by Ben Hughes
The route to Ouidah traversed a marsh and several rivers and lagoons where fishermen carried on a brisk trade. Salt production was another major factor in the local economy.47 The swampland was home to pheasant and partridge and the dazzling crown bird, easily identified, according to Bosman, by the “yellowish Tuft . . . intermixed with speckled Feathers, strutting like Hogs Bristles; with which their heads are adorned.”48 Europeans typically undertook the journey in hammocks borne by native porters. “The traveller . . . either lies . . . or sits as he is dispos’d,” Captain Phillips explained, “then . . . is mounted on the heads of two negroes . . . and away they will . . . run as fast as most horses can trot, cheerfully singing in parts to each other till they are quite tyr’d, when . . . they are reliev’d by two fresh, and they in course by two more.” Phillips recalled, “The motion of the negroes attracts a fine cooling air, [and] I have often taken pleasant naps in them.”49
Ouidah was a town of roughly one thousand inhabitants, each family living in a separate hut or caze. Standing low near the marshes it was considered a most unhealthy place by the Europeans who visited. Nevertheless, due to its primary importance in the slave trade, the French and English maintained factories in town, and there was also a significant Dutch and Portuguese presence. The English, who dominated the trade by the late seventeenth century, had built a settlement a small distance from town.50 Two hundred yards in circumference, their complex was enclosed “with a mud wall, about six-foot high” which was regularly washed away in the rainy season from May to August. “On the south side is the gate,” Phillips recalled, “within is a large yard, a mud thatch’d house, where the factor lives, with the white men . . . a store-house, a trunk [or holding cell] for slaves [where six hundred to eight hundred could be held at a time] . . . a good forge and some other small houses; To the east are two small flankers of mud, with a few pop-guns and harquebusses, which serve more to terrify the poor ignorant negroes than to do any execution.” In the courtyard was a collection of graves. Among them was one belonging to Captain Wyborne, the officer who had built the complex some years earlier. Wyborne had succumbed to disease and been buried days before the Hannah’s arrival.51
Unlike the Gold Coast, where European infighting and Akan attacks were a regular occurrence, Ouidah was a relatively peaceful town. The entire region and all dealings with Europeans were governed by King Agbangla and his numerous subordinates.52 Agbangla’s dominion, the Kingdom of Hueda, was a region which encompassed ten miles of coastline and stretched some twenty-five miles inland. Ouidah itself was merely a trading town, which Agbangla’s predecessors had designated fit for European habitation. No stone forts were permitted, hence the mud-walled enclosures, and fighting was punishable by either a fine of eight slaves or exile. All Europeans were obliged to employ local porters, and all purchases of slaves were conducted exclusively through the king, who resided in a “palace” at the capital of Savi, a settlement of over thirty thousand located five miles to the north of Ouidah. The slaves themselves, ten thousand of whom were sold annually by the 1690s, came via yet another polity twenty miles farther inland, the kingdom of Allada, which was said to have a population over twenty times that of Hueda.53
The traders of Allada came by their slaves through a variety of means. Many would have traveled hundreds of miles, passing through the hands of several different owners before reaching the coast. Those acquired by wide-ranging pillaging, banditry, kidnapping, and systematic warfare with neighboring states were supplemented by unfortunates who had been sold by their families to pay debts. Others were orphans or had been sold to allay fines imposed due to extramarital transgressions, while some fell victim to kidnappers or opportunistic bands of robbers. Social rank, wealth, or status were often not enough to save a person from such a fate: prosperous merchants, aristocrats, and even kings were sold into slavery in the period.54
While no accounts of slaves embarked from Ouidah are extant from either the seventeenth or eighteenth century, some roughly contemporary tales of Gold Coast captives survive. Abu Bakr, born in Timbuktu, was a prisoner of war who was sold to the English at Cape Coast Castle and spent thirty years in Jamaica. Belinda Royall was from the Volta River in northern Ghana. Aged twelve, she was kidnapped while her parents were praying at a local shrine, carried to the coast, and shipped to Antigua. William Unsah Sessarakoo, a young prince of Anomabu, was duped, shipped, and sold to a planter in Barbados around 1744.55 Another Akan, a wealthy man who was the cousin of a subking and commanded three thousand warriors in battle, was enslaved to pay off his gambling debts, while Quacco, a slave who eventually became the property of John G. Stedman, a British officer who fought maroons in Dutch Guiana in the mid-eighteenth century, was stolen from his parents as a young child along with two brothers. Carried off in a bag and sold to a “king on the coast of Guinea,” Quacco was given to one of the king’s officers as a gift, before being purchased by the captain of a Dutch ship for some “[gun]powder and a musket.”56
Two accounts of slaves known to have been sold out of Ouidah in the mid-nineteenth century survive. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was kidnapped at Djougou in northern Benin. He changed hands “7 or 8 times from market to market before arriving” at Ouidah. In his account, published in 1854 by an American abolitionist, Baquaqua wrote of his hope that he might escape en route or that his mother might purchase his freedom, but once he had reached Allada little hope remained: “When we arrived,” Baquaqua wrote, “I began to give up . . . [on] getting back to my home again . . . the last ray seemed fading away, and my heart felt sad and weary within me, as I thought of my mother, whom I loved most tenderly, and the thought of never more beholding her, added very much to my perplexities. I felt sad and lonely . . . and my heart sank within me, when I thought of the ‘old folks’ at home.”57
On February 18, 1690, Captain Danvers, the Hannah’s surgeon, and an armed escort of sailors travelled to Savi to do business with King Agbangla.58 The journey, according to Phillips, took the English “thro’ very pleasant fields, full of India and Guiney corn, potatoes, [and] yams, in great plenty.” At Savi, they were carried to the palace, “the meanest” Phillips “ever saw . . . being low mud walls, the roof thatch’d, the floor the bare ground, with some water and dirt in it,” where they “were met . . . by several [caboceers],” who shook their hands “with great demonstration of affection: when we enter’d the palace-yard,” Phillips continued,
they all fell on their knees near the door of the room where the king was, clapping their hands, knocking the ground with their foreheads, and kissing it, which they repeated three times . . . they [then] led us [in]to the room . . . upon their knees . . . and crawl’d to their several stations. . . . When we enter’d, the king peep’d upon us from behind a curtain, and beckon’d us to him, whereupon we approach’d close to his throne, which was of clay, rais’d about two foot from the ground. . . . He had two or three little black children with him, and was smoaking tobacco in a long wooden pipe . . . with a bottle of brandy and a little dirty silver cup by his side; his head was tied about with a roll of coarse callicoe, and he had a loose gown of red damask to cover him. . . . We saluted him with our hats, and he . . . told us we were very welcome . . . that he lov’d Englishmen dearly, that we were all his brothers, and that he would do us all the good offices he could.59
After drinking a series of toasts to the Royal African Company and King William and Queen Mary among others, Danvers and his men were shown to their rooms. They stayed in Savi for the next thirty nights.60 Sickness and fevers soon set in among the visitors. Malaria was the most common ailment to afflict the men of the Royal African Company. It began, one contemporary recorded, “with a violent pain and dizziness of the head. . . . Nausea, vomiting and restlessness” followed, after which “the patient . . . falls into excessive sweats, inextinguishable thirst and involuntary urinating.” Finally, “delirium, convulsions or speechlessness” set in and could lead to the victim’s death within four or five days. The bloody flu
x, or dysentery, was another killer, and river blindness took its share of victims. During the Hannah’s voyage, four of her crew of thirty succumbed to various ailments.61
Each morning at Savi, after a breakfast “of stew’d fowls and potatoes,” Danvers got down to business.62 According to Bosman, all transactions were conducted “on a large Plain. First the king’s slaves were exhibited for sale, then each of the . . . [caboceers], taking turns according to their rank, displayed theirs.”63 “Our surgeon examin’d them well in all kinds,” Phillips explained, “to see that they were sound wind and limb, making them jump, stretch out their arms swiftly, [and] looking in their mouths to judge of their age; for the [caboceers] are so cunning, that they shave them all close before we see them, so that . . . we can see no grey hairs in their heads or beards; and then having liqour’d them well and sleek with palm oil, ’tis no easy matter to know an old one from a middle-age one, but by the teeths decay.” Phillips continued, “Our greatest care of all is to buy none that are pox’d, lest they should infect the rest aboard, therefore our surgeon is forc’d to examine the privacies of both men and women, with the nicest scrutiny.”64 The surgeons were well-rewarded for conducting such thorough checks: each received a commission of five shillings for each slave delivered alive to their destination, while the Portuguese, who were particularly keen on purchasing only adolescent males for sale to the plantation owners in Brazil, were even known to lick the faces of the slaves they were considering purchasing to check their cheeks for stubble.65
Those rejected, Bosman informs us, were “thrown out.” These included “the lame or faulty . . . such as are above five and thirty Years old, or [those who] are maimed in the Arms, Legs, Hands or Feet, have lost a Tooth, are grey-haired, or have Films over their Eyes; as well as all those which are affected with any Veneral Distemper, or with several other Diseases.”66 What became of such individuals is uncertain, but it seems likely they were killed. Certainly, those prisoners of war considered unfit for the slave trade were typically slaughtered on the field where they were taken, while infants, thought to be more trouble than they were worth, were commonly left on the outskirts of town for the hyenas.67
‘When we had selected . . . such as we liked,” Phillips continued in his account of a slave transaction he conducted two years after the Hannah’s visit, “we agreed in what goods to pay for them, the prices being already stated before the king, how much of each sort of merchandize we were to give for a man, woman, and child, which gave us much ease, and saved abundance of disputes and wranglings[. We then] gave the owner a note, signifying our agreement of the sorts of goods; upon delivery of which the next day he receiv’d them; then we mark’d the slaves we had bought in the breast, or shoulder, with a hot iron, having the letter of the ship’s name on it, the place being before anointed with a little palm oil . . . [it] caus’d but little pain.”68 Bosman, when writing of branding, felt the need to explain himself to his readers. “I doubt not,” he began, “but this . . . seems very barbarous to you, but since it is followed by meer necessity it must go on; but we yet take all possible care that they are not burned too hard, especially the Women, who are more tender than the Men.”69
On the first day of sales at Ouidah, conducted on February 19, 1690, Danvers bought three lots of male slaves. The first consisted of nineteen individuals, the second of thirty-one, and the third of six. The first two lots were paid for in cowries, sea-mollusk shells long used as currency in West Africa, which were obtained by the East India Company at Bengal. The third lot was exchanged for seventy pounds of tobacco. Over the next nineteen days, as he and his men grew gradually sicker, Danvers continued to purchase slaves in lots of between two and forty-four individuals. Prices varied wildly. The king’s slaves, bought in the first transactions, were the most expensive. Subsequently, males brought in the first week cost up to one hundred cowries per head, but by March, the price had fallen to just one cowrie per individual. “Negresses” were generally cheaper than males, three selling for just forty-five cowries on the second day of transactions.70 Once purchased, the slaves were sent to a holding bay known as “the trunk.” From there they were dispatched to the coast in lots of fifty or sixty at a time. This operation was overseen by a caboceer known as the captain of the slaves, “whose care it was to secure them to the waterside.”71 By the time he had exhausted his trading goods, Danvers had purchased 399 Africans, 126 of them females, in exchange for 11,417 cowries, 900 bales of tobacco, and 589 brass pans. The fee included a 10 percent commission paid to King Agbangla, who also received an additional dashee of forty-five smoking pipes.72
Virtually nothing is known of the backgrounds of the men, women, and children Danvers purchased. We can only speculate as to who they were. A number of them were probably Akan, or Coromantee to the English. These may have traveled from west of the Volta River or perhaps were from the numerous Akan migrants then inhabiting territories inland of the Slave Coast. Others may have been Papas (also known as Popos or Papaws). Lighter skinned than the Akan, the Papas were natives of Dahomey, a rising polity to the north of Allada, and spoke Gbe languages.73 It is just possible that one of the Akan may have been a warrior, aristocrat, or even a king named Cudjoe. A typical Akan “day name” meaning a male born on Monday, countless Cudjoes were shipped to the Americas as a result of the slave trade.74 The Cudjoe that may have traveled on the Hannah, however, would leave a legacy which remains well-known to this day.
Once at the beach, Danvers’s slaves were carried by the canoes he had hired at Cape Coast Castle to the Hannah’s longboat.75 For many, this short passage across the breakers was the most terrifying part of their ordeal so far. John Duncan, a nineteenth-century English explorer, related the experience of one seven-year-old Mahi slave girl. “[She] had never seen the sea [before],” he explained, “and consequently felt much alarm. She could scarcely be urged to get into the canoe, though I told her she was going back to her . . . mother, of whom she was very fond. Unfortunately the sea was very high and the surf heavy, and though the canoe men displayed great skill in managing their boat, . . . a sea passed completely over us from bow to stern. . . . The little girl, who was upon her knees in the bottom of the canoe . . . [was distraught and] as soon as the little creature was able, for she was almost suffocated by the surf, she called out for her . . . mother.”76 Once aboard ship the men were all put in irons. “Two and two [were typically] shackled together,” Captain Phillips explained, “to prevent their mutiny, or swimming ashore.”77
While none of the slaves bought by Danvers left a written record of their feelings as they boarded the Hannah, the words of one eighteenth-century survivor, Olaudah Equiano, may be used to illuminate the scene. “The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast,” Equiano related in his 1789 book, The Interesting Narrative,
was the sea, and a slave-ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, nor the then feelings of my mind. When I was carried on board I was immediately handled, and tossed up, to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke . . . united to confirm me in this belief. . . . When I looked round the ship . . . and saw . . . a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate, and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted.78
Equiano’s fears about the “white devils” were not unusual. John Barbot, a French Huguenot who made two voyages to Guinea in the employ of the Compagnie du Sénégal between 1678 and 1682, recorded that “all the slaves from [Allada and Ouidah] . . . especially those whom we transport to the islands of America . . . firmly believe when they are embarked that we hav
e bought them to have them fattened in our own country, so that we will be better able to sell them when they are more suitable to be eaten.”79 Another theory is that the transported slaves believed the Europeans to be witches who were taking them to the land of the dead, a common African association with the European and American continents, which they often seem to have conflated.80
THE Hannah set sail on the third leg of its journey on March 10, 1690. By this stage, as Danvers was too sick to make entries in his account book, David Zebbett, the Hannah’s first mate, took over. Before reaching Jamaica, Zebbett was to make two stops: the first at the island of St. Thomas (Sao Tome), a tiny volcanic atoll lying 155 miles off the shore of West Africa in the Gulf of Guinea which had been colonized by the Portuguese since the 1470s; the second at Barbados in the Caribbean. As the sloop was now carrying over four hundred passengers and crew, both detours were required for the purchase of provisions and water as well as wood to fire the galley stove.81
The first day after leaving Ouidah was the most dangerous for the crew. Slave revolts typically occurred while still in sight of the coast, the Africans believing that some hope remained of their returning to their homes.82 As a result, the traders ensured security was tight. “We shackle the men two and two while we lie in port, and in sight of their own country,” Phillips recorded, meaning that each slave was shackled to the ankle of those immediately to his left and right. “We always keep sentinels on upon the hatchways, and have a chest of small arms, ready loaden and prim’d, constantly lying at hand upon the quarter-deck, together with some granada shells; and two of our quarter-deck guns, pointing on the deck thence, and two more out of the steerage, the door of which is always kept shut and well barr’d. They are fed twice daily,” Phillips continued, “at 10 in the morning and at 4 in the evening, which is the time they are aptest to mutiny, being all upon deck; therefore all that time, what of our men are not employ’d in distributing their victuals to them, and settling them, stand to their arms; and some with lighted matches at the great guns that yaun upon them, loaden with partridge, till they have done and gone down to their kennels between decks.”83