The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  1. Henry the Navigator whose captains looked for gold, but found slaves (c. 1440).

  2. Pope Pius II (Piccolomini) who declared that baptized Africans should not be enslaved (1462).

  3. Ferdinand the Catholic who, as Regent of Castile, first approved the despatch of African slaves to the Americas (1510).

  4. Charles II of England who backed the Royal Africa Company, on a golden “guinea.”

  5. Louis XIV of France who started the practice of giving bounties to French slave traders.

  6. William IV who, as Duke of Clarence, opposed abolition in the House of Lords.

  7. Maria Cristina, Queen Mother of Spain in the 1830s, whose slave interests in Cuba were vast.

  Slave Merchants

  8. Sir Robert Rich, among the earliest entrepreneurs to carry slaves to Virginia.

  9. John Blount: the brain behind the South Sea Company, whose main business was to ship Africans to the Spanish Empire.

  10. Humphrey Morice: Governor of the Bank of England, MP, London’s major slave trader (c. 1730).

  11. Thomas Golighty, mayor of Liverpool, JP, who traded slaves up till the last legal minute in 1807.

  12. Henry Laurens: a major slave trader in Charleston, South Carolina, who, in the 1760s, opposed the traffic, before becoming President of the Continental Congress (1776).

  13. Philip Livingston of New York who traded slaves in his youth, signed the Declaration of the Independence in his maturity, and founded a chair of Theology at Yale in his old age.

  14. Colonel Handasyd Perkins of Boston whose firm specialized in carrying slaves from one Caribbean island to another (1790s).

  15. Aaron Lopez of Newport, born in Portugal, the only important Jewish slave trader in the Anglo-Saxon world.

  16. Antoine Walsh of Nantes who conveyed 10,000 slaves from Angola to the Americas, and Bonny Prince Charlie to Scotland.

  17. Pierre-Paul Nairac, the most active slave trader of Bordeaux, who was refused a peerage because he was a Protestant.

  18. Joaquim Pereira Marinho, among the last great slave traders of Brazil, a philanthropist in Bahia.

  19. Julian Zulueta of Havana, the greatest merchant in the last days of the Cuban trade, carried his vaccinated slaves by steamer to his plantation.

  20. King Tegesibu of Dahomey who made £250,000 a year from selling Africans about 1750: far more than any English duke received as income.

  21. King Alvare of the Congo who provided slaves to the Portuguese (c. 1686).

  22. The King of Benin (c. 1686) whose ancestors refused to sell men; but his descendants sold everyone.

  23. Francisco Felix de Sousa (Chacha), a Brazilian who dominated the slave trade in Dahomey in the 1840s.

  Slave Captains

  24. Portuguese traders in Benin (c. 1500) who obtained five slaves for a horse.

  25. John Newton, the slave captain who wrote “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds.”

  26. Hugh Crow from Liverpool: one of 1,000 captains from there who sailed for Africa to obtain slaves.

  27. Newport slave traders carouse in Surinam (c. 1755). Those still sober include Esek Hopkins, later commander of the United States Navy, and Joseph Wanton, later Governor of Rhode Island.

  28. “Captain Jim” de Wolf of Bristol, Rhode Island: in his youth a slave captain, then a merchant, later a United States Senator and cotton manufacturer.

  29. Pierre Desse, a slave captain of Bordeaux in the illegal days (c. 1825).

  30. Robert Surcouf, corsair of Saint-Malo, who revived the French slave trade after 1815.

  Slave Harbors

  31. Lisbon: at least 100,000 slaves were brought here from Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  32. Liverpool: the largest slaving port in Europe; her merchants sent 4,000 slaving vovages to Africa between 1700 and 1807.

  33. Elmina, the Portuguese stone-built castle on the Gold Coast, captured by the Dutch in 1637. Slaves were exported from here for 350 years.

  34. Nantes: France’s main slaving port sent 2,000 voyages to Africa for slaves.

  35. Cape Coast castle, built by Heinrich Carloff, became the English headquarters on the Gold Coast in the 1660s.

  36. Rio de Janeiro, the major slave port of Brazil, whose merchants sent for and received several million Africans c. 1550-1850.

  37. Havana: in the nineteenth century the largest slave port in the world, both as receiver of slaves and as a planner of voyages. Here the British are seen moving into the city after their defeat of Spain in 1762.

  Scenes of the Slave Trade

  38. South Sea House. In quiet counting houses, as in imposing commercial edifices such as this headquarters of the South Sea Company, the slave trade was planned.

  39. Rochefort: in this French Atlantic harbor (depicted by Joseph Verney for King Louis XV) copper pots and other cargoes were shipped to exchange for slaves in Africa.

  40. The most important cargo in the slave trade was cloths such as this “indienne” made in Nantes in imitation of Indian textiles.

  41. Metal, such as these copper bars, also figured substantially in the slave trade.

  42. Cowrie shells from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean were a currency in West Africa. One slave might cost 25,000 of these. Here is a headdress made from the shells.

  43. A slave ship in the eighteenth century built for Pierre Rasteau of La Rochelle.

  44. A typical Liverpool slave ship, depicted on a plate.

  45. The Wanderer: “you’d think she could fly instead of sailing.” The last ship to bring slaves to North America (1859).

  46. Black captives like this Egyptian slave from Ethiopia were sought after in the Mediterranean from time immemorial.

  47. In Africa, slaves were captured in raids for both the Atlantic and trans-Sahara trade.

  48. Slaves were transported to the port or market in long marches lasting for weeks, as graphically described by Mungo Park (c. 1790).

  49. Branding a slave with the initials of the buyer (c. 1820).

  50. The brand of the Cadiz Company (c. 1768). “G” is for Gaditano (the adjective for Cadiz), “R” is for Rey, King.

  51. Slaves being taken by canoe to Dutch ships, near Elmina.

  52. Inside a slave cabin (c. 1815).

  53. A rebel slave at bay (c. 1830).

  54. Captain Kimber sued William Wilberforce when the latter talked of his activities depicted in this cartoon (c. 1790).

  55. What the captains most feared: a slave rebellion (c. 1820).

  56. The rebellion on the Amistad (1839) was one of the very few successful slave rebellions.

  57. Sales of slaves were carefully registered. This shows a list of slaves imported into Havana in 1791.

  58. The Rua do Valongo in Rio de Janeiro, a notorious slave market (c. 1800).

  The Uses of Slaves

  59. Slaves in a mine in Hispaniola in the sixteenth century. The pursuit of gold on this Spanish island led to the traffic in slaves.

  60. A black slave in sixteenth-century Spain, depicted by Christopher Weiditz.

  61. Slaves as servants: with a lady of quality in Brazil.

  62. Slaves at work on a tobacco farm in Virginia.

  63. Slaves on a sugar plantation in Antigua.

  64. Slaves in a diamond mine in Brazil.

  65. Shipping sugar from Antigua (c. 1823).

  66. Profits from sugar and slaves allowed successful merchants, such as Richard Oswald, to commission houses such as Auchincruive, Ayr, built by the Adam Brothers.

  Abolition

  67. Montesquieu who mocked the slave trade in his L’Esprit des lois and inspired two generations of abolitionists (c. 1748).

  68. Thomas Clarkson of Cambridge who devoted his life to gathering material about the slave trade (c. 1785).

  69. William Wilberforce who led the parliamentary fight for the abolition of the slave trade by Britain 1789-1807.

  70. Anthony Benezet, a Quaker pamphleteer, dedicated his life to the Abolitionist cause.
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  71. Lord Palmerston who devoted his zeal to seeking the international abolition of the traffic in slaves.

  72. Canovas del Castillo who introduced a bill in the Spanish Cortes, abolishing the Spanish slave trade (1867).

  73. The meeting in Exeter Hall, London, 1840, where “the great and the good” of Britain show themselves converted to abolition. The Prince Consort is in the chair.

  74. This picture designed by Josiah Wedgwood (c. 1790) was the symbol of the abolitionists.

  Endpiece

  75. Equiano: a slave who lived to tell the tale (c. 1793).

  ALSO BY HUGH THOMAS

  World History: The Story of Mankind from Prehistory to the Present

  Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico

  Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-1946

  John Strachey

  Europe: The Radical Challenge

  Suez

  Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom

  The Spanish Civil War

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  SOURCES AND NOTES

  Bibliographical Note

  THE MOST IMPORTANT collections of documents are J. W. Blake, Europeans in West Africa 1466-1559, Hakluyt Society, 2 vols. (London, 1942), V. Magalhães-Godinho, Documentos sobre a expansão portuguesa, 3 vols., (Lisbon, 1943-46); and above all Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, (Washington, 1930), a superb work even if it does neglect the Portuguese trade and the nineteenth century, and is fairly skimpy on the Spanish Empire. For antiquity there is Thomas Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery, (London, 1981). For the Arab middle ages, there is J. M. Cuoq, Recueil des sources arabes concernant l’Afrique occidentale du Ville au XVI siècle (Paris, 1985). Jean Cuvelier and Jadin, L’Ancien Congo d’après les archives de la Vaticane (Brussels, 1954), has some interesting material, as does Frédéric Mauro, Le Brésil au XVIIéme siècle, documents inédits (Coimbra, 1963). Useful documents for the North American trade in the nineteenth century can be found in Norman Bennett and George E. Brooks Jr., New England Merchants in Africa (Boston, 1965). One day let us hope a historian will publish selected documents from that wonderful source, FO 84, on British policy to the slave trade, as well as from some Spanish sources such as the division Estado in the Archivo Histórico Nacional for the nineteenth century.

  First hand accounts can be found in the works of many travelers and traders. But no slave trader seems to have written his memoirs with the possible exception of Nicholas Owen’s Journal of a Slave Dealer, ed. E. C. Martin (London, 1930); Owen was an Irishman established in West Africa. Captains did, for example, Jean Barbot (A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea, 2 vols., ed. P. E. H. Hair, Hakluyt Society [London, 1992]), Thomas Phillips (A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London 1693-1694 in Churchill’s collection of voyages, 1732, VI, 173-239), Francis Moore (Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa [London, 1738]), Captain William Snelgrave (A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea [London, 1734]), and John Newton (“Thoughts on the African Slave Trade,” in Letters and Sermons, 3 vols. [Edinburgh, 1780]). Others who wrote of the trade from personal observation or participation included Olfert Dapper, Nouvelle description des pays africains (Amsterdam, 1670), Willem Bosman (A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Eng. tr. [London, 1705]) and Père Labat (Voyages aux îles, new ed. [Paris, 1993]). Later there were a number of fascinating travelers’ tales, especially by French officials or other visitors (Antoine Biet, Ducasse, Pruneau de Pommegorge, Pierre du Caillu). In the illegal age, the unreliable but interesting works of Theodore Canot (Memoirs of a Slave Trader [New York, 1854]) and Richard Drake (or was he Philip?), Revelations of a Slave Smuggler (New York, 1860), are useful.

  A good introduction to the study of slavery in antiquity is Moses Finlay, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London, 1981), but see also Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man, Eng. tr. (London, 1974). For Greece, there is Yves Garlan, Les Esclaves dans la Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1982), Eng. tr. (Ithaca, 1988). There is also M. L. Bush, ed., Serfdom and Slavery (London, 1996). For the position of Africans, see J. R. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), and Mary Lefkovitz, Not Out of Africa (New York, 1996).

  The sources for the study of slavery in the middle ages are: Europe, Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, vol. I (Bruges, 1955), a marvellous book. In addition there is Marc Bloch, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe, Eng. tr. (London, 1966); Pierre Dockés, Mediaeval Slavery and Abolition, Eng. tr. (London, 1982); Georges Duby and R. Mandrou, L’Histoire de la civilisation française, vol. I (Paris, 1958); and Pierre Bonnassie’s excellent From Slavery to Feudalism in South-western Europe (Cambridge, 1991).

  For Islam, see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford, 1990), and also Raymond Mauny, Tableau géographique de l’ouest africain au moyen age (Dakar, 1961); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge, 1982); and Mervyn Hiskett, The Development of Islam in West Africa (London, 1984).

  For the Portuguese penetration of West Africa, the best work in English is Bailey Diffie and George Winius, The Foundations of the Portuguese Empire (Minneapolis, 1977). Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo, La exploración del Atlántico (Madrid, 1992), is, however, a most distinguished work. There are excellent essays in G. Winius, ed., Portugal the Pathfinder (Madison, 1992). V. Magalhães-Godinho, Os Descobrimentos e a economia Mundial (Lisbon, 1963) is the best Portuguese introduction, but also see his L’economie de l’empire portugais au XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 1969), and A economia dos descobrimentos henriquinos (Lisbon, 1962). See too the first chapters of C. L. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (London, 1973). Alberto Vieira’s O comerciante interinsular (Funchal, 1986), and Portugal y las Islas del Atlántico (Madrid, 1992), deal with the islands, as does, very well, Manuel Lobo Cabrera, La Esclavitud en las Canarias Orientales en el siglo XVI (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1982). For Portugal, see A. C. de M. Saunders’s admirable A Social History of Black Slaves in Portugal (Cambridge, 1982). The best description of the building of Elmina is now P. E. H. Hair’s The Founding of the Castelo de San Jorge da Mina (Madison, 1994), but it is still worthwhile to read the relevant chapter in A. W. Lawrence’s Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (London, 1963).

  The first generations of the Portuguese slave trade can be pursued in V. Magalhães-Godinho, Os Descobrimentos, especially chapter 9, but see too José Gonçalvez Salvador, Os Magnatos do Trafico Negro (São Paulo, 1981), and the same author’s Os Cristãos Novos e o comercio no Atlântico meridional (São Paulo, 1978). Edmundo Lopes Correia’s Escravatura: subsidios para a su historia (Lisbon, 1944), is a general study of the Portuguese slave trade. See too Mauricio Goulart’s Escravido africano no Brasil (São Paulo, 1950).

  Virginia Rau, “Notes sur la traite à la fin du XVe siècle et le florentin Bartolommeo di Domenico Marchionni,” Bulletin de l’Institute Historique Belge de Rome XLIV, 1974, 535-43, touches tantalizingly on the life of that great entrepreneur. The early days of Brazil are masterfully considered in the early chapters of John Hemming’s Red Gold (London, 1978), and in Stuart Schwartz’s excellent Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia 1550-1835 (Cambridge, 1985). For the trade from São Tomé, see John Vogt, “The Early São Tomé Trade with Mina,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, 1973; and the same’s book, Portuguese Rule in the Gold Coast (Athens, 1979). Fr. Dieudonné Rinchon, La Traite et l’esclavage des congolais par les européens (Brussels, 1929), is still useful.