The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The slaves who made these transformations possible were, in the first instance, mostly brought by English planters from the Dutch, but then they began to be carried in ever-greater numbers by English traders themselves, in circumstances to be discussed in the next chapter.

  The conversion of the Caribbean into the archipelago of sugar which it remained for two hundred and more years was largely a French and English enterprise; but, in the beginning, it was inspired by Dutch ideas deriving from Brazil, and it was powered by slaves made available by Dutch merchants.

  The investment in slaves and sugar equipment was so great, the strategic risks seemed so considerable, and the need for a regular supply of slave labor was so compelling that all the main colonizing nations organized privileged national companies of the kind which seemed such a success in the case of Holland. Private traders, it was thought, would build no forts in Africa, much less keep them up; would pay no taxes, make impolitic agreements with African rulers, and then perhaps betray them, to the home country’s disadvantage. So not only the French and the English developed these enterprises, in emulation of the Dutch, but even small polities, such as those of the king of Denmark, and the duke of Courland, in the Baltic States, established companies which combined African with West Indian interests. These companies soon developed bureaucracies of a kind not seen again till the advent of the great nationalized businesses of the early twentieth century.

  Thus the Caribbean and the slave trade came to be a treasure house of three monopolies. First, sugar was the dominant crop. Second, the colonies were formally supposed to trade exclusively with their own home countries: “to be immediately dependent on their original parent,” as an English pamphleteer of the eighteenth century, Malachy Postle-thwayt, put the matter. And third, the trade of the countries concerned with its colonies was supposed to depend on a national monopoly company. To protect these “mercantilist” colonies, every country had its version of the British Navigation Laws, which aimed to ensure that nothing in the colonies could be bought which was not made in England: neither a hat nor a hammer. Governments, anxious for popularity among the business community, also supported the Atlantic trade: for example, from 1651 to 1847, British West Indian producers were protected by duties against “foreign sugar” coming into England.II

  Colbert’s “colonial system” in France was the most elaborate of these schemes. It was based on the notion that colonies were to be economic children whose interests were to be entirely subordinate to the fatherland. The dependencies would produce sugar or, later on, coffee, or perhaps indigo, for the home market. That production would require black slave labor. Nothing else would suffice. The colonies were not to produce anything other than things specifically agreed with the government at home and, in general, the colonists would depend on goods produced at home for their survival. Nobody in the colonies could make anything for sale. Nor could currency be imported into the colonies. Instead, a theoretical Caribbean currency was devised: a recipe for both inflation and the surreptitious use of foreign coin, such as Spanish pieces of eight. The principle was “l’exclusif”: French colonies could “exclusively” trade only with France, and in French ships.

  Planters protested. Naturally, and in all the empires there were numerous acts of defiance by private or independent merchants. Dutch and British captains, as adept in those years at breaking other nations’ laws as their own, became specialists above all in smuggling slaves, but also other goods, into the Spanish colonies, whose masters in Madrid had still no African possessions.

  The reason for the sudden interest in sugar in Europe requires an explanation. The usual one is that in Britain, Holland, and France, every day richer, the rise in demand derived from the cult in the 1650s of drinking coffee, tea, and chocolate, and that that itself led to a growth in the processing of sugar.III Yet tea, coffee, and chocolate were taken in their original habitats without sweetening.

  The truth seems to be that, in the seventeenth as in the twentieth century, the desire for sugar, in milk as in tea, is strong among poor people in the first step of their rise from primary indigence. A report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1961 declared: “The large increase in consumption that takes place in low income countries as soon as personal income rises can be related apparently to the double function which sugar performs . . . first, a source of calories . . . [and second] as an appetising element, in a generally drab and almost always monotonous diet. . . . Sugar is craved because it adds taste, variety and attractiveness. . . .”9 Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America were in the seventeenth century for the first time experiencing the charms of this product on a grand scale. It was not only the classic beverages which gave sugar its frame: rum had a wonderful history of success in Britain; so did jam.

  Conditions on the plantations growing sugar were harsh. The condemnation can be made equally of Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, and later, Spanish sugar plantations. As early as 1664, a French priest, Antoine Biet, expressed his horror at the beatings in Barbados given by English overseers to slaves for the slightest offense.10 But the French acted similarly: it is childish to suppose that any nation conducted itself much “better” than its rivals. During the long eight-month sugar harvests, slaves were everywhere sometimes forced to work continuously for almost twenty-four hours. The length of the working “day” also increased the risk of accidents deriving from the primitive machinery. Sometimes, to begin with, slaves on these new plantations (in Cayenne, Guadeloupe, Barbados, and Jamaica, say) were allowed to build houses for themselves and live with their wives and even to form families. But as plantations became bigger, these possibilities diminished. The captives began to live as if they were soldiers in a barracks; women were few, for the planters considered that they were too weak to be effective in the canefields, and too expensive to maintain if they had children.

  The Dutch inspired, and served, this confederation of sugar in its first days. They still had, in their West India Company, the oldest, apparently the best-managed, and the richest of the monopoly companies. They had a fine line of forts in both Northwest Africa (Gorée, Arguin) and in the Gulf of Guinea, above all at the old Portuguese master-castle of Elmina, and, although gold was still the main export from the last-named, more and more slaves every year derived from there or from the next-door Slave Coast to the East. In the pursuit of gold from the Gold Coast, Dutch traders continued to import slaves as porters for African mines, as the Portuguese had done, both from the Slave Coast, and from Angola. In 1679, the Dutch West India Company was discussing ways of increasing shipments of slaves, with the Loango coast designated as the most important area for development. With that in mind, they planned new trading posts at the two small ports of Malemba and Cabinda, each with a factor and a small staff. Perhaps, they hoped, four thousand slaves could be shipped from there every year. A warship would be sent to the coast to seize interlopers, foreign or Dutch. In fact, though, the idea of a permanent establishment at Loango was abandoned as soon as it was conceived. By the turn of the century, Dutch traders were still trading for slaves in that region from boats anchored offshore.IV

  • • •

  France was also beginning to see an ever-greater need for slaves in the West Indies and even in Canada. Thus, in 1643, a new Company of the Isles of America had been formed to manage the French possessions in the Caribbean, and it contracted with a Rouen merchant, Jean Rozer, for sixty Africans to be delivered at the harbor of Guadeloupe at two hundred livres each. The first governor-general of the French islands on behalf of this company, Charles Houel, later said that he had paid for these slaves out of his own pocket, and unsuccessfully demanded the entire island of Marie-Galante as compensation, since the company seemed unwilling to recompense him.

  Meantime, French smugglers, with the support of the Crown, had begun to make temporary settlements in Western Hispaniola. Finding the land fertile, they established plantations there. Thus what became the French col
ony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) began its brilliant but ultimately tragic history. (The French position was recognized formally by Spain when, at the end of the century, the influence of France was at its most potent in Madrid.) Years of great prosperity lay ahead.

  Yet, in the 1660s, the French West Indies hardly seemed promising. The Company of the Isles went bankrupt, and most of its possessions were sold off to private people, who ran them as little duchies under the French Crown. The first Caribbean island to be colonized by France, Saint-Christophe, was even bought by the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. There were other eccentricities.

  Still, in 1664, a more effective Company of the Western Islands was founded by the protectionist statesman Colbert. This enterprise was intended to manage all French activities both in the Caribbean and in Africa. It bought out the dangerously independent private owners: France could scarcely have allowed a new feudal regime to establish itself in her empire just when she was busy reducing the power of nobles at home. To cover the initial investments, the company raised three million livres from private investors; another three million were promised from the king personally; the state contributed another two. One essential task was to deliver slaves to the colonies.

  Despite the egoistic nationalism symbolized by the expression “l’exclusif,” already mentioned, the new company immediately arranged that the first slaves would be delivered to the French Antilles by that Danish adventurer, Henrick Carloff, who had so successfully chased out the British from Cabo Corso.V He agreed to deliver slaves for six years from his private forts in Guinea: he would give the company 7 percent of them as a tax; and he would sell the rest, in French possessions, just as he liked.

  The scheme proved inadequate to the demand. Carloff was a man of vast schemes, never fulfilled. Once again, the Dutch West India Company, and Dutch interlopers, too, were asked to sell slaves to the French colonists without impediment. (Interlopers from the Netherlands made fourteen thousand sales between 1688 and 1725.) In 1669, Colbert decided to try again to exclude the Dutch from the French islands. So several French slaving expeditions were sent to the river Sénégal, with government backing: there was, for example, that of Jean Clodoré, himself the governor of Martinique, sieur d’Elbée, commissaire de la marine, who left a vivid account of his experiences.11 In 1670-72, the carrying capacity of the French slave trade was officially a thousand a year. That figure suggests how many illegal slaves were being carried, for the real number of imports from all sources, including from French interlopers, approached five thousand. The merchants responsible for the increase were principally from La Rochelle, still the leading French Atlantic port in these early years of the traffic; it began to dispatch vessels to Africa for slaves in 1643 and, between 1670 and 1692, sent forty-five such ships. But other ports were also involved: André l’Espagnol, for instance, sent the Pont d’Or from Saint-Malo in Brittany in 1688; and Bordeaux dispatched her first slave ship, the Saint-Etienne, to Africa in 1672, with a captain from Honfleur on board, with some of the king’s counselors in Paris being among the investors. The Hamel brothers were similarly active in Dieppe.

  In 1672, partly as a result of this lively illegal trade, Colbert lost patience with the company and it in turn lost its right, and its obligation, to sell slaves. Next year, a new company was formed, the first of many companies to be named “de Sénégal,” being headed by a group of Parisian entrepreneurs (Maurice Egrot, François François, Claude d’Apougny, and François Raguenet). This body bought the ownership of French facilities in northwest Africa, mainly the fledgling forts or trading posts on the river Sénégal. The change marked the end for the moment of the French government’s efforts to organize trade with all Africa and the Caribbean through one large company.

  The new arrangements worked better. Between 1675 and 1700, Martinique may have taken forty thousand slaves, Guadeloupe eight thousand, and the new (still formally illegal) settlement of Saint-Domingue over seven thousand. France’s equally new mainland colony of Cayenne (French Guiana) perhaps took two thousand.

  To ensure that these colonies received their slaves, Jean, count of Estrées (nephew of Gabrielle, the beautiful mistress of Henri IV), seized the strategically well-placed island of Gorée, just south of Cape Verde, from the Dutch in 1677. The brilliant young Captain Jean Ducasse captured the old Portuguese fort of Arguin in 1678. Two thousand slaves a year was now declared as the goal for carriage in French slave-trade companies these years, but it was a target never met.

  The new Sénégal Company, after six successful years, was enlarged and given new responsibilities: a monopoly of the whole African coast. That was its downfall. For, like its predecessors, it failed to cope with these extensions of authority and, overextended, and with too many officials in Paris, went bankrupt.

  Colbert sought then to found yet another new company, formed of civil servants, not merchants—he had an extraordinary enthusiasm for bureaucracy—but that, too, was inadequate. Ships sank, pirates captured other vessels, captains remained unpaid, planters failed to pay or paid late, many slaves died. In 1681, the new company also declared itself bankrupt. It handed over its assets to one more monopoly company, “la Nouvelle Compagnie de Sénégal.” This enterprise started its brief life with a capital of six hundred thousand livres. But it soon faced fresh debts, fresh crises. In 1682-84, its captains were carrying annually 1,520 slaves from the region of the river Sénégal, but that was its best performance. Further, its zone of activity was, in 1684, restricted to trade north of the river Gambia, for a “Compagnie de Guinée,” headed by Colbert’s son, Jean-François, the Jesuit-educated marquis of Seignelay, was set up to trade south of that landmark. In selling slaves in the West Indies, the two new companies cooperated. But the new company of Sénégal still seemed incapable. French private investors were unenthusiastic. If they were interested in the slave trade, they preferred to back interlopers. Funds, therefore, for the companies could only be gained by borrowing from the Crown, a stratagem which demonstrated their lack of independence. In 1685, to confuse matters exceedingly, a supplementary Sénégal Company was founded, with instructions to furnish a thousand slaves annually to the West Indies, receiving the right to trade south of the Gambia for twenty years. Five years later, the French Antilles boasted twenty-seven thousand slaves (mostly working in one or other of the four hundred or so sugar mills), alongside fewer than twenty thousand French settlers and a mere fifteen hundred free blacks or mulattoes. One or two thousand slaves were brought into these colonies every year in the late seventeenth century, probably three thousand in the early eighteenth.

  The Sun King himself, Louis XIV, had by now entered the debate. He asked his council in Paris in 1685 whether two thousand slaves could really be needed annually in the West Indies. The reply was that two thousand slaves did indeed constitute the minimum needed, particularly since expansion was always occurring. King Louis then suggested that French vessels should simply be sent to the Cape Verde Islands, where they would buy slaves from the Portuguese, as the Spaniards had often done, and go thence to the Indies. But the colonists insisted, in petitions, that the easiest solution to their problems was to be allowed to buy slaves in other islands in the Caribbean. The king was unenthusiastic, but soon that plan was privately if illegally accepted, war with Holland making it in many ways inevitable. Ducasse, the victor of Arguin, now governor of Saint-Domingue, was told that, because of the war, he might find slaves wherever he liked.

  The king should have known all about the capacity of slaves, for his own galleys were still powered by them. Thus, in 1685, Michel Misserel, an enterprising merchant of Toulon, engaged himself to supply 150 Turks for those galleys. They had to be between eighteen and forty, and in good health. The French consul in Candia acted as an agent for the king in providing most of these. In 1679, the Company of Sénégal provided 227 African slaves for the same purpose. The racial mixture was looked on as unimportant: at that time, the French royal galleys contained Russians, Poles, and Bulgars, as
well as blacks. Some of the Turkish soldiers captured by the Austrians after the siege of Vienna ended their days in these vessels, and there were two thousand helping with the fortifications at Cádiz; earlier in the seventeenth century, the Turks had enslaved hundreds of Christians after their victories in Hungary and the Balkans.

  Meantime, the French Crown was begged by its governor in Canada, the viscount of Denonville, to authorize the direct shipment of slaves from Africa to his colony. The attorney-general in Paris, Ruette d’Auteuil, supported him. For Denonville had, he said, failed to carry out his instructions to turn the savage indigenous Indians into Frenchmen; on the contrary, the settlers in Quebec were every day becoming more savage. Ruette thought that only the provision of Africans could reverse the tendency. The governor believed that the survival of slaves in New England and New Netherlands proved that Africans could sustain Canadian winters. They could be kept warm on the Saint Lawrence in coats of beaver skin, which the traders would naturally be delighted to sell to the planters. The king supported these ideas, but the traders never did much: French Canadians could not afford many African slaves, and most of the slaves whom they owned in the early eighteenth century were Indians.