by Ben Hughes
Friday, June 6, brought news of the death of one of the longest-serving members of the Council. Having first set foot in Jamaica in 1655 as a “soldier of fortune” linked to Penn and Venables’s invasion force, Thomas Fuller had become a Jamaican institution. The owner of a 1,309-acre plantation in St. Catherine’s Parish, he had been a member of the Council since 1678, had served as a colonel in the island militia, and had donated the land on which the sparsely attended Tamarind Tree Church in Old Harbour, St. Dorothy’s Parish, had been built in 1681. “Much troubled with gout” aggravated by an excessive consumption of red meat and managed with regular doses of opiates, Fuller had been in deteriorating health since at least 1687 when he had been treated by Hans Sloane. Buried in the church which he had patronized, Fuller left a son, Charles, who inherited his estate, and his fifty-year-old wife, Catherine, whom Sloane had once treated for “a swimming in her head” and “a great many incoherent and troublesome Fancies and Chimeras in her thoughts.”83
On June 12, the Council met at Port Royal. Peter Heywood, the former Royal Navy captain who had had the misfortune to wreck his ship within sight of Port Royal, was present, along with Inchiquin, Watson, White, Freeman, Bourden, and Ballard. The ongoing dismantling of Watson’s regime was the order of the day. A petition written by Roger Elleston requesting release from the Marshalsea Prison was read. The former chief justice was duly granted bail, but Samuel Mayo, another of Watson’s adherents, was ordered to pay securities of £400 to ensure he did not flee the island while awaiting prosecution at the next Grand Court “for words tending to sedition and rebellion.” Inchiquin was then called upon to read William and Mary’s order of January 9, declaring that the Monmouth rebels sentenced to transportation were to be released forthwith. The order proved somewhat belated. Half of the rebels, having served four years’ indenture, had already left the colony. The remainder had settled, having found well-paid work as boilers, distillers, refiners, and overseers on the sugar plantations inland.84
Mid-June saw a momentous arrival. One of many effects of the outbreak of war with France was that Jamaica had been starved of slave deliveries. Only a single Royal African Company vessel, the Blossom, which arrived from Angola with 280 “negroes” on October 14, 1689, had reached the island from West Africa in the previous twenty-two months.85 Although some undocumented interlopers had no doubt arrived in the interim, the large ships of the Royal African Company, which could deliver up to six hundred slaves at a time, had been sorely missed. Due to high mortality rates and frequent desertions, slave owners had to constantly top up their labor forces or risk them diminishing despite the occasional boon of new births. In 1688, for example, it was estimated that Jamaica would need to import ten thousand slaves annually to maintain its population of thirty thousand—meaning that one in three was expected to die every year.86 Slave prices had risen as a result of the recent dearth and many planters were left with no other recourse but to buy low-quality or sick “refuse negroes” from “Jews and beggarly sub-brokers.”87 On Monday, June 16, 1690, all this was about to change. That morning, news spread around town that the Hannah, a Royal African Company vessel of 170 tons and 22 guns, was in the offing. On board were 359 slaves to be auctioned at Port Royal to the highest bidder.88 Although hugely profitable, the Hannah’s voyage had been far from straightforward. One third of the slaves it had picked up in West Africa and nearly half of the crew with which it had left London over eighteen months before had died.89
CHAPTER 3
Black Ivory
THE Hannah AND THE WEST AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE
July 1689–June 1690
The stench 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 copious perspirations, so the air soon became unfit . . . from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on many a sickness . . . of which many died. . . . The wretched situation . . . aggravated by the galling of the chains . . . became insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
—Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 1789
ON DECEMBER 8, 1689, Charles Danvers, the master of the Royal African Company’s slave vessel the Hannah, opened his account book for trade. In response to a series of smoke signals emitted on shore, the 22-gun sloop had dropped anchor at its first port of call: the estuary of the Sanguin River. Located in the Malaguetta, “Tooth,” “Grain,” or Quaqua Coast, the Sanguin emptied its muddy waters into the Atlantic at a point roughly equidistant between the capes of Sierra Leone and Palmas, six degrees south of the equator on the Windward Coast of West Africa. As Danvers scanned the shoreline through the heat haze, with flies and malarial mosquitoes buzzing around his head and his clothes steaming from the frequent tropical downpours, he spotted movement off the palm-fringed beach. Several three-man canoes were paddling out through the muddy waters from an area dominated by a stand of high trees. Dressed in wide-sleeved shifts which hung to their knees, the Quaquas, as the Europeans called them, had a terrifying appearance. “Well-limb’d,” strong, and athletic, they daubed their skin “with a sort of dark reddish paint.” Their hair, which hung down to their shoulders, was plaited with flax and their teeth were filed to razor sharp points. As well as being rumored to practice cannibalism, the locals of Sanguin were notorious for theft. As they boarded the Hannah, Danvers warned his thirty-strong crew to be on their guard.1
Danvers’s voyage had begun in London six months earlier. After a seemingly interminable delay, enforced by port authorities who tightly regulated all merchant ships’ departures during wartime to ensure that enough sailors remained in the country to man the ships of the Royal Navy, the Hannah had set out from Custom House Quay with a special license on July 20, 1689.2 Like all outbound vessels of the Royal African Company, the sloop was deeply loaded: forty bales of perpetuanas, a hard-wearing, cheap textile manufactured in England’s West Country; twenty-two cases of pewter, containing basins of one, two, and three pounds in weight; two bales of boysadoes, a heavy, expensive cloth imported from Holland; one bale of Welsh plains; eight bales of bays, another British textile; twenty-three casks of knives; 450 iron and lead bars; 156 gallons of French brandy; twenty barrels of gunpowder; and 150 half firkins of tallow along with numerous scales and measures with which Danvers would weigh out his goods were packed in the hold. The cargo, when customs and other charges were included, was worth a total of £2,617, 14 shillings and sixpence. Also on board were £910, 17s. 10 d. worth of stores, goods, and provisions which Danvers had been entrusted to deliver to the company’s principal African outpost at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast.3
The trade goods were intended for the first of the Hannah’s destinations, the Windward and Gold Coasts. The former, reached after a brief stop at the company’s outpost on the Gambia River, stretched some five hundred miles between Cape Mount and Cape Palmas and had become increasingly important for the Royal African Company since 1680. More goods were consigned to the region than to any of the other seven regions into which the Europeans divided West Africa. With the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War, however, trade had slowed considerably. Unlike the Gold Coast, where Danish, French, German, Dutch, and English forts provided safe haven, the Windward Coast was almost entirely devoid of European settlement. As such it was frequented by pirates and French privateers: the latter had already taken five of the company’s ships in African waters that year. The Windward Coast’s remoteness also resulted in uneven trade. Business, as Danvers was discovering, was uncertain and slow. Specific ports of call were left entirely to the discretion of the ship’s captains and although trade could be plentiful, it was invariably carried out in small amounts. To make matters worse, the Royal African Company’s rivals, not to mention the countless ill
egal interlopers, also did business there, resulting in oft-flooded markets.4
The crew of the Hannah had less trouble at Sanguin than expected. In exchange for twelve iron bars, Danvers received 630 ozier, or wickerwork, baskets filled with malaguetta which were promptly stowed in the ship’s hold. Known as paradise-grains or Guinea pepper, malaguetta was a fiery condiment that grew on shrubs inland. As well as giving the coast one of the names by which it was known to its European visitors, the pepper was an essential purchase for all slavers. “[We] give [it to] our negroes in their messes to keep them from the flux and dry belly’ach, which they are very incident to,” Captain Thomas Phillips, another of the Royal African Company’s captains, explained in his journal written two years after the Hannah’s voyage had been concluded. Although Danvers was yet to begin picking up a human cargo, he would need the malaguetta soon enough.5
On the afternoon of December 8, Danvers left Sanguin for the Bay of Boffoe, one mile to the east. Watching for the half-submerged rocks, shoals, and sandbanks for which the region was notorious, Danvers took the Hannah toward shore where a series of smoke signals were rising into the sky. Once more several round-bottomed native canoes, their crews standing and dipping their paddles into the water in unison to the beat of a drum, rowed out to the sloop. Two bales of perpetuanas were bartered for nineteen “elephant’s teeth.” Captain Phillips left a description of the peculiarities of such a trade.
[The natives came alongside the ship in their canoes and] invited us to come to anchor; but ere the[y] . . . would come aboard, they requir’d the captain come down the out side of the ship, and drop three drops of the sea water into his eye, as a pledge of friendship, and of safety for them to come aboard . . . I . . . readily consented,” Phillips recalled, “[but] seeing so many on deck, [they] were mistrustful, and went into their canoes again . . . with much perswasion [I] prevail’d on them to return . . . and having given each . . . a good coge of brandy, I shew’d then some of my commodities, and they brought in some teeth.”6
The Hannah was a typical Royal African Company sloop. Built in London prior to 1687 in the broad-stern style common in England (as opposed to the lighter, flat-bottomed, round-stern ships favored by the Dutch), its current voyage was at least its second to the Guinea Coast.7 About eighty feet long from stern to bowsprit, the sloop had a displacement of 170 tons, it carried thirty crew, and its hull was pierced by twenty-two cannon. Triple heavy masts rose from its main deck, carrying a vast array of sails and miles of standing and running rigging. Although not the fastest of sailors, the Hannah was a sturdy, reliable, seaworthy craft. In the stern, under the quarterdeck, was Danvers’s cabin and those of the first, second, and third mates. The men’s quarters in the steerage, later used to hold the slaves, was a cramped, fetid space. Swinging with hammocks and littered with seamen’s trunks, it was accessed via the hatches in the spar deck beside the ship’s main mast. Below lay the hold. Tightly stowed with trade goods, ballast, gunpowder, round shot, small arms, and ship’s stores, it was infested with rats and awash with foul-smelling bilgewater.8
Charles Danvers, the Hannah’s master, was a sailor of considerable experience. He had probably been to Africa before, was paid in the region of £5 per month, and would receive a considerable commission on all sales. In his will, written on the day of the Hannah’s departure from London, Danvers had named his father, John, as his sole heir and executor.9 The Hannah’s first mate, John Zebbett, was married. He had two children and owned a property in the village of Ratcliffe in Stepney in London’s East End. Bordering the Thames, “Sailors Village,” as it was commonly known, was a shipbuilding center, had a notable community of Presbyterians and Quakers, and was infamous for its transient population and numerous lodging houses, bars, and brothels.10 The ship’s second mate was Thomas Cooper, and the third was David Cheyn.11
Among the remaining twenty-six crew members were a surgeon, a carpenter, a boatswain, and a gunner. The rest were rated able or ordinary seamen. The average age of merchant seamen on English vessels of the period was twenty-seven, although the youngest, the ship’s boys, would have been barely into their teens. It is likely that they hailed from a variety of countries. Germans, Swedes, Dutch, French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Irish, Scots, North Americans, Africans, Indians from the subcontinent, and men from the Caribbean colonies were frequently found manning English ships, especially in times of war, when many English seamen were impressed by the Royal Navy. Typically, the crew of a slave ship were drawn from the dregs of society. The trade, which traversed the disease-ridden tropics, was notorious for high mortality rates, and although a reasonable wage could be secured, especially in wartime when sums of over £2 per month for able seamen were not unheard of, and the men habitually boosted their earnings through “clandestine trade,” the route was not for the faint-hearted. Dalby Thomas, a veteran of the “Guinea Trade,” recalled that those who signed up “must neither have dainty fingers nor dainty noses [and] few men “[were] fit for . . . it. It is a filthy voyage,” he opined, “as well as a laborious [one].”12
On December 9, Danvers stopped at Sestre Crou.13 A wide estuary marked by two “Great rocks on the Shoar,” the area was dominated by a “large” and “beautiful” village and set against a backdrop of giant trees. Willem Bosman, a factor of the Royal African Company’s main rivals, the Dutch West India Company, recalled that “the Negroes [t]here seemed to be a good sort of People, honest in their Dealings, and much more regular than those who live [in Sanguin],” although their language—a series of clicking, or quaqua noises—was “utterly unintelligible.”14 Relying on signs and gestures, Danvers bartered eight iron bars and a single bale of perpetuanas for 415 units of malaguetta and seventeen “elephants teeth.” The Hannah then continued east, doubling the prominent point of Cape Palmas, before arriving at Cape Lahoue on December 12.15 The site of a “very large” village stretching a mile along shore which was dotted with “multitudes of Coco Trees,” Lahoe was renowned for the quality of its ivory. “The negroes” were “affable and civil,” according to Bosman, “and very easy to be dealt with.” Over the next two days, Danvers oversaw his briskest trade to date. In fifteen separate transactions, he exchanged 152 iron bars and fifteen dozen knives for 124 tusks. December 16 saw the Hannah anchored off Cape Apolonia, an area “in all parts furnished with great and small villages.” The cape itself was unremarkable. “[It] appears to be low ground,” Bosman wrote, “behind . . . are three high hills, which are its distinguishing marks . . . [and] without [which it] . . . would be sailed by without ever being seen.”16 From Apolonia eastward, Danvers traded for gold. On the first day business started slowly: the Hannah received a little over two ounces in exchange for four iron bars and 517 knives, but when Danvers moved on the next day, trade picked up and off Axim the Hannah took six and a half ounces.17
Both the Dutch and the Brandenburgers, subjects of an independent German principality, were drawn to Axim by its gold. Mined in the dry season from shallow shafts dug in the forested interior, from the sixteenth century the mineral had been transported to the coast and exchanged for goods bartered with Europeans.18 In late 1689 it was the Hannah’s turn to profit from the trade. The site of a Dutch and a Brandenburger fort, Axim was the first European settlement the crew of the Hannah had seen since leaving the Gambia River. Fort St. Anthony, originally a Portuguese settlement, had been captured by the Dutch West India Company in 1642, and, by the time of the Hannah’s voyage, was the company’s principal outpost to the west of the Gold Coast. The fort was “neat and beautifully Built,” according to Bosman, “as well as [being] strong and conveniently situated.” It boasted “three good Batteries besides Breast-works, Out-Works, and high Walls on the Land side, as well as a sufficient quantity of Guns” so as it “might hold out against a strong Army of the Natives.” Gros Frederic’sburg, the fort of the Brandenburgers, was situated three miles to the east. Named after the principality’s Elector, Frederick I, the fort, which had been founded in 1685,
was “situate[d] on the Hill Mamfro’ . . . . near the village Pocquesoe.” It “is handsome and reasonably large,” Bosman related, and “strengthened with four large Batteries furnished with forty six Pieces of Ordinance. . . . The Gate . . . is the most Beautiful of all the Coast, [but] . . . the Breast-works are built no higher than a Man’s knee, and the . . . [defenders] thereby are continually exposed . . . no small Incovenience in Wars with the Blacks, for . . . the Negroes [can] easily reach . . . [them] with a Musquet-shot.”19
On December 20, Danvers reached Cape Three Points, a headland ten miles southeast of Gros Frederic’sburg which marked the start of the Gold Coast proper. From this point onward the number of transactions recorded in the Hannah’s account book increased considerably. In just four days, in exchange for numerous iron bars and knives and bales of boysadoes and perpetuanas, Danvers took over ten marks of gold, a local measurement equivalent to £322.20 “The way of receiving the gold upon this whole coast,” Captain Phillips explained, “is by weight, of which the several kinds us’d, and in which we keep out accounts, are marks, ounces, achies, and taccooes. A taccoo is a small berry as big as a pea, 12 of which make an achy . . . 16 Achies are 1 ounce . . . [and] 8 ounces are 1 mark gold; value about 32l. Stirling. . . . The gold is most in dust,” Phillips went on, “with some pieces of rock among it; and sometimes in wire, and wedges . . . We first sift and blow the dust . . . until it be well clear of dirt . . . then it is carefully pick’d, and all the bad or suspicious taken from it by a negroe that understands gold well, and we entertain aboard for that purpose, giving him a gratuity when we have done trading. . . . Indeed we had need of all the caution imaginable to avoid being cheated by the negroes, [who] . . . mix . . . filings of brass with the gold dust, and fill . . . the middle of their cast ingots with lead, so that we never take any of them without cutting them with a chizel into small pieces . . . We are always very kind to good traders,” Phillips concluded, “giving them store of good punch and brandy, but such as bring very bad gold, we sometimes chastize . . . [by] turn[ing them] away with severe threats . . . [or] put[ting] them in irons.” Another means of punishment, which was reserved for Africans who defaulted on their debts, was to pinion them below decks until a ransom was paid by friends and relatives. If the money was not forthcoming, the captives were taken to the Americas and sold as slaves.21