The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Equiano testifies to the widespread suspicion, throughout Africa, that the white (or “red”) people—presumably followers of the Lord of the Dead, Mwene Puto (an Angolan devil)—had seized the slaves in order to eat them. Some Africans were certain that the red wine which the Europeans drank so merrily derived from the blood of the blacks, that the olive oil which they used so carefully came from squeezing black bodies, and even that the strong-smelling cheese of the captain’s table derived from Africans’ brains.

  Equiano asked if these people, the crew, had “no country.” Did they live in this “hollow place”? Did they have women and, if so, where were they? How did the ship sail? The answers which he received to these sharp questions were unsatisfactory, and inadequate.1

  The crossing of the Atlantic was now due to begin. Ships carrying slaves did not alter much over the generations. Thus, in the seventeenth century, in the era of the Portuguese asiento, an average vessel arriving in Cartagena de Indias would seem to have carried 300 slaves. The typical French slave ship in the eighteenth century was responsible for about 400, and a Portuguese ship 370. The usual load on an English ship was less: about 230 slaves at the end of the eighteenth century. But there were innumerable exceptions: thus the Comte d’Hérouville of Nantes (owned by René Foucault aîné, captained by Jean-François Cadillac) in 1766 carried only one adult slave and one négritte live to Martinique. Many ships sailed for the Indies with fewer slaves than they had been expected to carry; some were more crowded than planned.

  If conditions were good, the crossing of the Atlantic took, on Portuguese journeys in the seventeenth century, nearly thirty-five days from Angola to Pernambuco, forty to Bahia, and fifty to Rio. At the end of the eighteenth century, such voyages across the South Atlantic seem, because the vessels were larger, to have been cut to average only thirty days. These journeys were relatively easy, since, in normal circumstances, the captains sailed in a large circle around a mid-Atlantic area of high pressure. In the 1670s, British ships from Guinea would take some forty-four days to reach the Caribbean. But Dutch boats in the West India Company usually took eighty days to reach Curaçao, with the shortest journey twenty-three days, the longest 284. Most French journeys across the Atlantic, like those of the British, lasted two to three months, 70 days being normal for ships from Honfleur, but journeys lasting longer were frequent.

  The shorter journeys from West Africa to Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would, of course, have taken less time: perhaps twenty days to a month, from Arguin to Lisbon; in fine weather, though, from São Tomé, the time could have been as much as three to six months.

  In the eighteenth century, a record for a French slave journey across the Atlantic was set in 1754 by the Saint-Philippe of Nantes, 340 tons which, owned by the Jogue brothers, carried 462 Africans from Whydah to Saint-Domingue in only twenty-five days.

  The longest French journey in the eighteenth century seems to have been that of the Sainte-Anne, of Nantes, belonging to Louis Mornant which, in 1727, took no less than nine months to travel from Whydah to Cayes Saint-Louis, Saint-Domingue, fifty-five slaves being lost en route.

  • • •

  When the vessel set off, the captain would believe that, with good fortune, the southeast trade winds would almost automatically take the ship, before the wind, across the Atlantic. But before those winds could be picked up, while still in sight of Africa, the male slaves were usually held in chains, in pairs, the right ankle of one connected to the left ankle of the other.

  Jacques Savary, a brilliant Angevin businessman who had been a protégé of Louis XIV’s onetime favorite, Fouquet, and was a theoretician of commerce, wrote, in his Le Parfait Négociant, at the end of the seventeenth century: “From the moment that the slaves are embarked, one must put the sails up. The reason is that these slaves have so great a love for their country that they despair when they see that they are leaving it forever; that makes them die of grief, and I have heard merchants who engage in this commerce say that they die more often before leaving the port than during the voyage. Some throw themselves into the sea, others hit their heads against the ship, others hold their breath to try and smother themselves, others still try to die of hunger from not eating, yet, when they have definitely left their country, they begin to console themselves, particularly when [the captain] regales them with the music of some instrument. . . .”2 Captain Thomas Phillips of London wrote, from personal experience, about the same time: “When we come to sea, we let them out of irons, they never attempt to rebel. . . . The only danger is when we are in sight of their own country. . . . We have some thirty or forty Gold Coast negroes . . . to make guardians and overseers of the Whydah negroes, and sleep among them to keep them from quarrelling.”3 A hundred years later, in 1790, Ecroyde Claxton, a ship’s surgeon, told the House of Commons committee of inquiry that once, he remembered, a slave did manage to throw himself overboard as a protest. A great effort was mounted to recover him. The slave, “perceiving that he was going to be caught, immediately dived under water and, by that means, made his escape, and came up again several yards from the vessel, and made signs which it is impossible for me to describe in words, expressive of the happiness he had in escaping us.”4

  As for the character of the ships, the Dutch thought that they had the best-managed ones: “Though the number [of slaves] sometimes amounts to six or seven hundred, yet by . . . careful management . . . they are so regulated that it seems incredible: and, in this particular, our [Dutch] nation exceeds all other Europeans; for the French, Portuguese and English slave ships are always foul and stinking; on the contrary, ours are for the most part clean and neat.”5

  Overcrowding was normal. With regard to Portuguese ships, Father Dionigio Carli de Piacenza wrote, in the late seventeenth century, “Women who were pregnant were assembled in the back cabin, the children were huddled together on the first entrepôt, as if they were herrings in a barrel. If anyone wanted to sleep, they lay on top of each other. To satisfy their natural needs, they had bilge places [sentines] over the edge of the sea but, as many feared to lose their place [if they did such a thing], they relieved themselves where they were, above all the men [who were] cruelly pushed together, in such a way that the heat and the smell became intolerable.”6 A hundred years later, James Morley, who had served as a gunner on the slaver Medway, told a House of Commons committee of inquiry that he had seen the slaves “under great difficulty of breathing; the women, particularly, often got upon the beams, where the gratings are often raised with bannisters, about four feet above the combings [the raised borders along the hatches which prevent water from running below] to give air, but they are generally driven down, because they take the air from the rest. He has known rice held in the mouths of sea-sick slaves until they were almost strangled; he has seen the surgeon’s mate force the panniken [bread] between their teeth and throw medicine over them so that not half went into their mouths—the poor fellows wallowing in their blood . . . and this with blows of the cat [o’ nine tails].”7

  The Portuguese, it is fair to recognize, tried to lay down rules for the carriage of slaves. Thus the same King Manuel of Portugal who, in the early sixteenth century, had insisted on baptism for these cargoes ordered that the captives—they were then still mostly being carried to Europe, not to America—should have at the least wooden beds, under a roof to give protection against rain and cold. The same monarch tried to establish standards for adequate supplies of food, such as yams—though the provision of sticks to gnaw in order to calm the pangs of hunger, as well as to clean the teeth, scarcely seems to constitute the height of generosity.

  Even these tepid suggestions of humanity were rarely put into effect, and each early Portuguese slave ship carried on it the same locks, manacles, chains, and head-rings to secure the slaves which they carried three hundred years later.

  The Law of 1684 sought to make a clear provision for the arqueação—that is, the required official measurement of the slave decks on shi
ps, taking into account the need to define the difference between the hold, reserved for cargo, and the decks, for slaves. The regulations did not take into account headroom but, all the same, there were provisions for “comfort” which could be interpreted as requiring it.

  As a result of these and other rules, the Portuguese are sometimes supposed to have been the most humane of the European shippers of slaves: Jean Barbot wrote of them as “commendable, in that they bring along with them to the coast a sufficient quantity of coarse thick mats to serve as bedding under the slaves aboard, and shift them every fortnight or three weeks with fresh mats which, besides it is softer for the poor wretches to lie upon than the bare deals or decks, must also be much healthier for them, because the planks or deals contract some dampness more or less, either from the deck being washed so often to keep it clean and sweet, or from the rain that gets in now and then . . . and even from the very sweat of the slaves; which, being so crowded in a low place, is perpetual.”8 The Swedish mineralogist Wadström, who had information about the northern slave harbors, such as Bissau or Cacheu, also wrote, in the 1790s: “The Portuguese slave ships are never overcrowded and the sailors are chiefly . . . negros ladinos, who speak their language and whose business it is to comfort and attend the poor people on the voyage. The consequence is that they have little or no occasion for fetters, so constantly used in the other European slave ships, and that they perform their voyage from Angola etc., to Brazil with very little mortality. . . .”9 By the eighteenth century, good conditions were further assisted on Portuguese ships by allocating to each sailor the care of about fifteen slaves. These men were paid a new crown for every slave delivered alive.

  All the same, the Portuguese were perfectly able to balance profit against hardship. Dr. Wadström also testified: “Some slave merchants were sending a few ships to Mozambique for slaves. They told me that, though in the long, cold and stormy voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, many more of the slaves died than even in the passage from the coast of Guinea to the West Indies, yet . . . their cheapness in Mozambique fully compensated for their increased mortality.”10

  Thus, though the Portuguese may have approached the whole business of the slave trade more humanely than their Northern European confrères, in practice there was not much difference between them. For example, only in the latter half of the eighteenth century did Northern European attitudes to hygiene, modest as they were, begin to reach Lisbon, Luanda, and Rio. Perhaps the real difference was psychological. The Portuguese, with their slave sailors, had no great sense that a black captive was an unusual person—he was just one more suffering soul in God’s inexplicable scheme—whereas, for the white Protestants of the North, Africans were as exotic as they were alarming.

  The slave Equiano wrote of this first stage of the journey across the Atlantic: “The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced constant perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration . . . and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered a scene of horror almost inconceivable.”11

  Zachary Macaulay, the indefatigable abolitionist, traveled as a passenger on one English slave ship about 1795 to discover what such a voyage was like. Macaulay, characteristically, kept his notes in Greek to fool the crew. The captain “told us that a slave ship was a very different thing to what had been reported. He accordingly said a few things to the women [slaves], to which they replied with a cheer. He went forward to the forward deck and said the same things to the men, who made the same reply. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘are you not convinced that Mr Wilberforce has conceived very improperly of slave ships?’ ” Macaulay was shown where to sling his hammock and asked if he would not mind a few slaves’ sleeping under it: the smell, he was told, would be unpleasant for a few days but, “when we got into the trade winds, it would no longer be perceived.”12

  An examination of the diagram of the Liverpool slave ship Brookes of 1790 (so called since it was owned by a famous family of builders in Liverpool of that name) and of that of the 232-ton Nantes vessel Le Vigilant of 1823 (owned by François Michaud)I suggests that the British in the 1780s and the French in the 1820s would hold their captives in a space five feet, three inches high by four feet, four inches wide. Dr. Thomas Trotter, an Edinburgh physician (he later wrote a well-known thesis, Drunkenness and Its Effects on the Human Body) who served on the Brookes as surgeon in 1783, was asked about conditions by a committee of the House of Commons. The question was put to him: “Had they [the slaves] room to turn themselves, or in any sort to lie at ease?” Trotter replied: “By no means. The slaves that are out of irons are locked ‘spoonways,’ according to the technical phrase, and closely locked to one another. It is the duty of the first mate to see them stowed in this manner every morning; those which do not get quickly into their places are compelled by the cat and, such was the situation when stowed in this manner, and when the ship had much motion at sea, that they were often miserably bruised against the deck or against each other. . . . I have seen their [the slaves’] breasts heaving and observed them draw their breath, with all those laborious and anxious efforts for life which we observe in expiring animals subjected by experiment to bad air of various kinds.” The Brookes, on the voyage in which Trotter participated, carried over six hundred slaves and lost sixty en route.13

  About the same time as Trotter’s statement, Thomas Clarkson, the celebrated opponent of the trade, talked to a witness who told him: “The misery which the slaves endure in consequence of too close a stowage is not easily to be described. I have heard them frequently complaining of heat, and have seen them fainting, almost dying for want of water. Their situation is worst in rainy weather. We do everything for them in our power. In all the vessels in which I have sailed in the slave trade, we never covered the gratings with a tarpawling, but made a tarpawling awning over the booms . . . [but some were still] panting for breath, and in such a situation that the seamen have been obliged to get them immediately onto deck, fearing lest they would otherwise have fainted away and died.”14

  From time to time, there were suggestions that the provision of better conditions on board these ships might reduce the losses or, rather, increase the profits: “We find the covetousness of commanders crowding in their slaves above the proportion for the advantage of freight is the only reason for the great loss to the company,” the factors of the RAC wrote home to the directors from Cape Coast in 1681. “If Your Honours would be pleased to beat them down in their number though you gave them five shillings per head extraordinary, Your Honours would be considerable gainers at the year’s end.”15 But the RAC did nothing: in London, it was difficult to conceive of inhumanity in Africa, and “tight-packing” remained the rule.

  All the European nations lodged the two sexes of their slaves apart, as usual following Portuguese practice, ordinarily “by means of a strong partition at the main mast, the forepart is for men, the other behind the mast for the women. If it be in large ships carrying five or six hundred slaves, the deck in such ships ought to be at least five and a half or six feet high [being] the more airy and convenient for such a considerable number of human creatures; and consequently far the more healthy for them.” Female slaves were treated better than the men, not being chained. The reason for these arrangements was not only to prevent the male slaves
from seducing the women but also that black women were often said to do what they could to urge the men to assert themselves and attack the crew.

  These slave decks were usually between the hold and the main deck of the ship. Any lowering of the slave deck, or extending it towards the bow or stern of the ship, in order to allow more room for the slaves, had the effect of reducing the area in which food and water casks could be stored. But, on some ships, a second tier of wood would be set up within the slave deck, so as to allow a second assembly of captives to be carried in two narrower compartments.

  Most slavers had portholes, but they were normally too low in the water to be opened except in calm seas. Hatchways opening onto the deck allowed the slaves what air they could expect, without giving them any chance of escape.

  Several distinguished scholars have recently shown that, despite the comment of the RAC, cited above, there was no close relation between “tight-packing” and mortality. A meticulous analysis of statistics suggests that tightly packed ships in fact did not have a significantly larger number of deaths than more humanely stored ones: “the number . . . taken on board in itself did not relate to [the] mortality experienced by African slaves” during the crossing. The disadvantage of overpacking was not, it seems, that it in itself led to a greater incidence of disease, but that it was usually accompanied by a reduction in the space available for storing food for the voyage; and that, of course, caused malnutrition. An epidemic would, after all, sweep through even a lightly packed ship; and, if there were no epidemics, and the captain was clever as well as fortunate, he might be able to land most of his cargo even on a tightly packed vessel.16