The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The RAC’s African posts were to be on the Gold Coast: at Cormantine, Cape Coast, Anashan, Commenda, Aga, and Accra. Cape Coast was confirmed as the headquarters, with a garrison of fifty English soldiers, thirty slaves, a resident commander responsible for all English actions in West Africa, and some other officials. The RAC was also soon exploring the possibilities of trade in slaves as far south as the Dutch reserve of Loango Bay; and, though they soon established an interest there, the long-standing liking in the Vili kingdom for Dutch textiles obliged British slave traders to buy their cargoes in Rotterdam or Amsterdam before setting out.

  The RAC was one of the largest early joint-stock companies, combining the idea of incorporation (an ancient method of organization for charitable purposes) with the modern one of the association of capital. But since the sum raised by the company, though large, was less than what was needed to finance the activities envisaged, and since new building was necessary on the West African coast, the company had to borrow from the beginning and interest on this loan accounted for much of the budget. Commerce was not helped by having a royal duke as the chairman. Nor did the king pay what he had offered. In the West Indies, turnover was slow, too, because it seemed necessary to extend credit to planters who bought slaves. Then, to buy slaves on the scale needed to make a profit, the RAC’s captains had to have £100,000 worth of goods per voyage (for example East Indian cloth, Swedish iron bars, Dutch guns, or French brandy) for exchange. They rarely achieved that.

  Another difficulty was that the company, largely an enterprise of London merchants, was from the beginning of its life denounced and often outmaneuvered by interloping merchants and captains from “out-ports”—principally Bristol, a great port from the middle ages onwards which, by 1700, had become Britain’s premier sugar and West Indies harbor. The city’s distilleries and sugar refineries (active as early as 1654), on the river Avon and near Frome, were kept busy by the import of much raw sugar and molasses. (Bristol was also Britain’s chief port for shipping, and kidnapping, indentured servants, many of whom originally came from Ireland.)

  The RAC had, however, its defenders. Thus Charles Davenant, commissioner for excise, probably the ablest economist of the day (son of William Davenant, the playwright), argued that the company was “in the place of an academy, for training an indefinite number in the regular knowledge of . . . the African trade”6: a university of the slave trade, so to say. The Company paid what the biographer of its president, the duke of York, describes as modest dividends in the 1680s.III

  By the end of the seventeenth century, as much as three-fifths of the income of the RAC derived from the sale of slaves.IV Between its foundation and 1689, the company indeed exported just under 90,000 slaves—about 24,000 from the so-called Windward Coast, or the modern Liberia; nearly 20,000 from the Gold Coast; 14,000 from Whydah, on the Slave Coast (an important slave entrepôt from then till 1850); and a little over 10,000 slaves each from Senegambia and Angola. Six thousand slaves came from Benin and the two Calabar rivers. The largest number of these, over 25,000, went to Barbados; nearly 23,000 went to Jamaica (that island’s own enslaved population increased from 550 in 1661 to nearly 10,000 in 1673); nearly 7,000 went to Nevis; and the rest were sold either to the Spaniards or to English North Americans. The RAC sold 75,000 slaves to British North America between 1673 and 1725. These figures would suggest that over 5,000 slaves left Africa every year in ships of the RAC, about 4,000 arriving. In one way or another, the British Caribbean perhaps imported nearly 175,000 slaves in the last twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, instead of a total of under 70,000 in the preceding quarter-century.7

  In 1671, Sir John Yeamans, a Barbados planter of Bristol origin who became the first governor of Carolina, and who indeed founded Charleston, brought slaves from Barbados to clear his plantation on the river Ashley—the first notice of an introduction of slaves to that colony (he was accused of wishing to subordinate Carolina to Barbados, a charge he angrily rebutted, though Carolina for a long time continued in the shadow of Barbados). But some English colonists were also buying from the Spaniards. In 1674, Andrew Percival, who also had a plantation on the Ashley, was even ordered by the colony’s proprietors to “begin a trade with the Spaniards for negroes.”

  The English New Yorkers were even more imaginative: they established, in the first years after the capture of Manhattan, a fruitful relation with the pirates who infested the East India route and had their headquarters at Madagascar. How many slaves were thereby brought by the formidable journey from there may never be known, for these importers never made a legal entry. But several New Yorkers, we know, did well out of this improbable trade. For example, Frederick Philipse (born Flypse), a Dutch entrepreneur, came to America in 1647 from Friesland as a carpenter with the Dutch West India Company. Adolphus Philipse, his son, was described, at the end of the century, as returning in a ship from Madagascar with “nothing but negroes.” Frederick Philipse, who bought the Yonkers plantation and built Castle Philipse, as he also did the manor hall of Yonkers, had his respectability as a long-standing member of the Council of New York bruised by a quarrel, precisely because of his Madagascar trade, with the powerful East India Company. Philipse’s dealings in slaves began in the 1680s, and prospered in the 1690s. That was because of a friendship established by letter with an adventurous New Yorker, Adam Baldridge, who had set himself up on the island of Sainte-Marie, off Madagascar’s east coast. Rum and gunpowder were Philipse’s cargoes for exchange.8

  Philipse had successors, both among the new Anglo-Saxon and the old Dutch merchants of New York, which remained, however, in those days behind both Boston and Philadelphia as the commercially powerful city of the continent.

  These were good years for the RAC. The Gambia Adventurers’ license ended, and the RAC entered into possession of its monopoly. In 1683, the RAC was allowed to raise its prices for slaves, previously fixed at eighteen pounds a head. The company was successfully competing with the Dutch. In West Africa, a new fort was embarked on at a lovely, sheltered bay, Dick’s Cove (Dixcove), to the west of the Dutch ports at Axim and Elmina. Increasingly, English merchants now went direct to the Baltic for Swedish iron and amber, so useful to exchange for slaves in Africa, rather than buying such things in Amsterdam, where prices had increased vertiginously. Glass beads were also obtained directly, in London. The cheap fabric imitating East Indian goods known as “annabasses,” which was popular in Africa, had been bought in Holland till 1677. But after that, the RAC’s Court of Assistants ordered its Committee on Goods—the bureaucracy was already considerable—to promote the manufacture of the stuff in England; and so the twenty thousand or so pieces of this material shipped from England to exchange for slaves in Africa in the 1680s were of English manufacture. The same thing occurred in respect of scarlet cloth and “boysadoes,” a heavy material which had also previously been made in Holland. Birmingham knives and guns manufactured, say, by John Sibley & Co, took over from the Dutch trade. Serges in the Indian style, such as says (once of silk, now of a very fine wool) and perpetuanas (a very durable woolen), were henceforth made in Devonshire, carried by sea from Exeter, and then dyed in London. Thus the RAC stimulated what would become English manufacturing superiority in the eighteenth century.

  The Glorious Revolution of 1688 placed the RAC in a difficult position. Coincidentally, the date was when its exclusive license came to an end, or had to be renewed. But the company could hope for little from the new regime. The removal of royal support was evident. The last instruction to a naval officer to seize interlopers found trading in the area of the company’s monopoly was dated the day that King James left London in early December. Several of the old directors, such as Henry Jermyn, now Lord Saint Albans, fled to France with him. Thereafter, the company limited itself to encouraging interlopers to obtain proper licenses, and trying to persuade them to seek their cargoes to the east of the river Volta, where there were no English forts.

  The RAC traded over sixteen tho
usand slaves between 1690 and 1700. But there was now every year more competition from interlopers. Even Edinburgh was engaged: for example, in 1695, George Watson, first accountant of the newly formed Bank of Scotland, collaborated with the London-based Scottish firm of Michael Kincaird and James Foulkes, and some others (Robert McKerral of Dublin, William Gordon, Alexander Lorimer, who was concerned in Anglo-Dutch trade, and James Foulis, manager of the London branch of the Bank of Scotland), to fit out a slave ship of 120 tons.

  The RAC learned of these activities from their agents, whom they had at almost every port of England, as in the empire: a report by Sir Henry Morgan—the onetime brutal pirate who, by an appointment as curious as it was scandalous, had become lieutenant-governor of Jamaica—explained, with the intolerance of the robber turned policeman, that, “notwithstanding our vigilance, some interlopers do escape and, landing their negroes, distribute them in plantations near adjacent and so avoid seizure.”9 (When Morgan withdrew from Portobelo in 1668, one of his prizes had been a consignment of thirty slaves.)

  The inquiries into the best manner in which to carry out the African trade were extensive. The government received a vast number of petitions from anyone remotely connected with it: clothiers of Somerset, dyers of London, artificers of Bristol, as well as merchants of Virginia and Maryland and planters of Barbados, all of whom inveighed against the company. In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that, in the summer of 1698, the RAC, with only a quarter-century used up out of the presumed thousand years of privilege mentioned in its charter, lost its monopoly. Interlopers henceforth were able to practice as “separate traders.” A new act, giving them legal status, declared, though, that the forts maintained on the Gold Coast by the company were “undoubtedly necessary” and that all who traded to Africa should help in their maintenance. So the separate traders had in theory to pay an ad valorem tax of 10 percent on all exports to Africa—to the RAC, whose position was to some extent preserved. The independent traders were also to pay 10 percent on all direct imports to Britain from northwest Africa between Capes Blanco and Monte. Exports to the Americas, including slaves, were to be free of taxes. In return, traders were to have rights at the company’s forts. Governors and other officials at the forts would, however, be appointed by the Crown, and be paid well enough for them not to be tempted to trade in slaves, an injunction which was never kept.

  The “Ten Percenters,” as the English independent traders came to be known, complained about these “impositions.” The arguments were many and bitter. Taxes were not paid or, if they were, paid late. The tax was altogether remitted in 1712. Thereafter it was the turn of the company to rail at the interlopers’ bad behavior: how could they dare to say that the serge which they offered the Africans was superior to the company’s? Why did they not contribute to the cost of maintaining the forts and factors on the Gold Coast?

  With these changes, Bristol, home of interlopers, fully entered the slave trade—though this is to anticipate, there were to be over 2,000 separate slave voyages to Africa from that port up to 1807.10 Many smaller English maritime towns entered into the business too. All the heroic Elizabethan ports of Devon, such as Barnstaple, Bideford, and Plymouth, sent a slave ship or two in the next few years, as did Lyme Regis and Poole, Dartmouth and Falmouth, Exeter and her neighbor Topsham, Portsmouth and Weymouth, not to speak of Berwick and Whitehaven, as well as Lancaster and Deal, the last of which was the city of the tragic Luxborough, accidentally burned on her journey home from Jamaica, leaving her crew, under Captain Kellaway, to survive in a yawl, eating their (dead) companions’ flesh and drinking their own urine. The Irish ports of Dublin and Belfast, Kinsale and Limerick were also active in the trade in a mild way. Some of these lesser ports had already sent slave expeditions to Africa before this date: the Speedwell of Dartmouth took 170 slaves to Barbados from Mozambique in 1682.11

  The majority of the slaves whom the English carried worked on sugar plantations by the end of the seventeenth century: “The pleasure, the glory and grandeur of England,” Sir Dalby Thomas, the first governor of the English fort at Cape Coast under the new arrangements, would write, “has been advanced more by sugar than any other commodity, wool not excepted.”12

  The success of these changes is borne out by the figures. Ten Percenters would carry 75,000 slaves between 1698 and 1707, as against 18,000 by the RAC. The RAC tried to continue their fight for strict insistence on the rules; in 1699, Charles Chaplin, their man at the new city of Kingston, Jamaica, seized the Africa, James Tanner captain, for not paying the 10-percent tax. But one such action had little effect.

  A characteristic merchant among the Ten Percenters of these years was Isaac Milner of Whitehaven, who moved to London but all the same showed his old home town the way into the African trade. He sent twenty-four expeditions from London or Whitehaven to Africa between 1698 and 1712 and, throughout this time, was an active agitator against allowing the RAC any trace of privilege. He was interested in the wine trade from Madeira and Lisbon, too.

  It was understood that the North American colonies would continue to buy in the Caribbean. None of these English colonies needed slaves as yet on a large scale. But all the same, these captives were beginning to be found in New England. Each of these colonies has its own history.

  For example, in Connecticut, there is little evidence of trading slaves in the seventeenth century; in 1709, the governor wrote to the commissioners of trade and plantations in London: “We have made strict enquiry what number of negroes have been imported June 1698–December 1707, and find that there hath not been one vessel, either of the Royal Africa Company’s or of separate traders, that hath imported any negroes hither in that space of time, nor any since or before, that we can hear of. There are but few negroes in this Government and those we are supplied with [come] from the neighboring provinces, for the most part, except that, sometimes, half a dozen in a year may be imported from the West Indies.”13

  In Massachusetts, as late as 1680, her elderly governor, Simon Bradstreet, had said that the colony had only about 100 or 120 slaves, and added, “There hath been no company of blacks or slaves brought into the Country since the beginning of this plantation, for the space of fifty years, only one small vessel about two years since, after twenty months’ voyage to Madagascar, brought hither betwixt forty and fifty Negroes, most women and children sold here for £15 and £20 apiece.” He must have been referring to slaves brought direct from Africa, for many had by then come into the colony from the West Indies: a French refugee in 1687 reported, “There is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two [slaves]. There are those that have five or six. . . .”14

  New Hampshire, meantime, had nothing in the way of a slave trade till about 1708. In that year, Governor Joseph Dudley wrote, “There are in New Hampshire negro servants to the number of 70. . . . About 20 of them in the nine years past have been brought in. . . .”15 After that there are several mentions of direct journeys to Africa, though the ships concerned were probably based in Boston or Salem.

  Only in 1683 was there news of black slaves in New Jersey. There was then a dispute between the collector of the port of New York and a master who had returned from Madagascar with slaves. The latter thought that, if he brought his slaves to New York, they would be seized; so he took them into Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he sold them.

  Among the so-called border colonies, Virginia had begun a long history as the home of tobacco plantations. Even so, in 1649 she had a mere three hundred slaves. The annual import was fewer than twenty. Her needs were modest and were, for the moment, confined to the requirements for house slaves. The work on tobacco plantations was mostly done, at first, by European indentured laborers. But slaves soon began to play a part. In 1670, Virginia had about two thousand Africans, though there had been no ships importing them for several years. Natural increase must explain the change. That in turn must have been inspired by the Virginia climate or the relatively benign treatment
offered by tobacco planters (characteristics of Virginia throughout its history as a slave-employing territory). Virginia was, however, in 1700 still largely a colony of white yeomanry. Edmund Jennings, acting governor of Virginia in 1708, wrote to the Board of Trade: “ . . . before the year 1680 what negroes were brought to Virginia were imported generally from Barbados, for it was very rare to have a negro ship come to this country direct from Africa.”16 All the same, there was increasing interest. In 1681, William Fitzhugh, an English-born lawyer, planter, and merchant, who died in 1701 leaving fifty-four thousand acres in Virginia, wrote to a friend, Ralph Wormley, also a landowner: “I request you to do me the favour, if you intend to buy any for yourself, and it be not too much trouble to you, to secure me five or six, whereof three or four boys, if you can.”17 In the 1690s, these planters were beginning to find Africans better tobacco workers than the Europeans; and indentured servants were increasingly hard to find. Their plantations were beginning, too, to have the same imbalances between male and female which marked sugar plantations in “the islands,” as well as the same system of allocating slaves of different sexes to live in separate barracks, which obstructed the possibility of family life.