Part 2 (1/2)
[Footnote 14: Moore, pp. 112, 164, 182.]
[Footnote 15: _Ibid_., p. 82.]
[Footnote 16: William Snelgrave, _A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade_ (London, 1734), pp. 8-32.]
[Footnote 17: Moore, p. 157.]
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 regime. 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]
[Footnote 18: Snelgrave, introduction.]
[Footnote 19: Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, LXIX, 398, 429.]
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 s.h.i.+ps 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.
[Footnote 20: Jerom Merolla da Sorrente, _Voyage to Congo_ (translated from the Italian), in Pinkerton's _Voyages_, XVI, 253-260.]
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 s.h.i.+ps was particularly great in the Gulf of Guinea upon whose sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.e 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-gra.s.s prairies, pa.s.sing 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 rea.s.suring 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps 43 traded in Senegambia, 29 on the Gold Coast, 56 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 replied of Liverpool's. But acceptable statistics of the American s.h.i.+ps are lacking.
[Footnote 21: Francis Moore, _Travels in Africa_, pp. 69, 202-203.]
[Footnote 22: Gomer Williams, _History of the Liverpool Privateers, with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade_ (London, 1897), pp. 563, 564.]
[Footnote 23: _Ibid_., p. 471, quoting _A General and Descriptive History of Liverpool_ (1795).]
[Footnote 24: _Ibid_., p. 472 and appendix 7.]
[Footnote 25: Edward Long, _History of Jamaica_ (London, 1774), p. 492 note.]
[Footnote 26: Corner Williams, Appendix 13.]
The s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p _Marquis of Granby_ bound in 1762 for Old Calabar, was ordered to combine with any other s.h.i.+ps 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 circ.u.mspection 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, was.h.i.+ng 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]
[Footnote 27: Ibid., pp. 486-489.]
[Footnote 28: W.B. Weeden, _Economic and Social History of New England_ (Boston [1890]), II, 465.]
[Footnote 29: G.H. Moore, _Notes on the History of Slavery in Ma.s.sachusetts_ (New York, 1866), pp. 66, 67, citing J.O. Felt, _Annals of Salem_, 2d ed., II, 289, 290.]
s.h.i.+ps 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 1757,[30] this resulted in the victory of the natives and the destruction of the s.h.i.+ps. In general the captains and their owners appreciated the necessity of patience, expensive and even deadly as that might prove to be.
[Footnote 30: Gomer Williams, pp. 481, 482.]