The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  These middlemen would assemble slaves beforehand and so could offer captains the benefit of being able to buy slaves quickly. That in turn would reduce the time that they had to spend on the African coast. French merchants from Honfleur, Le Havre, and Rotterdam frequented Bence Island, but the main clients were the proprietors who sent their own ships from London to pick up four hundred or so slaves, and set off for North America, Grenada, Saint Christopher or Jamaica, where several of them had plantations. Florida was another market after the English gained the place in 1763.

  There was once a ferocious rebellion here: “Armed only with the irons and chains of those who were so confined, the slaves audaciously attacked the lock-keeper, at the moment he made his entré to return them to their dungeon after a few hours of basking in the sun. But this bringing on themselves the close fire of the musketry . . . which they probably neither saw nor contemplated . . . may have contained their only wish, a relief from the misery by the hand of death. . . .”4

  A fort was also built on the nearby but more swampy York Island. The region was from an early time full of mulattoes of English ancestry. A note to the Royal African Company in 1684 reported that there “every man hath his whore”; and the Prussian Otto von der Grüben noted prudishly that most officers, including the governor, had “concubines,” who gave them children.5

  The dense forest of the Guinea coastland began near what is now Conakry. Here the first landmark to the south was the estuary of the river Sierra Leone (so named by the Portuguese, apparently because of the lionlike mountains behind) which, despite treacherous rocks at the mouth, afforded the best harbor on this largely surf-bound coast. It had, therefore, been one of the main ports of call for ships bound for the southern Guinea coast, and even for India, from the early sixteenth century. In consequence, it had become also a headquarters of lançados. In canoes they would search the nearby creeks and rivers for slaves, and have them all available in the estuary of the Sierra Leone. Sometimes the urgent demands of the trade entailed long journeys into the interior. A headland to the south of the estuary known as Cape Tagrin marked where John Hawkins had bought his slaves in 1564. The main African peoples here were the Bulom, the Temne, and the Limba on the coast, and inland the Susu, the Fula (Fulani, Fulbe, Peul), and the Loko. Each of these peoples was independent, and for all of them rice was by the eighteenth century the staple crop. They provided a little gold and a good deal of ivory to Europeans. Here, too, the RAC had had a trading post till it was overrun in 1728 by men belonging to the powerful mulatto trader José Lopes de Moura, allegedly the grandson of a Mane ruler and the dominant figure in the region of Sierra Leone in the eighteenth century. Afterwards, no permanent European trading post was established. When the cities of Futa Jallon, where the river Sierra Leone rises, were violently converted to Islam, several of the coastal peoples adapted, and Muslim traders established themselves in most of the ports. Anyone who owed them anything and did not pay was seized and sold as a slave. Thus, in 1751, partly as a result, Captain Nye reported to the RAC that there was a “prodigious trade” in slaves in the locality, especially at George Island.

  To the south lay the river Sherbro, whose banks were swampy and thus hard to travel up; it was scarcely surprising that there should have been many small monarchies, Sherbro (or Bulom) people near the coast, Mende inland. On the river Sherbro, the English began to establish themselves as early as the 1620s, though Wood and Company, the first to be interested, were concerned not with slaves, but with the export of hard red camwood for making cabinets. In the eighteenth century, there were already many half-African, half-English families; and, by 1700, slaves were extensively traded at the mouth of the river, just short of Cabo Monte. The earliest English settlers had built a small fort, a stone house inside an earthwork, but that was in ruins by 1726. They were then being helped by useful mulatto intermediaries, the Caulker family, descendants of Thomas Corker of Falmouth, the RAC’s last factor on the coast, who had married a lady from the locally famous Ya Kumba family, Senhora Doll, the “duchess of Sherbro” to the slave captains whom she entertained. She and her descendants established a small standing army of free blacks with whom they exercised control over a large tract of land on the riverside; they held slaves for long periods in camps until they could make an effective sale. Here, too, was that “Black Liverpool” (the second place so named—the other being to the north, near the river Pongas), where John Newton once refused to buy a woman slave because she was “long breasted.” In the mid-eighteenth century, Nics (Nicholas) Owen, from Ireland, set himself up on the banks of the Sherbro River as an intermediary, trading slaves from a large boat in an attempt to revive his family’s ruined fortunes. Later, Henry Tucker, another formidable mulatto entrepreneur, a descendant of a John Tucker who worked for the Gambia Adventurers in the 1600s, with his seven wives, his retainers, his silver, his riches, and his plantation, on which he grew food to sell to slave captains, dominated the region. Later still, on one of the Plantain Islands, at the mouth of the Sherbro River, the villainous Mrs. Clow, “P.I.,” the African wife of an Englishman, severely ill-treated John Newton while her husband was away buying slaves.

  The British government in 1785 thought of relieving their country’s overcrowded prisons by sending convicts to Sierra Leone. The prisoners were saved from this fate by Edmund Burke, who spoke violently against sending the men concerned to what he assumed would be certain death in West Africa. The supposedly more salubrious site of Botany Bay in Australia was accordingly selected as an alternative.

  The river south of Sierra Leone was the Gallinas, which was not much used for trading slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but by the 1780s was already the center of operations of several famous Portuguese traders. There were several towns established on the banks of the river, and the only commerce seems to have been trading slaves, held in barracoons, in each of which some five or six hundred slaves could be assembled, till their sale to the Europeans.

  Farther south again, at Cabo Monte (Cape Mount), a Dutch fort had been built in the early seventeenth century in order to protect some experimental sugar plantations established there. But the local Africans destroyed this settlement, and neither from there nor from the next-door Junko were there slaves to speak of; ships stopped there only for indispensable supplies. The trade could, however, be taken up again between Junko and Sestre (Cestos), the center there being the tiny port of Sanguin. Sestre was a very old slave market: the Portuguese in the 1480s had bought slaves there for two shaving bowls a head, a price which by 1500 had increased to five.

  This zone, as far as Cape Palmas, was known as the Pepper or, occasionally, the Grain Coast, so named since peppercorn, or paradise grain, malaguetta, was grown there. That product had been much sought after in the fifteenth century but, by 1780 interest in it had long since evaporated. A few slaves could usually be obtained in this stretch of land, chiefly by kidnapping, for the peoples there were reluctant to trade, and attacked Europeans. The population in these densely forested coasts was anyway small. Another impediment to trading, of every nature, was an absence of harbors. The coast was surf-bound, and a strong easterly current made it hard to land. All this territory was still a favorite place for French pepper traders in the sixteenth century, before they began to trade slaves.

  The next important line of shore was the so-called Ivory Coast, between Cape Palmas and Cape Three Points. It received the name, which it retains in the twentieth century, because of the quantity of elephants’ tusks obtainable there in the sixteenth. Cape Palmas, where the coast of Africa turns eastwards till it reaches the Bight of Biafra, was the territory of the Kroomen, known to be good linguists and expert sailors. European captains often hired them for boat work or as interpreters. There were several lagoons near the town known to the French as Cap Lahou (earlier, Cap de la Hou and, after 1787, Grand Lahou, to distinguish it from Half Lahou and Petit Lahou) which were a promising source of slaves during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. The trade in ivory was considered more important, for it was held to be “the best in the world.”

  The local people, the Avikam, sold numerous slaves, ranging from individuals who were already slaves inside Avikam society, to others who came from a long distance away in the hinterland, whom they themselves had bought with salt or European goods. The Avikam obtained, by theft or purchase, as many female slaves as they could, in order to boost births, so as in turn to be able to sell the children. This was the only zone in Africa where such a policy was coherently pursued. The region of the Ivory Coast produced about 3,500 slaves a year in the 1770s, the largest embarkments being from Drouin, Saint-André, and Cavailly.

  The Dutch fort at Axim was about thirty miles short of Cape Three Points. Here the Dutch maintained cotton plantations—and they also did so at Shama, a little farther on. For a time they even had sugar plantations, at Butre, from whose product, briefly, they made rum.

  The Gold Coast, the modern Ghana, lay between Cape Three Points and the river Volta. The coast, which ran gently east-northeast in its general direction, was, as far as the modern city of Accra, hilly, with rocky knolls near the shore. Farther inland, there were higher mountains, which could often be seen from out at sea. In the eighteenth century, there were along the Gold Coast a hundred European trading posts and fortresses, of different sizes and pretensions, the most important being those of the Dutch. This was perhaps because there was in this zone an almost complete absence of dense forest, which only began again to the east of the Volta, near Allada. Throughout most of the era of the slave trade there were about a dozen small kingdoms here, with the capitals a little way inland. These monarchies remained masters of the territory into which the Europeans did not dare to penetrate far. The kings, however, had made arrangements so that, by the late eighteenth century, much of the coast had been divided among the English, the Dutch, and the Danes. The Portuguese had by then lost all their interests here, and the French never succeeded in establishing themselves, though they tried to, in the west, at Assini. The slaves exported were the product of the many small wars between the coastal states, probably as a rule not the consequence of conflicts undertaken specially to obtain them.

  This remarkable line of European forts had mostly been built of mud and brick, the latter material brought out as ship’s ballast in great quantities. Only the Portuguese brought out stone—for Elmina, in 1481. Most of these forts were obtained from the African local rulers on perpetual leases, in payment of an annual rent, even though some were bought by, or given to, the Europeans; and, in a few instances, the Europeans had merely imposed themselves. The reluctance of the African ruler Caramança, near what became Elmina, to make a contract with the king of Portugal is well-known; others probably shared his views, even if those were not recalled by a great Portuguese chronicler such as Barros.III The companies concerned would seek a monopoly of the local commerce and, in return, guarantee to defend the African town against attack. The arrangements often irritated the Africans, but they accepted them as the price of being able to trade and receive the European goods which they coveted. Occasionally, as in the case of a threatened attack by an internal empire, such as the Ashanti, that guarantee counted for something. The Europeans’ possession of these places did not mean that they were the masters of the country. Africans controlled the communications of the garrisons with the surrounding country, and they alone knew the roads through the tropical forests to the northern markets, which the Europeans never risked because of the threat of sleeping sickness, which was so easily contracted in the jungle.

  In these forts, a melancholy if brutal social life, characterized by excessive alcohol, bell-ringing for periods of commerce and of guard, ignorance of local conditions, slave labor, and the fear of death, was carried on. Palm oil and palm wine soothed many anxieties, as did rum, brandy, and gin. Of course, there were happy times: thus, when the first Dutch governor of Elmina went home in 1645, he gave a party to say good-bye in the garden of the castle, and invited the prominent local Africans, as well as some ships’ captains and his own staff. They “were entertained with ten casks and some bottles of wine, a cask of brandy and three cows . . . and, by the evening, were merry and each went off to his house in great satisfaction.” There were also prostitutes: every village from the Ivory Coast to Allada had “three or four whores,” noted the Dutch geographer Olfert Dapper.6

  Till the late seventeenth century, few slaves were shipped from the Gold Coast, for the European traders there were concerned with gold and ivory. The slave trade of Elmina continued to indicate an import of captives, not an export, till 1700. Between about 1480 and 1550, over thirty thousand slaves were imported in Portuguese ships, chiefly coming from São Tomé or from one of the five “slave rivers” of the Bight of Benin. Some of these were put to work in the rivers of the forests behind Elmina, to look for gold, and others were treated by their African masters as just another item of merchandise, and sold to the ever-hungry northern slave markets. Some such slaves may even have reached the Mediterranean, having begun their slave life in São Tomé under the auspices of Portugal.

  But by 1700, that particular African slave trade was in decline. By 1740, slaves on the Gold Coast intended for the Americas had replaced both gold and ivory as the most important item of export.

  The biggest fort here was still Elmina, which the Dutch had, of course, captured from the Portuguese in 1637. It was the African headquarters of the Dutch West India Company, and there lived the company’s African director, surrounded by a staff of about four hundred civil servants, soldiers, sailors, and craftsmen, mostly eating salted food, suffering from malaria or the “penitential worm,” and served by about three hundred “castle slaves.” The region of Elmina, unlike the upper Guinea coast, had in Portuguese days been relatively free of those lançados, the half-caste intermediaries who penetrated the interior: “The Mina negresses pregnant by white men,” the best historian of Portuguese race relations wrote, “seem to have indulged in abortion or infanticide; and mulattoes were much less numerous than in Upper Guinea.”7 Yet there was by 1700 a town at Elmina of about a thousand Africans, living in the shadow of the castle.

  The original designs for the castle, by Diogo da Azambuja in the fifteenth century, had long ago been modified by Portuguese, as well as Dutch, accretions. Yet Elmina was, according to Jean Barbot, “justly famous for beauty and strength, having no equal in all the coasts of Guinea. It is built square, with very high walls of a dark brown stone, so very firm that it may be said to be cannon-proof.”8 In the late seventeenth century, a hundred white soldiers, many of them Germans, served there, alongside a hundred black ones. The great cistern beneath the castle, which Azambuja had built, still supplied water to all trading captains who needed it. Elmina was, however, no longer such a great entrepôt as it had been in the sixteenth century, when so many merchants had used to gather there in order to buy the new things which the Portuguese had brought in their fine ships: including slaves from the island of São Tomé. Neither the Portuguese nor the Dutch had been able to employ the castle, overpowering though it was, as a means of dominating the neighborhood: the power of the governor scarcely extended beyond the city. From the 1660s onwards, as has been mentioned, Brazilian captains, who carried the much-sought-after molasses-dipped tobacco direct from Bahia to their own favored coast of Dahomey and Whydah, were required by the treaty to leave 10 percent of their cargo, including slaves, with the Dutch at Elmina.

  In the hinterland behind Elmina lay the kingdom of Ashanti, which had come into being at the end of the seventeenth century, created around a marketplace, Kumasi, 120 miles inland, ideally placed between the north-going inland trade routes and the coast. The Ashanti, like the Fanti on the coast, were descended from a people named the Akan. For a long time, the Dutch had treated with, and assisted, the Ashanti’s previous suzerains, the Denkyera. Then, about 1701, they saw that the military advantage now lay with the Ashanti who, in their capital of Kumasi, had adapt
ed themselves to the use of guns; and the Dutch began to court them, sending an emissary to their monarch, the Asantehene, that same year. A Dutch representative remained in Ashanti for most of the eighteenth century; and an equivalent Ashanti stationed himself at Elmina, being the broker for all local trade, for which he received a regular income.

  In the eighteenth century, the Ashanti kings were providing a substantial proportion of the European slave exports from Elmina, certainly over a thousand slaves a year in the 1770s. The Dutch at Elmina were still the closest European friends of the Asantehene, and one of the latter even sent fourteen of his children to the Netherlands to be educated. The Ashanti, as well as the Dutch, were keen to keep the roads open through the jungle from their capital to Elmina and Axim (the second-most-important Dutch fort) on the coast, because there were many gold-bearing reefs on the way; and the “great road” to Elmina was the most important line of land communication in West Africa. Along that road there also traveled slaves and slave traders, as well as the Ashanti collector of the kostgeld, which the Dutch had agreed to pay to one or another local potentate from as early as 1642, and to the Asantehene after 1744.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, the most effective traders in these territories were the tapoeijers, or Afro-Dutch mulattoes. Officials had been allowed by the Dutch West India Company to trade on their own account from the mid-century, and gradually came to use tapoeijers to find slaves for them. After 1792, tapoeijers would be allowed to trade on their own account, and two of them, Jacob Ruhle and Jan Niezer, were, in a short time, the richest and most powerful men on the coast, the latter becoming the recognized agent of the Ashanti in Elmina. (Niezer’s father was Johann Michael Niezer, of Würzburg, who came out to the Gold Coast as a surgeon to the Dutch West India Company. The boy Niezer worked with a well-known merchant of Vlissingen, Looyssen, who exchanged manufactures with him in return for slaves, and subsequently started himself selling Africans to the Americas: his first ship took a cargo of 125 to Demerara in 1793.) Jan Niezer and his wife, Aba, a Ga, lived in a grand house which he named Harmonie.