The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Yet January 1850 turned out to be the British navy’s best-ever month against the Brazilian slave trade—thanks largely to the activities of an informant, Joaquin Paula Guedes Alcoforado, an ex-slave trader who gave the British details of many journeys. Another British agent was the captain of the port of Rio, Leopoldo da Câmara, who organized the mulatto dockers to give the British information about movements of ships on a regular basis. At least one newspaper, the Correio Mercantil, seems to have been in those days in receipt of a subsidy from the British secret fund, as was the editor of O Brasil, the most important newspaper. The new antislavery societies in Brazil probably also received financial support from their mother country’s oldest ally.29

  The explanation for this change seems to be that Palmerston, disturbed by the threat to his policy offered by the debate on the Hutt Committee’s report, determined to use secret funds lavishly to assist a Brazilian surrender.VII Palmerston’s resolve was the greater since he had received, in June 1850, the enthusiastic support of the House of Commons, and the country, after his famous if inappropriate speech in favor of “Don Pacifico”; and he had been given a subscription dinner by 250 members of the Reform Club.

  In consequence, also in June 1850, Admiral Barrington Reynolds, an experienced Napoleonic War veteran who was now commander-in-chief of the West Africa Squadron, rightly assuming that he had the support of his government, and able to take any reasonable action without consulting them (the transatlantic telegraph was fortunately still over ten years away), ordered his captains to enter Brazilian ports to “flush out” all ships which they found to be fitted out for the slave trade. They did this first at Macaé, about 150 miles to the north of Rio. H.M.S. Sharpshooter covered the small boats and captured the brig Polka. Then Captain Herbert Schomberg, member of a distinguished naval family of Jewish origin, on H.M.S. Cormorant, captured four slave ships, “very fine vessels of 300 and 350 tons . . . American bottoms,” off Cape Frio and on the Paranaguá River, south of Santos. (One vessel scuttled herself; Schomberg burned two, in sight of the shore, and sent the last to Saint Helena.) There was some fighting, and one British seaman was killed, before Schomberg sailed up to Rio, looking for other slavers in the creeks to the north.

  The difference between these actions and what had gone before is that the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, and the Foreign Office (not always the same thing), openly approved. Palmerston told the Admiralty that his predecessor Aberdeen’s Act of 1846 contained no restrictions on “the limits within which the search, detention and capture of slave traders . . . are to take place . . . in Brazilian waters as well as on the high seas.”30 This was an interpretation which Palmerston decided for himself. No more important statement was made in the history of abolition. In so deciding, Palmerston must have taken into account the large stake that Britain had in the Brazilian economy, in the mines as in the mercantile houses, in insurance and in shipping. He knew that he could take action in Brazil in the interests of philanthropy, because so much of the wealth of the country was owned by British investors. Oddly enough, he was not at that time specially supported by the abolitionists, who were every day more critical of the use of force.

  What may have weighed most with Palmerston was the sense that he had had in the debate in the House of Commons in March that parliamentary and popular patience was running out. Despite Gladstone’s opposition, he and Russell had won the debate on that occasion. They might not do so again.

  The uproar in Rio was considerable. “A great sensation ensued and it was dangerous for English officers to land,” Captain Schomberg reported. Several newspapers and, in the Chamber, angry deputies demanded war. At that time, there were probably about 80,000 slaves in the city of Rio alone (a little less than 40 percent of the total population), and the place seemed to depend on them absolutely for its survival. Ownership of slaves was still widespread, and craftsmen and even many people accounted poor owned slaves. Some lived from the hiring out of slaves. But in contrast with the slaves of the North American south, the majority of these had been born in Africa, having come in recent ships: 66 percent, according to a census. In these circumstances, the foreign minister, the astute conservative Paulino José Soares de Souza, wisely delayed a decision. The Council of Ministers, with the Emperor Pedro in the chair, privately decided in July that, though threatened by possible insurgency in both Rio Grande do Sul and Pernambuco, given Britain’s commercial eminence, Brazil had no choice but to suppress the illegal slave trade. The influence of Britain in Brazil in those days extended far beyond commercial matters. Dress, taste, houses, language, and food in Rio were all influenced by what was done in London. The emperor had always opposed the slave trade, and his voice counted for much.

  Soares de Souza gave an account of the Cabinet’s attitude to the British minister, Hudson, but demanded that, in order to assist Brazilian abolitionists, he and Reynolds first call off the search-and-burn policies. They agreed. Soares de Souza then persuaded the Brazilian Chamber to accept genuine abolition, in a remarkable speech, which admitted the fact of British pressure. He pointed out that all countries except Cuba had abolished the trade: “Can we resist the torrent? I think not.” Brazil could no longer resist “the pressure of the ideas of the age in which we live. . . . And ought we indolently to sleep on and not take steps to find a substitute for African labor?”31 Inaction might lead to war with Britain, an eventuality which would damage Brazil more than the abolition of the trade. The Foreign Minister reminded the deputies that, thanks to the nomination in Paris of the persistent Victor Schoelcher, the most prominent abolitionist in France, to the post of undersecretary of state for the colonies after the Revolution of 1848, even Britain’s hereditary enemy had abolished the institution of slavery.VIII (That was on March 27, 1848: one of the few events of lasting significance of that year.)

  The quarrels in the Chamber of Deputies in Rio continued: an ex-minister of the navy, Joaquim Antão, called on the government to “destroy the ladders by which you have risen to power!” “What ladders?” “Can it be that noble ministers did not require the support of friends in the slave traffic in order to come to power?” Soares de Souza later admitted: “During the period when fifty to sixty thousand Africans entered the country annually, when speculation concerning Africa was at its peak, there were many people more or less directly engaged in the trade. Who amongst us did not have relations with someone engaged in the traffic when it was not condemned by public opinion?”32

  The resolute Captain Schomberg was in Bahia, where he delayed “five most beautiful ships evidently intended for the trade.” He persuaded the Brazilian government to buy three of these ships for their own navy, while the other two were turned over to legitimate trade. To those seeking to establish the role of Jews in the slave trade, Captain Schomberg should be cited as an important actor in achieving abolition in Brazil.

  For a bill abolishing the slave trade was now adopted in the Chamber of Deputies in Rio de Janeiro on July 17, 1850. It was accepted by the Senate, and Dom Pedro, the emperor, signed it. He did so with great satisfaction.IX On September 4, the bill became law. Henceforth, Brazilian slave ships were liable to seizure, the import of slaves into Brazil was declared piracy, all captured vessels were to be sold, and the proceeds were to be divided between captors and informers. For the first time, this legislation led to a real transformation.

  Manuel Pinto da Fonseca (who was said by Captain Schomberg to have lost sixty ships as a result of recent British naval action) and his brother Antonio were expelled from the country, along with the trader who was by now probably their chief competitor, the Sardinian Paretti. (He had landed thousands of slaves in Bahia the same year.) The president of the state of São Paulo even brought himself to denounce the insolent foreigners (that is, the Portuguese!) who had provoked the British attacks.

  Cynics would argue that the change in mood derived from an outbreak of yellow fever brought from Africa in a slave ship (apparently of French nationality) which swept
off 16,000 people and “set a great many people very much against the slave trade; they were frightened out of their wits.” But Palmerston thought that this revolution in attitudes was the result of British naval action: “These half-civilised governments,” he breezily commented, “all require a dressing down every eight or ten years to keep them in order.” He demanded that Hudson and Admiral Reynolds press further. Hudson, busily buying more support among newspapermen and harbormasters, threatened new attacks. Soares de Souza, astonished, pointed out that abolition was an immense task for Brazil: for example, an intelligence service had to be established, and public opinion had to be won round. For the change to be lasting, Brazil had to carry through the work of control herself.

  Many other arguments followed. There were some further forceful maritime acts by Britain (including the seizure of a few slave ships on the high seas), as well as new protests by Brazil, and renewed threats of war. But in 1851, only about 3,000 slaves were imported into Brazil. One captain, bringing the Tentativa into the harbor of Rio, found that there were no buyers for his cargo of 400 slaves, even when he dropped the price to $10 a head. The schooner Relampago, built in Baltimore, 295 feet long, twenty-three feet eight inches broad, two masts, 229 English tons, and owned by Marcos Borges Ferras, “Senhor Marcos,” was among the few ships to manage a landing of slaves that year. It had sailed to Bahia from Lagos, where it had been sold to Borges Ferras by an Italian, Jeronimo Carlos Salvi.X Most of those involved in this shipment were captured, some tried, fined, and even imprisoned.

  Borges Ferras for a long time denied his real identity, but was eventually tried in 1858 and imprisoned for three years. When he had served his term in Rio, he returned to Whydah, where he lived out the rest of his days. He was not bitter: talking to the Abbé Pierre Bouché, who met him in the late 1860s, he said, “I was admitted to the academy; and I came out with my diploma.”33

  In July 1851, Palmerston, with understandable pride, announced in the House of Commons that the Brazilian slave trade had concluded. The next year, Admiral Henderson, who had succeeded Reynolds, reported that the Brazilian trade really did seem at an end. One hundred and forty slave traders were supposed to have left the country hurriedly in these months for Portugal. They brought back to Europe perhaps a hundred million cruzados. In 1856, the British consul in Lisbon even estimated that these ex-slavers from Brazil were the biggest capitalists of the country.

  It is true that most Brazilian slaveowners were glutted as a result of the big imports of the late 1840s. Many middle-class Brazilians also came to support Soares de Souza, not because of philanthropy but because they had come to fear “Africanization” and revolt. Others expected an increase in the value of their slaves, as prices rose. (They doubled between 1852 and 1854.) Some landowners may have thought that abolition of the trade was a temporary matter, or that they would get all the slaves which they needed from intra-Brazilian trade. (The early 1850s certainly saw an increase of that commerce in Bahia and the northeast: over 26,000 slaves were imported into Rio City and Province during 1852-59.) Nor did the laws on the trade seem to pose any threat to slavery itself. (A bill in 1850 for the liberation of children born to slave mothers was defeated without discussion.)

  Some further slaves did slip in. In December 1852, for example, the North American brig Camargo put into the bay of Ilha Grande a few hours to the west of Rio, carrying five to six hundred Africans from Mozambique. They were disposed of so quickly that, when the chief of police arrived from Rio, he could find nothing. He challenged Joaquim José de Sousa Breves, the landowner who had bought them. In the end, however, only thirty-eight of Camargo’s slaves were recovered. Planters assumed that that might dictate the pattern of the future. But the last attempt to land slaves in Brazil seems to have been in January 1856, when the Mary E. Smith, 122 tons, of New Orleans but sailing from Boston, Massachusetts, was arrested by the Brazilian authorities off São Mateus, halfway between Rio and Bahia, carrying about 400 slaves. She had been sent to Brazil by a party of Brazilian slavers at that time in New York, who were primarily concerned with the Cuban trade. The Mary E. Smith’s captain had difficulty in disposing of his cargo. Water began to give out, the slaves started to die. The principal Brazilian-North American concerned died in prison. Evidence also later reached the British legation in Rio of the arrival of over 200 slaves at Serinhaém, near Recife. Palmerston made his usual threats, but by then the Brazilians had already punished those involved. All the slaves involved were freed.

  Abolitionists, of course, claimed a famous victory. All the same, at least 500,000 slaves had been imported into Brazil in the putatively illegal days of 1831-55. There were perhaps twice as many slaves in Brazil in 1851 as there had been in 1800. Slavery was still very well established throughout the economy, mostly in large-scale plantations, above all in farms producing coffee, now responsible for 50 percent of Brazil’s exports. In Rio, half the population were slaves.

  In the long term, abolition of the trade stimulated immigration from Europe. Concurrent Brazilian efforts to obtain free African labor were, however, opposed by Britain, whose representatives argued, recalling the fate of the emancipados, that free Africans would be treated much as slaves on arrival. This attitude may perhaps seem hypocritical when it is recalled that, after 1841, many African contract workers had been hired for the British West Indies.XI

  In fact, in contrast with what obtained in the United States, abolition of the trade did mark the slow beginning of the end of slavery in Brazil: the institution there, as in the Spanish empire, had always depended on large imports for, as has been often stated, the birthrate of slaves was low, mortality was high, and there was much manumission.

  Lord Palmerston in 1864, the year before his death, said that “the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade.”34 He was deceiving himself only a little. Though Brazilian fears and, to give Brazilian statesmen their due, some brave Brazilian speeches played an essential part, the trade in slavery would not have ended when it did had it not been for Britain’s moral crusade. That was one of Britain’s most remarkable achievements, which partly atones for that country’s unquestionable, and largely unquestioning, enthusiasm for the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  Domingos Martins, the last of the great slave merchants of Africa and Brazil, died in Lagos the same year as Palmerston made this remark. The Brazilian government, in their new mood of morality, had refused him permission to retire to Bahia. Richard Burton saw Martins in January 1864, a few days before he died, and admired his house, though he could see that the end of the trade in slaves had damaged him. Five of Martins’s daughters, all rich heiresses, nevertheless married well in Brazil, and he left a family in Africa too. His living descendants are the heirs of the Brazilian slave trade, the largest forced emigration in history.35

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  I See page 773.

  II He was known as a rigid disciplinarian and once delivered a sermon in a church in Cairo on the text “Ye believe in God; believe also in me.”

  III Gladstone’s father, John Gladstone, had bought sugar estates in the West Indies after 1815, principally in Guiana, but owned also two plantations, Holland and Lacovia, in Jamaica. He had over half his fortune invested in the West Indies in the 1830s and had a thousand slaves at the time of emancipation in 1833.

  IV It was after a successful oration on sugar duties, in July 1845, that Peel remarked to the orator: “A wonderful speech, Gladstone.”

  V In 1843, it had been, however, forbidden for a British subject to own slaves anywhere in the world.

  VI This was made possible by the practice of giving sea letters to vessels sold in foreign ports by one United States citizen to another. The rule was introduced in 1792 to encourage shipbuilding. United States citizens living in Brazil could buy ships from fellow countrymen and then ask the consul for permission to trade on the African coast. The ships would be charter
ed by Brazilians who would take “passengers” abroad. In Africa the “passengers” would take over the ship.

  VII This was a special triumph, since the undersecretary in the Foreign Office who disbursed Secret Service money was Henry Unwin Addington, a reactionary whom Palmerston disliked.

  VIII All slaves in French territories were freed. As with Britain, protectorates still accepted slaves.

  IX The greatest of Brazilian historians, Gilberto Freyre, described Dom Pedro as “a chaste man and a pure” one, and “the ideal type of husband for a Queen Victoria.” At twenty, dressed in a frock coat and wearing a silk hat, he already seemed a European, and a middle-aged European at that.

  X Pursued by the Brazilian naval police, the Relampago disembarked its cargo fast. The slaves were forced to swim to shore; those who did not drown were received by men from the sugar plantation of Hygenio Piris Gomes.

  XI Some of these, though, were Krus, real volunteers from the coast of Liberia, and all were in theory free not to go: 10,000 went to Jamaica, 13,970 to British Guiana, 8,390 to Trinidad, 1,540 to Grenada, other, lesser numbers to Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia, and Saint Kitts. In 1852, France adopted a scheme whereby a slave might be bought in Africa, liberated on board the ship, and carried to the Antilles as a worker under contract. Fifteen thousand or so were carried in that way until 1867.