded in one or another of the skirmishes which took place with slavers.55 There were also a few Brazilian barracoons, many of them connected with, or owned by, individual merchants, of whom Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, of Rio, was the foremost. He was said to hold in his factory goods worth £140,000 in 1846, awaiting deals to buy slaves. These barracoons were by now often placed a few hours away from the mouth of the river, in order to avoid attack by the British navy. Even so, Captain Matson, in 1842, did destroy five barracoons there.

  The slave merchants at Cabinda in the nineteenth century devoted great attention to loading slaves fast. A North American, Joseph Underwood, described how in 1845 “a sail [came] in sight . . . at 1 p.m. She showed no colours. At ten past one, she came to anchor, a few yards from the Sea Eagle [Underwood’s own vessel]. The brig had sliding sail booms rigged out and everything in readiness for making sail. The boats were soon alongside loaded with negroes. . . . They took on about 450 and, at 45 minutes past two, she weighed anchor and stood to sea . . . [bound for Rio].”56

  The Congo River itself was an important source of slaves for Cuba as well as for Brazil in these years. This waterway provided perfect cover for slave ships hiding until the cruisers were out of sight. They could then load quickly, and escape by means of the fast Congo current. Another North American traveler, Peter Knickerbocker, wrote: “The Congo river, at its mouth, is some twenty miles in width, and runs with the force of a mill sluice into the ocean; and the current continuing in strength and speed far out to sea, the slaver has greater facilities in obtaining a good offering at this point than any other slave mart on the coast. One dark night and an ebb tide will take him forty miles down the river and sixty miles [out] from the coast, let him sail ever so badly, and the probability of falling foul of a cruiser at this distance is very small.”57

  Yet one more traveler, Montgomery Parker, wrote, with respect to North Americans’ involvement in this territory, that “numerous United States ships sail from Rio . . . Bahia and other ports in the Brazils and even from Cuba, under a charter to go to the coast of Africa, carrying an outward cargo and such passengers as the charterers may see fit to put on board and, to return to the port they sailed from, . . . they will make two or three trips to the coast [of Africa] and return each time, with a cargo of camwood, gums, ivory, etc., and soon they become pretty well-known to the armed cruisers of the various squadrons, who look upon them as legal and honest traders and cease to watch them as closely as they would a vessel that had come upon the coast for the first time. By and by, one of these vessels comes out again. The agents . . . find the coast is clear and that a good opportunity is offered to ship slaves. . . . They make an offer to the captain to buy his vessel. He accepts it . . . [and] goes on shore with his officers and crew . . . the slaves are hurried on board, the vessel is given in charge of a Brazilian master and crew, who are generally the passengers she has just brought over on her outward voyage and, with the Stars and Stripes still floating at the mast, she leaves the coast in safety.”58 One such vessel sold in this way (or so it would seem) was Charles Hoffman of Salem’s Cipher, sold at Cabinda in 1841. Other traders with interests here included Julián Zulueta of Havana, represented here by a certain José Ojea, and several of his Cuban or Spanish colleagues such as Manuel Pastor or Manzanedo.

  It is scarcely possible to estimate the number of slaves carried from these waterways in the mid-nineteenth century. But from the zone to the north of the Congo, some 290 slave ships were seized by the British or other naval patrols; from the region to the south of it, the figure was only just a little less: about 280.

  Farther to the south lay the great slaving ports of Angola proper, at Ambriz and Benguela, the old city of Luanda lying between them. From these places and others on the coast, 500,000 slaves were probably shipped during the legal era, 1800-1830; and it would seem that over 600,000 may have been shipped in the illegal days after 1830. All these figures may be an underestimate.

  Ambriz was a new center for trading slaves to Brazil. Many Luso-Africans moved there from Luanda after 1810, for they could ship slaves in that port without the bureaucratic procedures usual at Luanda, and also avoid paying the taxes. The pioneer of this arrangement was Manuel José de Sousa Lopes, who made a specialty of selling slaves to Spanish buyers. The determined Captain Matson destroyed three barracoons there in 1842, but the trade recovered. About 1850, three prominent Brazilian or Portuguese traders had posts there: Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, Ferraz Coreira, and Tomás Ramos.

  Luanda itself was not much concerned in slaving in the mid-nineteenth century, though there was still a large slave barracoon outside the city, at Lamarinas Bay. The conditions of keeping slaves in this imperial Portuguese city seemed even worse in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth: “The detention of the negroes on the coast,” wrote one visitor, “in consequence of the market being overstocked, or of the nonarrival of the slavers which are to transport them to another shore, is a melancholy and notorious cause of mortality among them.”59 Many slaves who went first to Luanda were ordered to walk on to Benguela for shipment. Ambitious slave merchants in Luanda in these days who did not move up to Ambriz often moved inland.

  Benguela, with its close financial and commercial connections with Rio de Janeiro, was the home of those Angolans who, like the merchant António Lopes Anjo, after the independence of Brazil in 1822, would have preferred a political association with the new nation.

  Behind these westward-facing ports, there was, by the 1850s, the beginning of a tug in a different direction. Arab traders from East Africa had already reached the Congo by the 1850s, bent on carrying slaves across the continent to Kilwa or Zanzibar. The supreme exponent of this new traffic was an Arab from the latter port, Tippoo Ti, known throughout Africa for his raiding parties with firearms. Governor D’Acunha of Luanda told one British captain, Alexander Murray, that “these slave dealers did not hesitate to march armies of slaves completely across the continent from Benguela to Mozambique.”60

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  Throughout the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, a steady flow of slaves went to the Americas from East Africa. By the 1820s, these harbors, from Point Uniac in the south to Zanzibar in the north, a stretch of 1,000 miles, were probably shipping as many slaves as any other region—perhaps 10,000 a year in the 1820s, even 30,000 in the early 1840s, mostly from the cities of Mozambique, with their beautiful houses in which formerly Portuguese merchants trading to India had lived, and Quelimane (Quilimane)—“deci
dedly the headquarters,” despite its dangerous sandbar. East Africa was not ignored in the British crusade against the slave trade, but it was considered of secondary importance, at least until West Africa had been bullied, bribed, or persuaded into morality.

  Richard Waters, the United States consul to Zanzibar, who was on Mozambique island in 1837, recalled seeing slaves in the harbor, “mostly children, from ten to fourteen years of age. . . . What can I say to those engaged in this trade when I remember the millions of slaves in my own country?”61, XVII The main item in the commerce of this island was now slaves, ivory and gold dust being left far behind. The banks of the river Anghoza were also “a great depot for slaves.” “The slave coast begins at Cape Lady Grey,” Captain Rundle Watson, commander of the British naval ship Brilliant, told a House of Commons committee in 1850. Another slaving port was Sofala, “the Elephant’s Shoal,” at the mouth of the Zambezi. In 1827, Captain Charles Millett of Salem, a legitimate trader, found that, in the towns of Lindy and Kisawara, beyond Cape Delgado, there was “no trade except in slaves.” Here merchants of the Indian Ocean competed with those of the Atlantic. Zanzibar was also a great slave mart, and it also served the nearby islands in the Indian ocean. 250,000 slaves were probably carried from the island of Mozambique to those islands in the first half of the nineteenth century.