Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  Whenever they could, Iroquois women depended on slaves to do all their chores. The mother of a Seneca woman worried that her dead daughter could not manage in heaven without her slaves. She asked the Jesuit priest who had baptized her daughter to convert an ill slave to Christianity so that, when the slave died, she would go to heaven, where she could serve the daughter. The mother said:

  [My daughter] was a mistress here and commanded more than twenty slaves, who are still with me; she knew not what it was to go to the forest to get wood, or the River to draw water; she could not take upon herself the care of all that has to do with domestic duties. Now I have no doubt that, being at present the only one of our family in Paradise, she has great difficulty in getting used to it; for she will be obliged to do her own cooking, to go for wood and water, and to do everything with her own hands in the preparation of her food and drink.

  The Iroquois nation waned after years of fighting the Europeans, and many of their members left to join the Catholic mission villages. The slave system fell apart and eventually disappeared.

  Slaves of the Europeans

  Despite the wishes of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Columbus forced the native people in Hispaniola to work for the Spaniards. Under a system called encomienda, natives could only work if they paid their masters for the privilege, usually by giving them some of the gold they mined or the crops they grew. In return, the masters were supposed to protect the workers. Although this system often left the workers with nothing, it received the blessing of King Ferdinand in 1503 and spread throughout the Americas. In some places encomienda did not end until the seventeenth century.

  While the Spanish were settling the Caribbean Islands, the Portuguese were laying claim to Brazil. As early as 1500, they were taking Africans there as slaves. In 1505, a year after Queen Isabella’s death, the Spanish imported Africans to work in the copper mines of Hispaniola. By 1510, King Ferdinand had approved the use of African slaves in the island’s gold mines.

  The introduction of African slavery did not end the enslavement of the native people. Spanish law said that they could only be kept as slaves if they were captured in a “just war.” There was a catch: the king considered a war “just” if the native people refused to accept him and his daughter as their sovereigns and refused to become Catholic. The result was that Spaniards could call almost any slave raid a just war.

  But natives were proving to be unsatisfactory slaves. They knew the land and could escape and disappear – unlike the Africans, whose skin color marked them as runaways. And they fell ill from the terrible labor forced on them and from diseases they caught from the Europeans.

  The hardships they suffered troubled some Spaniards, most famously Bartolomé de Las Casas. Originally a planter with natives working for him and paying encomienda, Las Casas had become a priest. By 1514 he was so appalled by the mistreatment of the natives that he rejected the practice of encomienda and fought for the natives’ welfare. The Spaniards, he wrote, “came with their horsemen and armed with sword and lance, making most cruel havocs and slaughters,” sparing no infant, mother, or child. Las Casas journeyed five or six times to Spain to plead for laws to protect the native people. In time he became known as the “protector of the Indians.”

  Bartolomé de Las Casas, now a priest, looks out a window at the native people whose enslavement he denounced. He also wrote a history of the native people and their lives.

  Photo Credit 6.3

  In 1550, Las Casas took part in a debate about slavery. His opponent argued that the native people “require, by their own nature and in their own interests, to be placed under the authority of civilized and virtuous princes or nations, so that they may learn, from the might, wisdom, and law of their conquerors, to practice better morals, worthier customs and a more civilized way of life.” Las Casas spoke from his experience with them, explaining that native people were devout and hard workers. “Mankind is one, and all men are alike in that which concerns their creation,” he said. The debate did not settle the question, but the treatment of native slaves slowly improved. Three years later the Spanish king prohibited their enslavement, but the practice continued.

  Although Las Casas was a tireless champion of fair treatment of native people, he did not speak out against all slavery. In fact, he urged that native slaves be replaced by Africans. Many Europeans had seen natives dying under forced labor, and thought the Africans had more stamina and more experience farming. They also thought that the Africans in the New World did not suffer from enslavement the way native people did. By 1540, approximately ten thousand Africans a year were being transported to the Americas to live and die in slavery.

  Long after Las Casas’s death in 1566, his writings revealed that he had had second thoughts about enslaving Africans. He wrote, “It is as unjust to enslave Negroes as Indians and for the same reasons.” Unfortunately, his words came too late to do any good. As native slavery diminished, African slavery expanded. It was to envelop four continents for hundreds of years.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE TREACHEROUS TRIANGLE: SOUTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

  Before he became a slave, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua had never seen a white man, a ship, or the ocean. He could not have imagined what a dreadful fate awaited him.

  Baquaqua was born in what is now Benin, on the west coast of Africa. Years later, he described the horror of being a “poor, unfortunate, miserable wretch” who had been sold away from everyone he knew and everything he loved and crowded in with strangers on a ship to await further heartache.

  We were thrust into the hold of the vessel in a state of nudity, the males on one side and the females on the other; the hold was so low that we could not stand up, but were obliged to crouch upon the floor or sit down; day and night were the same to us, sleep being denied us from the confined position of our bodies, and we became desperate through suffering and fatigue.

  If a slave complained, Baquaqua said, “his flesh was cut with a knife, and pepper or vinegar was rubbed in to make him peaceable.”

  The title page of Mahommah Baquaqua’s biography shows him in African dress and calls him a native of “Zoogoo” in the African interior. It notes that the book includes descriptions of “that part of the world including the manners and customs of the inhabitants.” Although it was written by an Englishman, the story was narrated to the writer by Baquaqua himself.

  Photo Credit 7.1

  Between 1500 and 1870, more than eleven million Africans were torn from their families and homes and forced onto slave ships bound for South America and the Caribbean. Whether they were transported on a Portuguese ship like Baquaqua’s, or on one owned by the Dutch, the Spanish, the British, the Danes, or the French, the captives crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas on a voyage called the Middle Passage. The trip was called “middle” because the ships had a three-part route. First, they left European ports carrying goods like textiles, guns, and brandy to be exchanged in Africa for slaves. On the middle section of the trip, they left Africa with human cargo bound for the Americas, where the slaves were traded for sugar, rum, and other commodities. The third passage brought the ships and their new cargo back to their home ports in Europe. The triangle worked well because on each section the prevailing winds cooperated, blowing the cargo-laden ships clockwise along the route.

  Slave ships varied in size, with smaller vessels carrying as few as 150 unfortunate victims in their holds, and larger ones cramming in more than 400. Ships often had removable platforms so that they could crowd on more people. The slaves shared the dreadful voyage with strangers from other villages. Even if they had no language or customs in common, they were united in their longing for their homes and families. They would find no comfort on the Middle Passage.

  The Atlantic Slave Trade

  Baquaqua’s capture came in the closing years of the Atlantic slave trade, which had begun in the fifteenth century, when Europeans expected their new colonies in North and South America to make them rich.
To succeed, they needed cheap workers, and they looked to Africa to supply them. The Portuguese captured and shipped more slaves than any other nation – more than five million people by the 1860s. Other European powers, including Britain, France, Holland, Denmark, and Spain, shipped about six million Africans to South America and the Caribbean.

  The Voyage to America

  In 1799, Sibell, a slave woman in Barbados, told her story to a white man who wrote it down exactly as she spoke, spelling words the way she pronounced them. “Me nebber see de White people before, me nebber see de great ships pon de water before, me nebber hear de Waves before which me frighten so much-ee dat me thought me would die.”

  Before European traders took slaves on board, they made them pass an inspection by a “surgeon.” The slaves must have been terrified and humiliated as the doctor, a strange white man, made them take off their clothes and move naked in front of everyone, running, walking, and lifting and stretching their arms and legs. The surgeon’s sole interest was to make sure they were healthy enough to survive the journey and attract buyers.

  Slaves who were not accepted stayed with the African trader. An officer on the ship would name the price for those who passed inspection. European traders paid African traders not in money but in goods: textiles, guns and gunpowder, tobacco, rum, brandy, or other alcohol, or cowrie shells, which were used as money in West Africa.

  FROM SLAVE TRADER TO SLAVE

  Like other African traders in Old Calabar, the Robin Johns were black, could speak English, did business with Europeans, and even took British-sounding names. They were successful, but they had enemies.

  In 1767 James Bivins, an English trader, tricked two members of the Robin John family, Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin, into boarding his ship, where the crew bound them in irons. The ship sailed away to the Caribbean island of Dominica, where Little Ephraim and Ancona became slaves. Their owner did not treat them badly, but they were determined to escape and return to Africa. After seven months, the captain of another British ship agreed to help them if they boarded his ship at night. Instead he took them to Virginia, then a British colony, where he sold them to yet another captain. That captain gave them a taste of the misery of slavery. It lasted for five years, until the captain died at sea.

  Again Little Ephraim and Ancona found a captain who promised to return them to Africa if they came to his ship at night. They traveled with him to England, but they’d been fooled once more; he planned to send them back to Virginia for sale. Meanwhile, Little Ephraim wrote letters asking for help, and eventually he and Ancona were released by order of the court. No sooner were they free, however, than they were arrested for failing to pay for their voyage from Virginia!

  Little Ephraim wrote to the chief justice of the British court, arguing that he and Ancona should be released because they were enslaved illegally. “There was not any war between the people of New Town and the people of Old Town, but only a quarrel or dispute about trade, which never occasioned any fighting,” he argued. The judge ruled in their favor in November 1773, but it would be another year before they reached home.

  The two were deeply in debt by the time they got back to Africa. In spite of all they had suffered as slaves, Little Ephraim felt he had no choice but to return to the slave trade. He needed the money.

  Following the inspection, several crew members held each slave down while an assistant rubbed tallow on a spot on the captive’s right shoulder or stomach or arm. The assistant placed a piece of greased paper over the spot while another member of the crew placed a red-hot iron on top of it to burn the owner’s sign or name into the slave’s flesh. The wound would take days to heal, and over time the skin would rise where the burn had been inflicted.

  Slave voyages usually lasted months, and were miserable from beginning to end. The owners cared only about getting the slaves across the ocean as quickly and cheaply as possible, so they could sell them for a large profit. While the slaves suffered mightily, the crew lived in fear, knowing that they were outnumbered. In the eighteenth century it was not unusual for a ship to carry four hundred or more slaves and fewer than twenty crew members. The sailors were ever fearful of attack, and tried to protect themselves by keeping the male slaves chained and shackled.

  Even when the slave traders forced slaves to “dance” on deck for exercise, the shackles often remained. Officers enforced the exercise with a cat-o’-nine-tails, a whip that had nine thongs of braided rope or rawhide. A surgeon on a British slave ship in 1789 described the scene:

  This was done by means of a Cat of Nine Tails with which they were driven about one among the other, one of their country drums beating at the same time. On these occasions they were compelled to sing, the Cat being brandished over them for that purpose. It was the business of the chief mate to dance the men, and of [myself] and the second mate to dance the women. The men could only jump up and rattle their chains, but the women … were driven among one another.

  African men and women were kept apart. The women were not chained because the officers were not afraid of them, but their relative freedom did not make the voyage any easier for them. The ship’s crew often raped them.

  In their home countries, Africans were used to eating meals of seasoned meat, fish, and fresh fruit, but on ship they were served a bland porridge of fava beans, millet, peas, or manioc, a flour common in Central and South America. In 1729 an English surgeon wrote that slaves who refused the food were “abused by sailors, who beat and kick them to that degree that sometimes they never recover.”

  The “dance” was a degrading and joyless exercise forced upon captives to keep them healthy enough to bring a good price, but a French slave trader claimed it was “full of jollity and good humor.” Perhaps, for the sailors watching and laughing, it was.

  Photo Credit 7.2

  Baquaqua said he and the other captives were desperate for water but were given just two cups per day. Once, when a sailor brought them a bucket of water, a captive tried to grab a knife from him so that he could get more. The slave was taken away and never seen again. Baquaqua assumed he had been thrown overboard.

  Sickness spread quickly through the crowded and filthy quarters, and many slaves died from severe diarrhea, smallpox, fevers, or scurvy. It’s no wonder that in some ports, when a ship arrived, a health official would come on board to make sure the slaves were not carrying any contagious diseases that could spread on land. Estimates are that in the early years, two out of every ten slaves died on the Middle Passage. Eager to keep the slaves alive, ship owners improved conditions by the eighteenth century, but still one in ten died. Approximately one and a half million Africans were cast, dead or alive, into the sea from slave ships.

  THE ZONG

  Every slave voyage was nightmarish, but it would be hard to think of one that was worse than that of the Zong. The ship carried 440 slaves and 17 whites when it left Africa for Jamaica in 1781. After about two months, approximately 60 slaves and 7 whites had died, more were ill, and supplies were running low. A ship’s owner and captain could only get rich from a journey if they had healthy slaves to sell. With so many dead and many more sick, the Zong’s captain, Luke Collingwood, knew he was facing a financial loss.

  Collingwood ordered his crew to throw the sick slaves overboard, in hopes of collecting money on the insurance. The policy would pay up if cargo, including slaves, was discarded to save other cargo, but it would not pay for losses because of illness. Although at first Collingwood’s chief mate balked, in the days that followed, the sailors threw 133 living slaves overboard.

  When the ship returned to England, the insurance company refused to pay for this “lost” cargo. The case went to court – as an insurance case, not as murder – and the ship owners won and got their money.

  On Land

  Once a slave ship arrived at its destination, the captain wanted quick sales. The longer it took to sell the slaves, the more money he had to spend on feeding and housing them. Baquaqua wrote about the scramble
that took place as soon as a slave ship docked in Brazil:

  Down come all those that are interested in the arrival of the vessel with its cargo of living merchandize, who select from the stock those most suited to their different purposes, and purchase the slaves precisely in the same way that oxen or horses would be purchased in a market; but if there are not the kind of slaves in the one cargo, suited to the wants and wishes of the slave buyers, an order is given to the Captain for the particular sort required, which are furnished to order the next time the ship comes into port. Great numbers make quite a business of this buying and selling human flesh.

  Baquaqua was sold to a man who owned four other slaves. His owner treated him like a beast of burden, requiring him to carry heavy rocks over long distances. “I was compelled to carry them that were so heavy it took three men to raise them upon my head,” he said. At times a rock “would press so hard upon my head that I was obliged to throw it down upon the ground.”

  Baquaqua’s master had a quick temper and did not hesitate to beat his slaves whenever he felt like it, even during the family’s prayers. The Roman Catholic Church required that slaves be baptized, and let them attend Mass and confession. When the family and slaves came together to pray, Baquaqua said, “my master held a whip in his hand, and those who showed signs of inattention or drowsiness, were immediately brought to consciousness by a smart application of the whip.” Baquaqua eventually became a Christian, but that was long after he left this owner.