The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The two nerve centers of the French slave trade in the eighteenth century were Saint-Domingue and Nantes. The former was, of course, the territory on the west of Hispaniola, which had been officially ceded to France by Spain at the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. Thereafter, it experienced an extraordinary rise in its fortunes as a plantation colony, producing sugar principally, to serve the coffee, chocolate, and tea houses of eighteenth-century Europe. In the early eighteenth century, it expected slave ships every other month; by 1750, once a week was more likely. Its success dazzled Paris, whose merchants, bankers, and officials believed that they had not discovered, but created, a real El Dorado.

  The merchants of Nantes were Saint-Domingue’s complement in the home country, for it was they who provided most of its labor. Nantes, neither entirely Breton nor Angevin, nor even part of Poitou, had been, because of its position in the estuary of the Loire, with numerous islands nearby, a promising port for many generations. Set fifty miles from the sea, at a point where the Loire is joined by the Erdre (soon to be canalized in its urban section), the Loire linked Nantes with a valuable hinterland, even with Paris, through the Orléans Canal. But until the mid-seventeenth century, Nantes had limited its commerce to the French coast, with occasional excursions to Newfoundland for fish. Now Nantes entered the international trade with a vengeance. The Compagnie de Sénégal had used that port as the main one for the sale of its goods, and the place soon gained an advantage over other harbors because of its specialization in importing Indian goods, which could then be taken to Africa (especially cottons). In the late seventeenth century, a few slave ships probably left for Africa. One certainly did in 1707. Afterwards, between 1715 and the revolution, Nantes sent out about eight hundred slave ships. Already in the 1720s, it was the main French port for the commerce, being responsible for half the annual French expeditions.

  The family of Montaudoin, headed by the brothers Jacques and René, were the greatest names in this trade in Nantes. They were responsible for half of it from the city for the first few years after 1713.X When some Poor Clares visited René to seek charity, he might open a chest full of gold and say: “Plunge in your hands.”23 The Montaudoins equipped 357 ships between 1694 and 1791. Closest to them in the African trade were the de Luynes, with 182 ships; the Boutelhiers, with 171 ships; and then the Bertrands, the Drouins, the Grous, the Michels, and the Richards. Most mercantile enterprises in these days in Nantes, however, had, as in Bristol or Liverpool, about twelve shareholders.

  Among the interesting leaders of this business was Antoine Walsh, an Irish Catholic immigrant, but one of the most powerful figures of the French slave trade. Altogether he sent fifty-seven expeditions to Africa. He married Marie, a daughter of Luc Shiell, another major slave trader of the early eighteenth century, also of Irish origin (a sister of hers married another famous merchant of Nantes, a Grou). Haughty towards bureaucrats, contemptuous of small sums, Walsh was a romantic Jacobite, as well as a man of commercial vision. His father had carried King James II of England from London to France on one of his ships; and, in 1745, he himself accompanied Prince Charles Edward to the Highlands on another, the Du Teillay. After the ‘45, he saw the great opportunities presented by buying slaves from the African coast then known as Angola—really, the coast of Loango—and, with the help of Parisian bankers (Tourton and Baur, and Paris de Montmartel), he established a company, with a capital of two million livres, to send ten ships in 1749, whose purpose was to carry two thousand slaves to the colony of Saint-Domingue and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Walsh had a reputation for choosing poor crews and for losing many slaves en route, but perhaps that cannot be attributed personally to him.

  Walsh overreached himself. He lived on the elegant Ile Feydeau, an island whch seemed to be anchored to the city of Nantes by two noble bridges; he bought a nearby great property, Serrant, for his brother François-Jacques in 1749, for the then colossal sum of 824,000 livres; and he lost money as the chairman of the Société d’Angola, partly because, in the Americas, slaves from Angola were considered inferior to those from the Gold Coast. Though it failed, Walsh’s Société d’Angola was an original enterprise in that it sought to operate by stationing three large ships permanently off Loango Bay, Cabinda, and Malemba, the purpose of which was always to have European goods available to buy slaves, and from which five vessels would set off for Saint-Domingue. The Société carried, in the end, ten thousand slaves in seven years.

  Dutch merchants were as numerous as Irishmen in Nantes: handling the trade with Northern Europe, they formed a “nation” to such an extent that the Abbé Expilly, in the 1760s, thought it hard to “distinguish the true character of the native population.”24 They provided the merchants of Nantes with much of their regular cargoes: iron bars from Sweden, East India cloths, as well as the always sought-after cowries from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean.

  The sugar brought home to Nantes from the French sugar islands was usually refined nearby. So Nantes could export much sugar: twenty-five million livres’ worth a year, above all to the Dutch, but also to Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, and even to Guinea.

  Another tropical import to be processed at Nantes was cotton. There was a direct connection with Africa. For the first direct link between a slave trader in Nantes and the manufacture of cotton occurred in the late 1720s, when René Montaudoin, the great slaver, a director of the charity of La Sanitat, the Nantes general hospital, suggested that the workshop there should be geared to the manufacture of cottons—partly for use in the slave trade. Later, Montaudoin and some associates set up an annex to that hospital, which they named La Providence, specially to manufacture cotton. The printers of Nantes soon devised methods whereby they could copy on locally produced cloth the Indian designs; and these pretty “indiennes” also played an essential part in the cargoes sent to Africa. Finally, Montaudoin and his friends founded La Grande Manufacture, a factory in the modern sense of the word which made the first dyed cottons; it used indigo from the Americas as a dye. Another new firm in Nantes was the Royal Glass Manufacture, directed at first by Joseph de Wansoul, from Liège, one of whose first purposes was to make bottles for the slave and West India trade.

  Many of these successful merchants in slaves, cotton, sugar, and glass, such as the Grous, bought rural properties within a day’s journey of their countinghouses which not only afforded them the illusion of calm, but enabled the development of vineyards, which were able to produce the cheap brandies needed for the Africa trade. Just so had the Jorges of Seville used their finca at Cazalla de la Sierra to make the wine which they exchanged for slaves in Cape Verde two hundred years before.

  Traders from Nantes tried to obtain their slaves from the Gold Coast and Whydah on the Slave Coast, but the English and the Dutch dominated the first, and trade in the second was for a time in the doldrums after Dahomey’s seizure of it,XI so that the captains of Nantes became more and more interested in the free trade of the coast around Loango Bay. By 1740, about a third of Nantes vessels went to that region.

  Bordeaux, though in the eighteenth century the premier colonial port of France, never approached the activity of Nantes in the slave trade (except in 1802, the year of the Peace of Amiens). Still, in the 1730s, it was sending one slave ship out a year, the Heureuse-Paix, the Henriette, or the Union, mostly owned by a single merchant, Jean Marchais, son of a tailor, with experience of “the islands,” interested in selling wine, as well as “ebony.” Other shipping magnates of Bordeaux began to devote attention to the slave trade after 1750, among them David Gradis, Pierre-Paul Nairac, Isaac Couturier, and Laffon de Ladébat. Most of these merchants were men who came from far afield: from Gigounet, near Castres (Tarn), like Nairac; from Portugal, like Gradis; from Ireland, like Jean Valentin Quin; or from La Rochelle, like Elie Thomas. Nearly all of them were, like their counterparts in Nantes, Catholics, but a few Protestant (Nairac) and Jewish (Gradis, Samuel Alexandre) entrepreneurs also played a part.

  �
�Une seule passion dominait mon père,” a nobleman from Saint-Malo, wrote Chateaubriand, “celle de son nom.”25 But another interest ran that heroic passion close: making money, and particularly from the limited but all the same steady slave trade of Saint-Malo in which Chateaubriand père first served as a captain, of the Apollon, a ship owned by a friend, which carried 414 slaves from various African harbors to Saint-Domingue in 1754, and in which he subsequently engaged himself, as the owner of the Renoncule, captained by his brother, Pierre du Plessis, and the Amarante, which both set off in 1763. La Rochelle, Le Havre, Honfleur, Saint-Malo, Lorient, and Marseilles, in that order, all made contributions to the eighteenth-century French slave trade, each sending over a hundred slaving expeditions to Africa during the century.XII

  As a result of all these African voyages, the number of black Africans living in France grew, as it did in England. In 1691, the Oiseau had arrived in La Rochelle with two slaves from Martinique. They were not sent back, “la liberté étant acquise par les lois du royaume par des esclaves, aussitôt qu’ils touchent la terre. . . .”26 But there was some hesitation about this judgment and, though these two slaves went free, their price (three hundred livres each) was maintained on the list of goods of the captain. A new law of 1716, hastily introduced by the Regent Orléans, enabled masters to keep in France slaves brought home from the colonies. A decree of 1738 refined the conditions in which blacks could be retained. Black slaves in France would be obliged to learn a trade. They could not stay in France more than three years; otherwise they would be confiscated by the king, which might mean that they would go to the galleys of the navy. Nor could these colonials maintain slaves in their French houses. These changes marked a step away from what had seemed France’s refusal to accept the institution of slavery inside her borders: though masters were, in theory, not allowed to sell or even to exchange them in France.

  In Nantes, in consequence, there were soon innumerable black men and women: they seemed, with the children, the parrots, and sometimes the monkeys, in many cases to be part of the family. Slave merchants, living in their fine town houses, with the face of Neptune over the front doors, in the Rue de la Fosse near the docks, or on the more elegant Ile Feydeau, would give such “négrillons” or “négrittes” to members of their households as tips. In 1754, an ordonnance provided that colonials could bring into France only one black apiece. But that rule was often forgotten. At the beginning of the revolution, there were enough “nègres” in Nantes for a black battalion, les hussards de Saint-Domingue: they were a band of executioners, assassins, and pillagers who helped to make the city at that time one of the most bloody in France. Similar small populations of blacks survived in Bordeaux and La Rochelle.

  Between 1721 and 1730, the French shipped fewer slaves than either the British or the Portuguese, but they still were responsible for carrying at least 85,000. During the 1730s, the French were busier. They probably shipped over 100,000 slaves. Between 1738 and 1745, Nantes alone would carry 55,000 slaves in 180 ships, the chief buyers being the nouveau riche planters of Saint-Domingue (about three-quarters of the total) and Martinique (about a fifth).27

  Almost all French ports were allowed to engage in the slave trade after 1741, though this relaxation in no way affected the other Colbertian principles on which the French empire had been set up: neither slaves nor anything else could be sold to other empires.

  • • •

  The Netherlands scarcely seems in conventional history to have been an important Atlantic power in the eighteenth century. But that would not be quite the impression as seen by a trader in slaves. The Dutch still maintained four colonies on the north coast of South America, distant remembrances of the old days, when they had controlled half of Brazil—those on the banks of the rivers Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, as well as the far larger Suriname. During the eighteenth century, the colony on the Essequibo received 15,000 slaves, that on the Demerara (where a serious settlement began in 1746) 11,000, the Berbice 14,000, and the Suriname about 150,000. In addition, the Dutch West India Company developed the tiny Leeward Island of Saint Eustatius as a slave mart, as an addition to and, after a while as a substitute for, their old center of Curaçao. Some slaves were also still carried to Brazil by the Dutch West India Company: perhaps 3,500 between 1715 and 1731.

  Still, that West India Company lost its formal monopoly in Africa in 1734, as in the West Indies in 1738, and Dutch interlopers, now legal free traders, came into their own. Thereafter, any Dutch citizen who wanted to make money trading slaves could do so, on payment of a fee. Many independent firms took advantage of this opportunity, particularly in the late 1740s, when Holland was neutral in the War of the Austrian Succession, leading to a golden time for the Dutch trader. This was the era when merchants from Zeeland, especially Middelburg, moved into the forefront of the traffic. The most important firm there was the Middelburgische Kamerse Compagnie (Middelburg Commerce Company), which sponsored over one hundred voyages to Africa in search of slaves, carrying over thirty thousand of them. About 1750, the Dutch still had their fort at Gorée and, on the Guinea coast, others, at Elmina, Nassau, Axim, Accra, Anka, and Benda. But soon their decision to ally with the enemies of the Ashanti brought them into difficulties, for Ashanti power was every year increasing, partly at least because of the shipment of weapons to them in exchange for slaves initiated precisely by the company.

  The example of the British in entering the slave trade on a major scale was everywhere emulated by nations that looked to them as the economic leaders of Europe. Thus the Danes were further developing their interest in the slave traffic. In 1725, their West India Company began to allow the introduction of slaves into their small islands by private traders. In 1733, they added Saint Croix to their Caribbean possessions, which already included Saint Thomas and Saint John (the latter island acquired in 1719).XIII This new colony was larger than those other holdings, and the economy there was turned over from the production of cotton to that of sugar. Though the government failed to persuade Danish colonists to emigrate (Saint Croix was colonized by English Catholics from Montserrat, led by Nicholas Tuite), it carried on a good trade in illegal slaves to the Spaniards. The sugar plantations also required their own African captives: say, nine thousand in 1755, twenty-four thousand in 1775. A substantial number of the slaves taken to Saint Croix came from elsewhere in the West Indies, instead of direct from Africa. Saint Thomas, mountainous and tiny, was a transit slave camp rather than a plantation island, for which its beautiful harbor, Charlotte Amalie, prepared it. Probably over twenty-five thousand slaves passed through the place in the second half of the eighteenth century.

  Though on a small scale, Danish investors in sugar made fortunes as their counterparts did elsewhere. The Schimmelmann family, who directed the Danish economy during much of the late eighteenth century, accumulated their riches through sugar plantations in Saint Croix. (Henrik Schimmelmann would be minister of finance between 1768 and 1782, his son Ernest after 1784.)

  Finally, among the innovations of these years, an Ostende Company, founded in 1723, showed that the Austrian Netherlands had no intention of being mere spectators in what they assumed was the great international bazaar of African slaves. This re-entry of a Habsburg dominion into the slave trade was not, however, without its sorrows. For example, the Moors of Algiers were continuing their slave operations; and in 1724, a boat from Ostende, bound for Africa, the Keyserinne Elizabeth, was captured at the entry into the Channel by two corsairs, and the crew of one hundred white Europeans was taken to be sold at Algiers.

  • • •

  Despite the activities of the English and the French, the Portuguese remained the largest shippers of slaves across the Atlantic till the 1730s. In 1724, a new Portuguese monopoly company was set up to serve Brazil; between 1721 and 1730, nearly 150,000 slaves were probably carried to the latter colony, just under 80,000 from Mina, just under 70,000 from Angola. The urgent perceived need for slaves in the gold mines in Minas Gerais larg
ely explains this. English manufactures, as well as those brought from India by the Dutch and the English East India companies, which Brazilian gold bought in Lisbon, were ideal goods to exchange for slaves in Angola.

  Only a minority of ships which slaved in Angola now had contact with Portugal: for the trade with Brazil was becoming horizontal, not triangular. As for Africa itself, most of the slaves shipped from Angola now derived from inland, far beyond the tributary kingdom of Ndongo, farther even than Matamba (the monarchy deriving from Queen Nzinga) or the once-violent Lunda in Kasanje. The other monarchies just mentioned, even Kasanje, were now mere corridors through which the slaves passed. Though the wars which marked the first hundred years of Portuguese involvement in Angola were generally over, and though the Portuguese governors were more effective in control of their large territories, there were perpetual disputes between the governors (and other officials sent out from Portugal) and the settlers in Luanda. The latter thought that the governors neglected their responsibilities in order to make fortunes quickly from the slave trade. In the end, Portuguese Angolans were able to persuade Lisbon in 1721 to place a ban on the trading of slaves by the governors in return for substantial increases of salary. Perhaps as a result of these and similar disputes so typical of colonial society in the Americas as well as in Africa, the rate of export of slaves was less in the early eighteenth century than it had been in the early seventeenth: instead of 10,000 a year, the average between 1710 and 1720 was about 6,000.

  In the 1730s, Brazil still received well over 150,000 slaves, mostly (100,000 at least) from Angola, but nearly 60,000 from Guinea (Mina). Rio was still the most important slave-receiving port, taking about twice the number of those sold in Bahia. Buyers in both cities seemed, though, perpetually short of labor: the viceroy there wrote to the governor of Pernambuco, in 1742, that the trade was declining so much “that, unless we find a good means of reorganizing it, I am afraid that it may finish altogether. The consequence would be the ruin of Brazil, which cannot subsist without the service of slaves. . . . The mining people here who come and look for blacks which they need ruin themselves by paying prices both exorbitant and intolerable. The proprietors of sugar mills and the tobacco planters are in the same boat.”28