The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The slaves brought here from the interior were treated at least as badly as those in the Atlantic passage: “Often 1,000 slaves are stowed in a space hardly capable of receiving as many bags of rice,” commented Michael Shepard of Salem, adding, “When they arrive in Zanzibar for sale they are discharged in the same manner as a load of sheep would be, the dead ones thrown overboard to drift down with the tide.”62 A United States tourist in 1849, Mrs. Putnam, thought, though, that “the slaves mind no more about being sold than a pair of cattle would at home.”63 (How she knew she did not say.)

  Most of these slaving harbors were, as usual, estuaries of rivers, up which the 200-ton slavers could sail or steam. The agents were often Hindus (Banyans) from the Portuguese port of Gujerat, and Arabs as well as Portuguese were concerned to sell slaves to many places other than the Americas. One of the biggest traders was a Christian from Goa who had lived in Rio.

  The most substantial merchants, nevertheless, were Mozambiques, such as Joaquim do Rosário Monteiro, who began to build ships about 1784, and carried slaves to Brazil throughout the Napoleonic Wars; Manuel Galvão da Silva, who was for a time secretary to the governor (whom he persuaded to invest in his ships); and finally João Bonifacio Alves da Silva, probably the biggest slave merchant in Quelimane, of which city he was also governor for eighteen years.64 The largest Portuguese firm of slave traders in East Africa after 1840 was the Portuguese Company, registered in New York, directed by Manoel Basilio da Cunha Reis, whose interests extended in the 1850s to Cuba. In the 1840s, the firm, however, sold their slaves mostly to Brazilians, and most would be carried to Rio de Janeiro in United States ships, to be made available to such princes of the traffic as Manuel Pinto da Fonseca or Bernardino da Sá. Portuguese bureaucrats were easily suborned by such businessmen: “The small income of these officials renders the temptations to which they are exposed irresistible,” wrote a British civil servant in 1850; “banished for years to a pestiferous climate, the means for speedily escaping therefrom by enriching themselves sufficiently to give up their public situation is indeed very tempting.”65

  Theodore Canot about 1830 sailed on a slaver from Cuba on a “trim Brazil-built brig, of rather more than 300 tons,” which anchored at Quelimane “among a lot of Portuguese and Brazilian slavers. . . . We fired a salute of twenty guns and ran up the French flag. The captain in a full uniform [then] went to call on the Governor. Next morning, the Governor’s boat was sent, for the specie; the fourth day disclosed the signal that called us to the beach; the fifth, sixth, and seventh, [they] supplied us with 800 negroes; and, on the ninth, we were underway.” (But the success of this journey was ruined by the outbreak of smallpox, in the course of which over 300 slaves died en route.)66

  In 1846, Governor Abreu de Madeira was relieved from Quelimane for corruption; his successor abandoned his post, and “escaped in a slave ship, with a large cargo of slaves.” The next Portuguese governor of Mozambique, Captain Duval, seemed to the British “one of the best persons we ever met” and, within some years, had, on fifty miles either side of the city, brought the slave trade to an end. What usually happened, said Captain Duval, was that “governors would receive a box soon after they took up their office: on opening it, there were found to be four compartments. . . . [Inside] there was $1,500; $750 in one compartment, with a Crown on it and then, $250 in each of the others. These sums were from the leading slave trader in the place, for the Governor, his deputy, the Collector of Customs and the Commander of the troops.”67

  After 1840, the Portuguese navy was mildly active in the region with a brig and two schooners. They did stop some ships but, in general, “the slavers laugh at them.”

  The Mozambique Africans were usually seen by the Brazilians as “a finer race of men” than those on the west coast, “an affectionate race of people who soon acquire a knowledge of the value of money.” But they were men from many races, for slaves often reached Quelimane from the far interior, along the Zambezi.

  This trade diminished in the 1840s, thanks to the British who, after 1843, had powers locally granted by Portuguese governors which they never possessed in West Africa. They were able, for example, both to pursue all slave ships in parts of the coast where the Portuguese had not established a presence, and to destroy barracoons at will. But then the slavers turned to buyers outside Portuguese territory—for example, in the sultanate of the imam of Muscat (especially the Banyan barracoons), or in the Arab isles of Angoche, Comoro, and Western Madagascar. Madagascar prohibited the trade in slaves after a treaty between the Malagasy and the British in 1817, yet the evidence suggests a vigorous slave trade from the island throughout the nineteenth century, with about three to four thousand slaves being exported every year, some to Mauritius or elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, the rest to various American harbors, especially Cuba.

  The British capture and retention after 1815 of Mauritius did not affect the issue of slavery much, though the trade to the island from Mozambique prospered till it was legally abolished in 1813, and though it continued largely unchecked by the British authorities till about 1825. Nearby was Bourbon, which had remained with France after 1815. No slaves seem to have been carried from there, but many were, nevertheless, imported in the early nineteenth century, from both Mozambique and Madagascar, to assist in the harvesting of coffee and in the newly developed culture of cloves: “They are also employed to draw merchandise about town in carts, instead of cattle,” commented Dudley Leavitt Pickman, a merchant from Salem.68, XVIII

  Cuban vessels which used these harbors of East Africa were much bigger than those which frequented the west coast, because small boats would not so easily pass by the Cape of Good Hope.

  That passage past the Cape of Good Hope, incidentally, was trebly unpleasant for the slaves: first, because the journey from East Africa to Brazil was much longer than from Angola, sixty or seventy days being the average; second, because of the cold from which the slaves suffered when they rounded the Cape—in comparison with the great heat which characterized an Angolan slave journey to Brazil, where temperatures in the slave decks were often 130 degrees Fahrenheit; third, because of the storms.

  As for the numbers of slaves carried to the Americas from these remote ports in the nineteenth century, fifteen to eighteen Brazilian slavers would arrive at Mozambique Island in the 1820s, and each would take about 500 slaves, though very often half would die en route. Perhaps 10,000 a year would be a fair estimate from that port. After 1830, when the slave trade to Brazil as well as to Cuba became such a curious illegal enterprise, the figure was probably higher, perhaps much higher, for these were years when the West African trade was declining. In 1819, for instance, five Spanish ships from Havana were to be seen in Mozambique before going on to Zanzibar, and such vessels were often to be seen there till the 1850s. It would seem that 15,000 slaves may have been exported from there during these years. About 10,000 may have left Quelimane.

  * * *

  I See Appendix 2.

  II See page 684.

  III Ponsonby, an exceptionally good-looking man, was apparently sent to Rio by Canning to please King George IV, who was jealous of the attention paid him by Lady Conyngham, the royal mistress.

  IV A partial list of slavers suggests that a minimum of forty-four ships were built outside Maryland in the 1840s and 1850s, and twenty-three in Baltimore.

  V Canot was son of an officer of Napoleon’s army and an Italian mother, and educated in Florence. A brother of Canot, François, was doctor to Napoleon III in Ham Prison and in Paris.

  VI Saint-Louis, at the mouth of the river, had held out against the British in the Napoleonic Wars till 1809, and was not restored to the government of Louis XVIII till 1817. The return of the French, under the pedantic Colonel Schmaltz, was marred by the terrible shipwreck of the flagship the Méduse, to which subject the painter Géricault devoted his masterpiece.

  VII The missing pages in the log of Charles Hoffman’s Ceylon in 1845-46 probably conceal an illegal traffic in
slaves.

  VIII Another monarch to have Spanish slave traders (Victor Dabreda, José van Kell) established in 1840 on his territory in this region was King Banco of Beomba, on the river Jeba.

  IX Mrs. Lightburne’s barracoons were destroyed by Captain Nurse and Commander Dyke of the British navy. After further attempts to trade more slaves in the 1850s, some successful, she went to Sierra Leone to sue the British officers. Failing to gain any satisfaction, she died of a broken heart.

  X Forty-eight ships had been taken to Havana and forty-three condemned by the court there; twenty-three were taken to Rio, of which sixteen were condemned by its court; only one vessel was condemned by the court at Surinam.

  XI Blanco figures in Texido’s novel in the style of Eugène Sue, Barcelona y sus misterios, as in Lino Novás Calvo’s Pedro Blanco, el negrero.

  XII The kola nut had been important in West Africa for a remarkable number of uses—as a drink, as a yellow dye, as a medicine, as a religious symbol—and was specially valued by Muslims.

  XIII See page 612.

  XIV Cape Coast was taken over by the British Crown in 1821. But seven years later, there was a plan to withdraw. A committee of London merchants was again put in charge, with a subsidy to maintain Cape Coast and the fort at Accra.

  XV See page 776.

  XVI Probably L’Actif, Captain Benoît; L’Alcide, Captain Hardy; La Caroline, Captain Pelliful; L’Eugène, Captain Morin; and Le Fox, Captain Armand—all of Nantes.

  XVII Later, Waters, an antislaver from Salem, met a Spanish slave captain and said, “I cannot wish you a prosperous voyage for you are engaged in a business which I hate from the heart.” The captain, “quite a pleasant man,” smiled and insisted that they were better off where he carried them.

  XVIII Cloves were introduced to Bourbon in 1779 by Pierre Poivre.

  33

  Sharks Are the Invariable Outriders of All Slave Ships

  “Sharks . . . are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried . . .”

  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  “Next day we saw an English man-of-war [H.M.S. Maidstone] coming. When the Portuguese saw this, it put them to disquietness and confusion. They then told us that these were the people which will eat us, if we suffered them to prize us; and they also enticed us, if they should ask, how long since we sailed, we must say it was more than a month. And they also gave us long oars and set us to pull. About ten men were set on one oar, and we tried to pull as far as we are able, but it is of no avail. Next day, the English overtook us and they took charge of the slaves. . . .”

  Joseph Wright, a slave, in Curtin, Africa Remembered

  “Sailing rapidly on a strong land breeze, the vessel was soon out of sight of the coast of Africa.”

  Prospère Mérimée, Tamoango

  BOTH ENEMIES AND FRIENDS of the “ebony merchants”—the phrase much used in France by the dealers in slaves—argued that conditions in the trade were worse during its illegal stage, since captains often packed many slaves into a smaller space than they would have in the past. The duke of Wellington told the Congress of Verona in 1822: “All attempts at prevention, imperfect as they have been found to be, have tended to increase the aggregate of human suffering. . . . The dread of detection suggests expedients of concealment productive of the most dreadful sufferings to the cargo.”1

  Several witnesses at a long inquiry into the trade by a House of Commons committee in 1848 said the same. For example, J. B. Moore, chairman of the Brazilian Association of Liverpool, thought: “Year after year, I look upon it that the evils connected with the slave trade have been aggravated by our squadron being on the coast of Africa to prevent it . . . by increasing the sufferings of the slaves.” José Cliffe, a North American–Brazilian slave merchant, abandoned the trade because of the “loss of life and increase of human suffering” which he regarded as a direct consequence of British philanthropy.2

  Yet, for the first twenty or thirty years after British and North American abolition in 1808, the size and character of slave ships probably remained much the same as in the past. But in the midcentury, some ships were used, including steamships, which were capable of taking a thousand slaves across the Atlantic. On such slave journeys “the suffering, though more intense, is of shorter duration,” Captain Denman reflected in 1848. Still, one does not have to accept as true every sentence of the terrible account of Drake’s life as a slave captain and surgeon to realize that confusion was frequent, and stowing of captives disgracefully done, so that there was often what he called “a frightful battle among the slaves for room and air.” The crossing was, just as much as it had always been, “a pestilence which stalketh the waters.”3

  Vile conditions were as ever also encountered in Africa. Slave captains often genuinely supposed that they were doing slaves a real human service by carrying them off to Brazil or to Cuba, even if to slavery. Lord John Russell would tell the House of Commons in London in 1846 that a third of the captives intended as slaves for the Atlantic crossing died during the land journey on their way to the coast. But the time spent waiting in barracoons in Africa was probably longer in the 1800s than in the previous century for, as we have seen, the captains tried to pick up their cargoes in one sweep, rather than spend weeks negotiating: speed was necessary to avoid the interference of the British navy. Lord Palmerston commented: “The liability to interruption obliges these slave traders to make arrangements for a rapid embarkation.” Many children are said to have been carried on the illegal trade to Brazil, because their size permitted the loading of a greater number.4

  The existence of these depots, however, to some extent made the control of the slave trade easier: most sites were well known, and they could be watched. These barracoons were flimsy constructions, usually of bamboo, maintained by Africans. “Suppose that there were 500 slaves waiting in a barracoon,” said the repentant slave merchant Cliffe. “A cruiser is in the neighborhood, and the slave vessel cannot come in. It is very difficult to get on the coast of Africa sufficient food to support them.” Thus 2,000 slaves were believed to have been murdered in 1846 in a barracoon at Lagos because, on the one hand, the slavers Styx and Hydra (ships with Sardinian flags) did not dare to brave the British patrol; and because, on the other hand, the king of the place had run out of food: the “inducement . . . was simply that the feeding of so large a number of idle people was burdensome to him.” It was sometimes suggested that, if the British navy (or anyone else) were to destroy all the barracoons, then the slave trade would have been fatally damaged. But the surgeon of the navy, who has been quoted before, Dr. Thomson, in evidence to the Hutt Committee, said, realistically, “Whether there are barracoons or no, the slaves will be forthcoming.”5

  Another picture of slaves waiting in a barracoon was given by an American naval commodore, Henry Wise, who wrote from Cabinda, in July 1859, how, “in chained gangs, the unfortunate slaves are driven by the lash from the interior to the barracoons on the beach; there the sea-air, insufficient diet, and dread of their approaching fate, produce the most fatal diseases: dysentery and fever [often] release them from their sufferings; the neighboring soil grows rich in the decaying remains of so many of their fellow creatures, and the tracks are thick-strewn with their bones. . . . On a short march,” he continued, “of 600 slaves, a few weeks back, intended for the Emma Lincoln [of the United States], 125 expired on the road. The mortality on these rapid marches is seldom less than 20 percent. Such, sir, is the slave trade under the American flag.”6

  However unpleasant the barracoon, slaves would no doubt have preferred to remain there than go to the “finer country” talked about by the slave captains. An ex-slave, John Frazer, for example, described how, in the nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth, the slaves often “cried, they did not want to go.” “Would they have preferred to have stayed in the barracoons?” Mr. Richar
d Monckton Milnes, the aesthetic member of Parliament for Pontefract, asked him. “Yes,” said Frazer. (All ex-slaves who were questioned on the matter also said that they would prefer to remain in Sierra Leone than to return to their own birthplace, because, John Frazer insisted, Sierra Leone “is a free country.”7

  Often in the 1840s, the presence of the naval patrols made it difficult to embark slaves at the barracoons and so, as has been seen, the captives were forced to walk several miles, sometimes as many as forty or more, along the coast, to a secret rendezvous with a slave ship’s canoes.

  As in the past, slaves were obtained in Africa by the local dealers in diverse ways and nobody agreed exactly how. Captain Matson, for example, thought that the practice of obtaining slaves by war and the destruction of villages had almost ceased; and that, on the contrary, “one half of the slaves now supplied to the markets of Cuba and Brazil are obtained by purchases from their parents.” On the other hand, the Reverend Henry Townsend, of the Church Missionary Society, who lived for many years in Abbeokuta, a city of 50,000 people near Lagos, thought, about 1850, that war was a key to understanding the origins of slaves in that territory. For example, a quarrel might arise, and some fighting take place “and, ultimately, one of the towns was destroyed and the people carried into slavery, as many as they could take, and those who escaped joined those who had besieged them, and made an attack upon the others. And so they went from town to town, an army of the worst class of society attacked the towns, each town in succession, until the whole country was in a state of disorder. . . . The war first took place through revenge, and was then carried on through the slave trade giving them the means of carrying on that war, because they found then the profit of selling slaves which before they did not so well understand.”8

  Several survivors of the trade of the nineteenth century gave evidence to the committee of the House of Commons, previously mentioned, in 1848. One of these was William Henry Platt, then a prosperous merchant in Sierra Leone. He came originally from the region of Benin, and was kidnapped when so small that he “could hardly give an account of myself. . . . I and a friend went into a field to set traps for rice birds . . . and then I was kidnapped. I think we took about three weeks to travel towards the sea, when I was embarked in one of the vessels for Brazil.” He waited for three nights on the coast and (presumably, for his account did not embrace that part of his life) was liberated by a British cruiser and taken to Sierra Leone. Platt had no desire to return to Benin, whose language he scarcely spoke by the time he gave evidence.9