The Slave Trade
Page 104
Then there was the chase in 1852 of the Venus off Havana. It appears to have belonged to Antonio Parejo. It was thought to be the fastest ship in the slave trade at this time. But Captain Baillie Hamilton, in the Vestal a twenty-six-gun British fast frigate, was in Havana Bay. The captain of the Venus determined to slip away while the Vestal was undergoing repairs. One night, before dawn, Hamilton was onshore and told that, during the night, the Venus had sailed from Havana. Within minutes, the captain was back on board his ship. He sailed off in pursuit, the men on a nearby United States warship cheering as if a race had been engaged. Hamilton saw several ships on the horizon. He identified the Venus by her white colors and the spread of her canvas. The Vestal gained on her prey, but a tornado sprang up. The two vessels were parted. When the sky was clear again, there was no sign of the Venus. Hamilton assumed that her captain had sought refuge in one of the Bahama channels, perhaps hoping that those dangerous waters would deter pursuit. As Hamilton neared the shoals, he caught sight of the Venus, with two other vessels which he presumed were also slavers. They were trapped, but the Vestal could not go close, since she had a deep draft. Hamilton steered as near as he could, and fired a shot at an extreme range. He scored a hit. The master of the Venus hove to, and allowed a boat crew from the Vestal to board. Hamilton in person accompanied this boat and, putting a revolver to the head of the Spanish captain, said that he would shoot him if he did not make a course in the direction of the two other ships. He obeyed, and all three were captured, each with slave equipment. Hamilton brought all three of them back to Havana.25
There were also some outright naval battles. For example, the Pickle (with Lieutenant J. Hardy as captain), cruising in 1829 off northern Cuba, saw a heavily laden ship. He nearly reached this stranger by nightfall. No colors were hoisted even after a warning shot. As she came alongside, the Pickle was raked by musketry and cannon. The British crew had only one long eighteen-pounder and two eighteen-pound carronades (that is, short pieces of ordnance), whereas the Spanish ship had 65 guns. Three British seamen were killed, eight wounded. All the same, a close battle ensued, at pistol range. After half an hour, the Spaniard’s mainmast fell and she surrendered, her captain and most of her crew being wounded. A prize crew was put on board. They put the Spanish crew in irons and released 350 slaves.26
The British sometimes suffered. For example, in 1826, H.M.S. Redwing captured a Spanish schooner, the Invencible, with slaves in the hold. A prize crew was put on board, and the ship set off for Freetown. Soon this vessel captured another slaver, a Brazilian schooner, the Disunion, carrying slaves from the Cameroons. But both were shortly met by a Spanish pirate and themselves seized and taken to Havana. There the slaves were sold, but the ships set adrift. The Disunion, with five Brazilians, eventually reached Rio. Of the Invencible, with her British prize crew, no more was ever heard.27
The case of the Felicidade in 1845 had a different conclusion. This Portuguese ship was captured by H.M.S. Wasp, en route for Luanda, empty but equipped for slaves. The Wasp put a prize crew on board. Two days later, another Brazilian vessel was sighted and, when chased and captured, was identified as the Echo, with 400 slaves on board. The Wasp had been left behind, so the prize crew on the Felicidade sent a detachment to take over the Echo. The two prizes separated. The remaining British sailors on the Felicidade were attacked by the original Portuguese crew, who killed some and threw the rest overboard. After the Felicidade briefly chased the Echo (and her prize crew), the ships again separated. But soon H.M.S. Star came up, with the Felicidade. The latter ship was searched, and bloodstains were found on the deck. The crew confessed what had happened; Lieutenant Wilson and six men were put on the Felicidade to go to Saint Helena, recently established as the seat of a prize court. But a storm caused Wilson to abandon ship. He and his men took to a raft and were eventually rescued, after many hardships, by Commander Layton, on the Cygnet. Meantime, the prisoners had reached England. The judges had to decide about the “pirates.” Did an English court of law have jurisdiction over a vessel owned by a Brazilian who had murdered an English prize crew? The assize judge found the pirates guilty of murder. There was an appeal. In the event, the men were freed and sent back to Brazil, at British cost. There was uproar in the Times. “Remember the Felicidade” was a cry heard for many years in British naval circles.28
The seizure of a slaver was, of course, the occasion for a celebration: “When you take a slaver,” Captain Broadhead explained in 1843, “you will find lashed on deck puncheons of rum and puncheons of wine, and great quantities of ham and cheeses; and you cannot expect that those men [sailors from an English naval ship] who have been cooped up for such a length of time will not break out when they get on board that vessel. . . .” (Broadhead’s crew, on one voyage, included eleven men who had “never put their foot out of the vessel in three years and a half.”)29
The crews of captured slave ships suffered diverse fates. They were rarely treated as fellow seamen by British naval officers, though there were some instances of their officers being admitted to mess with those who captured them. If the seizure was close to the American coast, whether Cuba or Brazil, the seamen would be handed over to the authorities there, and their punishment would be at worst a token spell—of days, not months—in a local prison: “In the case of one prize which we took in the Racer,” reported Dr. Thomson in 1848, “I saw the crew after they were supposed to have been put in prison; I saw several of them walking about [in Rio] and conversed with them.”30 In 1836, Lieutenant Mercer, on the Charybdis, on the other hand told a legitimate United States merchant that his orders were to “put all [such] crews on shore and starve them.” Sometimes the crews were left for months in Sierra Leone, where they exercised “a decidedly bad influence,” it was generally agreed. On one such occasion, a group of such men—eleven slave captains and seventy-six crew—bought a vessel, the Augusta, which the governor of Sierra Leone supplied with six weeks’ worth of provisions, to take them to Havana. But their intention surely was to buy slaves, as another captain in a similar plight, Francisco Campo, had done, obtaining 357 slaves on the river Gallinas only nine days after leaving Sierra Leone with the Dulcinea, which he had bought for only £150.31
Sometimes these crews were left in disagreeable circumstances in the Bight of Benin or Lagos, where they had difficulty in surviving; but “most of them no doubt very soon find a passage . . . to a place where slave trading exists.” A Liverpool merchant, Robert Dawson—a kinsman of John Dawson, of Baker and Dawson, the shipbuilding firm of the 1790s—wrote with respect to this practice in May 1842: “The natives laugh at our philanthropy, when they allude to the system of our cruisers of landing poor Spaniards on the beach without food or clothing to a certain but lingering death.”32 Captain Bosanquet recalled that, when he captured the Marineto in 1831, he put the crew onshore: “Nine of them attempted to escape in three small canoes; two of the canoes were never heard of again; one of them was picked up by us after it had been fourteen days at sea; one of the men had died and, almost in a dying state, they were [all] landed at Fernando Po.” Asked whether, if captains were hanged by the yardarm for trading in slaves, it would be one of the “modes of suppressing slavery,” another naval officer, Captain Thompson, replied that would indeed have this effect. Most British officers thought that to treat Spanish or Portuguese crews as if they had been pirates would bring the trade to an end very soon.33
In 1850, Captain Denman captured his first slaver off the coast of South America. He took her to Rio, but the Court of Mixed Commission there declared itself incapable of judging her, and Denman was ordered to take his prize back across the ocean to Sierra Leone. That he did, though every rope was rotten on board this “mere wreck upon the waters,” every mast was sprung, and the 500 slaves on board had already once made the middle passage. At Sierra Leone, Denman again failed to get the ship judged, because she was a Portuguese vessel captured south of the Equator. The slaves were caused to make a third voyage across the Atlanti
c, back to Brazil, where the survivors were disposed of as usual.
Arrival in Brazil or Cuba was often painful. José Cliffe described how many slaves who reached Rio or Bahia were so emaciated that they could hardly walk, and had to be lifted off the ship.
Usually in the Americas the slaves were kept after their arrival in barracoons similar to those whence they had been shipped, and there fed, fattened, and treated well prior to sale. Sometimes, they were held up to six months in these encampments before being sold. In Brazil, these places might be remote. But in Havana, the most important camps were in the city, next to the captain-general’s residence.
It was frequently necessary, off both Cuba and Brazil, for slave captains to try to confuse the British navy about where slaves would be landed. Thus catamarans might take the slaves from their ship and deliver them in small harbors along the coast. Canot reported that, so far as Cuba was concerned, “a wild, uninhabited portion of the coast, where some little bay or sheltering nook exists, is commonly selected by the captain and his confederates. As soon as the vessel is driven close to the beach and anchored, her boats are packed with slaves, while the craft is quickly dismantled to avoid detection from sea or land. The busy skiffs are hurried to and fro incessantly till the cargo is entirely ashore, when the secured gang [of slaves], led by the captain, and escorted by armed sailors, is rapidly marched to the nearest plantation. There it is safe from the rapacity of local magistrates who, if they have a chance, imitate their superiors by exacting gratifications.”34
A messenger would be sent to Havana or Matanzas or Santiago, where the owners would send clothes for the slaves and money for the crew. Preparations would be made through the brokers for the sale. The ship, if small, would be sent under a coasting flag to a port of clearance. If the craft was large, she might well be sunk or burned where she lay at anchor. But sometimes no concealment was necessary.
Then began the new life for the slaves, and it is fair to say that there is not much evidence that slaves wanted thereafter, in Brazil or in Cuba, to return to Africa “and again to be made slaves and sold to someone else.” Perhaps, as William Ewart Gladstone suggested to José Cliffe in 1848, at one of the meetings of the Hutt Committee, that was “from fear of another middle passage.”35
Theodore Canot argued that, after the rigors of the journey, the reception of the slave at the plantation in Cuba must have seemed as if it was an arrival at paradise. The slave was often “amazed,” he thought, “by the generosity with which he is fed with fruit and fresh provisions. His new clothes, red cap, and roasting blanket . . . strike him dumb with delight. . . . The climax of wonder is reached when that paragon of oddities, a Cuban postillion [a slave, of course], dressed in his sky-blue coat, silverlaced hat, white breeches, polished jackboots and ringing spurs, leaps from his prancing quadruped and bids them welcome in their mother tongue.”36 All the same, the expectation of life of a slave as a picker of coffee or a cutter of sugar cane in Brazil in the 1840s would not have been more than eight years.
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Profits in the nineteenth century were greater than they had been in the eighteenth. Rossel and Boudet’s Le Cultivateur of Nantes in 1815 cost just under 600,000 francs to fit out, and the sale of about 500 slaves brought 1,236,200 colonial livres: say, 1,100,000 francs, a profit of 83 percent. José Cliffe, a North American who had a long experience of the Brazilian trade, told a committee in London that his transactions in the slave trade in the 1830s or 1840s, “were very profitable.” It was, he said, “the most lucrative trade now under the sun.” Lord John Russell, prime minister in London in the late 1840s, looking at the figures presented to a House of Commons select committee, said that a cargo of slaves which cost $5,000 on the coast of Africa might sell in Brazil for $25,000: a profit of 400 percent. Canot gave a figure of costs which showed that his vessel, La Fortuna, carrying to Matanzas 217 slaves which he bought for 200,000 cigars and 50 ounces of Mexican gold (costing about $11,000), made a profit in 1827 of over $40,000.
To consider the matter in greater detail: In 1848, a United States-built slave ship of, say, 180 to 200 tons, a reasonable average, plying between Brazil and Africa and bringing back slaves, might cost £1,500. The owner would have to pay about twenty seamen one hundred Spanish dollars a trip—say, £416. Food for those men for 90 days would cost £90. The captain would be paid 400 Spanish dollars: another £83. Food (and medicine) for 450 slaves might cost three pence a day per slave if the food were “flour,” which it usually was: another £169. Luxuries for the captain and other contingencies (water casks, wood for the slave deck, etc.) might cost another £300. Slaves would cost about an average of £4-10s in Africa—whether paid for in specie or in trade goods—£2,025 in all. The outlay, therefore, might be a little more than £4,500. Perhaps fifty slaves would die en route. But the sale of 410 slaves at £45 each would bring the merchant £18,450, or a profit for the voyage, therefore, of just under £14,000. Even if every other ship were captured by the British, there would still be a 100-percent profit. These figures were, of course, considerably higher than those in the era of legitimate trade.37
Another estimate was worked out by Edward Cardwell, the future reformer of the English army (himself the son of a merchant of Liverpool), in conversation with Admiral Hotham in 1849: “An adventure of this kind” would yield “upon the average profit of £45-10s upon an outlay of £14-10s.”38 Captain Drake said that, on one voyage—on the Napoleon, a Baltimore clipper of ninety tons, carrying 350 slaves in 1835—the profits were about $100,000 (the price of the slaves being $16 a head, the costs totaling $20,000, and the sales in Havana yielding $360 a head).39 Consul Crawford in Havana thought that one successful slave voyage would pay the costs of the loss of ten empty or five laden slavers. He thought that a ship whose costs were $150,000 could expect to make nearly $400,000 if the slaves could be sold for $1,200 each. Another estimate, using Crawford’s figures but reducing the average price of slaves in Havana to $500, would have, all the same, produced a profit of 53 percent.40
Still, many of the biggest merchants carrying slaves in the illegal era, either to Cuba or to Brazil, seem, unless they invested in sugar or coffee plantations, to have gone bankrupt. The British commissary judge in Havana commented in 1849: “The profits of the trade are much overstated. All persons are apt to boast much of their gains, but the slave traders more especially, as a triumph over the cruisers, and even the Government of England, as well as to console themselves for the discredit they could not but feel attached to their trade. Thus we hear of a few fortunate individuals who . . . formerly amassed fortunes in it, but of the many who have lost fortunes and life in it we hear but little. . . . the trade has not recently been a productive one. One proof of this is that the insurance offices lost so much on the policies of slave trade vessels that it is nearly ten years since they resolved to take none of them on any terms . . .”41
The profits above-mentioned might have to be abbreviated a little, because they do not take into account the necessary bribes to local police and other officials at the point of landing: even to the governor of the province and, in Cuba, the captain-general.
The benefits to the seamen explain their interest. Most seamen in those days were able to buy a slave of their own. The sailor would have to contribute to that slave’s cost while crossing the Atlantic. But, assuming that the slave lived, every seaman might be able in, say, 1848 to make a clear profit of £30 or £35: a good sum for a Brazilian sailor.
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I Dr. Grillé, the duchess of Angoulême’s optician, wrote a thesis on the epidemic, and the affair became public knowledge. The abolitionist Morenas pointed out that, in the second edition of this work the “jet en mer” was omitted.
II See page 615 for the Bay Islands trade.
III Neither Crofton nor Hutchings appears in the British Dictionary of National Biography, unlike many less valiant officers.
34
Can We Resist the Torrent? I Think Not
&nb
sp; The Brazilian Foreign Minister Soares de Souza proposing the end of the slave trade in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, 1850
THE 1840S SAW THE RETURN of the United States as an international combatant against the slave trade. For President Van Buren’s decision to revive the United States naval patrol led to the reappearance of Matthew Perry on the African coast (where he had been in the 1820s), with the sloop-of-war Saratoga and four other vessels. Perry was a bad choice as commander. He was a native of Rhode Island, connected to the de Wolfs by marriage, and so inclined to be favorable to the commerce in slaves on which his state’s prosperity had been partly built. He had turned a blind eye to the evidence of slave trading on his previous tour of duty in Africa; and he was almost as keen to prevent ships with United States flags from being inspected by the British as he was to abolish the slave trade. Moreover, he established his base in the Cape Verde Islands which, though healthy, and full of men experienced in the slave trade, was far indeed from the then centers of the traffic in the Bight of Benin and the Congo. Occasionally his frigates were even farther away, at Madeira. Perry’s enthusiasm for putting down the slave traffic was modest: he even wrote on September 5, 1843, to the Virginian Secretary of the Navy Abel Parker Upshur (he supported slavery and disliked England): “I cannot hear of any American vessels being engaged in the transportation of slaves; nor do I believe there has been one so engaged for several years.”1 These United States naval vessels were not concerned with any equipment clauses with respect to the slave traffic, and indeed their main task was to protect trade—as was made clear by an order of Secretary of the Navy John Mason to Perry’s successor, Admiral Charles Skinner: “The rights of our citizens engaged in lawful commerce are under the protection of our flag. And it is the chief purpose, as well as the chief duty of our naval power, to see that those rights are not improperly abridged.”2