The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Aristocrats, such as the duke of Chandos in London, the father of the writer Chateaubriand in Saint-Malo, and the Espivents and de Luynes of Nantes (though the latter originated in Orléans), were frequently involved. Many independent merchants in France were ennobled because of their mercantile success, as happened in the case of nearly all the biggest slave merchants of Nantes. Philip Livingston of New York, grandson of the founder of Livingston Manor, and John van Courtlandt, who descended from Stephanus van Courtlandt, proprietor of a vast Hudson River property, should surely be accepted as aristocrats in a broad sense.

  • • •

  None of these slave merchants financed more than a hundred voyages to Africa for slaves. The maximum probably would have been the eighty organized by the Montaudoin family of Nantes. Out of over 1,130 négriers in France in the eighteenth century, more than half sent only one or two expeditions to Africa, and only twenty-five families invested in over fifteen voyages.8

  Several slave merchants testified before British inquiries into the business during the late 1780s or 1790s. They contributed details about what was happening, but few general reflections. If they had had the time to consider the matter, they would surely have agreed with the much-repeated view of (among others) Jean Barbot, the Huguenot who traded slaves in the 1680s that, however unpleasant it was to be a slave in the Americas, it was better than to be one, or even to be a free man, in Africa. They would have accepted too the declaration of Sir Dalby Thomas, the English commander of Cape Coast Castle, who, in 1709, in an essay entitled “A True and Impartial Account of What We . . . Believe for the Well Carrying On of This Trade,” gave a bleak picture of morality in Africa: “The native here has neither religion nor law binding them to humanity, good behaviour, or honesty. They frequently, for their grandeur, sacrifice an innocent man. . . .” He thought that “the blacks are naturally such rogues, and bred up with such roguish principles, that what they can, they get, by force or deceit. . . .”9 Even more violent judgments were made in France: “At bottom, the blacks are naturally inclined to theft, robbery, idleness, and treason. In general, they are only suited to live in servitude and for the works and the agriculture of our colonies,” wrote Gérard Mellier, mayor of Nantes in the late eighteenth century.10 William Chancellor, surgeon on Philip Livingston’s Wolf, wrote in 1750 that the slave trade was a way of “redeeming an unhappy people from inconceivable misery.”11

  One or two doubts occurred, all the same, to some prominent North American slave traders. A few Quakers in Philadelphia in the early eighteenth century questioned the ethics of what they were doing—but many of them (such as Jonathan Dickinson and Isaac Norris) continued trading slaves nonetheless. In 1765, Stanislas Foäche wrote home to Le Havre from Saint-Domingue, “La vente [of slaves] m’a donné de cruelles inquiétudes, elle a achevée de me faire blanchir. . . .”12 That reflection did not prevent him from remaining a dealer in slaves in the doomed colony for another twenty years. In 1763, Henry Laurens, the largest slave merchant of Charleston, South Carolina, who, a few years before, had been openly talking of making “a glorious sale of the cargo,” wrote to John Ettwein, future Moravian bishop of North America, to say that he had often “wished that our economy and government differed from the present system but, alas—since our constitution is as it is, what can individuals do? Each can act only in his single and disunited capacity, because the sanction of laws gives the stamp of rectitude to the actions of the bulk of the community. If it were to happen,” Laurens went on, “that everybody . . . were to change their sentiments with respect to slavery, and that they should seriously think that the saving of souls [was] a more profitable event than the adding of house to house and laying field to field . . . those laws which now authorise the custom would be instantly abrogated. . . .” Later, Laurens abandoned the trade, explaining to William Fisher, a merchant of Philadelphia, to whom he had often sold rice, that he did so “principally because many acts [were reprehensible], from the masters and others concerned, from the time of purchasing to that of selling them again. . . .” Laurens was the first prominent person from the South of what soon became the United States to express any compunction about the slave traffic: “I hate slavery,” he later told his son, John, one of the heroes of the Revolutionary War, in 1776. But that was after he had made his fortune.13

  At much the same time, in 1773, Moses Brown resigned from the family firm of Brown of Providence, became an abolitionist and freed his own slaves; he often attacked his brother John for remaining in the business.IV Then, in 1788, the son of a prominent slave trader of Bordeaux also turned against the traffic in a sensational way.V But these instances are as nothing against such a vast background of commitment, justification, and neglect of humane consideration.

  Most merchants in these slave ports knew the nature of their cargoes. Thus Nantes had a large black population in 1780, including several hundred captives introduced as a result of recent laws making slavery legal in France. The population of Liverpool in 1788 included about fifty black or mulatto boys and girls, mostly not slaves but the children of African merchants who had sent them to England for their education. There were more blacks in Bristol, and far more still in London, some free, most of them living in limbo between liberty and bondage. Middelburg in Zeeland, the biggest slaving port in eighteenth-century Holland, also had its black minority, as did, on a larger scale, Lisbon and Seville. In North American slaving ports there were also slaves but, except in Charleston, fewer than might have been supposed. For example, there were merely seventy-three in Bristol, Rhode Island, very few owned by the family which became, in the 1780s, the dominant one in both the trade and the town, the de Wolfs.

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  The typical slave voyage is assumed to have been triangular. That geometric figure is supposed to have been emblematic of its special character. But there were many exceptions, such as the journeys made directly between Brazil and Angola. There were also numerous direct voyages between the English North American colonies and Africa in the late eighteenth century, and similar journeys later still between Cuba and Africa. For the first hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade, the Portuguese, as has been shown, sailed between Lisbon and different harbors in Africa; they carried some slaves from Benin to Elmina, or to São Tomé or the Cape Verde Islands. Many expeditions in the eighteenth century ended with the sale of the ship in the West Indies, or its return to Europe in ballast. Still, the classic journey, probably responsible for three-quarters of all the voyages, was one which began in Europe, picked up slaves in Africa in exchange for European manufactures, carried the slaves to the Americas, and then returned to Europe with certain tropical American goods which slaves would probably have helped to harvest.

  In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had founded this commerce by using single-decked caravels, with square or lateen sails, of fifty to a hundred tons’ burden. Each would have been able to carry about 150 slaves. They used even smaller vessels—of, say, twenty to twenty-five tons—for trading slaves between Benin and Elmina, Benin and São Tomé, or even São Tomé and Elmina. The Portuguese also had some vessels as big as 120 tons: three-masted, square-rigged roundships. Ships in the small-scale Spanish slave trade from the Barbary Coast to the Canary Islands in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were probably between thirty-five and forty tons, able to carry no more than about forty slaves each.

  A typical slave ship sailing from, say, European ports to Africa and the West Indies would not, in the eighteenth century, have been a specialized vessel. Rather, it would have been a typical wooden cargo vessel, perhaps in the seventeenth century a flute ship (a half-armed ship of war) and, in the eighteenth, a square-rigger with three masts, two complete decks, and fine lines. All slave ships had hulls, some had castles, a few were fast, and others just maneuverable. In the mid-eighteenth century, vessels from the merchant fleet of the country concerned were used as opportunity offered and, where necessary, adapted. Every ship was in its way a work of art of c
omplexity, joinery, and design, in which several different woods would have been creatively combined as if the carpenter had been a cabinetmaker. The ships of Clément Caussé of La Rochelle, for example, were masterpieces. All ships were subject to damaging attacks by barnacles or shipworm, for only in the late eighteenth century did ships of Northern Europe begin to be given copper hulls: an innovation which not only protected vessels from shipworm but increased their speed.

  A French slave vessel of about 1700 would have been between 150 and 250 tons’ burden, 80 to 90 feet long, 20 to 25 feet wide, 65 to 75 feet on the keel, with 10 to 12 feet of hold—that is, the size of an average modern fishing schooner. British ships were usually smaller. Slave ships could easily have been bigger and carried more slaves, but the nature of coastal and riverine trading in Africa dictated a range of 100 to 200 tons. At the end of the eighteenth century, the best-known shipbuilder of Nantes, Vial de Chabois, would declare that the ideal négrier was between three and four hundred (old) tons, with ten feet of hold, and four feet, four inches between decks. To show the diverse character of the trade, however, the ships of the asentista Baltasar Coymans should be recalled: they ranged from the Profeta Daniel, of 430 tons, to the Armas de Ostende, of 31.

  A high proportion of British slave ships, nearly half the total, were prizes, obtained easily at the conclusion of wars, the rest being built in British shipyards. In the 1790s, about 15 percent of all British shipping was intended for the Guinea trade, and almost all of that concerned slaves.

  The typical European slave ship, if such a vessel can be hypothesized, would by 1780 still have been less than two hundred tons’ burden. Its owners would not expect it to make more than about six voyages to Africa, or indeed to last more than about ten years: only one vessel out of nearly eight hundred which sailed from Nantes between 1713 and 1775 both made six journeys and lasted ten years. This was the Vermandieu, belonging to N. H. Guillon, which was active between 1764 and 1775. The longest-lasting Dutch ship was the Leusden, which made ten voyages between 1720 and 1738, and carried nearly 7,000 slaves. Ships from Brazil to Angola generally made even fewer voyages—an average of two per ship—though one or two made more than twelve; and four ships belonging to the Pernambuco Company made over ten voyages, one of them, the elaborately named Nuestra Senhora da Guia, San Antonio e Almas, twenty.

  To begin with, all the Portuguese ships which dominated the early slave traffic had the names of virgins or saints; how many Our Ladies of Misericordia or of Conceição, São Miguels, and São Tiagos traversed the green sea of darkness in that epoch we shall never know exactly. In the eighteenth century, those names still held their lead among Portuguese and Brazilian ships: out of forty-three ships which carried slaves under the flag of the Company of Grão-Pará and Maranhão, all had the names of saints except for two (those were the Delfim and the Africana); and, out of fifty ships of its sister Pernambuco Company, all but ten had religious names. In one list of slave ships to Bahia, Nossa Senhora appeared 1,154 times, with fifty-seven different suffixes, above all Nossa Senhora de la Conceição (324 times); while male saints were used 1,158 times, of whom San Antônio (of Padua, but with his identity moved to Lisbon) was the most popular (695 times). Bom Jesus appeared 180 times (above all, the Bom Jesus do Bom Sucesso).

  After 1800, however, pagan deities became frequent among Portuguese and Brazilian ships—Diana, Venus, Minerva, Hercules appearing often—while religious names declined. (In the nineteenth century, they would appear on the Bahia list only a few dozen times out of 1,677 voyages.)

  In the Anglo-Saxon world, the most frequent names of ships were Christian names, especially girls’ names, sometimes, in the comfortable Anglo-Saxon way, with a qualification: the Charming Sally, for instance. In the three years 1789, 1790, and 1791, 365 ships left Liverpool, London, and Bristol to go slaving in Africa; of these, 121 had girls’ names, Mary, Ann, Margery, Diana, Hannah, Fanny, Isabella, Ruby, and Eliza being the most popular. But sometimes there were more sophisticated Anglo-Saxon designations; for example, the Othello, owned by William and Samuel Vernon of Newport. The Reformation and the Perseverance also appeared; both belonged to Quakers, one to the Dickinsons in Philadelphia, the other to the Galtons of Birmingham.

  In France, however, most ships received the name of some kind of quality. Thus over a quarter of the slave ships leaving Bordeaux were called the Confiance, the Coeurs-Unis, the Paix, or some such concept. Neither the Amitié (one belonging to Rasteau, in La Rochelle) nor the Liberté (one belonging to Isaac Couturier, in Bordeaux) was unknown. But even in France, feminine Christian names were the second-most-frequent appellations: a fifth of them in Bordeaux, again commonly, as in England, with a qualifying adjective: the Aimable-Cécile or the Aimable-Aline. Among the last slave ships sailing from Nantes before the revolution in Saint-Domingue were the Cy-Devant, the Nouvelle Société, the Soldat Patriote, the Ami de la Paix, and the Egalité. The last vessel before the revolution closed down business for a time was the Subordinateur, belonging to Haussman & Company.

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  Portuguese vessels in the early days might have about twenty officers and men on the small caravels, and sometimes sixty on a nau. Matters changed over the years. Assuming a burden of 150 tons in the late eighteenth century, the captain, officers, and crew might number thirty on an English ship, while there could be forty-five on the somewhat larger Dutch or French ships. These crews would undertake formally to serve, obliging themselves to obey the captain as if he were their commander in battle. They must have realized that their chances of survival were poor: worse than those of their slave cargoes.

  On early Portuguese ships, there would always be a notary, to supervise the trade and prevent illegal trading.

  The crews on French ships were more numerous at the beginning of the eighteenth century than at the end. Thus, in 1735, the Victorieux, of Nantes, belonging to Antoine Walsh’s father-in-law, Luc Shiell, 250 tons, employed ninety-nine crew members, or one man per two and a half tons. In the late eighteenth century, the proportion was more likely to be one man per five tons, as it usually was in England.

  The captain on an English slave ship would probably be paid £5 a month (100 to 200 livres in France). René Auguste de Chateaubriand of Saint-Malo, on the Apollo in 1754, received 150 livres and also gained a 5 percent on bonus slaves delivered live: a rather high percentage, for a bonus of 1 or 3 percent was normal. The other officers, the mates, the surgeon, and the cooper and carpenter would all receive between £1 and £4 a month. As to the crew, experienced seamen might be paid £2 a month, inexperienced ones 30 shillings, boys £1 only. Half of these wages would customarily be paid in advance, before leaving home, the rest “at the port of delivery of the said vessel’s negroes in America in the currency there.” On ships from other European countries, payments would be similar. On all vessels, coopers were well paid, because of the need to carry so much water: three hundred barrels, say. Carpenters, whose task was to refit vessels from carrying cargoes to carrying captives, often received more than the other specialists.

  Most of the crew would be men in their twenties, the captain and the mates in their thirties, but some of the specialists might be older, even in their fifties; and there were many boys in their teens.

  Sometimes, especially on Rhode Island ships in the late eighteenth century, and on Brazilian ships from the sixteenth century onwards, members of the crew were free blacks, and sometimes the sailors might themselves be slaves, rented out as shipboard labor by their masters. The caravel Santa Maria das Neves, for example, carried seven blacks out of her fourteen crew when she traveled between the river Gambia and Lisbon in 1505-6. At that time, African slaves often crewed ships between Guinea and São Tomé. In the mid-sixteenth century, a French geographer, André Thevet, thought that the whole crew of one of the Portuguese ships which he saw were slaves; for that reason alone, he said, the captain would not engage in any close fighting. In the late eighteenth century, almost half of the 350 Brazil-bou
nd ships for which records seem to survive included slaves in their crews. These blacks could become able seamen, but never officers or captains.

  Most officers and some of the specialists had extra rights: for example, to carry a slave or two of their own (four such “privilege slaves,” say, for a captain, a boy for an ensign). The Royal Africa Company allowed a captain the right of two slaves free of freight for every hundred whom he carried; if 150, three; if five hundred, five; and so on; “the captain marking his own slaves [with a burning iron or a silver mark] in the presence of all his officers. . . .”14 The South Sea Company offered its captains four free slaves for every 104 slaves delivered live, and would then offer to buy them at twenty pounds each. The purpose was, of course, to encourage the captains to interest themselves in the well-being of their cargoes. The first mate in that company had a similar privilege of carrying one free slave; the second mate and surgeon, one between them, etc.

  The captain had to be a man of parts. He was the heart and soul of the whole voyage, and had to be able, above all, to negotiate prices of slaves with African merchants or kings, strong enough to survive the West African climate and to stand storms, calms, and loss of equipment. He had to have the presence of mind to deal with difficult crews who might jump ship, and he had to be ready to face, coolly and with courage, slave rebellions. A good captain would always discuss with his officers all the problems which might arise. Thomas Clarkson, in his History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, records the exploits of several brutal masters of slave ships, including murderers, but courage, patience, and serenity were frequent. French sea captains had to take exams before assuming a command. Many captains carried little libraries of useful books: for example, on the Créole of La Rochelle in 1782, the captain had, besides six volumes dealing with naval construction and maritime techniques, and six commercial works, the twelve volumes of the complete works of Rousseau, a history of Louisiana, the voyages of Père Labat, and the Histoire philosophique of Raynal. The latter, despite its ferocious criticisms of slavery, was much read by slave captains (the father of Chateaubriand referred to the abbé as “un maitre-homme”15). The French adventurer Landolphe who tried, unsuccessfully, to develop the region around the river Benin as a slave colony in the 1780s, read Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which criticized the institution of slavery in a lapidary manner, on the banks of that waterway.