by Hugh Thomas
One valuable piece of evidence derives from a slave later known as Joseph Wright who, in the 1820s, was loaded onto a ship at Lagos. Wright had been captured in the far interior and had been taken down to Lagos by canoe. “Early in the morning,” he wrote, “we were brought to a white Portuguese for sale. After strict examination, the white man put me and some others aside. After that, they then made a bargain, how much he would take for each of us. After they were all agreed, the white man sent us into the slave fold [sic] . . . [where] I was . . . for about two months, with a rope around my neck. All the young boys had ropes round their necks in a row, and all the men with chains in a long row, for about fifty persons in a row, so that no one could escape without the other. At one time, the town took fire and about fifty slaves were consumed because the entry was crowded. . . . [Then] we were all brought down close to [the] salt water . . . to be put in canoes. We were all very sorrowful in heart, because we were going to leave our land for another . . . [and] we had heard that the Portuguese were going to eat us when they got to their country. . . . They began to put us in canoes to bring us to the Brig, one of the canoes drowned [sic] and half the slaves died. . . . They stowed all the men under the deck; the boys and women were left on the deck. . . .”10
Slaves were as always branded before their departure for the Americas. In this respect there was no difference between what happened in the legal, eighteenth century and the illegal, nineteenth: an iron with letters cut into it “is put into fire on the beach, and a small pot containing palm oil is always at hand; the iron is heated, and dipped into this palm oil, and dabbed on the hip [men] or [just above] the breast [women] or wherever the slave dealer may choose to have his slaves marked. The palm oil is to prevent the flesh adhering to the iron.”11
Slaves bound for Brazil were still baptized before the crossing; and all continued as a rule to be examined by a doctor (“the doctor rubs them down to see if they are sound and picks out the best”), though many ships sailed without such officers: “A respectable man would not go and a bad one would not be worth having.”12 Sometimes, as occurred in the case of Mongo John, slaves were carefully inspected even before entering the barracoon.
As in the past, different peoples were preferred by different slavers. But in the nineteenth century, all agreed that a Kru, from the Windward Coast, made a bad slave, “because they know that if he is enslaved he will commit suicide immediately.”13
As for the crossing itself, routes to and from Africa from Brazil or Cuba were more direct than they had been in the days of the triangular trade. But sometimes even Cuban shippers would stop at Bahia en route for the Bight of Benin in order to pick up that molasses-soaked tobacco which was still popular in the latter harbor. The haste with which packing was often done on the return journey sometimes caused ships to leave with inadequate water, resulting in several instances comparable to the Zong, with the slaves being thrown overboard.
It is improbable that, before 1800, ships of only twenty-one tons burden would have been expected to carry ninety-seven human beings across the Atlantic, as was the case with the Conceiçao which reached Pernambuco in 1844. That ship’s captain gave the slaves a mere fifteenth of the space thought right for a British soldier when engaged in crossing an ocean. James Bandinel, who directed the efforts of the Foreign Office in London against the slave trade for many years, agreed that the British methods of suppression did result in increased suffering by the Africans: “In addition to the general horrible treatment, the slave traders have an additional motive, the fear of being taken, which induces them to start when their ships are half-provisioned; and . . . care is not taken of their health which was taken when the trade was allowed. . . .”14 Commodore Sir George Collier, on H.M.S. Tartar in 1821, found the slaves on the Cuban ship Ana María (captured in the Bonny) “clinging to the gratings to inhale a mouthful of fresh air, and fighting with each other for a taste of water, showing their parched tongues, and pointing to their reduced stomachs, as if overcome by famine for, although the living cargo had only been completed the day before, yet many who had been longer on the boats were reduced to such a state as skeletons that I was obliged to order twelve to be immediately placed under the care of the surgeon. . . .” Four hundred and fifty slaves were discovered “linked in shackles by the leg in pairs, some of them bound with cords; and several had their arms so lacerated by the tightness that the flesh was completely eaten through.”15
Very often in the nineteenth century, there were no special slave decks. But men and women were always separated, the former in the hold, the latter in the cabin; the children as often as not were left on the top deck. Most slaves seem to have traveled naked.
Many other details of these voyages were the same as in the eighteenth century: the distribution of the slaves in tens at the two daily mealtimes, the washing of hands in saltwater after eating, the punishment of slaves who refused to eat, the occasional distribution of brandy or tobacco, the rinsing of mouths with vinegar, the weekly shaving (without soap), the obligatory cutting of fingernails to limit damage in fights, and the daily cleaning of the decks. Then there was the systematic stowing of the slaves at night, “those on the right side of the vessel facing forward and lying in each other’s laps, while those on the left are similarly stowed with their faces towards the stern. . . . Each negro lies on his right side, which is considered preferable for the action of the heart.”16 “Constables” were as before chosen from “superior slaves,” and henceforth marked with a small rope or a row of beads round the neck. Sometimes billets of wood were available as pillows, the hatches and bulkheads were grated, and openings were made to give more ample circulation. Full-grown slaves seem normally to have been shackled to one another by the ankles.
Slave voyages in the nineteenth century usually took about twenty-five to thirty days between Angola and Brazil, or forty-five from the Bight of Benin or Biafra to the Caribbean; as earlier noticed, the voyage from East Africa could be far longer.
On these overcrowded ships, such food and water as were available were often passed round in calabashes in the slave areas, avoiding thereby the necessity of taking the slaves up to the open decks, as had usually happened in the past. The slave merchant José Cliffe thought that, on many voyages to Brazil, slaves never left the hold at all.
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Diseases continued to turn one out of every ten slave ships into a condition comparable to one of the most unpleasant circles in Dante’s Inferno. Thus Captain Matson described finding a slave ship, the Josefina, after a chase of a few hours and discovering that “many of the slaves had confluent smallpox: the sick had been thrown into the hold in one particular spot, and they appeared on looking down to be one living mass; you could hardly tell arms from legs, or one person from another, or what they were; there were men, women, and children; it was the most horrible and disgusting heap that could be conceived.”17
One passenger, J. B. Romaigne, described a most surreal journey in 1819 on the two-hundred-ton Rôdeur of Le Havre, a vessel owned by a merchant named Chedel, which was sailing from the river Bonny to Guadeloupe with 200 slaves. A virulent if apparently ephemeral form of ophthalmia broke out, causing most of the slaves and crew to become blind. The ship, without a helmsman, rolled about the ocean without a course and, after surviving a storm, encountered the San León of Spain, from whose crew they expected to gain help; but those sailors turned out also to be blind. “At the announcement of this horrible coincidence, there was a silence among us for some moments, like that of death. It was broken by a fit of laughter, in which I joined myself and, before our awful merriment was over, we could hear, by the sound of curses which the Spaniards shouted at us, that the San León had drifted away. . . . She never reached any port.” Most of the crew of the Rôdeur, on the other hand, eventually recovered and made their way to Guadeloupe, though not before Captain Boucher threw overboard thirty-nine blind slaves.18, I
Mortality on these slave journeys in the nineteenth century was,
usually, lower than a hundred years before. José Cliffe thought that the average number of deaths on ships to Brazil in the 1840s might be 35 percent. But Dr. Thomas Thomson, who spent years in Brazil, thought that figure exaggerated, and that 9 percent was more likely—a figure which was lowered by Admiral Sir Charles Hotham to 5 percent. In the 1840s, the House of Commons published similar, though more detailed, figures for shipments to Rio, Bahia, and Havana between the 1810s and the 1840s. Their estimate was 9.1 percent. Most vessels in the nineteenth century certainly traveled faster than their eighteenth-century equivalents, partly because of their coppersheathed hulls, but also because they were designed both to carry more water than their predecessors, and to catch more rainwater.
Slave captains were still ruthless if a case of smallpox was discovered and Canot described how a slave found suffering from that infirmity might be murdered at night, if it was thought that thereby the whole ship could be saved from contagion. But vaccination was already known, and seems to have been performed in Angola on most slaves after 1820.
The death rate among crews was, on the other hand, in the nineteenth century about the same as in the eighteenth: perhaps 17 percent (malaria and yellow fever being the usual killers). But there seems to have been an improvement in the 1840s.
There were also fewer rebellions or mutinies in the nineteenth century than in the past: first, because perhaps there were more children carried; second, because the journeys were shorter. But one of the most remarkable of all slave rebellions occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. A slave cargo was being carried west along the north coast of Cuba, from Havana to the small port of Guanajay, in a Baltimore-built vessel, “a matchless model for speed of about 120 tons,” the Amistad. The captain was Ramón Ferrer. The fifty-three slaves were mostly Mendes, originally from about sixty miles inland on the river Gallinas, where they had been embarked, perhaps by Pedro Blanco. The owners of the slaves, Pedro Mantes and José Ruiz, were on board. The ship was owned by a syndicate which was sending the slaves to be “refreshed,” apparently before marketing them, on one of the Bay Islands, off the coast of Honduras.II
A mulatto chef unwisely joked to the slaves, a little before they reached Guanajay, that, on arrival, they would all be killed and salted as meat. The wit was not appreciated. A certain Cinqué led a revolt, broke the slaves’ irons, and threw captain and crew overboard. Cinqué then ordered the owners, Mantes and Ruiz, to sail the ship back to Africa, towards the rising sun. These two Cubans arranged between them to sail their ship off course at night so that, after two months, with water and food very short, they were able to anchor off Long Island, at Culloden Point, New York. The vessel was first held as a smuggler. The slaves were sent to jail at New Haven, and the ship was seized. The Spanish minister in Washington demanded that both ship and merchandise be handed over to him, as provided by a treaty of 1795 between his country and the United States. But abolitionists, led by Joshua Levitt and Lewis Tappan, became apprised of the case, and a lawsuit followed. The central issue was whether the blacks had lawfully been made slaves. John Quincy Adams, the ex-president, now the serving congressman for Massachusetts and the leading abolitionist in the House of Representatives, was persuaded to represent Cinqué and his friends, and he successfully argued before the Supreme Court that they had not lawfully been made slaves; so they were released into freedom—or, rather, to Sierra Leone. Some senators tried to have the owners indemnified, but they failed.19
The suppression of the mutiny on board the Kentucky, under Captain Fonseca in 1844, must have been the worst of many such occurrences of the century. After a rising of slaves had been suppressed, forty-six men and a woman were hanged, shot, and thrown overboard; before they were killed, “they were . . . chained two together and, when they were hanged, a rope was put round their necks and they were drawn up to the yardarm, clear of the sail. This did not kill them, but only choked or strangled them; they were then shot in the breast, and the bodies thrown overboard. If only one of two who were ironed together was to be hung, a rope was put round his neck, and he was drawn up clear of the decks, beside of the bulwark, and his leg laid across the rail, and chopped off, to save the irons. . . . The bleeding negro was then drawn up, shot in the breast and thrown overboard. The legs of about one dozen were chopped off in this way. . . . All kinds of sport were made of the business.”20
There were also sometimes rebellions of the crews. For example, the vessel Céron, owned by Gervais Rives, left Bordeaux in December 1824, under Captain Jean-Baptiste Métayer. In March 1825, the Céron entered the river Bonny and began to buy slaves. But the negotiation was protracted (“s’éternisa” was the graphic expression of a French historian), many seamen died, and it was not till September that the ships left Africa, with 380 slaves for Santiago de Cuba. About three-quarters of the way across the Atlantic, the crew, led by a chef who had come on board at Paimboeuf, near Nantes, attacked the officers. The captain, the second captain, the supercargo, the lieutenant, the maître d’équipage, the master carpenter, and one other were murdered. The ship then anchored at San Juan, Puerto Rico. Half the crew denounced the mutineers, who were arrested, but the ship then left for Danish Saint Thomas, where it was intercepted by a French cruiser. All the same the slaves were sold—bought, it seems, by a trader from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.
A new dimension to the slave trade in the nineteenth century was created by the role of the British navy as a self-appointed world policeman; and to a lesser extent by the navies of the United States, France, and, in the end, even of Spain and Portugal.
The work of the naval officers responsible, as has been mentioned, was often tedious. Captain Eardley Wilmot pointed to this in a statement before a parliamentary committee in 1865: “The incessant rolling, which is most trying, the constant rumbling of the heavy surf upon the beach which becomes tedious from its monotony, the low and uninteresting appearance of the land, all have an effect upon the best organised mind which is sometimes distressing and we have, I grieve to say, examples of the effect of these trials in the invaliding of officers and others from mental disorganisation.”21
But there were also moments of excitement—a pleasure fully shared, it would seem, by the African traders. A British surgeon who knew both Brazil and Africa said that he thought the presence of the navy even stimulated the slave trade: “The blacks, like other people, are fond of excitement. [The slave trade] . . . is now more a gambling transaction than it has ever been. It requires great activity and a great combination of means to effect the escape of the slaves, and of the slavers, from the coast. . . . The excitement is one of the great inducements of the natives to keep it up. . . . It is the sort of wild excitement which is most palatable to the African character. . . . All parties are kept in excitement while there is a cargo waiting. . . . The prohibition lends not only a charm to it with the Africans, but a direct stimulus”—and, he might have added, to the British navy, too.22
Till 1835, as has been shown, the British had no standing with respect to the activities of the citizens of Spain (with Cuba), Portugal, and Brazil, unless slaves were actually found on board the ships. If the slaves were loaded at night, the captain of a slaver could hope to escape the attention of the British navy, whose captains, learning the technique of their prey, would accordingly stand out offshore about thirty-five or forty miles when day dawned. The navy came to know too that “one bright light from the shore indicated that a slaver could safely come into port; two bright lights meant not to come in”; and three such were the “signal to run away as fast as you can.” The lookout on the masthead of such a naval ship would be promised a reward of, say, $8, if a sail were sighted which proved to be that of a genuine slaver.
A specially exciting chase, in 1841, was that of the Josephine, “the fastest slaver out of Havana,” though Portuguese owned. At dawn on April 30, the British naval vessel H.M.S. Fantôme (a ship designed by the naval surveyor Sir William Symonds), Captain Butterfield, sighted—off Ambriz—a strange brigantine
. Butterfield gave chase and “immediately shook out all reefs set fore and maintop, with scudding sails and main royal flying jib, and went eleven knots.” By the afternoon, the mate of the Fantôme could see the Josephine cutting away her anchors, and throwing a gun overboard, to lighten the ship. By nightfall, the distance between the ships was reduced to six miles. The Fantôme was now trimmed so that every ounce of speed could be obtained: “At 1 a.m., I took in scudding sails and main royal, and carried through a tremendous squall of wind and rain—a thing I should never have attempted in any other . . . vessel; and gallantly she went through with it. [Though] the slaver was very nearly lost, . . . the Fantôme kept gaining on her prey by moonlight.” At dawn on May 1, when off the island of Ana Bona [Annobon], Butterfield “fired two shells . . . to bring the stranger to. I slackened sail as requisite. We hove to and boarded and detained the Portuguese brigantine Josephine, with two hundred slaves. Sent Mr. W. S. Cooper, senior lieut., and eight men to navigate the prize into Sierra Leone. . . .” The two vessels had covered 240 miles in twenty-four hours.23
The chase by the Rifleman in 1849 (under Commander S. S. L. Crofton) off Brazil raised a different issue. Crofton sighted a suspicious-looking sail fifty miles south of Rio. He entered Brazilian territorial waters to give chase. The quarry was thereupon run ashore, with all sails set, as darkness fell. When the Rifleman reached the stranded ship, heavy seas were breaking over her. The slaver’s crew had abandoned ship and left the cargo of slaves to die; some were washed overboard, others died because they had been manacled to the deck. Two midshipmen from the Rifleman’s boat crew remained on board the wreck and, at daybreak, a hawser was brought. Hutchings, the second master of the Rifleman, lashed himself to the slaver’s stern and, as each successive wave broke over him, passed the remaining slaves one by one from the slaver to the deck of the Rifleman by swinging them along the hawser in a cradle. “This tedious and dangerous service occupied the entire day. . . . [Thus] Commander Crofton rescued 127 Africans from death and slavery. . . .”24, III
