by Hugh Thomas
There was then no procedure for baptizing the freed slaves so, as Lord Courtenay put it, to a Select Committee of the House of Commons on the West Coast of Africa, “Many of them remain a long time pagans.” An experienced witness, Dr. Thompson, thought, “Scarcely any of the immense numbers that are [taken] there . . . have risen to anything above mediocrity.”26 Many problems were also caused by the ex-slave crews who were deposited there. In the late 1830s, a scandal broke out because of the activities of a certain Mr. Kidd who bought up the slave ships condemned by the Mixed Court, and then resold them to slave traders on the river Gallinas, to the south. This practice was difficult to prevent until, after about 1840, those slave vessels were destroyed (in “Destruction Bay”): sawn up, that is, in three bits, the material being sold piecemeal.
Until 1808, slave trading and conventional trade had continued, uneasily, side by side, in Sierra Leone and Africans could see no reason why that state of affairs should not continue indefinitely. An Englishman, Alexander Smith, an agent of the government, seemed, at least to a United States traveler, to constitute “the first mercantile house in the economy in the illegal slave trade”; he told a North American trader, in the presence of the governor, that “just round that point” was a bay which was not subject to British rule.27 In 1830, four freed Africans, by then British subjects, were condemned to death for selling slaves (to a French vessel, La Caroline, from Guadeloupe, with a French captain), though their sentences were commuted to five to ten years’ forced labor.
Despite its climate, Sierra Leone had its elegancies: the streets were well laid out; many of the houses were of stone; shops, taverns, and chapels gave the place an air of well-being; there was a racecourse and a Turf Club, for dances and fêtes. Saint George’s Church held regular Anglican services. The neighboring Kru people continued to play many roles as sailors, working for slavers and the British navy alike, with equal competence.
Farther still to the south of Sierra Leone, about sixty miles away, lay the famous slaving zone of Sherbro Island. Three English slave traders were arrested there in 1811, but their trials in Sierra Leone led to much confusion. The dominant family of traders in slaves, as in other cargoes, in the early nineteenth century, were still the Caulkers (Corkers). Canray ba Caulker, who flourished about 1800, acted as if he were an indigenous chief, for he often began raids and wars for control of the coast. Another merchant of Sherbro, also a mulatto, Henry Tucker, distinguished himself in 1844 by financing, organizing, and sending a ship to Cuba on his own, the Enganador, with 348 slaves whom he had himself procured. An English missionary, James Frederick Schön, visited the region in 1839, to find two Spanish slave dealers. While Schön was in the house of one of these men, “one of his servants came in and said that he had bought five slaves of the Cossoo nation. He . . . asked him what he had paid for them. . . . It averaged seven or eight dollars for every slave. He . . . said that they were cheap, but that they were Cossoos, and that Cossoos were mere cattle.”28
What he meant was they were unruly people, who had wrecked one of his ships and caused him losses. While Schön was present, several slaves, who were chained together in the yard heard that an Englishman was there and came in to Tucker’s house to ask for help. The slave dealer drove them out with a whip and curses. He told Schön that the English would be better employed helping the Poles against the Russians than liberating Africans.
South of Sherbro, many slave stations had been opened on the flat, mangrove-crowded banks of the sluggish river Gallinas, as on the innumerable islands which dotted the estuary. “To one who approaches from the sea,” wrote the slave captain Theodore Canot, the spongy islands of the estuary “loom up from its surface, covered with reeds and mangroves, like an immense field of fungi.”29 As late as 1848, a British naval officer declared that in this river “there is no trade but in slaves,” nor had there been so, to his knowledge, for a long period.
In the 1820s, the dominant slave trader was John Ouseley Kearney, a British ex-officer who carried on the slave trade openly under the Union Jack. He once told some English petty officers, “I buy nothing but slaves. My object is to make a little money, and then I’ll embark 300 or 400 slaves on board a large schooner . . . and go in her to the Havannah.” He had friends in Sierra Leone who kept him informed about all the details of the naval patrol.30 By the 1830s, Kearney’s place on the Gallinas had passed to Pedro Blanco, of Cádiz, “the Rothschild of slavery,” according to Theodore Canot. Blanco, a native of Málaga, had, like “Mongo John” and other successful slave merchants, originally been a captain of slave ships. For instance, in 1825, the British commissioners in Havana noticed him in charge of the brig Isabel, and he later brought in the Barbarita with 190 slaves. He was an educated man of great personal resource. He worked first with de Souza in Dahomey and then, as a result of an incident with a British naval vessel off Nassau, spent some time in Cuba, in a sugar mill near Matanzas. In Havana, he informed himself of the commercial possibilities of illegal slave trading, and he visited Philadelphia and Baltimore, where he bought clippers. On one of these, the Conquistador, he left Havana for the Gallinas in 1822. There he set up an encampment on several islands. By skillful arrangements with the local monarchs, especially King Siaka (Shuckar), he was always able to have slaves available for captains who, thereafter, never needed to wait and risk being observed by a British naval patrol. The slaves would be kept in a bamboo barracoon, be loaded under darkness, and be away before daylight.
On one island, Blanco built a house for himself and his sister Rosa; on a second was his office, with his lawyer, five accountants, two cashiers, and ten copyists; on a third was his harem, usually with fifty beautiful girls; on a fourth island, the largest, he had his barracoons, capable of holding 5,000 slaves at any one time. He built lookout posts a hundred feet high on outlying islands from which his sentries would sweep the horizon with telescopes to warn their master of the approach of an English man-of-war. He had, on his property, workshops capable of making most items needed on a slave journey: manacles as well as slave decks.
Blanco made a great fortune, telling a United States officer in 1840 that, if he could “save one vessel out of three from capture,” he found the trade profitable. “This can easily be believed” reported that captain “when slaves can be purchased at Gallinas for less than $20 in trade goods and sold in Cuba for cash for $350.” The scale of the traffic which Blanco promoted can be seen from the fact that, in the single year 1837, though the courts in Sierra Leone condemned twenty-seven ships, seventy-two left Havana for Africa and ninety-two arrived in Brazil. Blanco was assisted in buying slaving equipment from England through an intermediary (probably Zulueta and Co.), just as his Cádiz associate, Pedro Martinez, was assisted in buying ships by an English contractor named Jennings. Some sharp questions were asked in 1842, such as how it was that an English firm, whose chairman was William Hutton of London, could have brought themselves to sell 200 guns to Blanco in 1838. (Hutton’s lame answer was: “We cannot always be responsible for what masters [of ships] do.”) Papers confiscated by the British on one of Blanco’s ships showed that he maintained commercial correspondents in both Baltimore (Peter Harmony and Co.) and New York (Robert Barry).
Blanco eventually founded a firm of conventional shippers, Blanco and Carballo, of Havana and Cádiz, before retiring in 1839, with his mulata daughter Rosita, first to Cuba (where Rosita was legitimized, if not accepted), then to Barcelona, where he arrived with over $4 million. While in Havana, he carried on the slave trade as usual; the brigantine Andalucía brought 750 slaves to the beach of Guanimar, on the coast of the island, due south of Havana, in 1844. In Barcelona, he became prominent in the new stock exchange, and finally retired to Genoa, where he died of a stroke brought on by madness in 1854. Blanco’s last years were clouded by financial troubles: his firm failed about 1848, and Carballo, Blanco’s partner of many years, drowned himself in Mexico.31, XI
During the heyday of Pedro Blanco on the river Gall
inas, King Siaka and his colleagues abandoned all such former legal trades as they had—camwood, palm oil, ivory, and cotton. They had even given up growing their own food. They imported what they needed from Sherbro Island. King Siaka was then a monarch “wholly engaged in buying and selling of slaves.”
Captain Howland of Providence recalled seeing here in 1817 “a large number of slaves, mostly young men, women and children of eight, ten and twelve years of age, brought in by their black chiefs, or masters. There were several hundreds or thousands of them waiting for the rainy season to be over . . . so that they could be shipped away. . . . One cargo was for a French vessel which was fitted out from Le Havre [probably Le Rôdeur]. . . . They are kept in a large pen, with no covering to shelter them from the sun, or rain, entirely naked except the adults, and they have only a small piece of bark cloth tied in front by a string round the waist. They are very emaciated, being allowed only a few palm nuts to eat once a day. I walked round among them and they made signs to me for food by pointing their fingers into their open mouths. . . . Some had their feet in the stocks, a log with a hole in the centre for the foot, and a peg in likewise to confine it. . . . Those white monsters, the French slavers, were branding them with a hot iron on the breast and shoulder with the initials of the owner. . . . I saw them brand a delicate female about twelve years old, I saw the smoke and I saw the flesh quiver, and turned away as I heard a suppressed scream. I did not stop to see the impression. . . . I observed that the black slave dealers were nearly as cruel to them as the white. . . . The dead slaves were thrown in the river where the crocodile was on daily watch for them.”32
Blanco’s headquarters on the river Gallinas was destroyed by Captain Denman in 1841, but a year later, many of his barracoons had been re-established. There were even new Spanish slave merchants established there: José Alvarez, Angel Ximénez (“the most intelligent of the slave traders,” in the view of an English captain), and José Pérez Rola. It seems, though, that, by 1848, the slave traders on the Gallinas, like those on the Núñez, were finding that they could make more money selling slaves (who would earlier have gone across the Atlantic) to the local planters in Africa than to Cubans or Brazilians.
Between the river Gallinas and the Gold Coast there stretched the socalled Windward Coast which, apart from some modest activities at Capes Mesurado and Monte, had never been great slaving territory. But a few slaves had always been taken from the Ivory Coast beyond and, in the mid-nineteenth century, Cape Monte was, for a time, the headquarters of the slaver Theodore Canot (Conneau), who even built his own slaving vessel at New Sestos, one of the few successful slaving ports on the West African coast where there was no river. The landing was rough, and Canot needed the agile services of the local Kru, who took the boats full of slaves to the waiting slave ships.
Canot, according to his own account, became a slave captain in his twenties (with the Estrella, the Aerostático, the San Pablo) and made a fortune—which he soon lost in unwise speculations. After further adventures worthy of a picaresque novel, he established himself near Cape Monte about 1835. His establishment was destroyed in 1847 by an alliance of local people and the British commander of H.M.S. Favorite, with the connivance of the captain of U.S.S. Dolphin, an unusual example of British-North American collaboration. Canot then abandoned slave trading, and subsequently sold information about the traffic to British captains.33
It was at Cape Mesurado that North America’s answer to Sierra Leone, Liberia, was finally established in 1823 (after the failure of a first colony at Sherbro). The United States Navy Lieutenant Captain Robert Stockton selected the land concerned, and bullied the local king Peter into a sale of it. Here, as in Sherbro, the early days were made difficult by a continuing local slave trade, whose entrepreneurs made raids on the new polity until, in 1826, Jehudi Ashmun, the first important leader of Liberia, himself raided a large Spanish-owned barracoon at nearby Digby, and another at Tradetown, a little farther on. The last action killed many slaves but also some slave traders, both Spanish and African, and it would seem the attack shocked the neighborhood into calling an end to the traffic. The naval support of the United States (two United States naval vessels were present) played a part in this. In the early 1840s, Monrovia, though its population was a tenth of that of Freetown, already had two newspapers.
At Cape Palmas, by the river Bassa, in the early years after abolition, a British captain, Richard Willing, disguised by a Spanish name, established a settlement, New Tyre, with ample barracoons and with a Spanish factor. Here he assembled slaves from all over the coast, and then transported them, under a Spanish flag, to Brazil or even to Florida. According to the admittedly dubious evidence of the surgeon there, Philip Drake, they shipped 72,000 slaves to Brazil and the West Indies between 1808 and 1811. Later, the Philadelphia Colonization Society organized a small settlement near there, as did, farther south, the Maryland State Colonization Society, giving the place the name of General Robert Goodloe Harper, a local hero in Baltimore. Yet another colony was founded in the name of the American Board of Foreign Missions, which consisted for several years merely of a planter of South Carolina, John Leighton Wilson, who freed the thirty slaves whom his wife had inherited and brought them to Africa.
Slaves continued to be carried from the region of Cap Lahou (now Grand Lahou) in the early nineteenth century, if on a reduced scale. Thus, in 1843, two Brazilian brigs, suspected of “opérations négrières” were discovered in the region of that landmark by a French navy, by then interested in the repression of the trade. In 1848, recently imported slaves were found on Guadeloupe and Martinique from Cap Lahou, showing that the trade from there was still in being.
No doubt, in the far interior here, the decline of the Atlantic slave markets on the coast caused consternation, and sometimes worse: for example, a French official, Bregost de Polignac, reported that, in 1843, after a war between the Bambara and the Sarakole had ended in victory for the former, the king concerned found himself arriving home with 800 captives. Finding it impossible to sell these men, he had most of them beheaded, though the executioner kept one captive out of ten as his personal slaves.
On the Gold Coast, the dominant African power was still the Ashanti who, just after the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, had for the first time broken through to the coast, placing most of the tribes there, above all Britain’s old friends the Fanti, in some degree of subjection. The action infuriated the British and tempted the commander at Cape Coast to intervene. A United States merchant, Samuel Swan of Medford, Massachusetts, reported, “Since the abolition of the slave trade, the nations along the Gold Coast have been continuously embroiled in war,” adding that, still, “nothing can be done” without “American Rum.”34
The Danes and the Dutch on the Gold Coast had founded plantations of a sort. But costs were great, for salaries had doubled, because of loss of pay to which all had been previously entitled when they dispatched slaves overseas. As for the British, only in 1821 did the Crown agree to take over responsibility for the country’s old forts, convert the slave vaults into cisterns, allow towns to be built on the old gardens, and eventually leave the castles to decay. Cape Coast had by then become the headquarters of a new colony.
The Danes, on the east part of the Gold Coast, were in a scarcely better position, though they made efforts to compensate for the end of the slave trade by raising crops for export. But that expansion exposed the Danes concerned to the sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly from the nearby wild territory.
In 1826, the British, with their diverse allies, including the Fanti, defeated the Ashanti, and drove them from the coast. By the mid-century, that once-proud nation of warriors and slavers seemed more interested in selling kola nuts to their northern Muslim neighbors than slaves.XII It is not evident that that change had much to do with British pressure. But the slave trade became smaller still as, in the 1830s, the British presence was strengthened on the coast, chiefly thanks to the efforts of Captain Charles Mac
lean, president of the British Council of Government at Cape Coast. Maclean, who was accountable to a committee of merchants who had elected him, was a “dry, reserved, hard-headed Scotchman, of indefatigable activity.” He created an alliance of coastal tribes to resist the Ashanti, but he never recovered from the accusations, apparently false, that he had been concerned in the death of his wife, the poetess Letitia Landon, or “L.E.L.” He was eventually made to resign, on the unproved accusation that he had himself dealt in slaves; remaining in Cape Coast as second-in-command to a new governor, he had the melancholy experience of seeing the alliances which he had founded unravel before he died in 1847.35
At the time of abolition, the two most powerful and rich men in Elmina, Jacob Ruhle and Jan Niezer, both mulattoes, took different paths: the first chose legality, and helped the British; the second decided to continue to trade slaves, on behalf of the Ashanti. Niezer prospered, since most Dutch governors were under his influence, the exception being the intemperate Governor Hoogenboom, murdered by young men of the town as he walked after dinner in his garden. Niezer was unpopular during the Ashanti invasion, which he assisted, but that action brought him profits. He was for many years the uncrowned king of Elmina and, as well as being dean of the Dutch Reformed Congregation, he was named, by the priests of the Benya shrine, “Upper Great Ensign” of the Seven Quarters of Elmina: a duality of function as useful as it was unusual. His private army could be called upon to settle most difficulties in Elmina which Dutch officials could not resolve. He continued to sell slaves to the Spaniards, the French, and the Portuguese with impunity, till the arrival of a new and powerful governor, Hermann Willem Daendels, who had restored the Dutch standing in the East Indies by building a road the length of Java, and who had now been instructed to bring an effective end to the Dutch slave trade, which, of course, King Willem had in theory abolished.XIII Daendels succeeded in ruining Niezer by an unusual method: he set up his own company, which traded everything except slaves, and drove Niezer to bankruptcy. Daendels also planned another road twenty-four feet wide from Elmina to Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, “so good that merchandise could be carried on it by beasts of burden, such as elephants and camels.” Niezer was imprisoned on an invented charge after the two had had a quarrel, and Daendels freed his slaves.