The Slave Trade

The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870

Hugh Thomas

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781476737454
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, Hugh Thomas describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history.Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts.Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time, but to answer controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated.

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX ONE

Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale

A TINY MINORITY of the captives consigned to the slave ships can be identified, and most of those who can were slaves of the late eighteenth or the nineteenth century: men (there seem to have been no women) who gave evidence in inquiries in London, or who were talked to by missionaries, or proto-anthropologists, in Sierra Leone. There were men who, like the hero of Mérimée’s Tamoango, or the resolute Tambo, directed rebellions severe or successful enough to remain in the mind of the négriers. There were African kings or queens whose adaptation to life as a slave in Jamaica has been chronicled or, at least, as in the case of the mother of King Gezo of Dahomey, not forgotten. With respect to the vast slave market of Brazil, there are few accounts, and nearly all from the nineteenth century: for example, that of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, sold in Pernambuco and taken to Rio, who, after numerous attempts to escape in Brazil, found freedom by jumping ship in New York.

Few slave journeys had happy endings. But there were some. The extraordinary case of Equiano has been mentioned several times in this book. But there was also the curious instance of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a Fulbe, known to Europeans as Job Ben Solomon, son of a mullah of Bondu, a town high up a tributary of the river Sénégal. In 1730, he set out to sell some slaves on the river Gambia. He was robbed, captured, and himself sold by non-Muslims at Joar, a city lower down that waterway, to Captain Pike of the Arabella, an English slave ship, which carried him to Maryland. There he lived as a slave for a year with Vachell Denton of Annapolis, an amiable master, who sold him to a Mr. Tolsey, who had a tobacco plantation on Kent Island, in the Potomac River. Ben Solomon eventually sent a letter in Arabic to his father in Africa via London, where James Oglethorpe, then a director of the Royal African Company, and about to embark on the establishment of Georgia as a penal colony, sent that letter to Oxford to be translated. He also sent to Maryland for Job. Once in England, Job was employed by Sir Hans Sloane, the benign botanist and cofounder of the British Museum, who had spent his youth in Jamaica (hence his Catalogue of Jamaica Plants) and who was, at that time, president of the Royal Society. (He was also, like Oglethorpe, a promoter of Georgia.) Sloane found not only that Job was a master of Arabic but that he knew much of the Koran by heart. Either Sir Hans or the duke of Montagu, a noted Afrophile and practical joker, introduced him at Court. After living in London fourteen months, Job returned to Africa, taking with him presents from Queen Caroline and the duke of Cumberland. In a subsequent letter to Mr. Smith, writing master at Saint Paul’s School, Job described how he returned to Bondu and “how elevated and amazed they [his old friends] were at my arrival, I must leave you to guess at, as being inexpressible, as is likewise the raptures and pleasures I enjoyed. Floods of tears burst their way and some little time afterwards, we recovered so as to have some discourse and in time I acquainted them and all the country how I had been redeemed and conducted by the Company from such distant parts as are beyond their capacity to conceive, from Maryland to England and from thence to Gambia first. . . . The favours done to me by the queen, the duke of Montagu and other generous persons I likewise acquainted them of.”

One day, some years after his homecoming, Job was sitting under a tree at Damasensa, not far from Elephants Island, on the river Gambia, with the English slave captain Francis Moore (whose acute memories have been quoted several times), when he saw several of the men who had captured him three years before. Moore persuaded him not to kill them, but instead to ask questions. They said that the king, their master, had killed himself by mistake by letting off one of the pistols which Captain Pike had given him in return for Job. Job then gave thanks (to Allah, of course), for causing that king to die by means of the very goods in return for which he had been sold into slavery. He later admitted, though, that, had the king lived, he would have forgiven him, “because, had I not been sold, I should neither have known . . . the English tongue, nor had any of the fine useful and valuable things I now carry over, nor have known that there is in the world such a place as England, nor such noble, generous people as Queen Caroline, Prince William [the duke of Cumberland], the duke of Montagu, the earl of Pembroke, Mr Holden, Mr Oglethorpe, and the Royal Africa Company.”

Job was not the only slave to return from captivity in the Americas. In 1695, for example, a Dutch interloper, Captain Frans van Goethem, captured a Sonyo prince. The African traders in the Sonyo region (Angola) thereafter made trade impossible until that captive was returned. The Dutch West India Company found the slave, and sent him back from Surinam, via Holland.

Then Jean Barbot described how a certain Emanuel, governor of a large town, explained that his king had once sold him “for a slave to a Dutch captain who, finding me a good servant in his passage to the West Indies, . . . carried me with him into Holland, where I soon learnt to speak good Dutch and, after some years, he set me free. I went from Holland into France, where I soon got as much of that language as you hear by me. Thence I proceeded to Portugal, which language I made myself master of with more ease than either the French or Dutch. Having spent several years in travelling through Europe, I resolved to return to my native country, and laid hold of the first opportunity which offered. When I arrived here, I immediately waited on the King . . . and, having related my travels . . . , added I was come back to him, to put himself into his hands, as his slave again, if he thought fit. The King was so far from reducing me to that low condition that he gave me one of his own sisters in marriage and constituted me Alcaide or governor of this town. . . .”

“Jack Rodney,” a cousin of King Naimbanna of Sierra Leone, should also be remembered. He was asked by an English slave captain to pilot a slave ship down the river Sierra Leone from Bence Island. He agreed, on condition that he be put on shore at the small port of Robanna. But the captain said that he would land him further down river at its mouth. Instead, however, he took him to Jamaica. Rodney talked to the governor there and succeeded eventually in returning. Mungo Park encountered an African servant, Johnson, who had been taken to Jamaica as a slave, had been freed, and then found his way home.

Perhaps the most curious story of all was that of Thomas Joiner, who began life as a minstrel slave, on the Gambia. He was sold in Jamaica as a slave, gained his freedom, learned to read and write English, and made enough money to return to Africa, where he set up as a trader at Gorée (not in slaves) about 1810. He then moved back to the river Gambia where, by 1830, he was the most important shipowner. His brigantine, the General Turner, sixty-seven tons, was then the biggest ship on the upper river.

In the nineteenth century, there were several accounts of slaves returning to Africa from Brazil. In 1832, four freed women of Benguela came back; and sometimes in Rio slaves were punished by being deported to Africa. In 1830, thirty-five prominent citizens of Cabinda were sent home from Rio because they had been criminally seized in Africa by slave traders who had asked them to dinner on a ship. Nearly sixty Africans from “Mina” bought their passage back from Rio to the Gold Coast in 1835. In 1852, about sixty “Muslims” from the same part of Africa were returned to Africa on an English ship (the Robert, George Duck master) for £800, having first assured themselves that the coast whence they had originally come was then free of slave dealers. In the 1850s and 1860s, there were numerous saving societies in Brazil designed to collect enough money to return their members to Africa. All along the West African coast, from Dahomey to Angola, little settlements of returned slaves from the Americas were soon to be found, sometimes giving such names as Pernambuco, Puerto Rico, or Martinique to their new African homes.

APPENDIX TWO

The Trial of Pedro José de Zulueta in London for Trading in Slaves

PEDRO JOSÉ DE ZULUETA, son of a successful London merchant, a first cousin (and frequent partner) of the planter and slave merchant Julián Zulueta in Cuba, and an associate of the slave trader Pedro Blanco, was in 1841 charged in London with trading slaves. The accusation was that the previous year he had fitted out and used a ship, the Augusta, for the purpose of trading in slaves. He was tried with Thomas Jennings, who had captained the ship, when it was detained off the notorious river Gallinas, in what is now Liberia. The cargo shipped seemed suspicious—29 hogsheads of tobacco, 60 cases of arms, 1 case of looking glasses, 10 casks of copperware, 134 bales of unidentified merchandise (probably cloths), 1,600 iron pots, and 2,370 kegs of gunpowder—just the sort of cargo used in the slave trade. The prosecution established that the Augusta had in 1839 been known as the Gollupchick, and was sailing under a Russian flag, with Thomas Bernardos as the captain, commanding a crew that was mostly Spanish. Detained by a British naval officer, Captain Hill, the court in Sierra Leone declared that they could not act against a Russian ship—though there was plainly slave equipment aboard; in the judgment of Captain Hill, there were “more water casks than are necessary for an ordinary trading vessel . . . a caboose [kitchen] to hold a very large copper, gratings covered with temporary planks. . . .”

The ship was then sold to Zulueta and Co., at Portsmouth, for £650 and, according to the prosecution, dispatched as the Augusta to the river Gallinas, as part of an arrangement with the well-known firm of merchants of Cádiz and Havana, Pedro Martínez. The agreement was that payment should be made by the firm of Pedro Blanco with his associate Carballo, dealing from Cádiz, in Havana. There was no written specification that the ship was to take on slaves on the river Gallinas but, the prosecution argued, it could have no other purpose than that in that place: the only buildings there were slave barracoons.

The Augusta picked up part of her cargo at Liverpool and part of it at Cádiz. She was detained again by Captain Hill on the high seas off the river Gallinas; he was surprised to see his old prize, the Gollupchick, back on the West African coast in new colors.

The weakness of the prosecution’s case was that there was no sign of “slave equipment” by Canning’s definition on the Augusta when she was detained under that name. But Captain Hill testified that any ship could be turned into a slave ship in a short time. Numerous witnesses were called to prove that the river Gallinas had no other business than slaves so that, if the Augusta were bound for there, the purpose must have been the slave trade. But did Zulueta know that? The prosecution could not prove that he did; and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

In the light of the realization that, on the one hand, there was no trade other than the slave trade on the Gallinas and, on the other, that both Pedro Blanco and Pedro Martínez were major slave merchants (the former was called the largest slave trader in the world by Judge H. W. Macaulay), the verdict must seem rather generous. Zulueta formally told a House of Lords select committee that neither he, his father, nor his grandfather had ever had “any kind of interest of any sort, or derived any emolument or connexion from the slave trade”; and he was believed. Yet Pedro Blanco usually had all his bills in London drawn on Zulueta and Co.; and later evidence (not found in time for the trial) showed that the cargo of the Augusta was destined for three well-known slave merchants on the river: José Pérez Rola, Angel Ximénez, and José Alvarez.

APPENDIX THREE

Estimated Statistics^I

I. CARRIERS

COUNTRY	VOYAGES	SLAVES TRANSPORTED
Portugal (including Brazil)	30,000	4,650,000
Spain (including Cuba)	4,000	1,600,000
France (including West Indies)	4,200	1,250,000
Holland	2,000	500,000
Britain	12,000	2,600,000
British North America, U.S.	1,500	300,000
Denmark	250	50,000
Oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Book One: Green Sea of Darkness
• Book Two: The Internationalization of the Trade
• Book Three: Apogee
• Book Four: The Crossing
• Book Five: Abolition
• Book Six: The Illegal Era
• Epilogue
• Illustrations
• The Slave Trade: A Reflection
• Appendix 1: Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale
• Appendix 2: The Trial of Pedro José de Zulueta in London for Trading in Slaves
• Appendix 3: Estimated Statistics
• Appendix 4: Selected Prices of Slaves
• Appendix 5: The Voyage of the Enterprize
• Sources and Notes
• Index
• Illustration Credits
• Copyright