The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  A German surgeon who traveled with the Brandenburg Company’s slave ship the Friedrich Wilhelm in 1693 gave one of the most vivid descriptions. He discussed carrying out his duties in Whydah: “As soon as a sufficient number of the unfortunate victims were assembled,” wrote Dr. Oettinger, who was from Swabia, “they were examined by me. The healthy and strong ones were bought, while the magrones [the word was from the Portuguese magro, “weak”]—those who had fingers or teeth missing, or were disabled—were rejected. The slaves who had been bought then had to kneel down, twenty or thirty at a time; their right shoulder was smeared with palm oil and branded with an iron which bore the initials CABC [Churfürstlich-Afrikanisch-Brandenburgische-Compagnie]. . . . Some of these poor people obeyed their leaders without a will of their own or any resistance. . . . Others on the other hand howled and danced. There were . . . many women who filled the air with heartrending cries which could hardly be drowned by the drums, and cut me to the quick.”16 Pieter de Marees in 1600 reported that the Africans also branded their slaves.

  By the eighteenth century, the Portuguese forbade the embarkment of any slave who had not been baptized. That had not always been so: most of the slaves taken to Portugal in the fifteenth century were not christened. That did not hinder some slaves from being received into the church afterwards, a consummation which in turn did not prevent their remaining slaves—even if the enslavement of a Christian had been condemned by Pope Pius II.IV But King Manuel the Fortunate, in the early sixteenth century, ordered all masters in Portugal to baptize their slaves, on pain of losing them—unless the slaves themselves did not want it (as was the case with the small number of Muslim slaves, mostly by then brought from West Africa). All slave children in Portugal were to be christened, whatever happened. King Manuel made it possible for black slaves in Portugal to be able to receive the sacrament from the hands of the priest of the Nossa Senhora da Conceição, a church in Lisbon destroyed in the earthquake of 1755. Captains of ships could baptize slaves about to die on board their ships. This procedure was regularized by Pope Leo X, at the beginning of his pontificate, in a bull of August 1513, Eximiae Devotionis;V he also asked for a font to be built in Nossa Senhora da Conceição for the baptism of slaves.

  In the early seventeenth century, it became customary for slaves in Africa to be baptized before their departure from Africa. This requirement was first laid down by King Philip III of Spain (II of Portugal) in 1607 and confirmed in 1619. The slaves had, as a rule, received no instruction whatever before this ceremony, and many, perhaps most, of them had had no previous indication that there was such a thing as a Christian God. So the christening was perfunctory. In Luanda, the captives would be taken to one of the six churches, or assembled in the main square. An official catechist, a slave, say, who spoke Kimbundu, the language of Luanda, would address the slaves on the nature of their Christian transformation. Then a priest would pass among the bewildered ranks, giving to each one a Christian name, which had earlier been written on a piece of paper. He would also sprinkle salt on the tongues of the slaves, and follow that with holy water. Finally, he might say, through an interpreter: “Consider that you are now children of Christ. You are going to set off for Portuguese territory, where you will learn matters of the Faith. Never think any more of your place of origin. Do not eat dogs, nor rats, nor horses. Be content.”17

  Portuguese governments tried to make these ceremonies less rudimentary, for it was against canon law to baptize adults who had not been properly instructed. It was laid down that the blacks should receive an initiation into Christianity on the boats during the crossing. (The same King Philip who had laid down that slaves should be baptized decreed that Portuguese slave ships should carry priests to attend to the spiritual needs of the slaves.) But the lack of priests prevented the fulfillment of this pious rule and, even when priests were available, their commitment to the cause seems to have been lukewarm.

  Baptisms of slaves bound for Brazil were carried out, before sailing, in Angola and the Congo but those from “Mina”—that is, the Gold and Slave coasts—were often not baptized till they reached Brazil.

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  Slaves were drawn not only from all parts of Africa but from all classes within the different peoples, including the highest: a queen in Cabinda created a legend in Rio de Janeiro as the slave “Teresa the Queen”; she had been caught in adultery and sold by her husband. When she arrived in Rio, she still wore the gold-plated copper bands on her arms and legs which proclaimed her royal status, and her companions showed her respect. She refused to work, and behaved imperiously, until whipped into submission as if she had been a commoner. The mother of King Gezo of Dahomey, who had been a slave before she had been a queen, was sold into slavery, also in Brazil, by her stepson, Gezo’s predecessor. When her own son Gezo came to the throne, he instituted an abortive search for her.

  Different colonists had different preferences as to where they would like their slaves to come from. For example, whereas Virginian planters seem not to have been interested in ethnic origins (an attitude which bore some relation to the role of natural increase in the growth of the Virginian slave population), South Carolinians preferred slaves from Madagascar or Senegambia (mostly Malinke or Bambara in the eighteenth century), because these knew about the cultivation of rice. Similarly, some Spanish buyers preferred Angolans, because the work which was going to be required of them, such as copper mining (for instance, in the royal mines at Prado in Cuba), was something of which they had experience in Africa. Senegambians were prized because they were good at languages; many were bilingual, in Wolof and Mandingo, before they reached the Americas. Because of these skills, Wolofs were often used as interpreters on slave ships, lending a distinct Wolof character to the “emerging pidgin.” These Senegambians were the preferred slaves of the Spaniards in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, because they seemed intelligent, hardworking, and even enthusiastic, never losing an opportunity to dance and sing. The French in the eighteenth century thought them “the best slaves also.”18

  Physical characteristics played a major part in these considerations. Thus South Carolinian planters were prejudiced against short slaves. Barbadian planters made clear to the RAC in 1704 that they preferred “young and full breasted women.” Some French seem to have specially prized the Congolese, because they were “magnificent blacks,” in the words of Captain Louis de Grandpré, “robust, indifferent to fatigue . . . sweet and tranquil, born to serve. . . . They appeared content with their lot. If they had tobacco and bananas, they made no complaint.”19 When the South Sea Company of London assumed the responsibility for serving the Spanish market in the early eighteenth century, the company’s agents were made aware that the buyers wanted slaves “of the blackest sort, with short curled hair and none of the tawny sort with straight hair,” according to an instruction to the captains trading with Madagascar.20 The same prejudice in favor of jet-black slaves existed in Brazil, where the most highly prized were said by an English visitor to have been those who were “blackest in colour, and are born near the Equator.” Thomas Butcher, the South Sea Company’s agent in Caracas in the 1720s, reported a demand from the powerful cacao growers there for slaves “of the finest deepest black (Congo and Angola slaves being best liked here)” but “without cuts in their faces, nor filed teeth, the men to be well grown of a middle stature, not too tall nor too short . . . the women to be of a good stature . . . without any long breasts hanging down.” The prejudices against slaves with “a yellow cast” continued throughout the South Sea Company’s interest in the matter.21 The planter Caldeira Brant in Brazil insisted in 1819 that slaves from Mozambique were “the devil,” but he bought them all the same, because of their fine color. Moçambiques seem to have divided Brazilian buyers: some desired them, because they were “equally intelligent and more pacific than ‘Minas,’ faithful and trustworthy, they bring a high price.”22 But others disliked them, because of the scars which they had on their faces.
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  There were other preoccupations, more political than aesthetic or economic. In the eighteenth century, slaves from the Gold Coast seem to have been the most popular amongst all the buyers in the Americas: “The negroes most in demand at Barbados,” wrote Captain Thomas Phillips of the Hannibal, in 1694, “are the Gold Coast or, as they call them, Cormantines, which [sic] will yield £3 or £4 more a head than the Whidaws . . . or . . . Papa [papaw, Popo] negroes.” Christopher Codrington, from the hauteur of his fine plantations of Antigua, agreed: Cormantines “are not only the best and most faithful of our slaves, but are all really born heroes.”23, VI John Atkins, in the 1720s, also reported that slaves from the Gold Coast were “accounted best,” whereas a slave from Whydah was “more subject to small pox and sore eyes”; which last comment was echoed by Thomas Phillips, who considered those slaves “the worst and most washy of any,” and also “not as black as others,” while “an Angolan negro is a Proverb for worthlessness.”24 Henry Laurens of Charleston, though specifying that, in a good slave cargo, there “must not be a ‘callabar’ among them,” agreed that “Gold Coast or Gambia are best, next to them the Windward Coast are preferred to Angola’s”: that is, slaves from the rivers Calabar were thought rebellious, whereas those of the Gold Coast were considered the most capable of responsibility. The Dutch agreed: their colonists always disliked “Calabarries” as too prone to run away, or as being “crazy and retarded,” or “unwilling to work and [liable] to die more easily” and also to be “cowardly.”25 Like Laurens, Codrington, and the others, they preferred slaves from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. French colonists in the Caribbean, who disliked Bantu slaves from Central Africa, also preferred those from Guinea: “The Negroes from the Gold Coast, Popa, and Whydah . . . are the most valuable for the laborious cultivation of the sugar-cane.” They had a characteristically intellectual reason for this preference: these Africans “are born in a part of Africa which is very barren. . . . On that account, when they take the hoe in hand, they are obliged to go and cultivate the land for their subsistence. They also live hardly; so that, when they are carried to our plantations, as they have become used to hard labour from their infancy, they become a strong, robust people and can live upon the sort of food the planters allow them . . . : bread made from Indian corn, and fish, such as herrings and pilchards sent from Britain, and dried fish from North America, being such food as they lived upon in their own country. . . . On the other hand, the Gambia, Calabar, Bonny, and Angola Negroes are brought from those parts of Africa which are extremely fertile, where everything grows almost spontaneously. . . . On that account, the men never work but live an indolent life and are in general of a lazy disposition and tender constitution.”26

  The predilection for Gold Coast slaves was not universal: in the late eighteenth century, in Barbados and other English islands of the eastern Caribbean, slaves from the Gold Coast were looked on as “prone to revolt”; William Pitt, speaking in the House of Commons in favor of the abolition of the slave trade, in a debate in 1792, quoted from the historian of Jamaica, Edward Long, in arguing that, because of their rebellious nature, a tax amounting to a prohibition should be imposed on Cormantine Africans. Much the same disposition to rebel was assumed by the Portuguese to exist among slaves from the Bissagos Islands. Spanish colonists, who usually had recourse to shippers rather than their own merchants, had the view, in the earliest years, that the clever Wolofs (gelofes, they called them) were rebellious and dangerous.

  The French preference for slaves from the Gold Coast was tempered by their belief that they were subject to “une mélancolie noire” which led them to suicide, for they were convinced that, after their death, they would return to their own country. Jamaican colonists, on the other hand, had, like most people, a basically favorable view of the Akan (Gold Coast) peoples, but a hostile one of the Ibo and those from the Niger Delta (“Bight slaves” or “Calabars”).

  The slaves least prized were undoubtedly the Angolans, though more of them were traded than any other people. In the 1750s, Henry Laurens looked on them as “an extream bad sort of slave.” Much earlier, the Dutch in New Netherlands—that is, New York—considered Angolan slave women to be “thievish, lazy and useless trash.” Dutch traders were also contemptuous about slaves from the Bight of Benin; slaves from there seemed “very obstinate when they are sold to white men but, once they are on board and out of sight of land, they become very dejected and in too poor health for the voyage.”27

  Brazilians always had their own views, but their views changed. Thus, to begin with, they actually preferred slaves from Angola to those from “Mina,” because the former were more tractable and easier to teach, and because there were more of them and, therefore, they fitted in better with their comrades who had already arrived. They had a shorter distance to travel from Angola than their confrères from Guinea, and so survived the passage from Africa better. But by the eighteenth century, Brazilians came much to prefer “Minas” to Angolans, whom they began to consider inappropriate for working in mines or on plantations, and whom they thought good only as domestics. They thought slaves purchased at Allada or Whydah the best for sugar plantations, because they were stronger—even if they were often sullen, “not so black and fine to look at as the North Guinea and Gold Coast blacks,” and “most apt to revolt aboard ships.” Slaves from between Cape Verde and Sierra Leone were considered in Brazil as lazy but “clean and vivacious, especially the women, for which reason the Portuguese buy them and use them as domestic slaves.”

  One thing in particular probably saved the Europeans from more revolts: the Muslim Hausas, from what is now the north of Nigeria, were difficult to obtain, for they were the preferred slaves of the Maghreb, the men for their intelligence and the women for their neatness, meticulousness, good looks, and cheerfulness. When, in the nineteenth century, many Hausas were imported into Brazil, the incidence of slave revolts greatly increased.VII

  All these preferences, often arrived at so lightly, were expressed in prices: Gold Coast slaves were sold in the 1740s for £50 each in Jamaica currency, as opposed to slaves from Angola, Bonny, and Calabar, who might not raise as much as £30.

  Prices for slaves in Africa of course varied over the centuries. In the 1550s, the average price per slave was the equivalent of about £10; it rose to £14 by 1600, and fell back to £5 in the 1670s. But the price had risen again, to £25, in the 1730s, then to £30 to £50 in the 1760s; here the figure remained till the Napoleonic Wars when, as a result of events which will be amply explored in succeeding chapters, the price fell back to £15 (in the mid-nineteenth century, the average price was down to about £10, where it had been four centuries before). These prices were low in terms of other goods: even in the eighteenth century, the cost of a slave was only about four times the value of his subsistence for a year. But, as will be later suggested, the rise in prices of slaves, at the end of the eighteenth century, damaged the trade considerably.

  African slaves were not the only ones available in the obvious harbors. In consequence of Portugal’s and Holland’s international activities, Malays were sometimes to be come upon in Guinea. Thus we hear, for example, of slaves for sale at Accra “of a tawny complexion, with long black hair. They all go clad with long Trowsers and jackets . . . and can write and read . . . are now and then exposed for sale at the European forts.”28 They had been imported by the Dutch from the Orient. The implication of this passage describing them (in William Smith’s Journey to Guinea) is that they were much prized.

  Whatever the preferences of buyers, they were often not satisfied. On many plantations in the New World, the labor force still came from a dozen peoples. One of the best-documented estates at the end of the seventeenth century is Remire, in the French colony of Cayenne, where there were, between 1688 and 1690, twenty-eight slaves from Allada (on the Slave Coast), three from the Gold Coast, six from the Calabar rivers, eleven from near the river Congo, and nine from near the Sénégal.