Introduction

JOHANN PETER OETTINGER: BARBER-SURGEON, JOURNEYMAN, AUTHOR

On March 15, 1693, a twenty-seven-year-old German man named Johann Peter Oettinger arrived at the royal court of King Agbangla of Hueda, in the town of Savi in present-day Benin.1 He had just been carried there from shore on a hammock—it took the local porters several hours to make the seven-mile journey inland across lagoons and grassland. Safely offshore, out beyond the enormous waves and surf of the coast, the ship on which he served, the Friedrich Wilhelm, rode at anchor. As Oettinger looked around at the royal palace, the king’s many wives, the cannons protecting the English and French lodges, and the powerful local leaders (caboceers) with their servant boys walking behind them, it must have struck him: he had never been so far from home.

In terms of sheer miles, he had in fact already traveled a greater distance: in 1688 he sailed with the Dutch West India Company (WIC) to the Caribbean, landing first at Curaçao, about 5,200 miles from his tiny hometown of Künzelsau in southwestern Germany. The court of King Agbangla in Savi was “only” about 3,200 miles from Künzelsau as the crow flies. But in the Caribbean, Oettinger had seen only European colonial sites: Dutch Curaçao, the Danish island of St. Thomas, and Dutch Suriname. The Kingdom of Hueda was not ruled by Europeans. Like most of sub-Saharan Africa, it was (from the European perspective) an alien place. In the region just to the west (modern-day Ghana) local rulers permitted Europeans to build trade forts, but in the Kingdom of Hueda no European settlements were allowed. Oettinger and the other Europeans at Savi depended entirely on the king for their security. They had come to a place “where the Negroes are the masters” (as one English official put it).

There was only one force powerful enough to bring ordinary European men like Oettinger into the West African royal court of Savi: the slave trade. This ship that brought Oettinger to Africa, the Friedrich Wilhelm, was a slaver. It left Europe with a crew of 140 men, but in West Africa it had been refitted to carry human cargo, and two great cooking cauldrons were built into the main deck, so that (as Oettinger explained) “food could be cooked therein for 7[00] to 800” people. All of these people would be slaves, and almost all these slaves would be purchased, branded, and loaded in Hueda.

What was Johann Peter Oettinger’s role in all this? As a young barber-surgeon on a slave ship, Oettinger was what we might call a “subaltern perpetrator”: a low-ranking but willing participant in the enslavement of Africans. He described the trade in humans without condemnation or criticism; indeed, he did not even question it. Atlantic slavery was simply a part of the world Johann Peter found when he left his native region, rural Hohenlohe, in 1682 and began to trudge as a journeyman across Germany and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam he discovered the demand for surgeons on ships bound for Africa or the Indies, and he sailed for the Caribbean; in 1692 he signed on with the Friedrich Wilhelm for a second Atlantic journey. This slave ship would sail first to Africa to trade European and Asian goods for enslaved Africans, and then take these slaves on the dreaded Middle Passage to America (in this case the Caribbean), where those who survived would be sold. The profits would buy New World sugar, cotton, and tobacco, which the Friedrich Wilhelm would then carry back to Europe and sell for yet more profit. On both of his Atlantic voyages, Oettinger himself purchased a few crates of sugar, cotton, and tobacco in the Caribbean to sell at a profit in Europe. He was—literally—personally invested in the slave trade through the products of slave labor.

As he took part in the triangle trade, Oettinger noted in a journal what he saw and felt. Oettinger started the journal when he became a journeyman in 1682. Like a college transcript, it would document his learning and experience as a barber-surgeon so that he could one day become a master of his trade. And Oettinger continued the journal until he returned home to Hohenlohe, settled down, and became a master barber-surgeon in 1696. His journal is the only known German-language eyewitness account of a slave ship sailing all three sides of the triangle trade from Europe to Africa and the Americas.

In this journal Oettinger tried to bridge the enormous distance between Künzelsau and the Caribbean or West Africa. He wrote for his family and for some future group of master barber-surgeons who would one day examine him and question him about his travels. None of these people would know firsthand what the Atlantic world of slavery and trade looked like, so Oettinger had to situate himself—geographically, socially, professionally, and morally—in this unfamiliar world. Consider one part of his description of the Kingdom of Hueda: “Moreover, stealing and cheating are very much in vogue, so that the king himself is completely given over to theft. . . . The king had his hand right in the barrel [of cowrie shells, i.e., currency] as soon as one was opened; and as soon as one did not pay close attention, he took some sneakily. . . . Even though we could see what he was doing, neither the chief factor nor I could say anything about it.” This sounds like a familiar contrast between honest Europeans and thieving Africans or between good Christians and immoral pagans, as Oettinger continues: “If the biggest thieves here were to be hanged, one would have to start by hanging the king and his Herren [lords] caboceers.” But then Oettinger immediately follows this conclusion with another point, one not found in the journals of any of the slave ship captains or merchants who wrote about West Africa at this time: “—But enough of that. Among us Christians as well, the big thieves usually get away and the little ones are put to death.”2 Oettinger shifts from a Christian-pagan contrast to the social hierarchy of big vs. little. For him it is all too clear that the powerful go unpunished while the lesser folk pay with their lives—whether in Germany or in Hueda. Keenly aware of social hierarchy, he rejects the easy moral superiority of Christian over pagan African. In his journal Oettinger reveals himself to be a subaltern perpetrator engaged in the European stereotyping of Africans, but he is also looking up at the greed of kings (European or African) and noting wryly that the privileges of the powerful cross the line between pagan and Christian. It is this perspective, developed throughout his journal, that makes it such an engaging source for European, African, and Caribbean history.

To understand Oettinger’s unique journal, we must understand the author. Johann Peter Oettinger was born in 1666 in the tiny village of Orendelsall; the rural town of Künzelsau in the region of Franconia, where Oettinger died in 1746, lies only about ten miles from Orendelsall. Both localities are in the Kocher valley, where Oettinger’s ancestors had been living since at least the 1560s. In Oettinger’s day the region was ruled by different branches of the Hohenlohe family; the nearest cities were Heilbronn and Schwäbisch Hall. It might seem that Johann Peter was firmly rooted in his region—and for the major part of his life this impression is correct. Both during his childhood and during his adult life as master craftsman he did not travel—as far as we know—beyond his native region in the southwest of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation (which today lies within the German state of Baden-Württemberg). But as a young man he travelled extraordinary distances. During fourteen years as a journeyman he crisscrossed the territories of modern-day Germany and the Netherlands and embarked on ships that took him as far west as Curaçao in the Caribbean and south to the equator in the Gulf of Guinea. From the ages of sixteen to thirty, this small-town artisan lived a life punctuated by a period of exceptional mobility.

In 1669, when Johann Peter was three years old, his family moved to Künzelsau, where his father, Johann Adam Oettinger, was appointed pastor of the town’s Lutheran church. The family planned for Johann Adam’s first-born son, Johann Christoph, to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a pastor, so he was sent to study theology at the university in Jena (where Johann Peter visited him in 1685). As the second son, Johann Peter was directed to a skilled trade: he would become a barber-surgeon.

In early modern Europe, barber-surgeons were craftsmen, just like tailors, butchers, smiths, and the like. Since the Middle Ages, a sharp line separated them from physicians, both legally and socially. Physicians were educated at universities on the basis of scholarly texts that were still largely written in Latin; barber-surgeons practiced one of many lower-ranking “mechanical arts” (artes mechanicae). Like shoemakers or tailors, they were organized in guilds and learned their trade by working for masters of their craft, first as apprentices, then as journeymen. Their field was hands-on care of the human body: barber-surgeons dressed wounds, stitched up cuts, and treated fractures, ulcers, and burns. They often practiced bloodletting, teeth pulling, and shaving and cutting hair—hence the term “barber-surgeon.”

And so in 1679, at the age of thirteen, Johann Peter was sent to Schwäbisch Hall and apprenticed to the master surgeon Joachim Matthias Sander. Family connections played a decisive role here: Sander’s wife, Rosina Beeg (1626–84), was the daughter of Caspar Benignus Beeg, Johann Adam’s mentor and predecessor as pastor of Künzelsau. After the death of her first husband in 1671, she had inherited the latter’s workshop and then married Sander, a much younger journeyman who—by virtue of this marriage—was promoted to the rank of master and owner of the Beeg family barber’s surgery. Johann Peter’s apprenticeship with Joachim Matthias Sander was cut short, however: in 1681 Master Sander ran away with his stepdaughter, who had become his mistress.3

The cases of the Beeg and Oettinger families reveal some of the familial connections between pastors and surgeons in early modern southwestern Germany. Many surgeons were sons of pastors (and vice versa), and intermarriages between these two professional groups were common.4 This pattern may be linked to the growing “intellectualization” of the profession of the barber-surgeon starting in the seventeenth century. As the private libraries owned by surgeons show, the ability to read medical literature was becoming more important to the trade. Literacy and the ability to apply “book-learning” to everyday life are significant skills shared by pastors and barber-surgeons, which favored the establishment of family ties and intergenerational connections between the two professions. Both were professions of care that connected body and soul.

Surgeons were in charge of external interventions upon the human body, but they were—at least in principle—banned from practicing internal medicine, which was based on medical doctrines and thus required academic training. Nor were they allowed to prescribe or to sell medications. In practice, however, surgeons frequently trespassed on the professional realms of physicians and apothecaries. The services of surgeons were usually cheaper than those of medical doctors, so people often resorted to the former even in cases that by law would have concerned the latter. This was all the more common in rural areas, where physicians were relatively rare. By the same token, surgeons often acted as ambulant drug-sellers, thus competing illegally with the apothecaries. At the same time, barber-surgeons themselves faced illicit but widespread competition by all sorts of (often itinerant) healers, both male and female.

When he concluded his apprenticeship (a bit early due to the sudden departure of his adulterous master), Oettinger was promoted to the rank of journeyman and was required to travel from town to town to look for employment as training. To show where he had worked and what he had experienced, a journeyman might keep a written record of his travels. Oettinger had much to report: his time as a journeyman lasted fourteen years. It can be divided into seven segments of different length. (1) From 1682 to 1688 Oettinger first travelled to different regions of the Holy Roman Empire and then migrated to the Dutch Republic. (2) After having worked for a year in Amsterdam, he was recruited by the West India Company as ship’s surgeon, embarked on the frigate Juffrouw Alida, and from 1688 to 1690 he sailed to the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, to Suriname (on the northeastern coast of South America), and then back to the Netherlands. (3) From 1690 to 1692 he worked in Harderwijk, in the old Dutch province of Gelderland, and then travelled to Emden. (4) There, in July 1692, he embarked on a slave ship of the Brandenburg African-American Company (BAAC), the Friedrich Wilhelm. After circumnavigating the British Isles, the frigate sailed to West Africa, where the Brandenburgers traded all along the coast from modern-day Mauritania to Gabon, a distance of about 2,800 miles. After leaving the African coast and provisioning at the Portuguese island of São Tomé, the ship, carrying about 715 enslaved Africans, took the Middle Passage to the Danish Caribbean colony of St. Thomas. During their journey back to Europe, however, the Brandenburgers were attacked by a French naval squadron. As a consequence, the crew members were made prisoners and brought to Brest, where they arrived in November 1693. (5) After enduring a short detention, Oettinger trekked from Brittany to East Frisia, where he collected his salary from the Brandenburg company in Emden. While he occasionally travelled by boat, on horseback, and in horse-drawn coaches and sleighs, Oettinger mastered most of the distance by foot, trudging through the mud and snow of one of the harshest winters of Little Ice Age.5 (6) From 1694 to 1696 he travelled through the northern territories of the Holy Roman Empire and worked for a longer period in Aurich, in East Frisia. (7) Finally, in July 1696, at the behest of his brother Johann Friedrich, he headed back home, where he arrived a month later. Journeymen were advised to document their experiences, employers, and travels to prove that they had completed this stage of their training. This is what Oettinger did, resulting in the journal we have before us here.

Back in his native region, Oettinger was promoted to master barber-surgeon. In Künzelsau he acquired local citizenship and married Anna Barbara Böhm, the daughter of a dyer. Of the eleven children he had with her, five reached adulthood. After the death of Anna Barbara in 1719, Oettinger married twice more: first to Maria Regina Jacobina Wider and, after her passing, to Filippina Christina Juliana Fleischbein. Both his second and his third wife—with whom Oettinger had no more children—were widows of Lutheran pastors of the Kocher valley. This indicates the strong connections between families of pastors and surgeons in this region. Oettinger continued to practice as a barber-surgeon until his death in 1746. During his long career he consolidated his social status. From 1711 onwards he served as a member of the Council of Künzelsau, and in 1715 he was able to buy himself a house—a two-story building that had been erected by pastor Beeg and that still stands in the center of town. There, at the venerable age of eighty years, the former slave ship surgeon Oettinger died a respectable citizen in the town where his father had established the family.

BODIES IN MOTION

Enslaved Africans

It was the slave trade that drew Johann Peter Oettinger into the Atlantic world. Slavery was familiar to him, no doubt, from the many references in the Bible. But the system of Atlantic slavery in which he participated had an economic form unlike slavery in other times and places. In the pursuit of profit, Atlantic slavery relied on long-distance trade to move both people and goods. And in the Atlantic trade, enslaved people became commodities—goods bought and sold to maximize profit. Surgeons on slave ships examined and selected enslaved Africans for purchase and worked to keep them alive, maintaining the “quality” and exchange value of this human commodity. Moreover, these enslaved men, women, and children were used to produce commodities, primarily nonsubsistence agricultural products that were traded internationally: sugar, cotton, tobacco, and indigo, among others. We can describe the dominant form of Atlantic slavery—whether in Brazil, the Caribbean, or North America—as “commodity slavery” in a double sense: enslaved laborers became a commodity, and their labor was used to produce agricultural commodities.

Spurred on by European expansion and investment, Atlantic slavery was growing and changing rapidly in the last decades of the seventeenth century, the period of Oettinger’s involvement. Slave labor was becoming the most important—and in some places the only—form of labor used to produce sugar, tobacco, and other commodities. At the same time, slavery was becoming raced, increasingly identified with dark skin and African origins. Oettinger’s travel account reflects both of these New World developments: the rise of African chattel slavery as a primary form of labor and the rise of race as a primary category of social organization.

The European colonies of the Caribbean were built by various forms of unfree labor. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese shipped about 155,000 enslaved Africans to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World, from Africa to the Caribbean to Mexico and the Andes. For much of the seventeenth century Caribbean colonists used any kind of bound or coerced labor they could get. Africans and Native people were enslaved, but colonists also shipped over unfree laborers from Europe. From the earliest days of their own New World settlements until the 1690s, for instance, the English and French made extensive use of indentured servants (in French, engagés). On a smaller scale, the Danes tried to use convict labor to cultivate their Caribbean island colony, St. Thomas. But by the end of the seventeenth century, this mixed pool of unfree labor became overwhelmingly African. Native population decline in the New World, political and cultural constraints in Europe, and an upsurge in the supply of slaves in certain coastal regions of Atlantic Africa shifted the sourcing of labor. And early examples of profitable sugar plantations led to an ever-more-exclusive concentration on enslaved Africans.

The earliest successful commodity plantations produced sugar in Brazil and Barbados and tobacco in Virginia. In Barbados and Virginia these plantations were originally developed with European indentured labor, but as costs and availability changed, plantation owners turned increasingly to enslaved African labor. Native populations in the Caribbean and on the mainland continued to suffer from the Great Dying—a broad, catastrophic population collapse. In some parts of the Americas it wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population. There were not enough Native workers to even begin to meet the demands of plantation societies, and they continued to suffer from the diseases that Europeans and Africans brought to the New World. Nor was the European supply of forced labor elastic enough. While some indigent workers might be lured into New World servitude under false pretenses, by the end of the seventeenth century most working men and women in England, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark knew that American plantation labor was a death sentence—and in the rather unlikely event of survival, access to farmland was limited. Without large-scale raids in European cities to round up thousands of “sturdy beggars” and “lewd women,” there was no way Europe could meet the demand for labor in the New World. And European rulers, whether in London, Versailles, or Copenhagen, were unwilling to seize and transport their own Christian subjects, all the more since in the age of mercantilism, domestic population was considered a crucial economic resource that had to be maintained and augmented. To make plantation agriculture profitable African bodies, shipped across the Atlantic in the largest forced migration in recorded history, would labor in America.

As noted above, during the sixteenth century about 155,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Spanish and Portuguese ports in the New World. In the seventeenth century, northern European powers began to colonize the Caribbean and North America, and the import figure increased sharply to about 1.8 million Africans.6 Most of this increase came after 1650 as Portuguese, English, and French New World settlements shifted from small tobacco farms to large-scale sugar and tobacco plantations. As a result of the Dutch expansion during the last two decades of the Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), Portuguese domination of West African trade had been broken up. The northern European powers all began to trade directly with Atlantic Africa to meet an unprecedented demand for agricultural labor in the Americas. The Spanish continued to rely on forced Native American labor for mining and agriculture. At the same time, however, they purchased increasing numbers of enslaved Africans. While the Portuguese remained the undisputed leaders in the slave trade up to the 1670s, in the 1630s the Dutch began to increase the scope of their exports. By the 1640s the English had become fierce competitors as well, and in the 1660s they succeeded in surpassing the Dutch, as did the French in the 1710s. By 1700 every community of northern European merchants had participated in the transatlantic slave trade, including Swedes, Danes, and Germans from Hamburg, the Duchy of Courland (in modern-day Latvia), and Brandenburg-Prussia.

During the sixteenth and a good portion of the seventeenth century, Europeans trading in Africa spent more acquiring gold than buying people. That changed in the second half of the seventeenth century as the transatlantic slave trade entered a long-lasting period of growth. Between 1701 and 1810, well over 6 million enslaved Africans were forcibly exported to the New World. From the start of the new century until Oettinger’s death in 1746, about 2,370,400 enslaved Africans were loaded on ships bound for America.

What did this vast commerce look like on the supply side, in Africa? When Portuguese expeditions opened up new Atlantic sea routes in the second half of the fifteenth century, the coastal regions of West Africa became sites of global exchange and conflict. European military men, merchants, and Catholic missionaries established ongoing relationships with African rulers and traders—and from the start, human beings were among the commodities European merchants purchased. Initially, however, Euro-African trade focused on a variety of goods—foremost ivory and gold, but also spices, animal hides, and beeswax. (The images on page xlvi show the silver medal minted to celebrate the establishment of Brandenburg’s trade with Africa: the kneeling African, richly adorned with gold jewelry, holds a basket filled with pieces of ivory.)

Eventually most regions along the coast of West Africa were drawn into the international slave trade, though levels of participation varied. The existing internal African slave trade expanded to meet the ever-growing demand as trade networks and political structures reoriented toward the Atlantic coast, ready to supply slaves to European buyers. This vast and long-lasting trade in slaves functioned only because African and European political authorities and merchants cooperated. During the entire age of Atlantic slavery only a few small areas of West and Central Africa were directly colonized and occupied by European powers. The Portuguese ruled Cape Verde and the islands of São Tomé and Principe, but they were initially uninhabited: only after the Portuguese took possession of them in the second half of the fifteenth century were they populated by enslaved Africans and European settlers. When Oettinger set sail the only parts of mainland Atlantic Africa under the actual control of Europeans were Portuguese Angola (which encompassed only a small part of modern-day Angola) and the Cape of Good Hope, where the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) had established a small colony in 1671.7 With the significant exception of Angola, which was the major slave exporting region overall during the four centuries of the trade, all other African regions involved in transoceanic commerce were independent of European colonial rule. Careful, constant negotiations with African rulers were the common factor in all Euro-African trade.

West African forms of political organization and the degree of state (or state-like) institutionalization varied sharply between one region and another and developed significantly over time, sometimes in response to the forces generated by maritime trade. The societies of the Sierra Leone estuary, where the Brandenburg frigate anchored in October 1692, had not coalesced into states marked by centralized structures but were organized into small polities with shifting alignments. On the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, most of the enslaved captives were from within the region, but they also included some enslaved Africans from the interior of the continent who had been captured and marched to the coast. The German “hinterlander” Johann Peter Oettinger was born and raised far from the Atlantic Ocean, which for him was a site of opportunity. He inspected the bodies of African men, women, and children for whom the Atlantic Ocean meant bondage, forced migration, and death.8

Violent state-building processes accompanied the growth of this long-distance trade on the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. By the early eighteenth century two extended territorial kingdoms—Asante and Dahomey—asserted themselves as the leading regional powers and largely controlled of the movement of slaves to the coast for trade. Africa was developing new slave-supplying polities as slavers became increasingly proficient with European firearms, easily capturing men, women, and children from targeted populations. Long-distance trade networks fostered the growth of larger state systems: Asante in modern-day Ghana, Dahomey in what is today Benin, and Oyo in southwestern Nigeria linked the savannah areas in the north to the tropical rain forest and the Atlantic coasts.

As table 1 shows, the number of enslaved persons shipped from the Bight of Benin quadrupled from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of the seventeenth century. This is in fact the region where the ship that brought Oettinger to Africa, the Friedrich Wilhelm, embarked almost all its cargo of more than seven hundred captive Africans.

The likelihood that enslaved men and women would resist was omnipresent. Hence, the purchase, holding, transportation, and exploitation of slave labor had extremely high “surveillance costs.” On the Gold Coast, European trade forts such as Cape Coast Castle contained prisons that could hold large numbers of captives. To keep the captives in check while sailing the Middle Passage, ships like the Friedrich Wilhelm carried more crew than strictly necessary for operating the vessel, and more weapons as well. Despite these precautions, historians estimate that about one slaving voyage in every ten experienced a major rebellion, usually while the ship was still in sight of the African coast. Oettinger describes an enslaved African leader from the Gold Coast who was brutally executed for planning such a rebellion aboard the Friedrich Wilhelm as it sailed along the coast of Cameroon in 1693. Once at sea, confinement, squalor, and sickness threatened the bodies and spirits of the captives. On the Middle Passage the shipboard mortality rate averaged about 15 percent as disease, malnutrition, and suicide (another form of resistance) took their toll. The enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage and arrival in the New World were meant to be transformed into a commodity, ready for sale. But slave resistance—in many forms—was everywhere.

In slave-labor based societies in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America, planters took care to make collective resistance difficult. For example, when purchasing new slaves from Africa, the slaveowners’ policy was not to allow too many slaves who spoke the same African languages to be together on a single plantation. Planters employed overseers who did little else beyond physically enforcing labor discipline. Despite such precautions and such brutal physical coercion, rebellions were frequent. Resistance also took the form of abortion, infanticide, suicide, and the sabotage of equipment, but the most common and visible form of slave resistance was to run away. Slaves absented themselves briefly or liberated themselves permanently, escaping to cities, other islands, or remote regions.

Societies of self-emancipated slaves, called maroons, formed in Brazil, northern South America, Jamaica, Suriname, and in the southeast of North America. Maroon societies were formed by ex-slaves, their descendants, and Native people who had succeeded in escaping the plantation regime and who lived just beyond the reach of plantation owners and colonial authorities. As the documents for comparison included in this volume show, even on a small island like St. Thomas, a colonial official could still report ruefully that “most of the Negroes” on the plantation owned by the Danish West India and Guinea Company (WIGC) had “escaped into the bush and are runaway as maroons.” Slaves put their own bodies in motion to ameliorate or escape the violent life of the plantation.9

Another path to survival in the deadly world of plantation slavery arose from coerced accommodation. Cut off from their homelands and bound by the constant threat of violence, some enslaved persons survived by accommodating themselves to European culture and to the extremely limited opportunities of plantation society. By combining disparate elements of their past and present worlds, these women and men created new hybrid or creole cultures, which sometimes paved the way for other forms of resistance. Learning the master’s language, for example, provided slaves with a common tongue that could be used to plan rebellion. Christianity could be a powerful source of a new sense of personhood and community. Scholars describe all these instances of linguistic and cultural hybridity as a process of creolization.

The life and the writings of Damma/Marotta/Magdalena (d. 1745), a former slave on Danish St. Thomas and a direct contemporary of Oettinger, offer a vivid example of Caribbean creolization. Damma/Marotta/Magdalena was a Catholic West African woman enslaved near Hueda in the Bight of Benin and brought to St. Thomas in the 1690s when she was about forty years old. She may have been transported on a Brandenburg slave ship, perhaps even on the Friedrich Wilhelm on which Oettinger served. Damma/Marotta/Magdalena was born into the small Christian community in Great Popo, in present-day Benin, and was literate in her mother-tongue, Aja-Ayizo. As a slave on St. Thomas, she was known for her piety and devotion and learned to read and write Dutch Creole (the common tongue of the Danish West Indies). Manumitted in her old age, she was baptized Magdalena (after the Queen of Denmark), became an elder of the Evangelical Moravian Brotherhood, and wrote letters and petitions in Aja-Ayizo and Dutch Creole to the Danish authorities. These letters show the interplay of Catholic, West African (Ifa and Vodun), and Protestant (Pietist) words and concepts as Damma/Marotta/Magdalena appealed for protection from the violence of slave masters and joined calls for permission to form a new Pietist congregation on St. Thomas. She signed one letter “written by Marotta, now Madlena of Poppo in Africa,” underscoring the elements that formed her creole life. Her few letters give rare access to an African woman’s voice in a period documented almost entirely by male European authors.10

The new importance of African chattel slavery as the primary source of labor in the plantation societies of the Americas—from Brazil to the Chesapeake—brought with it a new way of organizing society and a new category of human difference: race. The plantation societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (such as Brazil, Barbados, Suriname, Saint-Domingue, Carolina, and Virginia) made the strongest early claims that racial distinctions were fundamentally real and unalterable. They were also the first societies in history governed by laws in which “white” and “black” were legal categories. The exchange of commodities and ideas between these colonies and European centers such as Lisbon, London, Paris, and Amsterdam promoted the idea that there are actual, distinct races, especially European and African races. This ideology of white racism had its most important origins and its longest-lasting effects in plantation societies, but it became part of European identity as well. Oettinger’s comments on Africans can show us how ideas about whiteness and race entered the values of ordinary Europeans who moved between rural hinterlands and the centers of colonial trade.

Oettinger certainly understood the dichotomies Christian-Muslim, Christian-heathen, and Protestant-Catholic before he left Europe. But his sense of white-black as principle by which a society might be organized or described is quite vague in the pages of his journal. Initially he relies on the familiar Christian-heathen and Christian-Muslim categories, referring to Africans in the Caribbean as “Moors.” This flexible term evokes both dark skin and Islam in shifting proportions. For Oettinger (and for many Europeans of his time) “Moors” can be Muslim or pagan, North Africans or dark-skinned sub-Saharan Africans. During his first transatlantic voyage aboard the WIC ship and at the start of his voyage along the coast of Africa, he uses the term quite broadly. But later in the second voyage, he adds two new words to his vocabulary: “Blancken” and “Noegers”—i.e., “whites” and “Negroes.” His spelling indicates that he learned these words from the Dutch. As he assimilated the idea of a racialized black-white dichotomy, he Germanized the spelling of “Negroes” and began using the word in his journal. But he did not entirely replace “Moors” with “Negroes”: Oettinger’s writing reveals a period of ideological transition in which the old religious identification of Africans with “Moors” or “heathens” accompanies a new racial perspective in which Africans are subsumed under “black” and associated with both old and new deficiencies and signs of inferiority. He learns to understand Africans in this context, and his contradictory writings express it.

The Africans that take shape under his pen are savage, as their “astounding ceremonies with dancing, wild, unruly postures, horns on their head, and cow- or horse tails behind” show.11 His experience with human variety in the context of the slave trade led him to disparaging and dehumanizing descriptions of Africans and, most disturbingly, to comparison with animals. He describes how African women “bind the [newborn] child on their back with an old linen cloth, throw their breast to him over the shoulder, and let them suckle. They look like a pair of young apes.”12 The claim that African women could suckle their children over the shoulder echoed a widespread trope that began to circulate in European travel literature from the early seventeenth century onward. Analogously, Oettinger’s perception of childbirth among the enslaved Africans also prompted comparison with an animal: “The mother lies in no child-bed; instead she walks straight away [after giving birth] like a cat does with its young.” As seventeenth-century Europeans understood the pain of childbirth as a curse that marked all women descended from Eve, the idea that women who bore children differently—seemingly without pain—suggests that they might not possess the same humanity as Eve’s Christian descendants.13

Immorality is another attribute of Oettinger’s Africans, best exemplified by his outrage about a “mulatta” who stole his two gold rings in Grossfriedrichsburg and by his claim that the inhabitants of Hueda—first and foremost their king—were “born into” thieving.14 In this regard, however, Oettinger’s Africans are very much like his Frenchmen, the recurring “villains” of his travel account, whom he repeatedly accuses of lying and trying to steal his possessions. Despite the unmistakable, slavery-driven tendency to inferiorize the Africans, Oettinger’s constructions of alterity remained unstable. His narrative uses racial categories, but they were not consolidated into an all-encompassing ideology of white racism. Instead, they coexisted with other categories of difference such as social status and, first and foremost, religion. When Oettinger encounters African clergymen on São Tome, he is most unsettled not by their skin color but by the fact that they are Catholic!

Free Migrant Laborers

We turn now to the parameters of Oettinger’s personal mobility as a journeyman barber-surgeon, and then (in the next section) to the chartered companies, such as the Dutch West India Company (WIC), that put the bodies of enslaved Africans and European craftsmen like Oettinger into motion. Over the past few decades, historians have shown that medieval and early modern people were far more mobile than previously imagined. Men, women, and families migrated—not only for seasonal labor (agriculture or construction) or in response to crises (wars, famines, or religious persecution). Well before the industrial and transportation revolutions of the nineteenth century, migrations were a structural element in European societies and involved many social groups, stretching from aristocrats and merchant-bankers down to clergy, artisans, and soldiers. That said, documenting individual migration is far from easy. Early modern states did not keep systematic records about the emigration of their subjects or the immigration of foreign subjects into their territories. Migrants belonging to the upper strata of society have produced abundant documentation, but texts written by migrants of humble origins—especially travel journals and other kinds of autobiographical accounts—are rare. This makes Oettinger’s narrative especially valuable: it reveals the itinerant life of a young artisan who had to earn his way across Europe and the Atlantic world under precarious conditions.

Oettinger’s fourteen years in motion—from 1682 to 1696—were framed by the rules and constraints of the guild system of the German-speaking lands, which took shape centuries earlier, in the High Middle Ages. Guilds were associations of artisans (or merchants) granted special privileges by cities or sovereigns. Their charters permitted them to regulate and maintain their craft in a given territory. As self-governing corporations, the guilds had a variety of regulatory functions, such as establishing rules to standardize the transmission of technical expertise, set wages and prices, limit competition, and enforce quality standards. By Oettinger’s time the artisanal workforce was divided into three ranks. The guilds were run by the master craftsmen, who were entitled to have their own workshops, sell their products on their own account, employ paid labor, and teach their craft. Journeymen formed the intermediate level of the guild system. These were trained artisans, but unlike the masters, they could not participate in the guilds’ assemblies and were not allowed to run their own workshops: they had to work for a master (or master’s widow) and were paid a wage. On the bottom rung of the guild system stood the apprentices. These young boys (Oettinger was thirteen years old when he moved to Schwäbisch Hall to do his apprenticeship) were trained in a craft by living and working with a master, usually for a period of three to six years. In most cases they were part of the master’s household, receiving room and board but no wages. The boy’s family was expected to pay “apprenticeship money” (Lehrgeld) to the master, who in exchange committed himself to teach the boy his trade and look after him. Once the apprenticeship period was complete, the guild declared the apprentice to be free from obligations and proclaimed him a journeyman. This new status usually meant a period of migration, especially in the German-speaking lands where the Walz, or Wanderjahre (literally, “walking years”), was often both a formal rule prescribed by the guilds and an economic necessity. Guilds required journeymen to travel from place to place to look for short- or longer-term work to broaden their knowledge and practical experience. On an economic level, this phase of institutionalized precariousness and flexibility assured that journeymen would always be ready to move wherever there was a need for their labor. Guild statutes stated that after a given number of years a journeyman could become a master and open his own workshop, but this passage was never automatic. To be proclaimed a master, one needed to find a guild that was willing to accept a new member. In order to limit the competition on the local market, however, guilds and established masters restricted or blocked the formation of new workshops by master craftsmen. Therefore, the actual Wanderjahre of many journeymen—as in the case of Oettinger—clearly exceeded the formal prescription. And without a secure position as a master with a workshop, few journeymen could settle down and start a family.

One solution was to marry a master’s widow. Widows were entitled to manage the workshops of their deceased husbands, but because they were not allowed to work themselves (at least in principle) they had to hire journeymen. And if a journeyman married a widow, he would then acquire the title of master and become the new owner of the workshop. As in the case of Oettinger’s master in Schwäbisch Hall, this regularly led to marriages between young men and much older women. During his journeyman years, Oettinger worked for five widows of master barber-surgeons. In the East Frisian town of Aurich, he worked for the widow of a master from 1694 to 1696—he might have ended up marrying the woman, but his brother successfully pleaded with him to return home. Oettinger’s family seems to have helped him to obtain a position as a master in Künzelsau. In contrast with the memoirs of the eighteenth-century Parisian glassmaker Jacques-Louis Ménétra, who described working for a master’s widow as an opportunity for amorous adventures, in Oettinger’s journal these widows remain largely anonymous.15 With the exception of Anna Catharina Schaab, for whom he worked in Mainz, and a few female relatives, no women are mentioned by name in his manuscript.

Despite the fact that Oettinger completely omits them from his narrative, women actually played a vital role in the workshops at the center of the guild system. Even though guilds often exerted pressures on them, the wives, widows, and daughters of master craftsmen took an active part in the family business and could acquire considerable technical expertise. Catharina Geertruida Schrader, a renowned midwife and widow of a barber-surgeon who employed Oettinger in the Dutch town of Hallum for a period of six weeks, is a good example of this. During her long career Catharina Schrader assisted with more than three thousand births and successfully managed the barbering and surgical practice of her deceased husband for over eighteen years. While her life is accurately documented in the journal she kept over five decades, Oettinger’s travel account does not say a word about her wide-ranging professional activity, nor does he even record her name.16

The search for work forced journeymen to wander from town to town. To make a living, they had to take up opportunities when and where they popped up. The maps of Oettinger’s continental journeys show that his travels were neither linear nor planned. This was typical: the migratory paths of early modern craftsmen were constantly redirected during the migration itself. As time went by a journeyman would make new personal connections, learn about the labor markets in distant regions, and (more concretely) hear of specific masters who were looking to employ trained workers. Initially, the scope of Oettinger’s journey was regional: Schwäbisch Hall, where he did his apprenticeship (1679–82), is about fourteen miles from his hometown, Künzelsau. During his first years as a journeyman (1682–85), all places where he found employment were within a hundred miles or so of Künzelsau. Then, in spring 1685, he sought his fortune farther east, in Saxony. He knew that in Jena he could count on the support of his brother Johann Christoph, who was studying theology there, and this seems to have been a key factor in the decision. His quest for work in Saxony, however, was unsuccessful, as was his trip farther south to Nuremberg. After months of unemployment, he headed back to Mainz, in the southwestern part of the Holy Roman Empire, where his journey had begun. After a six-month stay in this city, he then headed northwest to Düsseldorf, where he remained for almost a year, and from there he walked southwest to Aachen. In the summer of 1687 he decided to travel to the Netherlands. Did he hear of better opportunities or wages there? It seems likely. In Amsterdam he worked in the practice of a German barber-surgeon before being offered a position aboard a WIC ship. As his trajectory shows, his migration from the German hinterland to the flourishing Dutch territories was by no means direct; nor does it look like the result of a longstanding plan. That said, Oettinger must have known for some time that he could seek employment in the extensive maritime sector of the United Provinces (officially, the Republic of the Seven United Provinces). Augustin Faust, a fellow citizen of Oettinger and the author of a town chronicle, mentions another local man, Hans Christof Seyfriedt (d. 1694), who “during his years as a journeyman was in India among savage people, spent many years at sea and suffered much” before he settled down in Künzelsau as a house painter.17 Oettinger’s runaway master Joachim Matthias Sander let his abandoned wife know that he planned to get a position on a Hamburg ship bound for Greenland; a year later he wrote her that he would probably go to the Dutch Republic in order to serve on a man-of-war bound for North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.18 We do not know if Sander actually set sail, but such options would not have been unknown to a barber-surgeon from this region. Sander’s abandoned wife’s first husband had served with the military and as a ship’s surgeon, travelling as far as Denmark, the Dutch Republic, England, France, Portugal, Spain, and North Africa.19 And the first master Oettinger worked for as a journeyman, Michael Sutorius, had himself worked in the Netherlands in his youth.20 For journeymen barber-surgeons, working on ships or serving in the army were viable alternatives to employment by a master in a local practice. Oettinger’s contemporary Johann Dietz (1665–1738), who has left a vivid autobiography, served as a journeyman barber-surgeon on a whaling voyage to the Arctic Sea and as an army surgeon at the Siege of Buda (1686) during the Great Turkish War (1683–99).21

During the seventeenth century, the most attractive region for a Protestant migrant from the Holy Roman Empire was clearly the Dutch Republic, where the thriving economy created a high demand for skilled labor and thus offered relatively good wages. Every year thousands of itinerant workers from the German lands, the southern Netherlands, and Scandinavia arrived in the United Provinces. At midcentury, about 8 percent of the Republic’s population was foreign-born—a level that was exceeded only at the end of the twentieth century. The impact of migration was particularly evident in the cities of Holland, where foreigners accounted for 29 percent of the population. In Amsterdam, no less than 38 percent of the city-dwellers had been born outside the Republic.

The maritime sector was particularly dependent on migrant labor. In 1694 ships sailing under the Dutch flag (including merchant vessels operating in Europe and the Mediterranean; ships bound for Africa, the Americas, and the East Indies; whaling and fishing vessels; and the ships of the Dutch navy) employed about 53,000 men. Together these ships formed Europe’s largest fleet, and they were manned by the most nationally mixed crews. At the end of the seventeenth century foreign-born men represented more than 30 percent of the Dutch maritime workforce. During the eighteenth century the percentage of alien-born crew members continued to grow: in 1785 it amounted to slightly more than 50 percent. Migrants from the poorer German hinterlands played a crucial role in this trend. For the VOC, employees from the Holy Roman Empire—men who were willing to risk the notoriously high shipboard mortality rates in the tropics—allowed the company to keep wages low. This applied not only to sailors and soldiers but also to the artisans working on VOC vessels and overseas trading outposts. Barber-surgeons from the German-speaking lands were a growing presence in the ranks of the company. From 1700 to 1725 almost 90 percent of the VOC surgeons were Dutch, but from 1776 to 1795 foreigners made up 35 percent of this professional group (and 90 percent of those foreign surgeons came from German territories). The records of the WIC have survived only in fragments, allowing no such quantitative estimates. That said, there is no reason to believe that the role of German-speaking surgeons was significantly less important in the Dutch Atlantic shipping of the WIC than in the VOC.22

As a source for migration history, Oettinger’s journal provides a valuable perspective. Most other accounts from German-speaking oceanic travelers focus only on the (often heroized) seafaring, leaving us in the dark about the life of the author before and after the voyage. Oettinger’s manuscript allows us to place his two stints as a ship’s surgeon in a broader trajectory of migration. In 1690, after his return from Suriname, Oettinger resumed his regional mobility, accepting a position in the Dutch town of Harderwijk, where he remained for almost two years. His connections to maritime work must have remained active, however. He soon learned about and took a new opportunity: becoming senior surgeon aboard a Brandenburg slave ship.

During his travels Oettinger stayed for longer periods in some towns (his longest stay, over two years, was in Aurich), but he left other regions as quickly as possible. In Grossfriedrichsburg, in West Africa, he refused to stay on as fort surgeon; likewise, he declined an invitation to stay in the Caribbean, at St. Thomas, as a barber-surgeon employed by the BAAC. And when he was released from French captivity in Brest, he did not even try to find employment in France. For a German Protestant who did not speak French, the kingdom of Louis XIV clearly offered no opportunities. Back in the Holy Roman Empire, he remained in the north—both because he had to collect his salary from the Brandenburg company (which was paid in two installments) and because he was offered a long-term position in the East Frisian town of Aurich. The southwest of the Empire was on the front lines of the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97), making it a less desirable destination.

In the end Oettinger returned to his hometown of Künzelsau in Franconia. His family ties helped him secure a position as a master barber-surgeon, putting an end to his precarious life as a journeyman after fourteen years. His travels show that for the itinerant workers of the German lands, European expansion and oceanic trade created an important labor market. The demand for workers of all kinds on naval and merchant ships and in overseas territories drew in not just the inhabitants of coastal regions but also people coming from distant hinterlands. The risks of such work were high. But if one survived storms, disease, and injury, the rewards could be rich. Salaries were higher than on land, and individual microinvestments in trade goods could offer additional income. Oettinger himself traded in medicines on his own account and purchased sugar, cotton, and tobacco in the Caribbean. When he was captured by the French in 1693, he had hidden in a bandage on his leg “over 200 reichsthaler in gold,” which he had presumably earned through trade.23 Hence, his private business revenues were more or less equal to the salary he received from the BAAC.24

The seventeenth century was a turning point for German involvement in European trade and colonization. As the Iberian dominance over Atlantic trade routes declined, new spaces for French, Dutch, British, and Baltic competitors opened up. As a result, the German lands were better connected economically and culturally with the Atlantic world. Travel and migration into the Atlantic world increased. The main destination of emigration from the Holy Roman Empire remained eastern Europe, especially the Balkans and Russia, but German migration to the Americas (and to a lesser extent to Africa) was far from negligible. The majority of migrants from the Holy Roman Empire—whether to eastern Europe or to the Americas—came from the southwest of the Empire, where the population began to grow quickly after the Thirty Years’ War. Although no German principality possessed territories abroad, a growing number of German-speaking migrants found their way to the colonies of other countries: by 1775 the British settlements in North America had become home to about 225,000 “Germans”—in Pennsylvania they made up one-third of the population. In the Caribbean merchants, planters, mariners, officers, soldiers, pastors, and craftsmen from the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss Confederation were a constant presence. And at the Cape of Good Hope in 1807—just twelve years after the colony had been taken over by the British from the Dutch—roughly a third of the European population was of German descent. So while many employees of the BAC came from outside German lands (primarily from the Dutch Republic), likewise German migrants actively wove transimperial ties connecting central Europe to a multiplicity of regions overseas.

Chartered Companies

The manpower and resources necessary to create the Atlantic slave trade of the seventeenth century were assembled through what we today might call a public-private partnership. The rulers of England, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Brandenburg-Prussia created privileged trading companies open to private investment to promote trade. For example, Asian trade was handled by the English East India Company (chartered in 1601) and their Dutch and French counterparts (1602 and 1664, respectively). In North America the English Hudson’s Bay Company (1670) controlled the fur trade. Such chartered companies played a paramount role in European long-distance sea trade. The risks of undertaking intercontinental trade were high, and financing convoys sailing to Asia, Africa, or the Americas required huge capital investment. Chartered companies with limited liability for individual shareholders developed as a new and effective tool for pooling resources. These companies relied on national monopolies to eliminate competition. They argued that only through monopoly trade could profits be enhanced to the point that merchants would be willing to invest in such risky ventures. English companies were first chartered to trade with Africa in 1585. In Oettinger’s time the WIC and England’s Royal African Company (RAC, chartered in 1672) were major traders of enslaved Africans, working from a dozen forts and trading posts along the coast of West Africa.

Chartered companies began to face challenges at the end of the seventeenth century. All chartered companies trading with Africa were increasingly undermined by “interlopers”—private ships participating in the triangular trade in defiance of the monopoly claims of the established companies. Moreover, it became evident to all that this trade could not be neatly constricted by national boundaries: many investors and merchants operated across multiple empires. Following England’s Glorious Revolution (1688), merchants demanded deregulation and the elimination of the monopoly the RAC held on trade with Africa. In 1698 English interlopers (who preferred to be called “separate traders”) were allowed to participate in the fast-growing slavery business in exchange for paying a 10 percent tax to the RAC on goods imported to Africa, and in 1712 even this tax was abolished. The free trade of unfree humans prevailed. On paper the WIC monopoly on Dutch trade with West Africa and the shipment of enslaved people to the Americas continued to exist until the 1730s. But in practice it had been long since been circumvented.

In the eighteenth century, when the transatlantic slave trade reached its height, the monopoly-based chartered companies declined and private trade took over. But the historical role played by the chartered companies should not be underestimated. They laid the foundations for the massive “free trade” of the following century. Not only did they catalyze public and private investment in the slave trade, they also fulfilled state functions: signing treaties with non-European rulers, building fortresses and trading posts, and waging war on land and sea. In the seventeenth century corporations like the WIC and the RAC combined private capital investment with state resources, privileges, and monopolies to put hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and tens of thousands of European workers into motion.

When Johann Peter Oettinger was recruited in Amsterdam to serve as a surgeon aboard the slave ship Juffrouw Alida (Miss Alida) in the summer of 1688, Dutch merchant vessels had been trading directly with West Africa for nine decades. The first phase of their involvement in transatlantic commerce was marked by the Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648). Warfare and economic expansion were indeed intimately linked. The conflict between Habsburg Spain and its insubordinate provinces in the Netherlands not only gave birth to the Dutch Republic: on a global level, it also accompanied the decline of Iberian hegemony in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

After the Spanish conquest of Antwerp (1585), Amsterdam emerged as the new leading commercial entrepôt of Europe. From here, American colonial commodities as well as spices and manufactured goods from Asia were re-exported to the markets of the German-speaking territories and the Baltic. At first Atlantic trade was managed by small companies and individual merchants. But in 1621, when the Twelve Years’ Truce came to an end and the Dutch War of Independence flamed up again, the ruling body of the Republic—the so-called States-General—created an institution that combined investment and naval power: they established the first West India Company (Westindische Compagnie, WIC). Its charter gave it a monopoly over Dutch trade with the coasts of West Africa (south of the Tropic of Cancer and north of the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas.

This joint stock company was given significant state functions. In its first decades warfare was at the very heart of its activities. The attacks against Portuguese possessions in the Atlantic world were especially important. (From 1580 to 1640 the kings of Spain ruled Portugal through a personal union of the two crowns, so Portugal became involved in the Dutch War of Independence.) After conquering the captaincy of Pernambuco (1630), the WIC gradually extended its grip over the Brazilian coastline from the Amazon to the San Francisco River—not least thanks to mercenary troops recruited in the German states. On the other side of the ocean, the company captured the fortress of São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) in modern-day Ghana in 1637. In 1641 its troops occupied the island of São Tomé and the city of Luanda, the capital of the Portuguese possessions in Angola. For a couple of years the WIC seemed successful in materializing the “great design” of a Dutch circum-Atlantic territorial empire, which also included the colony of New Netherland (in North America), as well as possessions in the Guianas and the Caribbean.

This situation, however, did not last long. In 1648 the Dutch lost São Tomé and Luanda, and in 1654 they were forced to abandon their last strongholds in Brazil. At the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Treaty of Breda (1667) allowed the English to keep possession of New Netherland; in exchange the Dutch received Suriname and its rich plantations. At the time of Oettinger’s travels, Dutch possessions in the Atlantic world had shrunk to Suriname, a few small islands in the Caribbean, and Elmina and a few other fortified trading bases on the Gold Coast. While the Dutch Republic had failed to establish itself as the new master of the Atlantic, the WIC’s offensive substantially helped to end Spanish and Portuguese predominance on the maritime routes of the Atlantic world, opening up unprecedented opportunities for emerging entrepreneurs from northwest Europe. One of these Dutch entrepreneurs, Benjamin Raule (1634–1707), would help found the Brandenburg African Company (BAC), which employed Oettinger on his longest Atlantic voyage in 1692–93.

In 1674 the States-General dissolved the first WIC, and a year later they replaced it with a new one. The second WIC completely outsourced the shipbuilding business, and, in strategic terms, it had fewer military functions and focused to a greater extent on trade. On a general level, however, continuities prevailed; even in military terms the ships of the WIC maintained an important role. As privateering remained an enduring practice in maritime warfare well into the nineteenth century, well-armed merchant ships were both potential booty and—if entitled by governmental licenses (“letters of marque”)—legitimate aggressors, preying on vessels sailing under the flag of an enemy nation.

Oettinger’s Atlantic journeys took place during the War of the Grand Alliance, thus under constant threat of armed conflict.25 For both the Dutch vessel and the Brandenburg frigate, French attacks represented the most dangerous peril. In 1689, just after the war had broken out, the Juffrouw Alida and other WIC ships were attacked off Suriname by a French squadron commanded by the governor of Saint-Domingue, Jean-Baptiste Du Casse. On Oettinger’s second journey, in 1692, when the Brandenburg convoy left Emden, its commanders chose to circumnavigate the British Isles by sailing north to the Faroe archipelago. This route avoided the perils of the English Channel, which was thoroughly patrolled by the French navy and French privateers. Finally, in 1693, when the Brandenburg frigate Friedrich Wilhelm was on its way from St. Thomas to Cadiz—where it was meant to sell its cargo of Caribbean goods before heading for Emden, its home port—it was captured, looted, and burned off the coast of Morocco by a French naval squadron.

The WIC was a joint stock company whose structures and prerogatives were defined by a letter patent (the “charter”) issued by the States-General. On a formal level, the WIC charter was substantially influenced by that of the VOC, founded in 1602. Like the Dutch Republic itself, the WIC had a federal structure. The company was subdivided into five provincial chambers, each of which had its own provincial directors (bewindhebbers), who were chosen by public officials from the major shareholders. On a federal level the company was managed by a board of national directors: the Heeren XIX (Nineteen Lords) during the first period and the Heeren X (Ten Lords) during the second. The most influential chambers, which dominated the national board, were those of Amsterdam and Zeeland, which held shares of four-ninths and two-ninths, respectively, while the other three chambers had only one-ninth each. As a general rule the chambers were responsible for financing ventures by individual ships. Oettinger, for example, was recruited and paid by the Amsterdam chamber and the “noble Lords of the West India Company,” the provincial bewindhebbers. They required Oettinger to pass a surgical exam before he was hired to serve as a ship’s surgeon on the WIC ship Juffrouw Alida.

Eventually, the monopoly granted to the WIC was eroded from without and within. A considerable number of Dutch entrepreneurs—often from the province of Zeeland—organized trading voyages to the coasts of Guinea outside the WIC. These lorrendraaier (interlopers) took advantage of the fact that West African merchants and rulers did not have any interest in limiting their commercial interactions to one specific European company. And in the Americas they had no difficulty selling their captives: the growth of the plantation system created an insatiable demand for enslaved labor. Interlopers from all regions could profit from business opportunities in Atlantic Africa without paying for costly infrastructure, such as the fortresses and garrisons maintained on the Gold Coast by the chartered companies.

The WIC could not enforce its monopoly along hundreds of miles of the West African coast, and a vast “contraband trade” took place at sites outside Dutch authority. But the company was also weakened by its own mercantile porosity. High-ranking company officers, who were supposed to prevent smuggling, were often heavily involved in their own personal trade with interlopers, foreign companies, and African merchants. They used their positions and the infrastructure of the WIC to pursue their own interests, undermining their employer. On a lower level, many WIC employees followed their bosses’ example, supplementing their salary by trading on their own account. On slave ships, chartered companies usually allowed limited private trade by certain employees, such as the captain and a few others. As Oettinger’s journal entries for both of his transatlantic voyages attest, he was also trading for his own profit, though on a small scale. On São Tomé he tried (unsuccessfully) to sell some medicines to Italian Capuchin missionaries, and on St. Thomas he was often on shore buying cotton and tobacco.26 Unfortunately for him, when the Brandenburg frigate fell into the hands of the French squadron, all his “crates of sugar, tobacco, cotton, and medicine and everything else was gone,” looted by the enemy crew.27

The monopolies of the national chartered companies were also circumvented by investment in foreign companies. In the seventeenth century this strategy was favored by Dutch merchants outside the WIC: investing in potentially lucrative slaving voyages was an appealing option, and the capability of the WIC to absorb available commercial capital was clearly insufficient. Hence, Dutch entrepreneurs played a crucial role in financing the mercantile and colonial ambitions of the Duke of Courland, the Swedish African Company, and the Atlantic projects of the Prince-Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia.

The WIC was far from being the only Dutch involvement in the slave trade. But it was certainly the most important and the longest-lasting one. From 1596 to 1829 Dutch vessels embarked 554,336 enslaved persons in sub-Saharan Africa. With a share of 4 percent of the total trade, the Dutch are thus well behind the other slave traffickers: the Portuguese/Brazilians (47 percent) engaged in slaving voyages for a much longer period; together with the British (26 percent) and the French (11 percent), the three nations clearly dominated the eighteenth century at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. Nevertheless, Dutch merchants were not marginal players in the history of this trade, especially in the seventeenth century, when slave exports from Africa accelerated dramatically. If we focus more sharply on the period and regions of Oettinger’s Atlantic journeys, the importance of the Dutch trade is clear. From 1681 to 1700 they accounted for 20 percent of all slaves that were disembarked in the Caribbean, being second only to the English (64 percent).28

The share of the Dutch is all the more remarkable if one considers that—with the exception of the Guianas—the Dutch Republic did not possess any large American territories based on slave plantation labor. From 1654, when the Dutch lost Brazil, until the 1720s (when exports to Suriname increased), most slaves exported on Dutch slave ships ultimately ended up in non-Dutch territories. The most important export market was Spanish America. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Spanish Crown—unlike Portugal, France, and Great Britain—did not organize slave supplies for its colonies on the basis of national chartered companies or, more generally, by encouraging national carriers. Instead they established a system of licenses—the so-called asiento de negros—which, in the second half of the seventeenth century, repeatedly became an entrepreneurial opportunity for Dutch investors.

Oettinger’s journey aboard the WIC frigate points to an aspect of the slave trade that is sometimes overlooked: not all slaving voyages followed the triangular pattern (Europe to Africa to America to Europe). The Juffrouw Alida and her fellow ships sailed directly to the Caribbean, loaded slaves at Curaçao, sold them in Suriname, and then returned home to Amsterdam with a cargo of sugar and other colonial commodities. These roundtrip voyages between Europe and America were a necessary component of the triangular trade. When slave ships disembarked their human cargoes in the Americas, they usually reinvested their profits in colonial goods that they would then sell back in Europe. But the profits from the sale of one shipload of slaves could buy enough sugar, tobacco, or cotton to fill two or more cargo ships. Hence, to keep the system working, some ships had to make direct crossings between Europe and the Americas.

Oettinger would make his longest journey—all three legs of the triangular trade—on a ship of the Brandenburg African-American Company (BAAC). Like the WIC, the BAAC was created by the state and given special privileges to promote its trade. Chartered in 1682 and officially dissolved in 1717, the Brandenburg African Company—which in September 1692 was renamed Brandenburg African-American Company—undertook the only sustained engagement with Africa and the Atlantic slave trade by a German state. Holding a unique place in the history of connections between German-speaking Europe and the early modern slave trade, the BAAC brought Oettinger and other Germans into contact with Atlantic slavery in new ways. The BAC was created by Elector Frederick William I of Brandenburg-Prussia (ruled 1640–88) on the initiative of the Dutch émigré merchant and shipowner Benjamin Raule, first director of the company and first “director-general” of the nascent Brandenburg-Prussian navy.

In 1682 the Elector of Brandenburg ruled a patchwork of landlocked and overwhelmingly agrarian territories spread across central Europe, still depopulated by the effects of the Thirty Years’ War. This composite state was administered from Berlin and Potsdam. Among the many attempts by Frederick William I to enrich his hinterland territories, the BAC stood out. Alongside military strength, Brandenburg-Prussia now also looked to mercantilist policies and global trade to provide prosperity, following the model offered by the Dutch Republic (to which Frederick had close ties of religion and marriage). With the founding of the BAC in 1682, Frederick William I used Dutch capital and maritime expertise to carve out a place in the Atlantic slave trade. With access only to the Baltic, Brandenburg-Prussia possessed none of the geopolitical prerequisites for the triangle trade. But the pull of the Atlantic economy was powerful: direct trade with Africa and with the Spanish in the New World promised profits for the Elector’s treasury. To enter this world, the Brandenburgers patched together a new network of Atlantic harbors and trade sites. After a 1680–81 voyage from the Baltic port of Pillau to the Gold Coast, they signed an agreement in 1683 with the port city of Emden that gave them access to the North Sea. That year they began building trading posts on the Gold Coast, in the southwest of modern-day Ghana: the major fort of Grossfriedrichsburg in Pokesu (Princess Town), as well as the Dorotheenschanze in Akwida, and, starting from 1694, the Sophie Louise-Schanze in Tacrama.29 And in December 1685 Brandenburg-Prussia negotiated a thirty-year treaty with Denmark that allowed the BAC to set up a trading post and sell enslaved Africans on the Danish island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean. Brandenburg-Prussia now had modest but secure bases at three key regions of the Atlantic world: in northern Europe, on the west coast of Africa, and in the Caribbean. In 1685 Brandenburg-Prussia also became treaty partners with the Emirs of Trarza, who allowed them to use an existing fort on the island of Arguin (just off the coast of modern-day Mauritania) as a trading post and supply station.30 Its attempts to acquire its own Caribbean islands and to establish territorial colonies failed, but Brandenburg-Prussia developed an essential network of Atlantic bases, each secured by agreements with local authorities.

The chartered trading companies of relatively smaller or newcomer states, such as Brandenburg-Prussia, hired officers with expertise and experience regardless of their background. Dutch, English, and French Huguenot men served at all levels of the Brandenburg company as governors of trading posts, ships’ captains, and company merchants (factors, sub-factors, and assistants). This was the case for Pieter (Pedro) van Belle, a Dutchman who served as director-general of the Brandenburg trading post on St. Thomas from 1693 to 1702.31 He knew the slave trade well: from 1685 to 1687 van Belle had administered the asiento, selling slaves from Curaçao to Spanish South America. In 1693 he received the position on St. Thomas and sailed with Oettinger as far as Arguin before heading to the Caribbean.32

From the start, the slave trade was conceived as an important aspect of the BAC, though trade for gold and ivory was also meant to play a significant role in the company’s commercial strategy. Alternative commodities continued to be sought on the African coasts for the whole period, especially in Mauritania, where gum arabic and ostrich feathers constituted the core business. But by 1685 it was clear that the greatest profits could be made only with human cargo. As Frederick William I explained: “His Electoral Highness intends, because the African Company cannot develop without the trade of slaves to America, that one should establish the slave trade on the island of St. Thomas.”33 With a harbor in the Caribbean guaranteed by the treaty with Denmark, the BAC could now fully engage in transatlantic trade. In 1687 BAC director Raule reported to Frederick William I that their first slave ship had arrived at St. Thomas and that “the slave trade . . . is becoming the foundation of our company.”34

Records suggest that most of these slaves were re-exported from St. Thomas to French possessions (especially St. Croix) and to minor British islands. A significant (although not always traceable) share of the BAC’s slaves were sold directly to English and French planters, whose demand overrode the mercantile trade restrictions imposed on Europe and the trade monopolies of the chartered companies. Other BAC slaves were sold to Dutch merchants on Curaçao and St. Eustatius, from whence the slaves were brought—illegally or through the asiento de negros system—to the Spanish mainland. In 1693 Robert Morrison, an English agent in Holland, described the BAAC testily as “an Emden company trading under the Elector of Brandenburg’s patent to Guinea.” He complained that “though they [the BAAC] pretend they send their ships to an island called St. Thomas in the West Indies, belonging to the Danes, which does not produce forty hogsheads of sugar a year, it is evident from their papers that the [return] cargoes were purchased at St. Croix, Martinique and other French islands.” In light of the ongoing interimperial conflict in the Caribbean, he noted that “this company, under pretence of trading to St. Thomas, [does] supply all the French islands with provisions and necessaries of war.”35 And when the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat visited St. Thomas in 1701, he noted thriving trade from St. Thomas to Spanish islands and the Tierra Firme (roughly speaking, modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama).

In the Caribbean at this time, demand for slaves always exceeded the supply provided by the national chartered companies, and the Brandenburg company sought to profit from this gap. Between 1682 and 1715 ships sailing under the flag of Brandenburg-Prussia disembarked and sold at least 18,754 slaves.36 Overall, Brandenburg-Prussia’s share of the slave trade remained well below that of the Dutch, whose ships delivered 87,391 slaves to the Americas during the same period. However, if we focus on the Caribbean between 1690 and 1700, we can see that Oettinger worked for the BAAC when the Brandenburg slave trade was at its peak and the company’s share of the total trade was much higher. In these years the company disembarked 15,293 slaves in the Caribbean on thirty-six voyages, whereas vessels flying the Dutch flag delivered about 21,806 slaves to the same region on fifty-two voyages. For about a decade the Brandenburg company was a growing force in the triangular trade and posed real competition for the Dutch in the most significant slave-import market of the New World.37

This success inevitably drew the attention of the BAAC’s European rivals. Pressure from the Dutch in Africa and the general growth of the British slave trade in the Caribbean offered a constant challenge to the company. The most important factor of the BAAC’s decline—though certainly not the only one—was the attacks on its fleet by the French. The company’s fleet, which never had more than sixteen ships at any one time, lost fifteen vessels between 1693 and 1702. Oettinger’s return voyage to Europe in 1693, for example, ended when his ship, the Friedrich Wilhelm, was seized and burned by the French in November of that year. After 1700 the fortunes of the BAAC declined rapidly. In 1717 the company’s fortresses on the Gold Coast were sold to the Dutch, and the Brandenburg African-American Company was dismissed as a “chimera” by King Frederick William I (ruled 1713–40), who was much more interested in Prussia’s military position in continental Europe than in overseas trade.

On the Gold Coast, however, the Brandenburg company was no chimera. In the 1690s its main trading post, the “handsome and reasonably large” fort of Grossfriedrichsburg, was comparable to the Dutch headquarters at Elmina in size and strength.38 From their first voyage to the Gold Coast in 1680–81, the Brandenburgers signed treaties with local rulers; traded for gold, ivory, and slaves; and attacked and defended trading posts along the coast. In 1692 the BAC joined with the English RAC and the Dutch WIC to send a common embassy to Denkyira, an inland kingdom that had become a major source of gold and slaves.39 And further east, the Brandenburgers were in contact with the King of Hueda, in present-day Benin, to whose court in Savi Oettinger was admitted in early 1693.40

The manifold activities of the BAC/BAAC generated entrepreneurs’ proposals, business records, travel accounts, and official reports—an interwoven set of texts in Dutch and German linking Berlin, Baltic ports, and Emden with Arguin, the Gold Coast, and the Caribbean. The company tapped into an existing network of connections and opened new migratory and commercial channels between the Holy Roman Empire and the Atlantic world. In search of profit, trading companies chartered by England, the Dutch Republic, and Brandenburg-Prussia harnessed the personal mobility of men like Oettinger to move enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean and throughout the Atlantic world.

PLACES

The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation

One of the coldest winters of the seventeenth century had already begun when Johann Peter Oettinger arrived in November 1693 at the great military port of Brest in western France. He was a prisoner of the French, captured when the Friedrich Wilhelm was seized by a French naval squadron—one small episode in a nine-year-long war, the War of the Grand Alliance, waged between France and a coalition of European states, including the Holy Roman Empire and the United Provinces. Oettinger’s life and travels were shaped by these three very different European states. His German homeland was part of the Holy Roman Empire; his first contact with the Atlantic world came via the wealthy hub of world trade, the Dutch Republic; and on every level, from the personal to the geopolitical, Oettinger was convinced of the perfidy of the French and the Kingdom of France under Louis XIV.

Oettinger certainly considered himself a German, but “nationality” was not a major part of his self-image. When he and the other prisoners arrived in the harbor at Brest, they were told that all Germans would be kept as prisoners in Brest by the French. Soon confirmation came from the city: captives from all the major German seaports—Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Danzig—sent word that they were jailed in Brest. Oettinger reports that he and the other Germans among the prisoners from the Friedrich Wilhelm were told, “We must say we are Dutch, because all Germans were being held as prisoners.” It is not clear why the Dutch, also at war with France, would be permitted to leave Brest, while the Germans would be held. In any case, this deception was not a problem for Oettinger. Two days later he noted, “I received a royal pass [to leave Brest], after I claimed to be from Fort in Holland.” Some of his shipmates responded differently, however. Oettinger mentions “some twenty headstrong fellows . . . taken prisoner because they—following their principles—acknowledged that they were Germans.” Their loyalty to their German origins or to the truth cost them each a payment of four reichsthaler to “be set free.”41

In the early modern centuries there was no state called “Germany” that could join an alliance or declare war. Culturally, Oettinger and his countrymen and -women identified themselves (some more forthrightly than others) as German; in political terms, they were all subjects of the Holy Roman Empire, an elective monarchy which encompassed present-day Germany, Austria, the Czech and Slovak Republics, as well as parts of eastern France, northern Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, Switzerland, and western Poland. Among the many languages spoken in the Empire, German was by far the most common, and in 1512 the term “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” became the official title of the Empire. It spanned central Europe between the Kingdom of France to the west and the kingdoms of Hungary and Poland to the east. In the north it was bounded by the Baltic and North Seas and by the Danish kingdom; in the south, it reached to the Alps. The trade and communication of much of Europe moved along the mighty rivers within the Empire—the Rhine, the Main, the Danube, and the Elbe. On these rivers stood some of its most important cities: Cologne (among the largest in the Empire with about forty thousand inhabitants), Frankfurt, Vienna, and Hamburg.

The Empire was divided into a patchwork of principalities, some large and powerful like Brandenburg, ruled by the Hohenzollern dynasty, others small but independent. In each of these principalities the local rulers (princes) exercised many of the functions assigned by early modern and modern political theorists to the sovereign. The princes of the Empire—rather than the emperor—collected taxes, administered justice, minted coins, and claimed responsibility for the material and spiritual welfare of their subjects. Many of the principalities of the Empire had their own assemblies representing the estates of that territory.

The territorial ambitions of the princes, alongside their tendency to divide their lands through inheritance, created a collection of German principalities that grew bewilderingly complex. By 1650 the Empire contained the seven electoral principalities; twenty-five major secular principalities such as the duchies of Austria, Bavaria, and Braunschweig (Brunswick); about ninety archbishoprics, bishoprics, and imperial abbeys; over one hundred independent counties of very unequal importance; and seventy Imperial Free Cities, such as Cologne, Bremen, Lübeck, and Hamburg in the north; Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Ulm, and Augsburg in the south; and Frankfurt and Mühlhausen in central Germany. These Imperial Free Cities were subject only to the emperor and governed themselves, usually through an oligarchy. In his innovative analysis of the Empire’s “constitution” in 1667, the jurist and historian Samuel Pufendorf (who was, by the way, the father-in-law of Carl Constantin von Schnitter, the engineer who designed the BAC fortress Grossfriedrichsburg) explained the fragmentation of political authority in the Empire: “In the course of time, through the negligent complaisance of the Emperors, the ambition of the princes, and the scheming of the clergy” the Empire had developed from “an ordered monarchy” to “a kind of state so disharmonious” that it stood somewhere between a limited monarchy and a federation of sovereign principalities.42

Few European political units seem as distant and confusing as the Holy Roman Empire. But at the start of the early modern period, the supranational, multiethnic structure of this feudal conglomerate made perfect sense to the people who lived in it. Indeed, in the period from 1450 to 1555 the Holy Roman Empire was a dynamic political unit of crucial importance to the growth of the Habsburg Empire and the success of the Protestant Reformation. It survived the chaos of the Thirty Years’ War to emerge as a guarantor of stability in central Europe. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) confirmed the broader European trend toward a system of fully sovereign, independent states but left the Empire, with its fragmented sovereignty, and the imperial estates, with their lesser, territorial sovereignty within the Empire, as exceptions that proved the rule. Politically the Empire stood in sharp contrast with the Kingdom of France, where Louis XIV was centralizing state authority and reducing feudal particularism, and with the Dutch Republic, which had developed a decentralized federal government.

The Holy Roman Empire also stood out because the rulers of its individual territories were permitted to choose which variety of Christianity (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or—after 1648—Reformed) would be practiced within their territory. The Protestant Reformation was born in the Empire, and the peace treaties of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia guaranteed its survival and assured the permanent division of the Empire into Protestant and Catholic political units. Saxony, the homeland of Martin Luther, and Brandenburg-Prussia were Protestant, as were most of the Imperial Free Cities. Bavaria and Habsburg Austria were staunchly Catholic. Across the Empire the territorial patchwork was a religions patchwork as well: Catholics and Protestants were never far from territories living under the other faith. The rulers and clergy of these imperial territories and city-states strove mightily to teach their “true” Christian doctrine to their subjects: Lutherans like Oettinger learned that Holy Scripture (as interpreted by trained Lutheran theologians) contained everything one needed to know about salvation and the Christian life; subjects in Catholic territories learned that they were part of an ancient, vast church established directly by Christ and governed by his successor in Rome, the Pope. Lutherans believed that Catholic “external” forms of piety such as monastic vows, convent life, pilgrimages, and the veneration of the saints were unchristian and actually harmful to one’s faith and salvation; Catholics believed that Protestants had falsely rejected the rich variety of paths to salvation offered by the true Church in favor of a less demanding and more worldly religion.

The territorial and religious fragmentation, overlapping jurisdictions, and intricate mechanisms of local government that characterized the Holy Roman Empire are well exemplified by Künzelsau, the small town where Oettinger’s father was appointed Lutheran pastor in 1669 and where Oettinger lived and worked for the last fifty years of his life. Künzelsau lies in the Kocher valley, in the region of Franconia in the southwestern part of modern-day Germany. Since the Middle Ages this part of Franconia had been ruled by the counts of Hohenlohe. Over time, the family divided into several branches and sub-branches, each of which held seigneurial rights over small portions of territory. Künzelsau was itself a condominium (Ganerbschaft), a territory co-ruled by different lords, each of whom held a share of political authority. The most influential lords were of the Lutheran Oehringen branch of the Hohenlohe family, but this family shared authority over Künzelsau with other rulers (which changed frequently over the centuries), such as the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, or the lords of Stetten.43 Together the co-rulers (Lutheran and Catholic) appointed a common administrator (Schultheiss) to govern the town.

With the power of hindsight, we know that the future of the modern state in Germany lay in the larger territories of the Empire, especially Brandenburg-Prussia.44 Early modern political theorists offered a different perspective. In 1667 Pufendorf described the Empire as “resembling a monster” in his treatise on the Empire’s constitution, but Pufendorf, like most of his contemporaries, did not deny that the Empire was a state—albeit a state with a complex and irregular constitution that did not fit with any classical model or modern system.45 Johann Peter Oettinger had the good fortune to live in this state during the century after the Peace of Westphalia, when the fundamental acceptance of the existence of the Empire by the other European powers led to a period of relative peace and prosperity (the wars of Louis XIV notwithstanding). During this period German architecture, music, and learned culture flourished again as it had during the Renaissance. It was the age of Leibniz and Bach—and of the slaving ventures of the Brandenburg African Company.

Along the Coasts of West Africa

As Oettinger’s diary illustrates, when slaving ships reached West Africa they followed the Guinea current—which flows southward along the coastline from Senegambia down to Liberia and then eastward to the Bight of Biafra—and then shifted into the South Equatorial current to sail west to the Americas. Along this route Europeans traded with the various coastal regions, often naming them for the specific commodities obtained there. Although individual authors’ designations varied, one can roughly say that modern-day Mauritania was called the Gum Coast; the region between Cape Mount and Cape Palmas in Liberia was the Malagueta, or the Pepper or Grain Coast; and the lands stretching east from there to the lagoon of Assini were labelled the Ivory Coast. East of it began the Gold Coast, which ended at the mouth of the Volta River. Finally, the Slave Coast comprised the littorals of what are now eastern Ghana, Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria between the Volta and the lagoon of Lagos.

For the Friedrich Wilhelm, the first port of call in Africa was Arguin, a small island off the coast of modern-day Mauritania. The fortress on this island had a long history in Euro-African relations: the Portuguese had established a factory there in the 1440s, seeking to divert some of the lucrative trans-Saharan trade in gold, ivory, and slaves to the Atlantic coast. In 1633 Arguin was conquered by the WIC, and in 1678 the French—who created their own factories further south—chased away the Dutch and partially destroyed the fortress. In 1685 the BAC established itself on Arguin with the explicit consent of the Emir of Trarza, who wished to reactivate the local fortress as a commercial interface between the western Sahara and the Atlantic Ocean.46

From 1685 to 1721, when the French conquered the fortress at Arguin, this small island was administered by commanders appointed by Brandenburg-Prussia. Significantly, none of these commanders was a subject of the Hohenzollern. With the exception of Christian Düring, a native of Hamburg who served as interim commander from 1700 to 1702, they were all Dutchmen. Most were members of a single family from the Dutch town of Vlissingen: Cornelis Reers, his nephew Lambrecht de Hond (a former WIC employee), and finally his son Jan de Reers. Fluent in Arabic, Jan de Reers grew up on Arguin and became a personal friend of the Emir Ali Chandora (ruled 1703–27). The role of the Reers/de Hond family, whose business on the Gum Coast predated the Brandenburg period and continued after the withdrawal of the BAAC, shows how vital experienced Dutch personnel were for the Atlantic ventures of Brandenburg-Prussia.

Slavery and other forms of unfree labor were long-established on the Gum Coast in the seventeenth century. In the very early years of Euro-African trade this region had indeed supplied slaves to Portuguese traders. But human captives were not the main interest of the BAC on this section of the coast (modern-day Mauritania and northern Senegal). Other products were far more important: foremost was gum arabic, the hardened resin of acacia trees. The demand for this product was linked to recent innovations in European textile production. At the end of the seventeenth century, European manufacturers succeeded in imitating dyeing techniques from Asia to produce a broader range of colors on printed cotton and linen fabrics. As a relatively cheap and effective thickening agent, gum arabic was a crucial component of these new techniques and thus in high demand on European markets. The region also exported other luxury commodities, such as ostrich feathers (which could be sold at exorbitant prices in Europe), ambergris (a secretion of sperm whales used in perfumery), and animal skins. Arguin also served as a supply station where Brandenburg vessels could replenish their provisions and fresh water before continuing their journey along the coast.

The Emirate of Trarza, which extended from Arguin in the north to the Senegal River in the south, contained a variety of languages and peoples. Oettinger noted this, however confusedly: in his description of Arguin the barber-surgeon distinguished between Tartern and Mohren. The term “Tartars” clearly refers to the Arab-Berber population, descendants of the nomadic Banu Hassan, who had established themselves in the region in the fourteenth century, and of Arabized Amazigh (i.e., Berbers). Unlike other European travelers, Oettinger does not refer to them as “Moors” but—by virtue of their Islamic faith—as “Tartars,” a term he uses as a synonym for “Muslim.” The ruling elite of the emirate belonged to this group and identified themselves as “whites” (bīḍān), distinguishing themselves from the “blacks” (sūdān) originating to the south. In Oettinger’s text he refers to the sub-Saharan Africans as Mohren. These “Black Moors”—both free and unfree—were themselves a heterogeneous group. Some were the descendants of people who had inhabited the region before the Amazigh; others represented different ethnolinguistic groups brought from farther south to serve as slaves in the emirate. These sub-Saharan Africans in the Emirate of Trarza had embraced Islam and adopted the region’s Arab-Berber culture. Oettinger noted this when he pointed out that these “Moors” were distinguished by their “great beards.”

After leaving Arguin the Friedrich Wilhelm headed to the estuary of the Sierra Leone River to take on wood and water. Then the BAAC ship stopped several times on the Malagueta Coast, where they bought elephant tusks and malagueta pepper, and moved on the Ivory Coast to purchase gold and more ivory. In December 1692 they arrived at Cape Three Points on the southwestern coast of modern-day Ghana. Until January 1693 they anchored at the Brandenburg fortress of Grossfriedrichsburg and, briefly, at the BAAC factory in Akwida.

Pokesu, the settlement where Grossfriedrichsburg is located (today called Princess Town), belonged to the small polity of Little Nkassa. Its inhabitants speak Nzema, a language of the Akan family, which is the predominant linguistic group of southeastern Côte d’Ivoire and south-central Ghana west to the Volta River. By contrast Akwida, which lies about seven miles east of Pokesu, was part of Ahanta country. Neither Little Nkassa nor Ahanta were monarchies; each was a confederation of individual settlements linked by flexible alliances.

Located on the western fringes of the Gold Coast, the Cape Three Points region was marginal to Euro-African trade. Further west, in Axim, the Portuguese had built the fortress of Santo António, which served as an emporium to trade for the gold of the Ankobra River valley. Between 1637 and 1638 the Dutch WIC conquered the Portuguese headquarters in Elmina and their fortress in Axim. The Dutch were successful in ousting the Portuguese from the Gold Coast, but they were unable to enforce their own monopoly. Starting in the second half of the seventeenth century, the coastal strip between the Ankobra River in the west and the Volta River in the east became the site of fierce intra-European competition. The Dutch, English, Danes, Brandenburgers, and (briefly) the Swedes established dozens of fortified trading posts, which made the Gold Coast the West African region with the densest European presence. In Little Nkassa and Ahanta these developments accelerated the emergence of new commercial hubs and intensified Euro-African trade. The Dutch considered the whole region subordinate to Axim, and as the new rulers of the former Portuguese fort, they claimed the exclusive right to trade in both Little Nkassa and Ahanta. But the local elites of the region clearly did not share this view. Unhappy with the concentration of WIC trade in the existing Dutch emporia, they considered the other European companies, including the BAC, as potential economic partners and military allies. The history of the Brandenburg trading posts exemplifies these dynamics. They resulted from the converging interests of the Akan elites of Little Nkassa and Ahanta with the Brandenburg newcomers. The local rulers wished to profit from the increasing maritime trade by circumventing the monopoly claims of the WIC in Axim and sought military support against the inland polity of Adom; the BAC needed a foothold on the Gold Coast—and in any case much of its capital and management came from Dutch citizens who wanted to bypass the WIC monopoly on trade with West Africa.

In the early 1690s, when Oettinger visited Grossfriedrichsburg, the Brandenburg emporium was thriving. In the Cape Three Points region Brandenburg ships could buy ivory, gold dust, and—to a more limited extent—slaves. At the same time, Grossfriedrichsburg functioned as a supply station: Brandenburg vessels such as the Friedrich Wilhelm called there to get fresh water and provisions before continuing their journey to the Bight of Benin, where the supply of human captives was much more abundant. But Grossfriedrichsburg never dealt exclusively with Brandenburg ships. Portuguese vessels trading between Brazil and West Africa as well as Dutch and English interlopers—that is, Dutch and English vessels who infringed the respective national monopolies of the WIC and the RAC—frequently anchored there to take aboard provisions.47 With the complicity of the BAC officers at the fort, these ships sold commodities to Akan traders and even to members of the BAC staff. During the War of the Grand Alliance, French attacks so drastically reduced the fleet of the Brandenburg company that the latter could not reliably supply its African emporia with merchandise. At this point, non-Brandenburg ships became the primary trade partners of Grossfriedrichsburg.

Although German historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have often defined Grossfriedrichsburg as a Brandenburg “colony,” this label is completely misleading. Relations between the BAC and the Akan of Little Nkassa and Ahanta cannot be described in terms of European conquest and settlement. The Brandenburgers and their African hosts cooperated closely. To do business the BAC needed the support of the local elites; when problems arose BAC officials had to act in favor of local interests. The conflict between the Brandenburg frigate and a Portuguese vessel trading off Grossfriedrichsburg described by Oettinger shows this quite clearly. The Portuguese captain apparently had used violence to seize gold from African traders and had even captured some of these men, intending to export them as slaves. This behavior, which utterly transgressed the customary norms of Euro-African trade on the Gold Coast, could not be permitted by the Brandenburgers if they wanted to remain the partners and allies of the Akan elites of the region. Thus, they did not hesitate to threaten the Portuguese ship with military force, compelling its captain to free the Africans and return their gold.48

After 1700 the power balance in the Cape Three Points region gradually shifted to the disadvantage of the company’s officers. The dwindling naval power of the BAAC made their position as commercial partners more and more precarious. On the Akan side, the economic changes fostered by decades of intense external trade reconfigured the region’s elites. The key event was the emergence around 1710 of the “merchant prince” Kɔne Kpole (Conny the Great, alias Jan or John Conny, and known in the Caribbean as John Canoe). Having grown rich by managing a canoe fleet and growing maize for the Brandenburg garrison and passing slave ships, Conny developed a system of alliances throughout the region and became the major intermediary between hinterland traders and interloper ships. In Conny’s network, Grossfriedrichsburg rose to be the favored commercial partner on the western Gold Coast for the inland kingdom of Asante, to whom the emporium of Grossfriedrichsburg/Pokesu sold great numbers of firearms for their ongoing wars of expansion. Conny grew so powerful that in 1710, when a conflict occurred between him and the BAAC director of Grossfriedrichsburg, he could force the removal of the director. In 1717, when the BAAC was dissolved and its African fortresses were sold to the WIC, Conny simply refused to hand over Grossfriedrichsburg to the Dutch, declaring that the King of Prussia could not sell what did not belong to him. Conny took command of Grossfriedrichsburg and, having defeated a military attack by the Dutch, controlled the fortress for seven years, proclaiming Pokesu a neutral port that was open to the ships of all nations. It was not until 1724, when the Dutch succeeded in turning Conny’s inland allies against him, that the WIC could oust him and take control of the former Brandenburg site.

After leaving Cape Three Points, the Friedrich Wilhelm continued its voyage along the West African coast. A few captives were already on board, but the bulk of the human cargo was still to be embarked. On Oettinger’s voyage (and presumably on many other Brandenburg slave-ship journeys) Grossfriedrichsburg chiefly functioned as a supply station. The main area of slave acquisition lay some 350 miles to the east, in the Gbe-speaking area, on what—precisely during these years—was coming to be known as the “Slave Coast.”49 The Kingdom of Hueda, where Oettinger spent three weeks on land and participated in negotiations that led to the purchase of about 700 slaves, is largely unknown to the general reader today. Indeed, Hueda was a very tiny political unit. It probably did not measure more than 30 to 45 miles east-west and 20 to 25 miles north-south. Moreover, it was quite ephemeral. It only emerged as an autonomous polity in the 1670s, when it succeeded in affirming its political independence from the neighboring Kingdom of Allada, of which it had long been a tributary vassal. Its independence did not last long. In 1727 it was conquered and annexed by the inland Kingdom of Dahomey, which had already defeated and incorporated Allada in 1724. Savi, the capital of Hueda, was sacked, and its large royal palace was destroyed. It never recovered from that conquest: today Savi is just a small village in the savannah. The tiny and short-lived polity, however, was a true global player. To be more precise: between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, it was the African player in the rapidly expanding transatlantic slave trade. Historians figure that 222,391 enslaved men, women, and children were embarked on the coast of Africa between 1671 and 1680; half a century later, from 1721 to 1730, embarked slaves numbered 548,392. This figure had more than doubled because about a third—or perhaps even more—of all the enslaved Africans shipped to the Americas from 1671 to 1730 were bought in the Bight of Benin (the region from the Volta River to the Niger Delta, encompassing the Slave Coast).50 In earlier and later decades slave exports from other regions (chiefly West Central Africa) were more important, but in these decades—which were marked by the expansion of the Caribbean plantation economy—the Bight of Benin was the continent’s primary export area. And in the Bight, Hueda provided an immense supply of slaves: from 1690 to 1713 this tiny polity was the single most important slave exporter of all sub-Saharan Africa, providing ten to fifteen thousand captives annually.

Hueda was known to the English as Whydah, to the French as Juda, to the Portuguese as Ajudá, and to the Dutch as Fida. In Oettinger’s times these toponyms clearly referred to the polity as a whole, not to the coastal settlement of Ouidah, whose original name was actually Glehue. Until 1727 (that is, prior to the Dahomean conquest) Ouidah/Glehue was only a small village. Commercial transactions were not negotiated there (as was the case after 1727) but further inland, at the royal court in Savi.

Euro-African relations in the Gbe kingdoms of the Slave Coast differed significantly from the relationships worked out with Akan polities further west. On the Gold Coast various European powers had obtained permission from local Akan rulers to build fortresses. (This arrangement began when the Portuguese had established the castle of São Jorge da Mina [Elmina] in 1482.) Once a national company had built a fortified trading post, it claimed the exclusive right to engage in maritime trade along a certain coastal strip and tried to prevent ships sailing under different flags from trading with “their” African partners. Such attempts to monopolizing trade never succeeded because the trade company officers themselves bypassed the rules they were meant to enforce, and sovereignty over the coastal territories remained in the hands of the Akan rulers—these were not European colonies under European authority. That said, on a local level the different European fortresses (Dutch, English, Danish, and Brandenburger) did have the power to intervene in intra-African conflicts, offering military support to their Akan allies.

In contrast, the ruling elites of the Slave Coast polities (Hueda, Allada, and Dahomey) always refused to sign exclusive bilateral treaties with individual European nations or trading companies. They kept their maritime trade open to all ships, including interlopers. No European nation was ever given permission to build a fortress on the coast, which could have served to control the movement of goods and captives between the beach and the slave ships. Some European lodges in Ouidah/Glehue (two-and-a-half miles from the beach) were allowed to be fortified, but these structures could hardly be compared with the fortresses on the Gold Coast. In 1703 the King of Hueda formalized this policy, requiring the representatives of the different European powers to sign a treaty by which they recognized the neutrality of Ouidah/Glehue and committed themselves to refrain from fighting their intra-European wars on the soil of and off the coast of Hueda. Moreover, until 1727 commercial transactions were negotiated at the court in Savi, some seven miles inland, under the direct supervision of the monarchy. After the Dahomean conquest the town of Ouidah/Glehue became the center of trade. Apart from that, the new rulers confirmed the previous system: Ouidah/Glehue remained an open and neutral port, where trade was conducted under the oversight of royal officers.

As a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade, Hueda was also an important channel through which foreign commodities entered West Africa. Oettinger’s account confirms archaeological research showing that the king’s palace in Savi was a place where “exotic” goods such as European and Asian textiles, tobacco from Brazil, and porcelain from China were prominently exhibited and consumed. Like its counterparts in Europe, the royal court in Savi was a material culture “laboratory” where foreign luxury items were integrated into the changing consumer culture of local elites.

After leaving Hueda with about 700 slaves, the hold of the Brandenburg frigate was full. To make sure as many slaves as possible arrived alive in the Caribbean to be sold, the captain had to begin the Middle Passage immediately. From the Bight of Benin, the fastest way to reach the Caribbean was not to sail directly west: the strong west-east current flowing along the coast was a major obstacle. Instead, slave ships followed the Guinea current down to modern-day Gabon and then turned westward to catch the South Equatorial current, which would help them to reach the New World. On the way the island of São Tomé offered a last opportunity to fetch provisions and fresh water. In many respects, São Tomé and the neighboring island of Principe were “like West Indian islands stranded on the opposite side of the Atlantic.”51 After their discovery by the Portuguese in the 1470s, the hitherto uninhabited islands were populated by European settlers (including hundreds of Jewish children who had been wrested from their parents) and African slaves. These islands became the home of a creole mestiço population. Oettinger notes that in contrast with mainland Africa, the “Moors” of São Tomé were “all dressed like the Portuguese.”52 The sixteenth-century inhabitants of São Tomé developed extensive trading networks connecting the Niger Delta, the Kingdom of Kongo, and what was to become the Portuguese colony of Angola. At the same time sugar production developed on the island, so that it became an early laboratory for the slave-based plantation system that would later be transplanted to Brazil and from there to the Caribbean. At the height of production in the 1570s, São Tomé was the largest sugar exporter in the Atlantic world. Thereafter, however, competition with the emerging plantation system in Brazil proved impossible, and the sugar sector declined.53 When the Friedrich Wilhelm anchored at São Tomé on 15 May 1693, the main business on the island was providing fresh water and selling maize, yams, and other provisions to the slave ships of all nations.

As Oettinger highlights (in polemically Protestant terms), São Tomé was a Catholic society. It was the see of one of the three dioceses south of the Sahara, the others being Ribeira Grande on the Cape Verdean archipelago and Luanda in Angola. As such, since 1677 São Tomé was subordinated to the archbishopric of Salvador de Bahia, whose seminar was responsible for the training of the priests serving on the small island. While the bishops were all sent from Portugal, whose king retained the “royal patronage” over the church in his overseas dominions, the rest of the clergy was largely recruited from among the mestiços and free blacks. By contrast, the Capuchins, whom Oettinger met, came from the Italian peninsula. At the time friars of the Capuchin order were active both in the Kingdom of Kongo and in the Portuguese colony of Angola. In 1685 Brother Francesco da Montaleone—who had previously served in Angola and would die in the Benin kingdom in 1695—had founded the small hospice of Santo António in the town of São Tomé with the idea of using the island as a basis for the evangelization of the Niger Delta. In any case, Oettinger’s claim that there were “many” Capuchins is completely misleading: in 1693 there were just two friars on the islands. This exaggeration stems from his desire to highlight the fear he allegedly felt when meeting the Capuchins—a narrative display to show his readers that despite his travels among spiritually dangerous “papists” (and “heathens”), he remained a steadfast Lutheran. Rhetoric aside, perhaps Oettinger did indeed feel some relief when the Friedrich Wilhelm left São Tomé on 23 May 1693 and set sail for the Caribbean.

The Caribbean

When Johann Peter Oettinger sailed into the Caribbean for the first time in September 1688, he entered a politically divided zone in the midst of an economic transformation driven by sugar and slavery. The region is defined by an arc of islands stretching south and east from Cuba to Trinidad and Tobago, and on the mainland extends from the Guianas (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) to Belize and the Yucatán Peninsula in Central America. From the time of Columbus on, the Spanish crown claimed authority over the entire region. Until the seventeenth century that claim was barely contested. But by 1688 the English, French, Dutch, and Danes had all seized and settled islands belonging to Spain. The Caribbean had become a multi-imperial patchwork: Barbados (1627), Antigua (1632), and Jamaica (1655) were the principal English islands; the French settled Martinique and Guadeloupe (1635), Saint Croix (1651), and Saint-Domingue (1664); the Dutch controlled Aruba and Curaçao (1634), as well as Essequibo, Demerara, Berbice, and Suriname on the mainland; the Danes at this point had settled only the island of St. Thomas (1672). The northern European powers could access and occupy the smaller Caribbean islands because the Spanish Empire was transfixed by the vast size and wealth of its mainland possessions.

The rapid rise of the plantation economy and the export of its main product, sugar, fueled both the takeoff of slave imports and intense interimperial conflicts. The violence ranged from smuggling, privateering, and piracy to Carib raids and full-scale naval assaults: in April 1689 Oettinger saw this firsthand when Dutch ships were attacked in the mouth of the Suriname River by a French squadron commanded by the governor of Saint-Domingue, Jean-Baptiste Du Casse, who was himself a former privateer. Warfare was nearly constant; some islands changed hands repeatedly, and two smaller islands, Saint-Christophe (today St. Kitts) and Saint-Martin were shared uneasily between the French and the English and the French and the Dutch, respectively. It was common for treaties among the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English to note that peace in Europe did not extend to the Caribbean and that acts of violence or aggression beyond the confines of Europe were neither acts of war nor causes of war, whereas if they had happened in Europe they would have been. In these colonial spaces, interimperial violence was the norm.

The rise of slave societies in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries transformed the region. As a whole, the Caribbean imported more African slaves than anywhere else in the New World.54 When the Dutch brought new processing methods from northeastern Brazil to the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century, the production of sugar promised great profits. But growing sugarcane and then processing it into molasses, sugar, or rum was far more capital- and labor-intensive than the cultivation of tobacco or cotton. As described above, this new crop created an immense demand for labor. Planters turned to enslaved African labor; slave traders offered a steady supply. The dual emergence of sugar and slavery would shape the Caribbean into a society very different from colonial Spanish America or British North America. Of the estimated 10.7 million people who reached the New World as slaves, about 5 million were brought to the Caribbean. (Indeed, the use of enslaved African labor in English North America can be seen—at least initially—as a byproduct of the rise of Caribbean sugar planting.) By the end of the seventeenth century, people of African descent were becoming the majority of the population in each Caribbean plantation society; a century later they would outnumber the European-descended population many times over.

Despite distinct political and social differences between their “mother countries” in Europe, slave societies in the Caribbean all developed along the same lines. The settler societies of the early seventeenth century, based on indentured labor, gave way to large plantations built with major investments of European capital, often with absentee owners, and a divided society of masters and slaves. Whether the planters were loyal subjects of the “Most Christian King” Louis XIV, liberty-loving Englishmen, or the tolerant Dutch, their plantations all relied upon slave labor, brutal discipline, the constant importation of new slaves to compensate for the staggering mortality of the workers, and the sale of sugar to European consumer markets. Even on a single island, plantation owners were nationally diverse but united by their mode of production. As Oettinger observed on St. Thomas: “On the island there are Danes, French, Dutch, Germans, and English, who all have their slaves to cultivate their fields, which they call plantations.”

In Caribbean plantation societies, the turn to sugar and slavery transformed more diversified farming into monocrop agriculture. Almost all the commodities and manufactured goods needed for everyday life and for agriculture had to be imported. Any locally grown food came from the garden plots or provision grounds of the enslaved population. But following the logic of mercantilism, goods could only be imported legally on the ships of the mother country. Such restrictions meant smuggling was everywhere and illegal trade across imperial lines flourished. When the French and the English struggled over St. Kitts or looked north about five miles to the Dutch island of St. Eustatius, they saw both imperial rivals and lucrative (or essential) trading partners.

Conditions in the Spanish Caribbean differed from the slave societies built by the English, French, and the Dutch. Neither in their mainland colonies nor in the Caribbean did they use massed African slave labor to produce export commodities on a large scale. But the Spanish Empire was still a huge market for African slaves, who tended to serve in cities as domestic, manual, or skilled laborers. In Cuba, for example, enslaved women ran the cookshops, taverns, and inns of Havana; male slaves worked in the building trades or in ship construction. These enslaved men and women maintained the Caribbean infrastructure of Spain’s vast empire.

The slave trading of the Dutch shows how the demand for slaves connected all parts of the Caribbean. As noted above, during the years of Oettinger’s Atlantic voyages, Dutch ships accounted for 22 percent of all slaves disembarked in the Caribbean, second only to the English (62 percent). But in this period the Dutch did not yet possess any large colonies based on plantation agriculture and slave labor—the development of large plantations on Dutch Suriname had just begun. Most slaves brought over on Dutch slave ships (and on Brandenburg ships as well) ultimately ended up in non-Dutch territories. The most important export market was Spanish America.

The demand for slaves in the Spanish Empire explains the first stop on Oettinger’s first Caribbean voyage: the Dutch island of Curaçao. Unlike other American colonies that (in accord with mercantilist policies) were only allowed to trade with the mother country, Curaçao had been proclaimed a free port and functioned as an international hub for the re-export of enslaved people to northern South America. However, not all slaves who were brought to Curaçao were suitable to be sold to Spanish colonists. Those who were judged unfit for the asiento trade—because of a physical handicap, health problems, or age—were labelled by the Dutch as macqueron or manqueron, a term that Oettinger renders as “Mairon” and “Magronen.”55 They were either kept to labor on Curaçao (where the word mankeron is still used today in Papiamentu, the island’s creole language, to indicate a physically handicapped person) or shipped away and sold for a reduced price to other buyers. Like physical commodities today, we can see the human commodities of the early modern Caribbean move through commodity chains, becoming more valuable the farther they travel as they go through processes of standardization, refinement, sorting, and selection.

As a consequence of these sorting and standardizing processes, after arriving at Curaçao the Juffrouw Alida was loaded with 415 manqueron slaves to be sold to the planters of Dutch Suriname. Due to the contrary force of the Caribbean current, the Juffrouw Alida and the other WIC ships could not follow the coast of South America and sail directly east from Curaçao to Suriname. Instead they made a loop to the north and stopped at St. Thomas before starting a long and arduous southeastward voyage to the Guianas. In all, the 1688 voyage from Curaçao to Paramaribo took 103 days; much longer than the Atlantic crossing from São Tomé to St. Thomas on Oettinger’s 1693 BAAC journey (forty-seven days), where ships could catch the South Equatorial current. Significantly, losses of human life were much higher during Oettinger’s intra-Caribbean WIC voyage (20 percent) than on his transatlantic BAAC journey (7.8 percent), which was below average for the late seventeenth century. Of those 415 slaves embarked in Curaçao, only 332 arrived alive in Paramaribo.56 The other 83 “died and were cast into the sea” during the voyage, as Oettinger reported in his emotionless prose. By contrast, on the São Tomé–St. Thomas voyage “only” 56 of 715 slaves died. On the WIC Caribbean voyage mortality may have been higher because some of the manqueron slaves were likely in bad health before being embarked, but the duration of the voyage was certainly the decisive factor. Oettinger’s journal reminds us that the often-overlooked intra-American slave shipments through the Caribbean could be as dreadful and deadly as the notorious Middle Passage.

It is fair to say that the world had never spawned anything quite like the slave societies of the early modern Caribbean. On all levels, from the environmental and material to the cultural and intellectual, American, European, and African elements combined, fused, or hybridized to create something new.

When Europeans like Oettinger set out for the Caribbean, what ideas did they have of it? Nothing seems to have prepared them for mass chattel slavery—travel accounts usually show amazement (but in Oettinger’s time, little criticism) and describe in some detail a way of life and death unknown in Europe. Everywhere in these slave societies a three-tiered pyramid was forming: whites at the top, free people of color in the middle, and black slaves at the bottom. European visitors, even those of limited means like Oettinger, found themselves at the top of this racial pyramid and easily absorbed Caribbean ideas about race, once they got over their initial surprise at this new social form. On the other hand, Europeans did seem to understand from afar how dangerous Caribbean life was. Awareness of the tropical mortality rate increasingly deterred poor Europeans from indenturing themselves to the Caribbean; English Royalists complained that banishment to Barbados by Cromwell was a death sentence; and Oettinger refused to remain on St. Thomas in the employ of the BAAC, noting that on the island “the air is unhealthy and very hot, summer and winter, with many thunderstorms.”57

The emergence of race as the basis for social organization had enormous consequences. The parallel, although not completely overlapping distinctions “black-white” and “slave-free” became more and more legally unbridgeable as the slavery-plantation-sugar complex took shape. As discussed above, slaves resisted and/or survived. And in cultural and economic terms, they challenged the fundamental ideological distinctions under which they lived. With each facet of life they engaged, enslaved people bridged the distinctions the between slave and free, black and white. An internal slave economy developed, based on craftwork and produce grown on provision grounds with the limited time the enslaved were permitted to work for themselves. In the eighteenth century the local markets frequented by slaves became significant social and economic institutions (by reducing the mercantilist reliance on imported goods). Buying, selling, and bartering, people who were property showed that they were also owners of property. The growing presence of free people of color also testified to a gap between ideal distinctions and the reality of sexual violence, liaisons between masters and slaves, and opportunities for manumission. Finally, the incessant mobility around Caribbean societies belied the stability of racial and social distinctions. Accounts of runaway slaves, impostors, and bankrupts fleeing creditors appear in letters to Europe and in the fledgling newspapers of the region. Young men like Oettinger passed through, left, and returned a few years later; older planters returned to Europe and became absentees; some owners traveled to the Caribbean only to check on plantation managers. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and war displaced whole populations. A 1692 earthquake sank the Jamaican city of Port-Royal, one of the busiest and wealthiest ports in the Caribbean, into the sea, killing thousands. In 1695, fearing an English attack during the War of the Grand Alliance, the French evacuated the entire colony of Saint-Croix to Saint-Domingue; Saint-Croix remained uninhabited for another thirty-eight years. And given slavery’s ghastly brutality and the general mortality rates of the early modern Caribbean, life itself was especially transient. Oettinger passed through, but everyone in the Caribbean was moving on.

A MANUSCRIPT JOURNAL AND ITS HISTORY

The Travel Account of a Seventeenth-Century Journeyman

The diary of journeyman barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger provides new information on the people and places forced into contact by Atlantic slavery. But how did the journal make its way from the late seventeenth century to the present? In 1885 the travels of the young barber-surgeon were presented for the first time to a wider audience. In this year Paul Oettinger, a great-great-grandson of Johann Peter, published Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge: Deutsche-Kolonialerfahrungen vor zweihundert Jahren (Under the flag of the Electorate of Brandenburg: German colonial experiences two hundred years ago). Serialized in several issues of Schorers Familienblatt, a popular periodical for middle-class families, the story was reprinted—at the author’s own expense—as a separate book a year later. Paul Oettinger assured the readers that the text was “drawn as literally as possible from an old diary,” suggesting that the material he was presenting was an edition of his ancestors’ journal.58

A century later the location of the original journal used by Paul Oettinger was unknown. The historian Adam Jones—the pioneer in historical studies about early modern German–West African entanglements—translated a lengthy excerpt of the 1885/1886 version into English and published it in his source collection on Brandenburg-Prussia’s activities in West Africa. Jones recognized that Paul Oettinger “must have made substantial alterations and even added some sentences.”59 In his critical annotations he tried to figure out which passages were distorted by such modifications.60 Without seeing the manuscript on which Paul Oettinger had based his text, however, it was impossible for anyone to assess how much he had manipulated the narrative of his ancestor.

Where was the manuscript Paul Oettinger claimed to have used in the 1880s? It resurfaced only in the early 1980s. The Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (GStAPK) in Dahlem, in West Berlin, has held Oettinger’s journal since 1982.61 In that year the surviving daughter of Paul Oettinger had donated it to the archives of the former Prussian state, together with a rich archive of other family papers. But no one connected the Oettinger family archive with the history of the Brandenburg African-American Company.

However, the Berlin manuscript, which is named Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf (Travel account and biography), is not the original from the author’s hand. The handwritten “first draft” cannot be located. The text kept at the GStA PK is a copy by Georg Anton Oettinger (and an unidentified second copyist) completed in 1779.62 A grandson of Johann Peter, Georg Anton was a pastry chef and shopkeeper. In 1778 or 1779 he left the Kocher valley to establish himself in Leipzig, the commercial center of the Electorate of Saxony, where he lived for the rest of his life. Before leaving he copied his grandfather’s journal. The original remained with his father, the pewterer Georg Michael Oettinger, who lived in the Franconian village of Dörzbach.63 The intention of Georg Anton—who as an old man wrote himself a kind of a personal chronicle about Leipzig during and after the Napoleonic occupation—was clearly to take a piece of his family’s history with him, in the very moment he was leaving his home region.64 The copy seems to be faithful, as the style is often very elliptic—as one would expect of annotations taken during a journey—and full of details that, in principle, could have appeared insignificant for somebody who was reading from a great distance in time. However, Georg Anton did not simply copy the journal. He also attached some additional material to it: a frontispiece, an introduction sketching the genealogy of the Oettinger family, and a copy of a document granting one of his ancestors a coat of arms in 1621. In 1789 his father, who visited him in Leipzig that year, added a pious note about the last days of Johann Peter, recalling that he had passed away “gently and in peace” after he had prayed and given thanks to the Lord.65

By doing so, Georg Anton and his father reframed the journal of Johann Peter as a piece of an intergenerational family memory. In the journal itself, in contrast, references to the barber-surgeon’s family are rather sporadic. The travel account and biography covers a well-defined segment of the author’s life: his youth, when he lived away from his family. Aside from the brief reference to his birth and apprenticeship, the story in the journal actually begins with a specific rite of passage: On 8 February 1682 the Magistrate’s Council and the Barbers’ Guild of Schwäbisch Hall declared his apprenticeship concluded. He was formally released from the authority of his master—who had actually left town months earlier—and began his travels as a journeyman. The story ends fifteen years later with another rite of passage: his marriage to Anna Barbara Böhm. His journal covers the years when he was no longer under the authority of his father or master but before he became a pater familias and a master barber-surgeon himself.

Evidently the autograph manuscript from which Georg Anton made his copy was not materially written during Johann Peter’s voyages. It was likely a fair copy that was written down after his return to Künzelsau. This fair copy must have been based on notes and jottings made by the barber-surgeon during his journeyman years. The journal contains a rich amount of detailed information—such as measures concerning the depth of anchoring places and precise dates of arrival and departure—that would have been impossible to keep in one’s memory over so many years without any written notes. The Berlin manuscript is thus a copy of a compilation of earlier notes and journals. That said, we can presume that the original notes were transferred in a quite faithful way to the autograph fair copy and then to Georg Anton’s copy. Numerous passages still bear the genuine spontaneity of sudden emotions: when Johann Peter wrote “Ha ha ha butcher’s soup” on 11 March 1693, he shared the joy he must have felt when two pigs were slaughtered and the monotony of the shipboard diet was broken.

Aboard the slave ships, barber-surgeons stood somewhere in rank between the officers and the sailors. As artisans, they did not occupy a position of authority. But their salary was higher than the pay of soldiers, seamen, and most other craftsmen.66 The shipboard surgeon was in fact crucial to the success of a slaving voyage. He was responsible for the health of the officers and crew, treating aliments and diseases, tending to the injured, administering medication—as well as shaving and cutting hair. These duties were common to all ship’s surgeons. Moreover, on a slaving voyage the surgeons were sent ashore to examine the enslaved men, women, and children on offer for signs of disease, deformity, or old age. They commonly oversaw the branding of the captives, and they were responsible for the survival of the enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage so that they could be sold profitably in the Americas. Often surgeons also had clerical duties on board, keeping a record of the deceased crew members and slaves. Barber-surgeons were more likely than other shipboard artisans such as coopers or carpenters (let alone the regular sailors) to be literate and familiar with writing. They were thus overrepresented among the authors of personal accounts and journals of slaving voyages. Significantly, two of the earliest German-language eye-witness accounts of sub-Saharan Africa were written by journeymen surgeons employed on Dutch ships: Andrea Josua Ulsheimer (writing between 1603 and 1604) from Ulm in the southwestern part of the Holy Roman Empire, and Samuel Brun (accounts from 1611–13 and 1617–20) from Basel, in the Swiss Confederation.67

When Oettinger describes his two maritime voyages, we read (as far as we have been able to ascertain) the genuine expression of his own prose. This distinguishes Oettinger’s journal from the only other existing travelogue concerning the Brandenburg African Company: Otto Friedrich von der Gröben’s Guineische Reisebeschreibung (Travel account of Guinea), which describes the author’s 1682–83 journey to the Gold Coast and then back to Europe. As Jones has pointed out, in von der Gröben’s account—which, unlike Oettinger’s text, was published in 1694 by the author himself—numerous passages describing coastal regions of West Africa are drawn from a Dutch travelogue published in 1623. In contrast, only once does Oettinger seem to have integrated material about Africa from a published text. While writing about the Kingdom of Hueda, he added a general description of the nature, agriculture, and religion of the Slave Coast in a passage running from manuscript page 78 (“They have many kinds of fruits”) to page 80 (“. . . so that he might spare them”). In this passage, however, he included some information that clearly referred to the Akan region of the Gold Coast.68 Various elements in this passage can be found couched in similar terms in a contemporary book on the Gold Coast by Wilhelm Johann Müller.69 Müller, a Lutheran pastor from Harburg, had served as a chaplain at the Danish fortress of Fredriksborg, near Cape Coast, from 1662 to 1669. After returning to Europe and settling down in Hamburg, in 1673 he published a book about the African Kingdom of Efutu, which was reprinted in 1675 and 1676.70 At some point Oettinger might have seen or heard about Müller’s book and may have taken some notes from it. However, the passage in question is not simply the result of a direct text-to-text transfer. Oettinger seems to have extracted some individual elements from Müller’s book and entwined them in his own story. All other African material in Oettinger’s journal appears entirely original and contains no text found in early modern published works.

When describing his travels in the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands, on the other hand, Oettinger made extensive use of an existing published work. The descriptions of the German and Dutch towns and cities he visited during his continental travels are almost completely copied (or paraphrased) from the Memorabilia Europae, a very popular travel guide by Eberhard Rudolph Roth, first published in Ulm in 1678 and then in seventeen further editions. As a comparison between the Berlin manuscript and the different editions of the Memorabilia Europae reveals, Johann Peter must have drawn from the sixth edition (Ulm 1688).71 By enhancing his narrative with published material, Johann Peter tried to show that his migration had also been a voyage of cultural enrichment, meeting the ideals of early modern travel advice literature (ars apodemica) and proving that he had seen what one ought to see. His copying highlights a widespread paradox in travel writing: rather than writing down what they had personally seen and experienced, travelers often relied on published texts that were perceived as authoritative sources—even as the authors of these guidebooks (including Roth) often had not actually visited the described sites themselves, instead copying from other guidebooks.72

Johann Peter Oettinger added to his journal some elements that were not based in his own experience. He also—like every author of an autobiographical text—omitted much of what he saw, felt, and did. The account of his European journeys is particularly limited in this regard. He does not write much about his life beyond the dates of his stay in a given city and the names of the masters (or widows of masters) for whom he worked. This information was vital to his progress from journeyman to master. He did not write much about other people he met, about his health, or his emotions; nor did he comment much about the actual practice of travelling and the rural landscapes he saw. In his introduction Georg Anton laments that his grandfather “had not made the effort to describe with more care and detail the events that occurred now and then on his journey. Certainly some things which perhaps did not appear important enough to him would have interested his descendants.” He recalls that his stepmother told him that when his grandfather was among family and friends, he “recalled many incidents from his travels and told of things, about which not a single word can be found in the travel account.” According to Georg Anton, his grandfather told fascinating tales of huge snakes, giant fish (whales?), and even a mermaid, who, having been caught and pulled on the deck by the crew, so terrified the mariners that they had to calm her by giving her a smoked ham, after which they threw her back into the sea.73

Rewriting History in the Wake of the Congo Conference

Any comparison between the Berlin manuscript and the 1885/1886 version will reveal how fundamentally Paul Oettinger rewrote the story of his ancestor. Far from limiting himself to updating the text’s language and punctuation or embroidering its style, the great-great-grandson of the barber-surgeon actually used the events of the latter’s travel journal to write a new fictional narrative. Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge is not simply an unfaithful edition: it is a fabricated text that is heavily influenced by late nineteenth-century colonial literature and the genre of historical novels. It cannot be used as a primary source from the seventeenth century.

To understand the manipulations and the reasons that inspired them, we need to place Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge in its nineteenth-century context. After the Oettinger family preserved and handed down Johann Peter Oettinger’s journal within the family for four generations, the barber-surgeon’s story was first published in 1885/86—and this is a very significant time for Germany and Oettinger’s descendants. During the nineteenth century Africa had increasingly become a focus of scholarly curiosity, entrepreneurial projects, literary creativity, popular imagination, and colonial fantasies in German-speaking Europe. However, it was not until 1884–85 that the recently united German nation-state established its colonial dominion over various territories in western, southwestern, and eastern Africa. The beginning of Germany’s overseas expansion accelerated interimperial competition in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, at the Congo Conference—held from November 1884 to February 1885 in the German capital (thus, also known as the Berlin Conference)—the representatives of several European powers, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire negotiated common rules for the colonization of the African continent. The German nation-state had acquired a colonial empire that was almost exclusively situated south of the Sahara. From that moment forward, the ongoing process of nation building neatly entwined with propaganda intended to celebrate Germany’s overseas expansion as its historical destiny. The newly united Germans (ruled from Berlin since 1871) were now taught to imagine themselves as a people of conquerors and colonizers.

In this context, the history of the Brandenburg African Company—which had been largely forgotten after the inglorious dissolution of the company in 1717 described above—was rediscovered and widely popularized. This company was integrated into a national narrative that sought to claim that contemporary German colonialism had deep roots. The fact that both the early modern chartered company and the territorial expansion of the German Empire had taken place under the aegis of the Hohenzollern dynasty made this imagined genealogy all the more influential. Grossfriedrichsburg, the Brandenburg trading base on the Gold Coast (where Oettinger had declined a position), became a site of national memory and was emphatically celebrated as the “first German colony in Africa.” An old cannon from this fortress was even brought back to Europe and exhibited in Berlin, in the Hall of Fame (Ruhmeshalle) inside the Arsenal, the current location of the German Historical Museum. In short, the activities of the Brandenburg Company (in the Atlantic slave trade) were used as bricks to build an invented tradition of German colonialism.

Military officers played an important role in this process: the first collection of primary sources on Brandenburg-Prussia’s presence in West Africa was published in 1885 by the general staff of the German Armed Forces, not by academic historians.74 Paul Oettinger himself was a military man.75 The son of an officer of the Prussian army, he was born in 1848 in the Saxon city of Torgau, where his father was serving as a fortification engineer. Like his brothers, Paul was educated for a military career. After spending his adolescence in the military academies in Potsdam and Berlin, he took part in the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), which resulted in the establishment of a unified German Empire. In 1880 he left the infantry and settled in Berlin, where he worked for an association of army officers (Deutscher Offiziersverein) and as editor in chief of the Deutsche Militärzeitung, a newspaper published for a military audience.

When Germany and its Hohenzollern ruler entered the “scramble for Africa,” military officers suddenly saw the Brandenburg African Company as the founding episode of German colonialism. Paul Oettinger decided to take up the pen: his own ancestor Johann Peter had, after all, left an account of his journey to Africa in the service of the Brandenburg African-American Company. By writing Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge, he contributed to this emerging narrative and linked the name of his family to an increasingly glorified chapter of German history. To achieve his goal, he thoroughly studied the text of the Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf, which he had inherited from his father. Numerous handwritten notes on the margins of the manuscript attest to his engagement with his ancestor’s text.76 In his appropriation of the barber-surgeon’s travelogue, Paul Oettinger was supported by Vice-Admiral Ludwig von Henk, who helped him understand the nautical details of the account. A member of the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), the most important colonial lobby of the country, and a future MP of the German Conservative Party (Deutschkonservative Partei), von Henk was—like Paul Oettinger—a fierce nationalist.

A comparison of the narrative of Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge with the actual manuscript of the journal reveals many, many omissions and additions. Johann Peter’s continental migrations through the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic as well as his first maritime voyage with the Dutch West India Company are merely summarized in a few lines. As these segments of the barber-surgeon’s biography had no direct relation to the “bold and enterprising policies of the Great Elector” of Brandenburg, Frederick William of Hohenzollern, Paul Oettinger did not see any point to including them in his own narrative.77 While the Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf covers fourteen years of travel, Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge focuses only on Johann Peter’s second Atlantic journey (1692–93). Moreover, Paul Oettinger left out a vast array of details that, in his eyes, were of little importance. For example, he removed many nautical remarks about winds, currents, and the depth of anchoring places.

At the same time, Paul Oettinger transformed the often terse and elliptic style of his ancestor into exuberant prose. He did not simply embellish what was mentioned in the manuscript journal: he also took the liberty to add lengthy and entirely invented passages to the barber-surgeon’s account. Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge is full of stereotypical descriptions of exotic landscapes, the “primitive Negroes,” and the harsh but manly life of adventurous seafarers. Paul Oettinger’s text met the expectations of a popular audience accustomed to the style and themes of historical novels and colonial literature. As a result, not a single page of Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge accurately reflects its purported source.

In many cases Paul Oettinger added to the journal details that (as Jones often noted) are clearly erroneous. Breadfruit trees were not known on the coasts of modern-day Benin before the nineteenth century, for example.78 Similarly, while palm oil was certainly produced there at the end of the seventeenth century—and is indeed mentioned in the Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf—the “great plantations of palm trees” described in Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge were more recent: they had developed during the nineteenth century, when palm oil replaced slaves as the region’s major export commodity.79

These manipulations are particularly evident with regard to the depiction of Africans. Paul Oettinger’s rhetoric of black inferiority is full of tropes taken directly from nineteenth-century racist, pseudo-ethnographic discourse. “The character of the natives” (as the fake “edition” by Paul Oettinger explains regarding the coastal region of modern-day Benin) “is thoroughly timorous, mistrustful, avaricious, cruel, thievish, vain and indolent.”80 In these stereotypes gender and race were closely connected. While African men were described as coarse and lazy, woman were represented as victims of their men (“As in the case of most uncivilized people, women are considered only as beasts of burden”) and sexually voracious (“I found the young Negresses not at all shy . . . and I was more than a little astounded by the coquettish arts of seduction used by these savages”).81 In such (completely invented) passages, Africa was depicted as a world where neither male authority over women nor the material and carnal desires of women were disciplined by the norms of civilization.

Slavery was a particularly sensitive issue. The Brandenburg frigate carrying Oettinger sailed to West Africa and the Caribbean to buy and sell slaves—that could not be denied. And in late seventeenth-century Europe the trade in human captives aroused very little moral or ethical debate. But two centuries later the situation had radically changed. Now European powers had forbidden the transatlantic slave trade. And in their scramble for Africa, the fight against the persistence of slavery among African people became a key argument to justify conquest and colonization. The chattel slavery Europeans had fostered in Africa became an African moral failing. Despite such claims, Paul Oettinger could not really solve the inherent historical contradiction of celebrating the slave-trading Brandenburg African Company in the age of postabolition imperialism. He must have felt that he needed to offer his readers some kind of moral perspective. To this end, in his narrative he portrayed his ancestor as a compassionate man, instinctively opposed to the cruelties of the slave trade. In one of the most strikingly spurious passages, Johann Peter exclaims, “What a chill of horror came over me, as I entered the places [on board the ship] in which the unlucky victims were kept, inhaling the horrid atmosphere in which they were forced to live, . . . and my heart convulsed when I was forced to watch as those who bore the shape of men were treated like animals.”82 Again, no such comments or sentiments exist in the manuscript of the journal.

The two versions of the barber-surgeon’s story followed separate paths. As soon as Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge was published, Paul Oettinger sent copies of his booklet to the emperor Wilhelm I, the chancellor Otto von Bismarck, as well to the imperial princes (including the future emperors Frederic III and Wilhelm II).83 The 1885/1886 version became one of the sources for the history and the myth of Brandenburg-Prussia’s deeds in West Africa and the Caribbean. In 1902 Wilhelm Jensen, a popular author of his time, transformed Johann Peter Oettinger into a literary character, including him in his historical novel Brandenburg’scher Pavillon hoch! Eine Geschichte aus Kurbrandenburgs Kolonialzeit (Hoist the Brandenburg flag! A story from Brandenburg’s colonial times). The barber-surgeon journeyman had become a completely fictionalized hero of Germany’s colonial epic.

The eighteenth-century manuscript by contrast remained in the family’s private possession for one more century. When Paul Oettinger died in 1934, his son Wilhelm—who like his father had been educated at a military academy—inherited it. Between 1935 and 1936 Wilhelm had it rebound. He pasted three small pictures into the document (two of Johann Peter Oettinger and one of the frigate Friedrich Wilhelm), and he added both a short biographical introduction on the barber-surgeon (at the beginning of the manuscript) and a list of some his children (at the end of the document).84 The manuscript was modified one last time, in order to preserve it for future generations and help them to locate the author in the context of the family’s history and German history.

In 1937 Wilhelm joined the NSDAP, the ruling Nazi Party.85 He died in 1941 in a military hospital in Włodzimierz Wołyński, in present-day Ukraine, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf then passed to his sisters, who kept it without adding any further annotations to it. Of their life after World War II nothing is known. The oldest, Margarethe, died without children in 1985 in West Berlin—three years after bequeathing all the family papers to the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Johann Peter Oettinger’s manuscript remained unnoticed in this Berlin archive until 2010/2011, when the editors of the present volume (working independently) discovered it and, after making contact with one another, decided to join forces to prepare this English-language edition.

NOTES

1. Oettinger recorded all dates according to the Julian calendar; see note in journal on p. 32.

2. JPOe Ms, 82.

3. On the picaresque story of Sander and his mistress, see StA Schwäbisch Hall, files 4/289 (1682), 14/1298 (1683), and 2/72 (1684).

4. In the neighboring Duchy of Württemberg, for example, in 1742–52 11 percent of the surgeons were sons of pastors; Sander, Handwerkschirurgen, 142.

5. In the northern hemisphere the 1690s were probably the coldest decade of the second millennium; see Grove, Little Ice Ages, 1:381.

6. Unless otherwise noted, all quantitative information about the slave trade is drawn from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 2019. www.slavevoyages.org.

7. The Cape colony was not directly connected to Atlantic trade, however, but served as a base on the routes connecting Europe to Asia, especially to the VOC colony of Batavia (Indonesia).

8. However, one can reasonably assume that many captives bought by the Friedrich Wilhelm in 1693 had been enslaved during the 1692 war between Hueda and Little Popo (see Oettinger’s journal, below, note on p. 41) and were thus inhabitants of the coastal region.

9. See Delavigne, “Governor’s Journal, St. Thomas” (1693), in “Documents for Comparison,” below.

10. See Kea, “Crossroads and Exchanges,” 263–65, 279; and Kea, “World of Marotta/Magdalena,” 115–37.

11. JPOe Ms, 64.

12. JPOe Ms, 21.

13. See Morgan, “Male Travelers, Female Bodies,” 167–92, on the history and transmission of these specific dehumanizing claims, which Oettinger assimilated during his travels.

14. This woman, like all non-Europeans, remains unnamed in the journal; Oettinger avoids providing any additional information about his relationship to her. JPOe Ms, 66, 82.

15. Ménétra, Journal of My Life.

16. Marland, “Mother and Child Were Saved.”

17. Faust, Künzelsauer Chronik, 32. It is not clear whether Faust refers to the East or West Indies.

18. StadtA Schwäbisch Hall, 4/289 (2 January 1682); StadtA Schwäbisch Hall, 14/1298 (10 March 1683).

19. Wunder, Bürger von Hall, 135.

20. See note in Oettinger’s translated journal on p. 3, below.

21. Dietz, Master Johann Dietz.

22. Accounts of German-speaking VOC employees are relatively abundant, but analogous travelogues by Germans working for the WIC trading to West Africa are much scarcer.

23. GStA PK, VI. Hauptarchiv, Familienarchiv Oettinger, 12, p. 116.

24. Oettinger worked for the BAAC for sixteen months: from the end of July 1692 to mid-November 1693, when the Friedrich Wilhelm was seized by the French. With a salary of about 32.5 gulden a month (see “Weights, Measures, and Currency” in “Notes on Usage,” below), he earned approximately 520 gulden for his service. His revenue from private trade amounted to more than 500 gulden (or 200 reichsthaler). Combined, this was an income of at least 64 gulden a month. By comparison, in Aurich Oettinger earned 2 gulden a month plus one third of the fees for blood-letting (JPOe Ms, 147). In Emden, in 1694, his monthly expenses amounted approximately to 10 gulden (JPOe Ms, 135), which he thought were exceedingly high.

25. This conflict saw Louis XIV of France opposed by a coalition that included the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, Spain, England, and Savoy.

26. JPOe Ms, 110.

27. JPOe Ms, 116.

28. Here, the Caribbean includes the following disembarkation regions in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: British Caribbean, Danish West Indies, Dutch Americas, French Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Spanish Circum-Caribbean.

29. From 1685 to 1687 the BAC also controlled a trading post in Takoradi but then lost this base to the Dutch WIC.

30. For more detailed information on these regions and the Brandenburg bases there, see pp. liv–lviii.

31. For more on Van Belle, see our translation from Labat’s Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l’Amerique, in “Documents for Comparison,” below.

32. BS, 181n2.

33. September 1685, GStA PK, I. HA, Repositur 65, Marine und Afrikanische Kompaniesachen, Nr. 40 (formerly Nr. 11), fol. 324v.

34. Schück, Brandenburg-Preussens Kolonial-Politik, 2:303.

35. Extract of a letter from Robert Morrison, agent to the transport commissioners in Holland (10/20 April 1693), in Hardy and Bateson, Calendar of State Papers, 95.

36. Extant records show that BAC/BAAC vessels embarked (at least) 22,795 enslaved persons on African shores; about 17 percent of them died during the Middle Passage. See https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/rumUvo5x for these specific data on all known BAC/BAAC slaving voyages.

37. The English were—by far—the leading slave traders of the Caribbean between 1690 and 1700, having disembarked no fewer than 108,882 enslaved Africans on 381 voyages.

38. Bosman, New and Accurate Description, 7.

39. Daaku, Trade and Politics, 159.

40. JPOe Ms, 73–88.

41. JPOe Ms, 122f.

42. Pufendorf, Die Verfassung des deutschen Reiches, 106–7.

43. One should note that Oettinger never mentions any of these rulers; nor does he ever reference the Prince-Elector of Brandenburg.

44. In 1701 Frederick III Hohenzollern, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, succeeded in elevating his status to King of Prussia. This was legally possible because the Duchy of Prussia held sovereign status outside the Holy Roman Empire. With the approval of the Habsburg emperor and other European sovereigns (granted in the course of forming alliances for the War of the Spanish Succession [1701–14] and the Great Northern War [1700–21]), he became King Frederick I of Prussia. From 1701 onward the Hohenzollern domains were referred to as the Kingdom of Prussia. Berlin, in Brandenburg, remained the administrative and cultural capital of the territory.

45. Pufendorf, Verfassung des deutschen Reiches, 106 (original: De statu imperii Germanici, ch. 6, §9).

46. As Oettinger reminds us, the eastern part of the Ivory Coast was also known as Quaqua Coast; see JPOe Ms, 57. The status of Arguin was discussed during the 1697 peace negotiations at Rijswijk; see Brauner, Kompanien, Könige und caboceers, 436–43.

47. On the gradual legalization of English “separate traders,” see the section “Chartered Companies,” above.

48. JPOe Ms, 62.

49. The Gbe-language area comprises the modern territories of southern Benin, southern Togo and southeastern Ghana.

50. As Finn Fuglestad has pointed out, slaves who were transported on vessels that had stopped at both the Gold Coast and in the Bight of Benin have often been listed in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database as having been embarked on the Gold Coast, although they were probably bought further east in the Bight of Benin. Hence, he suggests that the exports from the latter region may have actually been considerably larger. Fuglestad, Slave Traders, 91–98

51. Hodges and Newitt, São Tomé and Principe, 1.

52. JPOe Ms, 97.

53. By 1615 only thirteen of seventy-two sugar plantations were still active.

54. On the definition of “Caribbean” adopted here for statistical purposes, see note 28 on p. lxxx.

55. From Portuguese/Spanish magro (thin) and manco (lame), respectively.

56. These figures refer to the numbers mentioned on JPOe Ms, 21; the information given on JPOe Ms, 18 (“some 420”) is clearly approximate and less reliable.

57. JPOe Ms, 106.

58. UkF, 1.

59. BS, 180n1.

60. Despite the fact that Jones was working with the manipulated 1885/1886 text, many of his footnotes still prove very useful, and we have used them extensively to prepare our own apparatus.

61. This is GStA PK, VI. Hauptarchiv, Familienarchiv Oettinger, 12, abbreviated JPOe Ms.

62. Up to JPOe Ms, 126, the Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf is written in the hand of Georg Anton Oettinger; the last twenty pages are written by another hand.

63. As stated in the foreword by Georg Anton Oettinger (not included in the present edition).

64. GStA PK, VI. Hauptarchiv, Familienarchiv Oettinger, 13.

65. With the exception of the frontispiece, these additional elements are not included in the present edition.

66. Oettinger’s monthly salary with the BAAC was 13 reichsthaler, or about 32.5 gulden. This figure is comparable to the pay of the surgeon Pieter Vezaert, who in 1683 (after six years of service on the Gold Coast) received 25 gulden per month from the WIC, but it is much higher than the monthly salary of 16 gulden paid to Isaacq van der Wegen, who served as a surgeon on the Gold Coast in 1682–83. In the same period, WIC sailor Hendrik van Looven earned 11 gulden a month, soldier Jan van Wezemar 8 gulden, rope maker Matthijs van Roeijen 10 gulden, and cooper Simon Buijst 22 gulden. By contrast, the pastor Adriaen van Loo received 100 gulden per month in 1693. NA, Tweede West-Indische Compagnie, 1008, A-E. On additional income through private trade, see p. xxxvii.

67. Other surgeons who wrote travel accounts about West Africa in the eighteenth century include John Atkins, who visited Hueda two decades after Oettinger, as well as Paul Erdmann Isert, a subject of the King of Prussia who served at the Danish trade outpost Christiansborg in modern-day Ghana (1783–86 and 1788–89) and Thomas Winterbottom, an Englishman who worked in the newly founded Sierra Leone colony (1792–96). Unlike Ulsheimer, Brun, and Oettinger, both Isert and Winterbottom had received academic training and became known as advocates of abolition.

68. See JPOe Ms, 80.

69. Cf. Müller in GS, 176 (the Creator God “Jan Commae”); 239 (thin cows); 161 (the worship of snakes and lizards); as well as 158 and 171 (the idea that the “Devil” needs to be worshipped and that offerings are given to him in the fields).

70. Müller, Africanische; for an annotated English translation, see GS, 134–259. In 1677 Hans Jacob zur Eich—a locksmith from Zurich who had served at Frederiskborg from 1659 to 1669 and so knew Müller personally—also published a book on Efutu (Zur Eich, Africanische Reiszbeschreibung), at least three-quarters of which was plagiarized from Müller (GS, 260).

71. He may also have used the fifth edition (Ulm 1686), which we were unable to locate. When describing the town of Coburg, Oettinger mentions the castle of “Friedeburg.” No castle of this name ever existed there. This erroneous name is contained in the 1688 edition (and perhaps also in the 1686 edition) of the Memorabilia Europae, where Oettinger must have seen it, but not in later editions.

72. In the case of Roth it is quite certain that he had visited only a small number of the cities he described in his Memorabilia Europae.

73. Preface by Georg Anton Oettinger, in JPOe Ms, x–z (not included in the present edition).

74. Grosser Generalstab, Brandenburg-Preussen auf der Westküste.

75. His life is known in detail thanks to a three-volume manuscript autobiography: GStA PK, VI. Hauptarchiv, Familienarchiv Oettinger, 17–19, “Aus meinem Leben.”

76. These notes, which mainly concern place names, have not been included in the present edition.

77. UkF, 102.

78. BS, 180, n 1.

79. UkF, 56. The hills and valleys where these imagined plantations were located are equally invented: the coastal region of modern-day Benin is flat.

80. UkF, 58 (translated by BS, 193).

81. UkF, 45.

82. UkF, 63.

83. GStA PK, VI. Hauptarchiv, Familienarchiv Oettinger, 22, correspondence of Paul Oettinger.

84. These pictures and additional notes have not been included in the present edition.

85. BArch (B.-L.), Berlin Document Center, NSDAP-Zentralkartei, file card “Oettinger Wilhelm—geb. 27.7.1899.”