The Portuguese continued to dominate maritime trade with the west coast of Africa until the end of the sixteenth century. Only a few ‘interlopers’ from other European states ventured there. In 1530, William Hawkins, the first English privateer to land in west Africa, picked up a cargo of ivory from the Guinea coast. In 1540, John Landye, a captain in Hawkins’s service, made a second voyage there. In the 1550s, three English captains – Thomas Wyndham, John Lok and William Towerson – sailed to Guinea and Benin, bringing back highly profitable cargoes of gold, ivory and pepper. French privateers were similarly active on the Senegal River and the Gambia River. Neither English traders nor the French showed any interest in acquiring slaves. For neither England nor France, unlike Portugal and Spain, had a market in slaves.
The dynamics of European trade with west Africa, however, changed profoundly during the sixteenth century. Following Columbus’s voyage to the Caribbean in 1492, Spain established a colony on the island of Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and developed mines and sugar plantations there, initially using enslaved labourers from the indigenous population. When their numbers were depleted by overwork and European diseases, the Spanish began to import slave workers from Europe. The first cargo of African slaves to arrive in the Americas came from Spain on a Spanish ship in 1510. As demand for labour in the Caribbean grew, the Spanish turned to Africa directly as a source for more supplies. Royal authority was granted for the transport of 4,000 slaves from Guinea. The first cargo of slaves imported directly from Africa reached the Caribbean in 1518.
A similar pattern occurred in South America. Following the voyage made to the coast of Brazil by Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500, the Portuguese developed sugar plantations in coastal areas using indigenous labour. As the demand for labour in Brazil grew, the Portuguese began to import slaves directly from Africa. The first batches were sent there during the 1510s.
As the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves burgeoned, other European privateers competed for a share of the business. In the 1560s, John Hawkins, the son of William Hawkins, made three journeys to the African coast, sponsored by a group of London merchants, to purchase slaves. According to a brief account of his first voyage in 1562, Hawkins sailed to Sierra Leone on the Guinea coast ‘where he stayed some time and got into his possession, partly by the sword and partly by other means, to the number of three hundred Negroes, besides other merchandises . . .’
With this prey, he sailed over the Ocean sea to the island of Hispaniola [where he] made vent of the whole number of his Negroes; for which he received . . . by way of exchange such quantity of merchandise, that he did not only load his own three ships with hides, gingers, sugars, and some quantities of pearls, but he freighted also two other [vessels] with hides and like commodities . . .
According to the Portuguese, however, Hawkins acquired slaves by raiding their own slave ships. He seized one Portuguese ship on the Guinea coast carrying 200 slaves and five other ships in Sierra Leone with several hundred more.
Buoyed up by the profits he made, Hawkins set sail for Sierra Leone again in 1564 with four ships carrying provisions for the 500 slaves he expected to pick up. These included one and a half tons of beans and peas for their food and shirts and shoes with which they were to be outfitted for sale. ‘We stayed certain days,’ the account continues, ‘going every day on shore to take the inhabitants, with burning and spoiling their towns.’
He encountered some resistance, but nevertheless left Sierra Leone for the Caribbean with a cargo of about 400 slaves, returning home to England ‘with great profit to the venturers’.
On his third voyage in 1567, Hawkins was about to depart Sierra Leone with a cargo of 150 slaves when he was approached by two envoys from ‘the king of Sierra Leone’ and ‘the king of the Castros’ asking him to join forces in a war against two neighbouring kingdoms. His reward was to be able to take ‘as many Negroes as by these warres might be obtained’. Hawkins duly obliged, setting out with 200 Englishmen to storm a town of some 8,000 inhabitants. He subsequently left for the Caribbean with 470 captives.
Year by year, the Atlantic slave trade gathered momentum. In the second half of the fifteenth century, according to modern researchers, the traffic in slaves taken by sea merchants from the west coast of Africa amounted to about 80,000. In the first half of the sixteenth century, when other European merchants became involved and the trans-Atlantic trade began, the number rose to about 120,000. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves reached about 210,000 – an average of about 4,000 a year.
In the seventeenth century, new factors drove the trade. The Dutch emerged as a maritime power in the Atlantic and broke the Spanish monopoly on Caribbean trade and Portuguese dominance in west Africa and Brazil. They spread new plantation technology from Brazil to the Caribbean, supplying slaves from Africa at low prices to expanding sugar estates there. As Europe’s demands for sugar soared, more land and more labour was needed to fulfil it. Attracted by the scale of profits the Dutch were making, the British and French joined the fray. New plantations that the British established in Barbados and Jamaica and the French established in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue (Haiti) propelled the demand for slaves ever higher.
In west Africa, the Dutch drove the Portuguese from the Gold Coast, capturing the Portuguese forts at Elmina in 1637 and Axim in 1642. Other European traders – the English, Danes, Swedes and Brandenburgers – followed, building their own forts along the Gold Coast. The French established themselves in 1639 on an island at the mouth of the Senegal River, building a fort and a town there, naming it St Louis. They also extended their foothold in the region by capturing the island fortress of Gorée (opposite modern Dakar), a strategic location controlling much of the sea trade of Upper Guinea, established originally by the Portuguese, then bought by the Dutch. The Portuguese managed to retain control of the Cape Verde Islands and a trading post on the Cacheu River on the Guinea coast. But otherwise their presence on the west coast of Africa was reduced to slaving ports at Mpinda and Boma in the Congo estuary and a new entrepôt at Luanda in the Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo established in the late sixteenth century. For all European traders on the west coast, the aim was to gain as much profit as possible whether from trade in gold, ivory or slaves. But whereas previously gold had been the driving force behind their scramble, the focus now was on acquiring slaves.
Whatever kind of trade with Africa was involved, European governments sought to benefit by granting national monopolies to commercial companies venturing there. In 1618, England’s James I gave a charter of monopoly to thirty London merchants who had formed the Company of Adventurers of London Trading into Parts of Africa, namely ‘Gynny and Bynny’ (Guinea and Benin) with the purpose of ‘discovering the golden trade of the Moors of Barbary’. The Dutch monopoly on trade between Africa and the Caribbean was run by the Dutch West India Company which, by the 1640s, was transporting about 3,000 slaves a year to the Americas. The French government gave a slaving monopoly to the French West Indian Company until the demand for slaves became so strong that it opened the slave trade to any Frenchman who wanted to engage in it. ‘There is nothing that does more to help the growth of those colonies [in the Caribbean] . . . than the labour of Negroes,’ declared a royal proclamation. In 1660, the Royal Adventurers into Africa, a London company whose investors included King Charles II and three other members of the royal family, was given a monopoly of England’s African trade for 1,000 years. Some of the gold it brought back from the Gold Coast was turned by the Royal Mint into coins with an elephant on one side; they were popularly called ‘guineas’, a unit of currency equivalent to twenty-one shillings which remained valid until 1967. In 1665, the company estimated that half of its returns came from gold, a quarter from slaves, and a quarter from ivory, pepper, wood wax and hides. When the Royal Adventurers encountered financial difficulties, its place was taken in 1672 by the Royal African Company of England which was given a licence to trade in ‘gold, silver, Negroes, Slaves, goods, wares and manufactures’ for 1,000 years and a monopoly of all African trade until 1688. Its main base in Africa became the Gold Coast and its headquarters there at Cape Coast included a garrison of fifty English soldiers, thirty slaves and a resident commander responsible for all English actions in west Africa. By the end of the seventeenth century, as much as three-fifths of the income of the Royal African Company derived from the sale of slaves. As well as chartered companies, increasing numbers of privateers – ‘interlopers’ – competed for a share of the business.
The triangular trade between Europe, the west coast of Africa and the Americas brought a triple round of profits to European merchants. On the outward journey to Africa, they brought linen, cloth, metalware, beads, brandy, wine and firearms; they then picked up slaves which they sold in the Caribbean or Brazil, taking back to Europe cargoes of sugar, tobacco and rum.
Yet the trade depended on the collaboration of African rulers and middlemen, all of whom made their own profits from it. European traders were confined for the most part to fortified posts on the coast or on river estuaries – ‘factories’, as they were known – built to protect them from European rivals. Rarely did they venture more than a few miles inland. They possessed no military power to force Africans to engage in any type of trade in which their leaders did not wish to participate. The business of selling slaves remained largely under African control.
Early, first-hand European accounts of trading on the west coast of Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all stress the crucial role played by African rulers. ‘The trade in slaves,’ wrote one English slaver at the end of the seventeenth century, ‘is the business of kings, rich men, and prime merchants.’ In a letter published in 1705, Willem Bosman, chief factor of the Dutch West India Company at Elmina Castle, reported:
The first business of one of our Factors when he comes to Fida [Whydah or Ouidah on the Dahomey coast] is to satisfy the customs of the King and the great men, which amounts to about 100 pounds in Guinea value . . . After which we have free licence to trade, which is published throughout the whole land by the Cryer.
But yet before we can deal with any person, we are obliged to buy the King’s whole stock of slaves at a set price; which is commonly one third or one fourth higher than ordinary. After which we obtain free leave to deal with all his subjects of what rank soever.
African rulers commonly required gifts, taxes or other tribute to be agreed before granting permission for slaving. Protracted haggling took place. On a voyage to the Calabar River in the Niger Delta in 1699, James Barbot recorded:
We went ashore . . . to compliment the king, and make him overtures of trade, but he gave us to understand he expected one bar of iron for each slave more than Edwards had paid for his; and also objected much against our basons, tankards, yellow beads, and some other merchandise, as of little or no demand there at the time.
The next day, the haggling resumed, the king and his entourage insisting on thirteen bars of iron for a male and ten for a female. After several more days of ‘conferences’, the two sides reached a deal: thirteen bars for males and nine bars and two brass rings for females. The occasion was celebrated at a convivial reception on board Barbot’s ship, at which the king and his nobles were plied ‘with drams of brandy and bowls of punch till night’, and the king was presented with a hat, a firelock and nine strings of beads. Barbot’s haul from the deal was 648 slaves.
The supply of slaves was at times random. ‘The Gold Coast, in times of war between the inland nations, and those nearer the seas, will furnish great numbers of slaves of all sexes and ages,’ wrote John Barbot, an agent of the French Royal African Company (and uncle of James Barbot). He recorded how, in 1681, ‘an English interloper at Commendo got three hundred good slaves, almost for nothing besides the trouble of receiving them at the beach in his boats, as the Commendo men brought them from the field of battle, having obtained a victory over a neighbouring nation, and taken a great number of prisoners.’ The following year, he wrote, ‘I could get but eight from one end of the coast to the other.’
Most slaves were war captives, but others were condemned criminals, kidnap victims, political prisoners or family members sold for debt or for food in time of famine. Enslavement became a common method for disposing of troublesome individuals of every kind. ‘Since the Slave-Trade has been us’d,’ wrote Francis Moore who traded in slaves on the Gambia River in the 1730s, ‘all Punishments are chang’d into Slavery; there being an Advantage on such Condemnations, they strain for Crimes very hard, in order to get the Benefit of selling the Criminal. Not only murder, Theft and Adultery, are punish’d by selling the Criminal for a Slave, but every trifling Crime is punish’d in the same manner.’
Kidnapping was also prevalent in some areas of west Africa. Olaudah Equiano, the son of an Igbo farmer, described in his autobiography how children in his village had been taught, when their parents had gone to work in the fields, to be constantly vigilant about the threat from kidnappers: ‘ . . . they sometimes took these opportunities of our parents’ absence to attack and carry off as many as they could seize.’ At the age of eleven, Equiano was kidnapped, along with his sister. He was first sold to an African chief, but escaped and returned home; he was then captured again and resold several times before ending up in the hands of English slavers.
Once brought to the coast, slaves were held in specially built ‘booths’ or prison pens to await inspection by European agents. The demand for males outnumbered that for females by two to one. Women were deemed unsuited for the heavy labour required to plant and harvest sugar cane and fetched a lower price. ‘In slaving our ships,’ the Royal African Company told its agents, ‘always observe that the negroes be well-liking and healthy from the age of 15 years not exceeding 40; and at least two 3rds. men slaves.’ Those selected for purchase were branded with the mark of their European owners.
Bargains were struck in a variety of currencies, as well as trade goods. The main currency along the Guinea coast was the ‘bar’, a bar of iron about nine feet long, with notches subdividing it into smaller units. On the Gold Coast, it was the ‘trade ounce’, a measure of gold dust, or the ‘manila’, a horseshoe-shaped bracelet of brass or copper. On many parts of the west coast, cowrie shells were used as a standard of value, both for large transactions and small ones. Payments were also based on multiple exchange rates. In 1676, for example, the Royal African Company bought a cargo of exactly one hundred men, women and children, paying for them with various lengths of cloth, five muskets, twenty-one iron bars, seventy-two knives, half a barrel of powder and other miscellaneous items.
Duly paid for and branded, slaves were held in barracoons awaiting shipment across the infamous Middle Passage of the Atlantic. The fear and distress of the slaves were all the greater as tales abounded that Europeans were sea creatures, cannibals from the land of the dead; their black shoe-leather was said to be made of African skins; their red wine was African blood; their cheese was made from African brains; and their gunpowder was burnt and ground African bones. Taken on board, they were chained together in pairs and placed in tightly packed ranks. The space allocated to each slave was minimal. In 1713, the Royal African Company stipulated that it should be ‘five foot in length, eleven inches in breadth, and twenty-three inches in height’. The moment of departure was especially terrifying. ‘The slaves all night in a turmoil,’ a sailor’s diary recorded. ‘They felt the ship’s movement. A worse howling I never did hear . . .’
Olaudah Equiano’s account of the crossing provides a vivid description of the conditions they faced:
The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo was confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced constant perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died . . . This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now became insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable.
The numbers of slaves exported from the west coast rose inexorably during the seventeenth century. In the first half, the total amounted to about 670,000, an annual average of just under 14,000. In the second half, it reached about 1.2 million, an annual average of 24,000. In the last fifty years of the seventeenth century, more slaves were sold to Europeans on the Atlantic coast than in the previous 200 years combined. In the eighteenth century, the numbers soared ever higher: the annual average was 65,000, rising to more than 80,000 in the 1780s, amounting to a total of 6.5 million.
The slaving port dispatching the highest number of slaves across the Atlantic was Luanda. Founded in 1576, just north of the estuary of the Kwanza River, it was used by the Portuguese as a base for colonial expansion, precipitating a century of wars that kept the slave trade at full tilt. Soon after their arrival, the Portuguese advanced inland along the Kwanza Valley intending to conquer Ndongo territory where silver mines were said to abound. They found no silver, but the slave trade presented even better prospects. ‘Here one finds all the slaves which one might want,’ wrote a Jesuit priest in 1576, ‘and they cost practically nothing.’ In 1592, Portugal sent out a governor-general to Luanda with instructions to set up a colonial government there, naming their coastal enclave Angola after the ruler of Ndongo, the Ngola, whose kingdom they had invaded.
The slaving networks established by the Portuguese and the growing community of Afro-Portuguese pombeiros reached far inland, drawing in supplies from Mbundu states such as Kasanje and Matamba and from territories beyond the Kwango River such as Kazembe and Lunda. Imbangala warlords roamed over large areas, acting in effect as mercenaries for the Portuguese. Local wars were often started with the aim of obtaining prisoners for sale. A new Portuguese enclave was established at Benguela, south of Luanda, populated by renegades from the Kongo, exiles and convicts from Portugal and criminals from Brazil who set up their own slaving networks in the highlands beyond the coastal zone.
The main destination for slave ships leaving the ports of Angola and Kongo was Brazil. More than half the number of slaves exported by the Portuguese from west-central Africa went to Brazil, a journey lasting from five to eight weeks; the rest were taken to the Caribbean and the plantation states of North America. The casualty rate during the various stages of enslavement was high. One modern estimate is that for every hundred Africans enslaved for export from Angola in the last decades of the eighteenth century, ten may have died through capture, twenty-two on the way to the coast, ten in coastal towns, six at sea, and three in the Americas before starting work, leaving less than half to work as slaves. In all, during the three and a half centuries that the trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted, some 2.8 million slaves were dispatched from Luanda and 764,000 from Benguela, about a quarter of the entire total.
A stretch of coast along the Bight of Benin produced the second highest number of slaves. The supply of slaves was so prolific in the seventeenth century that European traders there named it the Slave Coast. Encouraged by local rulers, keen to trade, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English ships made regular calls at the lagoon ports of Popo, Ouidah [Whydah], Offra, Jakin, Porto Novo, Badagry and Lagos. Rising from 2,000 slaves in the mid-seventeenth century, export numbers from the Slave Coast reached 12,000 a year by 1700.
The lead was taken by the lagoon port of Ouidah, part of the kingdom of Hueda, whose ruler made frequent raids inland to satisfy European demand. ‘The King is an absolute Boar,’ wrote John Atkins, a naval surgeon, about Ouidah in 1721, ‘making sometimes fair agreements with his country neighbours . . . but if he cannot obtain a sufficient number of slaves that way, he marches an army, and depopulates. He, and the King of Ardra [Allada], adjoining, commit great depredations inland.’
In the 1720s, Ouidah and several other ports along the Slave Coast were taken over by the inland kingdom of Dahomey, an Aja state adjacent to the Yoruba Oyo empire. At their capital at Abomey, seventy miles inland from Ouidah, the kings of Dahomey were soon heavily involved in the slave trade on their own account. The annual income of King Tegbesu, a ruthless monarch who executed rival merchants to enforce a royal monopoly on the slave trade, was estimated to be £250,000. Dahomey’s kings also made regular sacrifices of war captives at gruesome ceremonies known as the Annual Customs which European visitors were invited to attend. The Dahomey kingdom, in turn, was invaded by Oyo armies in the eighteenth century. Business along the Slave Coast, however, continued to thrive. In the eighteenth century as a whole, some 1.2 million slaves were dispatched from the Bight of Benin, most of them through the port of Ouidah.
Eastwards from the Bight of Benin, the Niger Delta, a maze of rivers, creeks and mangrove swamps running for a hundred miles along the coast, became another major source of slaves during the seventeenth century. Adapting to the demands of the slave trade, fishing communities in the Delta and the Cross River estuary acted as middlemen, setting up entrepôts on the coast – Bonny, Brass, Calabar – and organising supplies of slaves from far inland. African merchants travelled into the interior in large river boats, manned by crews of up to fifty paddlers, stopping at riverside markets to pick up cargoes. Their network covered much of Igbo and Ibibio territory and stretched as far as the Benue River Valley. European traders extended credit for their trips upriver and waited on the coast for their return. Describing journeys he made there in the 1760s, William James recorded:
The Black Traders of Bonny and Calabar . . . come down once a Fortnight with Slaves; Thursday or Friday is generally their Trading Day. Twenty or Thirty Canoes, sometimes more and sometimes less, come down at a Time. In each Canoe may be Twenty or Thirty Slaves. The Arms of some of them are tied behind their Backs with Twigs, Canes, Grass Rope, or other Ligaments of the Country; and if they happen to be stronger than common, they are pinioned above the Knee also. In this Situation they are thrown into the Bottom of the Canoe, where they lie in great Pain, and often almost covered with Water. On their landing, they are taken to the Traders Houses, where they are oiled, fed and made up for Sale . . . No sickly Slave is ever purchased . . . When the Bargain is made they are brought away . . . They appear to be very dejected when brought on board. The Men are put into Irons, in which Situation they remain during the whole of the Middle Passage, unless when they are sick.
During the eighteenth century, some 904,000 slaves were exported from trading ports on the Niger Delta and Cross River.
A fourth region which started to deliver huge numbers of slaves for sale in the eighteenth century was the Gold Coast. Hitherto, the Gold Coast had been a market for slave imports. Between 1480 and 1550, Portuguese ships transported more than 30,000 slaves there, mainly from São Tomé and from the ‘slave rivers’ of the Bight of Benin. The slaves were put to work in the Akan goldfields or as agricultural labourers or sold on to northern slave markets. The Gold Coast’s trade in slaves as well as gold and ivory drew in a plethora of European merchants. By the eighteenth century, the coastline was dotted with twenty-five major stone forts, separated from one another by an average of ten miles, plus an assortment of other factories and outstations – in all about a hundred trading posts.
But inland during the seventeenth century, a series of wars erupted between rival Akan states vying for supremacy, producing a tidal wave of slaves for sale. A director of the Dutch West India Company reported in 1705 that the Gold Coast was ‘changing completely into a slave coast, and the natives no longer concentrate on the search for gold, but make war on each other to acquire slaves’. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, European traders bought 80,000 slaves. The trade in slaves soon outpaced the trade in gold and ivory. Adding to the mix was a soaring demand from rival Akan warlords for European firearms. ‘We sell them incredible quantities,’ wrote Willem Bosman, the chief factor at Elmina Castle.
The dominant power that emerged in the Gold Coast was the new kingdom of Asante. Its founder was Osei Tutu, the first ‘Asantehene’, who drew together neighbouring Akan groups in an act of union, symbolised by a single wooden stool partly covered in gold. The Golden Stool became a state cult. With the help of Dutch and English firearms, the Asante kingdom, based on the inland capital of Kumasi, expanded into an empire, adding one conquered territory after another to its collection. The volume of slaves grew ever larger. Asante’s rulers needed to sell slaves to finance the purchase of European firearms with which to maintain control of their empire. Thus the Gold Coast became renowned as much for its exports of slaves as for its exports of gold. In the eighteenth century, more than a million slaves were dispatched from the forts of European traders to the Americas.
With soaring demand, the price for slaves climbed ever higher, spreading the trade far and wide. Between 1680 and the 1840s, the real price of slaves rose steadily by about fivefold. For inland rulers, eager to get their hands on European merchandise, especially guns and gunpowder, slave raiding became an essential activity. Thus the coastal trade reached ever deeper into the interior, blighting communities hitherto untouched.