University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER II
THE MARITIME SLAVE TRADE

AT the request of a slaver's captain the government of
Georgia issued in 1772 a certificate to a certain Fenda
Lawrence reciting that she, "a free black woman and
heretofore a considerable trader in the river Gambia on the coast
of Africa, hath voluntarily come to be and remain for some time
in this province," and giving her permission to "pass and repass
unmolested within the said province on her lawfull and necessary
occations."[1] This instance is highly exceptional. The millions
of African expatriates went against their own wills, and their
transporters looked upon the business not as passenger traffic but
as trade in goods. Earnings came from selling in America the
cargoes bought in Africa; the transportation was but an item
in the trade.

The business bulked so large in the world's commerce in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that every important maritime
community on the Atlantic sought a share, generally with
the sanction and often with the active assistance of its respective
sovereign. The preliminaries to the commercial strife occurred
in the Elizabethan age, French traders in gold and ivory found
the Portuguese police on the Guinea Coast to be negligible; but
poaching in the slave trade was a harder problem, for Spain
held firm control of her colonies which were then virtually the
world's only slave market.

The test of this was made by Sir John Hawkins who at the
beginning of his career as a great English sea captain had
informed himself in the Canary Islands of the Afro-American
opportunity awaiting exploitation. Backed by certain English

financiers, he set forth in 1562 with a hundred men in three small
ships, and after procuring in Sierra Leone, "partly by the sword
and partly by other means," above three hundred negroes he
sailed to Hispaniola where without hindrance from the authorities
he exchanged them for colonial produce. "And so, with
prosperous success, and much gain to himself and the aforesaid
adventurers, he came home, and arrived in the month of September,
1563."[2] Next year with 170 men in four ships Hawkins
again captured as many Sierra Leone natives as he could
carry, and proceeded to peddle them in the Spanish islands.
When the authorities interfered he coerced them by show of
arms and seizure of hostages, and when the planters demurred
at his prices he brought them to terms through a mixture of
diplomacy and intimidation. After many adventures by the
way he reached home, as the chronicler concludes, "God be
thanked! in safety: with the loss of twenty persons in all the
voyage; as with great profit to the venturers in the said voyage,
so also to the whole realm, in bringing home both gold, silver,
pearls, and other jewels in great store. His name therefore be
praised for evermore! Amen." Before two years more had
passed Hawkins put forth for a third voyage, this time with
six ships, two of them among the largest then afloat. The cargo
of slaves, procured by aiding a Guinea tribe in an attack upon
its neighbor, had been duly sold in the Indies when dearth of
supplies and stress of weather drove the fleet into the Mexican
port of San Juan de Ulloa. There a Spanish fleet of thirteen
ships attacked the intruders, capturing their treasure ship and
three of her consorts. Only the Minion under Hawkins and the
bark Judith under the young Francis Drake escaped to carry the
harrowing tale to England. One result of the episode was that
it filled Hawkins and Drake with desire for revenge on Spain,
which was wreaked in due time but in European waters. Another
consequence was a discouragement of English slave trading
for nearly a century to follow.

The defeat of the Armada in 1588 led the world to suspect
the decline of Spain's maritime power, but only in the lapse of
decades did the suspicion of her helplessness become a certainty.
Meantime Portugal was for sixty years an appanage of the
Spanish crown, while the Netherlands were at their heroic labor
for independence. Thus when the Dutch came to prevail at
sea in the early seventeenth century the Portuguese posts in
Guinea fell their prey, and in 1621 the Dutch West India Company
was chartered to take them over. Closely identified with
the Dutch government, this company not only founded the colony
of New Netherland and endeavored to foster the employment
of negro slaves there, but in 1634 it seized the Spanish
island of Curaçao near the Venezuelan coast and made it a
basis for smuggling slaves into the Spanish dominions. And
now the English, the French and the Danes began to give systematic
attention to the African and West Indian opportunities,
whether in the form of buccaneering, slave trading or colonization.

The revolt of Portugal in 1640 brought a turning point. For
a quarter-century thereafter the Spanish government, regarding
the Portuguese as rebels, suspended all trade relations with
them, the asiento included. But the trade alternatives remaining
were all distasteful to Spain. The English were heretics; the
Dutch were both heretics and rebels; the French and the Danes
were too weak at sea to handle the great slave trading contract
with security; and Spain had no means of her own for large scale
commerce. The upshot was that the carriage of slaves to the.
Spanish colonies was wholly interdicted during the two middle
decades of the century. But this gave the smugglers their highest
opportunity. The Spanish colonial police collapsed under the
pressure of the public demand for slaves, and illicit trading became
so general and open as to be pseudo legitimate. Such a
boom came as was never felt before under Protestant flags in
tropical waters. The French, in spite of great exertions, were
not yet able to rival the Dutch and English. These in fact had
such an ascendency that when in 1663 Spain revived the asiento

by a contract with two Genoese, the contractors must needs
procure their slaves by arrangement with Dutch and English
who delivered them at Curaçao and Jamaica. Soon after this
contract expired the asiento itself was converted from an item
of Spanish internal policy into a shuttlecock of international
politics. It became in fact the badge of maritime supremacy,
possessed now by the Dutch, now by the French in the greatest
years of Louis XIV, and finally by the English as a trophy in
the treaty of Utrecht.

By this time, however, the Spanish dominions were losing their
primacy as slave markets. Jamaica, Barbados and other Windward
Islands under the English; Hayti, Martinique and Guadeloupe
under the French, and Guiana under the Dutch were all
more or less thriving as plantation colonies, while Brazil, Virginia,
Maryland and the newly founded Carolina were beginning
to demonstrate that slave labor had an effective calling without
as well as within the Caribbean latitudes. The closing decades
of the seventeenth century were introducing the heyday
of the slave trade, and the English were preparing for their
final ascendency therein.

In West African waters in that century no international law
prevailed but that of might. Hence the impulse of any new
country to enter the Guinea trade led to the project of a chartered
monopoly company; for without the resources of share
capital sufficient strength could not be had, and without the
monopoly privilege the necessary shares could not be sold. The
first English company of moment, chartered in 1618, confined
its trade to gold and other produce. Richard Jobson while
in its service on the Gambia was offered some slaves by a native
trader. "I made answer," Jobson relates, "we were a people
who did not deal in any such commodities; neither did we buy
or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes; at which
he seemed to marvel much, and told us it was the only merchandize
they carried down, and that they were sold to white men,
who earnestly desired them. We answered, they were another
kind of people, different from us; but for our part, if they had

no other commodities, we would return again."[3] This company
speedily ending its life, was followed by another in 1631 with a
similarly short career; and in 1651 the African privilege was
granted for a time to the East India Company.

Under Charles II activities were resumed vigorously by a
company chartered in 1662; but this promptly fell into such conflict
with the Dutch that its capital of £122,000 vanished. In
a drastic reorganization its affairs were taken over by a new
corporation, the Royal African Company, chartered in 1672
with the Duke of York at its head and vested in its turn with
monopoly rights under the English flag from Sallee on the
Moroccan coast to the Cape of Good Hope.[4] For two decades
this company prospered greatly, selling some two thousand slaves
a year in Jamaica alone, and paying large cash dividends on
its £100,000 capital and then a stock dividend of 300 per cent.
But now came reverses through European war and through the
competition of English and Yankee private traders who shipped
slaves legitimately from Madagascar and illicitly from Guinea.
Now came also a clamor from the colonies, where the company
was never popular, and from England also where oppression
and abuses were charged against it by would-be free traders. After
a parliamentary investigation an act of 1697 restricted the
monopoly by empowering separate traders to traffic in Guinea
upon paying to the company for the maintenance of its forts
ten per cent. on the value of the cargoes they carried thither and
a percentage on certain minor exports carried thence.

The company soon fell upon still more evil times, and met
them by evil practices. To increase its capital it offered new
stock for sale at reduced prices and borrowed money for dividends
in order to encourage subscriptions. The separate traders
meanwhile were winning nearly all its trade. In 1709–1710, for

example, forty-four of their vessels made voyages as compared
with but three ships of the company, and Royal African stock
sold as low as 2⅛ on the £100. A reorganization in 1712 however
added largely to the company's funds, and the treaty of
Utrecht brought it new prosperity. In 1730 at length Parliament
relieved the separate traders of all dues, substituting a public
grant of £10,000 a year toward the maintenance of the company's
forts. For twenty years more the company, managed
in the early thirties by James Oglethorpe, kept up the unequal
contest until 1751 when it was dissolved.

The company régime under the several flags was particularly
dominant on the coasts most esteemed in the seventeenth century;
and in that century they reached a comity of their own on
the basis of live and let live. The French were secured in the
Senegal sphere of influence and the English on the Gambia,
while on the Gold Coast the Dutch and English divided the
trade between them. Here the two headquarters were in forts
lying within sight of each other: El Mina of the Dutch, and
Cape Coast Castle of the English. Each was commanded by a
governor and garrisoned by a score or two of soldiers; and
each with its outlying factories had a staff of perhaps a dozen
factors, as many sub-factors, twice as many assistants, and a
few bookkeepers and auditors, as well as a corps of white artisans
and an abundance of native interpreters, boatmen, carriers and
domestic servants. The Dutch and English stations alternated
in a series east and west, often standing no further than a
cannon-shot apart. Here and there one of them had acquired a
slight domination which the other respected; but in the case of
the Coromantees (or Fantyns) William Bosnian, a Dutch company
factor about 1700, wrote that both companies had "equal
power, that is none at all. For when these people are inclined to
it they shut up the passes so close that not one merchant can come
from the inland country to trade with us; and sometimes, not
content with this, they prevent the bringing of provisions to us
till we have made peace with them." The tribe was in fact able
to exact heavy tribute from both companies; and to stretch the

treaty engagements at will to its own advantage.[5] Further eastward,
on the densely populated Slave Coast, the factories were
few and the trade virtually open to all comers. Here, as was
common throughout Upper Guinea, the traits and the trading
practices of adjacent tribes were likely to be in sharp contrast.
The Popo (or Paw Paw) people, for example, were so notorious
for cheating and thieving that few traders would go thither
unless prepared to carry things with a strong hand. The Portuguese
alone bore their grievances without retaliation, Bosman
said, because their goods were too poor to find markets elsewhere.[6]
But Fidah (Whydah), next door, was in Bosman's esteem
the most agreeable of all places to trade in. The people
were honest and polite, and the red-tape requirements definite
and reasonable. A ship captain after paying for a license and
buying the king's private stock of slaves at somewhat above
the market price would have the news of his arrival spread
afar, and at a given time the trade would be opened with
prices fixed in advance and all the available slaves herded in
an open field. There the captain or factor, with the aid of a
surgeon, would select the young and healthy, who if the purchaser
were the Dutch company were promptly branded to prevent
their being confused in the crowd before being carried on
shipboard. The Whydahs were so industrious in the trade, with
such far reaching interior connections, that they could deliver a
thousand slaves each month.[7]

Of the operations on the Gambia an intimate view may be
had from the journal of Francis Moore, a factor of the Royal
African Company from 1730 to 1735.[8] Here the Jolofs on
the north and the Mandingoes on the south and west were divided
into tribes or kingdoms fronting from five to twenty-five leagues
on the river, while tributary villages of Arabic-speaking Foulahs
were scattered among them. In addition there was a small independent
population of mixed breed, with very slight European

infusion but styling themselves Portuguese and using a "bastard
language" known locally as Creole. Many of these last were
busy in the slave trade. The Royal African headquarters, with
a garrison of thirty men, were on an island in the river some
thirty miles from its mouth, while its trading stations dotted
the shores for many leagues upstream, for no native king was
content without a factory near his "palace." The slaves bought
were partly of local origin but were mostly brought from
long distances inland. These came generally in strings
or coffles of thirty or forty, tied with leather thongs about their
necks and laden with burdens of ivory and corn on their heads.
Mungo Park when exploring the hinterland of this coast in 17951797,
traveling incidentally with a slave coffle on part of his
journey, estimated that in the Niger Valley generally the slaves
outnumbered the free by three to one.[9] But as Moore observed,
the domestic slaves were rarely sold in the trade, mainly for fear
it would cause their fellows to run away. When captured by
their master's enemies however, they were likely to be sent to
the coast, for they were seldom ransomed.

The diverse goods bartered for slaves were rated by units of
value which varied in the several trade centers. On the Gold
Coast it was a certain length of cowrie shells on a string; at
Loango it was a "piece" which had the value of a common gun
or of twenty pounds of iron; at Kakongo it was twelve- or fifteen-yard
lengths of cotton cloth called "goods";[10] while on
the Gambia it was a bar of iron, apparently about forty pounds
in weight But in the Gambia trade as Moore described it the
unit or "bar" in rum, cloth and most other things became depreciated
until in some commodities it was not above a shilling's
value in English money. Iron itself, on the other hand, and crystal
beads, brass pans and spreadeagle dollars appreciated in
comparison. These accordingly became distinguished as the
"heads of goods," and the inclusion of three or four units of
them was required in the forty or fifty bars of miscellaneous

goods making up the price of a prime slave.[11] In previous years
grown slaves alone had brought standard prices; but in Moore's
time a specially strong demand for boys and girls in the markets
of Cadiz and Lisbon had raised the prices of these almost to
a parity. All defects were of course discounted. Moore, for
example, in buying a slave with several teeth missing made the
seller abate a bar for each tooth. The company at one time
forbade the purchase of slaves from the self-styled Portuguese
because they ran the prices up; but the factors protested that
these dealers would promptly carry their wares to the separate
traders, and the prohibition was at once withdrawn.

The company and the separate traders faced different problems.
The latter were less easily able to adjust their merchandise
to the market. A Rhode Island captain, for instance, wrote
his owners from Anamabo in 1736, "heare is 7 sails of us rume
men, that we are ready to devour one another, for our case is
desprit"; while four years afterward another wrote after trading
at the same port, "I have repented a hundred times ye lying
in of them dry goods", which he had carried in place of the
customary rum.[12] Again, a veteran Rhode Islander wrote from
Anamabo in 1752, "on the whole I never had so much trouble
in all my voiges", and particularized as follows: "I have Gott
on bord 61 Slaves and upards of thirty ounces of Goold, and
have Gott 13 or 14 hhds of Rum yet Left on bord, and God noes
when I shall Gett Clear of it ye trade is so very Dull it is actuly
a noof to make a man Creasey my Cheef mate after making
foor or five Trips in the boat was taken Sick and Remains very
bad yett then I sent Mr. Taylor, and he got not well, and
three more of my men has [been] sick. . . . I should be Glad I
coold Com Rite home with my slaves, for my vesiel will not
Last to proceed farr we can see Day Lite al Roond her bow
under Deck. . . . heare Lyes Captains hamlet, James, Jepson,
Carpenter, Butler, Lindsay; Gardner is Due; Ferguson has Gone
to Leward all these is Rum ships."[13]

The separate traders also had more frequent quarrels with the
natives. In 1732 a Yankee captain was killed in a trade dispute
and his crew set adrift. Soon afterward certain Jolofs took
another ship's officers captive and required the value of twenty
slaves as ransom. And in 1733 the natives at Yamyamacunda, up
the Gambia, sought revenge upon Captain Samuel Moore for
having paid them in pewter dollars on his previous voyage, and
were quieted through the good offices of a company factor.[14] The
company suffered far less from native disorders, for a threat
of removing its factory would bring any chief to terms. In 1731,
however, the king of Barsally brought a troop of his kinsmen and
subjects to the Joar factory where Moore was in charge, got
drunk, seized the keys and rifled the stores.[15] But the 'company's
chief trouble was with its own factors. The climate and conditions
were so trying that illness was frequent and insanity and
suicide occasional; and the isolation encouraged fraudulent practices.
It was usually impossible to tell the false from the true
In the reports of the loss of goods by fire and flood, theft and
rapine, mildew and white ants, or the loss of slaves by death or
mutiny. The expense of the salary list, ship hire, provisions
and merchandise was heavy and continuous, while the returns
were precarious to a degree. Not often did such great wars occur
as the Dahomey invasion of the Whidah country in 1726[16] and
the general fighting of the Gambia peoples in 1733–1734[17] to glut
the outward bound ships with slave cargoes. As a rule the company's
advantage of steady markets and friendly native relations
appears to have been more than offset by the freedom of the separate
traders from fixed charges and the necessity of dependence
upon lazy and unfaithful employees.

Instead of jogging along the coast, as many had been accustomed
to do, and casting anchor here and there upon sighting signal
smokes raised by natives who had slaves to sell,[18] the separate
traders began before the close of the colonial period to get

their slaves from white factors at the "castles," which were then
a relic from the company régime. So advantageous was this that
in 1772 a Newport brig owned by Colonel Wanton cleared £500
on her voyage, and next year the sloop Adventure, also of Newport,
Christopher and George Champlin owners, made such
speedy trade that after losing by death one slave out of the
ninety-five in her cargo she landed the remainder in prime order
at Barbados and sold them immediately in one lot at £35 per
head.[19]

In Lower Guinea the Portuguese held an advantage, partly
through the influence of the Catholic priests. The Capuchin
missionary Merolla, for example, relates that while he was in
service at the mouth of the Congo in 1685 word came that the
college of cardinals had commanded the missionaries in Africa
to combat the slave trade. Promptly deciding this to be a hopeless
project, Merolla and his colleagues compromised with their
instructions by attempting to restrict the trade to ships of Catholic
nations and to the Dutch who were then supplying Spain
under the asiento. No sooner had the chiefs in the district agreed
to this than a Dutch trading captain set things awry by spreading
Protestant doctrine among the natives, declaring baptism to
be the only sacrament required for salvation, and confession to
be superfluous. The priests then put all the Dutch under the
ban, but the natives raised a tumult saying that the Portuguese,
the only Catholic traders available, not only paid low prices in
poor goods but also aspired to a political domination. The crisis
was relieved by a timely plague of small-pox which the priests
declared and the natives agreed was a divinely sent punishment
for their contumacy,—and for the time at least, the exclusion of
heretical traders was made effective.[20] The English appear never
to have excelled the Portuguese on the Congo and southward
except perhaps about the close of the eighteenth century.

The markets most frequented by the English and American
separate traders lay on the great middle stretches of the coast

—Sierra Leone, the Grain Coast (Liberia), the Ivory, Gold and
Slave Coasts, the Oil Rivers as the Niger Delta was then called.
Cameroon, Gaboon and Loango. The swarm of their ships was
particularly great in the Gulf of Guinea upon whose shores the
vast fan-shaped hinterland poured its exiles along converging
lines.

The coffles came from distances ranging to a thousand miles
or more, on rivers and paths whose shore ends the European
traders could see but did not find inviting. These paths, always
of single-file narrowness, tortuously winding to avoid fallen
trees and bad ground, never straightened even when obstructions
had rotted and gone, branching and crossing in endless network,
penetrating jungles and high-grass prairies, passing villages that
were and villages that had been, skirting the lairs of savage beasts
and the haunts of cannibal men, beset with drought and famine,
storm and flood, were threaded only by negroes, bearing arms
or bearing burdens. Many of the slaves fell exhausted on the
paths and were cut out of the coffles to die. The survivors were
sorted by the purchasers on the coast into the fit and the unfit, the
latter to live in local slavery or to meet either violent or lingering
deaths, the former to be taken shackled on board the strange
vessels of the strange white men and carried to an unknown fate.
The only consolations were that the future could hardly be worse
than the recent past, that misery had plenty of company, and that
things were interesting by the way. The combination of resignation
and curiosity was most helpful.

It was reassuring to these victims to see an occasional American
negro serving in the crew of a slaver and to know that a
few specially favored tribesmen had returned home with vivid
stories from across the sea. On the Gambia for example there
was Job Ben Solomon who during a brief slavery in Maryland
attracted James Oglethorpe's attention by a letter written in Arabic,
was bought from his master, carried to England, presented
at court, loaded with gifts and sent home as a freeman in 1734
in a Royal African ship with credentials requiring the governor
and factors to show him every respect. Thereafter, a celebrity
on the river, he spread among his fellow Foulahs and the neighboring

Jolofs and Mandingoes his cordial praises of the English
nation.[21] And on the Gold Coast there was Amissa to testify
to British justice, for he had shipped as a hired sailor on a
Liverpool slaver in 1774, had been kidnapped by his employer
and sold as a slave in Jamaica, but had been redeemed by the
king of Anamaboe and brought home with an award by Lord
Mansfield's court in London of £500 damages collected from the
slaving captain who had wronged him.[22]

The bursting of the South Sea bubble in 1720 shifted the bulk
of the separate trading from London to the rival city of Bristol.
But the removal of the duties in 1730 brought the previously unimportant
port of Liverpool into the field with such vigor that
ere long she had the larger half of all the English slave trade.
Her merchants prospered by their necessary parsimony. The
wages they paid were the lowest, and the commissions and extra
allowances they gave in their early years were nil.[23] By 1753
her ships in the slave traffic numbered eighty-seven, totaling about
eight thousand tons burthen and rated to carry some twenty-five
thousand slaves. Eight of these vessels were trading on the
Gambia, thirty-eight on the Gold and Slave Coasts, five at Benin,
three at New Calabar, twelve at Bonny, eleven at Old Calabar,
and ten in Angola.[24] For the year 1771 the number of slavers
bound from Liverpool was reported at one hundred and seven
with a capacity of 29,250 negroes, while fifty-eight went from
London rated to carry 8,136, twenty-five from Bristol to carry
8,810, and five from Lancaster with room for 950. Of this total
of 195 ships 43 traded in Senegambia, 29 on the Gold Coast, 5S
on the Slave Coast, 63 in the bights of Benin and Biafra, and 4
in Angola. In addition there were sixty or seventy slavers from
North America and the West Indies, and these were yearly increasing.[25]
By 1801 the Liverpool ships had increased to 150,
with capacity for 52,557 slaves according to the reduced rating

of five slaves to three tons of burthen as required by the parliamentary
act of 1788. About half of these traded in the Gulf
of Guinea, and half in the ports of Angola.[26] The trade in American
vessels, particularly those of New England, was also large.
The career of the town of Newport in fact was a small scale
replica of Liverpool's. But acceptable statistics of the American
ships are lacking.

The ship captains in addition to their salaries generally received
commissions of "4 in 104," on the gross sales, and also
had the privilege of buying, transporting and selling specified
numbers of slaves on their private account. When surgeons
were carried they also were allowed commissions and privileges
at a smaller rate, and "privileges" were often allowed the mates
likewise. The captains generally carried more or less definite instructions.
Ambrose Lace, for example, master of the Liverpool
ship Marquis of Granby bound in 1762 for Old Calabar, was ordered
to combine with any other ships on the river to keep down
rates, to buy 550 young and healthy slaves and such ivory as his
surplus cargo would purchase, and to guard against fire, fever
and attack. When laden he was to carry the slaves to agents
in the West Indies, and thence bring home according to opportunity
sugar, cotton, coffee, pimento, mahogany and rum, and
the balance of the slave cargo proceeds in bills of exchange.[27]
Simeon Potter, master of a Rhode Island slaver about
the same time, was instructed by his owners: "Make yr cheaf
Trade with The Blacks and little or none with the white people if
possible to be avoided. Worter yr Rum as much as possible and
sell as much by the short mesuer as you can." And again: "Order
them in the Bots to worter thear Rum, as the proof will Rise by
the Rum Standing in ye Son."[28] As to the care of the slave
cargo a Massachusetts captain was instructed in 1785 as follows:
"No people require more kind and tender treatment to exhilarate
their spirits than the Africans; and while on the one hand

you are attentive to this, remember that on the other hand too
much circumspection cannot be observed by yourself and people
to prevent their taking advantage of such treatment by insurrection,
etc. When you consider that on the health of your slaves
almost your whole voyage depends—for all other risques but
mortality, seizures and bad debts the underwriters are accountable
for—you will therefore particularly attend to smoking your
vessel, washing her with vinegar, to the clarifying your water
with lime or brimstone, and to cleanliness among your own people
as well as among the slaves."[29]

Ships were frequently delayed for many months on the pestilent
coast, for after buying their licenses in one kingdom and
finding trade slack there they could ill afford to sail for another
on the uncertain chance of a more speedy supply. Sometimes
when weary of higgling the market, they tried persuasion by force
of arms; but in some instances as at Bonny, in I757,[30] this resulted
in the victory of the natives and the destruction of the
ships. In general the captains and their owners appreciated the
necessity of patience, expensive and even deadly as that might
prove to be.

The chiefs were eager to foster trade and cultivate good will,
for it brought them pompous trappings as well as useful goods.
"Grandy King George" of Old Calabar, for example, asked of
his friend Captain Lace a mirror six feet square, an arm chair
"for my salf to sat in," a gold mounted cane, a red and a blue
coat with gold lace, a case of razors, pewter plates, brass flagons,
knives and forks, bullet and cannon-ball molds, and sailcloth for
his canoes, along with many other things for use in trade.[31]

The typical New England ship for the slave trade was a sloop,
schooner or barkentine of about fifty tons burthen, which when
engaged in ordinary freighting would have but a single deck.
For a slaving voyage a second flooring was laid some three feet
below the regular deck, the space between forming the slave

quarters. Such a vessel was handled by a captain, two mates,
and from three to six men and boys. It is curious that a vessel
of this type, with capacity in the hold for from 100 to 120 hogsheads
of rum was reckoned by the Rhode Islanders to be "full
bigg for dispatch,"[32] while among the Liverpool slave traders
such a ship when offered for sale could not find a purchaser.
[33] The reason seems to have been that dry-goods and
sundries required much more cargo space for the same value than
did rum.

The English vessels were generally twice as great of burthen
and with twice the height in their 'tween decks. But this did
not mean that the slaves could stand erect in their quarters except
along the center line; for when full cargoes were expected
platforms of six or eight feet in width were laid on each side,
halving the 'tween deck height and nearly doubling the floor
space on which the slaves were to be stowed. Whatever the
size of the ship, it loaded slaves if it could get them to the limit
of its capacity. Bosman tersely said, "they lie as close together
as it is possible to be crowded."[34] The women's room was divided
from the men's by a bulkhead, and in time of need the
captain's cabin might be converted into a hospital.

While the ship was taking on slaves and African provisions
and water the negroes were generally kept in a temporary stockade
on deck for the sake of fresh air. But on departure for
the "middle passage," as the trip to America was called by reason
of its being the second leg of the ship's triangular voyage in
the trade, the slaves were kept below at night and in foul weather,
and were allowed above only in daylight for food, air and exercise
while the crew and some of the slaves cleaned the quarters
and swabbed the floors with vinegar as a disinfectant. The negro
men were usually kept shackled for the first part of the passage until
the chances of mutiny and return to Africa dwindled and
the captain's fears gave place to confidence. On various occasions

when attacks of privateers were to be repelled weapons
were issued and used by the slaves in loyal defense of the vessel.[35]
Systematic villainy in the handling of the human cargo
was perhaps not so characteristic in this trade as in the transport
of poverty-stricken white emigrants. Henry Laurens, after withdrawing
from African factorage at Charleston because of the
barbarities inflicted by some of the participants in the trade, wrote
In 1768: "Yet I never saw an instance of cruelty in ten or
twelve years' experience in that branch equal to the cruelty exercised
upon those poor Irish. . . . Self interest prompted the
baptized heathen to take some care of their wretched slaves for
a market, but no other care was taken of those poor Protestant
Christians from Ireland but to deliver as many as possible alive
on shoar upon the cheapest terms, no matter how they fared upon
the voyage nor in what condition they were landed."[36]

William Snelgrave, long a ship captain in the trade, relates
that he was accustomed when he had taken slaves on board to
acquaint them through his interpreter that they were destined to
till the ground in America and not to be eaten; that if any person
on board abused them they were to complain to the interpreter
and the captain would give them redress, but if they
struck one of the crew or made any disturbance they must expect
to be severely punished. Snelgrave nevertheless had experience
of three mutinies in his career; and Coromantees figured
so prominently in these that he never felt secure when men of
that stock were in his vessel, for, he said, "I knew many of these
Cormantine negroes despised punishment and even death itself."
In one case when a Coromantee had brained a sentry he
was notified by Snelgrave that he was to die in the sight of his
fellows at the end of an hour's time. "He answered, 'He must
confess it was a rash action in him to kill him; but he desired me
to consider that if I put him to death I should lose all the money
I had paid for him.'" When the captain professed himself unmoved

by this argument the negro spent his last moments assuring
his fellows that his life was safe.[37]

The discomfort in the densely packed quarters of the slave
ships may be imagined by any who have sailed on tropic seas.
With seasickness added it was wretched; when dysentery prevailed
it became frightful; if water or food ran short the suffering
was almost or quite beyond endurance; and in epidemics
of scurvy, small-pox or ophthalmia the misery reached the limit
of human experience. The average voyage however was rapid
and smooth by virtue of the steadily blowing trade winds, the
food if coarse was generally plenteous and wholesome, and the
sanitation fairly adequate. In a word, under stern and often
brutal discipline, and with the poorest accommodations, the
slaves encountered the then customary dangers and hardships of
the sea.[38]

Among the disastrous voyages an example was that of the
Dutch West India Company's ship St. John in 1659. After buying
laves at Bonny in April and May she beat about the coast
in search of provisions but found barely enough for daily consumption
until at the middle of August on the island of Amebo
she was able to buy hogs, beans, cocoanuts and oranges. Meanwhile
bad food had brought dysentery, the surgeon, the cooper
and a sailor had died, and the slave cargo was daily diminishing.
Five weeks of sailing then carried the ship across the Atlantic,
where she put into Tobago to refill her leaking water casks.
Sailing thence she struck a reef near her destination at Curaçao
and was abandoned by her officers and crew. Finally a sloop
sent by the Curaçao governor to remove the surviving slaves was
captured by a privateer with them on board. Of the 195 negroes
comprising the cargo on June 30, from one to five died nearly

every day, and one leaped overboard to his death. At the end
of the record on October 29 the slave loss had reached 110, with
the mortality rate nearly twice as high among the men as among
the women.[39] About the same time, on the other hand, Captain
John Newton of Liverpool, who afterwards turned preacher,
made a voyage without losing a sailor or a slave.[40] The mortality
on the average ship may be roughly conjectured from the
available data at eight or ten per cent.

Details of characteristic outfit, cargo, and expectations in the
New England branch of trade may be had from an estimate
made in 1752 for a projected voyage.[41] A sloop of sixty tons,
valued at £300 sterling, was to be overhauled and refitted, armed,
furnished with handcuffs, medicines and miscellaneous chandlery
at a cost of £65, and provisioned for £50 more. Its officers and
crew, seven hands all told, were to draw aggregate wages of £10
per month for an estimated period of one year. Laden with eight
thousand gallons of rum at Is. 8d. per gallon and with forty-five
barrels, tierces and hogsheads of bread, flour, beef, pork, tar,
tobacco, tallow and sugar—all at an estimated cost of £775-it
was to sail for the Gold Coast. There, after paying the local
charges from the cargo, some 35 slave men were to be bought at
100 gallons per head, 15 women at 85 gallons, and 15 boys and
girls at 65 gallons; and the residue of the rum and miscellaneous
cargo was expected to bring some seventy ounces of gold in
exchange as well as to procure food supplies for the westward
voyage. Recrossing the Atlantic, with an estimated death loss
of a man, a woman and two children, the surviving slaves were to
be sold in Jamaica at about £21, £18, and £14 for the respective
classes. Of these proceeds about one-third was to be spent
for a cargo of 105 hogsheads of molasses at 8d. per gallon, and

the rest of the money remitted to London, whither the gold dust
was also to be sent. The molasses upon reaching Newport was
expected to bring twice as much as it had cost in the tropics. After
deducting factor's commissions of from 2½ to 5 per cent, on
all sales and purchases, and of "4 in 104" on the slave sales as the
captain's allowance, after providing for insurance at four per
cent, on ship and cargo for each leg of the voyage, and for leakage
of ten per cent, of the rum and five per cent, of the molasses,
and after charging off the whole cost of the ship's outfit and one-third
of her original value, there remained the sum of £357, &y. 2d.
as the expected profits of the voyage.

As to the gross volume of the trade, there are few statistics.
As early as 1734 one of the captains engaged in it estimated that
a maximum of seventy thousand slaves a year had already been
attained.[42] For the next half century and more each passing
year probably saw between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand
shipped. The total transportation from first to last may
well have numbered more than five million souls. Prior to the
nineteenth century far more negro than white colonists crossed
the seas, though less than one tenth of all the blacks brought to the
western world appear to have been landed on the North American
continent. Indeed, a statistician has reckoned, though not convincingly,
that in the whole period before 1810 these did not ex
ceed 385,500.[43]

In selling the slave cargoes in colonial ports the traders of
course wanted minimum delay and maximum prices. But as a
rule quickness and high returns were not mutually compatible.
The Royal African Company tended to lay chief stress upon
promptness of sale. Thus at the end of 1672 it announced that
if persons would contract to receive whole cargoes upon their arrival
and to accept all slaves between twelve and forty years of
age who were able to go over the ship's side unaided they would
be supplied at the rate of £15 per head in Barbados, £16 in Nevis,

£17 in Jamaica, and £18 in Virginia.[44] The colonists were for a
time disposed to accept this arrangement where they could. For
example Charles Calvert, governor of Maryland, had already
written Lord Baltimore in 1664: "I have endeavored to see if
I could find as many responsible men that would engage to take
100 or 200 neigros every year from the Royall Company at that
rate mentioned in your lordship's letter; but I find that we are
nott men of estates good enough to undertake such a buisnesse,
but could wish we were for we are naturally inclined to love
neigros if our purses could endure it."[45] But soon complaints
arose that the slaves delivered on contract were of the poorest
quality, while the better grades were withheld for other means
of sale at higher prices. Quarrels also developed between the
company on the one hand and the colonists and their legislatures
on the other over the rating of colonial moneys and the obstructions
placed by law about the collection of debts; and the colonists
proceeded to give all possible encouragement to the separate
traders, legal or illegal as their traffic might be.[46]

Most of the sales, in the later period at least, were without
previous contract. A practice often followed in the British West
Indian ports was to advertise that the cargo of a vessel just arrived
would be sold on board at an hour scheduled and at a uniform
price announced in the notice. At the time set there would
occur a great scramble of planters and dealers to grab the choicest
slaves. A variant from this method was reported in 1670 from
Guadeloupe, where a cargo brought in by the French African
company was first sorted into grades of prime men, (piéces
d'Inde), prime women, boys and girls rated at two-thirds of
prime, and children rated at one-half. To each slave was attached
a ticket bearing a number, while a corresponding ticket
was deposited in one of four boxes according to the grade. At
prices then announced for the several grades, the planters bought
the privilege of drawing tickets from the appropriate boxes and

acquiring thereby title to the slaves to which the numbers they
drew were attached.[47]

In the chief ports of the British continental colonies the maritime
transporters usually engaged merchants on shore to sell the
slaves as occasion permitted, whether by private sale or at auction.
At Charleston these merchants charged a ten per cent
commission on slave sales, though their factorage rate was but
five per cent. on other sorts of merchandise; and they had credits
of one and two years for the remittance of the proceeds.[48] The
following advertisement, published at Charleston in 1785 jointly
by Ball, Jennings and Company, and Smiths, DeSaussure and
Darrell is typical of the factors' announcements; "GOLD
COAST NEGROES. On Thursday, the 17th. of March instant,
will be exposed to public sale near the Exchange (if not before
disposed of by private contract) the remainder of the cargo of
negroes imported in the ship Success, Captain John Conner, consisting
chiefly of likely young boys and girls in good health, and
having been here through the winter may be considered in some
degree seasoned to this climate. The conditions of the sale will
be credit to the first of January, 1786, on giving bond with approved
security where required—the negroes not to be delivered
till the terms are complied with."[49] But in such colonies as Virginia
where there was no concentration of trade in ports, the
ships generally sailed from place to place peddling their slaves,
with notice published in advance when practicable. The diseased
or otherwise unfit negroes were sold for whatever-price they
would bring. In some of the ports it appears that certain physicians
made a practise of buying these to sell the survivors at a
profit upon their restoration to health.[50]

That by no means all the negroes took their enslavement grievously
is suggested by a traveler's note at Columbia, South Carolina,
in 1806: "We met . . . a number of new negroes, some of
whom had been in the country long enough to talk intelligibly.

Their likely looks induced us to enter into a talk with them.
One of them, a very bright, handsome youth of about sixteen,
could talk well. He told us the circumstances of his being caught
and enslaved, with as much composure as he would any common
occurrence, not seeming to think of the injustice of the thing nor
to speak of it with indignation. . . . He spoke of his master and
his work as though all were right, and seemed not to know he
had a right to be anything but a slave."[51]

In the principal importing colonies careful study was given to
the comparative qualities of the several African stocks. The
consensus of opinion in the premises may be gathered from several
contemporary publications, the chief ones of which were
written in Jamaica.[52] The Senegalese, who had a strong Arabic
strain in their ancestry, were considered the most intelligent of
Africans and were especially esteemed for domestic service, the
handicrafts and responsible positions. "They are good commanders
over other negroes, having a high spirit and a tolerable
share of fidelity; but they are unfit for hard work; their bodies
are not robust nor their constitutions vigorous." The Mandingoes
were reputed to be especially gentle in demeanor but peculiarly
prone to theft. They easily sank under fatigue, but might be
employed with advantage in the distillery and the boiling house
or as watchmen against fire and the depredations of cattle. The
Coromantees of the Gold Coast stand salient in all accounts
as hardy and stalwart of mind and body. Long calls them
haughty, ferocious and stubborn; Edwards relates examples of
their Spartan fortitude; and it was generally agreed that they
were frequently instigators of slave conspiracies and insurrections.
Yet their spirit of loyalty made them the most highly
prized of servants by those who could call it forth. Of them

Christopher Codrington, governor of the Leeward Islands, wrote
in 1701 to the English Board of Trade: "The Corramantes are
not only the best and most faithful of our slaves, but are really
all born heroes. There is a differance between them and all
other negroes beyond what 'tis possible for your Lordships to
conceive. There never was a raskal or coward of that nation.
Intrepid to the last degree, not a man of them but will stand to
be cut to pieces without a sigh or groan, grateful and obedient to
a kind master, but implacably revengeful when ill-treated. My
father, who had studied the genius and temper of all kinds of
negroes forty-five years with a very nice observation, would say,
noe man deserved a Corramante that would not treat him like a
friend rather than a slave."[53]

The Whydahs, Nagoes and Pawpaws of the Slave Coast were
generally the most highly esteemed of all. They were lusty and,
industrious, cheerful and submissive. "That punishment which
excites the Koromantyn to rebel, and drives the Ebo negro to
suicide, is received by the Pawpaws as the chastisement of legal
authority to which it is their duty to submit patiently." As to
the Eboes or Mocoes, described as having a sickly yellow tinge
in their complection, jaundiced eyes, and prognathous faces like
baboons, the women were said to be diligent but the men lazy, despondent
and prone to suicide. "They require therefore the
gentlest and mildest treatment to reconcile them to their situation;
but if their confidence be once obtained they manifest as
great fidelity, affection and gratitude as can reasonably be expected
from men in a state of slavery."

The "kingdom of Gaboon," which straddled the equator, was
the worst reputed of all. "From thence a good Negro was
scarcely ever brought. They are purchased so cheaply on the
coast as to tempt many captains to freight with them; but they
generally die either on the passage or soon after their arrival in
the islands. The debility of their constitutions is astonishing."
From this it would appear that most of the so-called Gaboons
must have been in reality Pygmies caught in the inland equatorial

forests, for Bosman, who traded among the Gaboons,
merely inveighed against their garrulity, their indecision, their
gullibility and their fondness for strong drink, while as to their
physique he observed: "they are mostly large, robust well shaped
men."[54] Of the Congoes and Angolas the Jamaican writers had
little to say except that in their glossy black they were slender
and sightly, mild in disposition, unusually honest, but exceptionally
stupid.

In the South Carolina market Gambia, negroes, mainly Mandingoes,
were the favorites, and Angolas also found ready sale; but
cargoes from Calabar, which were doubtless comprised mostly
of Eboes, were shunned because of their suicidal proclivity.
Henry Laurens, who was then a commission dealer at Charleston,
wrote in 1755 that the sale of a shipload from Calabar then
in port would be successful only if no other Guinea ships arrived
before its quarantine was ended, for the people would not buy
negroes of that stock if any others were to be had.[55]

It would appear that the Congoes, Angolas and Eboes were
especially prone to run away, or perhaps particularly easy to capture
when fugitive, for among the 1046 native Africans advertised
as runaways held in the Jamaica workhouses in 1803 there
were 284 Eboes and Mocoes, 185 Congoes and 259 Angolas as
compared with 101 Mandingoes, 6o Chambas (from Sierra Leone),
70 Coromantees, 57 Nagoes and Pawpaws, and 30 scattering,
along with a total of 488 American-born negroes and
mulattoes, and 187 unclassified.[56]

This huge maritime slave traffic had great consequences for all
the countries concerned. In Liverpool it made millionaires,[57]
elsewhere in England, Europe and New England it brought
prosperity not only to ship owners but to the distillers of rum
and manufacturers of other trade goods. In the American plantation
districts it immensely stimulated the production of the

staple crops. On the other hand it kept the planters constantly
in debt for their dearly bought labor, and it left a permanent and
increasingly complex problem of racial adjustments. In Africa
it largely transformed the primitive scheme of life, and for the
worse. It created new and often unwholesome wants; it destroyed
old industries and it corrupted tribal institutions. The
rum, the guns, the utensils and the gewgaws were irresistible
temptations. Every chief and every tribesman acquired a potential
interest in slave getting and slave selling. Charges of
witchcraft, adultery, theft and other crimes were trumped up
that the number of convicts for sale might be swelled; debtors
were pressed that they might be adjudged insolvent and their
persons delivered to the creditors; the sufferings of famine were
left unrelieved that parents might be forced to sell their children
or themselves; kidnapping increased until no man or woman and
especially no child was safe outside a village; and wars and raids
were multiplied until towns by hundreds were swept from the
earth and great zones lay void of their former teeming population.[58]

The slave trade has well been called the systematic plunder of
a continent But in the irony of fate those Africans who lent
their hands to the looting got nothing but deceptive rewards,
while the victims of the rapine were quite possibly better off on
the American plantations than the captors who remained in the
African jungle. The only participants who got unquestionable
profit were the English, European and Yankee traders and manufacturers.