The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The biggest English fort was that at Cabo Corso (“short cape,” corrupted as Cape Coast), founded by the Swedes under Henrick Carloff in 1655. This was the best landing place on the whole coast, for nowhere else could ships reach so close to land. After changing hands often, belonging for short periods to both the Dutch and the Danes, it was finally captured in 1664 by the English, who enlarged it. The new fortification consisted of outworks, platforms, and bastions; with apartments for the governor-in-chief, the director-general, the factors, clerks, and mechanics, as well as the soldiers. There were magazines, warehouses, storehouses, granaries, guard rooms, and two large water tanks, or cisterns, built of English brick and local mortar. “Slaveholds” were established to confine a thousand to fifteen hundred captives: “The keeping of the slaves thus underground is a good security against any insurrection,” Jean Barbot wrote.9 There were also vaults for rum, not to speak of workshops for smiths, armorers, and carpenters. The fort was guarded by seventy-six cannon in the late eighteenth century and there was, in the armory, a substantial quantity of small arms, soldiers’ coats, blunderbusses, buccaneer guns, pistols, cartridge cases, swords, and cutlasses. The castle had gardens capable of producing plantains, bananas, pineapples, potatoes, yams, maize, cauliflowers, and cabbages, and it also had ponds of fresh water. There were attractive walks, planted with orange trees, limes, and coconut palms. There was, of course, a chapel.

  Yet the English seemed for many years the poor relations among the Europeans: they had too few men, their forts were shabby, and they had too few goods. The government’s subsidy, paid to the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa after 1750 to maintain the English forts, was also too small. European visitors to Elmina could not fail to notice the grandeur in which the Dutch governor lived, in comparison with life in the English headquarters.

  The RAC employed a chief factor, of whom the most intelligent was Sir Dalby Thomas, who had wished to establish a real colony at Cape Coast; and the most interesting was the engaging Nicholas Buckeridge, who became the lover of the corpulent queen of nearby Winneba. After 1750, the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa named Cape Coast’s commander the “governor” and a succession of experienced men followed one another in control: Thomas Melvill being the first, David Mill the richest, and Richard Miles the strongest. At the end of the century, the governor was the curiously named General Morgue, whose correspondence about the slave trade with the Graftons of Salem fills many pages in the letterbooks of that firm.

  The English also built a large new fort in the 1750s at Anamabo, twenty miles to the east of Cape Coast. Here—uniquely, as it happens—was a specifically designed cellar prison for slaves waiting to be carried overseas, which, for all its gloomy atmosphere, did have the merit of maintaining a constant temperature.

  The main Danish fort in the late eighteenth century was Christiansborg, in Accra, with a garrison of about thirty-five officers, some of them Germans. The Danes had bought the site in 1661 from the paramount local king for the equivalent in goods of a hundred ounces of gold; and nine subordinate trading posts to the east depended on it. The architect was Christian Cornelissøn, who designed as fine a castle there as was to be seen in all European Africa. But “there was a most vile harbour” for landing, and ships had to anchor a long way offshore to the east. Even there, the anchor had every day to be raised because the bottom of the sea was strewn with sharp rocks. For a time in the late seventeenth century, this fortress had been in Portuguese hands but, in the next generation, the place was firmly Danish. Accra had the name in that era of being one of the best places to slave, for the small local wars were continuous, so that many prisoners were available.

  The governors of all these European forts, English as well as Dutch, Danish as well as Brandenburger, traded slaves privately (and illegally): “Governor Melvill to his death,” it was reported, “and the other officers of the committee, during his command, carried on the Negroe trade, and sent them from Africa to America for their own accounts, without the least reserve or restraint; also . . . Governor Senior, and the officers under him, did the same.”10 Richard Brew, an Irishman, became governor of the English fort at Anamabo in 1761, when he already had a slave ship at sea, the Brew, fitted out in Liverpool: he would eventually set up as a private trader in a spacious house near Accra which he named Brew Hall (“Castle Brew”), and provided it with mahogany panels, chandeliers, and an organ. His friendship, based on a deep appreciation of the merits of Newport rum, was so close with the Vernons of that city that they envisaged taking over Anamabo as a North American trading station. Richard Miles, when governor of another fort, at Tantumquerry, was in close touch with the French dealers. In six years, he bought and dispatched to the French colonies at least three thousand slaves. He later became governor of Cape Coast, where he had seven children by his “wench” but, in the 1790s, leaving those descendants on the Coast of Africa, he established himself as one of the most important slave merchants of the city of London.

  These forts depended on supplies from home for even simple needs: recall, for example, agent Bradley’s request in 1679 from Cape Coast for “Timber Baulks, Planks, Deales, Sparrs, all sorts of nayles, locks, Crow[bar]s, Shovells, Pitch, Tarr, and Plaister of Parris, Rigging for shippes . . . sheathing board, Twine, some small anchors, Pick Axes, and workmen, [such as] bricklayers, smiths, armourers, carpenters, and chirurgeons to be sent to other places and a mate for this; Borax for soldering . . . 30 or 40 sheets of good lead . . . two pairs of bellows for the smith and hides to mend them, four dozen of good sheepskins for sponges, and staves for ditto, four or five dozen of sayle needles, 1,000 of ten inch tiles . . . quills’ ink, penknives, two quire paper books, and other and good writing papers, wax and wafers [as well as] parchment skins for drums heads. . . .”11

  One of the difficulties for captains when trading in these territories for slaves and other cargoes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that they did not always know whether their home countries were at war with one another. But even when they were not, the French and the English were always quarreling: thus, in 1737, the French Captain Cordier on the Vénus, of Bordeaux, began to trade at Anamabo, and stayed there twenty-one days, despite the bitter opposition of twelve English captains present. Then two coast-guard ships of the English arrived, and the English commander took “his launch to board the Vénus to oblige it to leave, saying that that port was not for them, that his countrymen had paid large fees to the King of Anamabo to trade there, and that the French had paid no such taxes. . . . Captain Cordier was forced to raise anchor and leave the harbour. . . .”12

  Given the European investment of men and money on the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century, it is surprising that there should not have been more serious efforts to try and encourage the development of agriculture. If plantations could only have been organized to grow sugar, coffee, rice, and cotton, it might have been possible to concentrate slaves to work there, rather than carry them across the ocean by such extraordinary efforts. Thus Sir Dalby Thomas made the imaginative suggestion that cotton, pepper, and mineral plantations might be founded, in 1705; his Dutch colleague Willem de la Palma went further and sent to Surinam for “twelve experienced blacks to teach the slaves here the method of the cultivation of sugar cane.”13 But these puny efforts were unsuccessful: no sooner did the slaves set to work than they escaped. Barbed wire, that fine invention of the mid-nineteenth century, which would have prevented such flights, had not yet been devised.

  * * *

  ISee page 223.

  IIFor Tomba’s future history, see pages 394 and 425.

  IIIAccording to Barros, Caramansa asked the Portuguese to leave and simply to go on trading as they had always done, for “friends who meet occasionally remain better friends than if they are neighbours—on account of the nature of the human heart.”

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  Slave Harbors II

  “At 5 a.m. at Aqua landing; it was a fine morning, so I go on board the Cooper
and come ashore. I make an agreement for two slaves with captain Osatam. After 9 o’clock at night I send 5 of my people to go to Yellow Belly’s daughter, the mother of Dick Ebrow’s sister, to stop one of my house-women from giving [any slaves] to the ship, because her brother gave one of my fine girls, which I gave my wife, to Captain Fairweather, who did not pay me. . . .”

  Diary of Antera Duke, June 17, 1785, in Old Calabar

  BEYOND THE SWAMPY ESTUARY of the river Volta, the coast continued in a generally eastern direction but, as far as the modern city of Lagos and beyond, there lay a series of lagoons, which enabled almost continuous transport, and much fishing, by canoe. Behind the lagoons lay a savannalike landscape, extending almost to the sea, allowing the breeding or at least the use, of cattle, horses, goats, sheep, chickens, guinea fowl—and, after the arrival of the Portuguese, pigs. (Dogs were also fattened and eaten in this region at the end of the seventeenth century, as they had been in ancient Mexico.)

  All European travelers noted both the large population—the inhabitants of the towns were said by Spanish missionaries to be so numerous in 1660 that “the squares, streets and roads form a continuous ant-hill”—and the “prodigious number of palm trees,” from which palm oil (from the fruit) and palm wine (from the sap) derived (though the indigenous Africans here preferred to drink beer made from sorghum).

  At the end of the eighteenth century, this coast was dominated by the powerful King Kpengla of Dahomey, whose state had been built up by his father and grandfather. The story of the family’s capture of authority is intimately linked with that of the slave trade, which was in the 1780s by far the biggest economic activity of the kingdom. Kpengla’s grandfather Agaja, the father of the country, was described by a French slave captain as “slightly bigger, and having wider shoulders, than Molière”; Kpengla’s father, Tegbesu, who sold over nine thousand slaves a year, chiefly to the French and Portuguese, was estimated as having an annual income in 1750 of about £250,000—a figure which far exceeded that of the richest merchants of Liverpool or Nantes. (The richest English landowner might expect, in the eighteenth century, an income of £40,000 to £50,000.1)

  There had been almost no slave exports from the so-called Slave Coast in the sixteenth century. Instead, seawater was boiled to make salt, smiths created iron weapons, beads were made, and both cotton and palm leaves were, from very early days, woven to make clothes. About 1550, the Portuguese began to trade there and, by 1600, regular commerce had begun, with some merchants established more or less permanently: Pieter de Marees, the first Dutch traveler in the region, wrote, “The Portuguese do a lot of trade here.”2 The Dutch themselves were on this coast by the 1630s, and set up a trading post. The Danes, the Swedes, the English followed—the Company of Adventurers founded a trading post next to the Dutch one—and the French eventually set up their base at Whydah.

  This territory was inhabited by two peoples, the Aja and the Yoruba, both of whom had established a multiplicity of kingdoms, some with a capital on which depended a number of subject towns and hamlets, others being autonomous cities. The Aja occupied the coastal stretch of land, and their main political entities, each with a recognizable monarch, were Allada, or Ardra, about forty miles inland; Popo and Whydah on the coast; and Dahomey, whose capital, Abomey, was about 120 miles inland. Allada was the “father-state” of all these places, though its kings usually found it impossible to control their nominally subject cities once the Europeans arrived.

  The peoples of this region were sophisticated. They had a currency based on cowrie shells (“They prefer them even to gold,” Barbot wrote), and they traded salt, cotton, wooden carvings, and some iron products, at large markets.

  Yet farther inland lay the Oyo empire, the main Yoruba monarchy, to whose ruler, the alafin, the Aja had been for a time subservient. The Oyo, also known in the seventeenth century as the Ulcumy, or Lukumi, as the slaves sold there were designated in Cuba, came into being in the fifteenth century, and their rise was marked by the skillful use of cavalry. The Oyo supplied Allada with slaves, receiving European goods in return—muskets included, once the Dutch and English had arrived. Unlike the coastal polities, they had always supplied slaves to their Arab neighbors to the north.

  The European trading posts were never here as formidable as those on the Gold Coast. In 1670, the French were refused permission by the king of Allada to build a post in the “European fashion,” since that would have enabled them to install cannon and so become masters of his realm, as the Portuguese had become on the Gold Coast through the establishment of Elmina (that monarch had been educated in a convent on São Tomé). The modest European trading posts for which permission was granted were obliged to set themselves up inland and were thus incapable of resisting African attacks very long should they occur. Most Europeans, therefore, traded from ships, which were sometimes anchored permanently in lagoons in unhealthy conditions. The monarchs of Allada tried to ensure that the Europeans concentrated all their commerce in their kingdom. They failed, as completely as the Capuchin monks who visited them in the 1640s failed to turn them into Christians.

  The Dutch reached Allada first among the Europeans, but seem not to have traded in slaves. Then the chevalier Dubourg and François D’Elbée led a French expedition to that city in 1670 and persuaded the king to supply four shiploads of slaves a year, the loading to occur at Offra or at Jaquin, on the coast.I Dubourg died in Allada, but D’Elbée carried the slaves to Martinique on his vessel, the Justice, of Le Havre. Thereafter the slave trade prospered, though Allada’s raids in search of captives in the interior were sometimes obstructed by the kings of Dahomey, and though the Aja never found as many slaves as did their subordinate neighbor, the king of Whydah. Further, the people of Allada became accustomed to selling slaves in lots, so that the European buyers had to take good and bad slaves together, whereas elsewhere slaves could be bought singly, and so could be carefully selected.

  Whydah was by 1700 de facto independent, and its ruler was soon priding himself on being able to produce several thousand slaves a year. An important part in the rise of the place had been played by the Polish-Danish adventurer Henrick Carloff, who established a trading station which he named Pillau just outside Whydah, in the hamlet of Gléhoué (Glehue), on behalf of the French (Pillau, now Baltisk, was his birthplace on the Baltic Sea near Königsberg). Here France maintained from 1671 its only permanent sub-Saharan outpost: a reflection of the popularity of the slaves from the port. Pillau was managed by about eleven Europeans, who supervised the work of a hundred Africans. It was a more elegant emporium than most European lodges in West Africa, for orange trees were planted in the large courtyard, onto which looked a fine dining room. Had it not been for the malaria and the yellow fever, Whydah would have been “one of the most delicious countries in the universe,” wrote the French writer Prévost, for “the green of the fields, the grandeur of the trees and the multitude of the villages formed a charming perspective.”3 Outposts were also established at Whydah by the Portuguese (São João Bautista) in the 1670s the Dutch in 1682, the English the following year, and even the Brandenburgers in 1684. All these newcomers enjoyed an unusual kind of free trade. The king kept the place open to ships of all flags, and there was an enlightened agreement, after 1704, that the vessels of one country should not interfere with those of another, even if the two were at war.

  The Slave Coast was soon sending about sixteen thousand slaves a year to the Americas, nearly half the African total then. The Portuguese specially prized slaves from Whydah who, they thought, had a magic nose for knowing where gold deposits were. In fact, much of the success of the gold mines of Minas Gerais depended on the resilience, if not the magic, of slaves from Whydah, mostly obtained from merchants representing the Oyo empire, and most of them being from the Yoruba linguistic group.

  Petley Weyborne who, having been an interloper from Bristol, became an agent of the RAC, described the English establishment: “This morning I went ashore at Whydah, accompa
nied by my doctor and purser, Captain Clay, the present captain of the East-India Merchant, his doctor and purser, and about a dozen of our seamen of our guard, armed, in order here to reside till we could purchase 1,300 slaves. . . . Our factory lies about 3 miles from the seaside, where we were carried in hammocks which the factor, Mr Joseph Peirson, sent to attend our landing, with several arm’d blacks that belonged to him for our guard; we were soon trussed in a bag, toss’d upon negroes heads and conveyed to our factory . . . low near the marshes . . . a very unhealthy place. The white men sent to live there seldom return to tell their tale: [it] is compass’d about with a mud wall, about six feet high and, on the south side, is the gate; within, is a large yard, a mud-thatched house, where the factor lives, with the white men; also a store house, a trunk [a prison] for slaves, and a place where they bury their dead white men, called, very improperly, the hog-yard; there is also a good forge and some other small houses. . . .”4

  As for payment, Whydah merchants, including the kings, were specially interested in importing cowries as a price for the slaves: “Each ship brings its thirty to sixty or even eighty thousand weight,” wrote the French official Pruneau de Pommegorge in the late eighteenth century.5

  A third harbor of interest, after Allada-Offra (later Allada-Jaquin) and Whydah, was opened at Popo and, for a generation or more, the people there vied with those of Whydah and Offra in promoting the slave traffic. A Danish surgeon, Paul Edmond Isert, was much impressed by the three-story mansions belonging to the African slave merchants which he saw at Popo. Dutch, French, English, and Brandenburger lodges were soon to be found there.