Black Cargoes

by Daniel P Mannix

 

Chapter 1

[They came] from Angola and the Congo; from Dahomey, Lagos, Old Calabar and the Bonny River; from the Central Niger and Hausaland; from Portuguese Guinea and the Gaboon.
— Sir Harry Johnston, The Negro in the New World

In the year of our Lord 1495, the Indians on the island of Hispaniola, or Haiti, rose against their Spanish oppressors. A great mob of them — the early historian Antonio de Herrera claims that it numbered a hundred thousand — marched on the little settlement of Isabella, where Christopher Columbus had arrived a few months before with three caravels after a prolonged voyage of discovery in the West Indies.

Columbus was a pious man, and Ferdinand and Isabella were conscientious monarchs who had instructed him to "honor much" the Indians and to "treat them well and lovingly", but they desperately needed gold. The Indians were unused to manual labor of any sort, especially fourteen hours a day of panning gold from the mountain streams. They seem to have been a gentle people who had gone about naked, subsisting on wild fruits, fish, and whatever small animals they could snare. They were so innocent that at one time Columbus thought he must have reached the Garden of Eden and tried to identify every river he found with the Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, or Euphrates, the four rivers of Paradise. But now the innocents had risen. If Spain was to have an empire, if Columbus was to continue his explorations, if the pagans were to be won to Christianity, their revolt had to be put down.

Columbus marched out against them, leading a force of two hundred infantry and twenty horsemen. With the Spaniards went twenty bloodhounds: big, savage animals bred to pull down wild boars and bears in the forests of Central Europe. Ten leagues from Isabella the Spaniards met the Indian hosts. The Indians had no more idea of battle than children. Some of the men wildly hurled stones; others ran at the soldiers and struck at them feebly with sticks or tried to push their reed lances through the Spanish armor. A volley from the arquebuses and crossbows poured into the crowd. The naked Indians lay groveling in piles. Then the hounds were slipped, and the mounted men dashed in with their leveled lances. What followed was simply a massacre. The riders killed until their horses could no longer be coaxed into a trot. Later the survivors were hunted down with the hounds and put to work in the mines. Many of them died within a few days, totally unable to stand captivity.

Seemingly only one man was moved by the wholesale destruction of this once happy people: the man was Bartolom• de Las Casas, later bishop of Chiapa in Mexico and known as the Apostle to the Indies. Las Casas had come to Haiti as a colonist and had there been ordained to the priesthood. After watching thousands of Indians dying in corrals, and scores of men and women burned alive in the hope that their fate would induce the others to work, while those still left in the hills were pursued by caballeros as if they were foxes, Las Casas returned to Spain, determined to save the survivors. In 1517 he stood before the throne of Charles V, who had succeeded Ferdinand and Isabella, and implored him to spare the last of the Indians. Las Casas realized that there must be labor to work the plantations and the mines, but he had an excellent solution. Already a considerable number of Negro slaves had been brought to Haiti; they seemed happy and were hard workers. As an act of mercy toward the Indians, Las Casas begged his majesty to import other Negroes, twelve for each colonist.

Others made the same plea to Charles V, though not always with the same humanitarian motives. The king was moved to pity, and there was also the highly practical consideration that the Indians were worthless as slaves and the Negroes extremely useful. Charles granted one of his favorite courtiers a patent which entitled him to ship four thousand Negroes to the West Indian colonies. This was the beginning of the famous Asiento, an import license which carried with it the privilege of controlling the slave traffic to the Spanish dominions in the New World. For more than two centuries the Asiento was to be a prize in European wars. Thousands of Dutchmen, Frenchmen, and Englishmen would die so that each of their nations in turn could possess that valuable piece of paper. The Spanish courtier, however, had no idea of the value of the king's patent. For 25,000 ducats he sold it to a syndicate of Genoese merchants, who obtained most of their supplies from the slave markets in Lisbon, although one cargo was brought from the Guinea Coast as early as 1518. The Atlantic slave trade was under way.

 

The Genoese merchants bought their slaves in Lisbon because it was the Portuguese who carried them from Africa. The Portuguese had explored the Guinea coast and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and their claim to exclusive rights in the whole African continent had been confirmed by two papal bulls issued in 1493. By that time they had already begun to build forts on the coast, as centers of national influence and also as depots in which slaves could be held for shipment. The first of the forts, Elmina on the Gold Coast, was started in 1481. The local monarch, King Kwame Ansa, had made no objection to the white men's trading with his people, but when the Portuguese asked permission to build a fort, he had politely begged them to desist, in the first recorded speech of a Gold Coast ruler.

"I am not insensible," he said, "to the high honor which your great master, the Chief of Portugal, has this day conferred upon me . . . but never until this day did I observe such a difference in the appearance of his subjects. They have hitherto been only meanly attired . . . and were never happy until they could complete their lading and return. Now I remark a strange difference. A great number of richly dressed men are eager to build houses and continue among us. Men of such eminence, conducted by a commander who from his own account seems to have descended from God . . . can never bring themselves to endure the hardships of this climate. . . . It is far preferable that both our nations should continue on the same footing they have hitherto done, allowing your ships to come and go as usual."

But the king remained open to persuasion. In consideration of a yearly rent he permitted the Portuguese to lease a rocky peninsula, and they set to work immediately. Their castle, as those early forts were called, took eighty years to finish. Unlike many of the others, Elmina was a true castle, with high towers and with walls thirty feet thick, protected on the landward side by two moats cut into solid rock. There were four hundred cannon, mounted to repulse attacks by land or sea. In the dungeons was room for a thousand slaves. John II of Portugal was so proud of the castle that, long before it was finished, he added Lord of Guinea to his other titles.

Beginning about the middle of the sixteenth century, Portuguese control of the African trade was challenged by other nations, notably by the French, the English, the Dutch, the Swedes (for a time), the Danes, and the Brandenburgers or Prussians, all of whom built forts of their own. The forts kept changing hands, either by purchase or else, more frequently, by force of arms. Thus Elmina was captured in 1637 by the Dutch, who retained it with some interruptions for more than two centuries. Cape Coast Castle, regarded as the second strongest fort on the Guinea coast, had a more violent history. It was started by the Swedes in 1652, captured by the Danes in 1657, captured by a local tribe in 1660, captured by the English in 1662, captured by the Dutch in 1663, and recaptured by the English in 1664. From that year it remained an English possession, notwithstanding a Dutch attack in 1665, a French attack in 1757, and various assaults by native tribes, until in 1957 it was peacefully transferred to the new government of Ghana.

In spite of wars between European states, the slave trade flourished from the beginning, and very soon it surpassed Charles V's original estimate of four thousand a year. Bishop de Las Casas proved to be right: Negroes could survive under conditions impossible for the Indians and would work hard under the overseer's lash. Antonio de Herrera wrote in 1601, "These negroes prospered so much in the colony that it was the opinion that unless a negro should happen to be hung he would never die, for as yet none have been known to perish from infirmity." Herrera also noted that the work of one Negro was more than equal to that of four Indians. As early as 1540 ten thousand Negroes a year were being imported to the West Indies. By the end of the century some nine hundred thousand slaves — by one estimate — had been shipped to the West Indies alone, not counting those sent to Mexico and South America. Bishop de Las Casas watched in agony the horror he had encouraged. He saw that the Indians, instead of being left in peace, had been virtually exterminated to make room for the newly arrived Negroes. Before his death in 1566, Las Casas became convinced that "it is as unjust to enslave Negroes as Indians and for the same reasons".

That the Negroes unquestionably made better slaves than the Indians — who either "died like fish in a bucket", as one indignant Spanish planter complained, or else were intractable, like the mainland Indians whom the English colonists tried to enslave — is a fact often quoted to prove that the Negroes are a naturally servile race. The Indians, so the argument runs, were too "noble" to bend their necks to the white man's yoke. But it was perfectly feasible to enslave white men, and indeed much of the labor in the North American colonies was performed by indentured servants — English, Scottish, and Irish — who were slaves for a term of years. It does not follow that they were culturally inferior to Haitian Indians.

The reason why members of most — not all — African tribes could be enslaved might lie precisely in their having attained a relatively advanced culture. "There is no case on record," says an English anthropologist quoted by Arnold Toynbee, "of what we may perhaps call truly primitive societies, that is pure food-gatherers, being successfully brought within the orbit of a civilization, whereas so-called primitive peoples who have passed through the agricultural revolution often so have been. Food-gatherers find the strain of such forcible integration into an alien society too great, and die out, like the West Indian islanders and most of the North American Indians; while African slaves are successfully — from the invaders' point of view — introduced to replace them." The anthropologist is wrong about the North American Indians; most of those in Mexico had passed through the agricultural revolution and were indeed reduced to serfdom by the Spanish invaders; while most of those in the United States were primarily hunters rather than food-gatherers like the Haitians. But hunting and fishing tribes are also difficult to enslave, because of the value they place on personal courage, and this seems to be true of Africa as well as America. The Krumen, for example, were primarily fishermen and they refused to be subjugated, although a few were sometimes procured as captains over the other slaves. On the east coast the Kikuyu, an agrarian tribe, could be enslaved, but not their neighbors, the Wacamba, who were a tribe of hunters. As for food-gathering tribes, some of those in the Gaboon, for example, died off in slavery almost as fast as the Haitian Indians.

Africans south of the Sahara are divided by ethnologists into five main groups, only two of which played an important part in the slave trade. The most convenient names for the groups are Bushmanoid, Pygmoid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid.

In the desert regions of southern Africa are the Bushmanoids, yellowbrown in color, with peppercorn hair (kinking so tightly that it leaves bare areas on the scalp). The true Bushmen are usually less than five feet tall, but the Hottentots, who are partly Bushmen by descent, stand nearly a head taller. Both peoples are frequently steatopygic, that is, possessed of huge buttocks which store up nourishment much as does a camel's hump. Although there is no record of Bushmanoid slaves being landed in North America, it would appear that some of them were sent to Brazil. An English clergyman named Walsh, who visited the country in 1828-1829, reported in his Notices of Brazil: "People of Mosambique include generally all those of South Africa. They are distinguished by their diminutive stature and feeble limbs, but still more by their color, inclining to brown and some even as light as mulattoes." He goes on to mention the "curious physical development" of a young girl, and this may be his clerical manner of describing her abnormally large buttocks.

In the Ituri forests of Central Africa are the Pygmoids, with an average height of four feet nine inches and an average weight of less than eighty-six pounds. They are brown-black in color and have high, bulging foreheads. There is the faint possibility that some of the slaves exported from Loango or the Gaboon were Pygmoids, but most slaving captains, if sober, would have rejected them.

On Madagascar are the Mongoloids, who reached the island from Asia many centuries ago, but who later mingled to some extent with a darker aboriginal people and with slaves imported from the mainland. The Malagasies, as natives of the island are called, resemble the Southeast Asians in stature and pigment; they speak a language classified with the Malayo- Polynesian group. There were shipments of slaves from Madagascar to the American colonies, but not enough, it would seem, to leave anything more than a small Mongoloid strain in the Negro population.

In a long strip extending from Senegal, at the westernmost extremity of the African continent, to Ethiopia and northern Kenya on the east are the Caucasoid — formerly called the Hamitic — peoples. They have deep black to light brown skins, curly but not woolly hair, and thin lips and noses, and they tend to be tall, long-legged, and slender. As a result of unceasing wars among Sudanese kingdoms, they contributed their share of the slaves exported by the French from Senegal and by the English from the Gambia River, but this Senegambian trade declined after the first quarter of the eighteenth century.

Finally, on the west coast from the Gambia to southern Angola and stretching across the continent to Kenya and Mozambique, are the Negroids. The inhabitants of this vast area are often divided into two groups, the true Negroes in the northwest and the Bantu in the south and east, but this distinction appears to be more linguistic than truly racial. Both groups — although with more variation from tribe to tribe among the Bantu — have dark skins, woolly hair, thick lips, and broad noses, and are usually described as being of average height, that is, the height of average Europeans. Since the great centers of the Atlantic trade were on the west coast from Senegal to Angola, the vast majority of slaves shipped to the New World were Negroids.

It would appear, moreover, that a smaller but still absolute majority consisted of the so-called true Negroes. This was especially true of the slaves brought to North America and the West Indies. The Portuguese, whose markets were in Brazil, recruited more of their labor from the Bantu tribes of the Congo, Angola, and Mozambique, all south of the equator. Usually their priests would baptize a whole shipload of Angolans before the vessel set sail. The English, like the French and the Dutch, obtained more of their slaves from the true Negro population of Upper Guinea. They also traded to Angola, but the bulk of their cargoes came from the great slaving ports of Elmina, Cape Coast Castle, Whydah, Lagos, Bonny, and Old Calabar, east or west of the Niger delta. The Niger and its many mouths, later known as the Oil Rivers, were highways for native slave traders, who carried much of their merchandise to market in canoes that were as long as fishing schooners.

Melville J. Herskovits, the famous student of West African cultures, believes that most of the New World slaves belonged to the coastal tribes, but this was a rule with many exceptions. In 1795 Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer, traveled for months with a coffle — that is, a string of bound slaves — most of whom had been purchased in the market of Segu, on the upper Niger, more than six hundred miles from the mouth of the Gambia. In the present century Herskovits himself, while traveling in northern Nigeria, talked with old Arabs in Kano who remembered taking coffles of slaves to the coast in the 1880s. Kano is five hundred miles from the coast, but the route followed by the Arab traders was three times as long. Cases have been reported of slaves captured in Mozambique and sold at the mouth of the Congo. Such incidents, however, cannot be regarded as typical. Most of the New World slaves came from tribes living within two hundred miles of the coast for the simple reason that they could be sold without a perilous long journey through the jungle. A disproportionate share of them belonged to the Twi-speaking, Yoruba-speaking, or Ewespeaking peoples living in what are now Ghana, Dahomey, and Nigeria. In his researches into African culture patterns transported to the New World, Herskovits found that many of the surviving patterns could be traced back to Dahomey, the kingdom that controlled the populous farmlands west of the Niger delta.

Before Europeans appeared on the coast, the Negroes of West Africa had created a number of brilliant empires, one succeeding another. The first to be recorded in history was Ghana, which, before the year 1000, ruled over most of the territory from the Sahara on the north and the Niger on the east to the Atlantic ocean. The king of Ghana could put two hundred thousand soldiers into the field. He maintained a system of highways with rest houses for travelers at regular intervals. His subjects had fine buildings, a code of laws, and an advanced knowledge of agriculture and medicine. The name Guinea, formerly applied to the whole west coast of Africa, is often said to be a modified form of Ghana, although there is argument over this derivation. The first African country to achieve its independence after having been a colonial possession was the new republic of Ghana, named after this ancient empire.

The earlier Ghana was weakened by drought in its northern territories, which were gradually taken over by the desert, and its capital city was sacked by the Moors in 1076. After a lapse of years the Ghanese empire was replaced by the Mandingo empire of Mali (or Melle), which has also given its name to one of the new African republics. It was in the days of Mali that the great city of Timbuktu became famous over the world for its wealth and its Mohammedan university with a faculty more advanced in knowledge than most European scholars of the fourteenth century. But Mali declined in turn, and during the fifteenth century it was replaced by the Songhai empire, which was still expanding when the Portuguese founded their first trading stations on the Guinea coast. The Songhai empire was overthrown by a Moorish army that crossed the Sahara and captured Timbuktu in 1591. The proud city was reduced by pillage and misgovernment to a huddle of mud houses around its once famous mosques.

The Portuguese learned little about the Songhai empire, which was in the interior. Of the coastal states with which they had dealings, the largest territorially was the kingdom of Kongo, at one time almost the size of California. After the king and his successors became Christians, their dominions shrank rapidly in size and wealth. A smaller but richer and more civilized kingdom than Kongo was Benin, in what is now Nigeria. The capital city, also called Benin, was six miles in circumference and was surrounded by a wall ten feet high. Shade trees lined the broad streets, and the houses were made of red clay polished to such a high degree that the first explorers thought they were made of red marble. One explorer reported that the palace of the king, called the Oba, "is as big as all Haarlem and it has square galleries, the pillars of which are covered with bronzes representing heroic deeds." Some of those bronze plaques, saved from the British destruction of the city in 1897, are still in existence, the treasured possessions of a few museums.

The first white man to reach Benin was a Portuguese, Ruy de Sequeira, in 1472. Before Sequeira was ushered into the king's presence, he and his party were taken to a caravanserai and carefully washed. He then prostrated himself before the Oba, whose arms, covered with golden ornaments, were each supported by a courtier. Sequeira received permission to trade for ivory, gold dust, and slaves. Later the Oba sent an ambassador to the king of Portugal and expressed some interest in Christianity; he even took a Portuguese, or half-Portuguese, wife from the island of Sao Tome to add to his harem of a thousand women, and he ordered one of his sons to become a Christian. The Oba himself could not be converted without losing his throne. He was a largely ceremonial monarch, regarded as a representative of God on earth, and Benin was actually ruled by a theocracy of priests; it was the holy city of the Bini nation. Its sanctity, or powerful juju, was maintained by the yearly sacrifice of hundreds of slaves and captives. Its subject peoples, who provided most of the victims, revolted one after the other, and great Benin declined into a squalid town. It has been rebuilt, however, and it is still ruled over by an Oba. In 1960 the ruling monarch complained because all of his fifty-two grandsons wanted to go to Eton or Harrow.

The period when Europeans first arrived on the Guinea coast was marked, in general, by the decline of great African kingdoms, by Moorish incursions from the north, by raids from the south by savage tribes like the Fang, who were then cannibals with filed teeth, and by almost continual warfare among the smaller states. That warfare was encouraged by the slavers, who provided both sides with muskets, powder, and lead on condition that they return from the war with slaves for sale at low prices. Nevertheless a vast majority of the west-coast nations were far from being naked savages living in primitive squalor. Several towns near the west coast were more populous, at the time, than any but the largest European cities. There were kingdoms and commonwealths comparable in size with many European nations, and even the smaller tribes had definite and often complex cultures. The West Africans had invented their own forms of architecture and their own methods of weaving. Many of them possessed flocks of donkeys and great herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. They were skilled workers in wood, brass, and iron, which last they had learned to smelt long before the white men came. Many of their communities had highly involved religions, well-organized economic systems, efficient agricultural practices, and admirable codes of law. We have only in recent years begun to appreciate West Africa's contribution to sculpture, folk literature, and music.

There were, however, notable gaps in the African cultures, and it was the gaps that impressed Europeans. The Negro peoples had never devised a written language that became widely known (although the Vai of Sierra Leone, a branch of the great Mandingo family, reduced their own speech to writing toward the end of the eighteenth century). They had never invented either the wheel or the plow, and in most technological matters even the more advanced African peoples were little removed from the early iron age. Thus, African craftsmen were able to fashion muskets after European models, but only a few of the northernmost Negro states had learned to make their own gunpowder, that hallmark of an advanced culture.

But the great advantage of the slavers lay in what President Nkrumah of Ghana has called "the Balkanization of Africa". One tribe could not understand another. There were 264 Sudanic languages (those spoken by the true Negroes), 182 Bantu languages, and 47 Hamitic languages. A single people, such as the Wolof of Senegal, might be divided into two or three hostile kingdoms; the Yoruba of Nigeria had ten separate states. Neither these little kingdoms nor the warring tribes around them would join together against a common enemy, and hence it was easy for the slavers to set one group against another. It was as though an invading force had arrived in Europe during the Dark Ages and had exploited the continent by pitting each feudal lord against his neighbors. The Africans remained independent, however, during the whole of the slaving era. What saved them from being conquered for nearly four hundred years after the white men appeared was partly their courage and skill in using European weapons, and partly the fact that slavers of various nations were as hostile to one another as were the African tribes.

But it was chiefly mosquitoes and malaria, dengue and yellow fever, that protected the vast continent from conquest and even exploration. One portion after another of the African coast — first Senegambia, then Sierra Leone, then the Bight of Benin — was called the white man's grave. The Portuguese, who tried at first to penetrate into the interior, became discouraged by their losses. To the slavers who followed them Africa was chiefly a coastline; or rather it was three parallel lines, one of boiling white surf, one of brown sand, and finally a green line of jungle beyond which few of them ventured and from which fewer still came back.

Of course certain facts, or supposed facts, were known about the interior. There was a huge river, the Niger, called the Nile of the West, which rose in the Mountains of the Moon and reached the sea no one knew where, although it was believed that the Senegal and the Gambia were two of its mouths. In Abyssinia lived Prester John, the Christian monarch of a powerful nation surrounded by pagan tribes. The king's banquets were lighted by trained elephants holding torches in their trunks, and his trappers caught unicorns with the aid of young virgins. Farther south wasthe kingdom of Monomotapa, a gold-encrusted land that was even richer than Eldorado. In Madagascar was a giant bird called the roc, which was capable of carrying off elephants (possibly the legend was based on the aepyornis, a gigantic ostrich that did not become extinct until the eighteenth century). In Central Africa was a nation of pygmies only six inches high who fought pitched battles against the cranes. Another tribe consisted of people with such huge lower lips that they used them as sunshades. There were cannibals everywhere, including the Niam-Niam — the name of a real tribe, incidentally — who were reputed to have tails, which they used to knock down their victims. Africa, in short, was a continent where any sort of beast or monster could flourish, but where white men died like fish on the sand.

 

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