The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Eventually, though in a different territory, the Lunda would settle down, adopt a conventional attitude to families and procreation, and become a formidable empire in Central Africa, trading slaves in traditional style on a large scale.

  The Portuguese about 1620 had three ways of obtaining the slaves which they desired. First, there was the usual, most common, method, of trade with chiefs or kings, as happened almost all the way along the African coast. This commerce depended, in the region of Luanda, on the finding of slaves by pombeiros—at first Portuguese but, by the seventeenth century, usually Luso-Africans or Africans who would negotiate with African monarchs, such as the ngola, who seems to have been happy to trade in that way, even when he was at war. Second, there were slaves obtained as a by-product of war, or even in consequence of wars nominally conducted to seek, say, silver mines—a method often resorted to by governors keen to make the most money out of a short appointment in Angola. The third method was tribute.

  A new Portuguese governor of Luanda, Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos, embarked on a campaign designed to finish with the threats of the continuously hostile Ndongo, for good or evil. He captured that monarchy’s capital at Kabasa, and the ngola fled. In the event, though, Mendes de Vasconcelos, through his military victory, damaged the slave trade: in defeating the ngola, he had weakened the monarch who, at that time, had been the most effective purveyor of slaves for the Brazilian slave ships.

  This governor’s service to the slave trade was, however, far from negligible, as befitted the son-in-law of one of the leaders of the business in the previous century, Manuel Caldeira Pereira. Thus he defeated a native chief named Bandi, on whom he imposed an annual tribute of one hundred slaves. Mendes de Vasconcelos also forbade any Portuguese or mulatto trader to enter the interior for slaves. Only the black pombeiros could do so. These traders would vanish for a year or so, and come back with trains of up to six hundred chained slaves, many carrying ivory or copper on their bowed heads.

  The next governors (João Correia de Souza, Pedro de Souza Coelho, and then Bishop Simão de Mascarenhas) sought to patch up relations with the ngola. They had come to realize that, to ensure the slave trade, which seemed every year as necessary as it was profitable, they required some stable African state in the region of Luanda with whom to deal. The king of Congo was now feeble, the Lunda unpredictable; the ngola, for all his faults, seemed to offer the best hope. The Portuguese were in the end successful in making peace, largely thanks to their skillful diplomacy with the ngola’s remarkable sister, Nzinga (baptized Dona Ana de Souza), who was living in Luanda as ambassadress. Then, in 1623, Nzinga succeeded as ngola, though not before poisoning, perhaps eating the heart of, her nephew, the late ngola’s son. Nzinga would have liked to re-establish the old slave trade with the Europeans but, instead, Portugal unwisely went to war with her, since she had begun the practice of harboring captives escaped from the coast. The Portuguese went so far as to establish a puppet ngola (Ari, baptized as Dom Felipe I), who agreed to pay to the settlers a tribute of one hundred slaves a year, as well as to allow the Jesuits to build a church at his capital, now Punga a Ndongo. Fairs for the sale of slaves were reopened. But warfare with Nzinga continued, usually sporadic, sometimes bitter. That princess adopted some of the techniques of the Lunda: cannibalism and infanticide among them. She eventually established herself as the strongest military power in southern Angola, and the Portuguese failed to deal effectively with her. She never became the reliable purveyor of slaves for whom successive governors of Luanda hoped. Nor could the puppet ngola produce slaves in the quantity which the Portuguese required; the latter sometimes even had to make do with old or young slaves, instead of men in the prime of their lives.

  In these years, the prize Portuguese colony of São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea, almost on the equator, survived as an essential entrepôt, seemingly unchanged, despite the periodic threats of Dutch fleets. In 1617, Fray Alonso de Sandoval, a most enlightened Jesuit from Seville, described how Portuguese or Spanish ships were still bringing cargoes of slaves there from all over the west coast of Africa. Many of these slaves came now from the “Caravalies” (the Kalbarai Ijo, from both New and Old Calabar, centers of the trade from the Bight of Benin until overtaken by Bonny later in the century). The Calabars were cities without kings, addicted to war between themselves, sometimes for the specific purpose of obtaining slaves for the external market.

  But in the Americas, Angolan slaves were dominant, so much so that another Jesuit, Fray Diego de Torres, in 1615 ordered a grammar in Angolese for the benefit of those from that territory who were working in the mines of Potosí.

  • • •

  The Spanish-Portuguese empire in those early days of the seventeenth century was a vast enterprise, such as was scarcely to be seen again in history. But its size, pretensions, power, and apparent prosperity prompted attacks on it. In 1623, the newly reformulated Dutch West India Company planned a remarkably aggressive onslaught. Having temporarily seized Benguela, they planned, first, a naval attack on Bahia, the port of the sugar empire of the Brazilian northeast; then the fleet would turn across the Atlantic to join another one, direct from Holland, and both would strike at Luanda, the largest European settlement in Africa, and the main source of Brazil’s slave labor.

  The idea of this venture, breathtakingly audacious but fraught with risk, derived from a property speculator of Utrecht, Moucheron, who may have known how to bribe mayors in Zeeland but knew little of the problems of empire. To begin with, however, all went well. The Dutch were instantly successful in the first part of this strategy, seizing Bahia in 1624. “When we entered Bahia,” wrote Johann Gregor Aldenburg, one of the Dutch commanders, “we only met blacks, for everyone else had fled from the city.”8 The Dutch immediately put these slaves into an armed company to fight their old masters.

  Though Bahia was soon recaptured, by a large Portuguese-Spanish expedition (the slaves who had fought for the conquerors were hanged “in a peculiarly abominable manner”), the Dutch shortly took Olinda and Pernambuco, to the north, and there further developed the sugar-plantation system which, through investment and commerce, they already knew well. A new empire, New Netherlands, seemed to have been achieved. The “time of the Flemings” in Brazil had begun.

  In Africa, however, the Portuguese held on at Luanda. That seemed for the time being of minor significance, since, having conquered one of the largest economies dependent on slaves, the Dutch West India Company was now having to revise its earlier doubts about the morality of the African trade. Their capture of Pernambuco was the turning point in this reconsideration. Those who still opposed the commerce in human beings were unable to suggest how the new possessions could be made to pay other than by the use of slaves. The earliest mention of the traffic in the records of the West India Company occurs in 1626, when that body’s Zeeland Chamber, the most Calvinist of the different colleges within the undertaking, gave permission for the dispatch of a ship to “Angola”—presumably, Loango, where the Dutch already had three trading posts—and the transport of slaves to the region of the Amazonas, a new Dutch settlement on the river of that name. The same Zeeland Chamber soon also allowed Dutch settlers in both Guiana and Tobago, as well as northern Brazil, to import slaves. The first reports from Brazil had, after all, told not only of the serious decline in the Indian population of the place, but of the difficulty of ensuring that those who existed worked effectively.

  The transformation in Dutch trade, however, was slow. The West India Company began by obtaining most of their slaves from ships which their captains captured in war—war, of course, with Portugal, for the ships of the two nations constantly fought in these years: for example, between 1623 and 1637, 2,336 slaves were so obtained, and sold in the New World, for an average price of 250 guilders each.

  The Dutch by then also had trading posts in North America: the first, on Manhattan Island, was set up in 1613; settlements were also made in the Caribbean by the West India Company before 163
0. By the mid-1630s, they had several entrepôts there—in Curaçao, a barren island in a convenient place off Venezuela, as well as Saint Eustatius and Saint Thomas, both previously uninhabited, in the Leeward Islands.

  Black slaves began to be carried by the company to the colony of New Netherlands in North America in 1625-26: in 1628, the Reverend Jonas Michaëlius, of New Amsterdam, the first minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in North America, was already complaining that Angolan slaves were “thievish, lazy, and useless trash.” The following year, the Dutch West India Company baldly declared that it would “endeavour to supply the colonists with as many blacks as it possibly can.”9

  As for Brazil, though the majority of the colonists continued to be Portuguese, numerous new settlers flooded in from Holland, including some Sephardic Jews whose families had had commercial connections with the territory for some generations. Slaves seemed to everybody to be the key to prosperity there; a governor of New Holland would remark, in 1638, “It is not possible to establish anything in Brazil without slaves.” Those Portuguese sugar planters who fled before the Dutch invasion had made the same point in a different way when they carried (in the words of an eyewitness) “their pretty mulata mistresses riding pillion behind them, while they left their white wives to struggle on foot through the swamp.”10

  Still, most slaves taken to New Holland—they averaged fifteen hundred a year in the late 1630s—continued to be captured at sea from Portuguese ships.

  The new masters of Brazil could not leave their labor force so ill provided for. In 1636, a cousin of the stadtholder of the Netherlands, Johan Maurits of Nassau, was appointed governor-general of Brazil (he was later known in his homeland for the Mauritshuis, which houses the greatest collection of paintings in the country). An enlightened and farsighted ruler, he was determined to make a financial success of New Holland. Olinda under his aegis became the finest city of the colony, possibly on the continent: royal palaces and four-story town houses soon looked out across broad avenues to botanical and zoological gardens, synagogues and Calvinist churches.

  Prince Johan Maurits first set about trying to improve the lamentable relations of the Europeans with the Indians; and, at the same time, tried, in the spirit of Las Casas and the first Spanish colonists in the Caribbean, to increase the supply of slaves from Africa. In 1637, to ensure the latter, he sent a naval force across the Atlantic to Elmina. Taken completely by surprise, it fell easily. This was the end of an era, for the Portuguese had been there 160 years. So the daily masses for the soul of Prince Henry the Navigator ended, the Portuguese church was converted into a warehouse (though a new chapel was soon built, as demanded by the Dutch Reformed Church), the rules for the pay and conduct of governor and officers drawn up in 1529 were abandoned, and the daily issue of four loaves of bread to each member of the garrison was forgotten. Salaries, to the local Africans, were thenceforth paid in florins, not reals, and a lay preacher replaced the royal chaplain. The Portuguese had, however, been singularly unsuccessful in converting the local natives, and African Catholics were scarcely to be found outside the region of the castle. So the Dutch conquest meant less to the people of Elmina than might at first have seemed likely.

  The victors thereafter made a determined effort to exclude the Portuguese altogether from the Guinea coast: the other Portuguese fort on the Gold Coast, at Axim, which had been developed recently to produce gold as well as to sell slaves, was surrendered to them in 1642. The pioneers of Western European endeavor in Africa thus retained, in the whole vast region north of the equator, only one recently fortified place on the river Cacheu, a little to the south of the river Gambia.

  Johan Maurits wanted another Dutch fleet to complete the grand designs of the 1620s and capture Luanda. The West India Company was at first reluctant and, instead, Hendrickx Eyckhout was sent out to the Dutch settlements at Loango Bay to increase the supply of slaves from that territory for Brazil. Cornelius Hendrickx Ouwman, who took his place in 1640, found it hard work to do this: only 205 slaves were sent to Pernambuco/Olinda in 1641, though there was no shortage of ivory, redwood, and copper. Dutch naval ships could also still lay their hands on some slaves by seizing Portuguese shipping in the waters of São Tomé or Luanda. But Ouwman, having been in Loango for a year, insisted that only the capture of Luanda could remedy the position. In May 1641, the Brazilian directors of the West India Company at last agreed with the adventurous plan, and a fleet was sent under Admiral Jol. He seized Luanda in August, São Tomé in October, Benguela in December. Now the Dutch in New Holland could surely have access to all Luanda’s sources of captives, including those available from the monarchy of Queen Nzinga which, a director of the new Angolan administration in Luanda, Pieter Mortamer, wrote, was now “overflowing with slaves for sale.” King García II of Congo also aligned himself completely with the new masters, and promised to revive trade with them, though not in slaves, since he had apparently had enough of the practice, as he remarked in unusually modern terms: “Instead of gold and silver and other goods which function elsewhere as money, the trade and the money are persons, who are not in gold or in cloth, but who are creatures.”11

  The man who from the first had opposed this new policy of trading Africans by the Dutch West India Company, Usselinx, now left his home country, determined to found a rival enterprise. He went first to the king of Denmark, Christian IV, and, when rejected in Copenhagen, went to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. That ambitious monarch authorized Usselinx to found “a South Company,” to trade with Africa, which, after Usselinx’s death, also did its best to enter the slave trade.

  The Danes soon became keen to found an Africa company of their own, and, in 1625, a Dutch merchant settled in Copenhagen, Johann de Willum, received a license to operate in the West Indies, Brazil, Virginia, and Guinea, a vast chain of territories which, however, in the seventeenth century, seemed to be one. The partners of the company were only allowed to load their ships at Copenhagen, where all cargoes had to be unloaded on their return. But little happened for the time being.

  • • •

  The Spanish and Portuguese officials in these difficult years of their countries’ defeat, withdrawal, and decay must have realized that the Dutch invaders were merely the precursors of other countries. For example, France had long before these events in Africa put down roots in America—in Canada in 1603 and, in the next generation, in several islands in the Caribbean, beginning in 1625, with Saint-Christophe and Tortuga—the latter in collaboration with some English pirates. In 1627, Bélain d’Esnambuc, acting in the name of Cardinal Richelieu, disembarked on the first island a contingent of 300 Norman emigrants. In 1635, a Company of the Isles of America was established in Paris by François Fouquet, a merchant interested since his youth in North American trade, father of Louis XIV’s financier, Nicolas, and himself a member of the Conseil de la Marine; and Liénard de l’Olive received permission to occupy Guadeloupe and Martinique. These colonizations were completed quickly, and tobacco began to be grown on Guadeloupe in the first year of settlement. Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, the Grenadines, and Grenada were also declared French, though an attempt to consolidate this little empire by occupying the intermediate island of Dominica was obstructed by the Caribs, who perilously survived there.

  The question immediately arose, how were these new colonies to be worked? In 1626, a French company had been formed in Rouen for trade to Sénégal to bring back ivory and gum. Behind this enterprise we detect the influence of Cardinal Richelieu, superintendent-general of commerce and navigation, who was determined to increase the maritime activity of his country. This Compagnie de Saint-Christophe received permission to buy forty slaves. Thereafter, Captain Thomas Lambert of Rouen was to be found frequenting the mouth of the river Sénégal. Soon, two further French companies were formed—one for trade between Cape Blanco and Sierra Leone, the other to operate from Sierra Leone to Cape Lopez. In 1637-38, Lambert’s expedition to the Sénégal reached what became Terrier Rouge, a hundred m
iles up the river, where the French offered iron bars, Indian cottons, linen, brandy, beads, and silver trinkets, for gum, gold, and pepper, but apparently no slaves. Were there moral scruples, were there religious doubts? Did the captains recall how, in the 1570s, a court in Bordeaux had ruled against the possibility of selling slaves there?IV It is not altogether clear. The greatest historian of the Atlantic slave trade, Elizabeth Donnan (whom no student of the matter can think of without gratitude), once wrote: “Just when the French scruples against trading in slaves were discarded is not clear but, by the time that French planters called for negro labour for their growing sugar plantations [say 1640–45], French merchants were willing . . . to provide such labour.”12

  The matter may have been affected by the fact that France still had slaves at home, especially in the navy, and Marseilles still had a slave market. A négrillon of twelve years born in Cartagena de Indias was, for example, buried at Perpignan in 1639.

  Like the Dutch and the French, the English were also beginning to work on the periphery of the great Spanish-Portuguese empire. Thus settlers from London, having made several journeys of reconnaissance, settled in Bermuda in 1609. The English were soon in Virginia and Massachusetts and, in the next few years, founded various Caribbean ventures: in 1625, Barbados, for instance; by 1632, Antigua, Nevis, and Montserrat in the Leeward Islands were considered English possessions.