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  Although the trade was scattered along an enormous expanse of African coastline, almost two-thirds of all Africans embarked on slave ships at a mere ten locations (Anomabu, Ouidah, Bonny, Old Calabar, Luanda, Benguela, Cabinda, Malembo, Loango and Quilimane), and an astounding 4.7 million left from just four of those places (Loango, Cabinda, Luanda and Benguela).[11] The centre of this trade also shifted across time, waxing and waning with the rise and fall of the colonial powers and of their maritime or trading strength.

  Slave traders from particular countries, even from specific ports, had favourite locations for their dealing with African traders. What emerged, at many African trading locations, were well-established relations between the seaborne traders (or in some cases their local representatives) and African dealers. This created important commercial and trading networks that linked the slave ships to a deeper African economic hinterland. It also had the effect of funnelling large numbers of particular African peoples into certain regions of the Americas, with profound consequences for the development of American slave communities – from the languages they spoke and the food they ate to the gods they worshipped.

  As if to make their torments worse, the enslaved Africans were guarded by sailors who were themselves often terrified. The crew of slave ships were always greatly outnumbered, and always worried about slave violence and revolt. Large numbers of the crew would become sick or die, especially on the African coast. Working a slaver was renowned for its dangers, and the crew were drawn from the bottom of the seafaring barrel: only the desperate, the ignorant or the drunk would sign up. Over the course of the British involvement in the slave trade, an estimated 350,000 men worked on the slave ships. In 1788, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson proved that fewer than half the men who left Britain on slave ships returned. Far from being a nursery for the Royal Navy (as was often claimed), it was a graveyard. Though the crew consisted of a mix of nationalities (and ethnicities) the bulk of sailors were drawn from ports and communities within Britain’s slaving system, so there could have been no secrecy about the deadly environment of the slave ships. And yet, it continued for centuries . . .

  Perhaps the best-known feature of the slave trade – the image that remains to this day – is the misery of the Atlantic crossing: the Middle Passage. The experiences on the slave ships have entered popular folklore. Indeed, the imagery of a crowded ship has become part and parcel of a collective memory. It is vivid in the mind’s eye because it has been so frequently portrayed in the mass media in recent years, with pictures of a crowded ship used in all sorts of advertisements, posters, flyers, dustjackets and billboards to portray an enormous range of issues – some tacky and tasteless – but all confirming the basic horror of the slave ships.

  Although most contemporary images of slave ships display a human cargo dominated by men and boys, that was not always typical. Some carried more women than men, while the number of child slaves varied enormously. In time, the proportion of child slaves – and males – increased. What happened to all those people on the Atlantic crossing depended largely on the time it took to cross the ocean, and that depended on the weather – and good fortune.

  Africans often spent longer on board a slave ship anchored off the coast of Africa than in crossing the Atlantic. The ships accumulated their human cargoes slowly, from place to place. Where there were no facilities for holding Africans on shore, the ship acted as a floating prison until the master decided that he had enough enslaved people to set out across the Atlantic. Some ships – little more than hulks – acted as permanent offshore prisons, passing on their captives to other ships ready to sail. In the seventeenth century, Dutch ships spent an average of 120 days on the coast; British ships 94. A century later, the Dutch spent an average of 200 days on the coast; French ships 143. In the mid- and late-eighteenth century, British ships spent 173 days on the African coast.

  One stark fact stands out from this welter of information: millions of Africans spent months at sea before the Atlantic crossing began. As they waited (not knowing what was to happen to them, but hearing rumours that swirled around the slave decks and gossip that was sometimes gleaned from crewmen), many fell ill, some died – most of them were bemused or terrified. The ship’s crew were now warders in a floating prison.

  Africans boarded the ships stripped of their names and given numbers. Whatever they called each other, and whatever their original names, was lost to the accountancy of slaving. Slave captains entered the Africans as numbers in their logs: ‘I woman, 2 boys, and 3 girls, all small, No. 38 to 43.’ When they died, they were deleted as numbers. ‘In the morning buried a boy slave (No. 66) who was ill with a violent flux.’[12] The Africans now became human cargo, at the mercy of the elements and the crew.

  Careless sailors and slipshod management of tools and equipment could lead to a disastrous slave insurgency, as we shall see later. The slave ship was a human brew of fear and animosity, with Africans shackled below – though released in small batches, weather permitting, for exercise. The yards of chains and metal fetters, loaded at the ship’s home port, now came into their own, shackling the Africans to prevent upheaval. Without the metal restraints there could be no guarantee of security. If the worst happened, strategically located guns covered the hatches to the slave decks.

  Though the speed of an Atlantic crossing was largely dictated by winds and currents, navigational and other errors sometimes intervened. Sailing from Upper Guinea to the Caribbean or North America might be completed in six weeks. So too a journey from West-Central Africa to Brazil. Voyages that crossed from one prevailing weather system to another were more protracted, with their slaves having to endure a crossing of three months. Of course, all sailing ships were at risk from the unpredictable freaks of weather, of storms and doldrums, and of maritime errors that sometimes sent them to their doom.

  Every slave captain knew that the key to a successful voyage was a quick passage and did what he could to speed the journey. There were times when a ship was reduced to a pestilential vessel. The filth of the slave decks, the contamination of eating and drinking in fouled conditions, created a perfect breeding ground for a string of ailments, none more virulent and commonplace than amoebic dysentery – the ‘bloody flux’. Although Africans had been crudely inspected for obvious physical defects or unhealthy symptoms, before boarding, illness was often brought on board, spreading quickly among the crowded slaves. Despite the efforts to sustain the human cargo in reasonable condition until landfall, Africans succumbed to a series of complaints en route. The sick were documented in the master’s log, and the dead were deleted from his list, their remains cast overboard to the following sharks.

  All this poses a bizarre puzzle. It was in the slave traders’ interests to maintain the Africans in a healthy state until they reached the American auction block. The foul conditions on a storm-tossed slave ship were not planned or intended, and the master and crew were struggling against conditions they could not always control. It is true that slave ships were marked by violence, often on a barbaric scale, and by sexual assaults and capricious cruelty. In addition, the crew themselves were subject to traditional shipboard physical punishment for any acts of personal violence against the slaves. Slave ships became a lethal brew of resentment and terror: among the slaves, between the slaves and the crew, and sometimes between the master and his men. The longer the voyage, the more severe the sufferings of the Africans, often made worse by the attrition among the crew. (Slave masters tried to conceal crew losses from the slaves. If Africans noticed the shortfall in sailors, they were more likely to take advantage of the diminished crew.)

  Like all sailing ships, slavers were at risk of oceanic and coastal dangers. Storms could simply swallow the ship and all on board. We know of 148 cases of the total loss of slave ships – of crew and Africans. The doldrums caused enormous human damage. So too could bad planning before departure, or navigational errors en route. On unexpectedly prolonged journeys, food and water simply ran out – that
was the cause in 1781 of the murderous disaster on board the Zong, when over a hundred slaves were thrown overboard. Most savage of all were the disasters when the crew abandoned the vessel in a shipwreck. Sailors struggling to save themselves rarely tried to save the manacled Africans (who might overwhelm them in the fight for survival). Africans remained shackled on a sinking ship driven onto rocks: one case in 1738 led to the death of 702 Africans.[13] A further 443 vessels were shipwrecked. Some slaves were rescued by other ships – only to be sold when they made landfall. In addition there was the danger of European warfare, played out in the waters of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, when slave ships were seized by enemy vessels, and the slaves then sold by different slave traders. The Zong itself had originally been a Dutch slave ship (the Zorgue) before falling into British hands during the conflict with the American colonies.

  Long-distance oceanic travel was always a physical and sometimes a frightening ordeal, but nothing came close to the prolonged physical and mental torments of months on board an Atlantic slave ship. No other ship smelled like a slave ship. They were infamous, among their own men and even among fellow sailors on distant vessels, for their stink. They stank like a floating cesspit and could be detected miles away, downwind.

  What did the enslaved Africans make of all this? Even when conditions allowed them to be brought on deck for exercise, what sense did they make of the watery vastness all around them? As far as the eye could see, for months on end, they saw nothing but the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, they were Africans drawn from inland regions who, in the main, had not seen the sea before they were marched to the coast. Now there was no escape from the sea. It was rarely silent. Even at night, or in those stormy fetid days when the Africans were incarcerated below, they could hear the sea, incessantly battering the vessel on all sides – only inches from where they lay.

  One major problem facing historians is that the facts and figures of the crossings can easily appear sterile and devoid of human feeling. How do we create a human story from the abundance of data we now possess? How do we conjure forth any sense of what all this meant for the millions of Africans involved? The one million who died on the crossing, and all the survivors – every single one of the eleven million Africans – had endured an experience of such deep and abiding trauma that it remains difficult, even now, to convey the full horror involved. What memories of the crossing did these survivors carry with them as they settled into their new homes across the Americas?

  The Africans landed as troubled people. Often sick, most were deeply distressed by the ordeal of their enslavement followed by months at sea. Slave owners buying Africans off the slave ships recognised they had to treat them carefully. Some had even lost the will to live. At first sight, then, the new arrivals looked like a defeated people: battered into physical and mental submission by a terrifying and violent experience. But that ordeal fostered embers of subsequent slave defiance. Every survivor drew their own conclusions from the slave ships, the most bitter being the knowledge of what happened to defiant slaves who resisted openly – and failed. But the Africans’ determination was not so easily quelled, and the subsequent history of slavery throughout the Americas is a complex story of slave defiance. In time, that defiance became a key factor in the overthrow of slavery itself.

  2

  Sinews of Empire: Africans and the Making of the American Empires

  ALTHOUGH SPAIN HAD been the first colonial power to dabble with African slavery in the Americas, it was the Portuguese establishment of sugar plantations in Brazil that launched the westward flow of Africans. The Portuguese sugar plantations on São Tomé and Principe had employed perhaps two thousand African slaves by the mid-sixteenth century. What happened to those slaves was the apprenticeship for the millions who were to follow them – but on the far side of the Atlantic. They produced crude cane sugar, which was then shipped to the early refineries in Europe’s major port cities, thence, once refined, to the fashionable tables of Europe’s well-to-do elites.

  The boundless prospect of Brazil persuaded sugar planters to quit the Atlantic islands and head west – accompanied by their slaves. Sugar was an obvious crop to transplant into the tropical lands of the Americas (Columbus had taken sugar cane with him on his second voyage in 1493) because it had already proved its commercial value in São Tomé and Principe. After initial experiments with various other export items (timber notably), from the 1530s Portuguese settlers in Brazil turned to sugar. Encouraged by royal support (in the form of land grants), Brazilian sugar entrepreneurs took hold around Pernambuco, then, more securely, in and around Salvador. São Tomé’s sugar industry vanished almost as quickly as it had emerged, undermined by Brazilian sugar.

  At first planters tried local Indian labour, but (in common with Indian peoples throughout the Americas) native people would not, or could not, bend themselves to the rigorous demands of sugar plantations. Thus, from the 1570s onwards, Brazilian planters turned to African slave labour. What followed was staggering. By 1600, 200,000 Africans had been shipped to Brazil. The critical link was between Brazil and Angola (which the Portuguese colonised, from their slaving post in Luanda, in 1575). Over the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade, an astounding 2.8 million Africans were shipped from Luanda, bound primarily for Brazil.

  Brazil seemed to be a cornucopia that yielded a multitude of crops, but until the nineteenth century it was sugar that dominated. Growing volumes were shipped first to Portugal, and subsequently to the greedy markets served by the port cities of northern Europe: Antwerp, Amsterdam, later Hamburg and London. The rise of sugar can be traced by the proliferation of sugar refineries in European cities, and by African arrivals in Brazil. Antwerp had nineteen refineries as early as 1550, Amsterdam had 110 in 1770, London 80 by 1753.[1] But all this was made possible by African labour, first in Brazil, and later in other European colonies. By 1600, 200,000 Africans had landed in Brazil and over the following century almost one and a half million had been transported there.

  The Brazilian sugar economy was copied later in the Caribbean. It was brutal, regimented, and paid little heed to many of the human needs of its labourers, forced to work in the unforgiving tropical environment. Producing sugar was not merely rural work, but also partly industrial. Bigger plantations had their own factories where the cane was converted to crude sugar and molasses, their large factory chimneys belching smoke and steam into the tropical sky. The enslaved labour force failed to increase naturally, however, and sugar planters were permanently in need of fresh labour for their fields. Sugar proved to be (in the words of David Geggus) a ‘barren mother’ who consistently failed to provide the offspring we might expect from such vast numbers of transported people. It was as if sugar devoured its own, and had to turn, year after year, to Africa to replace the sick and the dead, or to fill the labouring ranks when new lands were opened up.

  Brazil’s enormous geography soon revealed how adaptable slavery could be. Slaves were put to a multitude of different tasks, notably in Brazil’s increasingly large and sophisticated urban societies, where domestic slavery expanded hugely. As prosperous planters and other country residents developed more comfortable – sometimes lavish – lifestyles, they instinctively turned to slaves for domestic comforts. Slaves were widely used as symbols of status and wealth, and Brazilians became especially fond of being carried, in sedan-like arrangements, shielded from the sun by costly textiles, and cooled by fan-wielding slave domestics. Visitors (and graphic satirists) regularly remarked on the slave retinues attending Brazil’s prosperous classes (and not so prosperous too). Slave labour was available for every conceivable task – housework, cooking, travelling, childcare, sexual favours – all and more were provided by slaves. They toiled everywhere, from the dockside and riverside, through to the isolation of ranching on remote frontier lands. Slavery took on a distinctive form in the urban areas, where they were rented out as porters (both of people and goods), or were set to work as street vendors, salesmen, craft
smen and musicians. Recent scholars reckon that Brazilian slaves worked in more than a hundred occupations in town and country.[2] They were to be seen at their most wretched as they stumbled from the slave ships, on the auction block or being driven, they knew not where, to a new place of labour.

  African slaves found themselves used in every new Brazilian economic discovery and enterprise. Gold, discovered in Minas Gerais and Goiás, prompted an early eighteenth-century rush of speculators to the region – along with 80,000 slaves to do the hard work. The increasing world demand for cotton in the eighteenth century, and the expansion of cotton production in Amazonia, saw Africans shipped to the northern ports in Pará and Maranhão. In the late eighteenth century the most southerly regions of Brazil turned to slavery, with the development there of ranching, and an associated hide and beef economy. All these and other new industries, especially the coffee industry, required the enforced movement of Brazilian slaves from older, more established regions, and the importation of yet more Africans from the slave ships.

  Until 1791 the French colony of St-Domingue had been the world’s major coffee producer, but the Haitian revolution shattered that economy, allowing other tropical colonies, notably Jamaica, Sumatra and Brazil, to step into the commercial gap. The real expansion of coffee production, however, stemmed from the rise of coffee drinking in the USA. In their struggle against British colonial control, Americans had turned against their initial taste for tea, and by 1830 they drank six times as much coffee as tea; by 1860 nine times as much. The powerful coffee culture of the USA was nurtured first by European immigrants and then by the huge expansion of the US population. In 1800, the population stood at more than five million, but a century later it was seventy-six million. It was a nation of coffee drinkers, and cheap Brazilian coffee satisfied that thirst. In 1791, 1 million pounds of coffee were imported, but when the coffee import duties were removed in 1832, coffee imports increased massively, and by 1844 they were running at 150 million pounds. By then, on average, each American was consuming more than six pounds of coffee annually.[3] This had major ramifications on slavery in Brazil.