Ejo Oja Eru Ni Europe

The Story of the (European) Slave Trade

The Slave trade, started by the Portuguese in the middle of the 15th Century closely followed by the Spaniards, and at a longer interval (1562) by the British, then in quick succession by the Dutch (about 1620), the French (about 1640), the Swedes, Danes and Prussians, attained the full extent of its terrible activities in the 18th Century.

The earliest beginnings of the traffic were marked rather by an admixture of religious bigotry and love of adventure than by sordid motives. The passion for geographical discovery which inspired the famous Henry the Navigator of Portugal, great grandson of our Edward III., was the originating cause of a hideous and protracted tragedy. The captains of two of Prince Henry's exploring caravels brought back with them to Lisbon in 1442 a dozen Africans, whom they had captured on the West Coast in the course of a wholly unprovoked attack upon an African village. Further exploits of a similar kind followed. The ancient Portuguese chronicles recording them resemble the literature of the Crusaders. The African was a heathen, and as such fair game for the prowess of the noble Christian Knights who opposed their steel breast-plates, tempered swords and cross-bows, to his bare chest and primitive spear. Here is a typical account of one of these predatory forays:

Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best he could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts; others stowed their children among the sea-weed, where our men found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice.... And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a payment for all their labour and expense; for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those that perished and were killed. And when the battle was over, all praised God for the great mercy He had shown them, in that He had willed to give them such a victory, and with so little damage to themselves. They were all very joyful, praising loudly the Lord God for that He had deigned to give such help to such a handful of His Christian people.

Thus did Europe first bring the "glad tidings" to the African. It did not take long to ascertain that the spiritual consolation derived from converting the African to Christianity had its utilitarian counterpart. He made an excellent labourer. Thenceforth every newly-returned caravel brought its quota of miserable captives, and a brisk traffic grew up, Lagos in Southern Portugal becoming the principal slave mart.

That was the first stage. The second began with the discovery of America by Columbus, and of gold in the Island of Haiti, which the Spaniards termed Hispaniola. The aboriginal Caribs and Aranaks proving either intractable or useless as labourers, the Spaniards contracted with the Portuguese for supplies of Africans. Thus, in the opening years of the 16th Century, the black man was transported across the Atlantic and flung into that "New World," where he was fated to suffer such unspeakable agonies and which he has fertilised to such purpose, and for ultimate ends still concealed from the vision of prophecy, with his blood and tears and sweat.

For some years the Spaniards continued to employ the Portuguese as intermediaries for their African slaves. But with the extension of their conquests in the West Indies and on the American mainland, the demand for additional human material to exploit the natural riches of the country, gold and silver, precious stones and spices, waxed incessantly. The Spanish Sovereigns thereupon inaugurated a. system of special contracts ("Assiento") which became of international significance, and under which they bestowed from time to time the monopoly of the supply of Africans for their American possessions upon foreign nations, corporations, or individuals, who in turn employed sub-contractors.

In 1562 the first British sub-contractor appeared on the scene in the person of John Hawkins, and with Queen Elizabeth as sleeping partner, embarked on his career of murder and brigandage in the good ship "Jesus," lent him by his Royal confederate. Ten years later Elizabeth knighted him as a reward for his persistent energies -- contemporaneously described as "going every day on shore to take the inhabitants with burning and spoiling their towns."

The century which followed saw the breakdown of Spain's attempted imperial monopoly of the Americas, and of Portugal's attempted imperial monopoly of the African Seas; nascent British and French Empires rising across the Atlantic; adventurous spirits of many nationalities hastening towards the New World, and British, French, Danes and Dutch disputing for mastery at countless points on the West African Coast. And throughout that period the trade in African flesh and blood grew steadily in volume. Towards the middle of the 17th Century the British became direct exporters, both from the West Coast through "The African Company," and from the Mediterranean Coast of Morocco through "The Company of Barbary Merchants," among whose directors were the Earls of Warwick and Leicester. The French, Dutch, and Danes were then exporting considerable numbers of slaves from the settlements they had founded on the West Coast to their respective possessions in the West Indies and on the mainland, to work the sugar and coffee plantations. The Swedish effort at slave trading was short-lived as was the Prussian. A curious, isolated attempt on the part of one of the German Baltic Barons also came to nothing.

One can only speculate as to the total number of unfortunate Africans torn from their homes between 1442 and 1700, or as to the number that perished in the course of transportation on the slave ships -- the "middle passage" of infamous memory -- when:

the slaves could not turn round, were wedged immovably, in fact, and chained to the deck by the neck and legs ... not infrequently would go mad before dying of suffocation ... in their frenzy some killed others in the hopes of procuring more room to breathe ... men strangled those next to them, and women drove nails into each others' brains.

These horrors were intensified a thousandfold when the trade became an international offence.

It is computed in American records that the British were responsible in the twenty years, 1680-1700, for importing 300,000 Africans into the West Indies and the mainland.

But with the dawn of the 18th Century the trade assumed gigantic proportions. It had been thrown open two years previously "to all British subjects," and a swarm of speculators competed to meet the ever-increasing demand from the American plantations, which were now yielding enormous quantities of tropical produce, thanks entirely to this African slave labour. The risks for those engaged in the actual operations were not inconsiderable: but the profits were correspondingly large. Thenceforth the slave trade "occupied the very foremost part in English policy," and became a predominant concern of our foreign policy. This was clearly shown in the Treaty of Utrecht which closed, in 1713, the needlessly prolonged war of the Spanish Succession in which England, Austria, and the United Netherlands opposed Louis XIV. and Philip V. The part of the Treaty which gave "unqualified and unanimous satisfaction at home" was the "Assiento" compact, whereby England secured from Philip, in accordance with the practice of the Spanish Sovereigns referred to above, an "absolute monopoly of the supply of slaves to the Spanish Colonies." The monopoly was conferred by the British Government upon the South Sea Company. The "immense amount of guilty wealth acquired through the 'Assiento' Treaty did much to compensate for the great pecuniary sacrifices of the war." The generation which concluded it came to regard the "extension of the slave trade as a capital object of English commercial policy," and it became the "main object" of national policy to "encourage the kidnaping of tens of thousands of negroes and their consignment to the most miserable slavery." In fact the Peace which brought a precarious and short-lived truce to Europe, brought war, war of the most atrocious and desolating character, and on a scale until then unimagined, to Africa, and "made of England the great slave trader of the world."

The tradition persisted all through the century. Chatham made the development of the trade a main object of his policy, and "boasted that his conquests in Africa had placed almost the whole slave trade in British hands." Even Pitt, after the war with France which broke French sea-power, annihilated the French slave trade, shattered the French Colonial Empire and made us its heirs, went back upon the position he had precedently assumed [under the influence of Wilberforce] in the teeth of the opposition of three of his colleagues supported by George III. The result was that "in consequence of the British conquests and under the shelter of the British flag, the slave trade became more active than ever," and that under Pitt the English slave trade "more than doubled."

A considerable number of statistics are available from various sources covering the activities of the trade during the 18th Century and the closing years of the 17th, which give some idea of the stupendous havoc wrought in Africa -- almost entirely Western Africa -- during that period. The following have been selected from the most reliable authors, but they are only approximately consecutive:

1666-1766. -- Number of slaves imported by the British alone into British, French, and Spanish American Colonies -- three millions (quarter of a million died on the voyage).

1680-1786. -- Slaves imported into the British American Colonies -- 2,130,000, Jamaica alone absorbing 610,000.

1716-1756. -- An average of 70,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 3,500,000.

1752-1762. -- Jamaica alone imported 71,115 slaves.

1759-1762. -- Guadeloupe alone imported 40,000 slaves.

1776-1800. -- An average of 74,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 1,850,000. (Annual average: by British 38 000 ; Portuguese, 10,000; Dutch, 4,000; French, 20,000; Danes, 2,000.)

Some notion can be formed of the profits of the trade by taking selected cases. From about 1730, Liverpool began for various reasons to eclipse both London and Bristol as the chief English centre of the trade. In the eleven years, 1783-1793, 921 Liverpool ships were employed in the convoying of slaves. They carried 303,737 slaves of the total value of £15,186,850. After deducting 15 per cent. under divers heads, the net return to Liverpool in those eleven years amounted to £12,294,116, or an average of £1,117,647 per annum. The net profit to those actually engaged in the trade was £2,361,455 6s. 1d., or an average of £214,677 15s. 1d. per annum.

There was, of course, a double profit upon the value of the slave when sold in the West Indies, and upon articles of British manufacture -- largely cotton goods -- disposed of in Africa for the slave's purchase: Manchester merchants largely profited from the latter. It is computed that from 1750 to 1800, one-fourth of the ships belonging to the port of Liverpool were employed in the slave trade: Liverpool monopolised five-eighths of the British slave trade, and three-sevenths of the total slave trade of the world.

These figures do not, of course, convey any true impression of the horrors and of the devastation involved in securing the slaves in Africa, or of the cruelties attending their treatment in the West India Islands and on the mainland of America. The trade had grown so large that mere kidnaping raids conducted by white men in the immediate neighbourhood of the coast-line were quite insufficient to meet its requirements. Regions inaccessible to the European had to be tapped by the organisation of civil wars. The whole of the immense region from the Senegal to the Congo, and even further south, became in the course of years convulsed by incessant internecine struggles. A vast tumult reigned from one extremity to the other of the most populous and fertile portions of the continent. Tribe was bribed to fight tribe, community to raid community. To every native chief, as to every one of his subjects, was held out the prospect of gain at the expense of his neighbour. Tribal feuds and individual hatreds were alike intensified, and while wide stretches of countryside were systematically ravaged by organised bands of raiders armed with muskets, "hunting down victims for the English trader whose blasting influence, like some malignant providence extended over mighty regions where the face of a white man was never seen," the trade put within the reach of the individual the means of satisfying a personal grudge and of ministering to a private vengeance.

The direct loss of life which this perennial warfare inevitably necessitated must have been enormous in itself, to say nothing of the indirect loss through the destruction of crops and granaries incidental to it, and the consequent starvation ensuing. The transport to the coast by land and water of an incessant stream of shackled captives, over distances extending to many hundreds of miles, must have been even more ruinous. It has been estimated that something like 30 per cent. of the captives perished before reaching the coast, where the exhausted and emaciated survivors were crowded like cattle in barracoons waiting for a slave ship, whose arrival meant for them the still more terrible agonies of the "middle passage."

Throughout the century did this imported hurricane make furious havoc in the forests, plains and valleys of Western Africa, flinging the human wreckage upon the distant shores of the "New" Continent. Arrogantly and savagely did England's rulers oppose the multiplying evidence of aversion exhibited by the North American colonists at the black flood which England poured upon their country, a policy persisted in until the eve of the War of Independence. "We cannot allow," declared Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in reply to one of these remonstrances, in 1775, "the Colonies to check or to discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation."

Lord Dartmouth was merely giving expression to what, since the Peace of Utrecht, had become the fixed national policy. He was supported by the spirit of the time. The monarchy, the aristocracy, the commercial world, and ecclesiasticism, alike, defended the slave trade and directly benefited therefrom.

Queen Anne saw no objection, it is said, to increase her dowry, like her celebrated predecessor, from its operations. A statute of King William of pious memory affirms that "the trade was highly beneficial to the kingdom"; another of George II. declares it to be "very advantageous to Great Britain," and "necessary to the plantations," while the "Society for propagating Christianity," including half the episcopal bench, derived, as masters, from the labour of their slaves in the West Indies, an income which they spent in "teaching the religion of peace and goodwill to men."

England continued to be "the great slave trader of the world," until a handful of her sons, humane and determined men, compelled her to gaze into the depths of the Hell the greed of her ruling and trading classes had done so much to create.

The treatment of the transported African varied considerably. There is a concensus of opinion that he fared best under the Portuguese, the Danes, the French and the Spaniards, and worse under the Dutch and the British. The abuses, the immoralities, the tortures practised upon the slaves, and the fierce outbreaks to which they occasionally gave rise, fill hundreds of volumes. They seemed to have reached the height of their intensity in Dutch Guiana and the British West Indies. "For a hundred years slaves in Barbadoes were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death."

It would be beyond the scope of this volume to deal with the long struggle waged by Clarkson, Sharp, Wilberforce, and others against the trade, the gradual awakening of the public conscience to its infamies, and the final triumph of the reformers. To Burke, more than to any man, is probably due the changed mental attitude of England towards the rights and the wrongs of coloured peoples, which ultimately enabled the efforts of Wilberforce and his colleagues to attain fruition. In Sir Charles Dilke's incessant labours for the same ends during the closing years of the 19th, and the opening years of the 20th Century, a later generation will perceive more vividly perhaps than does the present one, the persistence of a Parliamentary tradition which he helped to undo something of the evils of official England's African record, and caused her in recent years to give to the colonising Governments of Europe as good an example, on the whole, as the bad one she so long personified. But neither the vigour which Britain showed in the early part of last century in stamping out the slave trade which had conduced so largely to her prosperity in the previous one nor her condemnation of its revival in inverted form on the Congo, nor the comparatively better treatment she has meted out to her coloured subjects during the past half century would qualify her, in view of her terrible past performances, to exercise the functions of judge in relation to the offences of her contemporaries.

Nor are Britain's hands wholly clean to-day. The hands of every European Power which has had dealings with him is stained deep with the blood of the African. For any such Power to approach the African problem on the morrow of the Great War otherwise than with a consciousness of past sins, would be to proclaim itself hypocrite in the eyes of the world. What Britons may legitimately hope for from their rulers is that British policy, devoid of pharisaism, may be directed patiently, strenuously and unselfishly to the task of providing for the long persecuted black man and his descendants a future of hope, promise and assured security.

Citation: Morel, E. D. The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920; BoondocksNet Edition, 2001). http://www.boondocksnet.com/editions/morel

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Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
This material is copy from BoondockNet website [04.02.2005].