The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The New Sénégal Company, directed by Parisian interests, soon confessed itself ruined. It sold itself to one of its directors, Claude d’Apougny, who shortly organized yet another company. This was explicitly not to meddle with the Guinea Company, which had been successful in maintaining French commercial interests south of the river Gambia. The new body sent out, first, Jean-Baptiste de Gennes, then the formidable André Brüe to Africa to restore the position. Gennes expelled the English from Fort James on the river Gambia, which France held till the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, when it was returned to the English. Brüe, however, built a port at Albreda, on the northern bank of that waterway, long a thorn in the side of the English, and established a trading post also at Vitang Creek, a southern tributary. He then began a long period of successful rule, basing himself at Saint-Louis, at the mouth of the Sénégal, establishing further trading counters, talking to kings and chiefs, trading slaves, exploring the country, and even making friends with the English.

  This increase in the slave trade from West Africa coincided with some turbulent events in the region which the French were beginning to consider their own. Thus a Muslim reform movement led by a prophet-king, Nasir-al-Din, seized power in what would now be thought of as southern Mauritania. A Muslim army swept south over the river Sénégal and, in support, the local Muslims there, previously living in enclaves outside the societies concerned, captured many capitals, such as Jolof and Futa Toro. Opposition to enslavement of Muslims inspired this movement, though doubtless a desire to convert the inhabitants to Islam and to recapture the rich valley of the Sénégal for its own sake played a part. The French, however, allied with the local monarchs, and drove out those whom they saw as usurpers; and Nasir-al-Din was killed in 1673. But the fear of a possible revival of a Muslim threat continued to hang over those desirable northern rivers.

  * * *

  IIn default of indigenous labor, African slaves, especially boys between fifteen and sixteen years old, had learned to dive for pearls, and also to take them to the mainland in large canoes.

  IIThere were in England three such acts: that of 1647, which attempted to ensure that no plantation should allow its products to be shipped save in English ships; that of 1650, which provided that all foreign ships trading with plantations had to be licensed; and that of 1651, the Navigation Act proper, which provided that no goods from Asia, Africa, or America could be imported into any English territory, colonies included, except in English-built ships directed by an English master, and manned by a crew at least three-quarters English in origin. Between 1660 and 1672, further laws provided that most colonial produce had to be sent to England and, on the English ships which carried the goods, three-quarters of the crew had to be English.

  IIIThe first coffeehouse in London seems to have been opened in 1652, teahouses existed by 1658, and chocolate soon followed.

  IVThe Dutch involvement in the Spanish empire at the end of the seventeenth century is discussed in chapter 12.

  VSee page 176.

  11

  Lawful to Set to Sea

  “We hereby for us, our heirs and successors grant unto the same Royal African Company of England . . . that it shall and may be lawful to . . . set to sea such as many ships, pinnaces and barks as shall be thought fitting . . . for the buying, selling, bartering and exchanging of, for or with any gold, silver, Negroes, Slaves, goods, wares and manufactures . . .”

  Witness the King at Westminster the seven and twentieth day of September [1672]

  BY THE KING

  Charter of the Royal African Company

  IN THE YEAR that the Stuarts were restored to the English throne, 1660, that monarchy had already substantial interests in the Caribbean and in mainland America. Jamaica had been captured from Spain in 1655, but the heart of this American empire was still, for the moment, the rich sugar island of Barbados. Its geographical position made it a natural lodge gate to the Americas. It was also a place much used by the North American colonists, who bought all manner of things there, slaves included. Thus, in 1645, the young Reverend George Downing went down from Harvard, as chaplain of a merchantman, and wrote to his cousin, John Winthrop (still governor of Connecticut): “If you go to Barbados, you shall see a flourishing island, [with] many able men. I believe that they have bought this year no less than a thousand negroes and, the more they buy, the better able are they to buy for, in a year and a half, they will earn (with God’s blessing) as much as they cost.”I

  Emmanuel Downing, father of George, then comfortably settled in the port of Salem, Massachusetts, also wrote to Winthrop in 1645, saying, “I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.”1

  At this stage, North American slaves were still few, almost all of them obtained by purchase in the West Indies. One journey, though, was made in 1645 from Boston, Massachusetts, to West Africa, where a certain Captain Smith seized some slaves. But these were afterwards returned, since the merchant concerned apparently did not wish to disturb good commercial relations with Africa by an act of kidnapping.

  In 1651, in the face of what seemed the obvious need for Africans, at least in the Caribbean if not in New England, a new Guinea Company in London was founded, in which, not surprisingly, the chief interloper of recent years, Samuel Vassall, was the major shareowner. Vassall was a Londoner but was, in the sense that so many prominent merchants, especially slave traders, were, also a citizen of the world. Nowadays we take it for granted that private persons and politicians travel; in the seventeenth century, the only people who did so were merchants and seamen; statesmen and monarchs stayed at home. Thus we find Vassall one of the early “incorporators” of Massachusetts. He also collaborated with Lord Berkeley (to whom Burton dedicated his Anatomy of Melancholy) to develop Virginia. Vassall had an adventurous life, being once committed to prison for “seducing the king’s people” (that is, forcing English workers as indentured laborers to embark for the Americas against their will). He had endless debts and lawsuits, and several terms of imprisonment. An MP, for the City of London, he was also a commissioner concerned in the establishment of the Providence plantations in Narragansett Bay.

  The eclipse of the monarchy of Charles I, and the coming of a Puritan administration, had had no effect on the City of London’s desire to make money from slaves; nor did the change in the regime after the Restoration of 1660 alter that ambition.

  The territory in which these Londoners were to trade was smaller than that allowed to their predecessors as monopolists, Nicholas Crisp and his friends: it was limited on the one hand to a stretch of land on the Gold Coast sixty miles on each side of the fort of Cormantine, and on the other hand to the banks of the river Ceberro (by now happily Anglicized as “Sherbro”), near the river Sierra Leone. This company did not prosper, for its ships were attacked at sea by the royalist Prince Rupert, then leading a piratical monarchist fleet to the West Indies in alliance with the Portuguese. They were also attacked by the buccaneer Captain Carloff and his Danes. The losses of the company perhaps reached three hundred thousand pounds.

  All the same, the trading of slaves by London-based ships now started on a regular basis. One instruction of 1651 by the Guinea Company demanded of a captain that he bring back to England “fifteen or twenty lusty negers”—presumably for use at home in England. Another asked a captain to “put aboard . . . so many negers as your ship can carry”—a cargo also apparently for London. Yet a third letter requested, more conventionally, “We pray you buy as many lusty negers as she well can carry, and so despatch her to the Barbados.”2

  In 1660, after the Restoration, a new company, that of the Royal Adventurers into Africa, was founded in London. The impulse for this was given by that same Prince Rupert who, in his days of impecunious exile, had attacked the old Guinea Company’s ships. King Charles, with whom Rupert had quarreled, was anxious to find a role for him, and seems to have been genuinely pleased at the idea of the new venture. For Rupert had been, with his bro
ther Maurice, not only to the Cape Verde Islands and the river Gambia (where Rupert had been wounded), but also to the West Indies, where he fought the Cromwellians at Nevis (Maurice was drowned off that island). They were the first members of a European royal family to go to West Africa; and the last till the nineteenth century.

  This new company was, as was then thought the best economic course, given a monopoly of the English African trade for a thousand years. The Royal Adventurers, each of whom invested £250 in the enterprise, included most of the important cavalier politicians: for example, the king’s friend the duke of Buckingham, and the rich and generous Lord Craven (the benefactor of the “Winter Queen”). Other backers included three members of the future “Cabal,” Lord Ashley, the duke of Albemarle (General Monck), and Lord Arlington, as well as Lords Berkeley (son of Vassall’s partner), Crofts (the duke of Monmouth’s guardian), Jermyn (a prominent Catholic and, despite “his looks of a drayman,” the Queen Mother Henrietta Maria’s cavaliere servente), and Lord Sandwich, the admiral who had brought back King Charles II from exile in Holland. The king’s brother, the unemployed duke of York, became president, and Princess Henrietta (“Minette”), the king’s sister, also had a share.

  There were, in fact, on this list of investors, four members of the royal family, two dukes, a marquis, five earls, four barons, and seven knights. Though the company was managed by a committee of six (headed by Lord Craven), it seemed more an “aristocratic treasure hunt than an organised business.” But once the patentees tried to trade—for gold principally, to begin with, slaves playing a minor role—they found themselves impeded by the Dutch.

  A new charter was issued for the company of Adventurers in January 1663. Shareholders this time again included the king, and the duke of York (with two thousand pounds invested). Among those who had not figured in the list of subscribers three years before were the new Queen Catherine of Braganza (as a daughter of the restored king of Portugal, she should have known all about the African trade: indeed, her colossal dowry of £330,000 was financed by a special levy on Lisbon merchants, including slave tradersII), the Queen Mother Henrietta Maria, and Samuel Pepys. The last wrote: “There was walking in the gallery some of the Barbary Company [Salé in “South Barbary” was the northernmost point where the company could trade], and there we saw a draft of the arms of the company, which the King is of, and so is called the Royal Company, which is, in a field argent, an elephant proper, with a canton on which England and France is quartered supported by two Moors.”3 (A canton is a section of a coat of arms occupying less than a quarter of it.) The young John Locke, philosopher of toleration, then teaching at Oxford, was another subscriber. For the profits which could be made from trading slaves had by then been appreciated in England.

  The commitment by the Court to the African trade was strong. In 1663, it was agreed that some of the gold brought back from the Gold Coast should be turned by the Royal Mint into coins with an elephant on one side. They were popularly called “guineas” from the beginning. Soon established at a rate of twenty-one shillings, the coin was made until 1813, and the unit of currency continued in use till the abolition of the old shilling in 1967.

  Neither the new king nor his brother—the one flippant, the other feeble—had any hesitation about embarking on the same course as their continental brother princes; nor do any of the standard biographies of these self-centered monarchs devote any attention to the matter. They were children of their age. If they ever considered the plight of African slaves, for which there is no evidence, they would have accepted the Catholic Church’s acceptance of the commerce, and supposed that it was better for an African to be in the New World at the behest of a Christian master than in Africa working for an infidel.

  The company set about restoring the English forts on the west coast of Africa, and seeking to recover what the Dutch (or Swedes) had taken. The cost of refurbishment was three hundred thousand pounds. Forty English ships set off for Guinea in the first year. Robert Holmes conquered the Cape Verde Islands, and recaptured Cape Coast and several other Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast, before crossing to seize New Amsterdam, in New Holland, in North America, a city soon after renamed after the leading shareholder in the Royal Adventurers, the duke of York. Cape Coast was hereafter the English headquarters in Africa.

  A quarter of this new African trade was, to begin with, devoted to slaves: in 1665, the company estimated its annual return from gold as two hundred thousand pounds, from slaves as one hundred thousand, and from ivory, wax, hides, woods, grain (pepper) as another one hundred thousand. Lord Windsor, the sickly first civilian governor of the new English colony of Jamaica, was told in 1663 that the company would soon deliver three hundred slaves to his colony; his colleague of Barbados, Lord Willoughby of Parham, was informed that he could expect to receive three thousand slaves annually at seventeen pounds each. The estimate was not far out: in the seven months after August 1663, 3,075 captives were delivered to Barbados.

  The company had assured the king that “the very being of the plantations depends upon the supply of negro servants for their works.”4 So its agents began to trade slaves seriously. Slavery, as an expanding English business, dominated the first formal letter of the company to Willoughby in Barbados. The plan was unfolded of also selling to the Spaniards on a large scale. Spanish merchants were to be allowed to go to Jamaica (from which they had only recently been expelled as masters) or Barbados to buy slaves whom the company would have brought there. That the Crown of England was learning from that of Spain how to profit from the traffic is shown by a rule that ten Spanish pieces-of-eight were to be paid as tax to the government for every slave exported to the Spanish empire.

  These innovations constituted a challenge to the Dutch. Those serious traders still desired to establish exclusive European rights to trade on the coast of Guinea. To confirm their rights, they sought to bring the rulers in Africa to their side by presents, and bribes. Hence what the English call the Second Dutch War, inspired by rivalries over the slave trade as much as anything else. Admiral Ruyter, greatest of Dutch admirals, soon reconquered most of the forts on Guinea, and established Fort Amsterdam on the site at Cormantine. The English company lost money, and failed to provide the planters in the West Indies with anything like the number of slaves which they had come to believe they needed. Prices rose: whereas formerly the slaves had been bought for twelve to eighteen pounds each, they were now sometimes sold at thirty pounds.

  There were many demands for a free trade in slaves. In 1667, Lord Willoughby in Barbados added his support when he said that, unless English captains were allowed to go to Guinea for blacks as and when they liked, the plantations would be ruined.

  In fact, with the Adventurers in parlous financial straits (they owed a hundred thousand pounds to creditors by 1668), licenses began to be sold to private individuals to trade within the monopoly. For the next five years, the greater part of the English trade was to be in the hands of such independent merchants; and they never forgot the advantages which they then enjoyed.

  In an effort to gain efficiency, the Adventurers founded a daughter company, the Gambia Adventurers, to exploit the rivers Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Sherbro. Though that was a success, by 1668 the original Adventurers, ruined by the Dutch war (“beaten to dirt . . . to the utter ruine of our Royall Company,” as Samuel Pepys put it), were scarcely much more than a holding company, in which the English interest in Africa was vested, being pressed for a mere £57,000 by their creditors.5 They did what trading they could through the ubiquitous Afro-Portuguese lançados who still dominated the banks of the river Gambia.

  The troubles of the Royal Adventurers continued, so much so that in 1672—a year when half Lombard Street seemed to be ruined—the company was wound up and, in its place, the Royal African Company (hereinafter RAC) founded: it paid £34,000 for the assets of the Adventurers, with which money the old company would pay off its creditors at 8s in the pound, its shareholders at £2 a head. The histor
y of these English companies was, therefore, very similar to that of the comparable enterprises in France. The new RAC would retain its predecessor’s handsome premises, Africa House, in Broad Street (later they moved to Leadenhall Street), and some of the staff remained the same, as did many of the shareholders. But there was a new flotation, and 200 people subscribed the large sum of £111,600. Though the RAC desired to import gold, ivory, dyewood, hides, and wax, it was more concerned with slaves from the beginning than the previous company had been. Its charter, like that of its predecessor, gave it a license for trade lasting a thousand years—a thousand years of carrying gold to England and Africans to America would surely enrich a multitude. The boundaries of its operations were also wide: from Cape Blanco in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south.

  The charter had some engaging provisions. The RAC was required to provide the king and his successors with two elephants whenever they should set foot in Africa (they never did). The company would also have a monopoly of all African trade till 1688 and, thereafter, it would be able to extract a fee from other English traders on the coast.

  The governor, and largest shareholder, was James, Duke of York. Thus the company maintained the royal connection which the Adventurers had had. But there were in this company more merchants than noblemen. The directors also included four proprietors of plantations in Carolina (Lord Shaftesbury—the minister, to whom Britain would owe the Habeas Corpus Act—and Lord Craven; Sir George Carteret, commissioner for trade and plantations; and Sir John Colleton, a landowner in Barbados as well as Carolina), as well as the ever-active Lord Berkeley, “the first peer . . . to collect directorships.” The shareholders included fifteen of the lords mayor of London in the years between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, twenty-five sheriffs of London and, like the Royal Adventurers, the philosopher of liberty, John Locke (he took £400 of stock to begin with, and £200 more in 1675).