The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  III Portuguese subjects would be allowed to take ten slaves from one Portuguese territory to another; and slaves could still be legally imported into Portuguese Africa by land.

  IV It offered Charles Dickens a fine opportunity to make fun of the expedition’s surreal negotiation with the oba of Aboh. The voyage also inspired the figure of Mrs. Jellyby, in Bleak House, whose eyes “had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa.”

  V See page 655.

  VI Bell, a Southerner by birth, was later chosen by Admiral Farragut during the Civil War to hoist the Union flag over the town hall of New Orleans.

  VII The French refusal was partly a matter of pique: a reply by Guizot, the foreign minister, to his colleague Palmerston, who had gone out of his way, in a demagogic electoral speech in the West Country town of Tiverton, to criticize the policy of France in Algeria.

  VIII See page 732.

  IX Until, in June 1842, he was dismissed by Palmerston’s prudent successor, Lord Aberdeen who told the Spanish minister in London that he would not press the matter of the register of slaves for the time being.

  X See page 671.

  XI See page 684.

  32

  Slave Harbors of the Nineteenth Century

  “The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. . . .”

  King Gezo of Dahomey to Captain Winniett, United States Navy, 1840

  Deponent Pepper said: “I was a slave, and lived with my owner, don Crispo, at Gallinas. The barracoons were burnt; I ran away to the boats of the big ship. A man told me that if I went to the Englishmen they would make me free. Ran away the same day that the big ship arrived. Saw great many slaves, men, women and children, in the barracoon. I was brought from Cosso about four years ago by a black man, who sold me to the Spaniard, don Crispo. . . . Don Crispo buys slaves and sells them to the Spaniards. . . .”

  Evidence in the first report of the Select Committee on the Slave Trade, 1849

  IN THOSE PROGRESSIVE DAYS of the mid-nineteenth century, the effective slave merchants were concentrated in the New, not the Old, World: in Rio, Bahia, and Pernambuco; in Havana; and, to a lesser extent, in New Orleans and New York. These fine harbors had generally taken the place of the old ones of Bristol, Liverpool, Amsterdam, and Nantes. In contrast to what happened in the eighteenth century, most slave ships ended their journeys where they began. The long-lasting triangle of Atlantic trade had been replaced by relatively straight lines. The only Northern European cities to have substantial slaving operations after 1815 were, indeed, French ports such as Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Nantes, but even there the trade more or less died out, as has been seen, in the 1830s. There were one or two suggestions that some trading in slaves was carried on from Liverpool in the mid-nineteenth century, but even the Maid of Islay, arrested by H.M.S. Alert of the British naval patrol in 1848, was in the end found innocent; as was, more curiously, Pedro José de Zulueta’s Augusta in 1843, in the High Court in London.I

  In Southern Europe, matters were a little different: Lisbon’s merchants continued to organize the dispatch of slaves from the rivers of Guinea to northern Brazil, and they also were still active in bringing slaves from Mozambique to the New World. But most of these traders went to Rio in the early years of the century, and remained there, seen by the Brazilians as Portuguese, and by the Portuguese as Brazilian. Still, a few slave ships were certainly being fitted out in Portugal for slaving in the 1820s. Similarly, Cádiz played a part in the new Spanish slave trade (“fitted out at Cádiz” is a frequent note by British commissioners about a ship arriving in Havana) and, to some extent, so did Barcelona, whose shipyards built several fine ships for the slave trade to Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century. Announcements for the sale of slaves appeared in Spain as late as 1826. The merchants who owned these ships of Cádiz often had a connection with Havana. General Tacón, captain-general in the 1830s in Cuba, would write of these last that the shareholders in many expeditions from Havana were anonymous, being backed by public opinion.

  Crews and captains in these years came from even more unexpected places than the ships, including Sardinia and the Papal States, though all participants were always ready with the pretense that they were not what they seemed to be. A few English or Irish sailors were to be found. On the French schooner L’Oiseau of Guadeloupe, for example, which sailed for Africa in 1825, the captain, second captain, and lieutenant when questioned said that they had been born in “Europe,” though actually Captain Jean Blais was Dutch; the mate came from Saint-Malo, the carpenter from Le Havre, the steward from Toulon, while the cook and one seaman came from Curaçao, and other sailors derived from Marseilles, Puerto Rico, Danish Saint Thomas, Germany, Saint-Barthelémy, and even India.1

  Captains would now normally be paid substantially more than they were in the eighteenth century: for example, in the midcentury they might expect to receive $400, or £83 per voyage. Cuban captains were paid best. These nineteenth-century masters of the illegal trade were often rougher than their eighteenth-century predecessors. Often they were men left behind by normal life, semicriminal survivors from the Napoleonic Wars, sailors ready for anything, like the hero of Edouard Corbière’s novel Le Négrier, or the captain in Mérimée’s Tamango, men capable, like Olympe Sanguines, of keeping their captives in barrels, the easier to throw them overboard if a patrol vessel appeared. The brothers Amanieu of Bordeaux, who sailed on Le Cantabre, should have been tried for murder for their actions against their brother officers. One brother, Joachim-Guillaume, was so tried at Brest. In February 1854, Cornelius Driscoll, an Irishman born in the United States, captain of the brig Hope, gave a speech to his crew which well suggests the era: “Well, boys,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about facing trial in New York. . . . Let the cruisers take you if they will. I can get any one off in New York for $1,000. All you have to do is to get some straw bail, and you’ll be free as birds. Look at me. I went to Africa, sold the Hope at Cabinda, and took my men over to the Porpoise while the Dagos put 600 ‘niggers’ on board. But we saw what we thought was an English cruiser coming, so I went back with my papers to keep her away from the Hope. Made myself a pirate, they say. Some of my scurvy seamen informed on me afterwards and the marshal caught up with me in New York. . . .” But he escaped.

  In 1845, Captain Peter Flowery was imprisoned at Salem for slaving. He had signed on in Havana as captain of the Caballero, ninety-six tons, had put out from New York to Africa, and had bought 346 slaves from Paul FaberII on the river Pongas. He landed them in Matanzas in Cuba and then, after his ship had been cleaned, sailed on to Havana, where the vessel had her name changed to the Spitfire; this ship Flowery registered before a public notary in Key West. He then sailed to New Orleans, where Juan Sococur, of Matanzas, chartered the Spitfire to sail to Africa. They sailed via Havana, where they took on appropriate cargo, with two “passengers,” Francisco Ruiz and Adolphe Fleuret, both slave traders. They set off to visit both Paul Faber on the Pongas, and Mrs. Lightburne nearby. There they were betrayed by an ex-sailor, Thomas Turner, to Lieutenant Henry Bruce who, on the U.S. brig-of-war Truxtum, escorted the schooner back to Salem, where Flowery was accused of launching a slave expedition. At a subsequent trial, one witness said that the ship could not be a slaver, since slaves could not be “very comfortably brought on boards laid over water casks,” to which the defense counsel, District Attorney Rantoul, said, “So the slaves thought too, I presume,” thereby showing that irony was not impossible at that time in North America.

  Flowery was ably defended by J. P. Rogers but, thanks to Rantoul, was found guilty. He only served two years. Thereafter, he set off again in the slave ship Mary Ann, whose crew abandoned him on finding, after setting out, the purpose of their voyage. The sailors put Flowery ashore in Africa. Under the command of a mate, they returned to New York, where they surrendered themselves to the authorities, only to be themselves charged
with piracy.2

  Crews also received much more pay in the days of the illegal trade than they had in the past: an average seaman in the legal trade in Brazil might receive a dollar a day, but a sailor on a slaver might get ten. That explains why it was so easy to find crews. Seamen too might have their own slaves: Captain Birch, of the British navy, said that, sometimes after he had captured a slave ship, seamen “came up and asked me to let them each take the slave that belonged to himself: he had paid for it. . . . They stamp them [that is, brand them] with their own mark.”3

  Cargoes were just as diverse as in the past. When Captain Matson destroyed the barracoons at Cabinda in 1842, he found there aguardiente, cotton goods, muskets, rum, tobacco, powder—“everything from red umbrellas to common small utensils of every kind . . . a great number of English production.” But a brother officer, Captain Broadhead, thought the trade in the 1840s was usually “rum, tobacco, bale goods, powder, and muskets.” Captain-General Tacón thought that the cargoes usually sent from Havana in the 1830s were “guns, powder, and tobacco,” which, he added, “were deposited openly . . . in warehouses and were earmarked publicly for Africa”; while the hero of Baroja’s Los Pilotos de Altura said that the cargo was usually “thirty or forty ‘pipas’ of alcohol, usually aguardiente, and eight or ten loads of blue cloth.”4 It seems that, in Nantes, the old favorites of the eighteenth century, locally produced indiennes were still the most popular goods in the French clandestine trade; and wellknown indienneurs of that city, such as Fabre and Petitpierre, did not hesitate to announce in the local press that they were supplying goods for the slave trade. The connection of the London general merchants, Carruthers and Co. of Rio, with Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, was evidently close. Carruthers sent the consul a statement in favor of Pinto da Fonseca, whom they described as “one of the most extensive general merchants in this market”: a statement which, in retrospect, and in our present knowledge of those “general” activities, could hardly have been more damning. The first British minister to newly independent Brazil, Lord Ponsonby, thought in 1829 that “one third of all [British] manufactures imported into Rio are eventually used in commerce with the coast of Africa.”5, III

  Not all this material was, of course, destined for the slave trade. But such an excuse could not have been made by Richard Parke and Singleton of Kingston, Jamaica, who supplied the cargo for a Havana slave ship, the Golondrina, in 1836 as they had surely done for other such vessels; and there were other merchants, in Brazil even more than in Cuba, who financed the trade by providing on credit goods to be traded in Africa. A witness at a select committee on the slave trade in London was asked in 1843 whether he was aware that many of the businesses in Brazil and Cuba concerned with the trade were “in direct correspondence” with the first commercial houses in Liverpool and London, and that goods used in the slave trade “were shipped to the orders of those houses in Brazil and Cuba?” The witness said that he was indeed aware of the fact, and thought, too, that “there are houses in Manchester which make no other goods.”6

  On the river Pongas, in Senegambia, iron bars were a currency in the nineteenth century; but when a ship exchanged slaves for a certain number of these, it could mean that the real exchange was against looking glasses, knives, guns, razors, scissors, gunpowder, china, red bonnets, sheets, and glasses. In East Africa, the goods offered for slaves were generally said to be “powder, and every sort of merchandise; hardware and cutlery and beads.”

  Merchants providing these goods could encounter difficulties in London if it could have been proved that they sold their goods knowing how these were going to be employed; but the act of selling something to Pedro Blanco in Africa, or Joaquín Gómez in Cuba, would not of itself determine the matter. Anyone found with a consignment of shackles on board could be condemned for slaving: but by the 1840s, that shipment was unnecessary, since blacksmiths in Africa were often able to make shackles from imported iron. Asked if any British merchant “were to adopt any plan to prevent the slave dealers getting goods, and were himself to refuse to sell goods on that ground, do you think he could bring a general concurrence in his views by others?” Matthew Forster, both a member of Parliament and a businessman, replied tartly, “That man must know very little of trading competition, or of human nature, who could dream of such a thing; it is painful to hear the twaddle that is talked on the subject of the sale of goods to slave dealers on the coast of Africa. People forget that there is scarcely a British merchant of any eminence who is not proud and eager to deal as largely as possible with slave importers in Cuba and Brazil, and slave buyers and sellers in the United States.”7

  The fall in the prices of manufactured goods in Northern Europe and North America made the slave trade cheaper to fit out than it had been a hundred years before. A legitimate businessman concerned in Africa, William Hutton, explained, in 1848, to a parliamentary inquiry in London, that the slave dealers “throw such quantities of goods into the market at such low prices, and of such good quality, that you would be perfectly surprised if you could see it.” Thomas Tobin, of a Liverpool firm which in the end did even better out of palm oil than they had once done out of slaves, estimated that the cost of such goods dropped by two thirds between, say, 1800 and 1848.8

  A similar part was played by United States firms, such as Maxwell Wright and Company of New York, Jenkins and Co. of Rio, and Birkhead and Pierce of Baltimore. Such merchants were, however, more concerned to sell ships to slave dealers than manufactured cargoes. These came from numerous ports: Providence, Bristol, Salem, Beverly, Boston, Portland, even Philadelphia, all made their contribution to ships for the Brazilian traffic. Thus, by irony, that part of the United States whose public men were most in favor of abolition also lent support for the traffic. Sometimes the individuals concerned seemed confused. For example, the owner of the Bangor Gazette in Maine preached abolition in his newspaper, while he was also apparently engaged in building slave ships in pretty ports in Maine such as Bath or Damariscotta.9, IV

  In 1840, Joseph Fry, of the Quaker and chocolate family, was assured, perhaps exaggeratedly, that nine-tenths of the ships in the Cuban slave trade were then built in the United States: many in Baltimore, “where bonds that they shall not be employed illegally are regularly taken, and as regularly evaded or disregarded.”10 Sometimes these vessels were very modern. Commander Charles Riley, for instance, a British naval captain who served off the Bight of Benin in 1848, described capturing a ship from Bahia, the Rasparte, of 105 tons, “built to beat every vessel” under British command (he captured her because her captain took no trouble): “I never saw anything so beautiful,” he said, adding that she could sail across the Atlantic regularly in twenty-four days from Bahia to Lagos. Ships for the trade also continued to be made in Portugal.11 A British captain captured one vessel built on the Douro in 1848. In the late 1840s, steamers made their appearance in the Brazilian trade, and they came to be important in the Cuban commerce in the 1850s.

  Theodore Canot (Theophilus Conneau), a captain who was later a slave dealer, described how, in Havana Bay, “these dashing slavers, with their arrowy hulls and raking masts, got complete possession of my fancy.”12, V Unlike their lumbering predecessors of the previous century, these could cross and recross the Atlantic several times a year, using a diversity of flags as the need arose. Thus the ship Fanny left Santiago de Cuba with a Dutch flag; arriving at Old Calabar, she carried a French flag; when pursued a little later, by a British frigate, she was using a Dutch flag once more. (She was almost certainly owned by Zulueta.)

  The North American brandy merchant George Coggeshall once dined at Ponce, in Puerto Rico, with a captain and a supercargo of a recently arrived slave ship: “They were intelligent, sociable men,” he reported, who, “when conversing on the slave trade, said that it was a most humane and benevolent traffic; that, in many parts of Africa, the negroes were cannibals and extremely indolent; that the different tribes were constantly at war with each other; that if there were no purchases f
or their prisoners, they would all be put to death; [and] that they were in the lowest state of degradation and of no service to the world. [But] on the contrary, when they were transported to the West Indies, they soon became civilized and useful to mankind.” Coggeshall said to one of these captains that it would be better if the slaves were carried in large, comfortable ships, rather than the crammed, small crafts in which they suffered so much. The captain replied that “those who were engaged in the trade had been driven to every expedient in consequence of the persecutions which they had received from short-sighted and ill-informed philanthropists”: that is, the British navy, government, and publicists.13

  • • •

  The African side of the Atlantic slave trade had changed in the nineteenth century almost as much as the American and European.

  By now the main European peoples had established in Africa their special zones of influence. For example, in the far north of the slave-trading territories, the valley of the river Sénégal was now French in character and, until the end of the trade in 1833, many slave captains from Nantes or Bordeaux dealt there, usually carrying their cargoes to Cuba. In 1819, there was still some local trading; indeed, we hear of a certain Labouret, an armateur of Sénégal itself, who had captiveries here. A shipbuilder of Saint-Louis, Bourgerel, member of the Council of Justice of the colony, was engaged in the slave trade, sending La Louise to the nearby river Casamance in 1821, as well as sponsoring a good deal of other local traffic.VI

  By 1840, however, there was practically no trading of slaves on the river Sénégal, at least for the Atlantic market. African and mulatto trading continued till the 1860s. Devout local Muslim rulers, such as Ma ba Jaxoo, were determined to oppose the enslavement of their coreligionaries. But that did not prevent their followers from organizing more raids than ever for slaves among “pagan” peoples surviving nearby, partly for their own use, partly for sale along the old Sahara routes. For, of course, here, as elsewhere in West Africa, the French, like the other Europeans, claimed as their own only a small stretch of land: scarcely no farther than the city of Saint-Louis itself. Beyond that, Richelieu, like Colbert, and like all the ministers of the eighteenth century, had shown no enthusiasm for extending French political control. Legitimate French traders, often mulatto in origin, sought after 1830 to develop old lines of commerce in gum, wax, and ivory, as well as palm oil; by 1850, they were bringing in substantial profits. Gum, in particular, had a sensational success in the mid-nineteenth century. Ivory too was important because of an expanding European market, for pianos, billiards, and fans. The territory was also beginning its adventure as a cultivator of peanuts and, by the 1860s, that crop, too, cultivated by small farmers or migrant labor, was bringing in more than anyone had thought possible.