Atlantic trade history and its geographic dimensions

¶ … History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

"[Beginning in the 16th Century]…America became the great market for some 9 to 10 million African slaves…and it was in the New World that African slavery most flourished under European rule…" (Klein, 2010, p 17).

Background into the Slave Trade

Roger Anstey writes in his book the Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760-1810 that there was a thriving slave trade in the Middle Ages. In fact, Antsey explains, there was a "lively trade in slaves around the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea," and the victims turned into slaves were Christians and Moslems (Anstey, 1975, p. 3). Centuries later, by the middle of the Seventeenth century, when Brazil was discovered (and subsequently seized as its own colony by Portugal) and when the native Indians didn't work out as adequate forced labor, the Portuguese brought in African Slaves.

As for the British, Sir. John Hawkins in 1562 was reportedly the first to make a slave voyage. And though, according to Antsey (p. 4), the Dutch and French, and the Danes -- and of course the Spaniards -- were all involved in kidnapping Africans, chaining them aboard slave ships for transport to the New World, "the British were most persistent and successful" in supplying slaves for their own needs and for the needs of other colonial powers.

The most important initial requirement for a merchant that wished to be involved on the slave trade was money, Anstey explains on page 3. The initial capital cost for Dutch slave ships was about 8,857 Pounds Sterling and for the British slave ships it was a bit less, 8,534 Pounds Sterling. Delivering slaves to various venues and being paid for the work earned the money needed to outfit the next slave ship, Anstey writes. The London slave trade was very busy; in fact between 1789 and 1791, the London slave ships made 50 voyages to and from Africa.

Anstey breaks down the partnerships that were made between various slave ship owners and their investors. It is clear that in Liverpool, one of the British ports where slave ships were launched, 80% of all the owners of ships were in fact merchants. Another 12 or 13% had some connection with maritime operations, Anstey explains (p. 8). At Whitehaven in England 40% of all the owners were linked to maritime interests, "30% were professional men, yeomen, widows or spinsters" and the other 30% were business interests with no direct connection to maritime or shipbuilding concerns. In other words, thirty percent of those participating in and profiting from the slave trade in the port of Whitehaven were simply investors (some pawnbrokers, others milliners, still others private entrepreneurs).

The French were involved in slaving as well, of course, and Anstey's data shows that in 1787 nineteen "slavers" were dispatched from the French port of Honfleur. Ten of the 19 ships were sent by one company, another five were sent from another company and four by a third company. This suggests, that unlike the British, the French slave trade owners were "highly concentrated" (Anstey, 8). In another busy French port, Nantes, the most important of the three French slave ports, there were four companies that basically dominated. In fact between 1740 and 1760 those four companies launched "two-thirds of the outfittings."

The vessels used in the slave trade, the author continues, were normally between 150 and 300 tons, and a slave ship needed to be constructed with "decks rather than holds" (Anstey, 9). European slave traders would pack their ships with the goods that we required for the purchase of the slaves in the West Coast of Africa, where African and European traders were waiting to receive the goods prior to delivering the slaves. Those goods consisted of gunpowder, brandy, rum, knives, hats, brass manufactures, earthenware, malt, flints and various sizes and patterns of cotton cloth, Anstey writes (p. 9).

There were British slavers that were hired by the French to transport slaves. The British slave ship owners got "a bounty" on the tonnage, a "premium on slaves sold" and there was a "much higher market price" for slaves that were delivered to and sold to French colonies (Anstey, 11). Since there was a limit on how many slaves that could be carried on British ships, a limitation imposed by the British Parliament in 1799, the British slavers "wore the Dutch flag" according to Anstey. Was it easy to recruit crewmembers to sail with slave ships? Not always, the author writes on page 12. The difficulty to enlist high quality crewmembers was based on the "reputation which some slave ship captains… had for exceptional brutality," and for the "high morality amongst crews," Anstey writes. Because of the bad reputation slave ship captains had, only the very young or the "innocent" signed up to work the slave ships. Recruiters established a system of "crimping" -- collusion between ship's masters and innkeepers -- and the recruiters would walk from one bar ("public house") to the next late at night, get the potential young man well intoxicated, and entice him to the boat (Anstey, 13).

The African Slave Coast -- Source of Millions of Slaves

George Dow describes the situation along the Guinea Coast of Africa (also known as the "slave coast"), where the Dutch, Portuguese, French and English established forts and "small settlements" to house Africans that had been abducted from the hinterland and were waiting to be sent sailing in slave ships. As the slaves were "brought in from the back country," they were purchased by "barter" in many case (Dow, 1927, p. 2). That is, as Anstey explained earlier in this paper, European ships sailed to Africa not with currency necessarily but with goods, to be used as barter for the slaves that were needed. Inside the forts there were storehouses for the merchandize, barracks for the employees and "sheds for the slaves." Outside the forts there were huts for "the negroes in service of the factory," and they were watched over by gun high up on the fort's walls. The forts were built to withstand any possible attack from native Africans, and the forts used 50 to 60 guns so they were protected from any European force that might attack, Dow writes (p. 2).

What did the men who lived and worked with the slave traders in these forts actually do? Dow said some would sail up the rivers into Africa and "exchange European manufactures for slaves, gold dust and ivory." Many of the men working for the slavers were "outcasts at home" or they were "destitute of means" and hence had nothing to lose by sailing to Africa where they could lead a life "of comparative indolence"; that is, they could indulge in "every human passion with utter freedom," including "drunkenness" or "unrestrained intercourse with negro girls" (Dow, 3). These men knew fever or other diseases they did not have resistance to could kill them, and hence they apparently spent much of their time "smoking, drinking palm wine and gaming," Dow explains.

Dow asserts that in 1618, England's King James granted a "charter" to a stock company to conduct trade with Guinea, thinking he was getting an exclusive deal, but the slave trade was soon wide open to many interests. In 1662, the king's brother the Duke of York, established another exclusive trading company ("Company of Royal Adventurers of England for Carrying on a Trade to Africa") that had as a goal the transport and delivery of up to "three thousand slaves annually" to English plantations (Dow, 4). The king's brother did very well and in fact for two years carried so much gold dust back to England that King Charles II "…ordered the minting of a new gold coin" that had the value of 21 shillings. It was known as the "guinea" for obvious reasons.

By 1790 there were an estimated forty forts and factories on the Guinea coast; the English owned 14 of them; the Dutch owned 15; the Portuguese had four -- as did the Danes -- and the French had three forts (Dow, 4). The number of African natives that had been kidnapped or sold into slavery in 1790 was an estimated one hundred thousand, Dow explains (5). And by the year 1800, Dow estimates that the total number of Africans that had been conscripted into slavery reached "thirty million victims."

How did it work, in terms of trading manufactured goods from Europe for humans in the hinterlands of Africa? Dow writes that a ship would be sent upriver (perhaps one hundred leagues) to Yanamaroo in the kingdom of Yancy, Dow points out. Liquor was paid to cover the cost of docking the boat, and "messengers were sent out to the principal people, for twenty or thirty miles around, soliciting slaves and trade" (Dow, 5).

African slaves were sold to the Europeans by other Africans, and some of those sold into slavery were "prisoners of war" albeit "not infrequently men would sell their own children or the children of neighbors, that they had kidnapped" (Dow, 6). A "linguist" would bring the slave broker on board the ship that had traveled upriver, and at that point there were negotiations and the broker (owner of the slaves that he had kidnapped) wanted to know of course what merchandise was being offered, what the commission the captain of the vessel was to receive, and he wanted to know what other offers might be out there on the coast from the other slavers. At the end of the day, if the broker liked the deal, and if the trader liked the slaves that the broker brought to the river (or the coast), the company "surgeon" was called in to check the health of the prisoners, and if that passed muster, a deal was struck. The male slaves were put in irons on the main deck; the children and women (not ironed) were placed on the quarterdeck; and the boys were not ironed and placed on the main deck (Dow, 6).

Saidiya Hartman writes that some of the Africans that were kidnapped and brought to the coast had trekked "hundreds of miles, passed through the hands of African and European traders" (Hartman, 2008, pp. 7-8). Hartman, an African-American writer who visited Africa on a research trip, said the Africans that were "torn from kin and community" were "exiled from one's country, dishonored and violated" -- the "perpetual outcast, the coerced migrant, the foreigner, the shamefaced child in the lineage" (p. 5). Hartman disagrees with Dow's assessment that men sold their own children. "Contrary to popular belief, Africans did not sell their brothers and sister into slavery," she insists. "They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships," she writes on page 5 of her book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The slaves that Africans sold to Europeans were "nonmembers of the polity," Hartman explains; they were "barbarians at the outskirts of their country, and lawbreakers expelled from society." In order to betray your race, "you had first to imagine yourself as one," she continued (5).

Hartman mentions the origin of "slave" -- it was first coined in Europe (from the word "Slav") because the Eastern Europeans were the "slaves of the medieval world," Hartman points out on page 5. As slavery expanded in Africa, it declined in Europe, although Harman asserts that into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "it was still possible to purchase 'white' slaves -- English, Spanish, and Portuguese captives in the Mediterranean ports of North Africa" (5). While Dow lists the number of European "forts" in Ghana Hartman writes that by the end of the eighteenth century, there were "sixty slave markets" there, and the town of Elmina was the "gateway between the African hinterland, the entrepots of Western Europe, and the plantations of the New World" (Hartman, 52).

When the Elmina castle was built in 1674, the "slave pens" were designed to "deter rebellion" and hence they were dug out under the castle. The slave housing consisted of "large vaulted cellars, divided into several apartments, which can easily hold a thousand slaves," Hartman explains, quoting from the notes of French trader Jean Barbot in 1681 (Hartman, 111). Keeping slaves underground wasn't like a "dungeon," according to the British; they called it "a factory," which, Hartman concludes, was the "indissoluble link between England's industrial revolution and the birth of human commodities" (111).

Why didn't the Europeans that colonized the Americas tap into the labor force that was already on the North American continent -- the Native Americans, the Indians? Herbert S. Klein writes that "Indians could be exploited systematically but they could not be moved from their lands on a permanent basis" (Klein, 2010, p. 20). The Indians were the "dominant cultural group" but they were also "relatively impervious to Spanish and European norms of behavior," Klein explains. The Africans, on the other hand, "came from multiple linguistic groups" and they had only "the European languages in common"; therefore, they were "forced to adapt themselves to the European norms," Klein continues (20). The slaves brought from Africa were perfect substitutes to the pool of European laborers that were put into servitude in Europe earlier, Klein explains. And thus the African slaves added "important strength to the small European urban society that dominated the American Indian peasant masses" (Klein, 20). Moreover, the Indians were more susceptible to European diseases, and Indians were "less adaptable to systematic agricultural labor…"

Why did Africans so willingly supply slaves for sale to the European interlopers? Author Patrick Manning writes that certainly there were Africans that "could not resist profiting from the sale of slaves" (Manning, 1990, p. 86). But that is not a sufficient enough explanation, the author goes on. How could this have gone on for "over two centuries," Manning asks, given that the total population of Africa declined and people were separated from their families. Many Africans did see the consequences of slavery, and some, Manning writes, and "some fought bravely against its continuation and expansion" (86). That said, enough Africans participated in the "capture, commerce, and exploitation of slaves" to keep this evil enterprise going "into the twentieth century," Manning points out.

More specifically, the author points to four reasons why Africans helped to secure the oppression and bondage of their fellow countrymen: a) most Africans that participated in the slave trade were "unaware of the damage the slave trade was doing to the continent"; b) there were powerful "social pressures" to participate, and those pressures were so powerful that they could not turn down the opportunities; c) besides social pressure, the Africans that helped the Europeans steal millions of people "were unable to escape the economic pressures to participate in the slave trade"; in other words, the money and the other rewards were just too good to turn down, even it if put your own countrymen in bondage thousands of miles away; and d) they "did not think enough about the consequences of their actions" (Manning, 86).

Manning delves deeper into the reasons why there were social pressures to participate in slavery; on page 88 he explains that many people in Africa were simply born into slavery in the first place. In Angola, many Africans were "suddenly" shackled and "exported when their lord's debts were called in by merchants" and others were "shifted subtly into slavery," Manning writes. There were several ways in which slaves were captured: a) many Africans became prisoners of war after a regional battle; b) some were seized during raids that were specifically targeted for the capture of slaves or for "booty"; c) some Africans were kidnapped by men out looking for ways to make money; d) there were "court proceedings in which persons were enslaved for violating the rules of society"; e) there were accusations of "witchcraft" in which those accused (sometimes falsely) were "enslaved for carrying on illicit supernatural activities" f) there were "exactions of tribute, in which tributaries were required to render up some of their own to a higher authority"; and g) in the event of a famine or an epidemic, some Africans placed themselves in a condition of slavery, or sold their own kin to attempt to beat the disease or famine (Manning, 88-89).

Of all those situations in which Africans could become slaves, the most "prominent means for the capture of slaves" was warfare, Manning asserts. Hideous those it sounds today, there have been wars reported involving armies of "several thousand on a side, with a baggage train enclosed within each army consisting mainly of women." On each side, the women were from a "pre-selected population, ready for export," Manning writes. It seems that slave merchants were waiting nearby to see who won the war, and for the losers they would be purchased from the winners and that's how the slave traders and merchants made their living (Manning, 89).

On another level, judicial enslavement was another well-known way to put people into slavery. The Aro oracle of the Bight of Biafra was a situation in which the oracle "rendered decisions in great disputations brought before it," and the defeated party was "marched to the coast for export" as slaves (Manning, 89).

There is a story that Manning admits is "true and untrue" about Cowrie shells; cowrie shells served as currency along the West coast of Africa and in other areas. The story goes that slaves were deliberately drowned in the sea so that cowrie shells would grow on their disintegrating bodies. After awhile the body would be dredged up and the cowries (currency) would be collected. Manning says the story is not true in that there are no recorded instances of slaves being deliberately drowned, and moreover cowrie shells grow in the Indian Ocean, not in the Atlantic. But the story is "a stark example of the ideology justifying slavery in Africa" in that Africans threw away a very precious resource (young men and women) for money. The irony in this story is that it is true that slaves did the work of "carrying sacks of cowries inland to the sellers" (Manning, 99).

In the book an Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, written by a "surgeon in the African Trade" named Alexander Falconbridge in 1792 (and published in the U.S. In 1973) the author give a first person original account of the activities of slave traders. In this book Falconbridge reported that once Africans "fall into the hands of black traders, they experience… dreadful sufferings which they are doomed in future to undergo" (Falconbridge, 1792, p. 19). "Great numbers" of kidnapped Africans "perish from cruelty, want of food" and from "traveling through inhospitable" environments, Falconbridge explains.

When the slaves are brought downriver to the European forts and factories, they have their hands tied and are pushed to the bottoms of the canoes. Since it is a journey of several days, and since they are given "barely sufficient" food to keep them alive, they are in rough shape by the time they are officially "sold" to the European traders. Falconbridge write (19) that once the African are in the hands of the Europeans, "more humanity might naturally be expected"; however the treatment that the Africans receive I "no less rigorous" than what they received at the hands of the black traders who turned them over to the Europeans.

Once on the slave ship, the slaves are shackled together, two-by-two, with handcuffs on their wrists and "by irons riveted on their legs" and placed in an "apartment" partitioned off for that purpose, Falconbridge explains (19). There is not enough room for the slaves to stand up, as they are shackled to a shelf "eight or nine feet in breadth, extending from the side of the ship towards the center" and the shelf is only a few feet from the one above it. Large buckets are placed in several spots in the slave area, and that is for bowel movements and urination, but some slaves can't reach the bucket so they "tumble over their companions." These tumbles result in "continual quarrels" and worse yet, slaves have to lay in their own excrement.