The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  Despite such difficulties they were able to collect a cargo of slaves and set sail for the West Indies. On their way they were becalmed for twenty-eight days, “which put us in great fear that many never thought to have reached the Indies without great death of the Negroes and of themselves. But the Almighty God (who never suffereth His elect to perish!) sent us the 16th of February the ordinary breeze, which is the Northwest wind, which never left us till we came to an island of the cannibals called Dominica.” But though Spanish plantation owners were eager to buy slaves, “the Governor of the island would neither come to speak with our Captain, neither yet give him any license to traffic.”

  Hawkins’ response was to use much the same method selling his merchandise as when acquiring it. Thus when told at Rio de la Hacha that “they durst not traffic with us,” Hawkins and one hundred men in armor went ashore. There followed a one-sided parley, after which Hawkins’ “requests” were granted, “and we made our traffic quietly with them.” After other stops to load up with hides, and stopping over in Florida, where they rescued some starving French settlers, and the Newfoundland Banks, where “we took a great number of fresh codfish,” they “came, the 20th of September [1565] to Padstow in Cornwall, God be thanked! in safety: with the loss of twenty persons in all the voyage; as with great profit to the Venturers of the said voyage, so also to the whole realm, in bringing home both gold, silver, pearls and other jewels in great store. His Name therefore be praised for evermore! Amen.”

  After one more voyage, Hawkins gave up slaving in favor of other ventures, though he did write a short book, An Alliance to Raid for Slaves, in which he advocated joint operations with African rulers. He is also credited with introducing the potato to Europe, and with establishing the Triangular Trade: buying goods in the home country, exchanging them for slaves in Africa, bartering the slaves in the West Indies for gold, sugar, hides, ginger, pearls and other local products, then selling these on his return home, and making a large profit at each corner of the triangle.

  This late eighteenth-century map reflects the way the slave trade worked: capturing slaves and bringing them to the coast was done by Africans, shipping them overseas by Europeans. Hence the precise depiction of the coastline with its forts and trading stations, while much of the interior is either blank or inaccurate—the bottom right-hand corner is marked “P. [part] of Ethiopia,” a country on the other side of the continent; and the Niger River, which flows in an arc from west to east, is shown flowing in a fairly straight line from east to west, and reaching the sea in Gambia rather than in Nigeria.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE TRADE

  THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE HAD TWO DISTINCT BRANCHES: THERE was the Southern Trade, from the Congo and Angola to South America, primarily Brazil; this was run largely by the Dutch and the Portuguese. And there was the Northern Trade, engaged in by all the sea-going countries of northwest Europe, with Great Britain emerging in the eighteenth century as the leader.

  Slaves were needed because the local people could not be coerced into working the gold and silver mines, acting as servants, or raising large crops of tobacco, coffee, rice, cotton and, above all, sugar. The first eastward shipment of sugar from the Spanish West Indies was made in 1515, and the first westward shipment of slaves from Africa in 1518. From its probable origin in the South Pacific, the business of growing and refining cane sugar had spread westward to the Middle East, then to Cyprus, Crete and Sicily, and from there to the islands off the west African coast—Madeira, Cape Verde and the Canaries; and then across the Atlantic. It had a huge and ever-expanding market in Europe, and its two by-products, molasses and rum, also sold well. But raising sugar was labor-intensive, and the work was so exhausting, the conditions so brutal, the birth rate so low and the mortality rate so high, that on average West Indian plantation owners had to replace one tenth of their workers every year. This may have seemed wasteful, but the planters had worked it out and the consensus among them was that it was “cheaper to buy than to breed.”

  Every European power that took part in the slave trade tried to corner at least part of it but, with the exception of Brazil, monopolies were not a success. Governments were too limited and their agents often too venal for effective enforcement, and buyers disliked them because, as usual, monopolies meant higher prices. One example was the Royal African Company, set up in 1672 with the backing, among others, of Charles II of England; his brother, the Duke of York; his cousin Prince Rupert; and the political philosopher John Locke, the expert on civil liberty. Their closed market was to be Jamaica, St. Kitts, Antigua, Monserrat, Barbados and Virginia. To supply them, the R.A.C. had a number of fortified trading stations on the West African coast, most notably Cape Coast Castle, also known as Cabo Corso, an elaborate fortress, expensive to garrison and maintain. When the trade went according to plan, ships from the Royal African Company would put into Cape Coast Castle, unload their trading goods, load the slaves that had been collected there and set off across the Atlantic. This way of doing business was known as the “fort trade.”

  There was also the free enterprise “ship trade,” unofficial and often unrecorded, which is one reason why firm numbers are so hard to arrive at. Under this system, ships would moor out at sea, or near the mouth of a river, and send in boats to do business with local rulers or merchants. Sometimes these would have slaves on hand, sometimes they would have to send inland for them, and nearly always a ship would have to make several stops to obtain a full cargo. This way of doing business, flexible and with much lower overheads, soon outstripped the official fort trade—in the ten years from 1698 to 1708, private traders shipped some 75,000 slaves across the Atlantic, and the R.A.C. a mere 18,000 (of whom six thousand went to Virginia, and twenty-two hundred to Maryland). About two thirds of those shipped were men. The peak years of the trade were 1741 to 1810, when some 60,000 were shipped each year.

  It was not an easy trade. Just getting from the home port to the African coast was often full of danger, especially during those frequent periods when England and France were at war. For example, this is what happened to Captain Phillips of the Hannibal, a ship with thirty-six guns and a crew of 103, which had set sail from London on September 5, 1693, “on a trading voyage to Guinea for elephants’ teeth, gold and negro slaves.” Two weeks later, while off Tenerife, they saw a ship “standing off to us with all sails set, whereupon we tacked to the north to have time to put our ship in a posture of defense, in case she proved an enemy.” By afternoon of the next day, “the ship that stood after us was got within random gun-shot of us, appearing a fine, long, snug frigate; so that now we no longer doubted but she was an enemy.” Further proof came when the frigate unfurled the French fleur de lys, whereupon “I perceived he was ready to pluck a crow with me. Therefore, after drinking a dram and encouraging all, ordered all my men to their guns, to behave themselves courageously, and expected his broadside, which when within pistol shot he gave us, and his volley of small shot. We returned his civility very heartily with ours; after which he shot ahead of us and brought to, and fell alongside our larboard side and gave us his other broadside, as we did him; then each of us loaded and fired as fast we could, until ten o’clock at night, when his foretop mast came by the board; then he fell astern of us.”

  The fight was over, but the Hannibal “was most miserably shattered and torn in her mast and rigging. We had five men killed outright, and about thirty-two wounded; among the last was my brother, my gunner, carpenter and boatswain; the carpenter had his arm shot off, and three others their legs; five or six of my best men were dreadfully blown up by their carelessness in laying the lighted matches among some cartridges of powder; our harper had his skull fractured by a small shot; the rest are but slight small shot and splinter wounds, and bruises.”

  Such stories were seized upon by English apologists for the slave trade who claimed that it was vital to the nation’s security by training sailors who in time of war could be recruited into the Royal Navy. But in fa
ct, rather than being “a nursery for seamen,” the trade was closer to being their graveyard, for the life of sailors on board a slaver was so harsh, and the discipline so savage, that their death rate while at sea was actually higher than that of the slaves—about twenty and thirteen per cent respectively. Only those in desperate straits volunteered; many were shanghaied by “crimps” who got them drunk in the brothels and low taverns that flourished in the home ports. “Every allurement and artifice is held out to entice them into these infamous dens,” wrote the English reformer, James Stansfield, himself a former sailor. “Festivity and music lay hold of the deluded senses; prostitution throws in a fascinating spell with too much success, and intoxication generally gives the business its fatal period.… I have known many seamen who fancied themselves cunning enough to evade these practices, go with the crimps to some of their houses, boasting that they would cheat the merchant out of a night’s merriment, and firmly resolved to oppose every artifice that could be offered, yet have they, in their state of drunkenness, signed articles with the very men whose purposes they were aware of, and have been plunged into a situation of which they had known the horrors.”

  One account of a seaman’s life was written by Silas Told. At the age of eleven Silas had been apprenticed to Timothy Tucker, “commander of the Royal George, bound for Guinea and the West Indies.” When at home, Captain Tucker “assumed the character and temper of a saint,” but at sea he became another person.

  “The first demonstration of his notorious conduct was given to the ship’s company in the enforcement of a white woman out of her native country, and selling her to a Black Prince of Bonny, on the African coast. The next proof of his villainy was the vile and blasphemous language wherewith he perpetually governed the seamen.” Then there was his brutal treatment of the ship’s cook. “The poor man had nothing but green wood to make his furnace boil with, on which account it was impossible for him to get the food ready in time: therefore the captain habituated himself to certain practices, such as horse-whipping him, and stabbing a knife into his face, so that the poor man’s life was grievously burthensome to him; indeed he oftentimes hinted to us that he would throw himself overboard, but we endeavoured to dissuade him from it; yet one morning, about eight o’clock, poor John Bundy plunged himself into the sea without our knowledge.” Only when they “saw a hat swimming astern” did they realize what had happened to him. (As to the white woman who was to be sold to the Black Prince of Bonny, shortly before they arrived she “died in a shocking manner, was sewed up in a hammock, and thrown overboard with a bag of ballast at her feet in order to sink her; but in the course of a week afterwards the corpse of the woman was observed to float upon the waters. I believe God had suffered this uncommon circumstance to happen in order to open the eyes of our wicked captain; but he had no dread or remorse in him.”)

  Also testifying about the harsh conditions endured by English seamen was John “Amazing Grace” Newton, who before taking up hymn-writing and entering holy orders had himself been a slaver. In his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade Newton wrote of the “inflammatory fever” and harm caused by exposure to those engaged in the “ship trade.” “If trade be scarce the ships which arrive in the fair or dry season often remain till the rains return before they can complete their purchase. A proper shelter from the weather in an open boat, when the rain is incessant, night and day, for weeks and months, is impracticable. And during the fair season tornadoes, or violent storms of wind, thunder and heavy rain are very frequent, though they seldom last long. In fact, the boats seldom return without bringing some of the people ill of dangerous fevers or fluxes.” There were also the sudden onsets of a wind called the harmatan which, according to the Anglo-French trader John Barbot, brought “a sharp piercing cold air, no sun appearing all the while; but the weather was thick, close, cold and raw, which very much affected the eyes, and put many into an anguish temper.”

  Having reached the African coast, sloops and small boats would be sent up the Senegal and the Gambia Rivers, but here too, wrote Barbot, the going was hard. “Through continual toils and hardships the best part of the sailors sickened and died, whilst others perish’d by the intolerable scorching heat, which threw them into burning fevers; and those who had been proof against that intolerable fatigue were destroyed either by the vile perfidiousness of the native Blacks of the country, or devoured alive by alligators, a sort of crocodiles which swarm in the cross rivers, as well as in the Senega, some of them above ten foot long, lying close among the bull-rushes, or under the water along the banks, and ever ready to seize and prey on man, when opportunity offers.”

  Along with the crocodiles in the rivers, the whole coast was infested with sharks, “extraordinary ravenous” and “of a vast size, some of them being twenty, and some thirty foot long, very large and thick, their head broad and flat, and the snout sharp-pointed. If a man happens to fall overboard, and these monsters are at hand, they soon make him their prey … Its eyes, tho’ very small in proportion to the body, and round, look like a bright flaming fire.” The mouth was “of prodigious width and bigness, within which are three rows, above and below, of very sharp and strong teeth, which at once cut off a man’s arms, leg, head, or any other part of the body. It swims incredibly swift, and great multitudes of them usually follow our slave-ships some hundred leagues at sea, as they sail out from the gulph of Guinea, as if they knew we were to throw some dead corpse overboard almost every day.”

  Another, much smaller, menace was described by a Dutch trader, David van Nyendael, when writing about the Rio Formosa, in Benin. This was “the innumerable millions of gnats, which the Portuguese call musquitoes,” and which “sting so severely that several persons have been so marked with pustules that it was impossible to know them. This torment, which deprives us of our natural rest, heightened by the unwholesomeness of the climate, continually occasions a great mortality amongst our men. This is my second voyage to this river. The first time I was here we lost half our men, and at present the number of dead on board is not less, and the remainder are most of them sick.”

  Then there was the weather, which in Senegal, wrote John Barbot, “is in the main very unhealthy, especially near the rivers and marshy grounds, and in woody places; but most of all to white men in July, August and September, which is the rainy season.” Nor was the rest of the year much better, for “from September to June the heats are almost intolerable, and produce many fatal distempers in the Europeans who reside here on the account of trade.”

  Many of the Europeans who garrisoned the forts or worked in the “factories,” as the trading posts were called, were generally what Barbot described as “necessitous persons, who cannot live at home,” and operated “without regard to the principles of Christianity.” They looked “poor and thin,” their countenances “shriveled and dismal. They are generally men of no education or principles, void of foresight, careless, prodigal, addicted to strong liquors, as palm wine, brandy and punch, which they will drink to excess.” Also, “some, and perhaps no small number, are over-fond of the black women, whose natural hot and lewd tempers soon wastes their bodies, and consumes that little substance they have.” As a result “they fall into several distempers, daily exposing their lives to danger, very many being carried off through these excesses, in a very deplorable condition, by fevers, fluxes, colicks, consumption, asthmas, small-pox, coughs, and sometimes worms and dropsies.” According to ship’s surgeon Alexander Falconbridge, at the Bight of Benin, “the bodies of the sailors who die there are buried on a sandy point, called Bonny Point, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the town. It is covered at high water; and as the bodies are buried but a small depth below the surface of the sand, the stench arising from them is sometimes very noxious.”

  Derived from the Arabic word qafila, coffles were used by traders to secure slaves while traveling from the interior to the coast. As well as being chained or yoked neck to neck, adults, especially males, often had their hands bound; man
y also had to carry loads on their heads. Those unable to keep up were put to death.

  In addition to this loss of life, there was “the dreadful effects of this trade upon the minds of those who are engaged in it,” wrote John Newton. “In general I know of no method of getting money, not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel, against all impressions of sensibility.” Another “dreadful effect” was racial prejudice. Unlike the aristocratic Portuguese adventurers, who waged war on Africans but did not despise them, the middle- and lower-class north Europeans were soon complaining about the innate vices of the people they were busy enslaving. According to John Barbot, the Yarays were “perfidious” and “expert at stealing”; the Senegalese were “lazy to excess … knavish, revengeful, impudent, liars, impertinent, gluttonous, extravagant”; the natives of Guinea were “the greatest and most cunning thieves that can be imagined”; the Camina women “made no scruple to prostitute themselves to the Europeans for a very slender profit.” The Dutchman, Willem Bosman, writing of the Gold Coast, declared that “the Negroes are all, without exception crafty, villainous and fraudulent … These degenerate vices are accompanied with their sisters, sloth and idleness, to which they are so prone that nothing but the utmost necessity can force them to labour.”