Encyclopedia of the Middle Passage - Free Download as PDF (2023)

Middle Passage Encyclopedia

Edited by Toyin Falola Amanda Warnock

Greenwood-Presse

MIDDLE PASSAGE ENCYCLOPEDIA

African slave trade routes. Courtesy of Savance Publishing Services.

MIDDLE PASSAGE ENCYCLOPEDIA Edited by Toyin Falola and Amanda Warnock

Greenwood Milestones in African American History

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Middle Passage Encyclopedia: Greenwood Milestones in African-American History / Edited by Toyin Falola and Amanda Warnock. p. cm. Including references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-313-33480-1 (Alk. Paper) 1. Slave Trade - Africa - History - Encyclopedias. 2. Slave Trade - United States - History - Encyclopedias. 3. Slave Trade - Atlantic - History - Encyclopedias. 4. African Americans - History - Encyclopedias. I. Falola, Toyin. II. Warnock, Amanda. HT1322.E63 2007 306.30 6209603—dc22 2007016156 British Library Cataloging in Publication Data is available. Copyright 2007 by Toyin Falola and Amanda Warnock All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the express written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress catalog card number: 2007016156 ISBN-13: 978-0-313-33480-1 ISBN-10: 0-313-33480-3 First published 2007 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book conforms to the Permanent Paper Standard published by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10

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Eric Williams and Joseph Inikori for their contributions to the study of the Atlantic slave trade

CONTENTS List of entries

ix

Guide to related topics

xi

introduction

xv

Middle Passage Chronology Encyclopedia

xxi 1

Selected Bibliography

411

Index

417

About the editors and contributors

423

LIST OF ENTRIES Abolitionism Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil Abolition of the Slave Trade, France Abolition of the Slave Trade, Great Britain Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States Accidents and explosions Accra Adanggaman (2000) African fear of cannibalism African institution African rulers and the slave trade African Squadrons, The Africanus, Leo (ca. 1490–ca. 1530) AfricaTown, Alabama Allada Amistad (1997) Amistad, The Angola Annobon Archeology Aro Arochukwu Arrivals Asante Asiato Atkins, John ( 1685–1757) Baquaqua, Mahommah Gardo (1824/31 –?)

Barbot, John (Jean) (1655–1712) Barracoons Benezet, Anthony (1713–1784) Benin Benito Cereno (1855) Bissagos Black Sailors Bonny Bordeaux Bozal Branding Brathwaite, Kamau (1930–) Brazil Bristol British Caribbean British Navy British Slave Trade Brookes , The Buenos Aires Calabar Cape Coast Castle Cape Verde Captains Cargos Carpenters Cartagena Chains Charleston Children Christianity Claver, Saint Peter (1580–1654) Clotilda, The

Coffle Congo River Cowries Credit and Finance Team Cuba Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah (ca. 1757–1803) Curac¸ao Dahomey Daily Routine Dancing and Sport Danish Slave Trade Decentralized Societies Destinations Sickness Doctors and Surgeons Calm Door of No Return Drowning Duration of Voyages Dutch Slave Trade Elmina Enslavement and Procurement Entrepoˆts Equiano, Olaudah (1745–1797) Eric Williams Thesis (1944) Escapes and Runaways (Maroonage) Ethnicity Europe, Enslaved Africans in Falconbridge, Alexander (?–1792) Families and Family Separations

x LIST OF INPUTS

Fernando Po Firearms and Gunpowder Folklore Food Fort Saint Louis Fredensborg, Free Trade French Caribbean French Slave Trade Galley Slaves River Gambia Garcia II of Congo (r. 1641–1661) Sex and Slave Exports Gold Coast Island of Gor ee Guerrero, The Haitian Revolution, The Handbooks for Slave Traders Havana Henrietta Marie, The Hispaniola Historical Memory Historiography Hold Humanitarianism Igbo Illegal Slave Trade, Brazil Illegal Slave Trade, Spanish Caribbean Indentured Servants Indian Ocean Insurance Interlopers Internal Slave Trade, Brazil Internal Slave Trade, United States Islam and Muslims Ivory Wreck , Jamaica Key West African Cemetery Kongo Kormantyn Lagos Languages ​​and Communications Leeward Islands Legitimate Trade Lewis, Cudjo (?–1935)

Liberia Lizenzierung Lebenserwartung Lissabon Liverpool Loango London Luanda Manqueron ''Middle Passage'' (1966) Middle Passage, The (2000) Minor European Nations Monopoly Mortality, Crew Mortality, Slave Mosambik Museen Music, Songs, and Singing Nancy, The Nantes Narratives by Sklavenhändler Nbena New England New Orleans Newton, John (1725–1807) Oral History Ouidah Ounce Trade Overcrowding Phillips, Thomas Plans and Diagrams Plantations Ports Portugiesischer Sklavenhandel Potosı Price Profits and Investors

Sa˜o Tom e “Spice” Seasons Senegal Seville Shipmate Shipwrecks Dockyards Sierra Leone Slave Coast Slavers (Slavers) Slave Tales and Slave Autobiography “Slavers throw the dead overboard and die – Typhon comes” (1840) Slavery in Africa Smuggling Spanish Caribbean Storms Sugar Suicide Offer and Demand Taxes Textile Torture Tourism Trade Commodity Trade Fortresses Transatlantic Slave Trade Database Trans-Saharan Slave Trade Triangular Trade Trudo, Agaja (r. 1708–1732) Ventilation and Suffocation Vili Violence Volume

Rape and Sexual Abuse Recaptured and Freed Africans Re-Exportation Regulations Religion Reparations Returnees to Africa Royal Africa Company Rum and Cachac¸a

Wars, Africa Washington, Madison (ca. 1815–?) Water and Dehydration Wheatley, Phillis (1753–1784) Wilberforce, William (1759–1833) Windward Coast Windward Islands Women

Saint Domingue "Saltwater Negro"

Zong, The Zulueta, Peter von

GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS Abolition Abolitionism Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil Abolition of the Slave Trade, France Abolition of the Slave Trade, Great Britain Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States African Institution African Squadrons, The British Navy Closure of the Slave Trade Haitian Revolution, Humanitarianism Legitimate Trade Regulations Art, Literature and Film Adanggaman (2000) Amistad (1997) Benito Cereno (1855) Middle Passage, The (2000) ''Middle Passage'' (1966) ' 'Slavers throw the dead overboard and die - Typhon is coming' (1840 ) Concepts of Asiato Christianity Decentralized Societies

Destinations Businesses Ethnicity Gender and Slave Exports Islam and Muslims Life Expectancy Monopoly Ounce Trade Plantations Ports Price Religion Reparations Slavery in Africa Triangle Trade Volume Wars, African Documentation and Remembrance of the Slave Trade Archeology Door of No Return Eric Williams Thesis (1944) Folklore Handbooks for Slave Traders Historical Memory Historiography Key West African Cemetery Museums Tales of Slavers Oral History

Plans and Charts Slave Narratives and Slave Autobiography Tourism Transatlantic Slave Trade Database Execution of the Slave Trade Arrivals British Slave Trade Cowrie Shells Credit and Finance Danish Slave Trade Dutch Slave Trade Enslavement and Retrieval Escape and Runaways (Maroonage) Free Trade French Slave Trade Illegal Slave Trade, Brazil Illegal Slave Trade, Spanish Caribbean Insurance Internal Slave Trade, Brazil Internal Slave Trade, United States Licensing Smaller European Nations Portuguese Slave Trade Profits and Investors Re-Export Royal Africa Company “Seasoning” Supply and Demand

xiii

GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS

Taxes Trans-Saharan slave trade Middle passage Experiences of accidents and explosions African fears of cannibalism Branding of chains Coffle Daily routine Dancing and sports Illnesses Drowning Duration of voyages Families and family separations Food intake Languages ​​and communication Mortality, crew mortality, slave music, songs and singing Overcrowding Seasons of Rape and Sexual Abuse Suicide Torture Ventilation and Asphyxiation Violence Water and Desiccation Nation, Empire and Ethnicity Aro Asante Bissagos Dahomey Igbo Vili

Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah (ca. 1757–1803) Equiano, Olaudah (1745–1797) Falconbridge, Alexander (?–1792) Garcia II of Congo (r. 1641–1661) Lewis, Cudjo (?–1935) Nbena Newton, John (1725–1807) Phillips, Thomas Trudo, Agaja (r. 1708–1732) Washington, Madison (ca. 1815–?) Wheatley, Phillis (1753–1784) Wilberforce, William (1759–1833) Zulueta, Pedro de People African Rulers and the Slave Trade Black Sailors Bozal Captains Carpenters Child Crew Doctors and Surgeons Galley Slaves Indentured Laborers Invaders Manqueron Recaptured and Freed Africans Returning to Africa "Saltwater Negroes" Shipmates Slave Traders Women

Notable Africanus, Leo (c. 1490–c. 1530) Atkins, John (1685–1757) Baquaqua, Mohammed Guard (1824/31–?) Barbot, John (Jean) (1655–1712) Benezet, Anthony (1713–1784). ). ) Brathwaite, Kamau (1930– ) Claver, St. Louis. Peter (1580–1654)

Orte Accra AfricaTown, Alabama Allada Angola Annobon Arochukwu Benin Bonny Bordeaux

Brazil Bristol British Caribbean Buenos Aires Calabar Cape Verde Cartagena Charleston Congo River Cuba Curacao Elmina Europe, enslaved Africans in Fernando Po French Caribbean River Gambia Gold Coast Island of Goree Havana Hispaniola Indian Ocean Jamaica Congo Kormantyn Lagos Leeward Islands Liberia Lisbon Liverpool Loango London Luanda Mozambique Nantes New England New Orleans Ouidah Potosı Saint Domingue Sa˜o Tom e Senegal Seville Sierra Leone Slave Coast Spanish Caribbean Windward Coast Windward Islands Ships and Shipping Amistad, The Brookes, The

GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS xiii

Captains Cargoes Clotilda, The Doldrums Firearms and Gunpowder Fredensborg, The Guerrero, The Henrietta Marie, The Ivory Wreck, The

Nancy, The Ports Rum and Cachac¸a shipmate shipwrecks shipyards smuggling storms sugar

Textile Trade Commodities Zong, the Structures Barracoons Cape Coast Castle Fort Saint Louis Trade Forts

INTRODUCTION From the 15th to the 19th centuries, the imperial powers of Europe transported between 9 and 15 million Africans to the Americas. Known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, this process was part of the larger process of European expansion during the same period. European imperialism and the slave labor that fueled it have left an indelible mark on Western and world history. The term Middle Passage formed part of what came to be known as the 'Triangle Trade', a term most commonly associated with the British. This trade pattern consisted of three voyages: one from Europe (or later America) to Africa in manufactured goods and alcohol, the second from Africa to America in slaves, and the third from America to Europe in bills and trade goods. The Middle Passage refers to the second part of the voyage undertaken by slaves, captains and crews, bringing slaves from the coast of Africa to the Americas. Throughout the history of the African slave trade, participants and observers published memoirs and exposés detailing the transatlantic crossing. However, the Middle Passage has only been a subject of interest to the general populace since the abolitionist campaigns of the late 18th century, which drew attention to the horrors associated with trade. Although interest in the Middle Passage waned with its abolition in the mid-19th century, scholars have produced a significant body of work on the subject over the last thirty years. Her contributions to this research area are reflected in this volume. Slavery in Africa The tradition of slavery had existed in Africa for centuries before contact with Europe, but the nature of the relationship between master and slave differed drastically from that which would later characterize American slavery. In Africa, slaves were not kept mainly for the production of export goods. A slave in Africa can work as a skilled artisan or marry into his or her master's family. Various forms of African slavery included clientele, pawnbroking, debt bondage, and apprenticeship.

xvi

INTRODUCTION

Slavery in Africa was indeed a diverse, diverse institution. Instead of speaking of the "African slave trade", we could well refer to the "trades" that transported African slaves from one place to another. The Indian Ocean trade in Southeast Africa and the Trans-Saharan trade, which existed before the era of transatlantic slavery, was responsible for the enslavement and removal of millions of slaves over the course of many centuries. This tradition of slavery helped shape the involvement of African states and leaders in the transatlantic slave trade. Wars, raids, kidnappings, and the collection of tributes led to the enslavement and sale of millions of men, women, and children. African leaders, in turn, saw their power increase as they gained access to imported goods, such as arms, that enabled them to wage war against neighboring states. Some scholars have referred to this phenomenon as the "gun-slave" cycle. Political upheaval, exacerbated by the introduction of firearms, bolstered trade as wars between African states led to the capture and export of increasing numbers of slaves. For many who were captured or sold into bondage, the long journey to America began in the interior of the African continent. Just as the slave trade did not end when captive Africans arrived on American shores, the slave trade began not with embarkation but with a forced march to shore. African merchants bought a group of slaves, chained them together in a coffle, and supervised their trek to a seaside holding cell or barracks. It is believed that millions perished in this way, as the journey, often hundreds of kilometers, proved too arduous, especially for children and the sick. Upon arrival, slaves were often baptized or branded and then stowed in the barracks to await transfer to ships bound for America. From 1441 to 1867, European powers (and later the United States) shipped approximately 12 million Africans to Europe and America. Determining the ethnic or regional origins of those transported presents considerable difficulty for scholars, as slaves exported from one of the main embarkation points may have originated deep inland. Therefore, even the best record-keeping efforts do not provide adequate information on ethnicity. However, we do know that Africans belonging to dozens of ethnic groups were transported to the Americas, and that the ethnic composition of the cargo varied according to African supply and American demand. Protracted military campaigns in West African states led to an increase in the supply of slaves for sale. This was the case in the 17th and 18th centuries when Oyo, Dahomey and Asante fought wars of expansion and generated large numbers of prisoners of war. Demand in America varied due to many factors. Although virtually all slaves in good health would find a buyer, planters often expressed preferences for certain ethnic groups based on their skills or the qualities they were said to possess. Plantation owners in South Carolina, for example, tried to procure field slaves from the Gold Coast because of their experience growing rice. They also sought out Igbos, who were considered particularly docile, for their service as domestic slaves.

INTRODUCTION xvii

With the increase in slave robbery and export, African societies experienced significant changes in modes of production and gender roles. As slavery spread, Africans began to rely more heavily on slave labor and particularly on women, as the majority of the captives exported were men. In parts of West Africa, particularly Yorubaland, the trans-Saharan trade, in which more women than men participated, contributed greatly to the increase in prices paid for female captives. High prices combined with American planters' preference for male slaves meant that fewer women than men were sent across the Atlantic. One consequence of this process was a shift in gender roles as women took on more responsibility for productive work. Despite the slave trade's impact on West Africa, historian John Thornton has argued that indigenous forms of slavery helped protect African societies from the extreme demographic effects and social dislocations associated with transatlantic trade.1 The institution of slavery became radical changed when it was transferred to America. Instead of the kinship ties that bound the master to the slave, slave owners in America held slaves as property. In European colonies and settlements, laws affirmed the rights of lords to buy, sell, and keep African slaves. Although most colonial powers would eventually issue policies, or in some cases regulations, for the treatment of slaves, masters continued to exercise control over virtually every aspect of their slaves' lives. The Transatlantic Slave Trade The first documented case of sub-Saharan Africans being shipped off as slaves by Europeans dates back to 1441, when Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal received ten African slaves as part of the cargo of a trading and exploratory voyage to West Africa. Over the following decades, merchants frequently brought slaves to Lisbon for onward export to other parts of Europe, particularly Portugal and Spain. By the late 15th century, scholars estimated that 35,000 Africans lived in Portugal alone. Because mainland Europe lacked a significant agricultural export economy, slaves in Europe worked in a variety of trades including fishing, public works, and agricultural cultivation for local markets, and worked as vendors and domestic servants. Although the transport of slaves to Europe was a significant episode in the history of the slave trade, the majority of Africans trafficked from the continent were destined for America. Slaves in America, as in Europe, would engage in a variety of productive activities, but the transatlantic slave trade arose out of a need for an inexpensive source of sugar plantation labor. By the mid-15th century, Spain and Portugal had started growing sugar in the Canary Islands, Madeira and Sa˜o Tome and Principe. After the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Spanish crown tried to develop the plantation economy in America as well. Spanish conquistadors initially relied on native labor to work in mining and agriculture on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. The decimation of the Taino and Ciboney in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the subsequent outlawing of the enslavement of the

xviii INTRODUCTION

However, indigenous peoples led to the direct importation of slaves from Africa after 1518. In the 16th century, when sugar production began in earnest, the Americas was the shared domain of Spain and Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas, ratified by the two kingdoms in 1494, divided the known world into eastern and western spheres – Spain controlled the west, based on Columbus' explorations of the Caribbean, and Portugal, based on late-15th-century African explorations. Century, controlled the West East. The treaty not only secured Portugal's African possessions, but also gave Portugal the easternmost portion of American territory, making the Portuguese one of America's most important colonizers. By mid-century, plantations established in Brazil far exceeded the production of their Spanish Caribbean counterparts. Like the Spaniards, the Portuguese did not initially employ Africans as the main labor force on the Brazilian plantations. It was only after their efforts to use local labor failed that they turned to Africa for slaves, and the forts, factories, and settlements along the West and Central African coasts provided ample supplies. Import patterns varied, but most slaves landed in Brazil are believed to have come from Angola and Guinea, with the former supplying the majority of slaves in the first 150 years of the trade and the latter rising in importance in the late 17th century. As the slave trade expanded, merchants began to specialize, often linking a Brazilian port to an African region. For example, Bahia imported more West Africans (referred to as "Sudanese") than Bantu. In contrast, Bantu slaves predominated in Pernambuco. The slave trade to Brazil, conducted over the course of more than three centuries, would result in the forced displacement of approximately 4,800,000 Africans. In fact, the Portuguese shipped just over 40 percent of the total number of slaves traded during the Transatlantic Slave Trade Era. The 17th century brought about a radical change in the dynamics of transatlantic trade. Britain's involvement in the slave trade dates back to 1562, when John Hawkins captured 300 Africans off the coast of Guinea and transported them to the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo. In the late 16th century, British privateers began to prey on Spanish shipping, and by the mid-17th century British maritime advances had usurped several of Spain's Caribbean colonies. Lacking experience in transatlantic trade, the Portuguese and Dutch initially shipped slaves to the British Sugar Islands. Britain only began trading slaves in any significant numbers with the formation of the Royal Africa Company (RAC, originally the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa) in 1660. Fueled by the RAC's monopoly privileges in the late 17th century saw the continued expansion of Britain's share of the slave trade. Merchants expanded their presence on the West African coast by establishing new trading forts or conquering existing Dutch and Portuguese settlements. When the Crown revoked the RAC's monopoly privileges in 1698, traders from Bristol and Liverpool, often interlopers with a background in the slave trade, eagerly began to take part. With the rapid expansion of sugar cultivation in the British Caribbean

INTRODUCTION xix

Especially on the islands of Jamaica and Barbados, imports of slaves increased during the 18th century. Over the course of about 150 years, the British slave trade led to the importation of 1.9 million slaves into Britain's Caribbean colonies and planted the seeds for the abolitionist movement that would intensify in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The eighteenth century also witnessed the steady growth of the sugar-producing colony of Saint Domingue (later Haiti) and the simultaneous rise in importance of the French slave trade. French ships had been involved in transatlantic trade since the 16th century, but it was not until the late 17th and 18th centuries, with the establishment of Caribbean colonies, that French slave traders established regular trade routes. The French slave trade followed a similar pattern to the triangular trade most commonly associated with the British. French ships sailed from Nantes or Bordeaux towards the African coast, usually trading in an area ranging from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south. From there they took slaves to the French Caribbean, where they loaded staples, mostly sugar, for shipment to France. After the loss of Saint Domingue in 1804 and the legal ban on the slave trade in 1815, the French slave trade declined, although merchants in Nantes and Bordeaux continued to regularly outfit slave ships until the late 1820s. During their long involvement in the slave trade, scholars estimated that French ships transported nearly 1.5 million slaves to America. The late 18th-century revolution in the French colony of Saint Domingue coincided with, and in many ways aided, Cuba's radical transformation from the backwoods of the Spanish Empire into a major sugar-producing colony. From 1762 to 1763, the British occupied Havana, opening the port to free trade and importing 10,000 slaves to work on Cuban plantations. Although this experiment ended with the departure of the British in 1789, Spain - hoping to boost sugar cultivation - declared the port of Havana free trade in slaves. Under the asiento, a system in which Spain made treaties with foreigners to ship slaves to the American colonies in the 16th-18th centuries, Spanish merchants had relied on the help of outsiders rather than investing time and money in the development of the investing in trade. Because the Spanish-Cuban merchants on the West African coast lacked a slave infrastructure and had little familiarity with the process of making a successful sea voyage, Britain, the United States, and Denmark dominated the Cuban slave trade from 1789 to 1803.2 After 1803, however, Cuban merchants began shipping regularly to equip for the coast of Guinea. Within a few years they would take over most of the slave trade to the island. Despite legal restrictions and the establishment of the Court of Mixed Commission in Havana, merchants continued to participate in transatlantic slave journeys long after traffic in other regions had died out. Between the late 18th century and 1867, between 600,000 and 1 million African slaves entered Cuba. Historians have long debated the reasons for the demise of the transatlantic slave trade in the early 19th century. Most people accept that now

xx

INTRODUCTION

a combination of factors led to the abolition, first of the slave trade and later of slavery in America. First, slave resistance during the Middle Passage and throughout the American colonies was a constant reminder of how far Africans were willing to go to secure their freedom. The constant threat of riots on board prompted repressive measures by the captains and crew during the transatlantic crossing. In the late eighteenth century, abolitionists publicized these and other crimes to persuade the British public to support a ban on the slave trade. However, it was the violent revolution that began in Saint Domingue in 1791 that seriously threatened the institution of slavery in America. The island-wide slave rebellion sparked similar rebellions in other colonies and spread terror among the white planter class in the Caribbean. Second, humanitarian goals shaped the debate about the slave trade and slavery. Although religious groups, particularly Quakers, had opposed the slave trade since at least the late 17th century, it is generally accepted that the growth of the British abolitionist movement stemmed from attempts by small groups of Britons in the late 18th century to publicize the horrors of the slave trade. Influenced by the new ideologies of individual rights, equality and justice, abolitionists circulated tracts and pamphlets exposing conditions aboard slave ships and denouncing the inhumanity of the trade. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave and influential abolitionist, published his personal account, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, to acquaint the public with his experience of enslavement and the middle passage. The movement grew in number and influence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But despite the efforts of religious leaders and politicians such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, the West Indian planter lobby prevented the passage of laws banning traffic until 1807. Finally, historians have debated the extent to which economics played a role in the abolition of the slave trade. In 1944, Eric Williams, author of the seminal book Capitalism and Slavery, argued that economics, rather than humanity, led to the abolition of the slave trade and American slavery. He suggested that slavery had lost profitability for West Indian planters after the US Revolutionary War. They therefore changed their positions so that they were no longer opposed to the abolition of the slave trade.3 Other historians claim that slavery did in fact become more profitable in the early 19th century as the disruption in sugar imports from Saint Domingue benefited British West Indies planters . Most recently, Joseph Inikori focused on the idea that abolition was based less on the profits from the slave trade and more on the role of the "slavery-induced" trade in supporting the Industrial Revolution. Both industrialists and planters helped shape debates about abolition, taking the position that the end of the slave trade would result in the loss of competitive advantage for British goods, leading to a rise in prices. Under intense pressure from the abolitionist movement in 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition Act, outlawing the slave trade by British subjects, and in 1808 the United States followed suit. Motivated by a

INTRODUCTION xxi

From 1807 to 1870, through a combination of humanitarian motives and economic self-interest, Britain invested considerable resources in trying to force other nations to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. To further the cause of abolition, the British often used economic and diplomatic pressure in their negotiations with other nations. In 1817, these measures resulted in a treaty to curb trade signed by the Spanish and Portuguese. Modified over the years but largely ignored, the Portuguese continued to transport slaves from their African colonies and outposts to Brazil well into the 1850s, while the Spanish continued to operate slave voyages to Cuba, the last of which was in 1867, with slave ships sailing from Africa or arrived in America met with mixed results. Naval patrols dispatched to the west coast of Africa from 1815 to 1870 captured slave ships and brought them before tribunals, condemned the ship, and freed and resettled the captives. In response to British attempts to enforce the ban on the slave trade, Portuguese and Spanish traders either shifted their activities to areas where the British did not maintain an active presence, or attempted to outwit the African squadrons. In the 1860s, a shift in public opinion coupled with increased enforcement of anti-slavery laws led to the cessation of the transatlantic slave trade. Concurrent with the decline of the slave trade in the 19th century, colonial powers and American nations began to abolish slavery on the continent. Many of the new Latin American states freed slaves as rewards for taking part in the independence struggles. In contrast, after the Revolutionary War from Britain, the United States chose to retain the institution of slavery, abolishing it only as a result of civil war. In other nations, the growing pressure of abolitionist movements led to emancipation. Due to intense lobbying by anti-slavery organizations in Britain, slavery was abolished in the British West Indies in 1833, although the training program established for ex-slaves continued until 1838. Other nations also tried to avoid the economic turmoil. With the end of slavery, emancipation programs gradually came into force. Both Cuba (1886) and Brazil (1888) abolished slavery after periods of gradual emancipation. In addition to converting former slaves into free labor, planters, always concerned about their labor supply, worked with national governments to encourage immigration of both white Europeans and indentured Chinese to work on American plantations. The Middle Passage Experience The Middle Passage experience varied widely, but for the most part it was characterized by cramped, unsanitary conditions, with little food and water, few opportunities for exercise, frequent sexual assaults, suicides, and the occasional rebellion on board. Slave ship captains thought more about maintaining safety and avoiding death than the comfort of the slaves, and thus subjected their captives to constant surveillance and discipline

xiii

INTRODUCTION

only the most rudimentary care is offered during the long, arduous transatlantic crossing. Of the millions of Africans who survived the Middle Passage, many did not survive to reach American shores. Disease, dehydration, abuse, and suicide were major contributors to what scientists believe to be high mortality rates aboard slave ships. Other factors such as overcrowding, length of voyage, time of year, catering, sanitation and medical care can also affect the success of a voyage. During the late 18th century laws aimed at improving conditions on slave ships and preventing excess mortality, such as B. Dolben's Act of 1788 to reduce overcrowding and provide adequate supplies and medical care. The eighteenth century also saw the development of the technological innovation of copper cladding, which reduced ship humidity and the duration of voyages, and possibly had the secondary effect of lowering the mortality rate on board. Merchants, captains, and crews generally preferred to provide the slaves with enough food, water, and exercise to reduce disease and mortality, thus protecting their economic investment in a slave voyage. Although the food given to slaves usually prevented starvation, the lack of variety, small portions, and overall poor quality of rations often left slaves hungry and unfulfilled. On most slave ships, captives were given two meals a day and a pint of water taken on the ship's deck. The food varied depending on the embarkation point and might include corn, cassava flour, sweet potatoes, millet, beans and rice. The meager rations of water given to the slaves did not replace water lost from sweat, seasickness, and diarrhea, and most slaves suffered significant dehydration during the Middle Passage. Similarly, the exercise afforded to the slaves did little to alleviate the effects of immobility resulting from being confined below decks for most of the voyage. Once a day, usually after breakfast, the slaves, often tied together, were forced to dance on the deck. The practice of "slave dancing" served both to entertain the captain and crew and to prevent illness and death that could result from poor circulation and loss of muscle tone. Slaves forced to feign joy and exuberance could be flogged if they complied reluctantly and without enthusiasm. During mealtimes and exercises, slaves were tied in pairs to prevent mass suicide or violent retribution against their captors. Controlling mobility on a slave ship was paramount. Inspired by the horrific conditions on board, fears of white cannibalism, or the belief that they would return to their homes when they died, slaves often committed or attempted suicide during the transatlantic voyage. To avoid throwing themselves overboard, slaves remained in the ship's hold, where they were often chained, and were only allowed on deck once or twice a day. Captains and crew maintained a high level of vigilance over all slaves, but onboard experience varied greatly by gender. In many cases, crews separated women, of whom there were fewer, from men,

INTRODUCTION xxiii

tuck male slaves below deck and women and children above so they can move about freely. Sexual assault and rape are believed to have been common experiences for female slaves during the Middle Passage. Due to abuse by the captain and crew and greater freedom of movement, some scholars also believe that female suicide rates were higher than males. This is how captive Africans survived the Middle Passage. The crossing typically took five weeks to three months, depending on embarkation and arrival points, seasonal conditions, weather, size and condition of the ship, and the skills of the captain and crew. Ships departing from West Africa would typically complete the voyage in less time and with less difficulty than those departing from Southeast Africa. Likewise, trips that started during the February to May rainy season were more likely to face problems such as severe storms and disease. Despite the problems associated with the length of the voyage and the conditions encountered, an experienced captain and crew could master the necessities of the perilous voyage more easily than relative newcomers to the slave trade. Regardless of the preparations made or the care taken to ensure the success of the voyage, the slaves continued to resist their enslavement aboard the ship and upon arrival in America. A Research Agenda for the Middle Passage In recent decades, scholars have devoted much attention to the subject of the transatlantic slave trade. By W.E.B. Du Bois' monumental text, first published in 1897, through Philip Curtin's seminal study of the demographic contours of the slave trade, published in 1969, to the completion of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database in 1999, our understanding of slave trade dynamics and demographics The slave trade has increased by leaps and bounds. Interest in the Middle Passage developed as the abolitionist campaigns of the late 18th and 19th centuries drew attention to the abuse of the slave trade in an attempt to end it. As a result of a concerted effort by abolitionists, the British held parliamentary hearings on the slave trade from the late 18th century. Evidence presented by individuals and agencies both associated with the trade and charged with its eradication revealed the horrors of the Middle Passage. Although later studies of the parliamentary hearings treated some of the evidence as dubious, it served the function of mobilizing the British citizenry to demand an end to the slave trade. After the slave trade was finally abolished in the mid-19th century, interest in the Middle Passage waned. Although few works dealing with the Middle Passage appeared in the mid to late 19th century, the publication of W.E.B. Du Bois' 1897 doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States, 1638–1870, launched a debate on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and initiated the modern, academic study of what we now call African-American history. Du Bois argued that the economic benefits of

xxiii INTRODUCTION

The continuation of the slave trade into the United States frustrated political and legislative attempts to abolish it. Other works by Du Bois emphasized the contributions of African Americans to US history. Although these arguments may seem obvious today, at the time of publication they represented a radical departure from the overwhelmingly racist scholarship of the 19th century. A pioneer in the field of African-American history, Du Bois inspired countless studies of the transatlantic slave trade and, more generally, the history of African-born peoples in America. In the early to mid-20th century, research into the slave trade and the history of slavery continued, producing new publications despite the climate of extreme hostility towards African Americans. Elizabeth Donnan's impressive four-volume collection of primary sources, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, published from 1930 to 1934, was widely used by historians conducting research into the slave trade and is still used as a reference today. The field of anthropology also felt the weight of Du Bois' influence. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits' 1941 publication, The Myth of the Negro Past, built on the findings of early 20th-century scholarship on the slave trade and the legacies of slavery by voicing those of E. Franklin Frazier and others Notion Challenged The upheavals of the Middle Passage combined with the effects of slavery had virtually wiped out most African cultural traditions. Herskovits countered that the legacy of Africa in the Americas was indeed evident in religion, food, dance, music, family and community structure, language and syntax, and folklore, and that, moreover, elements of African culture had been adopted by the African white population. Herskovits' work represented an early attempt to understand how African cultural traditions had survived the Middle Passage and contributed to American societies. While anthropologists were beginning to understand the legacies of slavery on the African peoples of the Americas, Caribbean historians conducted perhaps the most important historical studies of the era, covering the slave trade, abolitionism, and the post-abolition era. In the British West Indies, the 1930s saw a rise in previously unorganized labor militancy and the spread of nationalist ideologies: the result of decades of anti-colonial struggle combined with the economic hardship caused by the world depression. After World War II, West Indian leaders pushed for and gradually gained the right to self-government. Scholars like C.L.R. James and Eric Williams emerged from this political climate. Both James and Williams promoted scholarly understanding of the relationship between Caribbean slavery and European political and economic development, with Williams' seminal text Capitalism and Slavery (1944) stimulating debate for decades to come. Williams argued that slavery and the slave trade generated the capital that fueled Britain's industrial revolution. With the rise of industrial capital, the slave trade and plantation slavery became less important. Thus, economic rather than humanitarian motives drove abolitionism. Although the Eric Williams thesis, as it became known, has been debated and revised in the years since it first appeared

INTRODUCTION xxv

publication, Williams' advances in challenging Eurocentric historiography cannot be underestimated.4 In the United States, the influence of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and the concomitant growth of the field of African-American history reignited interest in the subject of the slave trade. In this environment, the publication of Philip Curtin's 1969 text The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census sparked a debate that revived scholarship on the demographics of the transatlantic slave trade. Using available published sources, Curtin estimated the number of Africans brought to the Americas during the transatlantic trade era at between 9 and 13 million.5 Although his number is still accepted today, with some modifications, at the time of publication, resolved a firestorm of refutations, chiefly from scholars who estimated the volume of the slave trade far more highly than Curtin. Using Curtin's estimates, Herbert Klein published a text in 1978 dealing specifically with the transatlantic crossing. In The Middle Passage, Klein not only detailed the demographic profile of the slave trade, but also provided a comprehensive overview of the funding, timing, routes, and mortality rates associated with the Middle Passage. With the publication of the book, Klein sparked controversy himself, outlining death rates associated with the Middle Passage that were much lower than previously thought. Despite the criticism raised by The Middle Passage, his work is considered by many to be a classic text on the slave trade and is still widely read and cited by scholars in the field economic as well as social aspects of slavery and the slave trade. Seymour Dresher's Econocide (1977) revised the work of Eric Williams and argued that the slave trade and slavery remained profitable for the British after the US Revolutionary War. Works by Stanley Engerman, Robin Law, Colin Palmer, Jay Coughtry, David Northrup, Leslie Bethell, Robin Blackburn, Boubacar Barry, Paul Lovejoy, John Thornton, Barbara Solow, Patrick Manning, G. Ugo Nwokeji and Joseph Dorsey elaborated the dynamic of the Slave trade and slave societies on both sides of the Atlantic. In recent contributions to what is increasingly referred to as Atlantean history, Joseph Inikori's Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002) argues for the centrality of trade to the Industrial Revolution in England and the importance of Africans on the continent and in the Americans as producers of export goods and consumers of manufactured goods, while Toyin Falola and Akinwuni Ogundiran's The Archeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora (2007) use material culture to update the scholarship on slavery in general and transatlantic links in particular. Perhaps the most significant advance in slave trade research in recent years was the 1999 publication of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM by David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert Klein. This work brings together and analyzes data from more than 27,000 slave companies. Using this material, a new generation of scientists has begun research into the movement of people from Africa to the Americas,

xxvi INTRODUCTION

including African region and ethnicity specific information. Toyin Falola and Matt Childs' volume, The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2004), draws on decades of research, from the pioneering work of Herskovits to the demographic studies of Curtin and Eltis, to understand how the traditions and contributions An African group, the Yoruba, have been instrumental in shaping societies throughout the Atlantic world. About This Encyclopedia In this volume we have provided a wide range of material on the Middle Passage. To provide our readers with the widest possible coverage, we have included 228 entries, covering subjects as diverse as ports of departure and arrival, finance, mortality, demographics of slaves, African culture, and depictions of the Middle Passage. Although entries may vary in terms of, for example, numerical estimates of volume or mortality, this merely reflects the state of the art and the variety of contributors' interpretations. Readers can quickly find their area of ​​interest by using the alphabetical and subject entry lists at the beginning of the book, or by consulting the index. For those looking for more information on a topic, you will find cross-references within the entries in bold and a “See Also” at the end of each entry. "Further Reading" guides the reader to both traditional and electronic sources. To aid readers in their research, we have included a comprehensive Middle Passage bibliography and timeline from the 15th to the late 20th centuries. Notes 1. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World: 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2. Recent research has challenged the view of Spanish "backwardness" that has long dominated discussions of this aspect of the slave trade. See Jose G. Ortega, Money, Power, and Control: The Cuban Slave Regime, 1789-1844 (PhD thesis, UCLA, 2007). 3. Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; with a new introduction by Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944]). 4. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 1994. 5. Phillip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 6. Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

References Barry, Boubacar. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. African Studies Series No. 92, ed. J.M. Lonsdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern Age, 1492–1800. New York: Verso Press, 1997. Conrad, Robert Edgar. World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. Costanzo, Angelo, eds. The interesting tale of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2001.

INTRODUCTION xxvii

Curtin, Phillip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Donnan, Elizabeth, eds. Documents Illustrating the History of the Slave Trade to America. 4 volumes, 1930-1935. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America, 1638–1870. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1904. Eltis, David, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, Herber S. Klein, eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Falola, Toyin and Matt D. Childs, eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantean World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Geggus, David, ed. The Impact of the Haitian Slave Revolt in the Atlantean World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Inikori, Joseph E. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study of International Trade and Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Klein, Herbert. S. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantean Slave Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. ———. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Establishment of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Solow, Barbara, ed. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. London: Macmillan, 1998. Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantean World, 1400–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Williams, Eric Eustace. capitalism and slavery; with a new introduction by Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 (1944).

CHRONOLOGY 1415

Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal initiates the first expedition to the West African coast.

1441

First shipments of African slaves are brought to Lisbon, Portugal.

1444

Portuguese country on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal.

1455

Pope Nicholas V issues a papal bull entitled "Romanus Pontifex" justifying the enslavement of non-Christians.

1456

Cape Verde Islands discovered by the Portuguese.

1471

Portuguese sailors spot Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea.

1472

Portuguese make contact with Kingdom of Benin. Portuguese sailors claim the uninhabited island of Annobon.

1482

Portuguese navigator Diogo Cao visits the Congo River. Portuguese build trade fort at Elmina on Africa's Gold Coast.

1485–1486

The Portuguese establish a factory in Gwato, Benin.

1490 c.

Leo Africanus, author of Description of Africa, is born.

1492

Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Caribbean initiates American contact.

1494

The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the known world into eastern and western spheres owned by the Portuguese and Spanish respectively.

1499

Spaniards arrive in Curacao in the Caribbean.

1501

Santo Domingo Governor Nicolas de Ovando orders the first shipment of slaves to the island.

1503

Casa de Contratacion, the Spanish government agency responsible for trade, is established in Seville.

xxx

CHRONOLOGY

1512

Afonso I of the Congo accepts Catholicism as the state religion.

1518

Carlos I of Spain grants the first Asiato Treaty (agreement) authorizing the shipment of African slaves to Spain's American colonies by monopoly traders.

1526

King Afonso I of Congo tries to ban trade with Europeans and expel all foreign merchants.

1530er

Portuguese set up a slave trading station in Luanda.

1532

The slave trader John Hawkins is born in England.

1534

Slaves are allowed to enter the Rio de la Plata region of South America.

1545

Founding of the city of Potosı in present-day Bolivia.

1550

Leo Africanus' description of Africa is published.

1562

John Atkins makes England's first slave-trading voyage.

1576

Founding of the city of Luanda in present-day Angola.

1580

Portuguese arrive in Ouidah on the slave coast.

1580

San Pedro Claver, a missionary who worked with slaves in Cartagena, is born.

1588

The Dutch conquer the island of Goree from the Portuguese.

1602

Foundation of the Dutch East India Company.

1619

First shipment of slaves to British North America (Jamestown).

1620-1640s

The Portuguese slave trade from the Congo is steadily increasing.

1621

Founding of the Dutch West India Company.

1626

France establishes its first West Indies colonies.

1627

Barbados is settled by the British, who begin importing large numbers of slaves.

1634

The Dutch conquer Curacao.

1635

French colonize Martinique.

1637

The first slave expedition from British North America sets out for the Caribbean.

1638

Dutch colonize Mauritius.

1641–1661

Garcia II rules the Kingdom of Kongo.

1641–1648

Dutch occupy territories in Brazil and Angola.

1642

Dutch capture Portuguese slave trading post of Elmina.

1644

The first slave expedition by a British North American colony leaves Boston for Africa.

TIMELINE xxxi

1649

The first Danish slave ship reaches the West African coast.

1650

Fort Carolusburg (later renamed Cape Coast Castle) was built by Polish architect Henry Caerlof.

1655

John (Jean) Barbot, slave trader and author, is born in France.

1655

British take over Jamaica.

1658

First Danish fort on the West African coast.

1661

The first permanent British colony in Africa is established on James Island in the Gambia River.

1664

Formation of the French West Indian Company.

1664

British capture Goree Island from Dutch.

1665

The Battle of Mbwila leads to the dissolution of the Kingdom of Kongo.

1672

The Royal Africa Company (RAC) replaces the failed Company of Royal Adventurers.

1677

The French conquer the island of Goree from the British and establish it as a major center of the French slave trade.

1678

Sa˜o Salvador, the Congo's capital, is sacked, leading to a strengthening of Portuguese control over the region.

1685

Code Noir sets conditions for slaves in the French West Indies.

1688

Mennonites in Germantown, Pennsylvania protest slave trade in British North American colonies.

1696

Pennsylvania Quakers make official statement for abolitionism.

1697

Spain cedes the western third of Hispaniola to France. Saint Domingue is founded.

1698

King William III. of England revokes the RAC monopoly.

1701

The first Asantehene, Osei Tutu, becomes the ruler of all Asante peoples.

1713

The Treaty of Utrecht grants a British monopoly (or asiato) to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies.

1713

Anthony Benzet, a Quaker anti-slavery activist, was born in France.

1720er

Dahomeische Invasion in Allada.

1725

John Newton, slave trader and abolitionist, is born in England.

1731

RAC ceases its involvement in the slave trade.

1732

John Barbot's A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea is published in English.

xxxii CHRONOLOGY

1735

John Atkins’ Werk A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies; in His Majesty’s Ships, the Swallow and the Weymouth, veröffentlicht.

1739

The Stono Rebellion, one of the earliest North American slave rebellions, takes place in South Carolina.

1740er

New England rum is made for 5 pence a gallon.

1745

Writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano was born in modern-day Nigeria.

1753

Poet Phillis Wheatley was born in the Senegambia region of West Africa.

1757

Abolitionist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was born in present-day Ghana.

1759

British abolitionist William Wilberforce is born in England.

1760

Anthony Benzenet's booklet, Observations on the [Enslaving,] Importing and Purchasing of Negroes, is published.

1761

Phillis Wheatley comes to Boston from Senegal.

1762

The British occupation of Havana temporarily opens Cuba to the free trade in slaves.

1768

The Danish slave ship Fredensborg has run aground off the Norwegian coast.

1774

The First Continental Congress declares a temporary embargo on importing new slaves into America.

1775

The British governor of Virginia issues a proclamation granting freedom to indentured servants and slaves if they join British forces.

1786 c.

The slave house Maison des Esclaves is built on the island of Gor ee.

1778

Spaniards take possession of Annobon, Fernando Po.

1783

The Zong affair, in which sick slaves were thrown overboard to prevent contamination of an entire shipment, caught the attention of the British public, sparking an uproar and fueling the abolitionist cause.

1786

The Swedish West India Company is formed.

1787

Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species wird in London veröffentlicht.

1788

Dolben's Act lays down guidelines for the British slave trade.

1788

In France, the Soci et e des Amis des Noirs (Society of Friends of Negroes) is founded.

1789

Spain declares free trade in African slaves.

1789

Olaudah Equianos The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself will be published in London.

CHRONOLOGIE xxxiii

1791

The Haitian revolution begins.

1792

Denmark is the first country to ban the slave trade.

1793

A rebellion breaks out aboard the Rhode Island slave ship Nancy.

1794

The US Congress prohibits the construction or outfitting of slave ships.

1794

French abolish slavery.

1802

Napoleon reintroduces slavery in the French colonies.

1804

Haiti is declared an independent republic.

1807

British declare abolition of African slave trade.

1808

The United States mandates the closure of the Atlantic slave trade.

1811

Britain makes slave trade a crime.

1812

Aponte Rebellion attempts to end slavery in Cuba.

1814

The Netherlands bans the slave trade.

1814

France bans the slave trade.

1815

Portugal bans the slave trade north of the equator.

1816

The American Colonization Society is formed.

1817

The Anglo-Portuguese treaty sets limits on the slave trade.

1817

On September 23, Great Britain and Spain sign a treaty banning the slave trade.

1819

Britain's official Royal Navy West Africa Squadron begins patrolling the West African coast. Court of Mixed Commission established in Sierra Leone.

1819

The United States makes participation in the slave trade a crime.

1820

The Anglo-Spanish treaty banning the slave trade comes into effect.

1821

Liberia is founded.

1823

The Anti-Slavery Society umbrella organization is formed to coordinate abolitionist efforts.

1827

The Spanish slave ship Guerrero sank off Key Largo, Florida, drowning 41 of the more than 550 slaves on board.

1831

Emperor of Brazil, Pedro I, agrees to phase out the slave trade. Britain establishes Goree Island as center of West African Squadron.

xxxiv

CHRONOLOGY

1834

In the American colonies of Great Britain, the abolition of slavery comes into force.

1835

On June 28, the Anglo-Spanish treaty is renewed. "Equipment items" are created.

1835

Inspired by Islamic teachings, slaves rise up in Bahia, Brazil. This rebellion is known as the male revolt.

1839–1841

The Amistad affair, in which Cuban slaves mutinied, killed the white crew and piloted the ship (the Amistad) to the United States, is being tried in US courts.

1840

J.M.W. Turners Gemälde „Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On“ wird in London ausgestellt.

1841

The quintuple treaty between Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria includes an "Equipment Clause" that bans equipment used to conduct the slave trade.

1841

Calabar, West Africa, fully transitions to palm oil exports.

1841

Madison Washington leads the revolt aboard the Creole bound for Louisiana.

1842

The Webster-Ashburton Treaty between the United States and Great Britain establishes joint cruises on the West African coast.

1843

The slave trader Pedro de Zulueta is tried and acquitted in British courts.

1844

La Escalera conspiracy seeks abolition of slavery in Cuba.

1847

Liberia becomes independent from the United States.

1848

Slavery is abolished in the French Caribbean colonies.

1849

The last known French slave ship leaves La Havre.

1860

Clotilda transports slaves from Ouidah, Bay of Benin to the United States, in violation of US prohibitions.

1862

The Washington Treaty allows the British to search and arrest suspected US slave traders.

1863

The Dutch abolish slavery in all their colonies.

1865

The United States abolishes slavery.

1868

AfricaTown, Alabama, just north of Mobile, was founded by slaves freed by the slave ship Clotilda.

1870

The British Royal Navy's West African squadrons stop patrolling the coast.

1886

Cuba abolishes slavery.

1888

Brazil abolishes slavery, becoming the last nation in America to end the practice.

1896

End of the Asante Empire of West Africa.

1930

The writer Kamau Brathwaite is born in Barbados.

CHRONOLOGY xxxv

1944

Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams is published in the United States.

1945

Robert Hayden writes the poem Middle Passage.

1962

John Newton's logs are published as Journal of a Slave Trader.

1978

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has declared Maison des Esclaves a World Heritage Site.

1985

AfricaTown, Alabama has been designated a Historic Landmark by the Alabama State Legislature.

1989

UNESCO declares Goree Island a World Heritage Site.

1999

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM is published.

2000

The film Adanggaman premieres at the Venice Film Festival. The film The Middle Passage will premiere in North America at the Toronto Film Festival.

Abolitionism Abolitionism is a political movement that sought to abolish slavery and the global slave trade, particularly the enslavement of Africans and people of African descent in Europe, America and continental Africa. The movement began in the 18th century, assumed large proportions in several nations in the 19th century, and largely achieved its goals. Abolitionism began as black resistance to slavery in the 15th century, when enslaved Africans attempted to kill their captors or themselves. It was later championed by the Christians in the late 1700s, whose teachings on morality, liberty, human rights, and economic change disapproved of human enslavement and therefore led to efforts to end it. The transatlantic slave trade, which began in Africa in the mid-14th century and lasted into the 19th century, was "driven" by Portuguese traders who bought small numbers of Africans from the West African coast and transported them to Portugal and Spain. The slave trade became a huge enterprise when European nations colonized America in the 16th century. By 1600, European countries had begun fiercely fighting each other. The Dutch, British, and French contested control of trade with the Portuguese, and by 1713 Britain had become the dominant slave-trading nation in the world. The total number of enslaved Africans has been the subject of serious dispute. The network. The Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research put the number at 15 to 20 million, with about 2 million dead in slave raids and 1 million more dead during the Middle Passage. More than 15 million eventually reached America. During the Middle Passage, slaves were chained, branded, crammed into disease-ridden ships, raped, and sexually abused by crew members and, in the New World, by slave owners and overseers. Deprived of basic human rights and stripped of all traces of human dignity, African slaves endured appalling conditions and were forced to perform horrible tasks in disease-ridden plantations. This inhuman treatment played

2 ABOTIONISM

crucial role in the emergence of abolitionism. Resistance peaked in the 18th century when slaves in the West Indies, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela and the British colonies in North America revolted, forming maroon communities located in inaccessible areas where recapture was difficult if not impossible. The cruelty associated with slavery was underscored by the risks, severe punishment, and death that slaves took to escape slavery. Anti-slavery sentiment was therefore ignited by a combination of revolts, flight to inaccessible areas, inability to recapture, and periodic violent raids by slaves from these communities. Despite these factors, opposition to slavery developed slowly for two important reasons. First, socio-political and economic life revolved around owning vast plantations, which required enormous labor that only slavGranville Sharp, who helped free slaves, could satisfy. Second, the general view through the courts, a founding member of the current in Europe, was that blacks were the committee formed in 1787 to fight the slave trade as spiritually, culturally, and morally disadvantaged. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery Rior to Whites. From the late eighteenth century, International. Revolutionary ideas such as equal rights and equality before the law began to challenge and replace the old beliefs. This development, the activities of the Quakers and the black resistance led to radical changes in Europe and America. The Quakers, the first whites to denounce and challenge slavery, believed that all people, regardless of race, have a divine spark and are equal before God. The movement achieved success in litigation, slave protection, and eventual abolition of slavery in Europe and America. Despite this fact, the movement failed to end racism and establish equal political and social rights for freed slaves and their descendants. It also failed to end practices such as contract labor, sharecropping, child labor, and sweatshops. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; closure of the slave trade; Haitian Revolution, The; Havana; Hispaniola; Illegal Slave Trade, Brazil; Illegal Slave Trade, Spanish Caribbean; Jamaica; Portuguese slave trade; Sierra Leone; Spanish Caribbean. Further Reading: Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Servitude: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds.

ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE, BRAZIL 3

The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Gold, Philip. Barbaric Commerce: Trade and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantean World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003; Hello Richard. Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labour: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987; Wise, Steven M. Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Process That Led to the End of Human Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005.

Oyeniyi Bukola Adeyemi

Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil Brazil was one of the last countries in the Americas (after the Spanish colonies) to abolish the Atlantic slave trade and the last to abolish slavery itself. Slaves in Brazil mostly worked on sugar plantations; The slave trade and slavery survived so long because of the power of the sugar planters and their political representatives. The slave trade was abolished largely as a result of outside pressure, as the British government saw the expansive and prosperous Brazilian plantation economy as a major obstacle to its anti-trafficking mission. Initially, the Portuguese colonizers of Brazil enslaved indigenous people, and this practice continued in some areas until 1755. Beginning in the 17th century, African slavery gradually replaced native bondage and continued to grow with the rapid rise of Brazilian sugar; Particular success followed the setbacks in French sugar production following the Saint Domingue revolution. The demands of growing sugar led to a staggering mortality rate on the plantations and inevitably made the planters dependent on the slave trade to replenish their exhausted enslaved workforce. So many people were imported that by 1800 half of Brazil's population was enslaved. Although sugar was the country's main export for much of the first half of the century, it increasingly competed with coffee imported from Arabia via Indonesia. For much of the nineteenth century, real political power in Brazil remained with the big sugar planters. Since the decline of gold mining in the province of Minas Gerais without economic equality, they have shied away from political initiatives that would weaken their control over the Brazilian economy. As such, they isolated themselves from the contemporary abolitionist sentiment propagated primarily by Britain. After Britain decided to ban the trade in 1807, and from a position of strength as the Napoleonic Wars began to turn in its favour, Britain exhorted its dependent allies to work towards a ban. The Congress of Vienna was held in 1815 to shape a post-Napoleonic world order. Britain saw the meeting as an opportunity to push abolition among delegate countries. British officials granted Portugal a grace period of a few years to replenish labor needs in anticipation of imminent abolition; Great Britain paid Portugal, like them

4 Abolition of the SLAVE TRADE, BRAZIL

Later, Brazil would pay large sums of money as encouragement. Despite these concessions, Portugal found little reason to abandon the human trade. Brazil followed the same path after independence in 1822. Brazilian sugar revenues, the planters' commitment to the aristocratic lifestyle and hierarchical ethos that perpetuated slave ownership, and a lack of European immigrants kept the Brazilian slave trade alive. Brazilian slavery also supported the broader Atlantic trade. Profiteering slave traders from other countries brought slaves to Brazil. Many came from the United States, despite its Abolition Act of 1808. Of course, as long as there was a market for slaves, there were African wars of enslavement. Largely as a result of Brazil's commitment to slavery, between 1821 and 1843 (the period immediately after the first abolition treaties with Britain) some 1,153,000 slaves crossed the Atlantic; between 1801 and 1820 there were 1,486,000. This influx of enslaved laborers led to another rapid expansion of the Brazilian plantation economy. Pedro I, the first emperor of an independent Brazil, agreed to phase out the slave trade in 1831. Under pressure from Britain, this covenant was never kept; Traffic to Brazil continued unabated. His son Pedro II, the first native emperor, was personally convinced of the injustice of slavery: he freed his own slaves in 1840 and advocated coffee production as a less harmful alternative to sugar. Despite his misgivings, Pedro remained less than enthusiastic about the high-handed British attempts to enforce the ban (in 1845 the Royal Navy received government sanctions to consider all slave traders pirates; worse, wrongdoers were to be tried in British Admiralty courts rather than common British-Brazilian bodies). Between 1846 and 1847, 150,000 West African slaves came to Brazil. Matters came to a head in 1850 when Britain warned that a squadron was entering Brazilian territorial waters to seize ships carrying slaves. The threats unleashed a storm of protests in Brazil, particularly as Brazilian pressure for abolition was just beginning to mount. Brazilian coastal forts even sporadically exchanged fire with British cruisers. As diplomatic relations reached a breaking point, the Brazilian Parliament promulgated the Euse'bio de Queiroz law. Under his terms, the slave trade became piracy, captains and sea captains trading on the Atlantic coast had to pledge not to transport slaves, and crews were rewarded with the proceeds of captured slave traders. However, as public opinion was not initially strong in favor of the law, its implementation proved difficult. The violations were so blatant that orders to allow British cruisers to seize suspects in Brazilian waters (briefly suspended after the Queiroz settlement) were restored in early 1851. But shortly after mid-century, a change in attitude in Brazil, particularly among officials, enabled enforcement. Enslaved people made up 33 percent of the total population in 1850; After the end of slave imports and an increase in free immigration, this number would later drop to 15 percent. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; abolition of

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slave trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; Internal Slave Trade, Brazil. Further Reading: Bethell, Leslie. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slavery Question, 1807–1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; Konrad, Robert Edgar. World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986; Tavares, Luı´s Henrique Dias. tica, 1988. Come ´rcio proibido de escravos. Sao Paulo: A

Tristan Stubbs Abolition of the Slave Trade, France French merchants had been shipping slaves across the Atlantic since the 16th century when they sold them to Spanish and Portuguese settlers in the New World. The establishment of French plantation colonies in the Caribbean in the 17th century increased French involvement in the slave trade. During the 18th century, about one in five slave ships crossing the Atlantic was French. Although French involvement in the slave trade was ancient, it was not until the mid-18th century that an enlightened minority of French began to criticize the practice. Concrete political projects that emerged in the late 1780s aimed to end the slave trade as quickly as possible while gradually abolishing slavery over two or three generations. The French Revolution gave a decisive impetus to the abolitionist cause, which led to the first and immediate abolition of slavery in 1794. Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery in 1802, a decision that led to Haiti's independence. Other French colonies had to wait until 1848 for slavery to be abolished. Criticism of slavery became evident in the 1740s, when French philosophers such as Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Bre`de and de Montesquieu; Jean Jacques Rousseau; and Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre began to point out the criminal and immoral nature of the slave trade and slavery. Despite some ambivalence and contradiction, notably by Voltaire, her writings were fundamental in informing contemporaries - or at least the minority of French who could read - about the horrors of the Middle Passage and the inhumane living conditions of black slaves in France's colonies: a distant reality of which most French people had only a vague idea. Consistent with the notion of mankind's common humanity, they criticized slavery as being based on racial prejudice and inequality. However, when they condemned slavery, they did not develop a program aimed at its abolition. In the 1770s, Louis-Sebastien Mercier and Guillaume Thomas Francois Raynal, among others, brought a new element to the debate. In their writings they vividly described the horrors of a general slave rebellion that led to the independence of the colonies they saw as the inevitable consequence of slavery. The anti-slavery discourse - not yet a political movement - henceforth urged some sort of reform of the existing system. The development of this literature contributed to the emergence of the first French anti-slavery movement, which sought a political answer to questions about the inhumanity of the slave trade and slavery.

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The Socie´te´ des Amis des Noirs (Society of Friends of Negroes) was founded in Paris on February 19, 1788 and continued its activities for four years, at a crucial moment in French history. The Socie´te´ was not a philanthropic institution dedicated to improving the living conditions of slaves, but pursued political goals. Its members promoted a better knowledge of colonial realities by translating and publishing relevant texts, and they sought to influence the king and the naval minister, who was in charge of the colonies and French shipping and trade. They wanted the abolition of the slave trade, which they considered necessary to improve the fortunes of slaves in the French colonies and which they saw as the starting point for a change in the economics of colonial production that eventually led to it within two or three generations the final abolition of slavery and its replacement by wage labour. Although the Socie´te´ was heavily influenced by its London equivalent with which it corresponded, its methods were appropriate to the French political system and lack of parliament under the Ancien Régime. But the Socie´te´, which suspended its sessions in the winter of 1791/92, was able to continue despite the great political upheavals in France and the proclamation of the equality and liberty of mankind in the Declaration of Human Rights (1789). Because of the powerful colonial lobby (Club Massiac), the priority given to domestic problems and factional struggles, such principles could not lead to the immediate abolition of slavery. It was the French Revolutionary Convention, led by Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, that abolished slavery on February 4, 1794, following the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue. Le´ger-Fe´licite´ Sonthonax, the French commissioner, had freed the island’s slaves in August 1793 after they helped him fight counter-revolutionary planters. This decision theoretically affected 700,000 slaves. The law effectively ended slavery in Guadeloupe and French Guiana and confirmed the situation in Saint Domingue. It had no effect, however, in Martinique, which the British occupied in March 1794, or in the French Indian Ocean colonies, where planters successfully prevented its implementation. The first abolition of slavery in the French colonies lasted until the first consul Bonaparte, influenced by his Martinique-born wife Josephine and the planters' lobby, reinstated slavery on May 20, 1802, a decision that affected no major ones reactions. Troops were deployed to the French Caribbean to implement the law. They were successful in Guadeloupe, where slavery was intensified after a bloody campaign (10,000 victims) and massive deportations. But they failed to reintroduce slavery in Saint Domingue, where the 23,000 troops dispatched under General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc met fierce opposition and yellow fever. Bonaparte's decision to reinstate slavery eventually led to Haiti's independence in 1804. France officially outlawed the slave trade in 1814, but it took thirty years for slavery to become widespread in the French colonies—i.e. H. Martinique – was abolished.

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Guadeloupe, French Guiana and the Bourbon Island in the Indian Ocean (present-day Reunion Island). On April 27, 1848, the provisional government that emerged from the liberal February Revolution decided to abolish slavery immediately. The initiative came from Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893), Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, who had joined the abolitionist movement after a trip to Cuba in 1830, prompting him to devote his life to the abolitionist cause . This second and permanent abolition crowned the efforts of various abolitionist groups formed in the 1820s and 1830s, such as the Socie´te´ de la Morale Chre´tienne or Society for Christian Morality (1822) or the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery (1834), which published L'Abolitioniste franc¸ais in 1844. The word abolitionnisme first appeared in the Dictionary of the French Academia in 1836. But the abolition of 1848 was also a direct consequence of the British abolition of 1833, which contributed to an increase in the number of slave rebellions in the French colonies. Around 190,000 slaves became French citizens. Their former owners should receive compensation. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; French slave trade; Haitian Revolution, The. Further reading: Be'not, Yves, and Dorigny, Marcel, eds. Re' tablissement de l'esclavage dans les colonies franc¸aises, 1802. Aux origines d'Haı¨ti. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003; Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848. New York: Verso, 1988; Dorigny, Marcel, eds. Les abolitions de l'esclavage de L. F. Sonthonax a` V. Schoelcher, 1793-1794-1848. Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes; Paris: UNESCO, 1995; Dorigny, Marcel and Bernard Gainot, eds. La Socie ´te´ des Amis des Noirs, 1788–1799. Contribution a` l'histoire d el'abolition de lesclavage. Paris: Editions de l'UNESCO, 1998; Schmidt, Nelly. Abolitionnistes de l'esclavage et re'formateurs des Colonies, 1820-1851. Paris: Karthala, 2000.

Silvia Marzagalli

Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain Britain was not the first European country to end its involvement in the slave trade - Denmark abolished the trade in 1792. But Britain's ascendant position at the end of the Napoleonic Wars gave her the military and economic power to impose abolition on other European powers. However, in many countries where the slave trade had been abolished, its profitability argued against its complete abandonment. The Royal Navy played a key role in ensuring that the terms of the abolition treaties were observed. Many eighteenth-century British abolitionists derived their opposition from deeply rooted Protestant beliefs. Christian exhortations to human unity were critical to the movement's success. However, it was only abolished after several decades and pressure levels. An early impetus was Somerset's case in 1772, in which the Earl of Mansfield ruled that slaveholders were unable to remove slaves from England under duress, making slavery unenforceable there. Petitions from the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor prompted the founding of Sierra in 1787

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Leone, a colony for free Africans, freed slaves and serfs fleeing their American owners to fight for the Loyalists in the American Revolution. To expand their popular base, abolitionists also tapped into print culture: gruesome images of the horrors of slavery illustrated their pamphlets and novels. Although the abolitionists managed to get Dolben's Act of 1788, which provided for more humane treatment of slaves, through Parliament, early attempts at a legal prohibition were unsuccessful. But there was also a populist tone in the opposition. Cartoons claimed that abolition would lead to soaring prices and depicted newly freedmen enslaving their former captors in retribution for years of servitude. Nationalism was often important: Britons feared being at a disadvantage in commercial competition with those who maintained the slave trade. Furthermore, many reforms of any kind linked to the French Revolution of 1789, an upheaval that went against the instinctively conservative British mood. The British Caribbean plantation economy benefited from the disruption in French sugar exports caused by the successful slave rebellion in the colony of Saint Domingue (later Haiti) between 1791 and 1804. The early nineteenth century witnessed the abandonment of American protectionism after the Revolution (North America had been the Caribbean's main market). For the time being, West Indian plantations would remain the British Empire's main source of sugar - traders would later switch to cheaper sources in the East. And mercantilist trade policies were still largely resistant to the laissez-faire principles that would derail imperial preference by mid-century. These economic factors motivated slave owners to resist abolition; Most importantly, much of their capital was tied up in land and slaves. For this reason, when plantation slavery itself was outlawed in the British colonies in 1834, planters demanded and received large payoffs. The planters therefore had little incentive to voluntarily abandon the slave trade. This conflicts with some histories, which have argued that the slave trade was outlawed because slavery was no longer profitable, even for Caribbean planters. But if economic pressures cannot adequately explain abolitionism, neither can a narrow focus on religiously inspired humanity. Broader cultural pressures were also at play. In the early 19th century, Britain, a more liberal middle-class society than before, was keen to marginalize reactionary West Indian landowners. Imbued with the spirit of progress, many Britons now viewed the slave trade and slavery as abominable, anachronistic and deplorable. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger tried to appeal to this constituency and in 1805 banned the importation of slaves into newly conquered territories from 1807; meanwhile, he limited the introduction of slaves to 30 percent of the existing number. Pitt died the following year, initiating the reformist "Ministry of All Talents" that took the abolitionist program even further. Their Foreign Slave Trade Act of 1806 prohibited the supply of slaves to conquered territories and foreign colonies. This legislation was presented as a necessary means to limit the economic power of the areas in times of war. The high point of the abolition process was in 1807,

ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE, GREAT BRITAIN 9th

However: The Abolition Act prohibited the slave trade by British subjects and the importation of slaves into British colonies not covered by the Act of 1806. By 1811, taking part in the slave trade was made a crime. In the Napoleonic Wars, Britain conquered many Dutch and French Caribbean colonies; As the tide of war turned in Britain's favour, the global might of its navy was confirmed. In the next phase of the abolition process, Britain used its international strength to pressure other states to abolish or limit slavery. Although certainly influenced by moral concerns, the British position was in turn partly driven by a desire to prevent competing plantation economies from gaining economic advantages over their non-enslaving British rivals. Pressure was initially exerted on Britain's dependent allies, and in 1814 the Netherlands abolished the trade, effective 1818. In 1815 Britain persuaded the restored Bourbon monarchy to end French slavery; At the Congress of Vienna, convened to discuss the post-war geopolitical order, British pressure forced a declaration against the slave trade. Next, Britain pressed Portugal, which was supported by British troops during the Peninsular War, to restrict trade in preparation for abolition. Since Portuguese Angola was the origin and Portuguese Brazil the destination of many African slaves, their consent was vital. In 1817, an Anglo-Portuguese treaty restricted the slave trade in Brazil to south of the equator; A contemporary Anglo-Spanish treaty contained similar provisions. Pushing against slavery, the United States, a new nation aware of its international reputation and confident in the sustainability of its naturally reproducing enslaved population, had abolished the trade in 1807 effective January 1, 1808. From then on, the British had determined to seize American slave traders who broke the prohibition, although American federal ships enforced the prohibition with similar rapidity until the Civil War. Britain's dominant sea power and transatlantic reach enabled effective abolitionist policies in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. For the first half of the century, their most successful force, based in West Africa, patrolled the region's coasts and transported freed slaves to Sierra Leone. Cape Town became a key post for British intervention south of the equator after the treaty with Brazil was amended in 1826. Violence was not the only weapon in Britain's arsenal, however. Diplomatic approaches also proved fruitful, although often backed by threats of reprisals. African rulers were pressured into agreeing to end the trade and engaging in legitimate trade instead. Furthermore, British recognition of the independence of Spain's former American colonies was conditional on their commitment to abolition, while their relationship with the short-lived Republic of Texas carried the same condition. Unlike enslaved populations in the United States, serfs in other American regions were largely unable to increase their numbers through natural reproduction. Thus, as long as the institution of slavery existed in the British Caribbean, there was a market for clandestine slave imports. Sugar profits, the seductive, aristocratic planter lifestyle and a lack of alternative labor ensured smuggling was profitable. In addition, postponing abolition by other colonial powers is unscrupulously encouraged

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Britons to sell - and thereby preserve - people to foreign slave economies. After direct trade with Africa was restricted, internal Caribbean slavery became especially important for colonies like Puerto Rico. Elsewhere, British policy was even less successful. French ships made at least 193 slave voyages between 1814 and 1820, although after 1831 the numbers were few. In 1839, the British took unilateral action against recalcitrant Portuguese slave traders after negotiations broke down. Abolition became a particularly sensitive issue in Britain-Brazil relations. Their 1826 treaty (ratified 1827) called for a Brazilian commitment to end the slave trade within three years; The Brazilian General Assembly passed a corresponding law in 1831. However, Brazilian enforcement has never been more than lackluster. Increasing European demand for coffee led to an annual influx of 50,000 slaves by the late 1840s. In 1850 there were 2 million slaves in Brazil. Britain's Slave Trade Act of 1845 sanctioned the Royal Navy for treating slave traders as pirates. Much to Brazil's chagrin, the Navy began pursuing ships into Brazilian waters. Nonetheless, continued British raids and threats of further reprisals if inaction continued, forced the Brazilian Parliament to pass the Euse'bio de Queiroz Law in 1850, formally abolishing the slave trade. At the time of the law, enslaved people made up 33 percent of the total Brazilian population; after slave imports ended, that number dropped to 15 percent. The British abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself occurred at different times but for similar reasons. Recognizing that it was futile to abandon the slave trade without also ending the institution of slavery, and encouraged by the popularity and relative electoral success of the abolition of the slave trade, Earl Gray's reformist Whig ministry passed that in 1833 Emancipation Act, which freed slaves in British colonies from August the following year. But the legal ban on slavery did not end the tight control of labor in the British plantation economy. Trinidad and British Guiana imported large numbers of Indian contract servants; On the Caribbean islands, many former slaves were forced to continue working in the sugar fields. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; African Squadrons, The; British Navy; British slave trade; closure of the slave trade; "Slavers throw the dead and dying overboard - Typhon comes"; Wilberforce, William; Zulueta, Pedro de. Further reading: Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810. London: Macmillan, 1976; Drescher, Seymour. Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in a Comparative Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; Engerman, Stanley L., and Solow, Barbara Lewis, eds. British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Jennings, Judith. The Deal of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783–1807. London: Frank Cass, 1997; Oldfield, J.R. Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807. London: Frank Cass, 1998; Williams, Eric Eustace. capitalism and slavery; with a new introduction by Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 (1944).

Tristan Stübbs

ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE, SPAIN 11th

Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain Spain outlawed the slave trade in an 1817 treaty with the United Kingdom that came into effect worldwide in 1820 – that is, forbidding its subjects to engage in any aspect of trade around the world and in 1867, when the prohibited trade actually ceased, the provisions of the 1817 treaty were implemented, clarified and amended in three subsequent royal cedulas (decrees), three further agreements with the United Kingdom and two statutes enacted by the Spanish Cortes. Unlike Britain and the United States, where international slavery was outlawed in response to internal political unrest, often expressed in moral terms, the reasons for abolishing trade in Spain were both practical and philanthropic. The abolition of Spain was also announced on humanitarian grounds, but resulted from both practical and ideological factors within Spain and its colonies, as well as external pressures, mainly from the United Kingdom. Spain's first step in outlawing the slave trade by its subjects—Spanish and colonial citizens, residents, business entities, and ships—was taken in 1804, as the participation of Spanish-flagged ships in the trade and the total number of slaves imported into the Spanish colonies each year was increasing . For the 272 years between 1517 and 1789, Spain's role in the African slave trade was primarily that of a licensor, authorizing ships - almost always flying the non-Spanish flag - to import slaves into its New World colonies under asiato treaties. It was only after 1789, when abolitionist efforts in the United States and United Kingdom suggested a likely end to the involvement of their ships, that the role of Spanish-flagged slave traders became more important. By 1804, Carlos IV's 1789 cedula, which opened the slave trade with Spain's colonies to all interested, was followed by ten other royal decrees intended to increase it, and by a substantial increase in the quantity of African slaves brought into his Colony Cuba were brought. Cuba's Spanish plantation owners bought large numbers of newly imported slaves, hoping to increase their sugar production to capitalize on reduced sugar exports to Europe from Saint Domingue, Haiti, which were the result of the slave rebellions there in the 1790s. After Congress outlawed the slave trade by US subjects beginning in 1808, the role of Spanish ships in the trade continued to expand as many US-flagged slavers were re-registered under the Spanish flag. At the same time, between 1804 and 1817, although the volume of the Spanish colonial slave trade increased, the number of Spanish colonial slave ports dwindled. There was little demand for new African slaves in Spain's continental American colonies, and Spain's hold over those colonies slipped. By the mid-1820s, Cuba and Puerto Rico were Spain's only remaining American colonies. The practical effect of the 1817 treaty, which banned the importation of Spanish and colonial slaves, was therefore limited to prohibiting slaves from being brought into Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Spanish peninsula itself—nowhere else. The additional effect of the treaty, the also prohibiting Spanish ships from trading in slaves was also limited. In practice, it only prohibited Spanish ships from bringing new African slaves into the few

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non-Spanish ports in the Americas, where they were still marketable—mainly to Brazil, where demand was greatest, and to a much lesser extent the southern United States—and to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Although a Spanish figure appears to have been pushing for the complete abolition of the Spanish slave trade in 1802, Spain's first step towards abolition in 1804 was comparatively small. The Saint Domingue slave rebellions had raised concerns about the potentially disruptive effects of importing large numbers of African slaves into Cuba. In response to this concern, Carlos IV's Slave Trade Cedulas of 1804 extended the rights of anyone wishing to import African slaves into the Spanish colonies by additional years and outlawed the inter-American slave trade. Legal imports into the Spanish colonies thereafter were limited to slaves coming straight from Africa through the Middle Passage, who hopefully were not exposed to revolutionary thought. Spain's next step in abolishing its subjects' participation in the slave trade was taken in the later years of the Napoleonic Wars, when it agreed to the United Kingdom's request to allow the Royal Navy to search Spanish-flagged merchant ships to determine if they were transporting slaves and whether their Spanish papers were genuine, and to confiscate them if there were grounds for doing so. The British Parliament had George III. In 1806 he sent an inquiry urging him to work with other governments to abolish the slave trade worldwide, but by the time the UK was in the midst of its sixteen-year war with Napoleon, the Spanish government was its ally, and that was it unwilling to make aid to the Spanish government conditional on abolition. During the same period, the Spanish Cortes first considered the complete abolition of the slave trade, but rejected it as a threat to the Spanish colonial system and the legitimacy of the Spanish government itself. Legitimacy was a particularly important issue for both the United Kingdom and Spain from 1808 to 1813, when Napoleon's brother Joseph Bonaparte sat on his throne and most of Spain was occupied by French troops. Most members of the Spanish government had fled, an extraordinary Cortes had finally been organized on the island of Leon, and the old Spanish government had been reformed in Cadiz. The first Cortes debate took place in 1811 after a resolution was introduced to immediately abolish the slave trade, and the debate alone led to Cuba's Cabildo considering secession from Spain. An 1812 slave rebellion in Cuba has been attributed to the resulting tensions. The possible abolition was raised again in the Cortes in 1813, but immediately dropped due to colonial pressure. With peace in Europe apparently restored by mid-1814, the United Kingdom and Spain began the extensive talks that led to their 1817 treaty abolishing the Spanish slave trade. The UK not only wanted to abolish the slave quickly, but also to preserve the friendship of Spain and Cuban stability, and thereby the position of the UK and its empire, including Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, over the United States and the Caribbean revolutionaries. Spain was concerned that the slave trade was essential to Cuba's economy and did not want to risk the Cuban declaration of independence. His interests in Argentina and

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Chile was under attack by South American revolutionaries, and its interests in the Floridas were being questioned by the United States, nor was it willing to risk losing the United Kingdom's friendship - or risking the closure of British markets to Cuban and Spanish goods . Finally, on 23 September 1817, after more than three years of back and forth negotiations, Spain and the United Kingdom signed a treaty under which (1) the United Kingdom paid Spain £400,000 for the stated purpose of compensating it for alleged wrongful interference with merchant ships under the Spanish flag for the last eight years, (2) Spain immediately outlawed the Spanish slave trade north of the equator, and (3) the Spanish slave trade was abolished altogether effective May 30, 1820. The ultimate impetus for reaching an agreement appears to have been a secret clause in a treaty signed by Spain and Russia on 11 August 1817, according to which Spain had already agreed to pay the £400,000 it expected to receive from the UK for the purchase of eight warships to use. Spain hoped to use them to retain and regain its South American colonies. Other provisions of the 1817 treaty, ratified in early 1818, allowed the Spanish and British navies to search each other's merchant ships if suspected of slavery and to seize them if slaves were found on board. The confiscation provision was clarified in a later treaty signed in 1822, allowing ships to be confiscated if slaves had previously been on board during a voyage, to prevent the throwing of slaves into the ocean when patrolling ships approached. Mixed British-Spanish commissions in Sierra Leone and Havana were to decide on ship hijacking. Captured ships engaged in illegal trade should be confiscated and sold. Captive slaves were to be emancipated and handed over to the Spanish or British governments to become free laborers or free servants. Convicted individual participants should be punished in the Philippines with ten years imprisonment. The latter provision quickly became domestic law through a Cedula issued in December 1817. The Spanish slave trade became illegal worldwide on October 30, 1820 — an extended date agreed to by Spain and the United Kingdom — but that didn't mean it had stopped. An illegal Spanish trade continued, often thriving despite higher selling prices per slave charged to cover the risks and costs of evading the law or bribing. The illicit trade continued for nearly fifty years, until by the late 1860s there was no longer a demand for new African slaves in Puerto Rico, Brazil, the southern United States, or Cuba. At this point, Chinese workers were being recruited to meet the demand for new labor in Cuba's sugar fields. Between 1826 and 1867 there were a number of additional agreements and decrees amending and supplementing the 1817 treaty with the stated aim of stopping illegal trade. A royal cedula of 1826 required that logs of ships coming into Cuba from Africa be examined by naval authorities for evidence of slavery, and it offered freedom to any slave who reported a slave landing. In 1835 a new Spanish government, operating under a new constitution of 1832, agreed to a new treaty allowing ships also equipped for the slave trade to be seized, thereby allowing the interdiction of eastbound Spanish ships en route to Africa westward sailing ships returning with slaves. The 1835

14 Abolition of the SLAVE TRADE, SPAIN

The treaty further provided for the destruction of captured ships instead of their sale, a condition that led insurers to stop underwriting Spanish-flagged slave ships and to convert most Spanish ships to Portuguese registration. It added that slaves confiscated by Spanish slavers were no longer to be turned over to the Cuban colonial government, which had effectively re-enslaved them, but to a British ship stationed in Havana's port, the Romney, and later to be distributed to the islands in the British West Indies. In 1845 the Spanish Cortes enacted their first internal legislation outlawing the slave trade. This legislation provided for the destruction of slave ships and included imprisonment, fines, and internal exile as punishment for convicted slave ship owners, officers, and crew. However, it included provisions added at the behest of Cuban planters that limited prosecutions to cases of slave ships entering Cuba directly from Africa without stopping elsewhere — stops that could be added — and that gave Cuban law enforcement the right refused to enter plantations to investigate where their slaves had come from. The latter provision was effectively rescinded in 1854, but only briefly, in a quickly withdrawn royal decree providing for the registration of all slaves in Cuba. In May 1867, when the Spanish slave trade was already at an end, the Cortes enacted a second anti-slave trade law, criminalizing all direct and indirect acts having anything to do with the slave trade and allowing for the prosecution of Spanish subjects who engaged in unregistered slaves were found in ships, increasing potential penalties and fines, allowing slave trade cases to be heard by ordinary criminal courts, and registering all slaves in Cuba. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; British Caribbean; British Navy; closure of the slave trade; Drown; French Caribbean; Haitian Revolution, The; Hispaniola; Illegal Slave Trade, Brazil; Illegal Slave Trade, Spanish Caribbean; Portuguese slave trade; Spanish Caribbean. Further reading: Bergad, Laird W., Garcia, Fe Iglesias, and del Carmen Barcia, Maria. The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Corwin, Arthur F. Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967; Dorsey, Joseph C. Slave Trade in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815–1859. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2003; Du Bois, W.E.B. The Suppression of the Slave Trade in the United States of America, 1638–1870. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965; Eltis, David. Economic growth and the end of the transatlantic slave trade. New York: Oxford, 1987; Flatland, Betty. Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972; Howard, Warren S. American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837–1862. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963; Klein, Herbert S. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. Revolution in Spain. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001; Mathieson, William L. Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–1865. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1929; Mannix, Daniel Pratt, with Cowley, Malcolm. Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865. New York: Vikings, 1962; Miers, Susanne. Britain and the end of the slave trade. New York: Africana, 1975; Murray, David. Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980; Rawley, James A., with Behrendt, Stephen D. The

ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE, UNITED STATES 15

Transatlantic Slave Trade, A History. Rev. Ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Ward, WEF The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

Steven B. Jacobson

Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States The idea of ​​abolishing the Atlantic slave trade by the United States was nothing new when it was passed in 1808. Even before a group of Mennonites protested the human property trade in 1688, there were a number of colonists who were unhappy with the transatlantic slave trade. Before 1808 there were a number of anti-slavery ideas that led to the end of the slave trade. These included religious ideals, including the Quakers, revolutionary anti-slavery ideas and the rhetoric of the Revolution, private liberation, gradual emancipation, and a series of congressional and judicial decrees and ordinances. Additionally, debates about the status of slavery were raging throughout the new nation, and its future was very much in question. This debate was particularly heated during the Constitutional Convention. Before the 18th century, few people questioned the morality of slavery; however, the Quakers did. The Quaker religion holds that all human beings are equal before God and that all human beings were created by the same God. Therefore, to Quakers, the enslavement of a person is an abomination in God's sight. They became early leaders of the United States anti-slavery movement. In 1696 they made an official statement for abolitionism in Pennsylvania. In 1775 they founded the first American anti-slavery group and led a movement to abolish slavery in the 18th century. George Fox, who founded the Quaker group Society of Friends, preached against slavery in the late 17th century. However, some Quakers owned slaves. Eventually this group became extremely small in number, and the group united behind the opposition to slavery. In 1780, Quakers in Pennsylvania passed "A Law for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery." . In 1787 Franklin and Rush headed the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Other states have also banned slave imports, including South Carolina. By far the greatest obstacle to ending the Atlantic slave trade was the debate over the constitution of the new United States of America. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention knew that any provision to end slavery or the slave trade would be a nail in the coffin for those trying to ratify the Constitution. After much debate, it was decided to submit the matter by 1808, which was set as the earliest possible date for the trade to be abolished. The Constitution did not prohibit the interstate slave trade, leaving that choice to the states. The constitution did not take this into account either

16 ACCIDENTS AND EXPLOSIONS

the eventual end of domestic slavery, because that would have sent half the delegates to Congress home. The federal government outlawed the slave trade in the District of Columbia and enacted regulations regarding the size of ships used in the coastal trade. The transatlantic slave trade was an issue readily discussed by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. The majority of delegates wanted to ban the traffic either immediately or after a few years. However, some states, such as Georgia, have been inflexible. The Union's southernmost states threatened to reject the constitution if it ended the slave trade. The twenty-year ban on federal action was the best that could be achieved, while most states were satisfied. Most northern states voluntarily abolished slavery by 1804. Some states abolished slavery immediately after the Revolutionary War, but others, such as New York and New Jersey, passed gradual emancipation laws that freed slaves after a certain time or when slaves reached a certain age (usually in their 20s). The British outlawed the slave trade in 1807. Even after the federal ban on the Atlantic slave trade on January 1, 1808, slave importation continued as smugglers continued their businesses illegally. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; closure of the slave trade; humanitarianism; Internal Slave Trade, United States; Liberia. Further reading: Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968; Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619–1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003; Dornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantean World, 1400–1800. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

James E. Seelye, Jr. Accidents and Explosions The transatlantic slave trade, like all other types of maritime trade, was subject to a number of accidents during the 1500s-1800s. Accidents were occasionally caused by the unfavorable weather leading to shipwrecks. In some cases, accidents were the result of attacks between European ships. Accidents and explosions also occurred as a result of slave mutinies during the Middle Passage. Shipwrecks occasionally occurred before and during the transatlantic voyage along the Slave Coast. Sometimes ships perished due to unfavorable storms and weather conditions. Shipwrecks also occurred after slave ships were attacked by pirates. A shipwreck lost all of its slaves and supplies. Pirate activities have traditionally been associated with national rivalries, with one European nation accusing another of using pirates to attack their ship. To protect themselves from pirates, slave ships were fortified with cannons and muskets. Slave uprisings or mutinies were commonplace during the Atlantic voyage. Despite being equipped with guns and other ammunition, the crew of a slave ship in some cases could not prevent a slave mutiny during the Middle Ages

ACCRA 17

Passage. During a slave mutiny, a ferocious confrontation led to the ship's seizure by the slaves. Slaves who survived confrontation with the occupation were automatically freed. An interesting and provocative story is worth telling. On June 1, 1730, Captain George Scott of the sloop Little George sailed off the coast of Guinea with a cargo of ninety slaves, thirty of whom were men. Six days into the journey, the slaves slipped out of their bonds. They breached the bulkhead and reached the deck where they were confronted by the crew. Frightened, the captain, three men and a boy took refuge in the cabin below and were promptly locked away by the slaves. One of the sailors tried to launch a bomb by filling two bottles with gunpowder. The sailor's plan was discovered by a slave who dropped an ax on the bottle as the sailor lit the fuse. The explosion set a keg of gunpowder on fire, blew and opened the door, lifting the deck, unloading all but one musket and seriously injuring both the captain and the bomb maker. This episode is just one of many such events that occurred between about 1500 and the mid-19th century. Fortress and ship bombing were common features of the European slave trade in Africa. Europeans sometimes shifted their continental aggression to Africa. During the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), European nations, notably France and Britain, were involved in a series of attacks on their ships along West African coastal waters. The mid-19th century could be seen as the period when coastal bombardment was at its heaviest. Britain, in its attempt to force Africans and its European counterparts to stop the slave trade, frequently attacked slave ships and set the captives free. Cannons were set up along the West African coast to force African merchants and governments to stop the slave trade. The failure of negotiations to end the slave trade and some complex political and economic motives led to the British bombardment of Lagos in 1851 and the attack on several coastal communities in the delta region. See also Guerrero, The; Henrietta Marie, Die; Key West African Cemetery. Further reading: Greene, Lorenzo. "Mutiny on the Slave Ship." Phyton 5, 4 (1944): 346–354; Inikori, J.E., ed. Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies. London: Hutchinson University Library for Africa, 1982; Palmie, Stephan, ed. Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Saheed Aderinto Accra During the Atlantic slave trade, Accra was a city on the eastern Gold Coast (modern day Ghana) where the Dutch, English and Danish trading companies maintained permanent trading strongholds. Accra was the headquarters of the Danish slave trade in Africa. The main Danish fort in Accra, now known as Christiansborg Palace, was originally built in the 1660s to protect Danish interests in buying West African gold in nearby coastal markets. During the 18th century slave dungeons were added to this early fort, coinciding with Denmark's growing interest in buying slaves

18 ADANGGAMAN (2000)

Africans are shipped to their Caribbean colony, St. Thomas. Three smaller Danish forts were also used for Denmark's slave trade in Accra. Greater Accra is home to the Ga ethnic group, who founded the Ga Kingdom in the late 17th century. The traditional economy of the Ga was lagoon fishing and salt extraction. Both fish and salt were traded with neighboring communities to the north. Textiles and other goods imported by European traders expanded the scope of Ga trade from the 17th century. The Ga were conquered and lived under foreign rule from the militarily more powerful African states of Akyem, Akwamu and Asante between the 1680s and 1820s. Between 1744 and the 1820s, Accra was a subject area of ​​the Asante Empire. During this period, the road from the capital Asante to Accra was the main artery between Asante and Europeans on the coast. Accra became the main market for Asante to import arms, ammunition and other goods essential to maintaining and expanding Asante rule inland. The Asante invasion initially destroyed parts of Accra but eventually enhanced the city's commercial potential. Many Ga merchants acted as intermediaries in trade between Asante and European merchants. The increasing transatlantic trade in Accra in the second half of the 18th century enriched the lives of many Accra families. After colonizing the Gold Coast, Britain established its colonial capital, Accra. Accra has been the capital of Ghana since Ghana gained independence in 1957. Accra today has a population of more than two million people. It is the center for business, commerce and higher education in Ghana. Christiansborg Palace, the former Danish trading fort, is currently used as the seat of government in Ghana. See also Asante; Danish slave trade. Further reading: Fynn, John Kofi. Asante and its neighbors. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971; Ghana Castle website: www.ghanacastle.gov.gh; Hernæs, Per O. Slaves, Danes and the African Coast Society: The Danish Slave Trade from West Africa and Afro-Danish Relations in the Eighteenth Century Gold Coast. Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 1995; Van Dantzig, Albert. Forts and Castles of Ghana. Accra: Sedco Publishing, 1980.

Rebecca Shumway

Adanggaman (2000) Directed by Roger Gnoan M'bala, Adanggaman, which premiered at the 2000 Venice Film Festival and later in North America at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival, is the result of the Ivory Coast filmmaker's international collaboration with screenwriter Jean-Marie Adlaffi and Bertin Akaffou. It is remarkably ironic that the internationally produced film generated no small amount of controversy for its blunt portrayal of an aspect seldom shown in contemporary viewing: the history of slavery within the borders of Africa. Using the enslavement and exploitation of Africans by other Africans as a theme, Adanggaman also marked a return to the theme of slavery, which, as scholarly critics such as Francoise Pfaff point out, was typically a rare theme

AFRICAN FEAR OF CANNIBALISM 19th

African cinema. The film is often cited as the first in African cinema to address this particular historical dimension. The events of Adanggaman take place in West Africa in the late 17th century and center on inter-tribal conflicts instigated and exploited by the titular king Rasmane Ouedraogo, a powerful despot whose collaboration with European traders – figures influenced by film critic Ken Fox astutely notes - conspicuously never seen done - satiate his selfish appetites and increase his dominance over rival groups. Aided by an elite force of fierce warriors, Adanggaman conquers the nearby populace, capturing and enslaving his neighbors and killing those he deems less useful. The village of the film's protagonist, the lost Ossei (Ziable Honore Goore Bi), is under attack and of his loved ones only his mother Mo Akassi (Albertine N'Guessan) remains alive, despite being enslaved. In his efforts to save her, he too is captured. During his struggle to free himself and his mother, the film depicts various configurations of inhuman bondage and violence inflicted on Africans by other Africans. The scenes depicting these events are harrowing; Critic and scholar Mbye Cham, in his analysis of the film, isolates the sustained use of longer shots during scenes in which Africans brutalize and exploit other Africans as one of the film's most impressive visual strategies, and denies the viewer any easy opportunity to look the other way. Although some critics have argued that Adanggaman's portrayal of Africans enslaving Africans may draw critical attention to the role played by Europeans in the slave trade, the film is perhaps better understood as historical fiction that emphasizes the fickleness of slavery in all its forms. Through the presentation of haunting imagery in which the oppressor and the oppressed cannot be easily distinguished by racial dichotomies, Adanggaman offers a poignant, unique glimpse into a past many would like to forget, at a time when such indiscriminate violence is rampant in many parts of the world. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; historical memory; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Cham, Mbye. "Film and History in Africa." In Pfaff, Francoise, ed. Focus on African films. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004; Fox, Ken. "Cry Freedom." [Online, February 14, 2006]. TV Guide website: http://online.tvguide.com/movies/database/showmovie.asp?MI=43049; Gügl, Joseph. African Film: Reinventing a Continent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003; M'bala, Roger Gnoan, dir. Adanggaman. Internationally produced in Ivory Coast, France, Burkina Faso and Switzerland and distributed in the US by New Yorker Films, 2000; Mitchell, Elvis. "Africans Making Slaves of Africans." New York Times, July 11, 2001. [Online February 7, 2006]. New York Times website: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html? res=9C02EEDC1E38F932A25754C 0A9679C8B63; Pfaff, Françoise. "Introduction." In Pfaff, Francoise, ed. Focus on African films. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Ilya T. Wick Africans Fear of Cannibalism The fear of cannibalism was an important element of the slave experience on both sides of the Atlantic and during the dreadful journey through the Middle Passage. Especially in the later years of the slave trade, rumors about the cannibalistic instincts of the white colonial invaders were rife

20 AFRICAN INSTITUTION

in the coastal regions of Africa. The slave ship itself, in which African corpses disappeared, became a powerful symbol of death and consumption. Voyage accounts and ship logs suggest that slavers were aware of the terror their supposed cannibalistic tendencies evoked in the imagination of their cargo, and consequently did little to discourage the rumours. For example, the narrative of the 18th-century freedman Olaudah Equiano suggests that in some cases whites toyed with African fears for their own amusement and as part of a larger discourse of control. Upon arrival in the New World, Africans were presented with a new group of supposed cannibals, the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Colonial actors deliberately spread stories about the savage, carnivorous Indians to discourage African slaves from fleeing the plantations. Cannibalistic practices have been reported among the Tupi peoples of Brazil, but it is in the Caribbean that the practice has attracted the most attention. The Caribs, from whom the term cannibal derives etymologically, have been accused of anthropophagy since Columbus' first voyage. This led to a decree from the Spanish Crown allowing the enslavement of all indigenous groups deemed to be cannibals. To what extent these speculations and accusations were believed by Africans is unclear, but what is certain is that the issue of cannibalism, real or imagined, had emerged as a major theme in the ongoing dialogue about control and domination in the colonial world. It became one of the most widespread and effective methods of dehumanizing non-European peoples and discouraging potentially subversive alliances between Native Americans and Africans. Cannibalism was strongly associated with savagery and was therefore used to justify the violent exploitation of African and indigenous peoples by Europeans. The question of whether or not African fears of cannibalism were well-founded remains a highly contentious one. Science today is somewhat conflicted as to the extent to which cannibalism actually took place, as it certainly served as an ideological tool. Most scholars accept that the extent and nature of cannibalism was distorted and exaggerated by colonial powers to justify the abusive treatment of enslaved populations. Further reading: Baker, Francis, Hulme, Peter and Iverson, Margaret, eds. Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Rice, Alan. Radical Tales of the Black Atlantic. New York: Continuum, 2003.

Erika M. Robb

African Institution In 1807 Britain abolished the slave trade in its colonies. Hailed as a great achievement by abolitionists, the event nevertheless raised further questions, such as how the anti-slavery movement should now proceed. There were many options, such as introducing emancipation legislation in Parliament, urging more direct intervention in Africa to root out the slave trade at its roots, or perhaps establishing a naval blockade in West Africa to stop slave ships. British abolitionists could use moral pressure, with or without it

AFRICAN INSTITUTION 21

their government's approval of countries that still use slaves in hopes of persuading them to stop the trade. In this environment, discussions began about a new anti-slavery organization that would take up the crusade from now-defunct groups like the Abolition Committee. The result of these discussions was the African Institution. The first organizational meeting of the African Institution took place in July 1807. The new group's leadership included virtually every major anti-slavery figure, such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay, Granville Sharp, William Allen, and others. Most of the group's goals and plans were laid out at this meeting and then presented at the group's first public meeting. The members present at this first meeting resolved to do everything in their power to promote the welfare of Africa, determined to spread practical information across Africa and to spread information across Britain on Africa's agricultural and commercial prospects. Therefore, the idea of ​​so-called legitimate trade was already an issue for abolitionists. It was naïve to expect, as most abolitionists did, that the abolition of the British slave trade would naturally be followed by a period of "development" and "civilization" in Africa, but the process of considering a possible trade relationship between Africa and Britain was reasonable . Before legal trade (as non-slavery trade was called) could flourish, the British needed to know “what was out there”. Promotion of any economic development in Africa. Over the next few years, the group's focus began to change and expand. Members of the African Institution used their personal connections to Britain's political leaders and managed to keep the anti-slavery issue at the forefront (or close to it). From the start, however, the group was hampered by a lack of financial resources. Although many wealthy people contributed to the organization, it simply never had the kind of fiscal power necessary to carry out its most ambitious plans. The African Institution wanted to promote Western education in Africa, but could hardly afford to send books and could not afford to support their few teachers for long. To encourage British interest in African products, the African Institution hoped to facilitate the cultivation of certain cash crops (such as hemp for rope, cotton, rice, etc.) that would demonstrate Africa's potential. The group offered incentives to those who imported African products, but the volumes imported were insignificant. Also, few people took up the group's offer. The organization recognized early on that the key to the success of its objectives was enforcing Britain's anti-slavery laws, as well as laws passed by other countries. The African institution exercised considerable influence over its own government on Africa-related matters, but it was evidently infinitely more difficult for the group to exert pressure on foreign governments. Nonetheless, the foreign slave trade became an important issue for the organization and for Britain. At the Vienna, Aachen and Verona Congresses, the group kept British diplomats "at work" to follow up the issue with other countries and ensured their diplomats were provided with relevant anti-slavery literature. Some

22 AFRICAN INSTITUTION

Minor successes are actually due to the group's industriousness, as other European powers slowly abandoned their slave trade and established joint Admiralty courts to try those accused of illegal slavery. The African Institution's efforts in relation to African development have been most evident in Sierra Leone. In the truest sense of the word, Sierra Leone provided a veritable testing ground for development plans and programs. Slaves freed by confiscated slave ships usually landed in Sierra Leone, ensuring a regular influx of new settlers, and the African institution effectively selected the colony's first governors after it came under Crown control in 1807. The group corresponded regularly with these governors. Sending school supplies and books when possible. As with other matters, the attention given to Sierra Leone by the African institution meant that the UK Government would be closely monitoring developments there. The colony was fairly stable and economically viable by the late 1820s, but how much credit the African institution deserves is debatable (though its lack of effort is not). The abolitionists envisioned a Sierra Leone based on the individual farmer working independently on small farms. These free peasants would form the basis of a successful agricultural economy. The key to the success of this idea was the regular arrival of new settlers. If the government sponsored a mass transport of free blacks from the western hemisphere, the reformers' hopes could be realized. That would certainly have helped the colony, but there were no such plans. However, a free black American named Paul Cuffe was willing to lead such expeditions and had lined up potential colonists. The African institution supported Cuffe as best it could, constantly trying to intervene on his behalf in order to make his efforts more fruitful and easier to complete. Ultimately, Cuffe brought 34 immigrants, but the War of 1812 and Cuffe's death in 1817 prevented further similar projects. After Cuffe failed to settle more than a handful of new residents in Sierra Leone, the African Institution progressively morphed from a group attempting practical activities such as colonization and agricultural projects to a body primarily concerned with political struggles against the injustices of the Slavery led and later opposed the institution of slavery itself. With this in mind, members of the group began to closely monitor slave conditions in the West Indies and advocated the establishment of slave registers in all West Indies colonies. Abolitionists believed that these registers would not only help indirectly improve the condition of slaves, but also stop the illegal importation of slaves. The African Institution began collecting information on the slave trade in East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Anti-slavery supporters had never paid much attention to these areas, and the group was the first to address the issue. The group corresponded extensively with Henri Christophe, the first and only black king of Haiti. Political reality prevented the British government from recognizing Christophe as the legitimate ruler, but the African Institution provided moral support and even arranged for several teachers to go to Haiti. Christophe's success would have been a significant boost to the abolitionist agenda - a successful, independent black king ruling his own territory in an "enlightened" way - but Christophe was overthrown and assassinated in 1820.

AFRICAN RULER AND THE SLAVE TRADE 23

What emerges from any reasonable analysis of the African institution is a picture of a group whose primary goals have been, at best, only partially met. The group's personal ties to the government did not ensure that all of its plans would be carried out, but they did allow the group to make its agenda a part of national planning and international concern. The African Institution was Britain's leading national anti-slavery group from 1807 to 1823, when its role was increasingly played by the new Antislavery Society. The African institution came to an end in 1827, having carried the anti-slavery banner (alone) for nearly two decades and having produced a new generation of anti-slavery agitators. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; African Squadrons, The; British Navy; British slave trade; closure of the slave trade; humanitarianism. Further reading: Ackerson, Wayne. The African Institution (1807–1827) and the anti-slavery movement in Britain. Ceredigion, UK: Mellen Press, 2005; Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Temperley, Howard. British Anti-Slavery, 1833–1870. Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972.

Wayne Ackerson African Rulers and the Slave Trade When the Portuguese began exploring the coast of Africa in the 15th century, African rulers were already involved in the internal African slave trade. Long before the arrival of Portuguese explorers and traders, African herders living in central and western Sudan employed slaves to increase crop cultivation and perform domestic services. In West Africa slaves made up a large part of the population and slaves could gain important positions in the royal household or serve as advisors to African rulers. Overall, European slave traders rarely traveled into the interior of Africa to capture their human cargo. Slave traders depended on African rulers to provide captives to feed the slave trade. From the beginning of the external slave trade, African rulers sought to control the trade by confining slave markets to trading centers. A prisoner of war or kidnapping could be ransomed, but most often prisoners were sold to merchants or soldiers gave their prisoners to their king. As local African governments obtained slaves through wars, raids, kidnappings, and taking tribute, the same African rulers also shipped slaves to the coast to sell to the European slave traders. Long before the arrival of Europeans on the West African coast, slavery was fully integrated into African society and Western society accepted the practice of slavery. The early slave trade in Africa lacks detailed descriptions due to the lack of detailed study and evidence; However, Africans were involved in slavery and the slave trade before the development of the Atlantic slave trade system. The Portuguese first sailed the coasts of Africa prospecting for gold, but they soon learned they could also provide shipping services, for which they were paid in gold. Portuguese sailors and merchants traded cloth and horses from Morocco along with metals (copper and brass) from Europe for pearls, pepper,

24 AFRICAN RULER AND THE SLAVE TRADE

and slaves. The pepper could be sold in Europe, but the Portuguese sold the pearls and slaves for gold on the Gold Coast. The first slaves bought by Portuguese traders were sold to other Africans. As the demand for labor increased on the plantations in the Caribbean and America, Portuguese slave traders stopped selling slaves to Africans. The definition of slavery varied in the numerous societies that held people in bondage. The West viewed the buying and selling of slave property similarly to cattle or other property, but African society demonstrated a more complex definition of slavery. African society contained a number of social and economic differences that could be viewed as slavery. African rulers held prisoners of war in servitude who were expected to work in agriculture, mining, and other arduous jobs. For various other reasons, individuals might be attached to a particular ruler or society. People agreed to become slaves to pay a debt or seek protection. In times of famine, parents would sell children for food, making sure their children were fed. Some slaves were criminals, kidnap victims, concubines, or slave soldiers. Regardless of their method, the slave-owning society viewed these slaves as outsiders, almost non-humans. Over time, outsiders could be brought into the local community through marriage or service. By the 14th century slavery was widespread, but slaves were divided into hierarchical groups, with clear distinctions between domestic slaves who could not be sold and slaves who were captured or bought in war. Although most slaves were female, free women often used and owned slaves. In some cases, African rulers collected vast quantities of slaves and relied on the use of slaves to expand agricultural production. In the central Sudan region, Kutumbi, the Kano leader in the first half of the 17th century, built his well-known reputation as a slave trader by capturing thousands of slaves. Kutumbi settled several hundred of his own slaves near Kano. Relying on prisoners, one of Kutumbi's generals built his headquarters and sent another 2,000 slaves to Kano. In some cases, slaves were used by African rulers as militia for defensive purposes. Farther east, captives of Badi II were settled as peasants around the capital of the sultanate, Sennar. These slaves also provided military support in the event of a foreign invasion. These slave farmers offered little military resistance to the well-armed and well-trained armies of the other states in Sudan. Although not very useful militarily, Badi II valued the slaves for their agricultural production, which would feed his armies. During the 18th century, the sultans of Dar Fur employed slaves in agricultural settlements adjacent to their capital. In addition to producing food, slaves could also be used to manufacture other industrial goods. Some Dar Fur aristocrats could have up to 600 slaves working in their domain. In addition to West Africa and Central Africa, East Africa developed an extensive trade in ivory and slaves. Because East African ivory was less brittle and retained its color longer than Indian ivory, Muslim merchants became interested in obtaining ivory for shipment to India. Along with the ivory, slaves were bought and sent to India, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. Muslim merchants joined African leaders - for example Mirambo von

AFRICAN RULER AND THE SLAVE TRADE 25

Nyamwezi - in the opening of trade routes, the establishment of states and the return of large quantities of ivory and slaves. Mirambo began by hiring Ngoni mercenaries and later adding prisoners of war, escaped slaves and deserters to form an armed militia. Mirambo and his army operated successfully during the slave trade era, and his mercenary armies were joined with other chiefs to form a single state in southern Tanzania, eastern Zambia and Malawi. With the arrival of Europeans, particularly the Portuguese, the internal slave trade changed while the external slave trade developed. Local African laws required payment of a fine for breaking the law, but as external demand for slaves increased, African rulers imprisoned convicted criminals who were later sold to Europeans as slaves. Although the sources of the slaves varied, many of the slaves sold on the coast were captives, the result of local wars that led to the establishment of new African states or the expansion of states in interior Africa. The Muslim Fulani of Futa Jalon created a new state by waging war against their neighbors and creating an ample supply of prisoners of war to be sold into slavery. The rulers of Oyo, Dahomey and Asante waged wars of political expansion and became powerful African states. As a rule, African leaders rarely sold their own subjects into slavery, but they also knew that the handsome price offered by European slave traders could make them quite rich. Local territorial conflicts resulted in a steady and plentiful supply of human goods. Located west of the Niger estuary in the Atlantic Ocean, the Bay of Benin became one of West Africa's most important slave export regions. Starting slowly, the export of slaves grew to enormous heights, surpassing the Portuguese-controlled region around Luanda, earning the Bay of Benin the nickname of the Slave Coast. The export slave trade became the first state monopoly controlled by the Oyo. Increasing hostile conflicts, which led to many new prisoners of war, explain the large increase in the enslavement of large numbers of people from the interior of Africa. Several wars instigated by the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo against the coastal towns of Ardrah, Whydah, Porto Novo and Lagos resulted in more and more people being conscripted into the slave trade. The Dahomey, also inland, raided further north, capturing captives for sale in the coastal trade and challenging Oyo and the coastal towns to dominate trade with the Europeans. Oyo eventually forced Dahomey to pay tribute, but hostilities between Oyo, Dahomey, and the coastal towns continued to produce prisoners of war who served as human commodities and fueled the slave export business. Examination of different regions of Africa suggests that African rulers traded based on local conditions. The Slave Coast had little European contact, depending on the proximity of European ships to the coastal towns and the activities of Muslim traders. African leaders traded with Muslim traders who brought slaves and other trade goods from the interior of the country to the coast via an interregional trading system. Developments within the Slave Coast trading system depended on political centralization. The rulers of the Oyo and Dahomey kingdoms created stronger centralized governments because of their dealings with other nations in the North and the United States

26 AFRICAN RULER AND THE SLAVE TRADE

Need to maintain control of one's territory. African rulers understood that maintaining the military readiness necessary to capture new prisoners and defend themselves required organization and a bureaucracy to regulate European trade. 17th and 18th century traders traveling west from the Slave Coast landed in the cities of Accra, Winneba, Cape Coast or Elmina along an area Europeans called the "Gold Coast". In terms of the slave trade, the Gold Coast never reached the importance of the Slave Coast, but Europeans still landed there because of the area's reputation as a source of gold. Although not a major source of slaves, political disputes among the Akan led to a supply of captives. The Asante rulers and their armies successfully subdued several smaller states and took control of the Gold Coast. In the second half of the 18th century, the Akan Wars resulted in approximately 150,000 slaves. Overall, the Gold Coast mirrored the Slave Coast. Few European traders traveled inland, and African leaders and the newly formed centralized African states restricted European trade to a few coastal towns. East of the Niger Delta, in Biafra Bay, another area emerged where African leaders participated in the slave trade. Because of its mangrove swamps, the coast along Biafra Bay developed later than the Gold Coast or Slave Coast as a source of slaves. By the late 1670s the towns of Aboh, Bonny and Elem Kalabari were well known slave trade depots, but the greatest economic expansion in the Bay of Biafra came later in the 18th century. The coast proved inhospitable to even the heartiest of slave traders, resulting in a sparse presence of Europeans. The minimal Muslim influence shows the difficulty of trading on the marshy coast. Because of the harsh terrain, the strong centralized governments that arose in the areas around the Slave Coast and Gold Coast rarely emerged along Biafra Bay. As a result, the slave trade developed a different character. Instead of protracted warfare, including punitive measures, raids, and tribute payments, local village leaders organized and conducted slave raids and kidnapping expeditions against neighboring villages, taking captives in canoes along the delta's winding tributaries to the coast. Although Biafra Bay never reached the same level of slave exports as the Slave Coast in the 18th century, it has the distinction of surpassing all other West African regions. The Fulani of Futa Jalon and along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, the centralized Asante, Dahomey, and Oyo monarchies amassed large numbers of state-owned slaves through repeated, protracted wars. Because these confrontations between kingdoms vying for control of the slave trade often decided the region's economic and political stability, African leaders often chose to execute their enemies and defectors as part of their victory. Although African leaders transported large numbers of captives to the coast, African rulers restricted the displacement of people within their own kingdoms. The Asante of the Gold Coast ended the mass expulsion of natives to the coast, and as the Oyo became dominant along the Bay of Benin, they prevented the export of slaves from their own borders. As the Oyo Empire lost its strong hold, exports of Yoruba slaves increased.

AFRICAN SQUADRONS, THE 27TH

Slavery and the slave trade needed the support and protection of centralized government to survive, expand, and produce immediate short-term wealth. Political authorities secured property rights for slave owners and traders. Governments protected slave transportation and slave markets, making escape or rescue difficult. However, government regulation and involvement in the trade did not result in ownership of all slaves. For example, the kings of Asante and Dahomey exercised rights over all slaves in their kingdoms, but they did not own all slaves. Government interest in capturing, transporting, and selling slaves led to the introduction of laws and regulations governing the trade. The regulations required the payment of a variety of fees, duties, and other levies. African states imposed monetary fees on merchants for anchorage, timber and water. Depending on the degree of control African rulers exercised over commercial activities, traders might have had to pay for brokers, interpreters, and other services. Beginning with the Portuguese, traders built several forts along the coast of Africa, the most notable being Elmina on the Gold Coast. These forts served as trading depots during the slave trade, while others served as shelters from invaders. None of these forts would have stood without the permission of the local African ruler or community. The occupier of the fort paid taxes and procured food from the surrounding villages. These forts were useful in opening up the interior trade routes and contact with slavers and merchants. From codifying slavery and the slave trade into law, it was a short step to making slavery a social institution that could be passed on to future generations as part of African social tradition. Many African states grew and prospered because of their ability to control the slave trade. With government involvement, law, a new social tradition, and increased external demand for slaves, African rulers seemed more than willing to trade their greatest asset, young men and women, for money. See also Decentralized Societies; ethnicity; Garcia II of Congo; slavery in Africa; Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. Further reading: Juli, Robert W. A History of the African People. 5th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998; Curtin, Philip, Feierman, Steven, Thompson, Leonard, and Vansina, Jan. African History. Boston: Klein, Brown, 1978; Davidson, Basil. The African slave trade. Rev. ed. Boston: Klein, Braun, 1980; Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Manny, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Western, Oriental, and African Slave Trade. African Studies Series, ed. J.M. Lonsdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Schillington, Kevin. history of Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Michael Bonislawski

African Squadrons, The four independently operating African squadrons of the United Kingdom, United States, French and Portuguese navies patrolled the West African coast at various times between 1819 and 1870. The African squadrons and smaller naval units before them were part of the effort by those nations

28 AFRICAN SQUADRONS, THE

to enforce - or appear to enforce - their own anti-slave trade laws, as well as any international anti-slave trade treaties to which they are party. The United Kingdom was the world's leading naval power after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and its Royal Navy maintained its leading position throughout the 19th century. The Royal Navy's African Squadron was the first to be sent to the West African coast and it was the largest, most significant and last to be brought back. The US, French, and Portuguese African squadrons came later, were smaller, captured fewer ships and slaves, and were withdrawn earlier. A combination of measures enacted by Parliament in 1806 and 1807 had prohibited British subjects - individuals, corporations and ships flying its flag - from engaging in the slave trade after April 30, 1807. In 1808, to set the stage for activating this interdiction enforcement, the United Kingdom sent two ships of the Royal Navy on a reconnaissance cruise off the West African coast, even as the United Kingdom's ongoing wars with Napoleon continued. Five more Royal Navy ships were sent to the West African coast in 1811 after the UK began acquiring treaty rights to board other nations' ships to stop slavery. The ships dispatched in 1811 managed to capture a number of slave ships and their slave cargoes between 1811 and 1813. Other Royal Navy ships were sent to patrol the West African coast from the end of 1815, after they were no longer needed for the Napoleonic Wars of the War of 1812. An official Royal Navy West African squadron was formed in 1819 and remained in service until 1870, when it was clear that the transatlantic slave trade had ended. The Royal Navy had three ships in West Africa by 1816, seven by 1819, ten by 1827 and nineteen by 1839. Their West African squadron ranged from thirteen to thirty-six ships between 1840 and 1860, with the number being reduced when the United Kingdom was elsewhere in Engaged in conflicts (e.g. China, Crimea and India) and averaged twenty ships in the 1860s before being withdrawn. Eventually extending to the African coast from Cape Verde (14°40'N) to Cape Frio (18°S) the Royal Navy's patrols initially focused on the 2,000 miles of coastline from the Isles de Los ( 9° north latitude) to the mouth of the Gabon (at the equator). The slave trade further north was mostly French, the slave trade further south was mostly Portuguese, and neither trade was originally covered by anti-slave trade treaties. The United Kingdom's patrols were later expanded south after Brazil's independence created grounds for claims that previous agreements that allowed southern Portuguese trade to continue no longer applied. Initially, the Royal Navy's job was to sail along the West African coast, capture slave ships and people enslaved in violation of law or treaty, and bring the captured ships and slaves before an appropriate court, usually at Freetown in Sierra Leone. These duties quickly expanded to include searches along West African coastal bays where slave traders and slave buyers moved to conceal their trade. The Royal

AFRICAN SQUADRONS, THE 29

The navy later negotiated with African kings and chiefs to obtain treaties — sometimes negotiated at gunpoint and often ignored after their execution — promising that they would stop trading in slaves. To help disputants willing to sign such treaties, she meddled in African political and successor contests. The Royal Navy's service in West Africa was widely regarded as uncomfortable and unhealthy, so unhealthy that, while the effects of malaria-carrying mosquitoes were still unknown, they issued orders that crew members were not allowed to stay ashore overnight. It was a difficult task and sometimes dangerous. Slavers on land could be heavily armed, and some slavers soon began using fast and heavily armed ships capable of outrunning and outclassing Royal Navy vessels. The much smaller US Navy was the next to begin African anti-slave trade patrols. It sent out five ships in 1820 and 1821 stopping at least eleven slave ships from returning home, and it sent out others occasionally over the next twenty-two years. The United States created its African Permanent Squadron in 1843 to implement the provisions of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842). Under this treaty, the United Kingdom and the United States not only agreed on the United States–Canada border, but also promised to maintain independent naval squadrons along the African coast to enforce their own laws and treaty obligations to suppress the slave trade. The US Navy's African squadron was small. Between 1843 and 1859 it consisted of two to seven ships. The entire US Navy had only twenty-five to thirty ships. For health and supply reasons, the US squadron was stationed in the Cape Verde Islands, nearly 1,000 miles from West Africa's main slave trading area. The US Squadron was created primarily in hopes of stopping Royal Navy interference with US merchant ships. The commander's first orders were to stop the abuse of the American flag and to assert American rights. In fact, the Royal Navy's practice of boarding American merchant ships during the Napoleonic Wars was one of the causes of the War of 1812 Overall size of the Navy under the 1858 legislation ships could be used to blockade Confederate ports. In 1862, while the Civil War was raging, the United States agreed for the first time to allow the Royal Navy's African squadron to board suspicious-looking American ships to search for slaves. The first French West African Squadron was established in 1825 and operated until 1831. Thereafter, the French Navy had comparatively few anti-slave trade duties, as there were few French-flagged slave traders after the French Revolution of 1830. France had not negotiated treaties with other countries (other than the United Kingdom) authorizing the French Navy to search their ships for slaves. Another, small French squadron (two to six ships) was sent to patrol the West African coast after France signed a convention with the United Kingdom in 1833. The size of the new French squadron was increased to fourteen ships

30 AFRICAN SQUADRONS, THE

1842, principally to counter the Royal Navy's alleged undue interference with French merchants, under the guise of exercising mutual search rights which France and the United Kingdom had granted each other in 1831. An Anglo-French Convention of 1845 followed. Instead of allowing a continued right of search, France promised to allow twenty-six of its own naval vessels to patrol the West African coast for the next ten years. This promise was briefly kept, but the size of the French squadron was reduced in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The 1845 Convention was not renewed when it expired in 1855. Portugal's Angolan squadron was the last to arrive and the first to leave. It resulted from an 1842 treaty between Portugal and the United Kingdom, made after Parliament passed legislation in 1839 asserting the right to ban Portuguese slave ships even without a treaty. It too was therefore seen as a means of reducing allegedly unlawful UK interference in another country's merchant shipping. Portugal's Angolan squadron consisted of four to nine ships, operating only from 1843 to 1848, and was similarly limited to patrolling slave ships in Portuguese colours. An estimated one-sixth of the ships involved in the slave trade in the Middle Passage between 1808 and 1870 were eventually lost to their owners after being interdicted by naval patrols along the West African coast. The vast majority of derelict ships, around 85 per cent, were stopped by the Royal Navy. An estimated 160,000 (one sixteenth) of the slaves shipped through the Middle Passage during these years were captured and freed. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; African rulers and the slave trade; Angola; British Navy; British slave trade; closure of the slave trade; enslavement and procurement; free trade; French slave trade; Portuguese slave trade; Slave Coast; slavery in Africa; trade forts; Wars, African; Zulueta, Pedro de. Further Reading: Bethell, Leslie. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; Catterall, Helen Tunnicliff. Trials Relating to American Slavery and the Negro. volume 1. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1926; Drescher, Seymour. The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Du Bois, W.E.B. The Suppression of the Slave Trade in the United States of America, 1638–1870. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965; Eltis, David. Economic growth and the end of the transatlantic slave trade. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; Flatland, Betty. Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972; Howard, Warren S. American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837–1862. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963; Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Lloyd, Christopher. The Navy and the Slave Trade. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1949; Matheson, William L. Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–1865. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1929; Miers, Susanne. Britain and the end of the slave trade. New York: Africana, 1975; Mannix, Daniel Pratt, with Cowley, Malcolm. Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865. New York: Vikings, 1962; Murray, David. Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Press, 1980; Porter, Dale H. The Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, 1784–1807. Hamden, CT: Archon

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Books, 1970; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Ward, WEF The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

Steven B. Jacobson Africanus, Leo (c. 1490 – c. 1530) Leo Africanus was a diplomat, traveler, and author best known for his book Description of Africa. The book represented the first major work written for Europeans by someone from Africa, and it provided information about African peoples and geography to budding European explorers. Africanus was one of the few Africans captured by Europeans in the early 16th century who left an account of his travels. Born in Granada to Islamic parents around 1490, Africanus was given the name Al Hazzan Ibn Muhammad Al Wazzan, also known as Al Hazzan Al Wazzan. In his early childhood, his family moved to Fez, a city in North Africa south of the Strait of Gibraltar. While living in Fes, Al Hazzan Al Wazzan served the Sultan of Fes as a diplomat and traveled to several regions including Egypt and Constantinople. In 1518 Al Hazzan Al Wazzan was captured and given as a gift to Pope Leo X in Rome. After a few years in captivity, Al Hazzan Al Wazzan converted to Christianity, resulting in Pope Leo X giving him the baptismal name Leo Africanus. After his conversion, Africanus was released from captivity but remained in Rome, where he wrote the Description of Africa. It is generally accepted that Africanus stayed in Rome for some ten years, possibly longer. Rome was sacked in 1527 and it is uncertain whether he fled to Africa, died in Rome or became a prisoner of the invaders. He probably returned to Africa, possibly Tunisia, where he died around 1532. A lively debate about his conversion to Christianity questions his religious affiliation and whether his return to Africa was conditional on his conversion to Islam. The lasting influence of Africanus was the description of Africa. The book, published posthumously in 1550, described various peoples, wars, trades and geography in Africa. The book became a bestseller and was published in Latin, English, French and later in German. One of the book's most important descriptions contained information about the famous city of Timbuktu along with other geographical details. Historians have debated the accuracy of Africa's description, leading to instances where some details have been disproved while others have confirmed certain information. Notwithstanding the work's general accuracy, it shaped the European view of Africa, like Timbuktu using gold nuggets for money, and provided Europeans with information about Africa at a time when exploration was continuing and the European slave trade was not yet an established institution in Africa . See also slave stories. Further reading: Davis, Natalie Zemon. Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006; "Leo Affricanus: Description of Timbuktu." Fordham University website: www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/leo_afri.html.

Adam Paddock

32 AFRICATOWN, ALABAMA

AfricaTown, Alabama AfricaTown was founded by West Africans in 1868 and is located three miles north of Mobile, Alabama. It was developed in connection with the Clotilda smuggling episode. Despite the tragic context from which it emerged, AfricaTown has emerged as a productive, viable community characterized by social order, self-reliance and communalism. The founding mothers and fathers of AfricaTown arrived in the United States as prisoners aboard the slave ship Clotilda in the latter half of the 19th century. Trapped in Alabama, they pooled their resources to acquire land on which they founded the community currently known as AfricaTown. Its name reflects the fact that the community is shaped and rooted in the indigenous West African traditions and values ​​that its founders transmitted to Alabama. AfricaTown's governance, for example, modeled the age-based governance system that exists in many West African communities. In this model, younger members of the community show respect for their elders, whose collective experience, knowledge, and wisdom are held in high esteem. AfricaTown elders established their codes of moral and social conduct and imposed sanctions on residents who violated them. The exigencies of American slavery and the practice of domestic terrorism against blacks during the Reconstruction period forced Africans and their descendants to be self-sufficient. Interdependence was facilitated by the ingenuity of African peoples, who were endowed with agricultural, metallurgical, carving, sculpting, tanning, weaving, and other indigenous knowledge and skills that not only ensured their survival, but also contributed to the success of plantations, industries, and household economies in America. Rice and indigo plantations would not have been successful without Senegambian, Ibo and Yoruba Africans who have preserved and passed on their expertise in cultivating these plants native to West Africa, particularly as European plantation owners did not possess this knowledge. The world's leading growers are arguably in West Africa, which partly explains American growers' preference for West African workers over European ones. Coming from West African agrarian societies, the founders of AfricaTown applied their agricultural know-how in Alabama, where they cultivated gardens that yielded bountiful harvests. In the spirit of communalism, they shared food, herbal medicine, and other essential resources, thereby improving their quality of life while contributing to the sustainability of their community. Some of the descendants of AfricaTown's founders continue to live in AfricaTown, where they continue to cultivate gardens in the tradition of their West African ancestors, who did not allow their indigenous practices and values ​​to crumble under the treachery of American slavery. The descendants preserve aspects of their West African heritage and architectural sites that document AfricaTown's history, including the Union Baptist Church. Near the church is Plateau Cemetery, where the founders of AfricaTown and some of their descendants are buried. In

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In 1985, the Alabama state legislature designated AfricaTown a Historic Landmark. Today, AfricaTown is a microcosm of African America, created by intelligent, hardworking, talented, and resilient Africans and their descendants who rose above their victimhood as enslaved peoples in the United States on several important levels. See also Lewis, Cudjo. Further Reading: Hurston, Zora Neale. "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver." Journal of Negro History 12 (October 1927): 648-663; Pettaway, Addie E. "AfricaTown, USA: Some Aspects of Popular Life and Material Culture of an Historical Landscape." Madison: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 1985; Robertson, Natalie S. "The African Ancestry of the Founders of AfricaTown, Alabama." Ph.D. PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 1996; Roche, Emma Langdon. Historical Sketches of the South. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1914; Williams, Henry C. AfricaTown, USA: A Pictorial History of Plateau and Magazine Point, Alabama. Np.: American Ethnic Science Society, 1981.

Natalie Suzette Robertson Allada Allada is one of the numerous Aja kingdoms of West Africa. Before the 19th century, the Aja occupied the western part of Yoruba land. Other important Aja kingdoms were Whydah, Popo, Dahomey and Jakin. The history of the slave trade in Allada is a story of serious power struggles between the Empire and its neighbors and private merchants, and between the Empire and the Europeans. This power struggle was inevitable given the importance of the geographical location of Allada's two major ports: Offra and Jakin. Both of these ports provided fine navigation and posed no threat to European ships. In addition, the densely populated nature of the Slave Coast and the uneasy relationships between the Aja-speaking people led to the capture of slaves as spoils of war. In 1681, 33 out of 35 English ships identified as embarking or embarking on the Slave Coast went to Offra. The rivalry between Whydah and Allada arose from the need to attract European slave traders. The Europeans preferred trading with Whydah for several reasons. Allada's slaves cost them much more than Whydah's slaves. The cost of poterage was higher at Allada than at Whydah, presumably because the Allada capital, where trade was concentrated, was further inland than the European forts at Whydah. In Allada slaves were bought in lots and the Europeans were forced to take the good and the bad slaves. At Whydah, slaves were bought individually and Europeans could choose the good and reject the bad. Although the Allada traders insisted on being paid in kauri for slaves, their Whydah counterpart (who also favored kauri) did not mind being paid in cheap goods when the European traders told them that kauri kauri were not available be. In the mid-18th century, the Allada monarchy was traditionally strict in granting concessions to European traders. Despite constant European threats to abandon its ports, Allada refused to reverse hostile policies. However, abandoning Allada was difficult for European merchants, since moving to another port meant building forts and building fortresses

34 AMISTAD (1997)

other slave trade establishments. For Allada, the best way to avoid crises between the monarchy and the intermediaries was to control trade in a centralized and bureaucratic manner. Excessive state control of trade presented the monarchy and the middlemen with conflicts of interest. Royal attempts to control trade by forcing inland merchants to deal with officials were a major factor in the Dahomey invasion of Allada in the 1720s. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; Decentralized Societies. Further reading: Akinjogbin, Adeagbo. Dahomey and its Neighbors, 1708–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967; Burton, Richard. A mission for Gelele, King of Dahomey. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1864; Priestly, Margaret. West African Trade and Coastal Company. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Saheed pendant

Amistad (1997) Amistad is a film that features a dramatized portrayal of the slave mutiny and the ensuing trial known as the Amistad Affair. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams and Djimon Hounsou as Cinque (the leader of the slave revolt aboard the Amistad), it is a historical film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg. It is also Spielberg's second film about the African American experience, following his adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1985). The film chronicles the events of the mutiny and trial through the eyes of McConaughey's character, Roger Sherman Baldwin. Amistad received critical acclaim and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Morgan Freeman for Best Supporting Actor. The film received four Golden Globe nominations and won two Image Awards, the NAACP's highest award for motion pictures. Although the film received acclaim from critics as well as African and African American groups, it was also criticized for its lack of historical accuracy. Unlike Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), the director exercised certain artistic liberties with the historical accuracy of the events. First, Freeman's character, Theodore Joadson, was not an actual person but a composite figure of the various black abolitionists who rallied around the Amistad case. Another plot device was Cinque's meeting with President Quincy Adams at his home. Adams was an avid botanist and in the film he shows Cinque an African violet. The sight of the flower reminds Cinque of his lost homeland. In reality, the judge of the U.S. Circuit Court in Hartford held Africans in custody during their trials and appeals. Second, the African violet is a flower native to modern day Tanzania and Kenya in East Africa. Cinque and his fellow Africans were Mende speakers from West Africa. It is highly unlikely that he would ever have seen an African violet in the wild. The Jamaican Film Censorship Board removed the opening scenes depicting the violent slave mutiny from all copies of the film released in Jamaican theaters. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; Amistad, Die; Cuba.

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Further reading: Owens, William. Slave mutiny: revolt on the schooner Amistad. New York: J. Day Company, 1953; Spielberg, Steven, dir. Amistad. Released by Dreamworks Pictures in association with HBO Pictures, 1999.

Roy Doron

Amistad , The Amistad Affair (also referred to as the Amistad Fall and Amistad Mutiny) is the general name for a mutiny by enslaved Africans aboard the slave transport ship Amistad, captured off the coast of Long Island, New York, and the subsequent ones Trials reaching the US Supreme Court regarding the status of mutinous slaves. Discovery of the Mutiny On August 25, 1839, news broke that a mysterious "Negro pirate ship" had landed off the coast of Long Island. Rumors about the existence of this ship have been circulating in the United States for several months. The schooner USS Washington impounded the ship the following day and transported the ship's passengers to New London, Connecticut (where slavery was still legal until 1848). Apart from the slaves, two Spaniards, Jose "Pepe" Ruiz and Pedro Montez, stayed on board and told the story of the mutiny. The Amistad was en route from Havana to Puerto Principe when one of the slaves, Joseph Cinque, used an old rusty nail to free himself from his bonds, freeing the other slaves and murdering the entire crew. Ruiz and Montez were only spared because they had navigation skills and received orders to take the ship to Africa. Ruiz explained that instead of taking the ship to Africa, he steered the Amistad in a generally northerly direction for two months until the ship ran out of supplies and was forced to land in New York. Although Ruiz issued passports to all the slaves stating that they were all born slaves in Cuba, not a single one of them could speak Spanish and all could only speak native African languages, later discovered by the general to be the Mende territory of Sierra Leone . The Trials After he was taken to New London and jailed to await trial on charges of piracy and murder, news of the indictment reached Lewis Tappan, one of the leaders of the abolitionist movement in New York City. He immediately saw the potential of this case to popularize the abolitionist movement and began raising funds and building one

Cinque, leader of the Amistad rebellion. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International.

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Defense team to try the case in the Connecticut District Courts beginning September 17, 1839. Not knowing where in Africa the slaves had come from, Tappan arrived in New London with three "Natives of Africa". One of them spoke "Geshee," which some of the prisoners could understand, but none could speak. Tappan endeavored to cultivate a romantic atmosphere around the prisoners, and especially around Cinque, whom he described as "about five feet eight inches tall, of fine proportions, with a noble air" (New York Journal of Commerce, September 8 1839). ). For Tappan, this process was both about saving the lives of these Africans and raising awareness everywhere, especially in the United States, about the inhumanity of slavery. The first trial was a confused case involving multiple claims by the abolitionists, who were demanding the freedom of the slaves, the surviving Spanish crew, who were demanding the return of the mutineer slaves to Cuba, and the attorneys of both the USS Washington's captain and a captain Green included. who was the first man on Long Island to meet with the Africans. Both lawyers were demanding salvage rights for the Amistad and a percentage of her crew or fair compensation. Because these slaves were of Spanish origin, the federal government requested that they be placed under the Pinckney Treaty of 1795 and thus placed under the direct control of President Martin Van Buren. The court's verdict was mixed. First, the United States had no jurisdiction in this matter since the mutiny took place on Spanish territory, on board a Spanish ship and among Spanish citizens. As for the prisoners, however, the court ruled that they should remain in custody pending the settlement of the property case, and a new date was set for this trial (October 31, 1839). To keep the case fresh in the minds of the American public, Tappan arranged for Montez and Ruiz to be arrested on Oct. 17 charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment in New York. This new trial would determine the fate of the Africans and the Spanish traders and the salvage rights of the two men on the USS Washington and Captain Green of Long Island. However, it would be the testimony of Cinque and another African, Grabeau, that would make this process a hallmark of the abolitionist movement. For President Martin Van Buren, the case was a high-profile case. Since 1840 was an election year, he wanted to end the case as soon as possible so as not to hurt his re-election prospects. If Africans were returned to Cuba as freedmen under the treaty between Spain and Britain, they would have the right to work as indentured servants for seven years and then regain their full liberty rights. In reality, however, most of these people did not survive seven years of servitude. To this end, Van Buren called the schooner USS Grampus from his anti-slavery patrols in the Atlantic to the port of New Haven to transport the Africans to Havana with British Superintendent of Liberated Africans in Cuba Richard Robert Madden. Madden, knowing what would be the fate of the Amistad men in Cuba, volunteered to help Tappan keep the men in the United States. Also, Madden had spoken to the owners of the barracks in Havana and he was convinced that the Africans would be executed

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upon their return to Cuba as a deterrent against future mutinies and uprisings. President Van Buren's plan was to await a verdict that said the men were slaves and should be returned to Cuba. Then the President could expedite the shipment of the men to Cuba, undermining due process and giving Tappan no time to appeal before the slaves were returned to Cuba. The verdict, announced on January 13, 1840, was to render the plans null and void. Connecticut Circuit Court Judge Andrew T. Judson read his verdict in front of a largely pro-African courtroom. Tappan, weary of Judson's abolitionist leanings, could not have asked for a better judgment. Judson explained that the men were in fact Africans who "were born free and have ever since had the right to be free and not slaves." He also explained that their actions on board the Amistad proceeded from a "desire to win." their freedom and return to their families'' and therefore could not be punished as they were the direct result of unlawful enslavement. Judson ordered the Africans placed under the control of the government's executive branch and returned to Africa. The U.S. government appealed the case to the Connecticut Supreme Court, which upheld Judson's decision, and eventually to the Federal Supreme Court, which convened in January 1841 to hear the case. For the Supreme Court arguments, Tappan enlisted the help of former President John Quincy Adams to support defense attorney Roger Baldwin (the main character in Steven Spielberg's film Amistad), who would eloquently advocate for African emancipation. Judge Joseph Story later called Adam's argument "extraordinary for its force, for its bitter sarcasm, and for its handling of issues far beyond the records and points of discussion." On March 9, the Supreme Court issued its decision, which was largely affirmed the lower courts. Justice Story would say that the actions of the Africans on the Amistad were not criminal but that the “ultimate right of the people in extreme cases . . . To use violence against devastating injustices.'' With that, Africans were finally free to stay or return to Africa. After several months working for Tappan and the abolitionist movement in New York, Tappan decided the time had come to bring the men back to Africa. On December 4, 1841, the Mendians (as they were now called after their language) boarded the barque Gentleman with several missionaries and teachers and, after a last meeting with Adams, presented him with an elegant Bible, Cinque and his compatriots returned to Sierra Leone. In November 1840, Van Buren lost his re-election bid to William Henry Harrison. The importance of the Amistad affair lies in the fact that it was the first trial of enslaved Africans to gain publicity nationwide and was widely and hotly debated in the press. Tappan and his comrades used the event not only to publicize the plight of Amistad men, but also to present slavery as a whole. For Tappan, ending the slave trade would not be possible as long as slavery existed because it was the institution of slavery that fueled demand

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for slaves and hence for the trade itself. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; Amistad (1997). Further reading: Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1987

Roy Doron

Angola Angola is located in southwest Africa. It can be referred to as the region between the Dande and Longa rivers. The hinterland extends several hundred kilometers inland. Originally the name of the country was Ndongo. The Portuguese named it Angola after their first contact, derived from the name or title of its ruler (Ngola). It has a varied landscape of beaches, forests, savannas and deserts. The African slave trade played an important role in its history. Trade was practiced between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally, most of the supply of slaves came from Guinea. By the 16th century, however, the Congo and Angola regions had become major suppliers of African slaves. Besides the Congo, Angola was the only other sea-accessible slave-supply area to which the Portuguese could turn. The human reservoir for slaves in Angola's hinterland was inhabited by the Bantu. Thousands of slaves were bought from European slave traders on the coast of the Kingdom of Angola. The Portuguese tried to conquer Angola, but tough resistance from the Mbundu and tropical diseases decimated their troops. After that, they resigned themselves to being normal slave traders. From the 1530s the Portuguese had established a slave station in Luanda. From there they bought slaves from the Ngola, who were the southern rival of the King of Kongo. The power of the Ngola was greatly strengthened in the 16th century through the captive trade. He produced many prisoners by conquest. These military invasions in turn affect weaker peoples. expanded his empire. Slaves from Angola, called Angolares, were brought to the Portuguese island of São Tomé along with other captives from Benin and places along the coast between Benin and Cape St Catherine. From there they were shipped to Portugal or America. Of particular importance was Pernambuco in Brazil. During this period, Angola's fate largely depended on the Portuguese colony of Brazil due to human trafficking between them. At the same time, some slaves from Angola were illegally sold to Buenos Aires directly from Luanda or via Brazilian ports. These captives were destined for sale in Potosı´ or High Peru. These types of slaves were usually sold in Angola for a few squares of palm cloth, but fetched 400 to 600 pesos in Peru. The price depended on the age and physical condition of the slaves. Angola's waterways (known as Libambos) are important in the country's slave trade history. They were used to transport African slaves from the US

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Interior to the Atlantic Ocean. During the 18th century, the supply of slaves in West-Central Africa expanded, moving beyond Matamba and Kasanje to the Lunda Empire on the Kasai. It is estimated that an average of 15,000 slaves per year were exported from the Congo and Angola regions in the 17th century. In the mid-18th century, Luanda alone was exporting more than 10,000 prisoners a year. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; Garcia II of Congo; longo; Portuguese slave trade; Vili. Further reading: "Breaking the Silence, Learning about the Slave Trade, Slave Routes." Anti-Slavery International Website: www.antislavery.org; Davidson, Basil. A History of East and Central Africa to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Garden City, New York: Double Day, 1969; Kaplan, Irving, and Roth, H. Mark, eds. Angola: A country study. Washington, DC: American University, 1979; Mueller, Joseph. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988; McEwan, PJM, ed. Africa from the Early Period to 1800. London: Oxford University Press, 1976; Minter, W.M., and Wiley, D.S. "Angola." Blacknet UK website: www.blacknet.co.uk.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin

Annobon The small island of Annobon (New Year), southwest of São Tomé, Prı'ncipe and Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea, served as a European base for growing food, manufacturing trade goods and resupplying ships during the transatlantic slave trade of the sixteenth century to nineteenth century. Portuguese sailors were the first to claim the uninhabited volcanic island, which stretches just eighteen square kilometers, on New Year's Day 1472. Until the Spanish took possession of Annobon in 1778, the island's social, political and commercial life was inseparable from that of its larger Portuguese neighbor São Tomé, whose inhabitants retained control of trade and government for much of the 16th and 17th centuries Century. Throughout the 18th century, slave ships from West Africa stopped at Annobon for supplies before embarking on the unsafe voyage across the Atlantic. In the nineteenth century Britain operated part of its African squadron from the island and sought to quell the illegal slave trade that was still thriving along the Angolan coast and in the Congo region. Today Annobon is part of Equatorial Guinea. Many of the approximately 3,000 residents are descendants of Angolan slaves brought by the Portuguese from Sao Tome' to farm the island. Portugal patterned its development of Annobon on a form of plantation production previously tried on various Atlantic islands, and established a system of royal land grants on the island to encourage sugar cultivation in the 16th century. Despite the success of similar arrangements in the islands of Madeira, the Azores and Sao Tome´, annobon never became a major source of the precious staple. Instead, several hundred slaves worked the island's volcanic soil to produce a range of agricultural commodities such as oranges, lemons, coconuts, and bananas. Although never reached

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the wealth of other Atlantean "sugar islands", Annobon's agricultural production, as well as its strategic position off the African mainland just below the equator, sparked a brisk trade with slave ships and merchant ships eager to replenish their supplies. The island also produced a limited amount of high quality cotton, which traders traded with Dutch, Spanish and Sao Tomean traders. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Annobon provided agricultural goods, timber, water and other supplies to ships plying the African coast, including European ships sailing to the East Indies, as well as slave ships making the two-week voyage from West Africa making their way to the Caribbean. Annobon provided an important stopover for slave ships bound for America. Although some ships sailed directly to Annobon from ports such as Calabar, Whydah, Cape Mount and Cape Coast Castle, others first stopped at Sa~o Tome' or Prı'ncipe. From Annobon, slave ships began the Middle Passage by sailing southwest, catching the southeast trade winds that would propel them across the Atlantic to various ports in Martinique, Saint Domingue, Dominica, and Jamaica. See also Entrepoˆts. Further reading: Raimundo, Jose´ da Cunha Matos. Corografia Hisorica das Ilhas de S. Tome ´e Principe, Ano Bom e Fernando Po´ . S~ao Tome´: National Imprenza, 1916; ~ Tome Serafim, Cristina Maria Seuanes. As Ilhas de Sao 'no Se' culo XVII. Braga, Portugal: Centro de Histo'ria de Ale'm-Mar, 2000; Abelardo de Unzueta y Yuste. Islands of the Gulf of Guinea. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Polı´ticos, 1945.

Edward D. Maris-Wolf Archeology Archaeological research has contributed significantly to the understanding of Africans and their enslavement. Archeology can be defined as the scientific study of the human past, focusing on artifacts and historical sites. As a branch of anthropology (the study of man), archeology deals in particular with culture and a holistic view of human behavior and experience. The archeology of the African diaspora is the product of a scholarship dating back at least to the 1930s, when plantations slowly became the target of research among North American scholars in the United States. But it wasn't until the 1960s that archaeologists began to study the Africans swallowed up by the Middle Passage and its aftermath. It was no coincidence that archaeologists began to take Africans and their descendants seriously in America at this time, as civil rights, the historic preservation movement, and African struggles for independence were transforming scholarship and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Chronologically, archaeologists have studied Africans living in places in America from the 15th century to the end of slavery. Plantations, slave castles, slave forts, urban residences, kitchen buildings, cellars, rural homesteads, cemeteries, and maroon communities are among the main types of archaeological sites. Most of the excavated sites date from the 18th and 19th centuries, although earlier periods are slowly receiving more attention. Locations in the US and the Caribbean were examined more closely

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as Latin American. The range of themes that have emerged from these studies include dietary habits, health, pottery production, architecture, Africanisms, status, resistance, ethnicity, cultural identity, religion, and landscape. African sites occupy slave depots on the African coast. Castle S~ao Jorge da Mina was founded in 1482 by Portuguese traders. By 1637 it was conquered by the Dutch, who held it until the 19th century. British soldiers occupied the castle in the late 19th century until it was destroyed by Asante forces. Chris Decorse's research teams have excavated more than thirty buildings and nearly 100,000 artifacts from El Mina. European and local pottery, imported glassware, metal fittings and trade beads are among the most notable remains recovered to date. The process of cultural contact has led to the creation of syncretic objects such as ritual vessels made from European metals. According to Decorse, European-made clothing accessories (buckles), writing implements (slates, pencils), and stone wall architecture were introduced because of the European presence. Plants and animals were also introduced, such as tobacco and geese. Wild and domesticated animals were consumed there based on the site's faunal remains. Much remains to be done at the inland African slave trade sites. Burial sites found in the floors of some of El Mina's houses show the African influence found in America. A slave ship is a fertile area of ​​marine archaeology. The Henrietta Marie was a ship that was wrecked about 30 miles off the Florida coast in the 1700s. A bronze bell bearing the ship's name confirmed its identity. The large number of manacles provided another clue to its function and identity. Jamaican shipping records also helped identify the ship. A huge cache of artifacts was recovered including glass beads of various colors, shapes and sizes; earthenware; ceramics; and pewter dishes. Remains of the ship were displayed in a traveling exhibition. A field of research called "bioarchaeology," the archaeological study of skeletal biology and human health, has advanced our understanding of the physical evidence for people of African descent in the Americas. From the 1890s through the 1930s, bioarchaeologists and anatomists from universities such as Oxford, Northwestern, and Columbia identified some African burials in the Caribbean. On islands like Jamaica and Barbados, Africans were unexpected discoveries in areas that also contained colonial-era Taino (Native American) burial remains. Tooth features and filing or modifications were diagnostic indicators of African origin. These features have been found in studies of skeletal populations elsewhere, such as Cuba, which have been associated with maroons ("runaway slaves") and religious enclaves. In the 1970s, North American physical anthropologists studied large samples of colonial and modern people of African descent. An interesting case, an African whose remains date back to the 18th century was buried in a 3,000 year old Native American mound. Bioarchaeological studies have uncovered evidence of the traumas caused by enslavement. For example, a study of a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, identified malnutrition in individuals who died between 1840 and 1870. Both urban (New Orleans and Philadelphia) and rural cemeteries have been studied to learn about life

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of Africans in America. The Waterloo Plantation (Suriname) illustrated the horrific effects of syphilis, evident from lesions on the skeletons. The extensive documentary evidence examined for Waterloo suggests that rape on slave ships and concubines by African domestic workers spread the disease. Caribbean burials such as that at Newton Plantation, Barbados, have illustrated the adverse effects of lead contamination and alcohol consumption, as well as more positive aspects such as the ability of enslaved people to manifest their own aesthetics through the adornment of brass bracelets. In the 1990s, studies began on nearly 400 burials in the well-known African Cemetery in New York City (1600s to 1790s). These studies have expanded our views of violent injury (spiral fractures), strenuous work (robust muscle attachment and arthritic bone degeneration), and disease. A flattened musket ball embedded in a skeleton speaks of a crime involving deadly force or execution. A mother was buried with her child en utero. Shroud pins illustrate the personal nature of items buried with corpses. A heart-shaped arrangement of tacks on a coffin from the African cemetery resembles a heart symbol found in Adinkra symbols from Ghana, West Africa, called Nya Akoma ("patience; perseverance"). Elements of Ghanaian culture, such as "day names," are well documented in cases of African influence, survival, and transformation in the Americas. Skull and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) research has linked the burials to Asante, Yoruba, Senegambian, and Ibo populations, among others. The New York tomb study became a highly politicized project as people of African descent fought to be represented on the project and for the right to conduct what they believed to be appropriate memorial ceremonies. Plantations are the most intensively studied type of archaeological site in the African diaspora. Kingsley (Florida), El Padre (Cuba), Drax Hall (Jamaica) and Monticello (Virginia), the estate of President Thomas Jefferson, are some of the better known plantations excavated in the past. Middleburg Plantation (1600s–1800s) in South Carolina, examined by Leland Ferguson, provides good examples of the types of material evidence that come from plantation archaeology. Ferguson discovered that the labor that went into clearing and maintaining lowland paddy fields and river banks was about the same as that required to build some of the world's largest mounds and pyramids. The Middleburg rice fields stretched two miles along the Cooper River. A number of artefacts illustrate the everyday life of enslaved workers. Pottery, bones, glass, shackles, locks, buttons, whistles and pickaxes are among the artifacts found on plantations like Middleburg. A handcrafted type of pottery called "colonoware" was also found in Middleburg. This type of pottery was discovered primarily at locations in North America and the Caribbean. Colonoware is important because it was a "creolized" expression of African and Native American flower pots. Africans were encouraged and forced to practice their skills and use their knowledge in crafts, healing, blacksmithing, and other fields. Postholes are important features as they are the only remaining evidence of an African architectural process that led to the construction of mud, thatch and timber houses. Postholes at Middleburg were only visible to archaeologists through the circular marks they left in the ground. That

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Post holes were arranged in rectangles that indicated the type of structural support as well as the size of the houses. Ceramic, brick, or glass pavements have been found at the liberated African homestead at Parting Ways in Plymouth, Massachusetts, as well as on the grounds of Sylvestor Manor at Shelter Island, New York. These two places are important because they are examples of how important slavery was in the US North as it was in the US South, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Many items used by enslaved Africans never survived long enough to be found by archaeologists. A fragment of woven grass baskets unearthed from a South Carolina privy compares well to modern sweet grass baskets such as B. "fans" once used for processing rice. Today's descendants like the Gullah still make these baskets. African baskets were compared to these South Carolina examples. Other artefacts that are rarely found at slavery sites - more due to the fact that they were highly prized and more carefully preserved - are marbles, pawns (floor pottery), coins and even weapons. Africans in the Americas remain one of the most productive areas of archaeological research. Archaeologists and bioarchaeologists have studied the past through material culture, oral tradition, ethnography, and documents. They strive to offer a holistic view of a complex and traumatic period in human history. Archeology has revealed the suffering, cultural resilience and everyday life of enslaved Africans. Inferences about possessions, behaviors, and meanings can be drawn from material culture and historical locations. Archeology is important in understanding the history of enslaved Africans as detailed documents on enslaved people of African descent are relatively absent, destroyed or damaged. A variety of subjects, locations, and scholars has spawned a growing body of research that provides one of the most tangible records of the costs and consequences of slavery and African life in the Americas. See also Elmina; Escape and Runaway; shipwrecks; trade forts. Further reading: Blakey, Michael L. "Bioarchaeology of the African Diaspora in the Americas: Its Origins and Scope." Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 387-422; Decorse, Christopher R. An Archeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans in the Gold Coast, 1400–1900. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001; Ferguson, Leland G. Uncommon Ground: Archeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992; Orser, Karl. "The Archeology of the African Diaspora." Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 63-82; Singleton, TA, and Bograd, M.D. The Archeology of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Guide to the Archaeological Literature of the Immigrant Experience in America, No. 2. Tucson, AZ: Society for Historical Archeology, 1995.

Terrasse Weik

Aro Aro refers to the people, settlements, and cultural forms of the city of Arochukwu and the Aro diaspora scattered across south-east and parts of the Middle Belt of Nigeria. The Aro are descended from both the original settlers of Arochukwu and the many immigrants that the Aro have

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incorporated since the seventeenth century when the Aro began their expansion. Aside from the Arochukwu homeland, the largest Aro cities are Arondizuogu and the Ndieni cluster in central Igboland, and Inokun in Ibibioland. The Aro were mostly traders. They made a living from the Atlantic slave trade and played an important role in its expansion in Biafra Bay. Their control of trade and the feared Ibiniukpabi Oracle, which the British called "Long Juju", gave the Aro enormous influence in the region. The Oracle served as the de facto supreme court of the region. As agents of the oracle, the Aro diaspora brought the non-Aro to the oracle to decide the cases they brought forward. By the nineteenth century, the expansion of the Aro had seen the group inhabit more than 150 settlements, mostly among the Igbo, with whom the vast majority of the Aro identify. The Aro settlements were connected to Arochukwu and to each other through a network of institutions. The Aro's control of the Ibiniukpabi Oracle, the massive incorporation of non-Aro into their group, and alliance with Arochukwu's warlike neighbors gave the Aro advantages over other hinterland groups in controlling trade. Since the Aro began establishing permanent settlements outside of Arochukwu, there has been no unified Aro culture. Like the Aro dialects, localized variants of the Aro cultural forms developed in the various settlements, all of which invariably took on elements from non-Aro immigrant and neighboring cultures. Nonetheless, the Aro maintain diverse Pan-Aro institutions throughout, such as the Ekpe Brotherhood, the Ihu homage system, and the annual Ikeji Festival. The Aro diaspora has the right to settle in Arochukwu when needed, as happened after the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) when the Aro were persecuted as Igbo in several non-Igbo regions. Some have dual residences in their respective settlements and in Arochukwu, although increasing land scarcity has limited this opportunity in recent times. Aro cohesion has declined significantly since the British conquest in 1902. Although the Aro resident in Igboland identify themselves as Igbo, the identity of their counterparts in non-Igbo regions - among the Ibibio, Igala and Idoma - is complicated. The Aro outside of Igboland share the Aro identity with their Aro counterparts in Igboland. They combine this identity with local non-Igbo identities in their non-Igbo locations. Most of these Aro are non-Igbo as well as the Aro-Igbo are non-Ibibio or Igala. Aside from shared institutions, the Aro are now under the nominal leadership of Eze Aro (the Aro King), and they retain what appears to be a common formal front in a socio-cultural organization called the Aro-Okeigbo. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; Arochukwu; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Dike, K.O. The Aro of South-Eastern Nigeria, 1650-1980: A Study of Socio-Economic Formation and Transformation in Nigeria. Ibadan: University Press Ltd., 1990; Ijoma, J. Okoro, ed. Arochukwu: History and Culture. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1986; Nwokeji, G. Ugo. "The Biafran Frontier: Trade, Slaves and Aro Society, C. 1750-1905." Ph.D. PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1999.

G. Ugo Nwokeji

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Arochukwu The historic city of Arochukwu is located on the Enyong River in south-eastern Nigeria, in the Igbo-IbibioEfik border region, west of the Cross River, and is home to the Aro people who live in settlements in the south-eastern and eastern central belt of the country. The city was home to the most important Pan Aro institutions, including the Ibiniukpabi ("Long Juju") Oracle, which is now the most important historical monument in this tourist city. Arochukwu's estimated population of 150,000 is divided into nineteen neighborhoods ("villages") grouped into nine ancestry groups, which in turn form three ancestry group clusters. Although the population is now entirely Igbo, the city has multi-ethnic origins in the 16th century, that of Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, Annang and Ekoi elements, as well as a later arriving relatively small group of Akpa migrants from the east were established Nigerian Middle Belt. Arochukwu's control of the Ibiniukpabi Oracle, which served as the highest court of appeal in the region, and his ubiquitous diaspora settlements facilitated Aro's control of the Atlantic slave trade era in the hinterland of Biafra Bay. The Aro diaspora was connected to Arochukwu through a variety of Pan-Aro institutions and through the respective Arochukwu neighborhoods of the settlement founders. Aro dominance ended in 1901–1902 when the British Aro Expedition's "Aro Field Force" conquered Arochukwu, destroyed its oracle, and killed or imprisoned its leaders. The average Arochukwu person, once fluent in several languages ​​of the Cross River region, is now only fluent in Igbo. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Dike, K.O. The Aro of South-Eastern Nigeria, 1650-1980: A Study of Socio-Economic Formation and Transformation in Nigeria. Ibadan: University Press Ltd., 1990; Ijoma, J. Okoro, ed. Arochukwu: History and Culture. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1986; Kanu, P. Okoro. Pre-British Aro of Arochukwu: Notes and Reflections on an African Civilization. New York: USAfrica Books, 2001.

G. Ugo Nwokeji

Arrivals The notion of Africans arriving as slaves in the Americas often conjures up images of the treacherous journeys through the Middle Passage from cell to cell, slaves being sent to prisons along the Slave Coast in present-day Ghana, Sierra Leone, Senegambia, and Nigeria were driven , Liberia and other places. Slaves were often prisoners of war or individuals kidnapped from their homes and sold for European goods including arms, horses and cloth. Once captured, slaves were held in slave prisons such as Elmina and James Fort until they were loaded onto slave ships and shipped to various ports around the Atlantic and throughout the Caribbean. These ports include Veracruz, Liverpool, Nantes, Cartagena, Boston, Salem, Savannah and others. Slaves were packed in the belly of ships, chained together. Once they arrived at their destinations, the slaves were then cleaned

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Recently arrived Africans offered for sale as body slaves. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International.

high; That means they've been covered in oils to make them look healthier and more attractive to potential buyers. This process of acquiring and selling slaves among European nations began with the Portuguese in the 15th century. The Portuguese were among the first European nations to begin trading slaves from West Africa; Slavery has existed throughout the Sahara region of Africa for centuries. Slavery was legitimized by the idea of ​​Christian conversion; The purpose of slavery soon became the redemption of the souls of Africans, considered sinners by the principles of Roman Catholicism. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, African slaves were shipped from Congo, Benin, and West African ports such as Elmina to Portugal and its neighboring islands, Spain, and other early Mediterranean and Atlantic colonies such as S~, Tome' and Prı'ncipe, among others. Their work consisted of agricultural work (both skilled and unskilled in sugar cane fields), gold and silver mining, and handicrafts. African slaves appeared in America with the first Spanish ships. The Spanish were familiar with the use of African slave labor because of their trade with the Portuguese. In the earliest days of colonization and conquest, there were only a small number of slaves aboard these ships. Nonetheless, the successful conquest of territory in the New World led the Spanish economy to new markets and new resources and demand

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increased significantly for African slaves. The earliest explorers, like Christopher Columbus, immediately began establishing sugar plantations, which required adequate labor to generate the revenues the Spanish monarchy demanded. There was a need for willing workers who were able to survive the harsh living conditions. Indigenous peoples were often unwilling to work as the Spanish demanded or were able to lead successful rebellions. They had the advantage of knowing the landscape and fled more often than worked as required. Consequently, the Spanish turned to the Africans. Large numbers of Africans came to America to work as forced laborers and later as slaves. The first African slaves came to the Americas from the Canary Islands with the first European travelers to the New World. The Portuguese and Spanish were among the first European nations to establish colonial settlements in the Caribbean and Central America. As their colonies developed and the need for labor increased, so did their reliance on Africans for a labor resource. With the help of the Pope, Spain and Portugal negotiated the limits of their geopolitical power and their control over the slave trade. The asiato, as it was called, was originally given to the Spanish. For many years the Spanish controlled the sale and acquisition of African bodies from West Africa to the Caribbean, North America and Europe. They established ports in their colonial settlements, including Veracruz, Havana, Hispaniola, Florida, and Cartagena. Veracruz helped supply New Spain or Mexico; Cartagena supplied the upper regions of South America such as Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. This ensured a steady supply of African labor throughout the sixteenth century; Mexico and Hispaniola had large slave populations; Slave imports often exceeded Spanish immigration to their colonies. Slaves worked to build the infrastructure of Hispanic American settlements and helped grow agricultural products such as sugar and indigo. The Spanish and Portuguese lost their hold on the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th century. The Dutch, French and English had been waiting to enter the geopolitical market for new land, new resources and new workers. Competition increased as the Dutch West India Company and English colonial companies such as the Virginia Company and the Royal Africa Company gained significant ground in both slave acquisitions and colonial settlements. The English had successfully established colonies in Virginia and New England, and the need for slave labor increased with the realization that tobacco could be grown and sold along with sugar. By the mid-17th century, the Royal Africa Company had established a number of ports along the West African coast. The English monopolized the Atlantic slave trade. Both the English and the French developed slave laws, the legal regulation of slave activity on Caribbean plantations and colonial settlements in North America. These codes aimed to control slaves and prevent both the reality and the threat of revolution. The codes were part of the "seasoning" process. Newly arrived Africans were broken into slavery with harsh and cruel treatment. Unruly slaves were bound and punished with whips and other brutal instruments of terror. See

48 ASANTE

also African fears of cannibalism; bosal; British slave trade; French slave trade; Internal Slave Trade, Brazil; Internal Slave Trade, United States; ports; Portuguese slave trade; "saltwater negro"; Force. Further reading: Blackburn, Robin. The Foundations of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern Age, 1492–1800. New York: VersoPress, 1997; Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. 3rd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.

Tara Bynum

Asante Asante was a powerful West African empire at the time of the slave trade. The name Asante (sometimes spelled "Ashanti" or "Ashantee") also refers to the language and ethnicity of the people of the Asante region of present-day Ghana. The Asante Empire was ruled by a king named Asantehene, who ruled from the capital Kumase. The king was assisted by a large number of chiefs and priests and a large professional army. Asante became heavily involved in the Gold Coast trade with European slavers and was recognized by Coastal Europeans as the main source of the enslaved people sold in coastal markets. In exchange for captives, Asante received imported goods, including cotton and woolen textiles, arms, alcohol, and tobacco. The wealth of the Asante Empire was based on vast amounts of gold, which the Asante and their ancestors mined for personal use and for trade. From about 1400 CE, gold from the Asante area was traded to merchants who traversed the vast trade networks that spanned the Sahara Desert. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this northbound gold trade was gradually exhausted by the growth of Asante's gold trade with European traders on the Atlantic coast to the south. During the 18th century, the trade in enslaved Africans became a larger part of Asante's coastal trade than the gold trade. The main trading partner of the Asante Empire was the Dutch West India Company, based in Elmina on the Gold Coast. Throughout the 18th century the Asantehene maintained an ambassador at Elmina and maintained regular correspondence with the Dutch general manager there. The Asantehene's power was based on his spiritual authority. The first Asantehene, Osei Tutu, became ruler of the entire Asante people in 1701, when tradition has it that a golden chair descended from heaven and landed on his lap, signifying his divine right to be king. Subsequent Asantehenes expanded the kingdom through wars of conquest that lasted into the 19th century. Prisoners of war captured during these empire expansion struggles were usually sold as slaves to European and American slave traders in the Gold Coast. At its peak, the Asante Empire covered an area slightly larger than present-day Ghana. The golden stool has been the symbol of Asante power since the time of Osei Tutu. It was temporarily confiscated by British troops in 1901 as part of the colonial conquest of Asante. That golden stool is still an important one

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Belonging to Asantehene, who resides in a palace in Kumase to this day. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; Dutch slave trade. Further reading: Fynn, John Kofi. Asante and its neighbors. Legon History series. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971; Perbi, Akosua Adoma. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004; Yarak, Larry W. Asante and the Dutch 1744–1873. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Rebecca Shumway

Asiato An asiato was a negotiable treaty with the Spanish Crown that allowed its holder to sell African slaves in Spanish colonies in America. Asiatos arose from a proposal for assisted migration to Spanish colonies made by Bartolome de Las Casas in 1517 to King Carlos I of Aragon and Castile, later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Las Casas' proposal allowed any immigrant to Spanish colonies to import twelve African slaves to replace Indian slaves. By 1518, Carlos I had granted the first asiato for the transport of 4,000 African slaves to the Spanish West Indies for purchase by colonists to a courtier, Lorens de Gomenot of Savoy, who promptly sold the right to a Genoese merchant group for 25,000 ducats. The Genoese then bought cargoes from Africans, one cargo on the coast of Guinea, the others in Lisbon, and transported them across the Atlantic for resale. Initially, most Asiato slaves were bought by Portuguese traders because a 1493 papal bull and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had given Portugal exclusive control over European trade with Africa. By 1789, all Spanish, Portuguese, Genoese, Flemish, Dutch and British merchants held asiento treaties, obtained either directly from the Spanish Crown or indirectly through the purchase of asiatos or shares in asiatos from other merchants. Asiato traders sometimes suffered great losses from their authorized slave trade, but asiatos could have other values ​​because they offered opportunities to smuggle in different goods or larger numbers of slaves than authorized. Between 1580, when the Spanish and Portuguese crowns were united under Felipe II, and 1701, when Spain's newly crowned Felipe V (grandson of France's reigning Louis XIV) awarded an asiento to a French company, most asientos were sold to Portuguese merchants. Felipe II needed revenue, especially after the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, and he saw asiatos as a means to obtain it. Seville's merchants held an asiento from 1651 to 1662, and Seville's Casa de Contratacion briefly controlled the asiento trade after 1676, but neither supplied the requisite number of slaves and their asientos reverted to the Portuguese. After France lost the War of Spanish Succession and breached a promise to share trade with its Dutch ally, Britain was granted an exclusive asiato in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) to supply 4,800 slaves a year to the Spanish colonies in America for thirty years. The British rights were then sold to the South Sea Company, which was owned by London

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Venturer and soon famous for a 1720 bubble in the stock price. UK asiato trading has not been as regular or profitable as expected. Spain was owed £68,000 and threatened to end Britain's Asiato when Jenkins' Ear's war between Britain and Spain was declared in 1739. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) ended this war and extended Britain's Asiato rights, but Spain bought them back for £100,000 under the Treaty of Madrid (1750). Spain had established the Royal Company of Havana to undertake the importation of slaves into its colonies, but the enterprise failed in 1760. Asiatos were sold again in 1765, 1773, 1780 and 1783, with Baker and Dawson of Liverpool taking 5,306 slaves to Spanish America shipped under the last asiato. Carlos IV abolished the asiento system by decree in 1789 and opened up the slave trade in the Spanish colonies to anyone who was interested. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Buenos Aires; Dutch slave trade; enslavement and procurement; French slave trade; illegal slave trade; Spanish Caribbean; import records; Jamaica; Portuguese slave trade; Slave traders (slave traders). Further Reading: Corwin, Arthur F. Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967; Du Bois, W.E.B. The Suppression of the Slave Trade in the United States of America, 1638–1870. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965; Du Bois, W.E.B. The Negro. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; Eltis, David. Economic growth and the end of the transatlantic slave trade. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; Mannix, Daniel Pratt, with Cowley, Malcolm. Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865. New York: Vikings, 1962; Murray, David. Vile trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980; Rawley, James A., with Behrendt, Stephen D. The Transatlantic Slave Trade, A History. Rev. Ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Trevelyan, G. M. England under Queen Anne: The Peace and the Protestant Succession. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1934.

Steven B. Jacobson Atkins, John (1685–1757) Born John Atkins in 1685, was a surgeon in the Royal Navy who opposed the slave trade. He did so most publicly in his 1735 work, A voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West Indies; on His Majesty's ships, the Swallow and the Weymouth. The voyage in Atkins' book was a two-year trek, lasting from February 1721 to February 1723, aimed at suppressing pirates. His work includes observations of the aborigines and inhabitants he encountered on his travels through Africa and the Americas, including notes on their colours, languages, habitats, diets, religions, customs and customs. In addition, it includes notes on the slave, gold, and ivory trading markets, as well as information on winds, currents, and tides on several coasts. The narrative addresses the undesirable nature of a livelihood dependent on the sea. The sections of perhaps historical interest include Atkins' commentary on the slave trade.

ATKINS, JOHN (1685–1757) 51

In it he explained the following: We who buy slaves say we bestow good upon them by putting them in a better condition both temporal and spiritual; the latter, few have the hypocrisy (among us) to . . . possess, and therefore I will only deal with the former. . . ; To bring Negroes then from their homes and friends, where they are comfortable, into a foreign land, people, and language must be grossly against the laws of natural justice and humanity; and especially when this change leads to forced labour, corporal punishment. (Atkins, pp. 177-178)

Atkins opposed the transatlantic slave trade not only on an ethical level but also on a practical level. Slaves often struggled to escape their captors' ships. Such uprisings usually took place while the coast was still in sight, but there are many accounts of these mutinies also taking place far out at sea. Such inevitabilities endangered the well-being of everyone on board. Atkins wrote of his belief that slaves thought - having bought themselves food and more, that death would send them to their own country - there has not been lacking in examples of raising up and killing a company of ships far from land, though not as often as on the coast; but once or twice is enough to show that a Master's care and diligence should never be over until its delivery. (Resistance Against Slavery, p. 4)

The intracontinental slave trade in Africa also angered Atkins. As African groups like the Ashantes and Dahomeans became more and more dependent on trading with European merchants, they began to confiscate other Africans and sell them into slavery in exchange for arms and other goods. In 1727 Atkins spoke out against such tactics, commenting on the irony that the negro who sold his fellow Africans as slaves one day might himself be sold days later. Atkins later published a medical textbook, The Navy Surgeon. A copy of this text is in the Foyle Special Collections Library. He died in 1757. See also British Navy; Tales of Slavers. Further reading: Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966; Recent Acquisitions Archive, September 2003. [Online October 8, 2006]. King's College London website: 2003. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/iss/library/speccoll/acqarch/acqarch03.html; "Resistance to Slavery, the Anti-Slavery Movement, and Abolition." University of Calgary, 2001. [Online October 8, 2006]. University of Calgary website: http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/migrations/four4.html.

Michael Lombardo

B Baquaqua, Mahommah Gardo (1824/31-?) As a Muslim and young adult, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was enslaved in the northern region of what is now the Republic of Benin while serving as a bodyguard in the palace of a local ruler of the region. After several changes of ownership, in 1845 it was brought to Ouidah, the notorious slave trading port of Dahomey, from where it was shipped to the Pernambuco region of Brazil. Upon his arrival there, Baquaqua was sold to a baker who lived in a town outside of Recife. By his own admission, Baquaqua worked under harsh conditions in the baker's care. This caused him to flee on one occasion and attempt suicide on another. Eventually, Baquaqua from the Recife region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil was sold to a ship's captain identified as Clemente Jose da Costa. Under his new master, he served aboard a slave ship (partially owned by his master) as cabin steward and made two voyages south along the Brazilian coast to Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina Island. In 1847, Baquaqua sailed on his master's ship to New York, where a local (and mostly black) abolitionist group known as the New York Vigilance Society supported him in his fight for freedom. In particular, they assisted Baquaqua and two other slaves, namely Jose da Rocha and Maria da Costa, in filing a writ of habeas corpus requesting that Captain da Costa bring the three slaves in question to the Court of Common Pleas of New York delivers. At the first hearing before this court, the slave Maria da Costa stated that she was not interested in the lawsuit, and thereafter the case concerned only the two male slaves. In the end, however, the court's decision was not favorable to Baquaqua and Rocha, as presiding judge Charles P. Daly ruled that the two male slaves should be returned to the ship because they were crew members, and their return was therefore in accordance with the terms of the reciprocal treaty between Brazil and the United States, which regulates the desertion of crew members. Following this court decision, Baquaqua escaped from a New York prison for Boston, where he became a free man. He then moved to Haiti, where he joined the American Baptist Free Mission between 1847 and 1849. In

BARBOT, JOHN (JEAN) (1655–1712) 53

In 1849, after his conversion to Christianity in Haiti, Baquaqua returned to North America and in due course attended New York Central College in MacCrawville. He finally wrote his memoirs in 1854 while residing in Chatham, western Canada (Ontario), which at the time was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad from the United States. This memoir is a valuable resource for the history of the African diaspora, in part because it includes Baquaqua's experiences, particularly as a slave and as an activist in abolitionist networks that shed light on the situation of enslaved and free black people in the 19th century. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Brazil; Illegal Slave Trade, Brazil; slave tales. Further Reading: Law, Robin and Lovejoy, Paul E. The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Transition from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2001.

Mohammed Bashir Salau

Barbot, John (Jean) (1655–1712) John (Jean) Barbot was a slave trader and author. Barbot was born on May 25, 1655 in Saint Martin on the Ile de Re´ (opposite the port of La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast) and grew up in a Protestant (Huguenot) family. 1678-1679 he served as a commercial agent ( Commis ) on a slave ship that was sent by merchants from La Rochelle to West Africa and the Caribbean. A second journey followed in 1681-82, when the business of the merchants had already been monopolized by a state company, the Compagnie du Se'ne'gal. The repeal of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 forced Barbot and his brother to flee to London, where he continued his trading career and probably took part in slavery as well as other ventures. In 1690 he married a woman from La Rochelle and became an English subject (hence John instead of Jean). A decade later he retired from trading life in London and in 1703 or 1704 moved to Southampton, where he had apparently worked for English intelligence and collected information from French prisoners of war. He died on December 27, 1712. Barbot's main importance lies in producing three large documents: a diary of his voyage of 1678-1679 (about 50,000 words, in French), a French manuscript on West Africa in letter form (about 250,000 words, completed 1688 ) and an enormous English account (about 500,000 words, based in part on the French account published posthumously in 1732). In addition to his own observations, the last two documents contain a considerable amount of material drawn from 17th-century publications such as those of Dapper, Villault, de Marees and Bosman. Nevertheless, Barbot's writings constitute one of the most important sources for the history of the West African coast in the late 17th century. They deal in particular with the coast from Senegal to today's Benin as well as with Calabar (Nigeria) and the island of Prı'ncipe. Much of what Barbot wrote about the slave trade was copied from earlier sources or derived from colleagues, and his views on the subject were largely conventional. But he does provide some first-hand information on how

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slaves were bought and treated, and how they were perceived. See also French slave trade; Tales of Slavers. Further reading: Debien, Gabriel, Marcel Delafosse and Guy Thilmans, eds. "Journal d'un voyage de traite en Guine'e, `a Cayenne et aux Antilles fait par Jean Barbot en 1678-1679." Bulletin de l'I.F.A.N. 40B (1978):235-395; Barbot, John. A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea. London: np, 1732; Hair, P.E.H., Jones, Adam and Law, Robin, eds. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1992.

Adam Jones Barracoons A slave barrack (barrack-like hut) served as a temporary prison or detention center where enslaved persons were held under armed guard. The barracks were just a stop on the way from freedom to slavery. Free people in interior Africa became slaves for a variety of reasons. Prisoners of war were the most common reason for enslavement. Not as widespread as warfare, slave raiding produced a plentiful supply of slaves. Next came kidnapping, which produced fewer slaves and usually targeted specific individuals. Enslavement could also result from court cases where slavery would be imposed as a punishment. Slaves could also be paid as tribute. The stronger, larger kingdoms often forced smaller, weaker kingdoms to pay tribute in the form of slaves. The next step toward enslavement was usually a forced march to the coast. Some of the weaker or injured prisoners died before arriving at the shore slave depot. European slave transport ships would wait on shore where their captain or trader would negotiate with their African agents for the purchase of slaves. African agents coordinated the transport of the captives to shore to coincide with the arrival of the slave ship, which often proved a difficult task. Approaching the coast might also prove to be the case

Slave barracks, Sierra Leone, 1840s. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

BENEZET, ANTHONY (1713–1784) 55

dangerous for the slave ships. Ship captains would risk their ships if they could buy a full or nearly full shipload of slaves. Slave traders chained the captives together and then locked them in wooden cages called barracoons. Slave agents bought captives in small quantities from the slave raiders until they amassed enough captives to lure one of the slave ships to approach the coast. The ship's captain and a slave trader came ashore and bargained with the local slave agent until they agreed on a price for the slaves. The entire process from reaching shore to boarding the slave ship can take as little as a few days or months. The prisoners stayed in the barracks the whole time. The barracks offered little protection against the elements, prisoners received little or no medical attention, and local slave traders provided little food, making the barracks a dangerous place to be. The slaver's sole aim was to sell the captives as quickly as possible. The open bars around the barracks offered buyers and sellers ample opportunity to appraise and barter their new human property. See also branding; Cape Coast Castle; Coffee; Elmina; company^ots; Gore'e Island; trade forts; ventilation and asphyxiation. Further reading: Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Western, Oriental, and African Slave Trade. In J. M. Lonsdale, ed. African Studies series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Schillington, Kevin. history of Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Michael Bonislawski Benezet, Anthony (1713–1784) Quaker philanthropist, teacher, writer and anti-slavery activist Anthony Benezet was known for his progressive views and the influence of his writings on the leaders of the abolition movement. Benezet was born on January 31, 1713 in St. Quentin, France, into a Huguenot merchant family. Besieged by widespread Protestant persecution, the Benezets moved to London. Benezet received a liberal education befitting his social position, and was educated in a merchant's house at the age of fourteen. In 1731 his family emigrated to Philadelphia. There he joined the Quakers. At eighteen, Benezet entered the trading business. In 1736 he married Joyce Marriott. Having little commercial success, he moved to Delaware to try his hand at manufacturing. This career also proved to be unsatisfactory. After these setbacks, Benezet became an educator. After his return from Delaware he taught in 1739 at the Germantown Academy. Three years later, Benezet transferred to Friends' English Public School in Philadelphia. He excelled at teaching and expressed contempt for strict discipline. Benezet believed that kindness breeds beneficial personal relationships and made this idea the cornerstone of his pedagogical style. In 1750 he set up an evening school for slave children in his house. Dismayed by the lack of education for women, Benezet left Friends' English Public School in 1754 to found America's first public school for women. In the 1760s, Benezet was a fervent abolitionist. Through travelogues and interaction with Quaker Minister John Woolman, he became

56 BENIN

concerned about slavery. Along with Woolman, he persuaded those attending the annual Quaker meeting in Philadelphia to officially recognize that slavery was inconsistent with Christian doctrine. Benezet wrote abolitionist articles for newspapers and almanacs, and published free anti-slavery pamphlets at his expense. As a writer, Benezet specialized in rhetorical appeals and stereotype reversal. In his 1760 pamphlet Observations on the [Enslaving,] Importing and Purchasing of Negroes, Benezet argued that buyers were complicit in slavery because their demands kept the trade alive. As justification for ending slavery, he emphasized the biblical dictum, “Treat others as you would like them to treat you.” In 1772 he authored the pamphlet Some Historical Account of Guinea, in which he extensively cited traveler accounts in his positive ones and realistic descriptions of life on the African continent. These depictions contradicted the nightmarish depictions of pro-slavery advocates. Benezet's writings were instrumental in mobilizing abolitionists such as John Wesley and Thomas Clarkson. His correspondence with Wesley and the British abolitionist Granville Sharp, who reprinted Benezet's writings and circulated them throughout England, helped maintain an informal anti-slavery campaign in the British Isles. His letters to Benjamin Franklin convinced him to join the abolitionist cause in 1769. In 1770, with Quaker support, Benezet founded the Negro School in Philadelphia for free and enslaved black children. Five years later he founded the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. He helped thwart an amendment to the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1780 that would re-enslave unregistered blacks. Benezet donated his estate to the Negro School after the death of his wife. He died in Philadelphia on May 3, 1784. See also abolitionism. Further Reading: "Abolition, Anti-Slavery Movements, and the Rise of the Sectional Controversy." African American Odyssey Website: http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/benezet.htm; Brookes, George S. Friend Anthony Benezet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937; "Foundation of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society." Africans in America. PBS Online website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3p249.html; Sassi, Jonathan D. Anthony Benezet's African Library: African Travel Narratives and Revolutionary-Era Antislavery. College of Staten Island and Graduate Center, City University of New York, undated.

Cassandra Neuman

Benin The Kingdom of Benin (not to be confused with the modern-day Republic of Benin) was among the earliest, longest-lived, and most active participants in European trade on the Slave Coast, including the trade in slaves. Benin had been one of the most powerful powers on the Eastern Slave Coast since pre-European times. The Portuguese probably reached Benin in 1472, but it did not develop strong ties with the kingdom until 1485–1486, when they established a 'trading factory' in the port of Gwato. Europeans demanded slaves from the beginning of trade with Benin, and it was there that the Portuguese bought their first large shipments of slaves. Portugal (to the mid-16th century), the Netherlands (late 16th to early 18th centuries), and

Benin 57

Britain (mid-18th-19th centuries, culminating in the occupation of the country in 1897) gradually became the dominant European power in the Benin region, although the French, Germans and others established intermittent presences there. Before the mid-17th century, Benin exported slaves not only to the New World but also to Europe and the Gold Coast. In 1506, a slave usually cost between 12 and 15 manillas (brass bracelets); by 1517 the price had risen to 57 manillas. After the 1520s, cowrie shells replaced manillas as the most popular "money" in the slave trade (in 1522, 50 manillas equaled 6,370 cowries). Goods such as hats, beads, etc. were also bartered for slaves. From the late sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries, Benin never sold its own citizens, only female prisoners of war captured in war or bought from neighboring peoples (including Igbo, Sobo, Ijaw and others). From the mid-17th to the 18th centuries, however, slaves became the most important trade item acquired by Europeans, and foreign male captives and eventually citizens of Benin itself were also sold abroad. In the heyday of the slave trade, Benin supplied 3,000 slaves annually. A contemporary related that “the West Indian planters prefer the slaves of Benin. . . to those in any other part of Guinea.” However, the influence of the overseas slave trade on Benin should not be overestimated, and Beninese-European trade relations cannot be reduced to the history of the slave trade. Slavery and the slave trade in Benin existed before the arrival of Europeans. Slaves were never the only - and until the mid-17th century they were not the most important - items bought by Europeans (others were pepper, ivory, cloth, and so on). The slave trade from Benin continued into the late 19th century, well after the official abolition of the overseas slave trade, and slavery existed in Biniland until the 1920s. Most importantly, the course of Benin's socio-cultural development was firmly established before the Europeans arrived. Unlike some West African societies such as Ouidah and Calabar, the rise and fall of Benin was not primarily determined by the slave trade, although the European presence in general and the slave trade in particular accelerated or hindered certain social, economic, political and cultural processes. The rise of Benin in particular, accompanied by intense military expansion and the growth of internal trade - both prerequisites for procuring increasing numbers of slaves - began several decades before the arrival of the Europeans and ended in the early 17th century, well before the slave trade ended. Conversely, Europeans provided Benin with firearms - sometimes in exchange for slaves - and served as mercenaries in the kingdom's armies, allowing Benin to expand more quickly and successfully. Benin acquired captives mainly through slave raids on its neighbors, but European demand also stimulated trade with inland peoples. At the same time, the kingdom's growing demand for slaves undermined the loyalty of its dependencies. In the 17th century, the European presence encouraged the coastal Itsekiri, who played the role of intermediaries in overseas trade, to gain independence from Benin. Although the overseas slave trade was declared a royal monopoly, it enriched and enhanced the political power of courtiers acting on behalf of the king, and contributed to an effective devolution of power to court officials at the king's expense.

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In the cultural sphere, the association of the Bini deity of wealth, Olokun, with the sea may be due to trade with Europeans; some folkloric motifs and royal ceremonies were introduced in the same context. The flourishing of Benin's famous royal art owes a considerable debt to the influx of metals received from Europeans in payment for local goods, including slaves; new themes such as depictions of Europeans and even new art media such as the so-called Afro-Portuguese sculptures and bronze plaques emerged. Although the slave trade was part of Beninese-European trade in general, its influence proved particularly strong in the two areas of demographics and morale. The slave trade led to the depopulation of inland areas, from which people were taken away to be sold. It led to a depreciation of human life and liberty in Benin, as evidenced by the enslavement and sale of the freeborn bini and the increase in human sacrifice - phenomena occurring despite the decline of the overseas slave trade. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; Dutch slave trade; Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Graham, James D. "The Slave Trade, Depopulation, and Human Sacrifice in Benin History." Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 5, 2 (1965): 317-334; Roese, Peter M. and Bondarenko, Dmitri M. A Popular History of Benin: The Rise and Fall of a Mighty Forest Kingdom. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003; Ryder, Alan F.C. Benin and the Europeans. 1485-1897. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1969.

Dmitri M. Bondarenko

Benito Cereno (1855) Benito Cereno is best known as the Spanish sea captain portrayed in Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno (1855), a fictional tale of an actual shipping rebellion by African slaves previously imported to South America and transported on Cerenos Ship from Valparaiso to Lima. In his play Benito Cereno, part of his The Old Glory trilogy (1964), Robert Lowell loosely adapted Melville's story and set it in the Middle Passage, set in an island port on the Trinidad coast. Real Captain Benito Cereno's ship, the Tryal, was seized during a December 1804 rebellion by slaves hoping to sail it to Senegal. They killed their owner, Don Alexandro Aranda of Mendoza, in what is now Argentina, along with most of the ship's crew. Cereno escaped the tryal two months later after the slave masters let him sail to the uninhabited island of Santa Maria for fresh water and food, only to find the US merchant ship Perseverance already there. The Perseverance's Duxbury captain, Amasa Delano, an indirect ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, boarded the Tryal and provided those on board with water, cider and food, but did not realize the slaves were in control until his whaleboat cast off to bring him back to his ship, as Cereno frantically leapt to join him. The real Cereno was an ungrateful. He later tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid compensation from Delano for recapturing the Tryal and her remaining cargo by presenting false testimonies to the Viceroy in Lima from three escaped Botany Bay convicts who had been crew members on the Perseverance.

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Melville's story is an adaptation and expansion of Delano's 1817 narrative of his experience. Melville was a master of pictorial description and symbolism, with a keen interest in ambiguity. He created an atmosphere of gray to reflect the ambiguity of his Benito Cereno, plus white and black to reflect Delano's perceptions, and it's filled with symbols that have irritated generations of readers, scholars, and critics. Melville changed several facts in his book. He changed the Tryal's name to San Dominick, a variation of the Spanish name for the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti); the day it left Valparaiso by May 20, Toussaint L'Ouverture's birthday; and the year of history to 1799, when supporters of L'Ouverture gained control of all of Saint Domingue. Delano's ship became The Bachelor's Delight by merging the names of the Bachelor and the Delight from Melville's Moby Dick (1851). The name of the leader of the slave revolt remained Babo, meaning an emphatic "No" in Hausa, a language with which Melville seems to have been familiar. Most of Melville's story is a narrative of what Delano fictionally perceived on the day Cereno escaped. What Delano thinks he sees after boarding the run-down San Dominick is largely inaccurate. He views Cereno's and Babo's relationship, whom Cereno introduces as his faithful body servant, as one of "beautiful" trust and loyalty, although he finds Cereno's allowing Babo to be overly familiar as annoying and Babo and Cereno's shared whispers inappropriate. He has premonitions, but his concerns are with Cereno's deviations from the expected behavior of a ship's captain, not Babo. Delano is apparently unable to perceive Babo as anything other than a dutiful slave until after Cereno escapes, Babo jumps into Delano's whaleboat and attempts to stab him - an event Melville created for his story. Because of Delano's blindness to Babo and Cereno's other kidnappers, Benito Cereno was considered the predecessor of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. As the San Dominick attempts to sail away, a canvas hull enveloping her figurehead opens to reveal the skeleton of murdered slave master Aranda, with the words "Follow Your Leader" scrawled beneath it - other inventions of Melville's. The skeleton had replaced the original figurehead of Columbus's ship. Melville's Babo remains silent after being subdued in the whaleboat, during his trial before Spanish authorities in Lima and at his execution. His head is then mounted on a pole and looks across the plaza towards the church where Aranda's skeleton is buried and across the Rimac River towards a monastery. Melville's Cereno thanks Delano profusely, but is haunted by "memory". When Delano asks, "What cast such a shadow over you?" Cereno's ambiguous answer is "the Negro." Cereno faints when he is forced to testify against Babo. Then, "three months after he was released from court," Cereno died, "carried on the bier, actually following his chief," dying in the monastery facing Babo's head, on a hill aptly named Mount Agonia-- just as Carlos I, who was the first to authorize the Spanish slave trade, died in a monastery “as a symbolic spirit,” according to one scholar. Interpretations of Melville's novella have differed radically from one another. Melville was seen as harshly condemning slavery or not even commenting on its morality. Babo was viewed as a socialist-communist revolutionary, Christ, or a representation of evil itself. Cereno was considered destroyed by Babo,

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Guilt, fear or "blackness". The "leader" whom Cereno followed in his death was thought to be Babo, Aranda, Carlos I, or the founder of the Dominican order. Many now consider Melville's Benito Cereno to be one of America's finest stories. Lowell's play has a smaller circle of followers. In addition to bringing Melville's story to Trinidad, Lowell's Benito Cereno - in Lowell's own words - hardened and politicized it, transforming Captain Delano from a poignant innocent into a know-it-all imperial State Department autocrat who himself shoots and kills Babo. Although three reviewers were enthusiastic, including the future Dean of Yale's Drama School and Randall Jarrell, the play's New York reviews were generally mixed and it received uniformly poor reviews after crossing the North Atlantic to London in 1967. See also Amistad, The; asiato; Buenos Aires; Haitian Revolution, The. Further reading: Adler, Joyce Sparer. "Babo's Creative Genius." Melville Society Extracts 114 (September 1998); Adler, Joyce Sparer. Dramatization of three Melville novels. Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1992; Colatella, Carol. Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2002; Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and His Work. New York: Button, 2005; Sanborn, Geoffrey. The Mark of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998; Wallace, Robert K. Douglass and Melville: Anchored together in the neighborhood style. New Bedford: Spinners, 2005; Wallace, Robert K. Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Terror. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Steven B. Jacobson

Bissagos The Bissagos (also Bijagos and Bujagos) occupy the Bissagos Islands off the coast of present-day Guinea-Bissau. Organized through relatively decentralized political institutions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, they still managed to produce significant numbers of slaves for sale to Atlantean merchants. Sixteenth-century observers made it clear that strong warriors occasionally emerged as powerful local leaders on each of the islands, but there were no noticeable differences between their way of life and that of others. So there was no Bissago monarchy or state, and by the 19th century none had emerged. Long before the sixteenth century, Bissago developed boat building and navigation skills so they could tap bountiful fisheries around their islands. As Atlantean merchants increasingly frequented the area, Bissago turned their skills to crafting tradable captives. From huge boats with dozens of rowers, Bissago warriors staged hit-and-run raids on the coastal villages of Balanta, Papel, Biafada, Floup and other groups living on and between the Cacheu and Grande rivers. Bissago often reached the mainland early in the morning and set houses on fire. As residents fled the flames, Bissago warriors killed men who resisted and quickly seized women and children, dragged them to their boats and withdrew before the victims' families could organize a response. By the 17th century Bissago had turned its islands into great slave trading centers ruled by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, British,

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and Spanish merchants. The British in particular visited the Bissagos and made the short journey there from the Gambia River. This angered the Portuguese officials, who were stationed near Bissau and Cacheu but were too weak militarily to respond. The Portuguese regarded the Bissagos as their own, but were never able to establish a trade monopoly with the islands. In the late eighteenth century, British abolitionist Philip Beaver attempted to colonize an island near the Bissagos. However, his settlers were harassed, kidnapped, and killed by Bissago warriors, forcing Beaver to abandon his colonization program. Bissago raids had several consequences. First, they forced coastal societies to change the architecture of their settlements, fortifying villages with stockades and building houses with many exits. Second, to counter the Bissago, coastal groups increasingly militarized, organizing young men into cohesive units that could defend against attack. In some cases, these military units were used for offensive purposes, with coastal societies hunting each other to harvest prisoners for trade. Third, while many societies have successfully combated Bissago raids, some have not. This was especially true for Biafada, the most common victim of Bissago attacks. In the seventeenth century, the Biafada kings Emchabole, Mangali and Bamala wrote letters to the Portuguese monarch seeking protection. Although missionaries saw Biafada as promising converts to Christianity, Portuguese military aid was not forthcoming. Finally, since women were mostly the targets of Bissago raids, Bissago warriors often kept some of them, married them, and relied on them to do much of their field work. Bissago agricultural practices were then feminized as women, both slave and non-slave, were forced to perform nearly all of society's food production and processing. See also Decentralized Societies. Further reading: Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Walter Hawthorne

Black Sailors Black sailors played a crucial role in the commercial revolution that brought the slave plantation to the New World. Armed with skills some acquired in Africa, learned when pressed into service during the Middle Passage, or served as stewards and servants on ships during enslavement, the black sailor became an important worker in the Atlantean slave trade. At the height of slavery, they transported goods from place to place in the Chesapeake and Mississippi regions and between the Caribbean islands. During the American Revolution (1776), the American Civil War (1864), and up until the World Wars, the black sailor was ubiquitous in the American military, particularly the Navy. Eventually, some served as part of the Liberty subway network. Before the arrival of the Europeans (Portuguese) off the African coast in the 15th century, African canoeists sailed the Atlantic, but often stayed close to shore. Also, a complex and extensive commercial

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Network of waterways served large parts of West Africa from the Niger-Senegal-Gambia region to the Hausa states and the Yorubaland region. The West-Central Africa and Congo regions were also linked by coastal trade by boat. African canoes, capable of carrying 5 to more than 100 people, were used for both fishing and river trade. The canoeists of the Gold Coast and the kru of Liberia impressed European merchants with their boating skills. In fact, they were largely responsible for the transport of goods and slaves between European ships on the high seas and European forts and castles on the West African coast. Companies chartered from Europe sometimes used "castle slaves" as boatmen. African sailors also served as linguists, pilots and surfers for Euro-African trade interests. Some Africans carried this maritime experience into Atlantean slavery. Not surprisingly, about 22 percent of 18th-century black seafarers were African-born. From the early European voyages of discovery (15th century), black seafarers (free and unfree) traveled to different parts of the world with Christopher Columbus, Balboa, Cortez and others. With the establishment of the plantation complex in the New World, black sailors (free and bonded) were among the workers of the Atlantic trade—working on ships, fishing, and doing other maritime activities. Due to the high mortality rate among European sailors during the slave trade, ships were sometimes left undermanned. In these cases, the slaves were taught to do aspects of seafaring work. On board slave ships, such "sailors" performed whatever work they were taught. European eyewitness accounts indicate that ship captains sometimes trained some of their slaves "to use the oar" in the Caribbean. Additionally, black sailors were commissioned on British ships during the turbulent 18th century, particularly during the Wars of Spanish Succession, Wars of Austrian Succession, Seven Years' War, American Revolution and French Revolution, all between 1700 and 1815. So , black seamen covered every corner of the Atlantic and brought tangible skills learned in Africa or during the Middle Passage to America or to the New World as free men. Sea voyages freed slaves, and the relentless demand for sea labor led to large numbers of blacks working on coasters and ships. They served as helmsmen of rowing boats, captains of sloops and schooners, and in the Chesapeake as pilots of ocean-going vessels. During the American Revolutionary Wars, some black sailors (sea slaves) piloted British invading forces hoping to gain their freedom in the event of a British victory. The plantation complex benefited in many ways from the services of black sailors. Boats and canoes transported rice, timber, tobacco, and other items along the maze of the Chesapeake Bay's southern waterways. Similarly, barge transport from ship to land, particularly from the Caribbean to the Chesapeake, was performed by boats manned by black seamen. Dugout canoes and hybridized boats with European-style sailing equipment (similar to Senegambian canoes) served the transportation needs of slaves in the Chesapeake. Black sailors helped build and handle the ubiquitous small boats that became common on the early American coast. Enslaved black sailors, with

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small boats and canoes, facilitated their masters' business in the Atlantic basin. In the Caribbean, slave boatmen traveled from place to place and between islands, fishing and transporting goods. Ships carrying black and white sailors and even runaway slaves filled the shipping lanes between the Caribbean islands. From the Caribbean to Africa, America and Europe, black sailors became an integral part of the workers of the new commercial capitalist maritime revolution. Black sailors were important in the fight against the slave trade, particularly on the Underground Railroad network, especially beginning in 1812. In the coastal waters of the lowlands of Carolina and the Chesapeake Bay, black sailors were important in transporting runaway slaves. They used their freedom on the water to spread abolition information throughout many parts of the United States and the Atlantic Basin. Leading people to freedom, they played the “role of newspapers and the royal postal service across the Atlantic,” carrying news and messages with regional and local differences. A majority of black sailors during the US Civil War, particularly 1863–1864, were "contraband" or "boys". They served on many ships and did work on shore installations. They occupied the lowest rungs of the hierarchy of authority and had the lowest rank among seafarers, in addition to being the lowest paid. Because of racial prejudice, many black sailors worked as laborers and servants instead of using their seafaring skills. Others worked as cooks and stewards preparing meals. Naval officers, as part of larger American society, generally viewed African Americans as inferior and subservient. There were prejudices against employing black sailors as officers. During the 1840s and 1850s, many black sailors from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Boston had commercial maritime experience on steamship lines. Some in the Virginia area, particularly near Norfolk, had warship experience. Others from New England had taken part in whaling voyages lasting two to three years. In Ohio, Missouri, and the upper Mississippi, many black seafarers gained experience as deckhands, stewards, cooks, barbers, and cabin attendants. They fired furnaces and serviced boilers on steamships. Some black sailors joined the navy while others served on pirate ships. Some black sailors ended up as seamen because of the captains' decisions. Others negotiated seafaring permits with their captains, inspired by a love of travel, the prospect of “freedom at sea” and the vision of distant horizons. Black sailors served as seamen in both slavery and freedom. Circumstances of war often presented black men with opportunities to enlist in the Navy. More often than not, these men escaped slavery, and the Navy became one of the few institutions where the federal government protected them and gave them a chance to serve. See also British Navy; Crew. Further Reading: Bennett, Michael J. "Union Jacks: The Common Yankee Sailor of the American Civil War, 1861–1865." Ph.D. PhD thesis, University of St. Louis, 2001; Bolster, W. Jeffrey. African American Sailors in the Age of Sailing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; Langley, Harold D. "The Negro in the Navy and the Merchant Service, 1798-1860," Journal of Negro History 52 (October 1967): 273-286; merill,

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James M. "Men, Monotony, and Moldy Beans - Life on Board Civil War Blockaders." American Neptune 16 (January 1956): 49-59; Putney, Martha S. Black Sailors: Pre-Civil War African-American Merchant Sailors and Whalemen. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Edmund Kings

Bonny Bonny is one of the city-states of the Niger Delta, a region that is now in the southern part of present-day Nigeria. In 1846, a period coinciding with the abolition of the slave trade and the establishment of the legal trade in palm oil, Bonny's geographical location was noted as follows: “By its safe and extensive anchorage, its proximity to the sea, and its connection with the great rivers of Central Africa, Bonny is now the headquarters of the palm oil trade, as was the slave trade in West Africa” (Dike, 1956). Bonny and Calabar, at the mouth of the Niger, has been identified as one of the four main centers of the slave trade in West Africa. The remaining three areas include the coast of Guinea, Senegal and Congo. Figures are readily available to demonstrate Bonny's importance as a major West African slave port. One of the most cited figures is that of Captain John Adams in 1822. The captain noted that 20,000 slaves left Bonny Harbor annually. By ethnic composition, 16,000 of the slaves came from the hinterland of the Ibo. According to the captain, this country alone has sold around 320,000 slaves in twenty years. A unique and amazing aspect of the slave trade in Bonny and other Niger Delta city-states is the manner in which slaves were acquired for the transatlantic slave trade. Although a good percentage of the slaves came from other parts of the Slave Coast—most notably Lagos, the Gold Coast, the Congo, and Dahomey—largely through inland wars and raids, Bonny had the opportunity to be supplied with oracle-acquired slave implements. The hinterland Igbo country sent slaves to the coast after being banished by the Aro Oracle for crimes or other anti-social offenses. The theories surrounding the origin of the Aro Oracle are complex. Some historians believe that the founders of the Oracle were formerly residents of Bonny and other parts of the Niger Delta but migrated inland and founded the Ibo towns of Arochukwu to exclusively send slaves to the coast. The overwhelming influence of the oracle restricted the acquisition of slaves in other ways. The Aro Oracle was not the only slave-producing oracle in Ibo country. Other less prominent are Agballa at Awka, Igwe at Umunora and Onyili-ora at Nri. See also Enslavement and Procurement; company^ots; Legitimate Trade; ports; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Deich, Onwuka. Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956; Jones, GI The Trading States of Oil Rivers: A Study of Political Development in Eastern Nigeria. London: Oxford University Press, 1963; Priestly, Margaret. West African Trade and Coastal Company. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Saheed pendant

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Bordeaux The city of Bordeaux in France was founded in the third century BC. Founded by the Romans in 1000 BC, it was one of the busiest ports in France during the slavery period (along with La Rochelle, Le Havre and Nantes). Indeed, from 1672 to 1792 what is commonly referred to in French as la traite des noirs (the trade in negroes) consisted mainly of importing slaves from Africa and sending them to the French overseas territories (West Indies) via Bordeaux. Despite an initial attempt to abolish slavery after the French Revolution (1794), Napoleon later revived it until he finally ended it in 1848. The prosperity of the French colonies depended largely on the continuous importation of slaves from Africa (especially Guinea). To keep production stable, around 1.25 million slaves were sent from France to the Caribbean. Between 1717 and 1789, French exports increased tenfold, with Bordeaux accounting for 40 percent of France-West Indies trade. The city's main merchants managed to export most goods from the French Caribbean to other European ports such as Amsterdam, Hamburg or London. Some of these traders named their slave ships with sometimes ironic names such as Amitie ´ (Friendship), La Fortune (The Fortune) or Liberte ´ (Liberty). The last belonged to Isaac Couturier in Bordeaux and was the first ship to be sent to the Caribbean in 1762. Few ships were to leave Bordeaux for the next few years, as traders were still unsure of the success of this type of trade. One of the main concerns was keeping the slaves alive due to the poor conditions on board (the slaves were often malnourished, carried diseases, etc.). If the number of surviving slaves was more than 20 percent, the voyage was considered successful. Such was the case with the Lys, owned by Teillard and Gachet, two famous traders who brought 492 slaves aboard and arrived in the Caribbean with 464 still alive. As early as 1717, Bordeaux's foreign trade reached incredible levels (13 million livres, accounting for about 10 percent of the nation's foreign trade) compared to other cities of the same size. At the time of the French Revolution, Bordeaux was one of the most prosperous French cities, bringing in around 238 million livres (25 percent of France's foreign trade). Although Nantes was considered a leading city in terms of the slave trade, its economic success was mainly due to the fact that Bordeaux was late in organizing its own trade. By the mid-1730s, however, Nantes was no longer the first leading port between France and its colonies. Slavery had a major impact on Bordeaux culture: many streets were named after famous slave owners, and some of the most popular buildings were built with money from the slave trade during the reign of Louis XV. built. For example, one of the most famous museums is the "Muse'e Colbert", named after the notorious minister of Louis XV. was named, who wrote the Code Noir. However, there are no official monuments commemorating the black people who involuntarily contributed to the city's wealth. Although Bordeaux's past as a slave importing town has long been kept secret and is still taboo in many respects, some historians have recently begun to research Bordeaux's past as a slave port. In 2001 the

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The French Parliament has publicly denounced the evils of the slave trade, calling it a "crime against humanity" Bordeaux as a colonial city. See also French Caribbean; French slave trade; historical memory; nantes Further reading: Crouzet, Francois. Britain, France, and International Trade: From Louis XIV to Victoria, Collected Studies Series. Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1996; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Steve Puig

Bozal The term bozal is of Spanish origin and was widely used in Iberia and in the American colonies of Spain and Portugal to describe people born in Africa. Iberian groups believed that a bozal was a culturally inferior person and a savage. In America, the term was used to identify an enslaved African who was brought to America directly from Africa and did not speak an Iberian language (e.g. Spanish or Portuguese). A Bozal did not practice Catholicism and thus was not religiously baptized. The term was widely used during the Atlantic slave trade era from the 16th to the 19th centuries to describe the large influx of enslaved Africans who were forced to cross the Atlantic from West Africa. Other European groups used comparable words to bozal, including the British who used "saltwater negroes". Bozales found themselves in the two-tier slave system that was being developed across America. Bozales performed pioneering tasks and were put in charge of the hardest work on a plantation or ranch, in the mines and forests. As a result, many of the newly enslaved Africans were moved to the interior of Central and South America to extract or manufacture commodities such as gold, silver, sugar, cocoa, and leather. Despite a bozal's initial inability to display or understand Iberian culture, the inhabitants and subjects of Spain believed that a bozal could be molded into a Christian, which was desired by all enslaved Africans living in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Shortly after a suspected Bozal's arrival in Spain or the American colonies, a Bozal would be baptized and forced to accept and practice Catholicism. They had to learn to speak Spanish or Portuguese to communicate with their slave master, driver, and other enslaved Africans. Hence, the term Ladino was introduced to distinguish between those who refused to give up their African heritage or who could not successfully speak Spanish and showed a high level of Iberian acculturation, and those who did. In some cases, Bozales escaped the clutches of their new destiny in America and settled in their own African community called Palenque. Many enslaved Africans were considered Bozal throughout the colonial period in Latin America, showing that African culture was not completely destroyed in the Middle Passage, as earlier scholars suggested.

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Further reading: Landers, Jane. Black society in Spanish Florida. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; Router, Leslie. The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Nadine Hunt Branding The transatlantic slave trade comprised a series of acts by slave traders aimed at enslaving the African, destroying his or her freedom, and severing family and tribal ties. Part of the physical and psychological transitions that Africans underwent in the process of enslavement was branding. Throughout the transatlantic slave trade, participants branded Africans to illustrate their ownership of the captives and to signal slave status. Branding was also an act of disempowerment. Branding was especially necessary when the slaves were owned by multiple owners. Distinctive marks, typically made from pieces of silver wire or small irons, were heated to an incandescent state and the branding iron was stamped onto the skin of slaves before they were transferred to the slave ship that would transport them to the New World and a life in Slavery. Marks were often placed on the slave's shoulder, arm, or chest. In the unsanitary conditions on the slave ships, the burns often became infected, causing fever and even gangrene. Many of the European governments, slave traders and trading companies, and African monarchs branded the Africans to ensure others knew who the slaves belonged to. Marks were usually used to indicate ownership, but additional marks might have been printed on the slaves for a variety of reasons. A brand, for example, could indicate that the appropriate

Burn slaves, nineteenth century. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

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export duties have been paid. A royal badge indicated permanent bondage to the crown, and a cross signified the slave had been baptized. Individual masters would sometimes distinguish their slaves from those of others by stamping their slaves on specific body parts with branding irons. The scars caused by the branding were both physical and emotional, serving as an enduring reminder of the trauma suffered by those who walked through the Middle Passage. See also Enslavement and Procurement; Torture; Force. Further reading: Clarkson, Thomas. The Story of the Rise, Progress and Enactment of the British Parliament's Abolition of the African Slave Trade. London: Cass, 1968 (1808); Falcon Bridge, Alexander. An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa. New York: AMS Press, 1973 (1788); Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Sharon A. Roger Hepburn Brathwaite, Kamau (1930–) The creative work of the Caribbean poet, critic, and historian Kamau Brathwaite is important to a study of the Middle Passage. The Barbadian's publications as a historian and his creative writing are based on an examination of the enduring traces of the transatlantic crossing on the Caribbean and New World experience. His scholarly work in cultural history discusses the impact of European-African encounters on Caribbean and New World identities. His theories on creolization attempt to explain how the melting pot of cultures in the Caribbean forged a new experience that synthesizes the diverse racial and cultural contributions to Caribbean society. Brathwaite's most significant contribution to Middle Passage discourse is arguably his creative writing, for which he is widely known and recognized. His poetic work transcends the traditional label of poetry. His creative collections are poetry, cultural criticism and philosophical document at the same time. His seminal collection of poetry, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), examines the nature of African New World civilization, in which the Middle Passage is a moment of crisis, grave, and limbo. In this work, one of the protagonists, a descendant of Africa named Omowale, returns home to explore the complex transition between the old and new worlds. Significantly, Brathwaite's work is not chronological, but transcends time and space to show the connection between history, present and future. Brathwaite was instrumental in understanding the Middle Passage not only as a historical process but also as a contemporary construct. His reading of the Caribbean creolization process builds on an examination of the centrifugal outward propagation of cultural relations, starting from the process of surviving the Middle Passage. In his poetry, the middle passage is Holocaust; it is physical and psychological rape. But, paradoxically, it is also a seething space for new creative cultural phenomena. His understanding of the impact of this process on Africans' creative cultural sensibilities is dramatized in his poetic treatment of limbo dance. His poem "Caliban" represents the cramped and distorted position of the

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Africans below deck in contemporary ritual of Limbo dance. The creative ability to submerge and re-emerge represents the African's resilient potential. His 'Tidelectics' (a play on the Western notion of dialectics) draws on the metaphor of waves lashing and receding from the shores of the New World islands. But the waves themselves are also metaphors for the ocean, the limitless, ceaseless process of time's passage. They are a trope of the story. The sea is therefore omnipresent in his poetry. In poems like "New World A-Comin" and "Caliban" and in collections like Mother Poem (1977), the waves on the shore instantly transform into the rhythms of the ocean. The sea is a tomb, but it is also a gateway to possessions and potential spiritual liberation. In Caliban, the rhythmic beating of the African drum anticipates a process of incessant ebb and flow of cultural death and rebirth. This is also reflected in later collections. His Sycorax video style (in which he experiments with computer and digital fonts, point sizes, and web phonetics) grew out of an understanding of capitalism, exploitation, and conquest symbolized by the Middle Passage. In X/Self (1987), the evil trade of imprisoning the African is recast within the system, matrix and digital middle passage of our time. Thus, Brathwaite's writing style (in which he defies the rules of standard English in favor of the nation's vernacular, the vernacular) reflects an artistic quest for liberation and a covert revolt, appropriating the vehicle of language that always nor does the New World threaten to carry Africans into new virtual enslavement. See also historical memory. Further reading: Brathwaite, Kamau. The comers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973; Brathwaite, Kamau. Root. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993; Rohlehr, Gordon. Scout. Tunapuna: Gordon Rohlehr, 1981.

Curwen Best Brazil Brazil was the largest importer of slaves in the Atlantic slave trade. Portuguese-American prominence in importing African slave labor grew as the colony rose to become the major exporter of tropical goods, making it the first American model plantation. Thus, if Brazil was a secondary destination for African arms exports in the 16th century, it gradually took the lead over the following century as its sugar exports increasingly supplied the European market. The use of African forced labor was the cornerstone of colonial Brazilian society and economy. As a result of the Atlantic slave trade, the presence of African slaves in the Portuguese-American territories spread and encompassed all economic and social activities until the late abolition of slavery in 1888. In the first half of the 17th century the sugar plantations of the Portuguese colony became closely linked to their main source of slaves: Angola. From the late sixteenth century, Indian laborers were replaced by African slaves in the sugar cane fields and sugar mills of Bahia and Pernambuco, who were chief captains of the sugar plantations.

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Brazilian Charcoal and Vegetable Vendors, 1816–1831. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

When the Dutch invaded and captured the Captain of Pernambuco (1630–1654), they soon saw the need to control slave sources. For this reason they conquered Luanda, Benguela and Sao Tome´ (1641), from where they brought most of the slaves of Brazil. The Dutch were driven out of Angola by troops from Brazil. Brazilian settlers in Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco organized the Africa expedition. These events show the close ties between the Portuguese colonies on either side of the South Atlantic. In the first century and a half of Brazilian colonization, enslaved blacks came from two main regions: the Guinea Coast (West Africa) and the Congo and Angola (West-Central Africa). From the former region, the slaves came from the mainland (Senegambia), but almost all passed through the Cape Verde archipelago, and increasingly thousands were trafficked from southern ports, mainly from the Bay of Benin, via the island of São Tomé. For this reason, Portuguese settlers spoke of Africa as "Guinea" and of Africans as "Guinea Negroes". export region. From Luanda, the Portuguese invaded the hinterland and mixed with the indigenous people, creating a Luso-African population. Luso-Brazilian merchants' control of the Luanda and later the Benguela slave trade was partly due to the formation of this mixed population, which supported the increasing demand for slaves in Brazil's sugar plantations. Across the Atlantic, Brazilian sugar exports experienced a crisis in the late 17th century, while the gold mining trade increased in the 17th century

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Central-South region of the colony, resulting in a dramatic increase in Brazilian slave imports. From the early 18th century, Rio de Janeiro was on par with Bahia and Pernambuco in the slave trade. Rio became the largest importer of slaves, with the majority of its captives being from Angola. The new colonial export boom (1789–1815) forced Brazil to import Africans at an unprecedented rate compared to the previous two centuries. The ban on the slave trade across the equator (1815) and the nearness of the complete abolition of the slave trade (banned by law in 1831) further accelerated the importation of African slaves. Thus, in the last fifty years of the Brazilian slave trade, despite the legal prohibition of this trade in the last two decades (1831-1850), more than 1.5 million slaves ended up in Brazilian ports. In general, the African slaves exported to Brazil came from two primary ethnic groups: Bantu and Sudanese. The former dominated for the first 150 years of the Portuguese slave trade, while the latter were imported on a large scale from the late 17th century. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Brazil landed an impressive number of slaves from the Indian Ocean region, including the Bantu brought from Mozambique. Bantu and Sudanese slaves were brought to different regions of Brazil, but the slave import pattern varied by port and captain. In Bahia, where West African imports predominated, Sudanese were known as Jejes (Fon and Daome´) and Nagos (Yoruba), among others. Rio de Janeiro, the southern region (including the River Plate through Buenos Aires), and Pernambuco imported more Bantu than Sudanese slaves. Although they received large numbers of West African slaves, mainly in the first half of the 18th century, the majority of the slaves were imported by traders from Pernambuco and Bahia, and some by traders from Rio de Janeiro itself. However, Brazil's slave import pattern over three centuries led to the general distinction in Brazil between "Mina" captives (exported from West Africa) and "Angola" slaves (from west-central Africa). The fact that most eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian slavery enterprises came from Portuguese America, and that these slave traders traded colonial goods (tobacco and cane rum) along the African coast might explain the relatively low cost of slaves in Brazil and the US resulting widespread use of slave labor in its various branches of production. Slaves were common on large plantations and in mining, but they could also be found in small groups or enslaved as personal property in cities. The owners of these small groups used their slaves for food crops such as cassava, which was important to the colony's supply, or even in the small tobacco farms for export, including supplying the Atlantic slave market. In the cities, slaves worked on infrastructure, as artisans and street vendors (“profit slaves”) and as domestic servants. As the main West African slave importer, Brazil exhibited a peculiar demographic pattern among American slave societies. From the mid-16th to the mid-18th centuries, Brazil imported about 4.8 million slaves, or just over 40 percent of all African slaves

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landed in the New World. In the 18th century, Brazil alone imported nearly 1.7 million slaves, and around the turn of the 19th century, African slave imports saw another sharp increase, reaching about 2 million captives between 1790 and 1850. By 1798, however, slaves were being made for 40 percent of Brazil's population — nearly 3.25 million — including the Ladinos (Brazilian-born) and Boc¸ais (African-born). Their slave imports soared to unprecedented levels, but the slave share of the Luso-Brazilian population declined slightly to 38 percent in the years 1800–18, and further reduced to 31 percent in 1819. On the eve of the abolition of slavery (enacted 1888), Brazil's slave population was only slightly larger than it had been almost a century earlier, at about 1.5 million people. Several reasons led to this small proportion of the slave population in the Brazilian population compared to importing large numbers of Africans. The abundance of slaves and the low cost of the Luso-Brazilian slave trade were the main factors. The ability to replace slaves meant that slave owners exploited slave labor and cared little about their longevity. The high proportion of men in traffic to Brazil (as to all of America) created an imbalance between male and female slaves. In addition, the low proportion of children imported through the Middle Passage (as well as the high infant mortality rate among slave offspring and the low fertility of female slaves) were conditions that led to low rates of natural slave reproduction. Mistreatment, harsh punishments, poor diet and housing, hard labor in the fields, and epidemics that affected more prisoners than free people contributed to the low life expectancy of the slave population. For all these reasons, only the steady importation of slaves could keep Brazil's slave population at levels necessary to meet slaveholder demand. These features contradict the so-called leniency of slavery in Brazil (compared to slavery in the Anglo-American colonies). Unlike the United States, which banned importation of slaves in 1808 and had increased the slave percentage of the North American population nearly six-fold by the eve of the abolition of slavery in 1865, Brazil maintained the slave trade until 1850, when the slave population declined. Miscegenation practices and the relative numbers of free people of color in colonial and post-colonial society did little to improve slave life in Brazil. It is not for nothing that the Atlantic slave trade and the omnipresence of slave labor in Brazil play an important role in Brazilian historiography. Since the 1930s, slavery in general, and the slave trade in particular, have played an important role in the historiographical models that have provided explanations for the formation of Brazilian society and Brazil's place in the world economy. The currently dominant model is the one that usually relates the social and economic formation process of Brazil to the expansion of the European market and the accumulation of capital in the dynamic centers of the western economy. The low cost of production – that is, land and

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Labor – would have established highly profitable export activities in America. Hence, the slave trade would be a mechanism to transfer the colonial economic surplus, consolidate the slavery system in peripheral regions, and encourage primitive capital accumulation in the center. Thus, it was the slave trade that enabled the formation of slave societies in America and led to the Industrial Revolution in Northwest Europe. This historiography had at least one major problem: its approach to the slave trade lacked original research. Only recently have some works presented in-depth research on the slave trade. These works have attempted to demonstrate that traders from some Brazilian ports (mainly Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in the 18th the Brazilian slave trade to be limited only to the 18th century and the Luso-Brazilian ports in the South Atlantic.Furthermore, even in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, metropolitan merchant capital had some importance in financing slave-trading enterprises, assuring risks and profits from them companies to share. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Great Britain; Angola; Credit and Finance; Illegal Slave Trade, Brazil; Internal Slave Trade, Brazil; Congo; Lisbon; Portuguese Slave Trade Further reading: Alden, Dauril. "Late Colonial Brazil, 1750–1808.” In Leslie Bethell, ed. Cambridge History of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Alencastro, Luis Felipe. "The Lesson of Colonization." In Barbara Solow, ed. Slavery and the rise of the Atlantic economies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Blackburn, Robin. The emergence of the new world slavery. New York: Verso, 1997; Inikori, Joseph E. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England. A study of international trade and economic development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Prado Junior, Caio. Colonial background of modern Brazil. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1967; Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Foundation of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Gustavo Acioli Lopes and Maximiliano MacMenz

Bristol A major British port city, Bristol, England owes its fame to the development of triangular trade, shipping and shipbuilding. The slave and sugar trades in the Caribbean made Bristol the second largest city in England in the first three quarters of the 18th century. An early English chronicler from Bristol observed: "There is no brick in the city, but that which is cemented with the blood of a slave. Magnificent mansions, luxurious living, liveried servants were the product of wealth derived from the suffering and groaning of the slaves bought and sold by the Bristol merchant” (Williams, 1994). In 1552 the Bristol Merchants received a Royal Charter establishing them as the City of Bristol Merchant Venturers Society, which sought exclusive control of overseas trade. The Bristol

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Merchant venturers date back to the fourteenth century. In this century of great commerce, the Bristol Merchants also formed the Merchants Guild to share the burden of entertaining the visitors who came to the port. The purpose of the guild was to establish trade connections and share any risk associated with these connections in order to establish new trade relationships. The Merchant Venturers were a powerful lobby responsible for Bristol getting its share of the African slave trade in the 18th century. The society defended trade on the grounds that the city's prosperity depended on it. Towards the end of the 18th century, another lobby, the West Indian Society, whose membership included a few merchant venturers, took up the defense of the interests of Caribbean planters. West Indian trade was worth twice Bristol's total overseas trade combined (Williams, 1994). With Bristol's decline as a major port in the 19th century, the society lost much of its influence. Today, many still remember the influence these powerful merchants once had on Bristol's development into a major trading city. British trade in West Africa began in 1562 with Sir John Hawkins' illegal shipment of human cargo to the Spanish West Indies. At its peak of success in the second half of the 18th century, England accounted for half of all slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the trade went to the West Indies, especially Jamaica, and amounted to more than 1.6 million people. Fewer Bristol ships sailed to West Africa; more sailed directly to the Caribbean. By the late 18th century, Britain was the largest and most successful slave nation in the world. The wins changed the lives of people living in Britain; it changed their landscapes (money was put into new buildings, homes, schools and colleges, museums, libraries, etc.), their tastes (turned sugar from a luxury item into a commodity), and their local economies (banks grew rich off the profits of some of the most notorious slave traders in Great Britain). Ultimately, this process of transformation would leave Britain as the world's premier industrial power, its slave economy inseparable from the whole. The changing fortunes of the sugar industry and abolitionist campaigns led to the abolition of the trade in 1807. Slavery itself continued to flourish until resistance by slaves and abolitionists alike was successful, and emancipation was finally granted in 1833. However, traders would continue to trade in slave-produced goods such as tobacco and cotton long after the trade was abolished, and given their preeminence, goods manufactured in the industrial heartland still found their way to the African coast to be bartered for people. See also Atkins, John; British Caribbean; British slave trade; credit and finance; Eric Williams thesis; Liverpool; London; ports. Further reading: Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Williams, Eric Eustace. capitalism and slavery; with a new introduction by Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 (1944).

Nicolas Jones

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British Caribbean The Caribbean became the economic center of the British slave trade and one of the last bastions of slavery within the Empire. The British encountered existing slave systems when conquering territories in the Caribbean. A slave-based economy subsequently developed across the region, leading to the rise of a powerful planter class that exerted a significant influence on British politics in the 19th century. The end of the slave trade and subsequent abolition of slavery marked the decline of the planter aristocracy and the marginalization of the Caribbean within the British Empire. Colonization and Slavery Spain was the first colonial power in the Caribbean, but although they claimed the entire region, the Spanish settled only a few of the large islands. In the late 15th century, British privateers and pirates began using the islands to attack Spanish treasure galleons en route from the mines in South America. Formal British presence in the Caribbean began in 1621 when the British settled St. Croix. In 1625 Barbados was claimed by the Crown and two years later a settlement was established on the island. In the same year there was an unsuccessful attempt to settle Tobago. In 1628 Nevis was colonized by the British and in 1632 settlements were established in Antigua and Montserrat.

The whip was frequently used to extract the best from the enslaved workforce; Any unauthorized break could result in brutal punishment. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International.

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Eighty Britons and ten slaves were among the first settlers in Barbados. Modeled on the North American colonies, the Barbadians established a Legislative Assembly in 1639, forming the third representative body created in the Western Hemisphere (after Virginia and Massachusetts). As other British colonies were established in the Caribbean, they too created legislative bodies and also continued the dichotomy of democracy and slavery created in the northern colonies. Sugar became the dominant crop on the island and planters began to use indentured laborers and convicts to find enough labor to work in the fields. However, the planters were unable to secure sufficient labor through indenture and the mortality rate among the British was high. Other islands used indentured servitude with similar results. Many of the former servants eventually formed a small middle or merchant class on some islands. Others, including runaways, formed renegade gangs that lived in the jungle. A group of Scots were transferred to Barbados for taking part in the Jacobite rebellion against the monarchy. Large numbers of the Highlanders fled into the jungle, where they became known as "Red Legs" because their legs became sunburned under their kilts. In the 1640s, Barbadian planters began importing slaves from Dutch and Portuguese slave traders. Barbados became the most profitable of the Caribbean colonies, dominating the region's sugar production. The number of imported slaves grew steadily, but a series of natural disasters in the 1660s, including a great fire and hurricane, devastated the economy. One of the most prosperous British colonies in the region, it was founded in 1655 when British troops under William Penn conquered Jamaica. In 1670 the island was officially ceded to the British. The population of Jamaica was about 3,000 when it was conquered by the British, including about 1,500 slaves. The British retained the slave system and new colonists to Jamaica also acquired new slaves supplied by Dutch traders. By the early 17th century, Jamaica had supplanted Barbados as the region's largest sugar producer, although both colonies were extraordinarily prosperous. Meanwhile, planters in the other British colonies increased the use of slave labor. Other colonies acquired through conquest were Trinidad, conquered by Spain in 1797, and Tobago, ceded to the British in 1814. In order to generate income from the slave trade, the monarchy founded the Royal Africa Company (RAC) in 1660. The company was granted a monopoly on the slave trade between Africa and Britain's western hemisphere colonies. The RAC then established new slave posts along the African coast or seized existing posts from colonial rivals such as the Dutch or Portuguese. During the 1680s, the RAC supplied the American and Caribbean colonies with an average of about 5,000 slaves a year. The RAC's monopoly was revoked in 1698, and other firms began to engage in trading. Bristol soon became the center of the slave trade, closely followed by Liverpool. In 1731 the RAC abandoned the slave trade to concentrate on other products and goods, and in 1752 the company was dissolved. One of the by-products of sugar production is molasses. Planters and slaves began distilling the molasses to make an alcoholic beverage, rum.

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Distilleries in New England soon became the main producers of rum, while the Caribbean colonies provided the molasses. The result was the development of triangular trade. One form of the system involved the shipment of molasses from Caribbean plantations to New England distilleries. Rum and other trade goods were then shipped to Africa where they were bartered for slaves. The slaves were then transported to the Caribbean and southern colonies. Other versions of the trade involved shipping sugar to Bristol or Liverpool, where slave traders transported trade goods to Africa for slaves. The slaves were taken to the American or Caribbean colonies via the Middle Passage. In the mid-17th century, New Englanders dominated the slave trade and Bristol and Liverpool slowly declined in importance. Slaves in the North American colonies had a high natural growth rate, but conditions in the Caribbean caused a high mortality rate and necessitated the importation of more slaves. Only about a quarter of children born to slave parents survived to adulthood. Malnutrition, overwork, and poor sanitation left slaves vulnerable to diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, and took their toll on the adult population. Life expectancy for field slaves in the British Caribbean was short, around 35 years. The youngest slaves were most at risk, with about 15 to 20 percent dying during their first year in the Caribbean. Most field slaves endured only about eight years of hard labor before they died. The population of the British colonies in the Caribbean grew to about 500,000 by 1750. The majority of the population, around 425,000 people, were slaves. In several colonies, slaves made up about 90 to 95 percent of the population. In order to maintain a large enough white population to deter or defeat slave rebellions, several colonies enacted laws that enslaved some whites. For example, plantations in Jamaica had to have one white man for every ten slaves, up to the first twenty slaves, thereafter there had to be one settler for every twenty slaves. The number of slaves continued to increase in the colonies until the slave trade was abolished. Despite their smaller geographic size, the Caribbean colonies absorbed about 40 percent of the total number of slaves brought to the British colonies of the Western Hemisphere. Between 1651 and 1807, the British brought approximately 1.9 million slaves to their Caribbean colonies, in addition to a migration from the islands. In Barbados, for example, large sugar cane plantations were gradually bought up and small farms and medium-sized plantations were taken over. Many of the displaced planters resettled, and a group moved north in 1670 to found the colony of South Carolina. Slave rebellions were a constant fear among white plantation owners in the Caribbean. One manifestation of this fear was the creation of restrictive slave codes. These codes were stricter than those in the North American colonies and included greater restrictions on release. The restrictions on release reflected white opposition to a free black population on the islands. Planters were often allowed to apply particularly harsh penalties. For example, a 1688 Barbadian law granted owners the right to kill or maim slaves for a range of infractions, some of them relative

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irrelevant. There were three major revolts in Jamaica (1655, 1673 and 1760). And in the 18th century, on average, there was a slave rebellion in the colonies every five years. One of the most significant uprisings was the 1816 uprising in Barbados. The uprising eventually included more than 5,000 slaves who burned and looted more than forty estates on the island. Open fighting lasted four days until the main slave force of 400 was defeated by British regulars. Some 124 slaves were killed during the rebellion, and 214 were executed afterwards (some historians claim that up to 1,000 slaves were killed in the ensuing reprisals). Another 123 slaves were deported to other islands. Only one white settler died during the fighting. The rebellion reinforced abolitionist arguments in Parliament and prompted the government to grant more autonomy to Barbados. The End of the Slave Trade and Abolition The first major group of abolitionists was founded in 1729 by the Quakers. The abolitionists initially focused their energies on ending the slave trade. Many believed that if the supply of slaves were restricted, slavery itself would end, as planters would be forced to find alternative sources of work. The first major victory of the abolitionist movement was the Somerset case of 1772, in which a court ruled that individuals should not be kept as slaves in Britain itself. This judgment created a dichotomy within the empire: slavery was illegal in Britain but legal in the colonies. Planters launched a series of unsuccessful legal challenges, but the abolitionist movement accelerated their push. In the 1770s, motions were introduced in Parliament to abolish the slave trade, or slavery. Popular efforts to abolish slavery continued to be led by Quakers, while the political campaign was spearheaded by Conservative politicians including William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and future Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. Most support for slavery and the slave trade came from the West Indian planter lobby. The planters enjoyed the support of King George III. and his son William, Prince of Wales. William, future William IV, led opposition to abolition in the House of Lords. The American Revolution dramatically changed the British slave trade and the patterns of slavery in the Caribbean. The British offered freedom to American slaves if they ran away and enlisted in the British Army or Navy (several thousand did). The conflict also restricted the triangular trade with New England, although American slave traders again dominated the slave trade with the Caribbean colonies after the war. The conflict also led to a new colonization. Some 8,000 Loyalists were resettled in the Bahamas after the war, and thousands of ex-slaves who joined the British military in exchange for their freedom settled in Sierra Leone. The start of the Napoleonic Wars led to a drop in sugar demand as Napoleon ordered his allies and conquered nations to ban imports of British sugar. This led to a simultaneous decline in the economic and political power of the West Indian planters' lobby in Parliament. Despite this, the planters and their allies in the House of Lords were able to oppose abolitionist bills passed by the House of Commons in 1799, 1801 and 1802.

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In 1805 the House of Commons again passed a ban on the slave trade. Faced with widespread public and political support for the measure, the King relented and the bill was approved by the House of Lords and the Crown. The slave trade was banned in 1807. Prohibition ended the widespread importation of slaves, although many planters bought large numbers of slaves in anticipation of the end of the trade. Additionally, slave smuggling continued until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, allowing the British to devote more resources to suppressing the trade. A naval squadron was stationed off the coast of Africa, and the government was able to negotiate agreements with more than thirty countries, allowing the Royal Navy to stop, search and, if necessary, seize suspected slave ships. The only major power that opposed such a treaty was the United States. In 1823 Parliament passed legislation to improve the lives of slaves. The new measures allowed slaves to buy their freedom and gave them the right to property. Punishment was limited and owners were required to keep a record of each punishment imposed. Eventually, all colonies were required to appoint an ombudsman to oversee the health and safety of slaves. Caribbean lawmakers rejected many of the laws, and only Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Tobago appointed the necessary official. Lawmakers from Antigua to Jamaica refused to comply. Despite this, the plantation lobby pushed through repeated attempts to outlaw slavery in the 1820s, but the group became increasingly associated with the Tories. When the Tories were defeated in the 1832 election, sixteen pro-planter MPs lost their seats, leaving only thirty-five openly proslavic members of the legislature. More than 100 members formed a bloc to support all abolitionist bills. The West Indian colonies, by their actions against parliamentary initiatives, had seriously undermined any popular support among the general populace. Anti-slavery groups presented a number of petitions to Parliament in favor of abolition. In 1833 the House of Commons received 500 separate petitions in favor of abolition, while the House of Lords received 600. A petition contained 187,000 signatures. The following year, on August 29, Parliament finally approved a measure banning slavery throughout the Empire until 1834. To compensate the planters for the loss of their slaves, Parliament approved grants of £20 million. The abolition did not come immediately. Instead, the colonies were allowed to approve five-year apprenticeship systems designed to prepare and educate the slaves for freedom. Many planters used the system, but by 1838 slavery in the British Caribbean was over. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; African rulers and the slave trade; African Squadrons, The; asiato; British Navy; closure of the slave trade; Haitian Revolution, The; Leeward Islands; Monopoly; Spanish Caribbean; Windward Islands. Further reading: Craton, Michael. Empire, enslavement and freedom in the Caribbean. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997; Goveia, Elsa. Reform and Emancipation in the British Caribbean. St. Augustine: University of the West Indies, 1977; Higman, Barry. Slave Populations in the British Caribbean, 1807–1834. Baltimore:

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Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984; McDonald, Roderick, eds. West Indian Accounts: Essays in the History of the British Caribbean and Atlantic Economy in Honor of Richard Sheridan. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1996; Turley, D. The Culture of English Anti-Slavery, 1780–1860. London: Routledge, 1991.

Tom Lanford

British Navy The British Navy initially helped expand slavery, but later served as the primary vehicle for suppressing the slave trade. The Royal Navy played an important role in conquering the Dutch and French colonies in the Caribbean where slavery already existed. The navy later served to protect slave ships from pirates, privateers, and even enemy ships in times of war. The Royal Navy's anti-piracy campaigns in the early and mid-17th century were particularly important in stopping large-scale pirate attacks on slave ships. For example, between 1720 and 1722, the notorious pirate Bartholomew Roberts captured more than 100 ships with a small fleet of pirate ships. Most of the captured ships were slave traders. In February 1722 a British squadron captured his ships and killed Robert during a battle. The Navy also undertook operations to end slave rebellions in British colonies. For example, in 1773 and 1820 the Navy helped put down slave rebellions in Belize. Sailors and Royal Marines were used to recapture airstrip slaves during the riots. The constant need for manpower in the Navy meant that some ex-slaves served as British seamen. Unlike the Royal Army, there were no racial prohibitions on service in the Royal Navy. During the American Revolution, the Royal Navy recruited approximately 185,000 sailors through the practice of impressionism. Among those who joined the service were runaway slaves and freed slaves taken from captured American slave ships. In addition, some slaves were forced into service in the British Navy following attacks on British enemies' colonial possessions in the 17th century. In 1807, during the Napoleonic War, Parliament outlawed the slave trade. Because of the law, few resources were available to suppress slave traders. However, the government stationed two ships along the West African coast to deter slave traders. In addition, slave ships of the warring powers were routinely captured by the British. Freetown, the capital of what would later become the colony of Sierra Leone, was founded in 1787 as a haven for ex-slaves who had joined the British during the American Revolution. During the Anglo-French conflict, the colony also served as an area where captured slaves from other countries could be granted freedom after 1807. The Napoleonic War lasted until 1815 and during this time Royal Navy ships received a bounty for captured enemy-fighting slave ships and for each freed slave. After the war, Parliament continued this practice, thereby providing a financial incentive to capture slave traders. In 1817, in the Le Louis case, a British court ruled that ships of the Royal Navy could not stop ships of other countries engaged in slavery without the consent of the home country. This prompted the British government to embark on a diplomatic offensive to secure treaties with other countries

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Africans freed from a slave ship, Jamaica, 1857. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

would allow the Royal Navy to stop, search and, if necessary, seize suspected slave ships from other countries. In 1815 Portugal had already granted the British the right to stop suspected Portuguese slave ships north of the equator, and eventually the British were able to obtain consent agreements from thirty nations. The United States was the only major power that refused to give Britain the power to stop and search suspected slave ships. As a result, many slave traders from other nations began to travel illegally under the American flag to avoid arrest by the British. The anti-slavery flotilla increased in size and scope after the end of the Napoleonic War and the ensuing agreements that allowed the search and seizure of foreign ships. The force became known as the West African Squadron and was based in Fernando Po off the coast of Nigeria with bases in Sierra Leone and Cape Town. The squadron reached full strength in 1819 and for the remainder of its existence the unit consisted of about 25 ships and 2,000 sailors (with an additional 1,000 local sailors, commonly known as 'Kroomen'). At its peak, the squadron comprised one-sixth of the Royal Navy's total number of ships and cost Britain about 2 per cent of its annual gross national product. In the early years of the force, about 25 slavers were captured per year and an average of 5,000 slaves were freed. About 1,000 slave ships were eventually captured by the squadron, most (595) between 1843 and 1861. It is estimated that the Royal Navy freed about 160,000 slaves.

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Service in the West African Squadron was not popular in the Navy. Although sailors could earn additional income from the bounties on captured slave ships and freed slaves, the squadron had a mortality rate ten times higher than the rest of the navy. Sickness and heat took their toll on many British seamen and officers; About 5,000 British sailors died in the squadron's history. Furthermore, service in the squadron usually meant that seafarers did not see Britain for years. The force was supplemented by naval units from other countries. In 1820, a four-ship flotilla was dispatched from the United States to assist the British. However, the force was withdrawn in 1824 after only two ships were captured. A French naval squadron began joint operations with the British in 1837, and the combined force achieved a significant number of captures and prosecutions. In 1842, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty led the United States to send another flotilla to the region to work with the British. The new American forces captured twenty-four slave traders by 1861. The Civil War led to more American support through the Union naval blockade of southern ports and the 1862 Treaty of Washington, which eventually allowed the British to stop suspected American slave traders. In addition to prohibiting slave ships, the Royal Navy was ordered to cut off the supply of slaves in the 1830s. Funds were allocated to provide local leaders with subsidies to local chiefs who agreed to end their participation in the slave trade. The British also bought colonies or acquired territories to end slavery. The Navy was authorized to take direct military action against local slave traders. Naval forces dethroned the king of Lagos in 1851 after he refused to end the slave trade. Further British expansion along the coast and the closure of slave markets in Cuba in 1886 and in Brazil in 1888 ended the need for the squadron. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; African rulers and the slave trade; British Caribbean; British slave trade; closure of the slave trade; French slave trade. Further reading: Alpers, Edward. Ivory and Slaves. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Mannix, Daniel Pratt, with Cowley, Malcolm. Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865. New York: Vikings, 1962; Miers, Susanne. Britain and the end of the slave trade. New York: Longmans, Green and Company 1972; Northrup, David, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2002; Ward, WEF The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

Tom Lanford

British Slave Trade During the 18th century, the British colonies in the western hemisphere were the largest importers of slaves; In the 19th century, however, the British led efforts to abolish the slave trade and end slavery. Great Britain entered the slave trade relatively late in some cases. The Spanish and Portuguese had long-standing and well-developed slaves

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Routes to the New World when the first British settlements were established in the Western Hemisphere. The first shipment of slaves to a British colony, Jamestown, in the Western Hemisphere was in 1619. North American Colonies Although the status of slaves in the Chesapeake Colonies was initially ambiguous, after 1619 the number of slaves in Virginia and Maryland steadily increased. Between 1640 and 1666, colonial legislatures passed a series of laws that institutionalized slavery and restricted the freedom of Africans. By 1700 the slave population of Virginia and Maryland was 13,000. As the British colonies expanded, so did slavery. The Dutch brought slaves to their colonies in the Hudson River basin in 1626, and by the time the British took over those colonies and renamed the area New York, slaves made up about a quarter of the population. South Carolina was founded by Barbados plantation owners, and slavery was enshrined in the colony's charter. To supply the growing colonies with slaves, the monarchy granted the Royal Africa Company (RAC) a monopoly on the slave trade with British colonies in 1660. The royal family was one of the main investors in the new company. Over the next several decades, the RAC established a series of slave posts and factories along the West African coast. In 1661, the first permanent British colony in Africa was established on James Island on the Gambia River. In the 1680s, the RAC shipped about 5,000 slaves a year to the western hemisphere. Merchants complained about the monopoly, blaming that the RAC alone could not supply enough slaves for the North American and Caribbean colonies. Other companies were allowed to bring slaves into the British colonies but had to pay a special tax of 10 percent to the RAC. In 1698 King William revoked the RAC's monopoly and other merchants and firms quickly entered the slave trade. Bristol, England became the center of the slave trade, supplanting London. In 1731 the RAC ceased participation in the slave trade and concentrated on other goods (the company was dissolved in 1752). In 1644, the first attempt to procure slaves by American settlers was made by three merchant ships from Boston. One of the ships could trade a cargo load of goods for slaves in Africa and then transport them to Barbados for sale, where the ship picked up a new cargo of goods to sell in New England. This voyage marked the beginnings of the triangular trade, selling manufactured goods such as rum for slaves on the African coast. The slaves were then transported to the Caribbean or southern colonies for raw materials such as molasses, tobacco or rice. The RAC's monopoly and the threat posed by foreign warships and pirates limited New England participation for most of the 17th century. Many American ships sailed to Madagascar to bypass the RAC. The abolition of the RAC's monopoly and the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which gave the British a monopoly or asiato to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies, led to a dramatic expansion of the American role in the slave trade. Under the terms of the treaty, the British were to provide the Spanish with 4,800 slaves a year. Merchants soon

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from Massachusetts and Rhode Island controlled between 60 and 90 percent (depending on the year) of the North American slave trade. At Newport, Rhode Island, about 150 ships, or two-thirds of the colony's ships, were devoted to the slave trade. The triangular trade also led to a dramatic expansion of distilling in New England. Molasses from the Caribbean colonies was brought to New England and made into rum for export to Africa. In the mid-17th century, Rhode Island had thirty distilleries while Massachusetts had sixty-three. New England distilleries reduced production costs so that by the 1740s they could make 5 pence a gallon of rum. A gallon of rum sold for ten times as much in Africa. Meanwhile, around 1700, the price of slaves in Africa was 4 to 5 pounds. The slaves were then sold in the Caribbean for between £30 and £80. In addition to rum, the most common trade goods included hardware, firearms, blankets and small items such as mirrors and beads. Over time, slave prices in Africa increased dramatically. In the 1790s a typical male slave was acquired for two muskets, shot, gunpowder, flints, iron pots, yards of cloth and other clothing and beads, as well as rum, knives and cutlasses. Colonial governments taxed shiploads to fund various expenses, including road and port construction. In 1750 Spain revoked its Asiato and New England merchants concentrated their trade in the southern and Caribbean colonies. By 1750 the slave population of the British North American colonies was 236,400, but this number grew rapidly as more and larger ships began transporting slaves to the region. The use of larger ships carrying 100 or more slaves at a time became common. At the height of the slave trade, ships carried between 450 and 600 slaves per trip. These larger ships could carry larger trade loads of molasses and rum and were therefore more profitable. The leg of the journey that transported slaves as part of the triangular trade was known as the Middle Passage. This journey between Africa and the Caribbean or southern colonies took between five and eight weeks. The Middle Passage typically had mortality rates of 10 percent and many ships lost higher numbers of slaves to disease and suicide. Smallpox, tuberculosis and dysentery were the most common diseases. The American Revolution marked a transition away from British dominance of the slave trade to American dominance. In 1774, the First Continental Congress declared a temporary embargo on importing new slaves into America (this was done to hurt British slave traders). In 1775, the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation granting freedom to indentured servants and slaves if they joined the British forces. Several thousand slaves eventually joined the British. After the war, these freed slaves were resettled in Canada and eventually in Sierra Leone. During the period of British control of the North American colonies, more than 4 million slaves were imported into the settlements. The region that is now Nigeria provided most of the slaves for the British trade. Between 1711 and 1810, about 39 percent of all slaves destined for the British colonies came from what is now Nigeria (Ghana supplied about

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15 percent and Ivory Coast about 12 percent). By the early 17th century, the British had a number of established slave ports along the African coast, including Sierra Leone, which later became a haven for freed slaves. Caribbean Colonies Many of the British colonies in the Caribbean had slave systems when acquired by Britain. For example, Jamaica was seized by the Spanish in 1655 and already had a large slave population. Other colonies imported slavery. Barbados was settled by the British in 1627 and began importing slaves soon after the colony was founded. The wealth of the Caribbean colonies was tied to sugar. Jamaica quickly became the world's largest supplier of sugar, producing 77,000 tons of sugar each year by 1800. When the sugar industry became dominated by large plantations, many small farmers and planters were displaced. Most of these colonists migrated to North American settlements such as South Carolina, which was founded by planters from Barbados. Slaves were originally supplied to the Caribbean colonies by the RAC and later by New Englanders. Modern rum was first distilled in the colonies when it was discovered that molasses, a byproduct of sugar cane refining, could be distilled into an alcoholic beverage. Rum was originally given to slaves as a labor incentive but later became popular with the colonists. The New Englanders perfected the distilling process and initiated the triangular trade, which shipped slaves to the Caribbean colonies in exchange for molasses and sugar. Slaves had a much higher mortality rate in the Caribbean than in the North American colonies. Tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever killed tens of thousands of slaves and caused higher import rates than the North American settlements. In the mid-17th century the population of the British Caribbean colonies was about 500,000, including about 425,000 slaves. In several Caribbean colonies, the slave population made up 90 to 95 percent of the population. The high concentration of slaves led to more restrictive slave codes than in the North American colonies. There were release restrictions and harsh penalties for violators. For example, the Barbadian Slave Act of 1688 gave owners broad powers to kill or permanently maim slaves for relatively minor infractions. Jamaican law required one white colonist for every ten to twenty slaves, and then one white for every twenty slaves. The Caribbean colonies faced more significant slave rebellions than the North American colonies. Jamaica had major revolts in 1655, 1673, and 1760; A large-scale rebellion broke out in Barbados in 1816, and Guyana was controlled by slaves for almost a year in 1763. Fear of revolt led to some restrictions on importing slaves. For example, after the Santo Domingo Slave Rebellion in 1791, several British colonies banned the importation of slaves from the former French colony. The number of slaves imported into the colonies continued to increase until the slave trade was abolished in 1807. By 1807, Caribbean settlements accounted for about 40 percent of the total number of slaves imported into the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere (and about 17 percent of the total number of slaves imported into the Western Hemisphere).

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Between 1651 and 1807 around 1.9 million slaves were imported into the British Caribbean colonies. The American Revolution restricted trade with the New Englanders, many of whom focused on the slave trade to the southern US colonies. However, the independence of the United States also led to a new colonization by the British. About 8,000 Loyalists and their slaves were resettled in the Bahamas after the war. Additionally, despite trade bans with the United States, much of the slave trade in the Caribbean continued to be dominated by American firms. Ending the Slave Trade The planter elite of the Caribbean colonies developed a powerful political bloc in Parliament that consistently prevented measures that would have restricted slavery or the slave trade. Efforts to abolish the slave trade were ironically focused on the heart of the slave trade in Bristol. Local Quakers launched a number of initiatives to abolish the slave trade in the 1770s. Their drive was quickened by the Somerset case of 1772, in which Lord Mansfield ruled that persons should not be kept as slaves in Britain. This created a two-tier system in which slavery was illegal in Britain but legal in the colonies. Caribbean plantation owners funded several legal challenges to the decision, but none were successful. Meanwhile, in 1776, the first motion to abolish slavery in the entire empire was tabled in parliament. Various Quaker groups began campaigns to abolish the slave trade with the idea that ending the trade would cause the system of slavery to wither and eventually end. Leading politicians such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and later Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger became active in the anti-slavery movement. Nevertheless, the powerful sugar lobby in parliament managed to consistently thwart legal measures to end the slave trade. The lobby enjoyed the support of King George III, who opposed any restrictions on slavery or the slave trade. In Parliament, the king's son William (later William IV) led opposition to restrictions on the slave trade. William was able to persuade the House of Lords to reject abolitionist measures approved by the House of Commons in 1799, 1801 and 1802. By the 18th century, efforts by anti-slavery groups had turned the majority of Britons against slavery. Furthermore, colonial legislators in the Caribbean undermined any support in Britain when they refused to enact legislation that would have made it a crime to kill a slave. In addition, the price of sugar had fallen over the previous decade, eroding the economic clout of growers. When the House of Commons enacted a ban on the slave trade in 1805, it was also passed by the House of Lords, despite William's efforts. Faced with a measure that enjoyed widespread popular support, King George approved the bill, although planters and colonial lawmakers petitioned the monarchy to oppose the measure. The slave trade was banned in 1807. Although slave imports dropped dramatically, non-British ships, including American, Dutch, and Spanish ships, continued to smuggle slaves into the colonies. The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 led to an increase

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Enforcing the ban both in the Caribbean and along the African coast. The British Navy also undertook a series of operations to suppress slave stations along the African coast. In addition, the government could negotiate treaties allowing British ships to stop and search suspected slave traders in thirty other countries (only the United States refused the consent of the great powers of the time). In 1823 a group called the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing Slavery through the British Dominions (commonly known as the Anti-Slavery Society) was formed as an umbrella organization to coordinate efforts to abolish slavery in Britain. The Anti-Slavery Society put pressure on the government, but abolitionists were unable to push through a general abolition law in the 1820s. In 1832, elections resulted in sixteen Proplanter members of Parliament losing their seats, and anti-slavery groups presented a petition to Parliament that was signed by more than 187,000 people in favor of abolition. Finally, in 1833, Parliament passed a general act abolishing slavery in the Empire by 1834. The act allowed for a five-year training system to free slaves and provided plantation owners with £20 million in grants to compensate for the loss of slavery compensate their slaves. By 1838, slavery in the British Empire, and with it the British slave trade, had ended. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; African institution; African rulers and the slave trade; African Squadrons, The; asiato; Brookes, the; closure of the slave trade; Eric Williams thesis; Fernando Po; French slave trade; invaders; Lagos; Leeward Islands; Liverpool; Newton, John; Ouidah; "saltwater negro"; Transatlantic Slave Trade Database; Zong, the. Further reading: Carton, Michael. Empire, enslavement and freedom in the Caribbean. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997; Hayward, Jack, ed. Out of Slavery: Abolition and After. London: Frank Cass, 1985; Higman, Barry. Slave Populations in the British Caribbean, 1807–1834. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984; Miers, Susanne. Britain and the end of the slave trade. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1975; Temperley, Howard. British Anti-Slavery, 1833–1870. Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972; Turley, D. The Culture of English Anti-Slavery, 1780–1860. London: Routledge, 1991; Ward, WEF The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

Tom Lanford

Brookes, The Brookes was a ship used to transport slaves during the Middle Passage. Built in Liverpool in 1781, the ship was named after co-owner Joseph Brookes, Jr., a British merchant. It was a 297 ton ship consisting of main, lower, half and quarter decks. Also on board were bars, slave compartments, a cabin and a gun room. The Brookes' stowage plans were meticulously documented and provided fodder for abolitionists who wanted to end the slave trade. Notorious for overcrowding, the Brookes sailed as

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Cross section of the Brookes slave ship. In 1789, 700 posters were printed showing 482 enslaved Africans crammed on board. This image shocked people at the time and remains one of the most enduring images associated with the transatlantic slave trade. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International.

Up to 704 people were crammed into its hold, a remarkable number given its unremarkable size. The lower deck of the ship was only 100 feet long and just over 25 feet wide; The height between the lower and main decks was only 5 feet and 8 inches. Wooden platforms between the main and lower decks created an additional place to house even more slaves. The Brookes made four voyages from the African Gold Coast to Kingston, Jamaica between 1781 and 1786, carrying no fewer than 600 people on each voyage. This inhumane way of traveling required a high degree of social and regulatory control. In 1788 an Act of Parliament was passed limiting the number of slaves eligible for transport during a single passage. The Brookes was one of nine ships surveyed that year as part of a parliamentary inquiry into procedural aspects of the slave trade. In 1789 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (a London committee better known as SEAST) published Description of a Slave Ship, a work which included illustrations of the Brookes based on measurements taken by Parliament while the ship was laid up at Liverpool . The description of a slave ship revealed that even after the passage of the 1788 Act of Parliament, the ship was still transporting an illegal high

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Number of slaves for a ship of this size, carrying 292 on the lower deck, 130 on the wooden platforms, and 20 to 30 more on the quarterdeck. A more detailed version of the publication entitled "Description" appeared later that same year and referred to schematic plans and overviews to further clarify the extent of the overcrowded epidemic on the Brookes. The description became the most widely circulated and most cited documentary on slave ships of the time. The outrageous accumulation of slaves at the Brookes sparked a backlash among abolitionists internationally. People in Britain, France and America were appalled at the conditions on board the ship. Leading abolitionists William Wilberforce and the Earl of Mirabeau each had models of the Brookes assembled based on the measurements in the description. They later used these models to illustrate the horrifying manner in which slaves were transported. The Brookes functioned as a slave ship until 1804, when she was captured and detained by the Buenos Aires authorities. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; British slave trade; Zong, the. Further Reading: "Brookes Slave Ship." Port Cities Liverpool. [Online September 30, 2006]. E. Chambre' Hardman Archive Website: http://www.mersey-gateway.org/server.php?show=ConGallery.30; "Looking for the Material Culture of the Middle Passage." Journal for Maritime Research, December 2005. [Online, September 30, 2006]. Journal for Maritime Research website: http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk/server?show=ConJmr Article.209&setPaginate=No&outputFormat=print; "Stowage of the British Slave Ship Brookes." Virtual Jamestown, 1998. [Online September 30, 2006]. Virtual Jamestown website: http://www.virtualjamestown.org/gallery.html.

Michael Lombardo

Buenos Aires The city of Buenos Aires, whose name means beautiful winds, is located across the Rio de la Plata from Uruguay. Originally settled in 1536, Buenos Aries was abandoned a year later due to a lack of fresh water and repeated attacks by Indians. The city was permanently restored by Juan de Garay in 1580 and is the modern capital of Argentina. The founders hoped that Buenos Aires would become a major South American port, but they soon realized that the bottom of the bay was an extension of the flat pampas plain surrounding the city, making it an awkward port. Ships entering the harbor had to anchor a few miles from the city, and their cargo was carried by horse-drawn carts. Buenos Aires was constrained by Spanish colonial policy, which allowed only four of its American ports to participate in European trade. Buenos Aires did not enjoy this status and was instead considered a remote region under the control of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Despite these geographic and economic limitations, the city, like many other colonial cities, engaged in illicit trade and fueled urban growth despite official colonial policies. Finally, in 1778, to stem the loss of money from illegal trade, the crown granted all colonies free trade privileges for ships flying the Spanish flag. This coincided with the establishment of the Viceroyalty of La Plata in 1776, with Buenos Aires as the administrative capital. invasion of Napoleon

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of Spain in 1808 led to the end of Spanish rule in the region in 1810 when the viceroy was deposed on 25 May. However, colonial rule did not officially end until six years later in 1816. Slaves were first admitted to the Rio de la Plata area in 1534, but by 1595 only 233 Africans lived in the city. Through a series of asiatos, granted first to a Portuguese merchant and later to a number of merchants and trading companies, the crown encouraged and attempted to control the importation of slaves. The British South Sea Company held the Asiato the longest, from 1715 to 1750. Between the French and the British, 14,000 slaves arrived in Buenos Aires in the first half of the 18th century. However, other traders largely ignored the Asiantos and entered the port illegally with the approval of local officials. Some traders even came to port claiming their ship was damaged at sea and in need of repairs while they were offloading their human cargo. With this double slave trade, it is difficult to estimate how many Africans came to Buenos Aires during the colonial period. For example, only 288 of the 12,778 slaves that passed through the port between 1606 and 1625 were legal. In 1778, after another attempt to grant asiatos to individual merchants, Spain abandoned the idea altogether, conceding to limited free trade. Most of the slaves who entered the port of Buenos Aires did not stay in the city but were instead sent inland to northern Argentina, Paraguay, Chile and upper Peru (modern-day Bolivia). At the end of the 17th century, African slaves made up half of the domestic population. Slaves who stayed in port usually worked as domestics or farmhands, while those who went inland often ended up in silver mines. Finding the African origins of the slave population that passed through Buenos Aires presents a challenge. Historians have frequently pointed to Congo, Mozambique and Angola as countries of origin for slaves in the Rio de le Plata region. However, historian George Reid Andrews finds that the West African presence in academia is often underestimated. Census information is further complicated by the fact that many Portenos (natives of Buenos Aires) knew little about Africa and tended to equate Africa with Guinea and referred to Africans as Negros de Guinea. This misnomer implies both that Portenos had significant contact with West Africans and that the census data is likely unreliable. However, a look at the census shows an interesting pattern: the 1778 census records that blacks made up 30 percent of the population (7,256 out of 24,363), and the 1810 census shows a similar percentage (around 9,615). Three years later, with the abolition of the slave trade and the passage of the Free Womb Law (granting freedom to all slaves born after January 31, 1813), the large-scale migration of Africans to the area ended. The population of blacks in Argentina began to decline proportionately, and by 1887 had also declined in total to 8,005, or less than 2 percent. Theories about this drastic population decline point to wars in the 19th century, mestizos or mixed races, high mortality rates from disease, and ultimately the end of the slave trade. This is also due to the targeted Europeanization of Argentina in the 19th century

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During this time, the government made a concerted effort to attract European immigrants. See also British slave trade; French slave trade; Congo; Potosı´. Further reading: Andrews, George Reed. The Afro-Argentinians of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980; Rout, Leslie B., Jr. The African Experience in Spanish America 1502 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Emily Brownell

C Calabar Tucked away in a corner of southeastern Nigeria on Biafra Bay, the Calabar region (variously known as Callabar, Calabari, Calbari, Kalabar, or Kalabari) played a prominent role in the historic transatlantic slave trade. The earliest maps on which the name Calabar appears are Dutch maps from the mid-17th century, although the Portuguese and others were certainly in the area before that. Two of the small towns of the Calabar region, Old Calabar (or Duke Town), located at the confluence of the Calabar and Cross Rivers, and New Calabar (Creek Town), located about 15 miles upstream on the New Calabar River, were major players in the Trade. Large European ships originally anchored near Old Calabar because of the difficult passage up the New Calabar River. Increasing familiarity with the river eventually allowed their large ships to sail to New Calabar. This in turn allowed New Calabar to become a major slave trading point. The Calabar region, including neighboring Bonny, was one of the most heavily trafficked slave trading areas in Africa, but did not become a major player in the slave trade until well into the 18th century. Although slavery existed in Calabar before Europeans arrived, their demand for slaves led to a significant increase in captured slaves. As the dominant tribe in Calabar, the Efik controlled both the population in the hinterland and trade with the Europeans on the coast. They never allowed any European nation to build a trading post, and they controlled the prices of trade goods (mainly elephant tusks) and slaves. No slave barracks or waiting areas were ever set up. Instead, when a ship was sighted, traders would go upriver in their canoes to procure slaves, who were then sold to the Europeans (mainly the English). Ship captains paid the chief a tribute or tax and were then allowed to trade. The infamous massacre of 1787 was supposedly in retaliation for the heavy toll demanded by the king of Old Calabar. In it, seven English sea captains assisted people from New Calabar in massacring those from Old Calabar. Old Calabar was destroyed and did not regain commercial prominence for many years.

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Calabar slaves were notorious for being smaller and less healthy than other West African slaves, probably because of an unnutritious, yam-heavy diet. They also had a reputation for having far more erratic tempers than slaves from other regions. Since slaves from Calabar were more laborious, less tough, and more difficult to obtain (it was a much longer journey to reach this part of the coast), they were not well valued in the Caribbean and America. Despite this, the sheer number of slaves in Calabar made the market profitable. As a result, they were often bought by privateers and invaders rather than trading companies, and usually sold at a lower price than their African counterparts. Slaves were traded from Calabar until 1841, when the regional economy switched entirely to palm oil exports. To this day, the Calabar and Cross rivers are referred to as the oil rivers of Nigeria. See also British slave trade; Appetizers; Legitimate Trade; ports; Slavery in Africa. po Further reading: Forde, Daryll, ed. Old Calabar Efik Merchant. London: Oxford University Press, 1956; Hair, Paul E., Jones, Adam and Law, Robin, eds. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1992; Heuman, Gad and Walvin, James, eds. The Slavery Reader. London: Routledge, 2003; Mayer, Bratz. Captain Canot, an African slave trader. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968; Sparks, Randy L. The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantean Odyssey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Rachel Horling's Cape Coast Castle Cape Coast Castle was one of the largest European structures outside of Europe at the time it was built. Strategically located on a sheltered beach where the waves break on a rocky ridge to the east of the castle, Cape Coast Castle was difficult to attack from land. It began as Fort Carolusburg built in 1650 by Henry Caerlof at Cabo Corcó (Portuguese for short cape and later corrupted to Cape Coast) for the Swedish African Company. This Polish architect also built other Swedish lodges. Caerlof returned to Europe in 1665 and let the Swede Krusenstjerna live in the new fortress. The fort was named Carolusburg after Charles X of Sweden (1655–1660). In 1665 the English captured Fort Carolusburg from the Swedes and rebuilt it as Cape Coast Castle. From the Restoration period (1660) England revived trade off the Guinea coast and to this end the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading to Africa was formed. The 1660s was a time of intense Anglo-Dutch rivalry. In 1664 England captured New Amsterdam (renamed New York) and along the West African coast Admiral Holmes captured the Dutch forts on the island of Gore'e (Senegal) and on the Gold Coast at Takoradi, Shama and Mouri. among other. Dutch Admiral De Ruyter repeated the same feat in 1665, capturing Gore'e and later Fort Kormantin. Ruyter also captured and later blew up the English fort at Takoradi, but Carolusburg had been reinforced and withstood the siege. It was later converted into Cape Coast Castle and became the headquarters of the English. In 1672 the Company of Royal Adventurers was founded

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Cape Coast Castle, Gold Coast, 1727. Tracy W. McGregor Library, Sondersammlungen, University of Virginia Library.

abolished and the Royal Africa Company founded. Based in Cape Coast Castle, the company shipped large quantities of gold to London. However, the slave trade replaced the gold trade as the main occupation of the British traders in the castle. Cape Coast Castle was expanded at this time (17th century) and the Atlantic side of the castle was heavily fortified. A low platform on which several cannons were mounted was added, making the castle impregnable. The new addition included large underground dungeons, ventilated with grates and some small holes in the sides of the structure. These underground dungeons became some of the most important slave prisons in the history of the Atlantean slave trade. They could hold up to a thousand slaves at any one time, and these Cape Coast Castle “underground bunkers” were designed to forestall a slave rebellion. Trapped in the bowels of the castle, the slaves had no way of launching an effective uprising. In addition, there were peepholes through which the activities of the slaves could be monitored from the yard. Beginning in 1672, the Royal Africa Company exported about 70,000 slaves annually from Cape Coast Castle. Between 1766 and 1773, the merchants' committee made further alterations to the castle to give it its current appearance. In the early 1750s, Cape Coast Castle became the setting for the introduction of Western education to the Gold Coast. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sent Phillip Quacoe to England to train as a preacher. After his ordination, Quacoe became chaplain and schoolmaster at the castle. In the 1870s, Cape Coast Castle became the headquarters of the West Indians

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Regiment and the Hausa Constabulary, all mobilized against Asante's stranglehold on the coastal states. See also trade forts. Further reading: Dantzig, Albert van. Forts and Castles of Ghana. Accra: Sedco Publishing, 1980; Lawrence, A.W. Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1963.

Edmund Kings

Cape Verde Cape Verde, called Cabo Verde in Portuguese, is a republic located on an archipelago in the Macaronesia ecoregion in the North Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa. The archipelago lies 620 kilometers west of Senegal, West Africa, in the Atlantic Ocean. Its official name is The Republic of Cape Verde and it covers 4,030 square kilometers. Cape Verde is named after Cap-Vert, now in Senegal, the westernmost point of Africa. Cape Verde consists of two distinctly different island types. Six of the islands further west are characterized by their mountainous landscape. The remaining four are characterized by their long sandy beaches. It has about eight islands, and the main islands are divided into two groups. Barlaventos is the northern archipelago consisting of Santo Ant~ao, S~ao Vicente, Santa Luzia, S~ao Nicolau, Sal and Boa Vista. Sotaventos is the southern group of islands consisting of Maio, Santiago, Fogo and Brava. Of all, only Santa Luzia is uninhabited and currently a nature reserve. All of the islands are volcanic, but only one of the islands, Fogo, has an active volcano. The islands are Branco and Razo. The previously uninhabited islands were discovered and settled by the Portuguese in 1456, who established plantations there. As these farms developed massively, the Portuguese realized that they needed outside labor to work the plantations and mills. They then went to Africa for supplies. The captives brought to the islands were used to replenish the slavers' ships when they stopped on the islands to stock up on slaves. The Portuguese then traded the produce from the plantations in the Geba estuary for more slaves captured in local African wars and raids. Shortly after African slaves were introduced, these islands began to support a sizable population of colonists and the larger number of Africans brought as slaves from the coast of Guinea. Cape Verde played an important role in the slave trade due to its unique location, halfway between Europe, Africa and America, facing the Slave Coast. From the 16th century, with the significant expansion of the black slave trade, this strategic location made Cape Verde a transit point for slaves from several regions on the west coast of Africa. The slaves were first transported to be sold in Europe and later to America. The islands were a thriving center for the slave trade, but after abolition in 1876 they suffered an economic decline. Most residents of Cape Verde are descendants of white Portuguese settlers and black African slaves. Most Cape Verdeans descend from both

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Groups. There are also significant numbers of Cape Verdeans in São Tomé and Prı´ncipe, Senegal, France and the Netherlands. See also Portuguese slave trade. Further Reading: Duncan, T.B. Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde in Seventeenth-Century Commerce and Navigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin

Captains The selection of a skillful captain was essential to the success of slave ventures. Since the managing partners could not personally supervise the buying and selling of slaves on the African coast, captains became de facto managers of companies. Captains weren't just sailors; They were businessmen. After a ship left port, their fate was in the hands of their master, and slavers had to rely on their captains' ability to deal effectively with native African slavers, to lead a ship and crew in difficult circumstances and to hold the ship against them Defend privateers and navigate the complexities of trading commodities in Africa and America to negotiate the best possible deal for the owners. As a result of these responsibilities, the captains were well rewarded for their expertise. Although a crew member's wage was common, captains could negotiate additional benefits on top of their wages. These wages could be substantial, but the sale of "privileged" slaves, shore commissions, primage, and other bounty made up most of a captain's remuneration. Experienced captains were in great demand and a market for captains existed in Liverpool and other centers of British trade. Skilled captains were so important that slavers often bought ships for particularly skilled or experienced men. Slave companies such as Liverpool's Crosbie & Trafford took advantage of the promise of larger ships to recruit captains from competing traders. Although many captains were employees recruited on the basis of reputation alone, a significant number were linked to partnership groups through kinship or association ties arising from personal or professional relationships. Many captains were themselves partners in the ventures they led, a practice intended to motivate captains to succeed. In the British slave trade there were many opportunities for shrewd captains, with and without advantageous connections, to join the ranks of the slavers. In the Liverpool slave trade, for example, 26 percent of captains were partners in at least one enterprise between 1695 and 1775 (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database). A significant number of slavers began their careers as supercargos, or resident slave factors, on the plantations before becoming partners. For example, John Crosbie, William Boates, Ambrose Lace and other Liverpool captains made their fortunes in the slave trade and eventually became prominent slave traders and important men in their communities. Between 1695 and 1775 the average sailing career for Liverpool captains who later became partners lasted just over two years. When organizing ventures, this experience provided captains

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with expertise that gave them an edge over investors who had no direct slave experience. The prominent Liverpool slave trader William Earle, for example, captained two ships, the Lucy and the Chesterfield, on three voyages between 1748 and 1750 before joining his former employers as a partner. Earle's experiences suggest that a career pattern existed for at least some captains in the Liverpool slave trade. In conducting their trade, slavers did not send ships to Africa so much as they sent captains. See also ports. Further reading: Anderson, Bruce. "The Lancashire Bill System and Its Liverpool Practitioners: The Case of a Slave Merchant." In WH Chaloner and Barrie Ratcliffe, eds. Trade and Transport: Essays in Economics in honor of TS Willan. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1977; Bains, Thomas. History of commerce and the city of Liverpool and the rise of manufacturing in the adjoining counties, 1852. The Daybook of William Earle, January 23, 1760 to September 23, 1761, Earle MS, D/EARLE/2/2 . Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool; power, Michael. "Councilors and Commerce in Liverpool, 1650-1750." Urban History 24 (1997): 301-323; Richardson, David. "Profits in the Liverpool Slave Trade: The Accounts of William Davenport." In Roger Anstey and P.E.H. Haare, ed. Liverpool, the African Slave Trade and Abolition. Widnes, United Kingdom: Lancashire and Cheshire Historical Society, 1976.

Brian W. Refford Cargoes From the late 14th century, Europeans built forts that served as trading posts along the coast of West Africa. European sailors brought rum, cloth, weapons and other manufactured goods from Europe to these posts and traded them with Africans for people. Both the people and the goods that served as a medium of exchange between the Europeans and the Africans made up the cargo. These were transported as cargo across the Atlantic, first from Europe to Africa and later from Africa to Europe and America. Cargos, understood in this way, refer to the African slaves and the European goods used for them. After receiving the captives, often through unequal terms of trade, war, diplomacy, and raids, the merchants forced African slaves to travel thousands of miles, sometimes bound and malnourished. Only half of the people survived these death marches. The weary and sick were often killed by the merchants themselves or left to die on the streets. Fredrick Lord Lugard, perhaps the greatest British administrator in colonial Africa and the person who merged northern and southern Nigeria in 1914, noted that during this period the bones of African slaves littered the streets; like the vultures ruled the sky. Those who reached the shores were placed in underground dungeons called barracoons, where they remained for long periods, sometimes up to a year, before boarding ships for the Atlantic crossing. The Atlantic crossing was as horrific as the death marches. In the first leg, slave traders shipped goods manufactured in Europe to West African ports, and in the second leg, European ships transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic for sale to the New World, where plantation and mine owners used them as slaves.

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Africans are forced below decks before transport to America. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International.

A typical trip lasted between sixty and ninety days, although some lasted as long as four months. During this dreadful journey, Africans were treated no better as commodities. Men were separated from women, tied up and locked below decks. Wrist to wrist, ankle to ankle, and bound in pairs, they were forced to lie naked on wooden planks in ship holds no longer than 1.8 meters (6 ft) and not high enough to enable a person to stand upright to sit. Crowded together like this, they endured each other's feces, urine, and blood. Diseases such as smallpox, dysentery and yellow fever are spreading like wildfire. Many died from these diseases because medical facilities were either inadequate or reserved for crew members and European merchants. To reduce the burden and prevent widespread epidemics, the sick were thrown overboard. Cruel measures such as iron muzzles, flogging and rape were used to enable control. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, became an abolitionist and tormented himself: “The confinement of the place and the heat of the climate contributed to the numbers on the ship being so crowded that everyone barely had room to turn around, almost suffocating us. This led to copious sweating, so that the air soon became unfit for breathing. . . from a variety of disgusting smells. . . many died” (Equiano, 1789). To amuse and satisfy their sexual pleasures, the crew sometimes allowed Africans to come on deck. This gave the slave traders and crew unlimited and unhindered opportunities to rape the women and sexually abuse the children. Given the nightmarish conditions of the voyage, the unknown future that awaited them across the Atlantic, and the General

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In desperation, many Africans refused to eat or jumped into the sea at the slightest opportunity. From the captain's point of view, these human cargoes were extremely valuable and had to be kept alive and unharmed at all costs. Therefore, any slave caught refusing food or attempting to jump into the Atlantic was severely tortured. Those who refused to eat were force-fed the "speculum orum," a device that held their mouths open while the food was forced down their throats. Despite efforts to keep the enslaved alive and unharmed, the death rate in the Middle Passage was high. Efforts to determine the number of deaths during the Atlantic crossing have resulted in contestable numbers. Undoubtedly, an estimated 10 to 20 percent (i.e. between 2 and 4 million Africans) must have died. Unlike the inanimate cargoes brought to the shores of Africa, the human cargoes brought to Europe and America were prepared for sale at auction upon arrival in the New World. Whether sold to planters or miners, Africans were not treated or employed as human beings, but as slaves. See also daily schedule; dancing and sports; travel duration; mortality, slave; overcrowding; shipmate; Suicide; Torture; trading in commodities; trade forts; ventilation and asphyxiation. Further reading: Ballagh, James Curtis. White Servitude in the Virginia Colony: A Study of the Contract Labor System in the American Colonies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973; Breen, T.H., and Innes, Stephen. Myne Owne Ground: Race and Liberty on Virginia's East Coast, 1640–1676. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980; Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, written by himself, ed. Robert J Allison. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995; Franklin, John Hope and Moss, Alfred A., Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994; Howard, Thomas, ed. Black Voyage: Eyewitness Accounts of the Atlantic Slave Trade, by Alexander Falconbridge. Boston: Klein, Brown, 1971.

Oyeniyi Bukola Adeyemi Carpenters The ships used to transport slaves for the Middle Passage were usually modified merchant and cargo ships. Seeing the slave trade as a thriving investment, European kings, nobles, and leading merchants commissioned the building of the great ships for use in their lucrative new industry. Experienced carpenters and shipbuilders from England, France, the Netherlands and Portugal were hired to build the merchant ships. In many cases, captive slaves who already had carpentry and building skills were forced to modify the ships for transporting slaves. Since two of the sections of the triangular passage were intended to transport goods other than slaves, the modification of ships for slave transport was minor. The goals of the ship modification were to get as many slaves on board as possible to prevent the slaves from rebelliously attacking the crew and to prevent the slaves from jumping overboard. Constructions and conversions were made with these three goals in mind.

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The ship's carpenters, their apprentices, and sometimes their captive slaves, were instructed to build a platform to divide the hull into two separate 'tween decks'. This allowed the crew to fit as many slaves as possible into the cramped hull area. Strong fences were erected along the decks of some merchant ships to prevent slaves from jumping overboard. Many of the shipbuilders and carpenters erected strong fences to protect the ship's crew from attacks by rebellious slaves. See also hold; shipyards; triangular trade. Further Reading: "The Middle Passage." Africans in America. PBS Online website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html; "The Middle Passage." University of Michigan website: http://www.umich.edu/ece/student_projects/slavery/middlepassage. html.

Kathryn Vercillo Cartagena Cartagena de las Indias, now Cartagena in Colombia, was one of the most important ports of the Iberian transatlantic slave trade and trade in general in the Carrera de Indias system since 1533. The Villa de Cartagena, officially founded in the same year by Pedro de Heredia, in a place already known as a trading center of Indian slaves, due to its strategic location developed into the main port of slave trade for the Spanish centers in Mesoamerica (including Portobello, Nombre de Dı ´os, San Juan and Panama´), as well as in South America (including Bogota´, Quito and Peru´). Cartagena was the most important and best-fortified port city in South America in three respects: first, as the economic and strategic center of the Nuevo Reino de Granada (viceroyalty since 1739) and the Tierra Firme (the coasts of present-day Colombia and Venezuela); second, as an entry point for slaves, contraband (Jamaica) and European and African goods to Peru; and third, as a center for silver and other South American exports (like gold from the mining centers between Antioquia, La Plata and Timana´ or the Choco´ in New Granada). Since 1610, a tribunal of the Inquisition was established in Cartagena to investigate heresy and new Christians suspected of being Jews. In many cases these new Christians organized the slave trade and smuggled goods from African slave ports (Luanda, Cacheu, Cape Verde, Gold Coast and Slave Coast) to Cartagena, Portobello, Nombre de Dı´os and Veracruz or Havana. During the long voyages from Africa along the Atlantic coast of South America, the slave traders organized smuggling and slave smuggling with the ports of (later) Brazil, the locations of the "Wild Coast" (later Guianas) and Cumana´, Caracas, Maracaibo and Santa Marta. In the seventeenth century, Cartagena was a Jesuit center of religious conversion for the incoming slaves (Saint Peter Claver, Alonso de Sandoval). From 1750 the slave trade declined. On various occasions, Cartagena has been badly destroyed or besieged by pirates, with the heaviest destruction occurring in 1816 when Cartagena was recaptured by Spanish troops under General Morillo. In 1741, one of the largest British and British-American fleets ever seen in colonial South America attacked Cartagena but failed to capture the fortifications.

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Further reading: Bushnell, David. Colombia - A Nation Against Itself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; Ferry, Robert J. The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Emergence and Crisis, 1567–1767. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; McFarlane, Anthony. Pre-Independence Colombia: Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Olsen, Margaret M. Slavery and Redemption in Colonial Cartagena de Indias. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2004; Parsons, James J. Antioquia's Corridor to the Sea: An Historical Geography of the Settlement of Uraba ´ . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967; Thornton, John K. Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantean World, 1400–1880. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Wate, Peter. Blackness and Miscegenation: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Michael Max P. Zeuske Chains Chains and Shackles remain perhaps the most vivid images of material culture from the Middle Passage. Slaves were bound and chained together at all stages of their journey from Africa to the New World. From their first capture inland and marching on the coast to boarding the slave ships and often throughout the Middle Passage, slaves were bound and chained together to prevent rebellion and insurrection. However, whether the slaves remained chained together for the duration of the voyage varied from ship to ship. Some captains removed the bonds once the slaves were on board; others kept the slaves in shackles at all times. This decision was largely based on the origin of the slave population on the ship

Shackles Used on a Slave Ship, 1845. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

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(Certainly also dependent on the temperament of the captain and the size of the crew). Some slaves, such as Angolans, were considered "very peaceful" and thus were often untied once land was no longer in sight, while Bonny slaves were considered vicious and violent (Rawley with Behrendt, 2005). Chaining slaves not only discouraged them from rebelling, but also prevented slaves from committing suicide by jumping off the ship. Chained slaves were bound and chained in pairs, left leg to right leg, left wrist to right wrist. Women and children were not usually bound, but remains from the wreck of the Henrietta Marie, a slave ship that sank near Key West in 1701, contained several small leg irons. Chains are important to the history of the Middle Passage as they became a well-known symbol of the abolition movement in the 18th century. The English potter Josiah Wedgwood began making medallions for the abolitionist movement in 1787 with the relief of a suppliant African slave on his knees with his legs and arms in shackles and chains. Engraved above the images was the question, "Am I not a man and a brother?" Wedgwood sent a shipment of these cameos to Benjamin Franklin in 1788, and they soon became fashion accessories in the United States, worn as bracelets and hair ornaments or for decoration of tobacco cans. The image and inscription were the official seal of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England and became the most prominent image associated with the abolitionist movement in the United States and England. The image was also used on anti-slavery broadsides, including one printed in 1837 containing John Greenleaf Whittier's poem Our Countrymen in Chains. Used in both visual and written art, chains became a universal symbol of the inhumanity of the Atlantean slave trade. Today they are synonymous with human bondage. See also coffee; enslavement and procurement. Further Reading: Rawley, James A., with Behrendt, Stephen D. The TransAtlantic Slave Trade: A History. Rev. Ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005; "HarpWeek American Political Prints, 1766–1876." HarpWeek website: http://loc.harpweek.com/LCPoliticalCartoons/DisplayCartoonMedium.asp?MaxID=&UniqueID=27&Year=1837&Year Mark=.

Emily Brownell Charleston By 1740, most Africans sent into slavery in North America entered the colonies through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston's easily navigable waterways, natural harbor, sizable population, geographic proximity to the West Indies, and developing trading system attracted traders, and the region's burgeoning rice and indigo industries stimulated planter demand for slaves. The slave trading season lasted from March to October. By 1703, the majority of the slaves sold during those months were from the West Indies. However, increasing slave rebellions in the Caribbean resulted in prohibitive taxes on imported West Indian slaves, thus encouraging planters and traders to trade with Africans. Planters from the Lower South intentionally bought slaves in their

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first class, specifically male slaves between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five and female slaves between the ages of fourteen and twenty. In addition, planters requested specific ethnic groups for specific tasks. Rice planters, for example, tried to buy slaves from the Gold Coast who already knew the intricacies of growing rice. Reportedly, Ibos were excellent domestic servants and Whydahs served as able field hands. Regardless of the ethnicity sought, all were looking for submissive and docile Africans who were unlikely to rebel. However, the Stono Rebellion of 1739 proved that African slaves were just as prone to revolt as their Caribbean brethren. On the way to freedom in Florida, 60 to 100 Catholic Congolese slaves Slave rebellion in the southern United States. started a revolt that ended in death. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International. of sixty whites and thirty blacks. The following year, Charleston authorities imposed a prohibitive £100 tax on all imported foreign slaves, hoping to push slave prices out of the reach of most planters and thus reduce the slave population. As a result, only 1,562 slaves passed through the port in the 1740s, a drastic decrease from the 12,589 slaves imported between 1735 and 1740. Despite such a radical reduction, white fear continued to develop and deepen in South Carolina as slave numbers continued to outnumber whites. As a result, the state officially ended the foreign slave trade for a three-year period in 1787 and outlawed the interstate slave trade in 1792. State officials renewed the 1787 Act for a second three-year term. In 1802 and 1803, demand for rice exceeded supply, and South Carolina chose to resume the domestic and foreign slave trade. About 40,000 foreign slaves passed through the Port of Charleston between 1803 and 1808 when the federal government ordered the foreign slave trade to be closed. However, during the 19th century rice prices continued to rise and in addition to the continued illegal importation of foreign slaves, South Carolinians began discussing the formal reopening of the foreign slave trade. Although never officially reopened, South Carolinians often ignored foreign slave imports. In 1858, the slave ship Echo arrived in Charleston harbor with a full load of African slaves. Perhaps in retaliation for the Fugitive Slave Act, Charleston authorities refused to try the ship's crew for violating federal law. The passage of the 13th Amendment of 1866 permanently ended both the foreign and domestic slave trade. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; ports. Further reading: Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History. Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998; Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981; Morgan, Kenneth. "Slave Sales in Colonial Charleston." The English Historical Review 113 (1998): 905–927.

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Children Many African children were deeply affected by the Middle Passage. Some of the younger and weaker children were left behind in Africa when their mothers, fathers and older brothers and sisters were forced to board the ships. They suffered from fear of loss, developmental difficulties, and emotional problems ranging from loneliness to severe depression. Other children were forced to accompany their parents on journeys through the Middle Passage. Many children had never seen light-skinned men before and were unfamiliar with the language of the ship's crew. Most of the children had never been on the big ships. These unfamiliar aspects caused great fear in the children, which was increased by the terror on the ships during the voyage. Unlike the male slaves, who were forced into cramped quarters below decks, the children were usually allowed to roam freely on the ships. However, many of the children were abused by the crew members. Some children were forced to perform for the men; others were teased, pushed, and shoved to entertain the crew. Boys as young as eight or ten were sometimes forced to stay with the other male slaves in the holds below decks. The men were tied together and piled into small, crowded areas with barely enough room to turn around. The younger boys were sometimes crushed or suffocated due to the weight of the adult males to whom they were tied and their inability to escape. Many children died while traveling in the Middle Passage. The Africans were not used to sailing in the big ships and seasickness was common due to the rough waters and cramped quarters. The ship's rations allowed no extra water or food to feed the sick slaves, and many children died of dehydration or starvation. Diseases were also widespread on the ships. Many outbreaks of contagious diseases occurred during voyages in the Middle Passage. Because the ships were designed to carry cargo rather than human passengers, they lacked the necessary spaces and methods of disposing of human waste. The slaves had to share buckets to relieve themselves, and sometimes those buckets would overflow for days before being emptied. This contributed to the spread of contagious diseases. Without proper nutrition, rest, medical care and sanitation, the younger and weaker children had little chance of survival. The children were usually fed twice a day. Large numbers of slaves died during the early voyages through the Middle Passage, and many of the captains and investors believed it was because the slaves ate foreign foods their bodies could not tolerate. On later voyages, the captains bought large quantities of yams with which the African bodies were familiar. Some slaves were given corn, rice, and palm oil, but only enough to sustain them, not enough to actually thrive. Since the voyages were intended to be profitable, many captains did not purchase enough food to feed all the slaves for the entire voyage. The ships did not have adequate food storage areas, so the yams and other perishables began to rot after just an hour

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short time at sea. With no other supplies on board, the spoiled food was often served to the children, increasing the disease and death rates of these young passengers. As ships approached ports to trade goods, the crew began preparing the slaves for their new lives. The goal was to fetch the highest dollar for each slave, so the slaves had to appear clean, healthy, and ready to work. The children were usually forced to huddle on the deck while the crew dumped numerous buckets of icy seawater on them. Crew members attempted to clean up the disease and dirt the children were exposed to during the voyage. Many children were brutally scrubbed with large brushes used primarily for ship cleaning duties, injuring their skin and frightening them. The children underwent an intensive physical examination. The crew examined their eyes, ears, mouths, noses, armpits, private parts, muscles and bone structures. The children, who looked healthier and stronger, were traded for larger amounts of firearms, textiles, and other items. These invasive procedures have often traumatized the children. After the long sea voyages, the children's clothes were mostly torn, torn and dirty. Instead of showing the children in rags, the crew stripped the children and forced them to remain naked for the inspection process. The ragged clothing would have given buyers a glimpse of the inhumane conditions aboard the ships, and buyers would want to see the slaves' entire bodies before making a purchasing decision. This, too, caused trauma to the children, leading to lifelong difficulties. Once the ships arrived in their ports, the children sometimes had to wait for days before they could disembark. The strong male slaves were in high demand, as were the female slaves who had experience spinning thread or doing household chores. These slaves were taken off the ships first, and the children had to wait while negotiations were conducted for the adult slaves. Separated from their families, in a foreign land where they didn't understand what was going on and unsure of what would happen next, the children waited in fear. The children who accompanied their parents and siblings on journeys through the Middle Passage sometimes never saw their relatives again after the ships docked in the ports. Fathers, mothers, teenagers and children were not kept together as families. Sometimes the slaves were traded or sold in lots, but often the slaves were all taken to auction houses and bought by different owners in different places. After they left the ships, the children underwent further physical examinations. The potential buyers would examine the children from head to toe to determine if the child's height, health, and build would be appropriate for the job that the child would be performing. In some cases, the children were repeatedly screened as buyers made their choices. During the long journey, the children did not know their fate. Since they didn't understand the language of the crew, they didn't know where they were going. They didn't know what would happen when they got to the ports. They didn't understand why they were being forced to be examined or what would happen if they were bought or traded.

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The children rarely stayed with the master from whom they were originally purchased. As the children grew and the needs of each master changed, the children were traded again and again. It was not uncommon for a child slave to have at least five different masters by the time they reached adulthood. This constant disruption prevented the children from settling into stable lives even after the destructive journey across the seas was complete. See also Charges; mortality, slave; overcrowding. Further Reading: "The Middle Passage." Africa in America. PBS Online website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html; "The Middle Passage." University of Michigan website: http://www.umich.edu/ece/student_projects/slavery/middlepassage. html.

Kathryn Vercillo Christianity The forced transport of millions of Africans across the Atlantic did not take place in a vacuum. The Middle Passage grew out of centuries of doctrinal and practical interaction of the Christian Church with the institution of slavery. The transatlantic slave trade must be examined in this larger theological and historical context. Christianity was born in a Mediterranean world long familiar with the practice of slavery. The writings of ancient Israel that made up the Christian Old Testament had permitted other people's possessions, but established a much milder form of master-slave relationship than was prevalent in Greco-Roman societies. In his ministry, Jesus did not explicitly condemn slavery and generally did not comment on the political and social conditions of his day, but the general tone of his message exuded an ethic of charity that undermined the underlying social assumptions of slavery. The rest of the New Testament radiated an eschatological egalitarianism that leveled social differences within the church but did not directly challenge slavery as an institution. The book of Philemon best illustrates the ambiguity that would characterize the Christian attitude toward human bondage. In this brief personal letter to a slave owner whose house housed a Christian church, Paul counsels what should be done with Philemon's runaway slave Onesimus. Philemon was legally entitled to the life of this barren runaway, but Paul intervened on behalf of "my child." "no longer than a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother" (Philemon 1:16). Paul's instructions embodied the early Christian approach to slavery, granting slaves full acceptance into the community and expressing a final hope for the end of slavery, but also accepting slavery as a ubiquitous part of this present age. This step-by-step approach to the end of slavery continued throughout the Imperial period and into the Middle Ages. Christianity and the Emergence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade As slavery and serfdom declined in Christian Europe, new forms of human servitude emerged to support the burgeoning economies of modern states.

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Christianity's first encounter with the sub-Saharan slave trade occurred in the context of the reconquest and hostile involvement of the western Islamic world. Exploration further strengthened the desirability of the slave trade. The discovery of the New World and its subsequent colonization provided the impetus for the expansion of African slavery across the ocean. As Native American and Caribbean populations declined dramatically due to disease and oppression, Spain and Portugal sought new workers. Building on the Portuguese experience on islands off the African coast, the Spanish turned to African slaves for their colonies in the New World. In 1501, Ferdinand granted permission to import slaves from Africa to Hispaniola. Emperor Charles V encouraged further trade expansion by granting a patent to a Flemish company in 1517 to transport 4,000 Africans a year to Spanish possessions in the West. The Middle Passage was born. The Church responded to these new forms of slavery with its original propensity for liberty, but softened its response in the face of sixteenth-century circumstances. Just decades after Hispaniola imported its first African slaves, Christianity experienced its greatest schism since the schism of the Eastern and Western Churches. The Protestant Reformation redrawn the religious and political map of Europe and in turn influenced the shape of transatlantic African slavery. The necessities of theological warfare tempered the moral response and criticism of transatlantic slavery and its abuses. Both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches became dependent on the protection and patronage of the civil sphere, which in turn needed new sources of wealth to feed these religious wars. The rise of transatlantic slavery hit Western Christianity at a vulnerable moment when ethical scruples gave way to church survival. In 1517, Pope Leo X issued a papal bull declaring the Christian religion against slavery. Two decades later, Paul III consolidated. this ecclesiastical position with the bull “Sublimis Deus” threatening excommunication for those who captured and sold slaves, but these decrees seem to have been applied only to trade with native populations in America, and the plight was brought to the Vatican by men like Bartolome ´ de Las Casas reported. Neither applied these condemnations to the actions of the Spanish monarchy or the Holy Roman Emperor in stimulating the transatlantic slave trade. Her patronage proved crucial in thwarting Protestants. The needs of Africans did not come to the fore in the Church's anti-slavery stance until centuries later, after the end of the Wars of Religion. "Christianization" Protestants and Catholics both fully participated in the forced transport of millions across the Atlantic, but their spiritual response to these "souls" varied. Initiation into the Christian faith through the rite of baptism provided the most important visible difference between Catholics and Protestants. Both Spanish and Portuguese codes provided that those entering their colonies had to be certified as Christians. Baptism became obligatory whether received on departure from Africa or on arrival in the New World. At the very least, this "baptism" involved priests indiscriminately sprinkling holy water donated from the same troughs that were later used

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to feed slaves on their way to America. More often, baptism took its place as part of the bureaucratic process of processing a human cargo for shipment. The Portuguese created an official position of catechist for slaves (Catequizador dos negros/dos escravos) who were responsible for providing religious instruction to those awaiting transport. Regardless of whether enslaved Africans understood or remembered Christian baptism, other accompanying ceremonies made a longer-lasting impression. The Portuguese branded slaves to demonstrate ownership and to provide proof that the necessary duties had been paid. Attempts to enforce the legal requirements for baptism more strictly resulted in an additional cross mark, which is a visible sign of baptism. This burning of human flesh left a painfully visible reminder of official entry into Christianity. Ironically, the human desire to convert African slaves to the Christian faith led to their increasing pain and suffering. Protestantism, with its emphasis on the necessity of personal faith for Christian salvation, denounced Catholic slave baptism as a superficial ritual without substance. Adequate instruction in the doctrines and customs of the faith was a necessary condition for Protestantization to Christianity. Therefore, only an extensive educational and enculturation program could overcome the linguistic and cultural differences between Protestants and their slaves. During the era of legal transatlantic trade, few Protestants made the necessary personal and economic investments to bring Africans to their faith. In addition, persistent doubts about the legal status of baptized slaves meant that most owners were extremely reluctant to allow missionaries to operate among their slave populations. Many felt that the egalitarian aspects of the Christian message would make their slaves haughty and provoke acts of defiance. By the late 18th century, most slave owners preferred to use the religious divide to maintain a clear barrier between themselves and their slaves, and to put profit margins ahead of Christianization. Christianity aboard Slave Ships Few logs expressed residual doubts about the morality of the slave trade, but their opening verses often explicitly linked the name of God to the nature of their enterprise. Like the captains aboard other types of ships, the captains of slave ships kept official records of their voyage to demonstrate their competence if later questioned. Frequently, captains acknowledged the uncertainty of their undertakings with a formulaic appeal to the divine. Roman Catholic slave traders extended these formulaic appeals to include the Virgin Mary or one of the saints associated with maritime trade. The Latin phrase "De Majorem Dei Glorium Virginis q: Maria" (To the greater glory of God and the Virgin Mary) boldly opened Robert Durand's diary of the slave ship Diligent. Sometimes slavers made these implicit prayers clear in pre-voyage inscriptions by adding an "Amen bound for the coast of Africa, so surely God send the ship to her desired port, Amen" (Andrews and Gates, 1998). These supplications demonstrate the Christian seafarers' trust in God

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supported their efforts to extract and transport slaves across the Atlantic. In Brazil, Portuguese slave traders formed a religious brotherhood, formally cloaking their human trafficking in the protective guise of the Church. These Roman Catholic slavers recognized St. Joseph as their patron saint and protector of their ships. The saint himself made a sort of middle passage when the Portuguese transferred his long-cherished image from the West African slave depot of São Jorge da Mina to the Church of Santo Antonio da Barra in Bahia. Such practices assured both human traffickers and ordinary Catholics that God cared for the needs of the slave traders and blessed their enterprise. Sailors recognized that "the help of God" was needed "to sell our blacks and make our return," but they gave little thought to the prayers their human cargoes offered (Harms, 2002, xi). For some Protestants, the Christian aspects of the middle passage were transformed beyond mere supplication into opportunities for worship. As John Newton's ship safely docked and unloaded its human cargo, he ended his account with the words "Soli Deo Gloria." The floating tombs sometimes became a place of worship. However, few Anglo-American slave ships with religiously inclined captains allowed Christian worship on their decks. Newton noted in his journal that he led services on deck twice each Sunday, weather permitting. Whether or not the slaves on board witnessed Christian rites, he did not say, but the slaves on some ships observed such performances. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw admired the sincerity of his ship's captain, who "openly read prayers to the ship's crew every Sabbath day" (Andrews and Gates, 1998, p. 40). In general, there were few public displays of Christian worship aboard slave ships. Catholics faced even greater challenges related to worship aboard ships. Baptized African prisoners were eligible to receive the other rites of the Church. The grueling conditions of the Middle Passage required the sacrament of last rites to be available. Catholic nations such as Portugal and France enacted laws requiring ships to take on board chaplains who would countersign the captain's "book of death" to demonstrate that the proper rituals had been performed. Ship owners resented such regulations mandating the presence of an unproductive mouth on board the ship. Some ships incorrectly declared their tonnage to avoid the ordinance of carrying a chaplain, while others simply reported that they could not find any priests willing to make the crossing. The language of Christianity penetrated even the secular aspects of the Middle Passage. Slave traders generally applied the names of the biblical ancestors to the first slaves aboard the ship, claiming their power to create identity. For example, Samuel Gamble referred to the first slave - a 4-foot-tall boy - to board the Sandown as "Adam" (Mouser, 2002, p. 64). James Arnold described a bright and intelligent young girl who was "immediately named Eve, for on slave ships it was customary to name the first man and woman brought on board the names Adam and Eve" (Dow, 1970 , p. 172). In this way, transatlantic slave ships used the Middle Passage as an ironic recreation of Africans in the Christian narrative.

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Eventually, the Christian emphasis on love and freedom led to a more active approach to the abolition of slavery. The constant protests of Catholic and Protestant advocates brought an end to the transatlantic slave trade. In some cases, the critiques of African Christians like Olaudah Equiano helped awaken the moral conscience of Europeans and encouraged them to go beyond mere Christianization. See also abolitionism; Claver, Saint Peter. Further reading: Andrews, W. L., and Gates, H. L., Jr., eds. Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Enlightenment Slave Tales. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998; Berry, Stephen R. "Seaborne Conversions, 1700-1800." Ph.D. PhD thesis, Duke University, 2005; Dow, George Francis. Slave Ships and Slavery. Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970 [reprint of the 1927 edition]; Goldenberg, David M. The Curse of the Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A journey through the worlds of the slave trade. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002; Harrill, James A. Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006; Maxwell, John F. Slavery and the Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Doctrine on the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery. Chichester: Rose, 1975; Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988; Mouser, Bruce L. A Slave Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Record of the Sandown, 1793–1794. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002; Neuton, John. The Journal of a Slaver (John Newton) 1750–1754, eds. Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell. London: The Epworth Press, 1962; Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Stephen R. Berry Claver, Saint Peter (1580–1654) Peter Claver (San Pedro Claver), apostle to all blacks and self-proclaimed “slave to slaves,” was the first monk to be canonized in the New World as a result of his tireless work under new incoming African slaves. He is the patron saint of African missions, African Americans and slaves. Claver was born in Verdu, Spain, in 1580. After entering the Jesuit College in Barcelona and taking his final vows in 1604, he went to study with Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Rodriguez, later canonized at the same time as Claver, influenced the young priest to pursue missionary work in America. In 1610, Peter arrived in New Granada, in the city of Cartagena (modern-day Colombia) to begin a lifelong ministry that would last more than four decades to alleviate the plight and conditions of African slaves and provide for their redemption. Cartagena was considered the leading slave market in the New World and during this period more than a thousand slaves entered the city each month. Under the leadership of Father Sandoval, his predecessor in Cartagena, and drawing on a progressive understanding that all men are brothers under Christ, Claver saw the immediate need not only to help the sick and mistreated captive Africans, but also to treat them as equals and worthy of contemplation of Christian love and sympathy. Claver began work almost immediately when

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As soon as the ships came into port, they rowed out to provide food and water. Once ashore, he took the sick and infirm to a hospital he helped build, while arranging burial for the dead. His efforts included teaching slaves the gospel of Christ and resulted in more than 300,000 baptisms among Africans brought to America. Declared venerable in 1747 by Pope Benedict XIV, in 1850 by Pope Pius IX. Beatified and finally beatified in 1888 by Pope Leo XIII for the time he lived. He is buried in the Church of San Pedro Claver in Cartegana, where he lived and worked. Further reading: Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

William Morgan Closing the Slave Trade The movement to end the transatlantic slave trade began in the 18th century, but effective measures to suppress the trade were not implemented until the 19th century. Closing the slave trade was seen as a means to end slavery's worst abuses, and most abolitionists believed that suppressing the trade would lead to the end of slavery. Although Britain led early efforts to end the trade, the sale and transportation of West African slaves was effectively ended only after the United States began enforcing anti-slave trade policies. In 1792, Denmark became the first European country to ban the slave trade by its citizens. But it was not until Britain abolished trade in 1807 that significant efforts were made to suppress transatlantic trade. Great Britain was the largest participant in the trade due to its North American colonies. Although laws to end the trade were introduced in Parliament as early as the 1780s, a powerful bloc of Caribbean planters and traders managed to thwart successive laws against the slave trade. Finally, in 1805, the leaders of the abolitionist movement in the House of Commons, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, succeeded in passing legislation ending trade. The law went into effect in 1807 and was followed in 1811 by another measure making involvement in the slave trade a crime. The legislation empowered the Royal Navy to stop and seize suspected slave ships. The government paid a bounty for each slave ship captured and for each freed slave. Newly freed slaves were transported to Sierra Leone. The colony eventually became the center of British efforts to suppress trade. Freetown, the colony's capital, was the headquarters of the naval squadron tasked with suppressing slave transports and the site of the courts that tried suspected slave traders. The Napoleonic Wars limited the British ability to station troops to suppress slave traders. In 1808 two Royal Navy ships were stationed in Sierra Leone; however, it was not until the end of the Continental Wars in 1815 that the British significantly increased anti-slavery

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Flotilla known as the West African Squadron. At the same time, the British worked to persuade other countries to either abolish the slave trade on their territory or allow the British to stop and arrest non-British citizens involved in acquiring or transporting slaves. In 1817, in the Le Louis case, a British court ruled that ships of the Royal Navy could only stop foreign ships with permission from the ship's home country. In 1815 Portugal banned participation in the slave trade north of the equator and agreed to allow the British to stop, search and, if necessary, confiscate Portuguese ships involved in trade north of the equator. By the mid-1820s, most major powers previously engaged in the slave trade had conceded to the British the right to enforce the slave trade ban. The main exception to this trend was the United States. To further aid their repressive efforts, the British also negotiated "equipment clauses" in their anti-slavery trade treaties. These agreements allowed the British to seize empty slave ships if the ships were equipped to transport slaves. Other countries, including France and eventually the United States, also stationed naval forces along the West African coast to suppress slave traders. By the mid-1830s, the various naval forces could capture an average of thirty slave ships per year and free approximately 5,000 slaves. About 80,000 to 100,000 slaves continued to be transported during the same period. The United States remained the primary destination for many of these slaves. In 1794, Congress banned the building or outfitting of ships for the slave trade, and in 1800, US citizens were banned from engaging in the slave trade between two foreign countries. In addition, the United States outlawed the slave trade in 1807. However, these measures were enforced sporadically, and the penalties initially failed to deter participants from smuggling slaves into the country. In some southern ports, the arrival of slave ships in the 1820s was not even masked. Additionally, the United States remained the primary source of slave ships. By the 1850s, two out of every three captured slave ships had been built in the United States. By 1835 the British had secured search rights in treaties of all major European states. The quintuple treaty of 1841 between Britain, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria centered on an equipment clause allowing the British to search suspected Great Power slave ships. Even when Texas became an independent state in 1836, it granted the British the right to stop suspected slave ships sailing under the Texas flag. A common feature of anti-slave trade agreements was the creation of mixed courts, so suspected slave traders were tried by both British officials and representatives of their own country. Mixed courts were established in Sierra Leone, Havana and other ports. Unlike most European states, the United States refused to give the British the power to stop and search American ships. One result was that many foreign slave ships sailed under the American flag to avoid interference from British or French patrols. Instead, successive US administrations made uneven efforts to unilaterally suppress the trade. In 1819, the United States enacted measures making participation in the slave trade a crime tantamount to slavery and punishable by death. In

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In addition, a four-ship flotilla was sent to West Africa in 1820 to enforce the American trade ban. However, the squadron was withdrawn in 1824 after tense negotiations between the United States and Britain for a treaty for a joint effort to suppress trade (the provisions of the treaty were considerably weakened after the Senate added amendments that essentially deprived the agreement of any real enforcement Energy). In 1837 the British invited the United States and the French to form a tripartite anti-slavery naval squadron to be stationed in West Africa. The French agreed and developed a joint squadron with the British, but the United States refused. Simultaneously with the joint French patrols, the British government embarked on a more vigorous program to try to cut off the supply of slaves. The British began offering subsidies to African chiefs who ended their tribe's involvement in the slave trade. Those chiefs who did not voluntarily cease participation faced the possibility of direct British military action. When the King of Lagos refused to end the slave trade, the British conquered the area. A Royal Navy blockade was established around Dahomey to stop their involvement in the slave trade, and the British bought the former Danish slave colonies in 1850 to end their involvement in slavery entirely. In 1842, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty between the United States and Britain marked a breakthrough in efforts to suppress the slave trade. The treaty promised that the United States would again send a naval squadron to West Africa to patrol alongside the British and stop and search suspected American-flagged slavers. The initiative was dubbed "Joint Cruising" and proved successful in banning it; However, officials in the United States often refused to act on intelligence information or information about suspected slave ships. For example, as late as 1860, twenty slave ships were being outfitted in New York without the intervention of customs officials. The Webster-Ashburton treaty included a provision that, at US insistence, provided for restitution for freed slaves. The British only agreed to compensate owners for slaves freed when a slave ship was wrecked in British territory. The United States included an extradition clause in the treaty. Ultimately, it was the US Civil War that effectively ended the great slave trade. With the Union blockade of southern ports, the number of slaves imported into the Western Hemisphere dropped from 25,000 per year to 7,000 (mostly destined for Brazil). In addition, the Washington Treaty (1862) allowed the British to seize suspected American-flagged slave ships. The Washington Treaty also created mixed Anglo-American courts in New York, Cape Town and Sierra Leone for cases involving US citizens. Slavery continued in Cuba until 1886 and in Brazil until 1888, but the improved ability of British anti-slavery patrols essentially ended the Atlantic slave trade by the 1870s. Furthermore, European bans on slavery in the African colonies eliminated the large stocks of slaves and ended the external slave trade by 1900, although as late as 1920 a slave ship in the Persian Gulf was seized. Only the formal abolition of slavery as an accepted institution across Africa effectively ended the slave trade. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Brazil; abolition of

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slave trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; African rulers and the slave trade; British Caribbean; British Navy; British slave trade; Danish slave trade; Dutch slave trade; French slave trade; Illegal Slave Trade, Brazil; Illegal Slave Trade, Spanish Caribbean; Portuguese slave trade; Slave Coast; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Alpers, Edward. Ivory and Slaves. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Mannix, Daniel Pratt, with Cowley, Malcolm. Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865. New York: Vikings, 1962; Miers, Susanne. Britain and the end of the slave trade. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1972; Northrup, David, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2002; Ward, WEF The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

Tom Lanford

Clotilda , The Clotilda is one of the last American-built ships to smuggle a cargo of African captives to the United States in violation of federal law. The Clotilda began her transatlantic smuggling expedition in 1860, during the height of the "illegal" slave trade era. The Slave Trade Act (1807) criminalized the importation of Africans into the United States after January 1, 1808, ushering in the "illicit," "illegal," or "clandestine" period of the slave trade. However, American citizens continued to plan and launch smuggling expeditions, despite the introduction of the Piracy Act (1820), which defined smuggling as "piracy" and imposed the death penalty on violators. The lucrative nature of the smuggling industry, the rise of cotton as the dominant source of income, and the absorption of new slave states into the Union formed the context of events that increased the demand for African labor. American smugglers scrambled to comply, defying all federal laws enacted to end slave smuggling on land and sea. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842) sanctioned the establishment of independent squadrons of American and British naval vessels for the mutual suppression of slave smuggling in Atlantic waters, particularly along the West African coast. "Cruising together" was negligible at best. Efforts to capture ships laden with slaves at sea were undermined by advances in marine technology in the form of schooners and clippers, which were designed for speed and allowed smugglers to evade sluggish federal cruisers and 'cut' or shorten sailing time between West Africa and North America. Although federal cruisers overtook some slavers, their captains evaded prosecution, largely because of the quid pro quo, the ties to slavery they shared with the law enforcement officials and judges chosen to rule cases involving ships slandered and condemned. In 1860, Captain William Foster and his fellow smugglers outfitted the elegant two-masted schooner Clotilda for a transatlantic smuggling expedition, in violation of Section 2 of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Then captain

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Foster sailed the Clotilda to the city port of Ouidah in the Bay of Benin. Ouidah played a central role in the political economy of the Kingdom of Dahomey, controlled by powerful Fon warriors who sold millions of African captives to European and American buyers who continued to port well into the second half of the 19th century. The Clotilda is one of the last American slavers to call at Ouidah, where Captain Foster bought 125 West African captives and transported 110 of them to Mobile, Alabama. Like most of their predecessors, Captain William Foster and his fellow smugglers escaped conviction for the crime of smuggling West Africans into the United States and outfitting a ship for the purpose. With no prospect of returning to West Africa and forced to spend the rest of their lives in Alabama, thirty members of the Clotilda's cargo established a community called AfricaTown, Alabama, where some of their descendants currently reside as living testimonies of the Clotilda's infamous voyage. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; Lewis, Cudjo. Further reading: Du Bois, W.E.B. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America, 1638–1870. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1904; Hurston, Zora Neal. "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver." Journal of Negro History 12 (October 1927): 648-663.

Natalie Suzette Robertson Coffle Commonly used throughout the Atlantic world, the term "coffle" derives from the Arabic term qafila, or caravan. It is uncertain where and when the term was translated into the English language, but from its first appearance in print it referred specifically to mobile caravans of prisoners bound together by yokes or chains. In 17th- and 18th-century records of the English Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, the term is commonly used to describe processions of slaves arriving on the coast, but not to refer to slaves staying in coastal forts and barracks or enclosed on board ships. By the 18th century at the latest, the word had come unscathed to the Caribbean and mainland America, where it also referred to a bound procession of slaves. Coffle technology was very different. In Africa, slaves marching on long-distance trade routes were often secured by iron shackles tied together. Wooden yokes secured with iron bolts were rarely used and were sometimes reserved for punishment. Chains were often added at night. The ill health of the enslaved in the final stages of a long march to markets often made it possible, and even necessary, to completely cut the bonds. This was especially true for those deemed too weak to run away. In addition, African coffles were notable for the frequent requirement that captives also act as carriers of trade goods to be transported to the coast. In contrast, in America, the hordes of slaves were usually chained and bound with heavy irons. This additional burden was made possible primarily by the generally shorter distances of newly arriving slaves. See also slavery in Africa. Further reading: Park, Mungo. Journeys to the inner districts of Africa. London: Mungo Park, 1799; Tondut-Sene, Mame Kounda. "The Journey and Transportation of Slaves." In

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Captured Africans are forced to march to the shore to be sold to Europeans. Millions of Africans died resisting capture in Africa while being transported to shore or held in slave forts or other camps before making the transatlantic crossing. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International.

Doudou Diene, ed. From Chains to Bonds: The Slave Trade Revisited, 15–21. Paris: UNESCO publication, 2001.

Trevor Getz Congo River The Congo River (Zaire River) provided a strategic communication system between the Central African region and the Atlantic world. At more than 4,375 kilometers long, the Congo is the fifth longest river in the world and the second longest in Africa after the Nile. It flows through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the People's Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Angola, Cameroon and Zambia to the Atlantic. The great river became known to the outside world in 1482 through the visit of the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cao. Navigation launched trade links between the Kingdom of Congo and Portugal. Trading started with the commodity exchange and developed into a trading business

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Slaves. In 1816 a British force under Captain J.K. Tuckey pursued its lower reaches. The upper headwaters were charted by David Livingstone in 1871. Henry Stanley's transcontinental voyage discovered that the headwaters were tributaries of the Congo and not sources of the Nile. The Kingdom of Kongo flourished on the Kongo River. It was a confederation of provinces under the Manikongo (the king; mani means blacksmith, indicating the early importance and spiritual power of ironworking). Extensive trading networks were already developed along the Congo River before contact with Europeans in the 15th century, particularly for natural resources and ivory, copperware, metalware, raffia and pottery. The Portuguese's attention was drawn to the trading opportunities offered by the Congo River's excellent communications system. The Congo became strategic for the Portuguese trade in salt, copper, shells and fabrics, which they sought to dominate and develop. A direct line of communication was set up between the Kingdom of Congo and Portugal for Christianization and trade monopolization. The slave trade flourished in the Congo, when slaves captured from the hinterland were transported to European coastal forts, where they were bartered for firearms, clothing and alcohol. It is estimated that 15,000 slaves were exported annually from the Congo and Angola region in the early 17th century. In the Congo, as in many African communities, European slave traders preferred to buy men. The human reservoir for slaves in the Congo and Angola was inhabited by the Bantu-speaking people. By the sixteenth century, the slave trade became more organized and dominated Congo trade. In 1526 the King of Congo, Afonso, tried to ban all trades and expel all Europeans except priests and teachers. This became difficult because the slave trade and slave raids were also carried out by some of the Bakongo chiefs. Nonetheless, Afonso opposed the unregulated slave trade, which undermined his authority and created general insecurity. The Portuguese increased their monopolistic control over the Congo's ports. In 1678, São Salvador, the capital of the Congo, was sacked, depopulated and abandoned. The Portuguese benefited from the chaos as more slaves were procured and the Portuguese established control. See also Christianity; Portuguese slave trade; Trading in commodities. Further reading: Curtin, P., Feierman, S. Thompson, L., and Vansina, J., eds. African History: From the Earliest Times to Independence. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1998; Fage, J.D. A history of Africa. London: Routledge, 1997.

Rasheed Olaniyi Cowrie Shells Cowrie shells (also known as "cowrie shells") have been used as jewelry, spiritual tools, medicine, or currency on almost every continent. In Africa and Asia, the widespread use of cowries is common. There is evidence that cowries were most commonly used as currency, particularly during the transatlantic slave trade. The shape, size, weight, and durability of these shells have made them attractive since prehistoric times. Cowries were used as decorations

118 KAURUSSCHALE (COWRIES)

as jewelry, on works of art and on clothing. As spiritual tools, cowries have served as oracle tools and have systems that bear their name. Cowries were seen as necessary complements to certain sacred objects. Its calcium content provides medicinal properties. Cowries are sea slugs, in the same class as snails. There are more than 200 species of kauri found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The two most common cowries are Cypraea moneta and Cypraea annulus. Cowrie snails can grow up to one and a half centimeters long. The shells are solid and will easily last for hundreds of years. After processing, cowries are usually creamy white in color and sometimes shiny. The use of cowries as a means of payment dates back to the 4th century CE. Although cowrie shells were found in North, East, and Central Africa, they were most commonly incorporated into West African societies. Cowrie shells have been part of the Trans-Saharan trade since around the 13th century. With the advent of transatlantic trade, kauri importation multiplied in West Africa (and to a lesser extent Central Africa). Europeans imported cowries before disembarking for Africa. For 1,000 years, the Maldives off the coast of India were the world's leading suppliers of cowrie shells. The grenades were ideal cargo, especially considering how far they traveled. On average, 400 cowries equaled a pound. Cowries placed in barrels for shipping had no kingdom or cultures on them and were virtually impossible to counterfeit. Billions of cowries were imported into West Africa during the transatlantic trade. It has been estimated that cowries accounted for 20 to 35 percent of what was exchanged for enslaved people in the Benin Bay region. In 1790 an enslaved person was worth about 80,000 kauri. This money was used alongside gold, silver, and (later) paper bills. Despite this, Europeans and Arabs only exchanged cowries with Africans, they did not accept them in return. Cowries were imported via the trade for enslaved people and then circulated in many West African societies. Africans used cowries as legal tender for items such as food, clothing, and spiritual offerings, and to pay for services (like a haircut). It's no wonder that cultures around the world have associated cowries with fertility, not only because they were highly reproductive animals and the "female" shell shape, but also because the cowrie shell trade enabled purchasing power. Towards the end of the slave trade, there was an oversupply of cowries in West Africa. This lost their value. Additionally, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonists created plans to intentionally diminish the kauri as a currency in Africa. Cowries can still be found in Africa today, although they are rarely used as currency. See also trading in commodities. Further reading: Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantean World, 1400–1800. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Natalie Washington-Weik

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Credit and Finance Credit was vital to the transatlantic slave trade. It allowed merchants to fund their travels. According to Inikori, loans were granted to slave traders on the African coast and to slave labor employers in America. To avoid risk, slave traders secured credit in various forms: export credit from the manufacturer of goods for trade, and credit by discounting the large bills of exchange they received from selling slaves in America. It further stimulated the development of banking and the discount market in Great Britain. In the transatlantic slave trade, bills of exchange became the preferred form of payment for slave sales, rather than in the form of property or products. The growth of the British slave trade, run by private merchants, led to practices such as the remittance of bills "down the leg" from ships that had delivered slaves to the North American and Caribbean markets, and the extension of long credit periods for buyers. Colonial factors also played a role in financing the slave trade as they acted as agents in coordinating remittances. Safe British trading houses were used as guarantees for payment by bill of exchange. The development of credit practices associated with the slave trade, including remittance schemes, helped strengthen the British economy by providing robust, complex intermediary tools for realizing profits from international trade. From 1750 to 1807, slave buying and shipping dominated Britain's economy. As such, slave traders, who were constantly at risk, demanded insurance coverage, which inadvertently stimulated the development of marine insurance in Britain. Liverpool merchants were funded by banks and other financial institutions in the transatlantic slave trade. The Bill system maintained British supremacy in the transatlantic slave trade until its abolition in 1807. By the early nineteenth century, Liverpool had established its supremacy in the transatlantic trade through Bristol and London. Transatlantic trade in Liverpool was funded by the bill of exchange circulating system between the banks of Liverpool and the capital. Little empirically explored in existing studies, this credit system played a key role in the Industrial Revolution, channeling capital north into regional trade and industrialization. The cost of trading goods in exchange for slaves was met by manufacturers and suppliers in London, Liverpool and Manchester. In British America, the slave trade depended mainly on credit offered by the London financial houses in the form of bills of exchange. The credit system was replicated in many parts of Africa, where a trust system for the exchange of European goods for slaves was introduced. In the Bays of Benin and Biafra, British merchants dominated the slave trade. In fact, the local credit system was adapted to accommodate the slave trade. The local system of credit, or debt bondage, especially lien, became widespread during the transatlantic slave trade. Local traders procured goods from European traders on the coast and distributed them inland to procure slaves. In Old Calabar, the monarchy was involved in the credit network, acting as an intermediary between the European and African traders who sourced goods on credit. In this way the credit system supported the

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British traders dominated the Bay of Biafra and the region became an important supplier of slaves. The credit system and finance were not limited to financial institutions alone; Individuals also funded slave travel. In 1562, Sir John Hawkins was the first person in England to ship Negro slaves to the New World. His profitable voyage caught the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who had publicly denounced the slave trade but secretly invested in Hawkins' subsequent slave expeditions. The two largest of Hawkins' six ships belonged to the Queen. Further reading: Inikori, J.E. "The Slave Trade and the Atlantic Economies, 1451–1870." In V.A. Shepherd and H. McD. Beckles, ed. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd., 2000; Morgan, Kenneth. "Remittance Procedures in the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade." Business History Review 79(4).

Rasheed Olaniyi Crew The crew on a slave ship served many functions. Perhaps their first main task was to ensure that all supplies needed for the Middle Passage were complete and in the correct order. European ships arrived on the African coast with several finished goods, which they bartered for the slaves. In most cases, food and other household necessities were sourced locally from the African coast before ships were loaded with slaves. Although the function of tagging the slaves belongs to the slave traders and slave owners who held them along the coast prior to the ship's arrival, there have been occasions when the crew performed the function of placing inscriptions on the slaves to ensure their identity was recorded in place of ownership and destination has been determined. The crew of a typical slave ship was under the sole control of the captain, who was responsible for ensuring the voyage was successful. The captain kept records of daily activities during the Middle Passage. The long nature of the Middle Passage increased the crew's responsibilities, as they had to feed the slaves daily and remove the bodies of dead slaves (which were thrown into the sea). The crew to slave ratio is one of the most important aspects of the Middle Passage experience. Aside from privateers, the slave trade employed the largest crew of any sea-trading vessel. The need for seamen was directly related to the demands of trade and the need to guard the captured slaves. Thus the crews per ton of some 252 ships leaving Liverpool for Africa between 1785 and 1787 were 0.17 crews per ton, while the 249 ships leaving the same port for the West Indies carried 0.09 crews per ton. Slave ships needed to be adequately armed for two main reasons: protection from pirates and protection from slave mutiny during the Middle Passage. A ship attacked by pirates automatically lost all of its slaves and supplies. Shipwrecks exposed slave ships to the strongest attacks by pirates. A slave rebellion on a Dutch ship in 1715 claimed about ten lives

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Team members. On January 28, 1731, a Massachusetts schooner lost all but three of its crew during a transatlantic voyage slave revolt. Crew and slave mortality rates usually moved together. A study of French slave ships shows that as crew mortality increased, so did the overall slave mortality, albeit at a slower rate. Not all crew members who died did so during the Middle Passage. A good percentage of crew mortality occurred before embarkation, that is, while the ship was still in African coastal waters waiting for slaves to be loaded. The deaths of crew members in Africa can be largely explained by the unfavorable nature of Africa's coastal environment, which until the 19th century was considered the white man's "graveyard". See also food; Trading in commodities. Further reading: Klein, Herbert. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantean Slave Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Saheed Aderinto Cuba Cuba was one of the first large islands that Columbus saw and explored (November–December 1492). The island was divided into territorial chiefs of a people later called Arawacs (taı 'nos), Siboneyes and Guanahatabeyes. On the island and between Cuba and other islands, there was a form of prisoner-of-war slavery, kin slavery, and the slave trade in the form of raids. The best-known concept for this pre-Columbian kin slavery is naborı ´a, which was later used by the Spanish for domestic slavery, garden slavery, and gold

Church and Monastery Scene, Havana, Cuba, 1839. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

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Mining. From 1511 to 1521, eastern Cuba was the springboard for expansion into the Mayalands and Mexico, and a center for the slave trade in captive Native Americans—first from the Lucayas (the Bahamas) and parts of Florida. As in La Hispaniola, the first black slaves came to Cuba as members of conquistador groups. Between 1518 and 1530 the first slaves came directly from Cape Verde, São Tomé or from the Congo region to Santiago de Cuba, Baracoa, Remedios, Trinidad or Havana, often as highly valued specialists in agricultural work, mining and blacksmithing - for example as esclavos del Rey (king slaves) in the El Cobre copper mines near Santiago. In the 16th century, near Havana, the main port of the Carrera de Indias, the first landscapes of sugar slavery and mass slavery developed, initially with Congo slaves, Mina slaves or Jolof slaves. Havana, along with Cartagena de Indias and Veracruz, became a center of the transatlantic and inter-American slave trade, slave smuggling, and various forms of domestic and artisanal slavery (shipbuilding). The first cultural grouping of slaves came from the Congo and was constantly renewed by the steady arrival of Bozales (new slaves from Africa) and some smaller ethnic groups (Mina-Arara´, Mandinga, Carabalı´ and Ganga´). The other parts and towns of the island remained centers of cattle breeding or local subsistence with slave smuggling and various forms of petty slavery until the 1800s. From 1740, new forms of mass slavery emerged in the Havana region, financed by profits from tobacco exports, smuggling and situados (silver from the Mexican royal treasury). The new and dynamic economy of western Cuba was aided by the British occupation of Havana in 1762–1763, the British slave trade into Cuba (and slave smuggling by Americans and Dutch), the Saint Domingue Slave Revolution, and pressure from Havana's elite. The Crown began demonopolizing the slave trade to Havana and later to other ports in Cuba (1789–1804). Initially, a sizeable slave trade developed with strong American involvement. Ships brought African slaves to the efficient and technologically advanced regions of sugar and coffee production. From 1820 to about 1870, this trade functioned as slave smuggling, often as a combination of coastal transportation and covert transatlantic trade. The slave trade and smuggling facilitated the establishment and development of cultures of the African diaspora in Cuba, the many different forms of resistance (palenques, cimarronaje) and transculturation (santerı ´a, palo monte, etc.). Between 600,000 and 1 million Africans came to Cuba during the slave trade and slave smuggling era in the 19th century. From about 1846 to 1870, 140,000 Chinese coolies also came to the Cuban coast, mainly to work in the most modern sugar mills, but also as domestic, artisan, and transport slaves. The slave trade and smuggling was formally outlawed in 1820 by British pressure (treats of 1817, 1822, and 1835 and the Havana Mixed Court) and Spanish laws (1844, 1845, 1856, and 1866), but remained one of the major sources of capitalization in sugar production and modernization by the start of the anti-colonial Ten Years' War in 1868. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Haitian Revolution, The; Religion.

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Further Reading: Falola, Toyin and Childs, Matt D., eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantean World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004; Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba. Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Fuente, Alejandro de la. "Sugar and Slavery in Early Colonial Cuba." In Stuart B. Schwartz, ed. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, 115–157. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004; Heywood, Linda, eds. Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Rosa Corzo, Gabino la. Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression, trans. Maria Todd. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985 [reprinted, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000]; Zeuske, Michael. "Hidden Markers, Open Secrets: On Naming, Race Marking and Race Making in Cuba." New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 76, 3-4 (2002): pp. 235-266.

Michael Max P. Zeuske Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah (ca. 1757–1803) Born about 1757, Cugoano was an African abolitionist best known for writing "Thoughts and Feelings Concerning the Evils of Slavery and Trade of the Human Species." became famous, a literary masterpiece that blamed all Britons for the persistence of slavery and at the same time a plea for the slave rebellion. Hailing from the southern coast of Ghana, Cugoano was born to the same Fante people who later formed a confederation that aided the British in wars against the Asante in the 19th century. At the age of thirteen, Cugoano was kidnapped and sold into slavery. It was first shipped to the West Indies but ended up in Britain two years later. In 1773 he was baptized "John Stuart". He quickly developed a strong faith in his Christian faith, which explains the numerous religious references in his work. In it he countered those who used the Bible to justify the morality of slavery by asserting that God intended all human beings to be equal. A year after his baptism, he was hired as a servant by Richard and Marie Cosway, two Regency-era miniaturists. It was primarily through this association with the Cosways that Cugoano managed to infiltrate British high society. There he met Olaudah Equiano, an African intellectual who would go on to write The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Cugoano and Equiano were both active members of the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group that frequently wrote condemnations of slavery to British newspapers. Her arguments against the British slave trade were compelling. Between 1662 and 1807, British ships transported 3.25 million Africans across the Atlantic. Until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the British shipped more than 40,000 Africans each year. Cugoano, a vocal leader among his peers, believed that the scope of slavery-related problems increased exponentially as a result of colonialism in the Americas, where slaves were needed to work the large numbers of plantations. Cugoano believed that slavery made neither economic nor ethical sense. He argued that all slaves who had been held in the colonies for at least seven years

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Years should be emancipated, all other colony slaves should be prepared for freedom, and a naval blockade should be instituted to prevent further plundering of West Africa. He was a strong advocate of relocating Africans from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to a community for London's black poor in Sierra Leone. The first edition of Cugoano's book, published in 1787, displayed scholarly language and complicated postulates as he attempted to persuade Britain's intellectual elite to bring about social change. It has been speculated by some that Equiano helped revise the first draft of this work, although the ideas expressed in it were certainly the author's own. In 1791, Cugoano published an abridged version aimed at a slave-based audience. Little is known of his life after this latest publication, although one of his colleagues claimed that Cugoano married an Englishwoman. He died about 1803. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Great Britain; returnees to Africa. Further reading: Cugoano, Quobna. Thoughts and Feelings about the Evils of Slavery and Trade in the Human Species. London: Dawsons Pall Shopping Centre, 1969; Walvin, James. Atlas of Slavery. UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2006.

Michael Lombardo Curac¸ao The Caribbean island of Curac¸ao was an important market for the slave trade. Especially in the last half of the 17th and the first decades of the 18th century, this small Dutch colony off the coast of present-day Venezuela served as a meeting place for Dutch merchants and buyers from all over the New World. More than 90,000 enslaved Africans were shipped to the port of Willemstad by the Dutch West India Company (WIC) between 1634 and 1730 (Jordaan, 2003). The Spaniards were the first Europeans to set foot on Curacao in 1499. The Dutch, seeking a defensible port near the important trade routes, conquered the island in 1634. Since they were fighting Spain for its independence (1560–1640), settling off the Spanish American mainland and attacking Spanish merchant ships was also a way of strategic warfare. After the signing of the peace (1648, Munster) banning the Dutch from traffic with the Spanish colonies, Curacao became the perfect transit port to circumvent this restriction. For the WIC, bringing captive Africans to the Caribbean meant bypassing Spanish customs. It was easier for buyers to have a central market rather than having to deal with multiple locations and merchants. To control imports, Spain introduced the asiento: a treaty that monopolized the supply of slaves to Spanish colonies. However, some traders have subcontracted the WIC, ensuring a stable market for the company. Rivalry with English and French slave traders, both pirates and Asentistas, led to a declining market for the WIC from the 18th century. The company lost its Dutch monopoly in the 1730s. Gradually, independent merchants such as the Middleburg Trading Company got involved. Intruders had been illegally involved in the slave

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traded all along, supplying up to 40,000 slaves in the period 1600-1795 (Jordaan, 2003; Postma, 2003). In Curacao, no records were kept of the origins of the enslaved. The ports of embarkation of WIC ships indicate that the majority of slaves embarked in the Guinea region, mainly on the Gold Coast (Elmina, Bercu) and the Slave Coast (Ardra, Fida). Another significant part came from the Angola-Loango region. More than half of those embarked were men, about a quarter were women, and the remainder were children, mostly boys (Gibbes, 2002; Jordaan, 2003). During the Middle Passage, an average of 16 percent died from dysentery, smallpox, scurvy, and tuberculosis, and another one percent died immediately before or after disembarkation due to the time spent aboard the ship in port, which could be up to three weeks ( den Heijer, 1997; Jordaan, 2003). The survivors were marked, examined, classified and branded. Those who were apparently healthy, possessed all teeth and limbs, were between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, and at least four feet nine inches tall were referred to as Piezas de India. Minors aged four and over are counted as part of a pieza; Babies who stayed with their mother were not counted. The handicapped, aged and sick were referred to as manquerons and separated to be sold at public auction. Piezas were intended for the Asentistas (Gibbes, 2002; Jordaan, 2003). Other, mainly local, buyers bought smaller quantities. Although there was no plantation economy or mining industry on Curacao, slaves outnumbered free whites for a long time. For example, in 1789 the island had 3,964 whites, 12,804 slaves and 2,776 free men (Gibbes, 2002). To this day, the heritage of the residents is strongly influenced by the African presence. See also asiato; Dutch slave trade; Monopoly. Further Reading: "A Reassessment of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade." In Postma, J., and Enthoven, V., eds. Riches of the Atlantic Trade: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817. Leiden: Brill, 2003; Heijer, Henk den. Goud, Ivoor en Slaven: Scheepvaart en Handel van de Tweede Westindische Compagnie op Afrika, 1674-1740. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1997; Gibbes, F.E., Rømer-Kenepa, N.C., and Scriwanek, M.A. De Bewoners van Curacao: Vijf Eeuwen van Lief en Leed, 1499-1999. Willemstad: National Archives, 2002; Jordan, Han. "The Curac¸ao Slave Market: From Asiato Trade to Free Trade, 1700–1730." In Postma, J., and Enthoven, V., eds. Riches of Atlantic Trade: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817. Leiden: Brill, 2003; Klooster, Wim. "The Curac¸ao Slave Market: From Asiato Trade to Free Trade, 1700–1730." In Postma, J., and Enthoven, V., eds. Riches of Atlantic Trade: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817. Leiden: Brill, 2003; Postma, John. "Curação and the Caribbean Transit Trade." In Postma, J., and Enthoven, V., eds. Riches of Atlantic Trade: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

Valika Schmeulders

D Dahomey Dahomey, situated in one of the poorer regions of the West African Coast region, was one of the smaller Aja states. Founded by a clan or ruling dynasty claiming affiliation with the royal house of Allada in the south, Dahomey emerged in the region between the Volta Basin and Yorubaland in the early 17th century. This ruling family, the Aja, migrated northwards inland from the coastal trading state of Allada (established 1575) due to a disputed line of succession and Dutch intervention on the coast. Led by Do-Aklin, the Aja settled among the Fon on the Abomey Plateau (about 100 km from the coast) around 1620. Over the next two decades, the Aja asserted their authority over the loosely organized Fon. Thus, around 1650, the new kingdom of Dahomey was established as a landlocked kingdom with its capital at Abomey and Wegbaja as king. Dahomey existed until it was conquered by the French in the 19th century. Expansion and Trade King Vebayah (1650–1685) and King Akaba II (1685–1708) retained their control of the Abomey area and also began wars of expansion, conquering lands south and south-east of Abomey. To profit from trade with Europeans, particularly the slave trade, Dahomey conquered Allada and Ouidah in the early 1720s, eventually replacing Allada as the dominant slave community in the Aja region. However, some scholars believe that Agaja Trudo (1708–1732), who conquered Allada and Ouidah, wanted to end the slave trade to ensure greater political stability in the region. Others claim he wanted Europeans to set up plantations in Dahomey and use slave labor to keep slaves in Africa, but the Europeans ignored his advice. Whatever the case, the need for firearms made Dahomey a key player in the slave trade that swept the hinterland in the 18th century.

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Coronation of the King of Whydah, Dahomey, April 1725. Tracy W. McGregor Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

Political System Wegbaja and his successors strengthened royal power in Dahomey by establishing the primogeniture system. However, only sons born to royal women during their father's reign were eligible to prosper. By introducing succession through the king's eldest son, Dahomey rulers attempted to prevent inheritance disputes and the attendant anarchy that accompanies wars of succession. When a king ascended the throne at an advanced age, few children were likely to be born, which meant that the number of rival heirs to the throne was sometimes limited. In addition, the primogeniture system was intended to reduce village chiefs' influence in choosing a king's successor. Dahomey rulers developed a cult around the institution of kingship. This cult included annual human sacrifices to honor deceased members of the royal family and to provide them with a new set of servants at the annual custom. Several European visitors to the Dahomey Court reported these human sacrifices, also designed to demonstrate the omnipotence of royal power. The Dahomey constitution was similar to Oyo's and lasted until the early eighteenth century when it was undermined by a new group of rulers who transformed Dahomey into a centralized state. Under the Dahomean constitution, the king or oba was the supreme political leader, but he was a primus inter pares rather than an autocratic ruler. Although many of the highest offices of state were hereditary, many others (political and military officials) were appointed by the king. The king also controlled

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State taxes, tributes and profits from the slave trade and the inheritance of wealth were upheld by his court. The king was assisted in the performance of his duties by councils of officials who controlled his authority or power. A council consisted of kingmakers who elected the king from royal lineage; Another council might ask the king to commit suicide, similar to the Oyo Mesi of the Yoruba Kingdom of Oyo. The king performed his duties with the support of state officials such as the migan, or prime minister, who was also the commander-in-chief of the army. Other officials were the meu, or minister of taxes, and commander of the left wing of the Dahomey army, and the to-no-num, the chief eunuch and minister of taxes. Taxes were levied in the form of income tax, duties, tolls, and revenue from royal estates, as well as taxes on agricultural production (including livestock). Other officials were the yovo-gan or viceroy of Whydah and the tokpo or minister of agriculture. These top Dahomey officials were responsible for central government functions and were also commanders of various branches of the army. The king had a private bodyguard that included the famous Amazons, an all-female contingent known for their courage and fearlessness. That was unique in Africa. In the early 18th century, the Dahomey constitution was undermined by a new group of rulers. Under these rulers, Dahomey became an absolute monarchy with a highly organized central government. With their control of firearms, they made the Kingdom of Dahomey an all-powerful state. This started with Agaja Trudo. A by-product of this centralization was Dahomey's ability to move from economic dependence on the slave trade to extensive oil palm plantations after trade was suppressed. A royal cult of offerings was developed to support the centralized state system. To facilitate efficient administration, Dahomey was divided into six provinces, with each province reporting to a provincial chief or governor. The provincial governor was assisted in fulfilling his duties by village chiefs and could be summoned to the capital, Abomey, at any time. The King stationed representatives at the offices of the provincial governors to keep him informed of all activities. In addition, the king and his officials (central government) communicated with the provincial governments through the use of a 'carrier corps' of runners known as halfheads. These runners, stationed at relay stations across the kingdom, kept the channel of communication between the central government and the provinces open and active. The kings of Dahomey also introduced a unique element to the provincial system of government. They implemented a system known as Dahomeanization. Through this policy, the kings of Dahomey largely abolished the ruling families of the conquered states and appointed governors for the conquered cities. The laws and customs of Dahomey were to take precedence in these conquered states. Through this policy, Dahomey attempted to fully integrate all conquered states into the Dahomey polity. In this way the laws of Dahomey took root in all parts of the kingdom and thereby conquered all people

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were made part of the kingdom in order to achieve a homogenization of laws, customs and institutions. In accordance with this policy, citizenship was not based solely on blood relationship. Foreigners could become citizens of Dahomey by attending a "Citizenship Ceremony" in which the state and national will was represented by a perforated gourd filled with water. Dahomeans and the foreigners seeking citizenship stuck their fingers in the holes, preventing the water in the perforated gourd from spilling. This symbolic action was intended to make it clear to the applicant for citizenship that pulling a finger from the perforated gourd would cause water to drain from the gourd, much like an act of treason would weaken or even collapse the state . A similar ceremony was performed when individuals were knighted, emphasizing good citizenship. Dahomey and Oyo For all its importance, Dahomey was a relatively small kingdom, some seventy miles north to south and fifty miles east to west. Its relationship with its larger and stronger neighbor to the east, Oyo, proved problematic. Between 1726 and 1740, Oyo attacked and raided Dahomey to maintain control of the south-western trade routes to the coast. Despite Agaja's efforts to secure Dahomey's independence from Oyo, Dahomey continued to remain a tributary state, a status confirmed by a 1730 treaty. Dahomey's tributary status meant large annual payments in return, for which it retained its army and was not subject to the watchful eye of an Oyo-based official. It was only when Oyo was engaged in the Fulani Wars that Adandoza (1797-1818) and later Gezo (1818-1858) wrested Dahomey from Oyo suzerainty. Dahomey and the slave trade Dahomey is one of the few African states that owes its importance to the slave trade. It built a well-trained army that increased in size and efficiency through the mid-19th century. In 1727 the army was estimated at 3,000 regulars and 10,000 militia and by 1845 had grown to 12,000 regulars and 24,000 militia. A porter corps of young men supplied the army. With this army Agaja conquered the areas northwest of Dahomey and between 1724-1727 the coastal states of Allada and Ouidah. Scholars differ on the motivation for the conquest of the coastal states, but there is no denying that control of the coastal Dahomey region was in contact with the Dutch (excellent at Allada), the French and the English (excellent at Whydah), and made slavery the cornerstone of the Dahomey economy. Dahomey traded guns and gunpowder for slaves, and in turn used the gun to raid north and northwest for prisoners. Agaja's successors Tegbesu IV (1732–1774), Kpengla V (1774–1789) and Agonglo (1790–1797) continued the wars of expansion in south-east and south-west Dahomey in the Upper Weme, Mono and Porto Novo areas. When Gezo (1818–1858) broke away from Oyo in 1821, he used the army to attack the Mahi people north of Dahomey. In 1841 and 1851 Gezo attacked the Oyo

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Ketu and Abeokuta Provinces. His successors Glele (1858–1889) and Benhazin (1889–1894) attacked Ketu and Abeokuta. The rivalry between Dahomey and Oyo in the 18th century was instrumental in large numbers of captives being sold into the Atlantic slave trade. Systematic annual raids also resulted in large numbers of slaves. The Dahomeian state exported slaves that it had received in the wars of expansion. Slave export became a state monopoly and the slave traders' profits were taxed by the state. The state also relied on large plantations farmed by slave labor. During most of the 19th century, during the suppression of the slave trade, Dahomey gradually turned to oil palm plantations for sale to Europeans, overcoming the adjustment crisis that accompanied the suppression of the slave trade. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; Allada; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Boahen, A. Adu. Themes of West African History. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1966; July, Robert W. A History of the African People. 5th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998; Schillington, Kevin. history of Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Webster, J.B., and Boahen, A. Adu, with Idowu, H.O. The Growth of African Civilization: The Revolutionary Years - West Africa Since 1800. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1968.

Edmund Abaka Daily Routine A prisoner's life took on a pattern when he reached the barracks. These were pens where the enslaved were held before boarding a slave ship. The slaves were freed from their bonds twice a day for meals and exercise. On the West Coast, consisting of the Gold Coast, Slave Coast, and Ivory Coast, the slaves were usually fed bread and water at the expense of the slave traders. Food was clearly for the nutrition and not for the health of the prisoners. Likewise, exercise should not ensure a slave's physical fitness. Both diet and exercise should reduce the likely occurrence of morbidity or mortality that could be caused by starvation and immobility. Each of the major players in the trade insisted that they possessed the best regime for African slaves as they were transported along the Middle Passage. For example, the Dutch claimed to have fed their slaves "good food" three times a day, better than their African food, while the English often criticized the Portuguese for abusing slaves. Overall, there seemed to have been a general pattern. Slaves were fed twice a day. On English ships it was usually mid-morning (around 10am) and early evening (around 4pm). They were usually allowed to go on deck in pairs. Most slave traders would tie up slaves in pairs or threes. A chain was passed through a ring in their chains. This in turn was attached to the eyebolts. These were then attached to the deck at intervals. These precautions were deemed necessary as all slaves would be on deck at the same time, presenting opportunities for mutiny or jumping overboard. The sailors who served them the food were under arms. On

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On other ships, they came on deck as early as 8:00 a.m. while breakfast was served to them at 9:00 a.m. Women and relatively young boys were usually allowed to walk about the deck without chains. This was common on most ships. Meals were usually coarse fare. On ships bringing captives from the Windward coast, it was boiled rice, millet, or cornmeal. This was sometimes cooked with a few cuts of salt beef from the sailors' rations. On ships bringing prisoners from the Bay of Biafra at the eastern end of the Gulf of Guinea, the food consisted of steamed yams. Water was severely rationed, and each slave received half a liter of water served in a pan. After the morning meal came what the slavers called "the dancing of the slaves." The dance was no fun. It was a mixture of torture and forced exercises. This ritual was supposed to lift their spirits against suicidal thoughts and prevent scurvy. The exercise proved torture for those with swollen limbs. Slaves in irons were ordered to stand up and dance within the limits allowed by their shackles, while enough space was left for those without chains to dance on deck. This sadistic ritual did not evoke any joy. The men in irons had to do this by force until their knees bled. Otherwise, sailors would be flogged with “cats” (whips). Those who could perform this unhindered dance were usually women and children. Music was provided by either a drum, an upside-down enamel jug, or an African banjo. Sometimes a sailor with bagpipes or violin provided the music. Slave traders were known to advertise violinists to travel to Africa with them. One reason for this was to provide music when they danced the slaves. On the final days of the voyage, when land was sighted, the women were decked out in the discarded sailor's clothes and all were expected to dance in gratitude for surviving the Middle Passage. While some sailors enforced the dance ritual on deck, others went below deck to clean the hold where the slaves slept. It was not a pleasant task, because the dirt and stench in the hold were unbearable. This level of cleanliness was intended to ensure that there was sufficient cargo for sale in America. Similarly, before the slaves came up in the morning, the deck was decorated with sacred stones. Most ships added that they washed slaves' mouths in vinegar and clipped their nails. The latter should normally prevent them from using their nails as weapons. General hygiene was primarily for the health of sailors and slave traders. In the afternoon, the slaves received their second meal, which was often identical to breakfast. Sometimes a change in diet involved the addition of broad beans, the cheapest European feed. The beans were boiled down to a pulp. It was then topped with a mixture of palm oil, flour, water and red sauce. The sailors referred to this food as "slabber sauce". Once they had finished eating, they were herded below deck. Then the stowage of the slaves for the night began. Freedom to go on deck depended on good weather. In bad weather or rainy days, the slaves were left in the hold all day. Sometimes they stayed there for days until the weather improved. Their meals were served to them in this narrow space.

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Further reading: Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1969; Dow, George Francis. Slave Ships and Slavery. New York: Dover Publications, 1970; Howard, Thomas. Black Journey. Boston: Klein, Brown, 1971; Kay, F.George. The shameful trade. London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1967; Klein, Herbert S. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Meltzer, Milton. Slavery: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. Chicago: Cowles Book Company, 1972; Plimmer, Charlotte and Plimmer, Denis. Slavery: The Anglo-American Involvement. New York: Harper and Row, 1973; Rawley, James A. The Transatlantic Slave Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin

Dancing and Practice "The Slaves Dance" was a daily ritual that took place on board most slave ships during their transatlantic crossing. One of the first accounts of slave dancing was written in 1694 in the log of the slave trader Hannibal. The famous account of the surgeon Falconbridge also describes this practice. This enforced ritual was performed on the decks of most slave ships after the first meal of the day. Bound slaves (mostly men) were forced to jump up and down, twist and feign joy for an hour or two under the gaze of the crew. Those who could move more freely (generally the women and children) would circulate around them. The slaves who didn't want to "dance" or didn't show enough enthusiasm were brutally whipped with a "cat-nine-tails" by crew members. It was a powerful whip to which nine cords of leather or tarred cotton were attached. The ship's doctors (who were in charge of allocating food) enforced this practice, which they also described in their logs, but it was the masters or crew members who were in charge. It was a common ritual performed on all slave ships. Ironically, the physical restraint imposed on the slaves' bodies on the lower deck (enforced immobility) was in stark contrast to the forced movement (forced exercise) on the upper deck. Because the slaves were cramped and had to huddle day and night in the unventilated and filthy lower deck (or in specific quarters, as was the case with the women), 'dancing the slaves' was seen as a way, among other things, to to reduce the high mortality rate among slaves, and as such was motivated by greed. The high mortality rate on slave ships from ill-treatment and dysentery, murder and suicide was a real problem, as each slave killed represented a loss of profit for the slaver's captains. Some of them took out insurance for their human cargo, but most insurance companies only reimbursed losses after revolts or suicide. There was no "natural" death in their clauses. In addition, fit slaves could be sold at a better price, and "dancing the slaves" was believed to keep them in better shape to exercise their muscles or stimulate blood circulation. Some reports suggest that this widespread practice supposedly lifts slaves' spirits, alleviates anxiety caused by their condition, and therefore lowers the level of violence on board.

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Some accounts suggest that the slaves were forced to dance at night to entertain the crew, and that the best dancers were rewarded with petty privileges or alcohol. Slaves were also forced to sing, and these simulations of African rituals were sometimes accompanied by the sound of a banjo, drum, or cauldron. This practice was so widespread that musicians were often hired to play on the ships as well. Once at their destination, the slaves were still forced to perform dances, but this time it was to be for the pleasure of their plantation masters, particularly in the United States. See also Music, Songs, and Singing; Torture. Further reading: Falconbridge, Alexander. An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa. New York: AMS Press, 1973 (1788); Smithsonian Institution Press, in association with the Mariners' Museum. Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press; and Newport News, VA: Mariners' Museum, 2002.

Carole Maccotta Danish Slave Trade Centered in the Danish West Indies and the Gold Coast of Africa, the Danish slave trade began in 1649 and lasted until 1803. Denmark was the first colonial power and the first European country to outlaw the slave trade. In 1792, his king issued a decree declaring the end of Danish slave exports from January 1, 1803. Although the first registered Danish slave ships appeared in Africa in 1649, the first charter for a Danish slave trading company went to the Glückstadt Company in 1651. The success of the Neldebladet, the first Danish ship to transport slaves from Africa to the West Indies, encouraged the Danish Involved in the Atlantic slave trade as the ship returned to Europe with sugar, ivory, gold and palm oil. Denmark's involvement in Africa was centered on the Gold Coast, where it established coastal forts such as Fort Frederiksborg in 1660 and Christiansborg Palace in 1661. Other later important facilities were Fort Fredensborg (Old Ningo), Fort Kongensten (Ada) and Fort Prinsensten (Keta). During the 17th century the Danes traded slaves from Popo and Ardra in Dahomey for gold on the Gold Coast, where mines required an inexhaustible labor force. In the eighteenth century, the Danes extended their influence into the eastern Gold Coast to control trade in the Volta Delta and the western Slave Coast (now Togo and Benin). They established a number of merchant lodges east from Accra to Aflahu on what is now the Ghana-Togo border. In the New World, where Spain regulated the slave trade by issuing licenses to trade in slaves, Danish traders initially found little access to the slave markets. Spain refused its licenses as it saw the Danish companies as weak and unable to handle the contracts with certainty. After Spain stopped issuing licenses in 1773, Danish slave traders brought Africans directly to the Spanish colonies, although the Danish presence there was never large. In 1671 the Danes emerged in the West Indies, which would become their main trading territory, as Christian V of Denmark

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granted his subjects a charter to establish plantations on the unoccupied islands of St. Thomas and St. John. From 1680 the Danish West India Company exercised control of the sugar trade in these islands before the Danish Crown took over the task in 1754. In 1733 Denmark bought St. Croix, the largest of the Danish Sugar Islands. As a small colonial power, Denmark limited its tropical kingdom to the three West Indian islands of St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John. Sugar production on these islands was not spectacular and in 1725 less than 5,000 slaves lived on St. Thomas and about 1,500 slaves on St. John. Along with the Dutch and Swedish Caribbeans, the Danish Caribbean imported about 6 percent of slaves originating in Africa. Slave rebellions plagued the Danish West Indies colonies until Denmark abolished slavery there after a rebellion on July 3, 1848. In 1917, the United States bought the three West Indies and renamed them the US Virgin Islands. Before the abolition of slavery in 1848, Denmark declared the end of Danish slave exports in January 1792, but with the understanding that the ordinance would not come into effect before January 1, 1803. Because of this proclamation, Denmark became the first European nation to abolish its slavery export slave trade. However, the export of some 30,000 Africans during the last decade of legal slave trade - a sharp increase from previous years - has tarnished its reputation. The illegal slave trade continued from Danish forts, particularly Fort Fredensborg, into the 1830s and 1840s. Exact figures are not available, but the Danish slave trade exported an estimated 85,000 slaves from Africa between 1660 and 1806. When Denmark abolished its export trade in slaves in 1803, it attempted to find an alternative economic base on the Gold Coast by developing cotton and coffee plantations and by switching the trade to 'legitimate' export products such as palm oil. By 1850, however, Denmark had abandoned its colonial ambitions and sold all of its branches in West Africa to Britain. See also Escapes and Runaways (Maroonage); Fredensborg, Die; Small European Nations. Further reading: Reynolds, Edward. Stand the Storm: A History of the Atlantean Slave Trade. London: Allison & Busby, 1985; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). "Danish-Norwegian Slave Trade." [Online, October 2006]. Slave Ship Fredensborg Project website: www.unesco.no/fredensborg/danish_norwegian_slave_trade.

Leslie Wilson Decentralized Societies Decentralized societies are sometimes referred to as "stateless" or "acephalous" societies. In such societies the largest political unit was the village or a confederation of villages. There were often a range of positions of authority, but within villages and alliances no individual or group had an exclusive claim to the right to exercise coercive power. In face-to-face meetings with many people, household representatives sat together to decide matters affecting the whole. Sometimes influential leaders emerged who became "chiefs" or "chiefs."

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"big men". However, there were no ascribing positions of authority. Put simply, there were leaders but no rulers. Decentralized societies on the borders of states sometimes fell victim to powerful armies, their people enslaved and shipped to the New World. This was the case in what is now Angola. Other decentralized societies formed hierarchies as strong rulers emerged who were able to protect people from threatening outsiders. Such was the case on the island of Bussis, off the coast of Upper Guinea, where in the late 16th century the people submitted to the rule of a warrior who transformed the island into a militarized state. Political centralization, then, was one way people restructured institutions to defend themselves against slave traders. Many decentralized societies refused to adopt centralized political systems but found ways to respond to outside threats. Five general patterns emerged across West Africa. First, when politically decentralized societies were threatened with slavery-related violence, members moved to easily defendable locations. For example, in northern Togo, Kabre moved to mountainous areas to escape from the Ashanti and Dahomey armies. In central Nigeria, pagans threatened by Muslim invaders retreated to the Jos Plateau and found sanctuary in the devastated land. On the coast of Guinea-Bissau, the Balanta moved into the dense mangrove forests of the coastal rivers. Second, where the terrain offered no protection from attackers, members of decentralized societies concentrated in walled settlements. Walls protected Sikasso from Samori and his powerful armies in 1888 and 1889. In West Africa's Sahel, the Samo's thick-walled banco houses, connected together, offered no entry for attackers. Chamba also built walled settlements on plains where they were forced to cultivate crops, and some Igbo built walls in south-eastern Nigeria. In Guinea-Bissau, the palisades that protected politically decentralized communities were known as tabancas, a word that eventually meant village in the Creole language of the region. Third, in the Atlantic slave trade era, people living in decentralized societies engaged in the Atlantic market to gain access to valuable imports, particularly weapons needed for protection. Because decentralized societies lacked broad institutions governing exchanges in state societies, they often relied on women to connect and exchange with outsiders. In decentralized regions, marriages between women and foreign traders were particularly important to cement relationships of trust. Thus, in politically decentralized stretches of the Congo River and in the Igbo and Ibibio areas of south-eastern Nigeria, male merchants took wives from great distances and relied on marriage to facilitate trade. In the Anlo-Ewe areas of the Slave Coast, the Gbodzo merchant family settled when a foreign merchant named Tettega married a local's daughter. On the Casamance River, floup women visited trading centers and transported goods in canoes. Fourth, in many decentralized regions, people made and traded slaves to gain access to imports. On the Congo River, Bobangi communities often consented to the sale of adulterers, thieves, and witches, and organized raids to produce tradable captives. Similar,

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The villagers of Igbo and Ibibio conducted raids and trials, and produced captives who traded them for weapons and iron, which was of great use in warfare. Eventually, Montagnards in northern Cameroon produced slaves by staging kidnappings and raids that resembled feuds between lineages. Finally, since decentralized societies could not raise massive armies, they mostly sent relatively small groups of men to produce tradable captives. Because the raiding parties were small, they tended to target relatively weak women and children and kill men who resisted, or retreat empty-handed when resistance was strong. How decentralized societies produced slaves meant that the sex and age ratios of the captive populations they sold for export differed from the sex and age ratios of the captive populations sold from state-based regions. State armies could subdue strong men more easily than smaller raiding parties. Therefore, a large proportion of the children and women prisoners were shipped from the Cameroonian grasslands, Igboland and Guinea-Bissau. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; slavery in Africa; Wars, African. Further Reading: Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Perbi, Akosua Adoma. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004; Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantean World, 1400–1800. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Walter Hawthorne's Destinations Slaves captured throughout Africa traveled to several destinations. Some of these targets were on the African continent and others were in cities and ports in the New World where slaves were strategically distributed among various plantations. Slavery in Africa was not like slavery in America. In Africa, slavery was based on mutual agreements made by kings, chiefs, or community leaders. Thus, it was common for slaves captured from wars, strife, and ethnic conflicts to be housed in locations within a community or region in Africa. Tensions and hostilities between communities, ethnic groups, religious groups, and kingdoms sometimes led to violence and increased the prisoner population. Because of the mutual understanding that often existed between these kingdoms, families, neighbors, rivals and friends alike, arrangements were made to keep slaves within reasonable distances within communities in Africa. Slaves in such conditions had other responsibilities. Slaves serving in royal palaces at times performed various duties such as guards, servants, and other prestigious jobs. In other African communities, slaves worked as farmhands and produced food to serve their masters. Other slaves were relocated to nearby towns, villages, or communities to serve in similar positions directed by community leaders. Such practices were widespread during the period when Muslims enslaved Africans. This era was known to be associated with the period of Islamic Jihad.

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Destinations for slaves in the New World differed from those for domestic slaves in many areas of Africa because of the complex money-making ventures that existed during the period of slavery between the 16th and 19th centuries. With the support of African chiefs and local slave traders, European traders increased the number of captives. Slave traders did this through batter trading - a system whereby European goods and arms were supplied to African chiefs and slave traders for slaves. Armed with European weapons, African slave traders quickly invaded villages and towns and captured more slaves to satisfy European demands. Negotiations between the two groups expanded the slave trade and made innocent Africans more vulnerable to enslavement. In addition, the new slavery project changed the dynamics that existed domestically. In fact, the introduction of European slavery convinced many native Africans to abandon domestic slavery. The future destinations of slaves in Africa and the New World were shaped by economic, religious, political, and social elements beyond slave control. As Europeans gained more control over the terms of trade and slave destinations in 18th-century Africa, Europeans made strategic arrangements to capture and disperse slaves according to ability and sex. Therefore, slaves captured from the hinterland in the Gold Coast, Benin Bay, Dahomey Kingdom, Angola and other regions in Africa had to travel thousands of kilometers to new locations where barracks or slave stables and slave dungeons were located coasts of Africa. These pens and dungeons and other locations served as temporary targets as the slaves waited weeks and sometimes months for the slave ships along the coast to arrive. Weak slaves who could not complete the journey to their destinations were abandoned along the way. Many slaves captured and brought to coasts, such as the slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast in the Gold Coast region and Gore'e Island in Senegal, died along the way. In the dungeons, rebellious slaves were separated from passive slaves and held in new locations, such as cells, within the grounds of the slaveholder castle until they died of starvation. Other slaves, whose voyage ended not on the shores of Africa but in the New World, were scattered according to the preferences of slave masters and slave traders. For example, as rice cultivation increased in the wetlands of sub-Saharan Africa, slave traders in North America established strategic systems to import slaves from countries with rich rice-growing experience. Between 1782 and 1810, when the number of slaves captured along the coasts of Guinea, Senegal, Gambia, and Angola was at its peak, many slaves found new homes in South Carolina and Georgia. Here, planters invested heavily in rice production, relying on the skills and labor of African slaves, particularly women, who had experience growing and cultivating rice. Thus, strategic selection of slaves created new targets in rice-based communities such as South Carolina's Gullah Islands. The strategic importation and distribution of slaves led to the emergence of new African communities across North America with similar cultures, skills, and ethnic backgrounds. slaves out

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Angolan and Congolese territories were transported to Louisiana, while slaves from the Gold Coast and Nigeria found Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Mississippi and other places as their final destinations in America. Demand for specialized African skills characterized many plantations in the Caribbean and South America, where European merchants and traders invested heavily in rice, coffee, and sugar production in Kingston, Jamaica. Havana, Cuba; and other regions of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, Suriname and Guyana. Slaves from Nigeria and Angola mined gold and worked on coffee plantations in Bahia, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; Cartagena in Colombia; and Buenos Aires in Argentina, as well as other destinations in South America. In Europe, port cities like Liverpool and London, England; Marseilles, France; Lisbon, Portugal; and Amsterdam, Holland received many African slaves. Overall, slaves had multiple goals. On slave plantations across America and Europe, families suffered isolation and divisions as slaves were sold to new owners and shipped to different destinations at different times. See also entrepreneurs; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001; Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969; Gomez, Michael. Exchanging Our Country Brands: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998; Small, Herbert. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantean Slave Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Nisida, Mieko. Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003; Solow, Barbara, eds. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Kwame-Essien Disease The transatlantic slave trade was a lucrative international trade that benefited many nations economically. Due to its repressive nature, it also caused infamous death and misery at every stage. Exact death rates for the Middle Passage are elusive; However, scholars generally agree that mortality rates fell as trade developed. Slave voyages in the 17th century probably killed about 20 percent of the slaves. By the late 18th century, modest improvements in food, water, and cleanliness gradually reduced the mortality rate to 10 to 15 percent. During the Middle Passage, the biggest killer of Africans was disease. Numerous factors influenced the number of slaves killed during the sea voyage: the time spent trading slaves along the African coast to fill the holds, the length of the voyage across the ocean, the size of the crowd on board the slave trader, the quantity and quality of food and water shortages during the voyage, the care or lack thereof by the captain and crew, and the ever-feared outbreak of an epidemic.

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Many Africans fell ill before the start of the transatlantic journey. They had often walked long distances from the African interior to the coast in harsh conditions and were therefore not healthy enough to resist disease. Weeks of confinement in the dungeons or barracks waiting to be sold to the European traders further weakened their immune systems and increased their chances of becoming victims of disease. Scholars have suggested that most deaths on the Atlantic voyage occurred in the first few weeks, and were often due to malnutrition and disease picked up during the forced marches and subsequent internment in slave camps along the coast. The cramped, unsanitary, and deplorable conditions aboard slave ships allowed disease and disease to thrive. The cargo hold floors were filled with blood, human excrement, parasites and vomit. Toilet and washing facilities for the Africans aboard slave ships were inadequate at best and did more to spread disease than to prevent it. Slaves had to share toilets, which were nothing more than tubs placed in various places in the holds that were difficult to reach at best. To reach the facilities, the prisoners, who rarely had room to sit upright, let alone stand and walk to the tubs, had to crawl on top of each other. Those too ill to move were forced to lie in their own urine and excrement. The spread of disease at sea required captains to maintain a degree of cleanliness and to provide medical attention to their human cargo. At intervals slaves would have their mouths rinsed with vinegar or lime juice and given a sip of the juice as an antidote to scurvy. Weather permitting, slaves were brought on deck to eat, get some fresh air, and exercise. While on deck, the captains had the holds cleaned and the slaves washed themselves to keep disease and death at bay. In bad weather, the slaves stayed in the holds and the ship's crew did not have time to clean the slave decks. The ship's portholes were covered during storms to keep water out, making conditions even more unbearable and breeding disease. Given the different incubation periods for diseases, longer journeys increased the likelihood of illness and death. Slave captains noted that apart from mortality caused by epidemics such as smallpox, the main cause of death during the Middle Passage was dysentery, and that length of stay along the coast to pick up cargo usually increased the death toll. When inclement weather prolonged the journey, the normal ration of water and either boiled rice, cornmeal, millet, or yams was halved, leading to starvation and disease. Malnourished slaves were prone to fever and more susceptible to disease. Scientists have found that there was a relationship between the epidemic and the season, with autumn and winter being the worst. Dysentery was the leading cause of death after epidemics of infectious diseases, so the availability of different types of food depending on the season might also account for this season-mortality relationship. Slave loads were afflicted with smallpox, measles, dysentery and other gastrointestinal diseases, malaria, hookworm, fever, eye infections, and body wounds. Ophthalmia, an inflammatory disease of the eye, was a high

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contagious disease that spread quickly on slave ships, often resulting in total blindness and death. Countless succumbed in the hold of the dysentery, which was then called flux or bloody flux. In fact, fever and flux were the terms most commonly used to describe common causes of death aboard slave ships. European diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea were often passed on to African women who were victims of rape. The brand to which many slaves were subjected before embarking on the Middle Passage was sometimes infected by the unsanitary conditions in the holds, causing fever and gangrene. These and other terrible diseases could afflict a whole batch of slaves and crew in a matter of days if left unchecked. Plague epidemics spread like wildfire through the crowded holds, wiping out hundreds at once. Smallpox was particularly disastrous because there was no cure. An English ship, the Hero, lost 360 slaves to an outbreak of smallpox. Slaves with the slightest sign of smallpox or other deadly diseases were thrown overboard alive to prevent an epidemic on board the ship that could cost the trader tens of thousands of dollars. In 1819 the captain of the Le Rodeur ordered thirty-nine slaves blinded by an outbreak of ophthalmia to be thrown into the sea instead of bringing unsaleable slaves to market. When dysentery broke out on board, the Zong's captain ordered 132 weak and sick Africans to be thrown overboard. In 1788 the British Parliament, in an effort to reduce mortality rates, required every ship to have a certified surgeon or doctor on board. The law granted a bonus to the doctor and the ship's captain if no more than three out of a hundred slaves died during the Middle Passage. Unfortunately, given the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions aboard slave ships, there was little even capable, conscientious surgeons could do to stem the spread of communicable diseases. Surgeons sometimes kept death registers detailing the number of slaves who died at sea and diaries vividly describing the disease and death aboard the slavers. One surgeon, Alexander Falconbridge, wrote in an account of his voyages of boils caused by slaves lying in their own excrement, of seasickness so bad it resulted in death, and of the bloody discharge of those slaves who suffered from dysentery. His report provides evidence of the devastating effects of disease. He noted a slave ship that took on board more than 600 slaves and nearly half the captives died without encountering storms or experiencing a longer than normal voyage. Conditions on board the ships show the extreme callousness of those involved in the slave trade and the gross inhumanity with which Africans were treated. Yet there is little evidence of intentional abuse, including death, as it was not to the slave traders' economic advantage to neglect or starve their captives, or to deny them medical treatment. Only living slaves could be sold for profit. Upon arrival in the New World, the slaves were emaciated from the devastating conditions on board and the lingering effects of malnutrition and disease. Slaves would continue to die in the days and weeks after they landed, as the effects of their mistreatment took their toll. See also ventilation and asphyxiation.

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Further reading: Alden, Dauril and Miller, Joseph C. “Unwanted Cargoes: The Origins and Spread of Smallpox via the Slave Trade from Africa to Brazil, c. 1560–1830.''; In Kenneth Kiple, ed. The African Exchange: Towards a Black Biological History, 35–109. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987; Buxton, Thomas Fowell. The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy. London: John Murray, 1840; Curtin, Philip D. "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade." Political Science Quarterly 83, 2:196-216; Falcon Bridge, Alexander. An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa. New York: AMS Press, 1973 (1788); Klein, Herbert S. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Klein, Herbert S. "The Trade in African Slave to Rio de Janeiro, 1795-1811: Estimates of Mortality and Patterns of Voyages." Journal of African History 10, 4: 533-549.

Sharon A. Roger Hepburn

Doctors and Surgeons The slaves' first contact with surgeons was on the coast before embarkation. The captain and the ship's doctor subjected naked slaves to a thorough physical examination. They examined the slaves' limbs, teeth, feet, eyes, genitals, and general physical condition to detect ailments. The old and the infirm were singled out. Such were called "macrons". Despite this, sick slaves continued to come on board with no apparent symptoms. Hence, ships carried medicines and usually a surgeon on each ship. Despite this, medical treatment was either ineffective or sometimes impossible. The sick were separated from the healthy and locked in a room. Common ailments were often violently treated through heavy bleeding and purging. These treatments further damaged the health of the slaves, and often they were thrown overboard within days. A slave ship was not a place to treat epidemics, and the commercial interest of the captains was an important factor in treatment. After the ship was anchored, it was left to the surgeons to help sell the human cargo. The slaves were unchained and given fresh air in the open air and fed good food. These measures were intended to increase the selling value of the slaves and were not undertaken out of concern for their welfare. In the case of diseases that could not be overcome by these simple measures, the surgeon camouflaged himself. For example, yaws would be covered in a mixture of iron rust, lime juice, and gunpowder. Once sold, the yaw would erupt and be virtually incurable. Again, the appearance of sores and other sores was literally removed by washing. Blackenings and palm oil were then used to cover the scars. STDs were treated with astringent injections. This unprofessional treatment of patients can be better understood by looking at the position of surgeons. They were in the same social order as barbers. They fell far below the status of doctors. The surgeons of the slave ships were more or less the ones unable to make a decent living given the competition between them and the pharmacists and unorthodox doctors on the mainland. Beginning in 1790, slave companies no longer paid percentages based on trading profits. They began paying premiums based on ship mortality rates during the voyage. When the course was lower

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less than 2 percent, the captain got £100 and the surgeon £50. If the death rate rose to 3 percent, they each got half their amount. Captains and surgeons circumvented this by falsifying the amount of their human cargo. Mainland doctors sometimes accompanied buyers to sales. Older slaves were made to speak their own language to new slaves to determine if there were disguised diseases. In the New World, plantation owners always had surgeons who could be called to treat both his family and his slaves. By 1792 it was required by law in Jamaica with the passage of the Consolidated Slave Act. When a slave fell ill, the owner first attempted treatment at home. Sometimes slaves passed off their grievances as not serious. They preferred the native African treatment. In both cases, the surgeon was called when home remedies failed. Both parties had their different reasons. Some plantation owners did not trust "normal" surgeons. They believed more in the efficacy of "irregular" medical practices such as botanical remedies, homeopathy, and hydropathy. Thomsonism was a popular self-help treatment that was widespread in South America. It was a method of returning heat lost to the body through herbal and steam treatments. Plantation doctors received a per capita fee. The standard rate was 4 shillings. You were paid regardless of whether treatment was given or not. Although the number of slaves on a plantation determined their income, most surgeons earned between £2,000 and £4,000 a year. Only because slaves were economic investments did the masters summon these surgeons. The doctors of that time were such that they did not understand the diseases and therefore could not properly diagnose most tropical diseases. Surgeons got away with their shortcomings in diagnosis and treatment by claiming that slaves had faked it or that injuries were self-inflicted. John Trapham, a doctor on a Jamaican plantation, claimed in 1679 that yawing in Africans was due to their being an "animal people." Most slaves feared the process of medical treatment. Medical practice of the 18th to 19th centuries followed the "fallacy of the fours" based on humoral theory. Doctors concluded that every disease, ranging from hookworm to cancer, resulted from an excess of one of the four humors (fluids) in the body. The goal of medicine was to ensure that all four were in balance. The methods of balance were bloodletting, salivating, blistering, and purging. In addition to the remedy of the four, the doctors used two dangerous substances for treatment: mercury and opium. Although the former has been used effectively to treat "smallpox" to some extent, its side effects have been harmful. The latter was an effective pain reliever with highly addictive side effects. During this time there were few spectacular breakthroughs in medicine. It was the harsh treatment that killed her more than the discomfort. Apart from the occasional emergency amputation, a surgeon's knife was rarely used in surgery. Planters preferred the services of African midwives to high medical fees for normal deliveries. Again, most farms were very remote and there was little rapid communication or transportation. It usually took hours or even a day for a doctor to show up after being called. See also Falconbridge, Alexander.

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Further reading: Falconbridge, Alexander. An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa. New York: AMS Press, 1973 (1788); Miller, Randall M. and Smith, John David, eds. Dictionary of African American Slavery. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin

Calm The "calm" is also referred to as "lull". It occurs when air movement is reduced to light wind or even completely still air. Gusts of wind, heavy rainfall or severe thunderstorms sometimes break the calm. The lull occurs primarily in the equatorial band that circles the globe. This region of unpredictable air currents is also known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone or ITCZ. Seafarers have known for centuries the relative location of the lull zone (varying in latitude between 5° and 30° above and below the equator); However, it was, and for the most part still is, impossible to predict when the calm would come. A site substantially in the middle of this zone is in the Gulf of Guinea and on the west coast of Africa. The presence of the doldrums zone at this location particularly worried those involved in transatlantic trade, as western voyages were known to be prone to encountering the doldrums. Getting caught in the doldrums was one of seafarers' worst nightmares, especially before the invention of the engine or electric motor. Being caught in the doldrums meant ships were at the mercy of currents, which could cause them to veer far off course, sometimes with dire consequences. Calmed ships that stalled for hours, days, even weeks had to either wait for a breeze or storm to force them out of the zone, or use the ship's boats (rowed by crew members) to literally steer the ship along its course course to draw. Of course, towing the ship in these smaller boats to cross the Atlantic did not prove very practical, and in most situations the ships were forced to simply wait for the wind. Stranded ships, which were not usually well supplied at the best of times, were at risk of running out of supplies, and even well-stocked ships could face serious shortages. This was a potentially deadly situation for ships carrying large numbers of newly enslaved Africans. It was not uncommon for a ship to lose up to 50 percent of the slaves on board in the doldrums. As supplies ran short, more and more slaves (as well as sailors) died, mainly due to the lack of fresh drinking water. Other deaths occurred from starvation and related diseases. Physical health aside, people were usually hot, bored and easily irritable, leading to arguments and additional problems on board. The infamous lull features prominently in stories like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In this poem, a sailor, driven to boredom and madness by the doldrums, shoots at a revered albatross and is cursed for it. In fact, although Coleridge's poem is only a story, the doldrums were an all too present reality for those who dared to cross seas. See also team; Eat.

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Further Reading: Hair, Paul E., Jones, Adam and Law, Robin, eds. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1992; Mayer, Bratz. Captain Canot, an African slave trader. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968; Pope-Hennessy, James. Sins of the Fathers: The Atlantean Slave Trade 1441–1807. New Jersey: Castle Books, Edison, 2004 (1967); Walvin, James. Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1994.

Rachel Horling's Door of No Return The main exit point through which thousands of enslaved Africans traversed en route to the New World, this site marked the beginning of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Located on Gore'e Island, three kilometers from Dakar, Senegal, the Door of No Return is part of a larger slave complex known as the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves). Built by the Dutch in 1776 and used as a warehouse for storing and processing slaves both for domestic use and for the larger and more profitable foreign trade, this depot was one of many on the island and along the coast of West Africa that was the terminus before they are loaded onto ships bound for America. This special site was recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1978. Although the exact number of slaves actually sent through this gate is undetermined (estimates range from 25,000 to 60,000), the Door of No Return is symbolic of these and all the other millions of slaves forcibly incorporated into the Middle Passage been and will never return. See also Dutch Slave Trade; Entrepots; French slave trade; historical memory; Volume. Further reading: Northrup, David, ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2002; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

William Morgan's drowning Death on the crossing from Africa to America took many forms. Along with disease and starvation, drowning was not uncommon during the Middle Passage. The two main causes of slave drowning were suicide and what amounted to murder, slaves being forced overboard by their captors. Accidents or natural disasters, while less common, are associated with a larger number of casualties per incident. The crowded and filthy conditions of the cargo hold, combined with the heat and stench, not to mention the psychological trauma of their harrowing capture, transportation, sale and the unknown horrors of their future, left many Africans prey to melancholy and despair and attempt suicide by jumping overboard. To prevent such loss of life, slaver captains made a concerted effort to prevent their human cargo from taking their lives, not for humanitarian reasons but for economic reasons. slaves

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were tied together when above deck, with their leg irons often attached to a chain that ran the length of the deck. Extra crew members were kept on hand to prevent the slaves from throwing themselves over the ship's edge, and nets were attached to the ship's hull to prevent the slaves from reaching the ocean depths if they managed to escape to free their kidnappers. Despite these precautions, an unknown number of desperate slaves succumbed to the waters, their remains trapped forever in the ocean depths. Despite such suicides, more slaves drowned at the hands of their captors than their own. Some slave captains ordered one or more slaves to be thrown overboard as an example for others to prevent mutinies or possible slave uprisings, either early in their voyage or when they heard rumors of discontent or increasing despondency among the captives. Because captains had incentives to supply only salable slaves to markets, extreme circumstances could lead to mass murder at sea. If the prisoners seemed so ill that they might not survive, they could be thrown into the sea. Shortages of food or drinking water could similarly lead to mass executions to spare the ship and at least some of its cargo and avert economic disaster. On particularly long voyages, when supplies were scarce and disease was rampant, some captains would throw sick slaves overboard. In 1819 the captain of the Le Rodeur ordered thirty-nine slaves blinded by an outbreak of ophthalmia to be thrown into the sea instead of bringing unsaleable slaves to market. Insurance policies often covered death from drowning but not from starvation or disease, so captains who threw slaves overboard often sought reimbursement for such losses from insurance companies. In one instance, the Liverpool Zong brought 440 slaves from the African coast to Jamaica. With an outbreak of dysentery on board and a shortage of food and water, Captain Luke Collingwood ordered 132 weak and sick Africans to be jettisoned over the course of several days. When the ship owners tried to collect the insurance money, the insurance company refused to pay and the case went to court in England. No one in the Zong case was charged with murder. And in the end, the court ruled in favor of the owners, declaring the slaves' drowning as a loss of goods. Another murderous incident occurred when Captain Homans of the slaver Brillante, surrounded by four British ships attempting to enforce the slave trade ban, brought his 600 slaves on deck and tied them to the large anchor chain. To prevent the slaves on board from being found, Homans then ordered the anchor thrown into the sea and the 600 slaves dragged to the bottom. By eliminating the evidence, the captain avoided capture and prosecution. In 1827, a Spanish slave ship, the Guerrero, pursued by HMS Nimble and fired upon by the British ship, rammed a coral reef a few miles off North Key Largo, drowning 41 of the more than 550 slaves on board, who were tied below deck. Accidents or storms on the high seas were responsible for the drowning of many slaves. A Danish slave trader, the Kron Printzen, sank in a storm in 1706 with more than 800 slaves on board. In 1738, the Dutch slave trader Leuden was stranded in a storm off Suriname. To avoid panic that

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The crew closed the hatches to the slave decks and the abandoned ship. More than 700 Africans drowned. After an accident on the Phoenix in the fall of 1762, the crew left the leaking ship and sank the 332 Africans with her. See also accidents and explosions; chains. Further Reading: Shyllon, Folarin O. Black Slaves in Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Sharon A. Roger Hepburn

Journey time It took a trading company between three weeks and three months to load a cargo of 450 slaves. It took four to ten months for a slave ship sailing off the West African coast to load a similar cargo. After the ship had been taken care of, provisions taken on board and the bills settled, preparations were made to leave the port. The slaves were then treated to a large meal. Their heads were shaved and the slaves undressed, presumably for health reasons. Then the medical and moral ordeals of the Middle Passage would begin. The duration of the voyage can range from 18 to 150 days at sea. The number of days depended on the point of departure, the route and the weather at sea. The percentage of slave ships leaving Southeast Africa averaged about 5 percent; Angola had a departure percentage of about 12 percent, Senegambia averaged about 18 percent, and the Gold Coast peaked at about 34 percent. This high percentage was because the West African coast had the largest supply of slaves. One of the most common crossings was that of a ship from Luanda to Brazil. The crossing from Luanda to Recife took an average of thirty-five days. From there to Bahia it took another forty days, while the journey from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro took an average of two months. The more days a ship was at sea, the greater the number of dead (of both slaves and sailors), the more supplies ran out, and the greater the risk of being caught in a storm. Therefore, a captain would attempt to abort his voyage. One such method was to navigate a straight course while attempting to replenish supplies. For example, the captain might have taken his supply of slaves from Bonny, Old Calabar (or any southern port). He may have stopped at one of the Portuguese islands in the Gulf of Guinea to replenish his supply of food and fresh water to ensure it would last for about three months (at which point his voyage would end). If he had acted north, he would have navigated his ship directly to the West Indies. This route was usually 4,000 to 5,000 nautical miles long. If the crossing was from Angola to Virginia, he had more miles ahead of him. The shortest passage across the Atlantic led from the Gambia River to Barbados. With good weather, the trip could be completed in three weeks. A longer course and unfavorable winds would mean more than three months on the Atlantic. Stopovers at other ports may also be made for reasons other than provisioning.

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There was a particularly lengthy part of the Middle Passage called the "Sea of ​​Thunder." A ship sailed west along the equator for about 1,000 miles and then navigated north to the Cape Verde Islands. This stretch of ocean has been reported as deadly to seafarers. When the calm on the sea set in here, it usually took too long. These long calms would keep the ship under an unfriendly cloud. The clouds themselves have been described as electric. The rains usually fell in torrents. It was on this part of the voyage that deadly diseases were most prevalent for both slaves and sailors. This “thunder sea” was avoided as much as possible by slave ships when approaching the shores of Africa and America. The mortality rate was not strictly correlated with overcrowding. Both large and small ships experienced similar mortality. The actual length of a given voyage and the consequent risk of increased incidence of an infectious disease had a greater impact than overcrowding. The middle passage took an average of sixty days, with the majority of slavers making the journey in forty to seventy days. The reduced rations required during long journeys reduced slaves' resilience, and longer journeys increased the likelihood that an infected person would exceed the incubation period and show signs of illness. Also, the longer the voyage, the greater the likelihood of plagues spreading through the unhealthily cramped holds. Bad weather not only lengthened the voyage but also prevented the slaves from coming on deck for fresh air and also forced the crew to cover the grates and close the air ports to prevent the ship from taking on water. The Middle Passage was often interrupted for a few days when the slave traders called at St. Thomas or the Princes' Islands in the Caribbean for water and supplies. During this time, the slaves were given a spell to help them recover from the horrors of the journey. Far from being motivated by humanitarian considerations, the slave captains realized that this actually improved both the physical and mental condition of the slaves and allowed them to fetch higher prices when they were sold. Slave traders heading to Jamaica and places further west would call at the Lesser Antilles for fresh supplies. Cases of scurvy showed improvement during this treatment; However, many ships arrived in Jamaica with serious epidemics on board, and the inhabitants became infected with diseases carried by the slaves. See also slack; storms; ventilation and asphyxiation. Further reading: Falconbridge, Alexander. An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa. New York: AMS Press, 1973 (1788); Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin Dutch Slave Trade The Dutch dominated the East African slave trade and were major players in West African trade during the 18th century. From the late 1500s, the Dutch undertook a broad campaign to oust the

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Portuguese in Africa. At the forefront of these efforts were the Dutch East India Company (DEIC), founded in 1602, and the Dutch West India Company (DWIC), founded in 1621. The DEIC's success and profitability in the slave trade and in the trade in oriental goods led to the creation of the DWIC. DWIC took over the existing United New Netherlands Company, which had attempted to establish colonies in North America, and began formal operations in 1623. The Society was a semi-autonomous entity, nominally under the control of the Dutch government, but in reality it operated as an independent branch of government (although it could not conduct military campaigns without government approval). The DWIC was given a monopoly on colonies and general commerce in the western hemisphere. It also obtained a monopoly on the slave trade in Africa and with the European colonies in North and South America. No Dutch citizen was allowed to trade in any part of Africa from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope or in the western hemisphere between Newfoundland and the Strait of Magellan without prior consultation with the company. Like the Portuguese before them, the Dutch encountered pre-existing systems of slavery, including trade patterns, and adapted them to suit their economic interests. Throughout the 17th century, the Dutch were at war with various European powers. One purpose behind the formation of the DWIC was to take market share away from the Portuguese, who were allied with Spain through the Iberian Union during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Under the mercantilist principles of the time, the Dutch saw the best way to increase their national wealth and power as cutting the economic resources of other European states. During the 1620s and 1630s, the DWIC established a number of colonies in the New World, including New Amsterdam, which included regions of present-day New York, Connecticut, Delaware, and New Jersey. The DWIC also established colonies in the Caribbean and South America and conquered Portuguese territories in Brazil. Significantly, the Dutch took over Portuguese colonies and trading posts along the African coast. By the 1640s, the Dutch had overtaken the Portuguese as the leading slave traders in West Africa. Although the Portuguese had traded in a range of other commodities in addition to slaves, the Dutch concentrated almost exclusively on the slave trade. By 1705, a Dutch official in Africa reported that local rulers had abandoned trading in other items, such as gold or ivory, and instead focused solely on the slave trade due to the volume and perceived high profits. The Dutch played an important role in establishing the slave trade with the European North American colonies. In 1628, the company decided that a labor shortage was limiting New Netherlands' profitability and preventing the colony's expansion. To attract settlers, the company introduced the "patroon" system, whereby land was given to Dutch settlers who agreed to stay and work the land for a period of time. In addition, the DWIC began importing large numbers of slaves into the colony to supplement the workforce and provide a labor pool for the new settlers. Large slave camps were established outside of what is now Manhattan. The Dutch also found they could sell slaves in the British colonies

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South. In some Dutch colonies, slaves could purchase certain liberties and liberties by paying an annual payment to the DWIC. In 1642 the Dutch captured Elmina, the main Portuguese slave trading post on the Gold Coast. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch relied on local brokers to capture slaves and take them to the various slave forts along the coast. There were sporadic clashes between the Dutch and local chiefs and rulers, and those stationed in the forts faced disease and heat. The result was a high mortality rate among the Dutch in Africa. During the height of Dutch trade, about 5,000 slaves per year were transported from West Africa by Dutch slave traders. During the entire period of the Dutch slave trade, about 900,000 were transported to colonies in the western hemisphere. At its peak, DWIC maintained a fleet of forty merchant ships that transported slaves to the Western Hemisphere and brought back goods such as sugar, gold, and silver. In Africa, the Dutch avoided large-scale colonization attempts, instead establishing a series of trading posts. In other areas, such as South America, the Dutch did not seek native conversions like the Spanish, but instead focused on economic exploitation of the resources. The DWIC also engaged in privateer operations and even outright piracy on Spanish gold and silver ships. The rise of the Dutch was short-lived. In 1654 the Portuguese conquered Dutch colonies on the border with Brazil, and the British took over New Amsterdam in 1664. Meanwhile, the British, French and other European powers took over most of the Dutch outposts in Africa. The DWIC was dissolved in 1674 and a new, reformed society was formed to replace the corporation. The new company focused primarily on the slave trade, supplying slaves to the Dutch Caribbean colonies and Suriname, as well as the colonies of other European powers. However, the Dutch were excluded from the slave trade with British colonies when the British Royal Africa Company was granted a trading monopoly in 1660. In addition, the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) granted the British the right to ship slaves to the Spanish colonies in the western hemisphere, further reducing the Dutch share of the slave trade. One result was that the Dutch increasingly focused on the Indian Ocean slave trade and looked to Asia as a source of slaves. Between 1680 and 1731, 30.2 percent of the slaves transported by the DEIC came from Indonesia, 24.8 percent from India, and only 22.1 percent from Africa (mainly Madagascar). After the British conquest of Suriname, the DWIC was finally dissolved in 1791 and its holdings taken over by the Dutch government. In the late 1790s and early 1800s, the Dutch faced a series of slave rebellions that ultimately led to the abolition of the slave trade. The most significant of these revolts occurred in 1795 in the colony of Curacao. The island's slaves were inspired by the Haiti rebellion. The uprising lasted two weeks and it took Dutch authorities another month to recapture the runaway slaves. During the rebellion, slaves were able to capture muskets, ammunition, and even a small cannon. They defeated two militia troops but were ultimately defeated by a superior militia force. After the rebellion, twenty-six slaves were hanged and

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several dozen more were banished from Curacao and transported to other colonies. The colonial government sought to alleviate some of the harsh conditions that characterized Dutch slavery in the Caribbean. Rules were established requiring owners to feed and clothe their slaves, and the more severe forms of punishment were limited. In addition, slaves were ordered to have Sundays off, and field slaves could not be forced to start work before 5:00 a.m. and had to finish their work before dark. Some of the continent's slaves managed to escape inland. The Suriname chestnuts eventually numbered more than 20,000. They were able to defeat successive military expeditions to bring them back into servitude, and in 1760 the colonial government even recognized their autonomous status, although further military campaigns were waged against the Maroons. Although the Atlantic slave trade had declined sharply by 1800 as a result of the loss of colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, the Dutch continued to transport slaves to their Asian colonies after the other major powers outlawed the slave trade. Powerful trading elites could lobbied to keep trade going. The Netherlands did not outlaw the slave trade until 1814, and even after it was abolished, the ban on slave transport was only loosely enforced. The pro-slavery lobby has been even more effective in thwarting successive efforts to end slavery. Slavery continued in the Dutch colonies for twenty years after it had been abolished by other European states. The first ban on slavery was enacted in 1848 by a Dutch colonial legislature in Saint Maarten, not the national government. Complete abolition in the Dutch colonies did not occur until 1863. See also abolitionism; African rulers and the slave trade; Angola; British Caribbean; Cape Coast Castle; closure of the slave trade; enslavement and procurement; Haitian Revolution, The; Mozambique; trading in commodities; trade forts; triangular trade. Further reading: Arasaratnam, S. Ceylon and the Dutch, 1600-1800. Ashgate: Aldershot, 1996; Kraton, Michael. Empire, enslavement and freedom in the Caribbean. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997; Geggus, David, eds. The Impact of the Haitian Slave Revolt in the Atlantean World. Colombia: University of South Carolina, 2001; Genovese, Eugene D. From Rebellion to Revolution: African-American Slave Rebellions in the Making of the Modern World. New York: Vintage Books, 1981; Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Tom Lanford

E Elmina Elmina, a port city on the Atlantic Ocean in Ghana, was one of West Africa's most famous entrepreneurs. It was a center of the slave trade supplemented by a fishing industry. It was the first major European settlement in the region. In 1482, the Portuguese built the Castle of S~ao Jorge da Mina, which provided the commercial basis for the founding of Elmina. The Portuguese used Elmina for trading purposes and a small attempt was also made to spread Christianity. The Portuguese Castle at Elmina began as a military fortress, built as a prefab and shipped from Lisbon to West Africa. The original purpose of the castle was to gain access to gold. The castle was intended to serve as a fortress and a factory to mine gold from the hinterland. However, the main trading interest shifted to slaves, and the castle gained prominence as a slave depot. Elmina became the oldest and largest slave castle in West Africa. The Portuguese made the place their trading center for many years. In 1637 the Dutch West India Company captured Elmina and made it the commercial capital of their West African trading empire until handing it over to the English in 1872. Elmina had a huge warehouse that could house more than a thousand slaves. There were male and female dungeons. European sailors and slave traders did not come with their wives, and they relied on the local female population to meet their sexual needs. They abused these women in a variety of ways, including rampant rape. So-called difficult women were punished, sometimes tied to poles, until they either succumbed to the demands or were too exhausted to survive. A small mixed-race population emerged, living in different houses in Elmina. A thriving commercial population developed in Elmina. Elmina Castle is the oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa, and its Portuguese and Dutch architecture survives to this day. See also Dutch Slave Trade; Monopoly; Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Thornton, John K. Africa and

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Elmina Castle on the West African coast served as a slave trading outpost for the Portuguese and, after 1637, the Dutch. Courtesy of Manuel Barcia.

Africans in the Making of the Atlantean World, 1400–1800. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Toyin Falola Enslavement and Acquisition Slavery has always been part of the human condition. Aristotle, Plato, and other ancient thinkers often pondered and discussed the subject in their writings. Therefore, slavery was a common practice in ancient African societies. Compared to the European or Arab-Muslim enslavement of black Africans, African forms of servitude and slavery were relatively benign and an extension of lineage and kinship systems. Slaves and servants were often treated well and could rise to power and high positions in households and communities. Slaves were usually prisoners of war. Their social status and conditions of servitude were tempered by extensive kinship networks based on community, clan, and family affiliations. In the forest regions of West Africa (e.g. Benin and Congo), slavery was an important institution prior to the arrival of Europeans. African rulers enslaved other African groups rather than their own people to project their wealth and prestige and to control labor. Although they symbolized wealth and power, slaves also had rights and were not considered property. They could and did marry their conquerors. Conversely, the African slave trade, as practiced by Western European nations (including, for example, Portugal, France, Great Britain, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and Holland) from the mid-15th to the late 19th centuries,

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Enslaved Africans are transported to a slave ship on the Gold Coast in the late 17th century. Tracy W. McGregor Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

was a far dirtier and more dehumanizing practice. It was rooted in notions of racial inferiority among Africans, particularly the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. People were simply regarded as property and as such sold through commercial exchanges and with utter disregard for their humanity. The Roman Catholic Church, the most powerful institution in 15th-century Europe, provided strong ideological support for the European enslavement of the black peoples of Africa. In their attempts to recruit converts and rally support against the rapid spread of Islam into Western Europe, Popes Nicholas V and Calixtus III. the Portuguese royal family the right to subdue and enslave native, non-Christian peoples in Africa and the New World. Three important church documents—the Dum Diversas of 1452, the Romanus Pontifex of 1455, and the Inter Caetera of 1456—provided the moral, legal, and political justification for Western European trade in African people. These papal bulls granted the Catholic nations of Europe (Spain and Portugal) dominion over "discovered" lands during the Age of Discovery. In addition to authorizing the confiscation of non-Christian land, the Church encouraged the permanent enslavement of native non-Christian peoples in Africa and the New World. For comparison, Arab-Muslim enslavement of black Africans predates that of Western Europeans. Even then, it was an equally devastating experience for black Africans and their communities. Arabs had dominated the African slave trade from about the eighth century. Thereafter, for several centuries, sub-Saharan Africa was a source of slaves captured and sold in the Middle East, India, and regions of Central Asia. Although these slaves were forcibly converted to Islam, the acquisition of slaves was purely for profit. Raids or raids on African communities were carried out by marauding gangs (a sinister precursor to today's Sudanese Janjaweed and their activities, which included looting African villages in South Sudan and enslaving young and non-Muslim black Africans). In the Mediterranean region, millions of Africans were captured and sold as slaves in the Middle Ages - just as was the case with Western European slavery in later times. The casualty figures were high. Most male slaves died because they were castrated on the way to their masters' land. Most were used as soldiers. These raids typically involved the looting of

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Villages and the massacre of as many men and older women as possible. Young women and children were then captured by the attackers. The young women were targeted for their value as concubines or sex slaves, while the boys were made eunuchs and laborers in wealthy Arab and Mediterranean homes. In fact, the sex ratio of slaves in the Islamic trade was two women to every man, while in the Atlantean slave trade the ratio was reversed: two men to every woman. Large numbers of slaves were used for domestic purposes. Concubinage was for those who could afford it, and there was no stigma attached to having women as sex objects. Enslaved Africans did not just tacitly accept their fate. Indeed, for almost two decades beginning in 869 CE, the zanj, or black African slaves, of Basra, Iraq, rebelled against their exploitation and their living conditions on the southern Iraqi plantations. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Arab-Muslim slave raiders continuously plundered sub-Saharan Africa in central Niger, including Mali and Songhai, for slaves. The Arab trade in African slaves continued well into the 19th century. For example, Tippu Tip, a merchant from Zanzibar, was a notorious Afro-Arab slave trader of the time. Some justified slavery in this part of the world by claiming that Islam and the Koran sanctioned it. Today, slavery persists in the Islamic world, particularly in Mauritania and Sudan. In his Economic History of Medieval Mediterranean Societies, S. D. Goitein seems to portray the Arab-Muslim enslavement of Africans less as a collective effort to treat them as property and exploit them for industrial or agricultural activities - as was the case with European enslavement - than as individual activity in which wealthy Arab merchants owned slaves as symbols of their economic status and power. Nonetheless, the brutality and monstrosity of the pre-European enslavement of Africans (particularly the large-scale rape of young African women) compared to the European slave trade that followed it differed in time, but not in sequence for black Africans. Historically, one can speak of two Middle Passages for black African slaves: the Asian or Trans-Saharan trade in the Middle Ages; and western or transatlantic trade in modern times. The massive and pervasive cultural, psychological, and social disorders are well documented by historians and other scholars. In both professions, the African slaves had no control over their person and their destiny. The slave trade is also known as the triangular slave trade because the shipment of African slaves followed a tricontinental and triangular route - Europe to Africa to the Americas. Slave traders often sailed from western European slave ports including Lisbon, Seville, Nantes, Boulogne, Plymouth and Liverpool (the largest slave port between 1700 and 1807). European capital, African labor and American land resources combined to supply European markets with commodities such as sugar, rum, coffee, tobacco, rice and later cotton products. American slave traders and colonists made direct voyages to Africa to fetch slaves to replenish the indigenous population that had been decimated by introduced diseases and forced labor. They did not follow the triangular route. After 1800 this trade increased significantly, particularly from Brazil, which had slave numbers several times that of the United States. During this era, slaves were the main product leaving Africa.

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Regarding the European procurement of African slaves, three main phases have been identified. The first was slavery through piracy and raiding, reminiscent of the Arab-Muslim raids of the Middle Ages. In the 1440s, Europeans captured Africans raiding communities in the coastal areas. Firearm technology played an important role in the slave trade, as the gun functioned as an instrument of power and terror - power in the hands of the slavers and terror in the minds of the captives. The second phase was slavery through martial alliances. Europeans, desperate for slaves, offered goods that African kings and chiefs coveted, including firearms, horses, alcohol, jewelry, and metal bracelets. In return, black slave traders sold Africans they had captured through wars. African kings formed alliances with Europeans during wars against their African enemies. Defeated and captured Africans were considered spoils of war and sold to Europeans. Gradually, African chiefs became major players in the slave trade, forming alliances to raid weaker neighbors for slaves. Over time, the slave trade evolved into a third phase of peaceful trading partnerships with European slave traders. Beginning in the 16th century, Africans sold Africans to European slave traders for a profit. Slavery had become an industry and an economic system that forever changed the fortunes of all peoples. It funded Western Europe's Industrial Revolution and the British Empire, as England traded in African slaves for more than three centuries. The accumulation of slaves covered much of African territory, starting from present-day Angola to Senegal in West Africa. Slaves were housed in various parts of West Africa, including Gore'e Island in Senegal, where the Dutch built a slave house in 1776; Elmina in Ghana, where a fortress was built by the Portuguese in 1482 and conquered by the Dutch some two centuries later; and Ouidah (Hweda/Whydah) in old Dahomey, modern-day Benin Republic. Over time, the slave procurement zones would extend around the Cape of Good Hope at the southernmost tip of the African continent and include Mozambique and the island of Madagascar. Slave ship captains traded directly with African chiefs or through European agents known as "factors" (often free Africans) who were in charge of slave collection centers. In these centers, the slaves were kept in enclosed spaces known as barracks, or in cages to be loaded onto slave ships for voyage to the New World. Slaves were mainly brought from inside African towns and villages as the coastal areas were less populated. The enslaved were forcibly marched in chains and shackles and in coffles (groups of four tied together) to the west coast of Africa for transport to Europe and the European colonies in America, where they were exploited as forced labor to feed the dying workforce replacing the native Indians. African slaves were used in mines and on rice, tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations. In transit, captured slaves were held in forts built by the Portuguese, English, French and Danes along the coast. These forts were warehouses for human cargo en route to America. Thousands died midway of disease and violence and by their own hands as a result of the simple human longing for freedom from enslavement. Today some of these slave havens have become

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Monuments and museums commemorating the evil of the slave trade and its irreversible consequences. The journey across the Atlantic generally took more than two months. The crossing between Africa and America was unspeakable misery for the slaves. The slave traders had to subjugate the Africans to facilitate the transportation of their human cargo. This happened through a process of violence and dehumanization that was both physical and psychological. From African ports of origin to final destinations in America, this process has included branding, beatings, torture, physical confinement and brutalization, name changing, rape, death, and forced interbreeding with other Africans of unrelated languages ​​and cultures. The whole journey was designed to make the Africans forget their origins or their humanity. Arriving in America, the Africans who survived the voyage were unloaded, sold, and put to work on sugar and cotton plantations. Recently, scholars have begun to study and address African involvement in the procurement and enslavement of Africans and its consequences. Some have demanded reparations from the nations involved. Slavery brought huge profits to African kings and rulers. From 1774, for example, Abiodun, ruler of the Oyo Empire in Yorubaland, derived much of his political and economic power and influence from the trade in captive slaves in and around Dahomey. He bought slaves from his northern neighbors and resold them to the south in the large slave market at Abomey-Calavi. Likewise, Madame Tinubu of Badagry (now Lagos, Nigeria) was a prominent slave trader. King Tegbesu of Dahomey reportedly earned a quarter of a million British pounds around 1750. He sold more than 9,000 slaves a year to the French and Portuguese. Francisco Felix de Souza, another Dahomeer, dominated the trade in the mid-19th century. On the Gold Coast (today's Ghana), the Ashanti traded slaves and gold with the Dutch from around 1705. Babatu was another African slave trader in what is now northern Ghana. He sold slaves at the Salaga slave market in the 19th century. King Alvare of the Congo region is another African leader who sold other Africans as slaves. The African role in the Atlantic slave trade is a highly charged and emotive issue that is often an undercurrent in the relationships between recent African immigrants in the United States and their African American neighbors. In fact, those who try to acknowledge and discuss African involvement are sometimes criticized as apologists for Euro-American slave traders. As for the number of slaves bought from Africa, the exact figures are unknown, but scholars and experts generally agree that between 15 and 20 million were taken from Africa. Records kept by dealers - commercial banks, investors, shipping directories, and insurance companies - show that about 11 million ended up in America alive. By the early 16th century, the Senegambia region of West Africa was the main source of slaves for the transatlantic trade, as it had a long history of providing slaves for the sub-Saharan Islamic trade. In the mid-17th century, the Kingdom of Kongo began exporting slaves to Europe, and Kongo and Angola remained large exporters of slaves until the 19th century. In the 1670s, the Slave Coast (present-day Nigeria) saw rapid growth in the slave trade, the

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lasted until the end of the slave trade in the 19th century. On the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), slave exports increased significantly in the 18th century, but declined significantly when Britain abolished slavery in 1808. From the 1740s, Biafra Bay (on the Niger Delta and Cross River) became a major procurer and exporter of slaves. Together with the Bay of Benin, this area produced two-thirds of the slaves captured and sold in the first half of the 19th century. In Europe, the transatlantic slave trade declined during the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) but recovered quickly thereafter. In the United States, African slaves and their unpaid labor were important factors in the country's rise to global economic power. For nearly three centuries, African slaves in America laid the foundations of American wealth through their labor and skills, while being treated as the property of their owners. The enslavement of Africans was the primary cause of the American Civil War of 1861-1865. In America today, the grave consequences of slavery continue to affect the lives of all Americans, especially African Americans. For example, various demographic indices show the precarious nature of black life through the legacy of persistent racism, high unemployment, persistent poverty, and other social pathologies. African Americans still haven't recovered from human trafficking, which officially ended around the turn of the century. The ill effects of the Middle Passage still linger on the American descendants of African slaves. In Africa, the end of the slave trade ushered in a new era of European subjugation of Africans. The same Western European nations that sold African peoples as commodities began to see Africa as a different resource - one for its land, its minerals, and its cheap labor. The slave trade was followed by the struggle for Africa and subsequent colonization, legalized by the Berlin Conference of 1884. See also Christianity; Religion; slavery in Africa; trading in commodities; triangular trade; Volume. Further reading: Davidson, Basil. The African slave trade. Rev. ed. Boston: Klein, Braun, 1980; Engerman, Stanley L., and Gallman, Robert E., eds. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States: Volume 1, The Colonial Era. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Engerman, Stanley L., and Gallman, Robert E., eds. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 2: The Long Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974; Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society. Vol. I: Economic Basics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000; Gordon, Murray. Slavery in the Arab World. New York. New Amsterdam Books, 1989; Inikori, Joseph E., and Engerman, Stanley L., eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Implications for Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, America, and Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992; Manning, Patrick, and Anderson, David, eds. Slavery and African Life: Western, Oriental, and African Slave Trade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Making of America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; United Nations Human Rights Commission. "Kidnapping and Forced Labor in Sudan." [Online, July 2006]. Anti-Slavery International website: http://www.antislavery.org/archive/submission/submission2005-sudan.htm; Glahn, Richard. "GE 22B: Globalization of Labor Markets, 1500–1900." [Online, July 2006]. UCLA College of Letters and Science website:

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http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/classes/cluster22/lectures/lecture3/sld004.htm; Walvin, James. The dealer, the owner, the slave. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 2006; Wintel, Justin. "The African Slave Trade." In The Timeline History of Islam, 328–329. New York: Barnes & Noble Publishing, 2005.

“BioDun J. Ogundayo Entrepoˆ ts Entrep^ ots were warehouses where slaves were kept before shipment. These were trading centers where slaves and other products could change hands. Entrep^ots were found along the African coast, where they were an integral part of port towns. For the vast majority of slaves, it was the last time they saw their home regions. It was the beginning of an arduous life. They were chained to prevent escape and some had lacerations on the face and body for identification. For the slave traders, ventures provided opportunities for trade and recreation. For local merchants and chiefs, controlling corporations was a lucrative business. Chiefs fought for power, partly to control corporations, partly to establish monopolies over trade and dealings with foreign merchants. Fights between chiefs could degenerate into political instability, as was the case in Lagos in the 19th century. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; barracks; ports; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Toyin Fola

Gore'e Island served as a transhipment point for slaves leaving for America. Courtesy of Manuel Barcia.

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Equiano, Olaudah (1745–1797) Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa (1745–1797), is known for his interesting short story (1789) in which he recounts his abduction from Essaka, Eboe, in Guinea with his and his sister subsequent journey via the Middle Passage to the New World. At ten, after being bought by Michael Pascal, he crossed Europe, America, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. Equiano's credentials include Ship's Steward, Explorer, Barber, Gauge, Minister and Christian Missionary, Slave Trader and Owner, Abolitionist, Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the Sierra Leone Resettlement Project, and Author. Equiano's multiple identities have been labeled "conman, plagiarist, apologist, hero, capitalist, and guerrilla fighter" (Sabino and Hall, 1999, p. 5). In 1792, Equiano married an Englishwoman named Susanna Cullen. Olaudah Equiano was a former slave who bought his freedom. He wrote one of the and had two daughters, Ann Marie and Johanna. Slave tales like Equiano's best-selling books of the time not only embody the fears of a people and critique the inhumane policies of Britain's most influential abolitionists. and practices, but also testify to human resilience. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International. iez. The abolitionists used these narratives to illustrate the inhumanity of the institution and to counter the stereotype of inferior or uncivilized Africans and a pagan land portrayed in racist travel accounts by William Bosman, John Harris' Collection of Voyages, Linnaeus' Systema Naturae and Buffon's Histoire Naturalle is described. Equiano's tale went through eight editions during his lifetime and twenty more by 2003; with nine text choices; seven contemporary reviews and reports; two 19th-century commentaries; thirty-seven commentaries of the twentieth century; and five 21st-century commentaries, including five language translations and the 1995 BBC documentary, A Son of Africa: The Slave Narrative of Olaudah Equiano. The narrative also appears in anthologies of African American literature. The development of Equiano reflects a recurring theme of multiple identities, a process of reclamation and a re-establishment of an African cultural identity and political subjectivity. His travels transformed him from noble to slave, from African slave to Atlantean slave to English slave and later subject, from English slacker to Christian surveyor and missionary, from Christian advocate to anti-slavery writer and from abolitionist to autobiographer. Finally, the husband and father culminates in an African, American, and British ancestry. Equiano's African childhood is integrated and remembered through a Western lens, though never at its expense. His assimilated English culture helps him regain his African identity: Oluadah means 'favoured' and Embrenche means 'noble lineage'. as snakes,

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European scammers and exploiters, shipwrecks, drowning, starvation, shelling, fires, etc.). His visionary world of spirits confirmed his success in the New World. Equiano published and promoted his tale to nobility (including the Prince of Wales and eight dukes) and lecture tours of Europe supported by abolitionists. Equiano's achievements have been attributed to his Igbo culture. On board ships and in England, Equiano will read and write and learn arithmetic. When he's sold to life on a sugar plantation, he uses those achievements to become his owner's right-hand man. Nor is Equiano satisfied with gaining his own freedom and amassing individual wealth - worthy goals in the eyes of the West. Rather, he emerges as the leader of the African community in London, a position of respect from which he could work to improve the lives of his comrades. (Sabino and Hall, 1999, p. 14)

Equiano finally abandons his earlier racial stereotypes of suspicious, red-faced, and loose-haired whites for an essentialist worldview of Igbo-Jewish-English cultures. The quarrels and crimes that Equiano's father dealt with are not unique to his people. Despite differences in skin color, Africans and Jews share a similar lineage with similar laws and rules under a hierarchical umbrella. And like the British, the Eboe lifestyle is dictated by a social code, with "historical traditions, customs and geneology in common with European readers" (Caldwell, 1999, p. 277). By raping and separating families, slave traders violate not only African virtues of family and decency, but also bourgeois humanism in civilized cultures. Paradoxically, the Muskito Indian prince challenges the atrocities of educated whites, with the exception of the assimilated Equiano. Equiano presents himself as a more humane slave trader, even championing a recaptured free African, appealing to Christian and humanistic values. However, his apologetics for African humanity and culture reflect a marginal non-Western identity. Atlantean slavery is extreme. Enslaved or free, blacks are afraid of whites. In the end, Equiano speaks for the status quo in reinterpreting the British colonial empire. Questions remain about Equiano's African origins, especially considering his baptismal and naval records place him in South Carolina and St. Croix. Subsequent editions of the Interesting Narrative refute such claims. Equiano's generic portrayal of his African roots reflects an African childhood, but also draws extensively on existing slave narratives and travel journals by Jonathan Edwards, Anthony Bezenet, James Albert, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, and Ignatious Sancho. Reflections on his true origins hardly subside. Further Reading: Caldwell, Tanya. "Talking Too Much English: Languages ​​of Economy and Politics in Equinaos The Interesting Narrative." Early American Literature 34 (1999): 263–282; Costanzo, Angelo, eds. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oaludah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, written by himself. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001; Adams, Francis D. and Saunders, Barry. Three black writers in 18th century England. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1971; Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: Prophets and rebels fight to free an empire's slaves. Boston: Mariner Books, 2004; Langley, April. "Equiano's Landscapes: Viewpoints and Views from the Mirror, the Lens, the Kaleidoscope." The Western

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Journal of Black Studies 25, 1 (2001): 46-60; Sabino, Robin, and Halle, Jennifer. "The Road Not Taken: Cultural Identity in the Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano." MELUS 24 (Spring 1999): 5–19.

Namulundah Florence

Eric Williams Thesis (1944) The influential research of Eric Eustace Williams has led generations of scholars to examine new approaches to the Middle Passage and slavery in the New World. Born in Trinidad in 1911 and educated at Tranquility Intermediate School and Queens Royal College, Williams won the coveted Island Scholarship in 1931, which enabled him to do a doctorate in history at Oxford University between 1932 and 1938. After Oxford, Williams taught at Howard University in the USA before returning to Trinidad and Tobago. Finally, in 1956 he founded his first modern political party, the People's National Movement, the party that led Trinidad and Tobago to independence in 1962. Williams was Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1962 until his death in 1981. With more than 600 books, monographs and a large number of articles and lectures, Williams was instrumental in turning West Indian historiography away from its traditional Eurocentric approach. Through his writings and his influence on future generations of intellectuals, Williams promoted a new historiography of the Caribbean from a Caribbean perspective. Related to the study of the slave trade, Williams is best known for his Williams thesis, articulated in Capitalism and Slavery (1944). The book has been translated into eight languages ​​including Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Korean (2006). The Williams thesis consists of two central premises. First, the profits from the Atlantic slave trade and American slave plantations provided the capital accumulation necessary to finance Britain's Industrial Revolution. Second, economic rather than humanitarian interests succeeded in destroying the slave system. After the American Revolution, the slave system declined in importance to the British economy, prompting business interests to abolish first the slave trade and later American slavery, the very groups that benefited from the rise of the system. This second premise directly challenged the humanists' role in the abolition of the slave trade. Williams provoked several decades of study by Eric Eustace Williams. Eric Williams' memo was concerned with placing the slave system in his Rial Collection, University of the West Indies in the proper context with British economic development. Trinidad and Tobago.

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Much of the work of the past thirty years has challenged the first premise of the Williams thesis. The current consensus is that profits from the slave trade were not unusually large and could not have funded the Industrial Revolution. Critics assume that it was internal factors that explained the industrial revolution. More recently, to continue the debate, Joseph Inikoris Africans and the Industrial Revolution (2002) shifted the debate away from focusing on the role of profits and rather argued that it was slavery-bred Atlantic trade that stimulated the Industrial Revolution. The second premise was also contested. The critics' argument is best articulated in Seymour Drescher's Econocide (1977), a work that confronts Williams' thesis on the decline of slavery and the slave trade after the American Revolution. Instead, Drescher argued that the system was profitable and vital to the UK economy. Selwyn Carrington's work The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (2002) contradicts Drescher's assumption of the continued vitality of the slave system, arguing that it is in fact declining in importance and that economic interest groups are at the heart of its abolition. Despite criticism of his work, most scholars agree that capitalism and slavery is a crucial starting point for studying the slave trade. By linking events on multiple continents, Williams shifted the discussion away from Anglocentric approaches to British economic growth. Recent historiographical trends demonstrate the continuing relevance and impact of the Williams thesis on slave trade research. See also British Caribbean; triangular trade. Further reading: Cateau, Heather and Carrington, Selwyn, eds. Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams: A Reappraisal of Man and His Labor. New York: Peter Lang, 2000; Palmer, Colin. Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; Paquet, Sandra Pouchet, eds. "Special Issue: Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean." Callaloo 20 (1997); Solow, Barbara, and Engerman, Stanley, eds. British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Williams, Eric Eustace. capitalism and slavery; with a new introduction by Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 (1944).

Josef Avitable

Escape and Runaways (Maroonage) From the 15th century to the end of slavery in America, there were always a number of Africans fleeing or attempting to flee. Before their appearance in the western hemisphere, Africans fought slavery together, individuals escaped from bondage, and captives fought to free themselves from slave ships in the Middle Passage. Those who escaped slavery found temporary refuge or long-term freedom in rural and urban areas. They were known by various names to chroniclers, chiefly runaway slaves or chestnuts. In the sixteenth century, the English borrowed the word "maroon" from their Spanish colonial rivals. The Spaniards originally called cattle and pigs that escaped from ranches into mountains and forests cimarrones, meaning "wild or untamed" creatures. Cimarron was first imposed on Native Americans,

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because they were the first to be enslaved in America. Maroon cities - known as Palenques in Latin America, Manieles in Hispaniola - sprung up almost anywhere slavery existed. Brazilian settlements called Quilombos were among the largest in the Americas; It is estimated that the towns of Palmares had thousands of inhabitants. People of African descent who escaped from bondage are important historical figures because they successfully attacked plantations and freed slaves. They also circumvented laws that discriminated against them on matters such as trade and collaborated in wars with international opponents of slave societies. A wide range of evidence informs our view of past auburn lives. Government records, military papers, and slave-catcher accounts describe population numbers, names, and environments. Descendants in the mountains of Jamaica preserve oral traditions that discuss spiritual beliefs, military exploits, and the ever-present role of ancestors. In Brazil and the Dominican Republic, archaeologists discovered creativity and self-sufficiency. The depiction of a runaway slave, often chestnut and making pottery and whistles, was used in notices offering a reward for a runaway's return. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery Intersome with intricate geometric decoration. Ma-national. The archaeological sites of Roon illustrate undocumented aspects of life, such as acquiring European pottery that came from 'smuggling' (as the authorities saw their business) or plantation raids. Ethnographic studies of the River Saramaka Maroons of Suriname have illustrated their ancestors' struggles with new environments, as well as their historical migrations, gender relations, and politics. All kinds of people fled slavery: men, women, children, and the elderly. In some cases, couples escaped; in others, Africans left captivity in groups that shared a cultural identity. Newspaper advertisements and travel accounts suggest that auburns (particularly in the earliest centuries) were mostly male, unskilled laborers, ethnically diverse, and young (e.g., eighteen to twenty-five years of age). This gender imbalance is a cause of maroon contacts with Native Americans that encourage intermarriage. Eventually, women of African descent became a significant part of Auburn societies. Harriet Tubman and Nanny (revered in Jamaica) illustrate how women took up arms and led the anti-slavery resistance. Maroons' interactions with humans at borders or seas and in urban areas were complex. Enslaved people were potential spies and covert trading partners or informers who betrayed the chestnuts to the slaveholders. The different attitudes and interests of the Native Americans and Africans caused them to interact in a variety of ways in kinship, conflict, and military alliances. Native Americans helped the maroons understand the local environment. The knowledge of the maroons of introduced domesticates (i.e. rice) and Euro-Americans

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Politics, warfare, and economics were valued by Native Americans. Although primarily adversaries, Euro-Americans occasionally allied themselves with maroon traders and marauders to defy their international enemies. Innumerable forces worked against marriage (the French colonists' word for escaping slavery). The government's slave laws required Africans to carry passports to leave the plantations. Slavery systems established slave patrols, administered punishments, and compensated slave catchers. Intellectually, advocates of slavery invented mental illnesses such as "Drapetomania" to pathologize "fugitives" who refused to endure servitude. The research shows evidence of various aspects of the everyday life of the maroons. A zooarchaeological study of the Spanish-Maroon alliance that led to the founding of Fort Moses in 18th-century Florida shows that the inhabitants' food routes were based on wild animals such as (shelled) fish rather than domesticated animals such as cattle. Documented practices such as honey gathering, hunting, and farming were other important means of subsistence and exchange. Due to the short duration of many Maroon settlements and the perishable nature of building materials, it has been difficult to recover structural remains at many archaeological sites. The built environment of the maroons included houses, gardens, watchtowers, walls and pit traps. Pottery, metal objects (i.e. parts of weapons or cauldrons), and remains of glass bottles combined with site features (i.e. garbage pits or postholes) indicate the general size and specific location of settlements. Recovered from Pilaklikaha, Florida, the metal conical stud earring was a rare find. Metalworking was discovered by historians studying Maroon cities in Jamaica and Brazil. Archaeologists who found iron slag in Jose Leta (Dominican Republic) propose other evidence of maroon metallurgy. Kaolin pipes, a common find at Maroon sites, provide evidence of mundane practices (tobacco smoking) and possessions. Beads and buttons sewn onto clothes or worn as necklaces refer to the clothing and aesthetics of self-emancipated Africans. Archaeological remains are often unearthed in extremely inhospitable locations such as Dismal Swamp (North Carolina, Virginia). From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Africans and blacks fled slavery in all parts of the Americas. Maroons are a complicated subject to understand because they displayed such great diversity in their relationships with enemies and allies, their attitudes, their group composition, and their political-economic circumstances. Studies of world history have found that there have always been freedom seekers. For example, the Africans known as Zanj rebelled against their Muslim captors more than 1,100 years ago in what is now Iraq. She and her Muslim allies established communities and held at bay the armies of one of the world's most powerful empires for almost two decades. In America, the fights of chestnuts and their offspring showed different levels of success. Some used networks like the Underground Railroad, while others sought independence by building new cities. To understand the complexities of Maroon life, the student and scholar must seek multiple lines of evidence: material culture, archival texts, oral traditions, and ethnographic observations.

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Note: The identity label "maroon" is a biased and some would say derogatory term. The author has attempted to use various terms to challenge this and other terms chroniclers have passed down to modern scholars. Descendants differ in their acceptance, use, and preference on the issue of maroon over other self-attributed labels of cultural identity. Further reading: Franklin, John Hope, and Schweninger, Loren. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Price, Richard. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in America. New York: Anchor Books, 1979; Weik, Terrance. "The Archeology of Maroon Societies in the Americas: Resistance, Cultural Continuity, and Transformation in the African Diaspora." Historical Archeology 31, 2 (1997): 81–92.

Ethnicity Terrance Weik The transatlantic slave trade involved a variety of people from diverse geographic, cultural, and historical backgrounds. Cultural diversity is complex because of the involvement of different peoples in the above parameters. Ethnicity in the transatlantic slave trade can be defined simply as the relationship between people of the same race and between one race and another. The ethnic factor in the transatlantic slave trade was fluid and never static. It was constantly changing as Afro-European relations underwent a major shift between the 1500s and 1800s. Relations between one European nation and another have been determined by a variety of factors. The most important factor appears to have been economic, as the purpose of human trafficking was related to the need to amass wealth through plantation farming. The British, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and French were the main European nationalities who bought slaves from Africans and transported them to America. Each of these nations established the plantation economy in America. Although some of the plantations were owned by the national government, others were owned by private landowners. The goal of all European nationalities in Africa was unified, i.e. the need to explore different parts of Africa and to buy and transport slaves to America. Tensions between these countries were inevitable for various reasons. They all needed the best parts of Africa to get slaves. They also had to look for markets and plantations where the slaves would work in America. Sea pirate activities increased as profits from the human trade soared. An attacked slave ship automatically lost its slaves and other supplies. Pirate activities caused tensions between European countries. It was common for one country to blame another for attacking its slave ship. In 1750, pirates attacked a wrecked French ship along Offra, a port of Allada. The French government suspected British pirates and ordered similar attacks. Retaliation was common among Europeans who felt other nationalities were doing things contrary to their interests in the slave trade. A good percentage of the slaves who went to America via Lagos and Badagry in the 19th century were Yoruba. The Yoruba civil wars of the nineteenth century produced many slaves from the war raging

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Backland. In general, the question of whether one ethnic group enslaved another was a prominent aspect of inter-ethnic relations between the 16th and 19th centuries. Coastal communities were traditionally considered the "enslavers" of the people from the hinterland because they had the gateway to America, where the slaves were needed. For Africa, transatlantic human trafficking exacerbated existing differences between African states or empires. The nature of interethnic relations changed dramatically as a result of the introduction of the transatlantic slave trade. Interstate wars, as old as the history of state and empire building on the continent, were intensified. The need to acquire slaves for the Americas escalated the nature of warfare among people in different parts of Africa. Wars and raids on villages were fought in the Bay of Biafra to acquire slaves for the Atlantic voyage. The intensification of warfare among the Aja-speaking people of West Africa can be explained by the need to obtain slaves as spoils of war. Ethnicity played a significant role in the numbers or number of slaves transported from certain parts of Africa. Of the 4 million slaves known to be of coastal origin, 38 percent, or about 1.51 million, came from Benin Bay along the Slave Coast; 18 percent or about 730,000 came from the Akan area along the Gold Coast, another 21 percent or about 850,000 came from inside Biafra Bay. The remainder, perhaps another 910,000, came from the west coast into the Senegambia basin. This number is for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The number of people of African descent who were taken to America as slaves remains a matter of debate. However, an undeniable aspect of slave culture is the ethnic factor. Obviously people can be physically enslaved but not mentally enslaved. African slaves came to America with their culture, which included music, dance, food, and religion. The resilience of African culture in the Americas—particularly Brazil, which had the highest number of black people outside of the African continent—shows that culture and ethnicity are aspects of human behavior that cannot be enslaved. Ethnicity played a significant role during the numerous slave rebellions in America. People of the same ethnic group could talk to each other and find ways to improve their condition. Ethnic solidarity thus played a significant role in facilitating slave resistance both during the Middle Passage and on slave plantations in America. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; decentralized societies; languages ​​and communication; slavery in Africa; Volume; Wars, African. Further reading: Klein, Martin. Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition. Lanham, MD and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2002; law, robin. "Slave Raiders and Middlemen, Monopolists and Free-Traders: The Supply of Slaves for the Atlantic Trade in Dahomey, c. 1715–1850.” The Journal of African History 30, 1 (1989): 45–68; Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Ross, David. "The Career of Domingo Martinez in the Bight of Benin 1833-1864." The Journal of African History 6, 1 (1965): 79-90.

Saheed pendant

Europe, enslaved Africans in 167

Europe, enslaved Africans in An estimated 80,000 Africans were enslaved from the areas between the Sahara and the Congo some fifty years before Columbus discovered the New World. Of these, 25,000 had destinations in Europe, particularly Portugal, which served as the main re-export point to Castile, Andalusia, Valencia and Barcelona, ​​and in the early 16th century to the Antilles. By 1466 there were significant numbers of Ethiopians in Portugal, particularly in Porto and the Guanches, and Moorish slaves were being supplanted by black slaves. In the fifteenth century there was an estimated black population of 35,000 (32,370 slaves and 2,580 freedmen), about 25 to 30 percent of the Portuguese population. Black slaves were engaged in agriculture, clearing forests, draining swamps, and public works, and worked as vendors, fishermen, ferrymen, artisans, and porters. Some earned money for their masters, while others were employed as personal servants. Portuguese attitudes towards black slaves were influenced by religious and social differences, as well as racial considerations. In Spain, slavery was part of society long before they colonized the Americas, and most Africans were imported legally right after the Spanish reconquest. They were referred to as Ladinos, Africans who had either lived in Spain or were born in Spain. Some were captives or descendants of captives captured and forced to convert to Christianity in the long wars against the Moorish kingdoms of southern Spain. Others had reached Spain via the numerous slave routes that crossed the Sahara. An estimated 10,000 Ladins lived in Seville in 1492, and Ladin crew members worked alongside free seamen on the Spanish expeditions of the 15th and 16th Aztec and Inca empires). The Spaniards granted certain privileges to the Ladins, including the right to ransom. However, their independent spirit worried the Spanish colonists, who pinned their hopes on the more docile and stable bozales (African-born slaves). Legal importation of Bozales was sanctioned in 1518, but they proved just as determined to resist their oppressors and regain their freedom as the Ladinos. Black Africans in Europe served in England, Portugal, and northern Europe between 1440 and 1600 as pirates, landowners, men of letters, members of urban brotherhoods, galley slaves, and artisans, among many other socioeconomic roles. Many slaves were owned by plantation owners living in Britain. The legal status of enslaved Africans in Britain prior to the abolition of slavery was ambiguous. Revolutionary uprisings demanding natural justice shook America in 1776 and France in 1789, but the principles of political and social liberty found limited application, particularly in the case of slaves. Plantation owners in America depended on slaves to ensure high profitability. In 18th-century Britain, laws were drafted to support a slave trade sanctioned by the king and Parliament. A decision by the Attorney General said that "Negroes" should be "goods and commodities of good standing under the Commerce and Shipping Acts." Such a decision allowed slave owners

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to apply the law of property in relation to their slaves "to recover property wrongfully imprisoned, lost or damaged as any other property." The British courts made a number of equivocal judgments on the legality of slavery, encouraging several thousand slaves in 1783, along with the themselves retreating Britons fleeing the newly independent United States as refugees. The British courts ruled in 1772 that such slaves could not be forcibly returned to North America, and the British government resettled them in Sierra Leone as free men. Most plantation owners lived in Britain. They brought their house slaves with them from trips to America and used them to do household chores in Britain. James Somerset, a young African slave, was bought by Charles Stuart in Virginia in 1749. Stuart was in the service of the English government and traveled with him from Somerset on his duties. In 1769 Stuart and Somerset traveled to England. While in England, Somerset became associated with the anti-slavery movement in England, including prominent activist Granville Sharp. Somerset was christened James in a church ceremony. In 1771 Somerset fled. Stuart posted a reward and Somerset was retaken. Stuart then had Somerset brought aboard a ship bound for Jamaica, where Somerset was to be sold. Somerset's godparents from the christening ceremony discovered the state and location of Somerset. They obtained a writ of habeas corpus from the King's Bench, the highest court in England, urging the ship's captain to bring Somerset to court, which they did. By this time the general public in England had a bad opinion of the institution of slavery and the time was ripe to force a decision on whether slaves in England were indeed free. Somerset, supported by anti-slavery groups, sued Stuart, supported by West Indies planters interested in continuing the practice of slavery, for his freedom. The case went to trial before the King's Bench. Although Somerset's case provided legal precedent for slavery being illegal in England itself, having become extinct there centuries earlier, it did not end British involvement in the slave trade or in slavery elsewhere in the British Empire. It was not until 1807 that Parliament moved to suppress the slave trade; However, slavery continued to exist in various parts of the British Empire until it was finally abolished by an Act of Parliament in 1833. Legislative reports provide ample evidence that enslaved people in England brought suits to obtain release from forced labour. Well aware of the brutality of plantation life, they often did whatever they could to avoid returning to the colonies with their masters. But the verdicts they received were often contradictory and did not end slavery in Britain. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; Lisbon; Portuguese slave trade. Further Reading: Russell-Wood, A.J.R. "Before Columbus: Portugal's African Prelude to the Middle Passage and Contribution to Discourse on Race and Slavery." In V. Shepherd and H. McD. Beckles, ed. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd., 2000; Earle, F., and Lowe, K.J.P., eds. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Knocked out Olaniyi

F Falconbridge, Alexander (? – 1792) Alexander Falconbridge, British surgeon, politician and author, worked as a doctor on four voyages in slave ships from Bristol to Africa between 1780 and 1787. Disgusted with the treatment of slaves, he left the trade and became an abolitionist. His 1788 account left us with a lasting record of the conditions of the slaves in the Middle Passage. His book An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, published in London in 1788, points to the resistance of the slaves in the Middle Passage. The slaves hated the hardships and lamented the loss of freedom. As he explained, the slaves always organized rebellions. The book explains the origin of the slaves from the hinterland, where they were bought and sold in the coastal towns. European merchants, he said, screened slaves for age and health before paying them. The slaves were then taken to waiting ships, where men and women were kept in separate rooms and heavily guarded. The men were tied together in pairs. His descriptions reveal additional atrocities: they were forced to sleep on their side as upright posture was not possible; they had to relieve themselves where they slept; The main diet consisted of horse beans, boiled yams, and rice, served twice a day around 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.; those who refused to eat were force-fed; they were forced to sing on deck and do exercises to maintain their health; Sailors had sex with any woman they chose; they suffered from seasickness; those who might commit suicide; and they suffered deprivation of fresh air and poor nourishment. His book was well received by abolitionists in England, who used his accounts to publicize the horrors and atrocities of the Middle Passage. Falconbridge, an ally of Thomas Clarkson, the famous abolitionist, was encouraged to publish his reports, based on interviews with Richard Phillips (a member of the Anti-Slavery Society), exposing the gross abuses and inhumanities of the Middle Passage. He was appointed governor of Sierra Leone in 1791 to reorganize Freetown. He traveled with his young wife, Anna Marie, who did not share his vision and commitment. He failed in his task and was thereafter dismissed from his appointment

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a few months. He died shortly thereafter in 1792 from excessive drinking. His wife, who remarried three weeks after his death, wrote her own account of the Middle Passage, Anna Maria Falconbridge: Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone with Alexander Falconbridge: An Account of The Slave Trade on the African Coast. See also abolitionism; British slave trade; Illness; humanitarianism; Tales of Slavers. Further Reading: Howard, Thomas, ed. Black Voyage: Eyewitness Accounts of the Atlantic Slave Trade, by Alexander Falconbridge. Boston: Klein, Brown, 1971.

Toyin Fola

Families and Family Separations Slavery and the slave trade redefined the nature of families and kin. During its four centuries of existence, human trafficking and the circumstances that led to it had situational implications for African family unity and division. African families were scattered as wars and raids from stronger neighbors abducted members. Former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano and Ajayi Crowther were kidnapped from West Africa. parents have lost children; Siblings lost each other and children were orphaned when one or both parents were abducted. Aside from those who were abducted, large numbers of men and women of various ages were massacred to take prisoners during the wars. Most of the prisoners were young people in their prime, usually between the ages of sixteen and forty-five. The rest was a dysfunctional population. The villages were left with the old and the very young. The result was misery and fear. It was all the more painful when parents didn't know what became of their children, whether they survived the ordeal and how they fared. Even when family members were caught in groups, they were almost always sold separately. Recalling his experience, Equiano recalled being separated from his sister after capture. Perhaps the most traumatic moment for him was when he last saw her in a slave pen. They were separated the next morning and he never saw her again. At the last slave market in Barbados, he watched as some brothers captured together were sold separately. Entire families were suddenly wiped out by death or imprisonment as if they had never existed. On the ships at sea, some gave up the will to live as a result of this separation. Some jumped overboard because of the hopelessness of their situation. In the New World, African captives arrived as forcibly separated individuals who, apart from tribal identity, were not members of the same family. The families who seemed to escape the devastating separation of a slave family in the West Indies. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International. of attacks were the ruling class. They are

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the mercenaries behind the organized raids, kidnappings, wars and sentencing. They knew how to protect themselves and their family members from being captured or sold into slavery. The slave trade was a catalyst for the creation of a new class. This was a group known as the mulattoes, who had African mothers and European fathers. They were not beholden to either side, but they used both backgrounds to become ruthlessly efficient slave traders on the coast. Once settled on plantations, most slaves raised families with great difficulty. One of the first problems was the ratio of male to female slaves. With manual labor in mind, male slaves were mainly exported. The number of wives was limited. Some of the men who came from wealthy backgrounds and who had many wives, or who were the sons of men who had many wives, found monogamous existence difficult to imagine. As their numbers multiplied and the plantation economy calculated a cheaper return on investment through procreation, slaves began to engage in legal marriages. Even in this situation, family unity was not secure and prone to frequent and sudden separations. Most planters said they value family life. However, the same owners redefined traditional African family structures and were the cause of the separation of families in the diaspora. Their idea of ​​the structure of a slave family was fundamentally matriarchal, and they often kept slave mothers with their children. The ability to raise families varied by geographic region. Raising families was particularly difficult for African slaves in the Carolinas and Chesapeake region. The latter region had fairly compact plantations with farms of between ten and fifteen slaves. Given the size of the population, it was difficult to raise families. Larger farms housed their slaves in separate quarters, and married pairs of slaves lived on separate plantations. More slaves lived together in the Carolinas. There were usually between twenty-five and thirty slaves on a farm, but there was still the common factor that "natively born" and acculturated slaves did not want to marry the newcomers. Nevertheless, little by little, families were founded. Family procreation was encouraged because the few children were born to slave parents who survived infancy into adulthood and then married. In both the Chesapeake region and the Carolinas, the sex ratio in the slave population had evened out by the mid-eighteenth century. In contrast, natives throughout America raised families easily. They had acculturated and formed their own African American kinship ties. These slaves had no direct experience of Africa and could not easily identify with the newcomers. As the slave population grew with the new arrivals, both groups expanded. They met after work and even visited plantations. The economic interest of the plantation owners counteracted the family unit. Plantation owners usually start farms for their adult children and for those who marry. These gifts landed usually came with a well-stocked supply of manpower. In these cases, families were separated as slaves were brought to the new farms. It was mostly male slaves who were resettled. The children of plantation owners who received such gifts almost always had their farms nearby. This allowed slaves to move to see their families.

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Other ways in which slaves were passed from parents to children could be through the death of the owners, who determined the share of the inheritance before death. The movement of slaves was usually the same in inheritance cases. In some separations, slave couples and other family members were not allowed to see each other. Sometimes hard times can come for a Master. His losses could be so great that he had to sell his slaves. In other cases, a master might die, stating that his slaves and other property should be sold to defray the costs associated with his death. Women were left alone to raise children. These slaves formed slave networks. They bundled the help of the slave women with child care and other tasks. From the early to mid-19th century, another development led to the slave movement in the New World. At the beginning of the century, the internal slave trade increased, especially in the United States. It declined somewhat in the 1840s, but rose again in the 1850s. This period was the high point of the abolitionist movement. Most owners were unwilling to let go of their slaves. As abolitionist movements spread throughout Europe and the New World, slaves were forced to move with their masters or were sold across the states. By 1860, about a million slaves were forced to move southwest with their owners. Children born on the plantation and lucky enough to stay there grew up to see couples separated, children separated from their parents, and siblings sold. Knowing that the possibility of seeing their families again was virtually impossible, slaves remarried upon arrival on other plantations. Others, experiencing the agony of forced separation from their original homelands and the destruction of the families they raised on new soil, were less willing to remarry. Sometimes they were forced by their owners to remarry. Some slaves who could afford it simply stayed away from family life because of the pain of separation. The 1865 Freedmen's Bureau of Mississippi Marriage Records show that half of all slave marriages in which both spouses were still alive ended by the act of forcible separation. Most of these spouses were in the prime of life. Most of them were in stable marriages between the ages of five and fifteen. A number of slaves joined the Christian Church, but the Church had no power to impose any obligations on their masters. The Church could admonish a master in cases of extreme violence against a slave. The Christian church did one thing for slaves that seemed to have a slight impact on the family unit: it intervened to persuade owners to buy spouses living on other plantations. After the American Civil War, the immediate mission of freed slaves was to seek out separated family members. Family and kinship ties were important to the slaves. It helped them maintain their cultural identity and create a sense of belonging. They have tried very hard to keep this alive. Those on smaller plantations visited those on larger plantations. Only in this way could they keep the African identity alive. At worst, they only knew how to integrate some African elements into the new culture that their children had assimilated. It was the slaves' tenacity to keep their family values ​​alive that allowed African elements to survive in most of America. See also Enslavement and Procurement; slavery in Africa; Suicide.

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Further reading: Miller, Randall M. and Smith, John David, eds. Dictionary of African American Slavery. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997; Shepherd, V. and McD. Beckles, H., ed. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World. Oxford: James Curry Publishers, 2000.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin Fernando Po Fernando Po is an island in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of what is now Equatorial Guinea. Although the local African population formed a complex system of lagoons for voyages along the West African coast, few African fishermen ventured out of sight of the country. As a result, Fernando Po remained uninhabited until the arrival of the Portuguese. Seafarers first saw Fernando Po in 1471 on one of Portugal's many voyages of exploration along Africa's long coast. Under a Portuguese royal charter, Fernao Gomes successfully explored the African coast between 1469 and 1475, reaching Fernando Po and crossing the equator. Towards the end of the slave trade, Fernando Po provided British naval squadrons with a port for anti-slave trade operations. (In the 1840s, the British installed a consul on Fernando Po and signed anti-slavery treaties with the Duala on the mainland. In the late 19th century, with the help of the Spanish, cocoa came to Fernando Po from America as a plantation, eventually becoming the most important crop Export item of the region. Although Fernando Po was sighted early on in Portugal's early explorations along the West African coast, the island never reached the importance of other islands in the Bay of Biafra. Fernando Po's ecology played a crucial role alongside diseases such as sleeping sickness, malaria and other tropical diseases that thwarted European efforts to establish a colony, the Bantu-speaking Bubi refused to be conquered by the European colonizers and resembles a steep peak of a submerged volcano, making the island inhospitable for agriculture .Because Fernando Po is difficult to reach with the sail t, the island remained outside ide of the burgeoning slave trade. After the 1820s, Europeans finally settled on Fernando Po and encroached on the Bubi. Fernando Po was at the center of the slave trade system, but the island served several other functions related to the Atlantic slave trade. Fernando Po became a maroon settlement of escaped slaves from S~ao Tome´ and Prı´ncipe. Later, the British Royal Navy's anti-slavery squadrons used Fernando Po as a blockade station to stop ships carrying slaves. Many British warships served in Fernando Po's anti-slavery squadron from 1827 to 1844. The anti-slavery squadron captured slave ships and freed the slaves in Sierra Leone. Slave traders could be executed if found guilty. See also African Squadrons, The; British Navy; Escape and Runaways (Maroonage). Further reading: Curtin, Philip, Feierman, Steven, Thompson, Leonard and Vansina, Jan. African History. Boston: Klein, Brown, 1978; July, Robert W. A History of the African People. 5th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998; Reader, John. Africa: A Biography of the Continent. New York: Vintage Books, 1999; Sundiata, Ibrahim K.

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From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bay of Biafra and Fernanado Po in the Age of Abolition, 1827–1930. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Michael Bonislawski

Firearms and Gunpowder The introduction of firearms and gunpowder into African society forever changed the course of African history. African indigenous ethnic groups competed for commercial supremacy, control of the best agricultural lands, dominance of trading markets, political influence, and control of the slave trade, and consequently sought every advantage. One of those advantages was the increased use of firearms and gunpowder. European traders wanted slaves for sale in America and willingly traded firearms for slaves. Africa's knowledge of firearms dates back to the introduction of firearms to North Africa by the Ottoman Turks. Across the Sahara, Africans traded in textiles, copper, breeding horses, and cowrie shells. Trans-Saharan traders added firearms in the 17th century. The proliferation of firearms in sub-Saharan Africa depended on the frequency of African contact with Portuguese traders and later Dutch and British merchants. West African imports included cowries, silver coins, copper and brass bars, and glass beads. By the 1730s, military implements—including knives, swords, horses, and firearms—became major imports to West Africa. Firearms and gunpowder dominated the West African trade with a fifty-year period during which a total of 1.7 million firearms along with 22,000 tons of gunpowder were imported each year. European plantation owners in America desired an endless supply of slave labor. In the 18th century, the firearms trade proved to be the most important means of payment during the slave trade. As European plantation owners increased their demand for labor, the number of slaves exported from Africa accelerated. Increased firearms imports coincided with the rise in internal African warfare and the conversion of prisoners of war into slaves. As local African leaders procured more firearms, those firearms were in turn used to capture more slaves. Despite the poor quality of these imported arms, arms from Britain and Belgium were among the most coveted commodities of African leaders. The guns sent to Africa were inherently the lowest muskets possible and proved just as dangerous to the users as they were to the intended targets. African riflemen constantly risked death and maiming, as European-made rifles often failed to fire in wet weather and regularly exploded. European merchants supplied the gunpowder needed for musket warfare. Like the firearms sold by Europeans, the gunpowder used by Africans was of the poorest quality, contributing to the instability of gun use in African warfare. Because African ironmaking never progressed beyond primitive hand methods, the harder, denser types of metal used in weapon-making never materialized; Therefore, the leaders of sub-Saharan Africa depended on trade with European merchants for modern weaponry. Although European traders no doubt rushed to get arms to African leaders, traders viewed firearms as the ones

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most likely commodity that Africans would covet. Some Europeans may have made the connection between trading more firearms and acquiring more slaves, but most traders provided what African leaders wanted in exchange for a lucrative human cargo that slave traders sent to the mines and plantations in America could deliver. See also Slavery in Africa; trading in commodities; Force; Wars, African. Further reading: Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981; Lovejoy, Paul E. A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Schillington, Kevin. history of Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Michael Bonislawski Folklore Slavery in America was an industry and system that served a single purpose: the buying, selling, and exploiting of Africans. In order to more easily achieve this goal, the slave traders had to deny the Africans what they had in common with them - their humanity. They did so through a process of dehumanization that was both physical and psychological. It was designed to either erase African identity or make the African forget his or her origins or the very source of their being. From African ports of origin to final destinations in America, this process resulted in branding, name-changing, rape, torture, physical confinement and brutalization, death, and forced admixture with other Africans of unrelated languages ​​and cultures. Thus the transatlantic voyage between Africa and America, also known as the Middle Passage, was in many ways a zone of oblivion, a zone of obliteration of African essence and self. Kinship and family ties were damaged beyond repair. Folklore was the unbreakable and unbroken umbilical cord that maintained slaves' ties to their roots. It had the ability to heal the psyche of enslaved Africans in America. In their new homelands, folklore linked Africans to their ancestral homeland and collective memory. This memory, symbolized and expressed through fairy tales, gave them a sense of their humanity despite the harrowing experience of the crossings. In the New World, folklore restored its spirituality and sense of personality because it affirmed the ethical and timeless values ​​it contained. In their new homeland, descendants of African slaves used folklore to create culture and give meaning and vibrancy to their existence. Folklore became a vehicle of affirmation because it witnessed Africa's diaspora connection to an unforgettable past - a rootedness in humanity. Through language and myth, folklore signaled their participation in the human capacity for the divine and eternal. Thus, folklore gave hope and inspiration to future generations. Generations of diaspora Africans will internalize the ethics and epistemologies contained in folklore from Africa. The oral repetition, performance, and transmission of these folk tales ensured African American myth-making ability. Folklore affirmed the contribution of Africans to human civilization because it contained individual and social stories

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testified to black survival and consequently human survival. Folklore was thus the main element that bore the seed of the rebirth of African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-American cultures in the diaspora. The psychological impact of this genre on black lives is immense. According to Jennifer Hildebrand, "folk tales provided a socially sanctioned psychological release" in the face of unspeakable suffering and pain. Folk songs played an important role in the emerging black spirituality. For example, dirges evoked connections to African ancestors, while lullabies rooted in folklore expressed longing for a better life (for the next generation) beyond the misery and misery of slavery. Afro-American music—from Negro spirituals to jazz to blues—is rooted in the lament, protest, and hope of folklore. Folklore provided a measure of optimism in a rather hopeless world. It enabled Africans to exercise some degree of control over their dire circumstances, as the various forms were poignant and poignant marks that contained racial, ethnic, communal, and personal memories. Contrary to the racist claims of the Enlightenment, Africans have contributed to human history through their unique, folkloric way of remembering. In African American life, folklore took many forms. The key shape was community effort. It emphasized orality because slaves had little or no access to literacy. Storytelling, often for moral education and shared edification, was accompanied by song and dance, using call-and-response, repetition, riddles, and rhymes. In antebellum America, the black church was the only central and enduring institution that nurtured and sustained African-American spirituality in its various forms—music, art, politics, discourse, and thought. Its roots can clearly be traced back to the slave religion. Thus the Church, its theology and expressions can be seen as products of African folklore with strong influences of European religious forms. Black preaching as a rhetorical and performative act still bears witness to the power of folklore. His ability to mobilize African Americans for social and political change can be traced to the power of folklore. The influence of African traditions is evident in the early black churches. Forms of worship included shouts, hand clapping, foot stomping, and jubilee songs, just as in the plantation "houses of praise." Negro spirituals were thus the forerunners of today's gospel music - a key feature of black church worship. African-American folklore, as expressed in Negro spirituals, emerged as a subversive tool in the cry for freedom and redemption that slaves developed in response to slave masters' oppression of their language. Southern plantation slaves depended on Bible texts for verse subjects. In the history of Jews in bondage in Egypt, African Americans found a striking parallel to their own status. In this regard, the famous tune "Go Down, Moses" is a good example. In the United States, these songs eventually became a code, or roadmap, for freedom in the northern parts of the country. In 20th-century America, folklore, expressed through the powerful performances of Paul Robeson through Negro-spirituals, became a vehicle for promoting racial and cross-cultural understanding. Folklore continues to be a versatile template for reappraisal and renewal of African American heritage and life in modern America. See also Christianity; historical memory.

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Further reading: Anderson, Paul Allen. Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001; Carretta, Vincent, and Gould, Philip, eds. Genie in bondage. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001; Kurlander, Harold. A Treasury of African-American Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Memoirs, Legends, Stories, Songs, Religious Beliefs, Customs, Sayings, and Humor of the Peoples of African Descent in the Americas. 2nd ed. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1996; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; Hildebrand, Jennifer. "Folktales." In Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore, 456–459. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2005; Mintz, Sidney W., and Price, Richard. The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston, MA. Beacon Press, 1992; Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

"BioDun J. Ogundayo Food" The meals fed to the slaves during their captivity in Africa and during the Middle Passage were monotonous and meager. However, their content varied significantly depending on the regions the slaves came from, the nationality of the slave traders, and over time. Originally, the food fed to slaves reflected agricultural production in Africa, but slave traders sometimes imported crops from other regions, including Europe. The French imported oats, the English biscuits and horse beans, and the Dutch barley, dried peas and beans. The staple diet of Africans in Senegambia was milho (millet or sorghum) supplemented with rice and beans, while on the Gold Coast and Biafra Bay yams predominated. In Angola, millet and beans were the staple foods, although the Portuguese imported farinha (cassava flour) from Brazil from the earliest days of the slave trade and established cassava plantations in Angola by the 17th century. Corn cultivation was now widespread, particularly in West Africa, where it figured prominently among the stocks of English slave traders on the Gold Coast. Rice cultivation in Upper Guinea was expanded by employing slaves on plantations in the months before they were shipped to America. Initially, slave traders favored the use of imported food for provisions because, while not necessarily more nutritious, it was often more durable and took up less space on board. This was especially true of yams, which were allowed to rot before consumption. Slave traders soon realized that slaves fared better when fed foods to which they were accustomed. As a result, more emphasis was placed on native African crops. In the early eighteenth century, the French commercial agent John (Jean) Barbot claimed that "a ship [leaving Calabar] taking on board five hundred slaves must deliver about one hundred thousand yams. . . . yet no less should be provided, as the slaves are of such condition that no other sustenance will sustain them; Indian corn, beans, and mandioca, which are not agreeable to their stomachs, so they get sick and die quickly” (Hair, Jones, and Law, 1992, p. 700). Gold Coast slave traders attempted to provide at least one meal a day based on foods that the

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Slaves were used to it, although they still relied heavily on corn. This was not the case in Angola, where cassava cultivation was better adapted to drought conditions and continued to dominate slave rations. Whether the staple diet was grain, sweet potato, or cassava, these staples were administered in the form of porridge or paste rather than bread. This was prepared in a large copper pan and seasoned with palm oil, salt or malaguetta pepper. Pepper was used partly to flavor food, but also because it was thought to stimulate appetite and prevent dysentery. Small amounts of dried meat or fish were occasionally added, but fresh fruit and vegetables were rare additions, although they were taken on board whenever ships touched land. The slaves were fed twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, with the food being distributed in large bowls shared between six to eight slaves, each with a spoon attached to their belt. The meals served on board were the most dangerous times for rebellions. Although meals were monotonous and limited, the slave traders were careful to subsistence, for it did not make economic sense to cut food rations to the point of causing malnutrition diseases such as scurvy or even starvation. This was especially true because food expenses generally accounted for less than 5 percent of a slave's total cost from captivity to sale. Therefore, in 1519 and 1684, the Portuguese established regulations on the amounts and types of food to be provided for slaves. Whether or not these regulations were followed, provisions, like water, took up valuable cargo space. The regulations stipulated that each ship with 300 slaves should carry thirty-five barrels of water. Due to space limitations, slave ships generally carried limited amounts of food and water, in excess of what was needed for an average voyage across the Atlantic. Unexpectedly long voyages would therefore cause severe food shortages, with much of the remaining food being of poor quality due to spoilage. Under these circumstances, sanitary conditions deteriorated and outbreaks of scurvy or dysentery, when not resulting in high mortality, resulted in slaves arriving in a sick and debilitated condition. Malnutrition was often compounded by seasickness. Most evidence suggests that ship crews in general fared little better. By the early 17th century at the latest, slave traders had learned that scurvy (caused by a lack of vitamin C) could be effectively treated with a regular lime juice mouthwash, but it is not clear how widespread its use was. The food shortages during the Middle Passage were evident in the fact that many slaves became ill upon arrival in America, confronted with the richer and richer diets of the slavers as they attempted to fatten them for sale. The Atlantean slave trade not only affected slave diets in Africa and during the Middle Passage, but also in America. Yams spread widely in the Caribbean, while rice was introduced to Carolina, where it was grown on plantations by slaves who brought rice-growing techniques from Africa. Many other African crops were not developed commercially, but were grown as subsistence crops on slaves

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plantations or on small plots in the hills of free Africans. These included crops such as yams, eggplant, akee, okra, and the kongo bean (pigeon pea), all of which feature prominently in the Caribbean diet today. Further Reading: Carney, Judith A. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001; Hair, P.E.H., Jones, Adam and Law, Robin, eds. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1992; Hall, Robert L. "Savoring Africa in the New World." In Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, eds. Seeds of Change, 162–171. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991; Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A journey through the worlds of the slave trade. Oxford: Perseus Press, 2002; Kiple, Kenneth F. The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Linda A. Newson

Fort Saint Louis From the 15th century, forts were built by various European nations along the West and Central African coasts. These forts served as trading posts and temporary settlements. In fact, some of them grew into large settlements with thousands of residents. Arguin, a zone on the bay behind Cape Blanco, was the first part of Africa where a fort was built for intensive slave trade. It was from here that the Portuguese first took slaves in the 1440s. The Spaniards were not reluctant to join their Iberian counterparts, whose influence at Arguin had increased considerably. The Iberians were not the only Europeans who saw the Arguin as a fertile region for the slave trade. The French also expanded their trade in ivory and slaves to the south of Arguin. Here a large, mud-built, ill-designed fort called Saint Louis (in present-day Senegal) protected their trading port. Surrounding the fort were a cemetery, a hospital, and a church, as well as a few brick houses for the small white and mulatto population. There were also numerous huts in the fort where Africans lived. The population of French officers and soldiers and some European-born residents has been estimated at 600c. 1780. This number included the undefined mulattoes who were descendants of Portuguese traders and settlers. The importance of this region for the slave trade was not only that it faced the Atlantic, but also that it was connected to the savannah country by good waterways. The Savannah had the ancient caravan routes to the Magreb where slaves were bought and transported to the Arguin. There were also artificial and natural salt flats. The bamboo goldfields were accessible by water, 300 miles inland. The first slaves sold here are said to have been Wolofs (Jolofs), the people who ruled the area. But, as with most names in Atlantic Africa, many called Wolof in America originally came from far inland, from locations far beyond the headland of navigation on the Senegal River. The presence of the fort led to serious rivalry between France and Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. Conquest and reconquest took place between the two nations. In 1693 the fort was conquered by Great Britain. France later won it by a peaceful

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Settlement. The English recaptured it during the Seven Years' War, but lost it again to the French in 1779. In 1783, France and Britain signed a treaty that gave the latter the ability to trade chewing gum. The two powers agreed to continue to frequent the rest of the African coast, in accordance with previous customs. See also trade forts. Further Reading: David, Eltis, and Walvin, James. The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Impact in Europe. Africa and America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981; Rawley, James. The Transatlantic Slave Trade, a History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981; Stone, Robert. The French Slave Trade in the 18th Century: A Business of the Old Regime. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Saheed pendant

Fredensborg, The Die Fredensborg was a Danish slave ship wrecked off the coast of Norway in 1768. Recovered by Norwegian divers in 1974, it offers a valuable insight into daily life on board an 18th-century slave trader. It is the most intact wreckage of any known slave ship. The Fredensborg was a 31.4 meter long frigate built as a slave ship in Copenhagen (1752–1753). Her last voyage began in June 1767 when she sailed from Copenhagen to the Gold Coast. She arrived fourteen weeks later at Christiansborg, the most important Danish fort in West Africa (present-day Osu, Ghana), with a cargo of brandy, cloth, weapons, gunpowder and flints. Over the next seven months, she picked up a human cargo of 265 slaves (158 men, 78 women, 9 girls, and 20 boys), mostly from the Akwamu, an Akan people living near Christiansborg. During her stay she was refitted to carry slaves. Three tall cylindrical canvas tubes were installed to supply air to the slaves below decks. A strong bulkhead was built across the deck in front of the mainsail and fortified with cannons in case the slaves tried to rebel. Four pivoting cannons were positioned along the decks and nets were installed to prevent desperate slaves from throwing themselves overboard. In April 1768, the Fredensborg sailed to St. Croix in the Danish West Indies with her cargo of slaves, 92.8 kilos (205 pounds) of ivory and 1.25 kilos (2 3/4 pounds) of gold. The tribute to their team had been heavy. In just under seven months, eleven men out of a crew of forty, including the captain, died on the Gold Coast. During the course of the Atlantic passage, another crew member died and others became ill. This forced the new captain (formerly the first mate) to hire nine of the slaves as makeshift deckhands. Since the slaves on board were from the same area, they could communicate with each other. They would have rebelled and tried to take the ship if an African crew member hadn't spoken their language and warned the captain. During the journey, the slaves received a daily ration of beans and grain, and a piece of meat on Sundays. Each slave was allotted a clay pipe with some tobacco daily and four cups of brandy each week. The women and children were kept aft, separate from the men. In the three and a half months

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Twenty-nine slaves (11 percent) died during the voyage. The overall fatality rate for Europeans, counting time on the West African coast, was 37.5 percent. Her last leg of the voyage was from Christiansted, St. Croix, with a cargo of sugar, dyewood, mahogany, tobacco, cinnamon and cotton. Overloaded she wrecked in a storm off Arendal, Norway. See also Danish slave trade; Eat; Smaller European Nations; shipwrecks. Further reading: Svalesen, Leif. The slave ship Fredensborg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) website: http://www.unesco.no/fredensborg/index.htm.

Timothy Neeno Free Trade The modern system of European slavery had its roots in the mercantilist economic patterns of the contemporary era, but slavery spread in the period that coincided with the rise of free trade and the laissez-faire system. The trading system that existed in the early days of Portuguese slavery in the 14th century revolved around government-sponsored efforts to gain control of markets and establish monopolies. Mercantilism was based on the principles of protecting domestic industry through tariffs and monopolies and controlling trade with the aim of creating a favorable trade balance (or importing less than a country exports). As a country's wealth increased, so would its military power, increasing the state's ability to spend more on soldiers, ships, arms, and ammunition. The implementation of mercantilist policies resulted in policies that restricted free trade. One manifestation of mercantilism was the granting of monopolies to government-chartered companies to control a country's slave trade. Examples of such companies were the Royal Africa Company and the Dutch West India Company. Monopolies were so integrated into international trade that Spain granted monopolies for the supply of slaves (known as asiato). Britain's Royal Africa Company obtained the asiento for slaves through the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. In addition, countries enacted various laws to support monopolies and encourage exports. Enacted by the British in the 16th century, the navigation laws were intended to prevent other countries from trading with British colonies and instead force the colonies to trade exclusively with British companies. In the 1600s and 1700s, most countries viewed slaves as commodities comparable to other products. One result was intense competition between colonial powers for control of slave forts along the African coast. During the 18th century, laissez-faire economics, which emphasized free trade, became increasingly popular among the elite. In 1776 Adam Smith (1723–1790) published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in which he described how markets regulate themselves by the “invisible hand” operating under the law of supply and supply could requirement. To enable markets to reach their full potential, government

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Disruptions had to be limited or eliminated. In contrast to mercantilism, proponents of free trade argued that monopolies needed to be abolished and protectionist tariffs reduced or abolished. The independence of the American colonies led to the informal end of British mercantilism. After the revolution, the British continued to dominate trade with the United States. This persuaded many British lawmakers that mercantilism was unnecessary and that they could hold or grow market share through the free market. Other nations began to adopt free trade policies, although they often maintained protectionist policies in support of specific industries. Examples of this tactic were the sugar industries in countries like Britain, France and the Netherlands. Although the British increasingly advocated free trade, much of Europe became involved in Napoleon's continental system, which sought to replace British goods and products with those of countries allied to or conquered by the French. Therefore, instead of using sugar from the British colonies, Napoleon tried to rely on Dutch imports. As free trade became popular among elites, the economic approach was used as an argument both for and against slavery. In the United States, the South became increasingly dependent on agricultural exports to Britain. As such, tariffs and other obstacles to free trade were unpopular in the South because they increased the cost of Southern exports. Slave owners in the south supported free trade. However, northerners in the United States tried to protect growing industries with import tariffs. The result was a long-running dispute over national tariffs between North and South. Free trade slavery advocates argued that slaves were a commodity like any other product. Taxes and duties were paid on imported slaves. The building of slave ships and the fitting out and maintenance of the ships employed people, and the ship owners usually paid for insurance for their ships (slaves were also insured in some countries). The powerful sugar lobby of British-Caribbean planters and southern plantation owners were examples of slave groups advocating free trade. Pro-free traders were more often abolitionists. In Britain, people who supported laissez-faire economics and free trade opposed slavery because it kept labor costs artificially low. They argued that money spent on slavery and the slave trade would benefit a select few elites and remove money from economies that could otherwise be invested in legitimate industries. Pro-free trade Whigs in Britain joined the abolitionists, including Tories like William Wilberforce, to abolish the slave trade. Subsequently, free traders claimed that the slave trade must be abolished worldwide or countries that continued to participate in the trade would have an advantage. Similar arguments were used to encourage abolition. Free traders argued that slavery restricted competition and had to be stopped, especially after countries started ending slavery, otherwise the invisible hand of the market would not work and markets would not be able to regulate themselves. See also abolitionism; Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, Spain; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; British slave trade; closure of the slave

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Act; enslavement and procurement; Legitimate Trade; Monopoly; slave traders (slave traders); trading in commodities; trade forts; triangular trade. Further reading: Armitage, David, ed. Theories of Empire: 1400–1800. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998; Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997; Dumett, Raymond E., eds. Gentleman Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire. Harlow, UK: Longmans, Green and Company, 1999; Fieldhouse, David K. The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependency, and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Kaufmann, W.W. British Politics and the Independence of Latin America, 1804–1828. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1951.

Tom Lansford French Caribbean French merchants, sailors and pirates took an interest in the Caribbean in the 16th century, but it was not until the 1620s that the French established colonies in this area and encouraged settlement and a plantation economy, first based on tobacco and then indigo later mainly on sugar and coffee. These colonies became one of the main markets for slave trading ships, particularly in the 18th century when 1 million Africans were shipped to the French West Indies. Haiti's independence (1804) greatly reduced the importance of this area to France, while the abolition of slavery (1794–1802 and 1848) and the slave trade (1814–1815) changed the nature of labor and manufacture in the French Caribbean in the nineteenth century. After the failure of its colonization projects in America in the 16th century, France successfully occupied St. Kitts in 1626 and Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635. These colonies became the basis for the conquest of other small islands in the Lesser Antilles (St. Martin, St. Barthe´le´my and others in the following years), as well as for the first French settlement on the island of Tortue and in the northwestern part of Hispaniola. The Enterprise of Colonization; the organization of migration, settlement and trade; and dominion over the colonies was conferred upon originally incorporated companies, such as the Compagnie des Iles d'Amerique, founded in 1635 by the king's chief minister, A. J. du Plessis de Richelieu. After the failure in 1674 of the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (1664–1674), which monopolized the slave trade to New France and the Caribbean, Secretary of the Navy J. B. Colbert placed the West Indies directly under the direct control of the Crown: one governor and one Intendants should govern the colonies in the name of the king. They were supported by a colonial assembly representing the interests of the planters. When the Spanish ceded the western part of Hispaniola (i.e. Saint Domingue) to France in the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, this colony, which would become the most important part of the French West Indies, came under the direct rule of the king. The end of the chartered companies opened up the West Indian slave trade and shipping to individual French merchants and provoked an increasing specialization of French ports in the Atlantic economy. Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Le Havre gradually entered the colonial and slave trade,

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eventually left shipping to Newfoundland to smaller French ports. By the late 17th century, France dominated a significant and rapidly developing part of the Caribbean, and French merchants took advantage of West Indian trade opportunities. Despite temporary foreign occupation of some of the large colonies in times of war (the British occupied Guadeloupe in 1759 and Martinique in 1762 and returned them to France in 1763) and the eventual loss of smaller islands over time (St. Barthe´le´ was ceded to Sweden in 1785, St. Vincent became British from 1763 to 1779 and again from 1783 until independence in 1979), France managed to hold most of its Caribbean possessions throughout the Ancien Regime. This was clearly a government priority: in 1763, at the end of the disastrous Seven Years' War, the French king decided to cede New France to Britain in order to regain its West Indies colonies. The French Revolution greatly affected the French possessions in the Caribbean, as warfare between the European powers (1793–1802, 1803–1815) again threatened the colonies. However, the loss of Saint Domingue was not so much the result of international rivalry between the great powers of Europe as the implosion of the slave system on which colonization was based. The 1791 slave rebellion in Saint Domingue, which led to Haiti's independence (1804), reduced the French empire in the Americas to Guadeloupe and Martinique and some of the Lesser Antilles. Most of these colonies are now part of the French Republic. From the mid-17th to the late 18th centuries, the French West Indies played an increasingly important role in France. The colonies became an important market for slaves and European products, and the development of plantations provided rich returns to the mother country. The plantation economy developed rapidly from the middle of the 17th century. From the 1630s to the 1660s, the French Caribbean was a base for pirates and privateers (hunters who smoked and sold meat on wooden frames), while early planters grew tobacco and indigo. From the 1650s to the 1660s, Dutch refugees from Brazil brought their knowledge of sugar cane and financed the first sugar plantations. French colonists quickly abandoned tobacco, unable to compete with the Chesapeake's increasing production and falling price of that commodity, and instead cultivated sugarcane. In parallel with these changes in colonial cultures, the French made an effective attempt to secure sea routes, encourage French shipping and trade, and exclude Dutch merchants from the lucrative colonial trade. In 1683, the French Lesser Antilles produced 9,300 tons of sugar. A subsequent significant increase in production was prevented by soil depletion and lack of space, so that in 1767 the Lesser Antilles produced a total of 14,000 tons of sugar. In the meantime, Saint Domingue had developed into the world market leader in sugar production. The planters of Saint Domingue had started cultivating sugar cane at the turn of the 18th century and were already exporting 7,000 tons in 1714. This island dramatically increased its sugar production during the 18th century (43,000 tons in 1743; 73,000 tons).

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1767; 86,000 tons in 1789). By 1788, the French West Indies produced half of the world's sugar, and 85 percent of French sugar was grown in Saint Domingue. From the mid-18th century, coffee production increased steadily, reaching 40,000 tons in 1788. France was the only legal destination for all ships from the French West Indies, but colonial products were mostly re-exported to northern Europe, mainly Amsterdam. Hamburg and the Baltic Sea. About 80 percent of the sugar and coffee imported to Bordeaux in the 1780s went to these destinations, providing further opportunities to capitalize on shipping activities. The West Indies greatly improved France's balance of payments and intensified French port activity. They were important markets for French agricultural and industrial goods such as wines and flour from the Bordeaux region and textiles from northern France. The French government required the colonists to trade exclusively with France, and all trade had to be conducted on French ships. This monopolistic system (the so-called exclusif) was softened somewhat in 1767 and again in 1784, when foreign ships were allowed to call at some colonial ports but restricted the types of trade they could engage in. Smuggling still continued, allowing colonists to acquire North American supplies and foreign slaves at a lower cost. Colonial trade and manufacturing relied on slave labor. In addition to being an important market for French products, the French West Indies maintained a steady demand for slaves. The substantial increase in goods produced in the 18th century is closely linked to an increase in the number of slaves living and working in the French Caribbean. Because their mortality rate was higher than their birth rate, the increase in the slave population depended on the intensity of the slave trade, which significantly changed the population composition of the French West Indies. In 1650 there were about 12,000 slaves and 15,000 to 16,000 French in the West Indies, two-thirds of whom were indentured servants. The number of forced laborers and their high mortality rate led to a massive reliance on slave labor on plantations. As early as 1683, the slaves outnumbered the French colonists (28,000 and 19,000 respectively), and the ratio of Africans to Europeans continued to increase throughout the 18th century. The slave trade to the French West Indies increased dramatically from the late 17th century, in parallel with the number of sugar cane plantations: 80 percent of the Africans shipped to Martinique in the 17th century arrived after 1680. In the 1780s it was 80 to 90 percent of the total population of the French West Indies. They were about half a million in Saint Domingue, 85,000 in Martinique, and an equal number in Guadeloupe. Three-quarters of the whites in Saint Domingue were French-born, and two out of three were males, a factor that contributed to a growing mulatto population, both free and enslaved. On the eve of the French Revolution, one in five Guadeloupan slaves had a white ancestor. In Saint Domingue the free blacks were then as numerous as the white colonists. Although a constant percentage of slaves were born in the West Indies, the increase in the slave population was largely due to the slave trade: 3,000

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Ships transported about 1 million slaves to the French West Indies in the 18th century, 15 percent of whom died during the Middle Passage. One in three slave ships left Nantes, the main French slave port. More than three out of four ships went to Saint Domingue. The conditions of slaves in the French West Indies were regulated by the Code Noir (1685) or Black Code, later modified in the 18th century. Slaves were considered the property of their owners, who could sell or rent them out. Marriages between a free person and a slave were forbidden, and marriages between slaves were only possible with the consent of their masters. The children of slave women were slaves, although white French fathers tended to free their mulatto children and mother. Slave children could not be sold separately from their mothers until they were fourteen years old. The masters were obliged to provide their slaves with food and clothing, to heal the sick, and to provide their aged and disabled slaves with necessary care. All slaves were to be baptized and taught the Catholic faith. Masters could beat and physically punish their slaves, but they could not kill or maim them. The king's court should judge slaves for their crimes. They faced death if they hit their master and mutilation if they tried to run away. Since slaves had neither legal status nor the right to testify, they were largely subject to their master's arbitrary authority. Both the representatives of the crown and the assembly of planters were unanimous in keeping the slaves under their complete submission, and they did not hesitate to harshly repress any threat to the established order. While the Code Noir made a clear distinction between slaves and free people, it made no distinction in rights between whites and free mulattoes, who at the time the code was issued still constituted an insignificant minority. The need to emphasize the superiority of the French in maintaining slavery led to increasing racial prejudice and segregation. In the 18th century, at the request of West Indian planters, the French Crown enacted laws restricting the rights of free blacks—for example, they were prevented from practicing any profession or trade, and they could not serve in the local militia with whites. This system, based on slave labor, plantation economy, and the mother country's monopoly of colonial and slave trade, allowed France to increase its participation in the Atlantic economy and increase the prosperity of French ports and their hinterlands throughout the 18th century Century. But it suffered serious damage in the 1790s to 1810s. The slave rebellion at Saint Domingue (1791), the first abolition of slavery by the French Republic (1794), and the British occupation of Martinique and some of the Lesser Antilles (1794–) disrupted both manufacturing and trade networks for two decades. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815), France had lost Saint Domingue, which became independent Haiti in 1804. Napoleon had reintroduced slavery in the French colonies in 1802, but France outlawed the slave trade in 1814–1815, although enforcement of the law was ineffective until the 1830s. Guadeloupe and Martinique, France's most important Caribbean colonies in the 19th century, continued to produce sugar in slave-run plantations until slavery was finally abolished in 1848, but the quantities were less important than in France

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West Indian production in the 1780s. As in the British colonies after the Abolition of 1833, workers in India in the second half of the 19th century were recruited on a voluntary basis. From 1849, however, the sugar beet fields in France produced more sugar than those exported to France from the French West Indies. The French Caribbean no longer played a relevant role in the French economy. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; French slave trade; Haitian Revolution, The; Volume. Further reading: Adelaı¨de-Merlande, Jacques. Histoire ge ´ ne ´ rale des Antilles et de la Guyane, des pre ´ colombiens a` nos jours. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994; Butel, Paul. Histoire des Antilles Francaises, XVIIe-XIXe sie`cles. Paris: Perrin, 2002; Moreau, Pierre. Les Petites Antilles by Christophe Colomb a' Richelieu. Paris: Karthala, 1992; Pluchon, Pierre, ed. History of the Antilles and de la Guyane. Toulouse: Private, 1982; Tarade, Jean. Le Commerce Colonial de la France a` la fin de l'Ancien Re ´ gime: L'e ´ volution du re ´ gime de l'exclusif de 1763 a` 1789. 2 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Silvia Marzagalli

French Slave Trade Along with Britain and Portugal, France is one of three European countries that together have equipped more than four out of five slave ships crossing the Atlantic. French merchants took an active part in the Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Evidence of the triangular trade from French ports to Africa, then America and back to Europe existed for the first half of the 16th century, although this was not until the 17th century and the establishment of the first French colonies in the Caribbean The slave trade was officially registered as such. French involvement in the slave trade increased throughout the 18th century, when French ships were responsible for transporting a million Africans to the West Indies. Although France banned the slave trade in 1814–1815, French merchants continued to ship slaves out until the late 1820s, when stricter enforcement of the ban greatly reduced the chances that a French slave ship would complete its voyage. There is no physical evidence to confirm the exact nature of the trade conducted by the French ships sailing from France to Africa and then to Brazil or Spanish America in the 16th century, but there are strong suspicions that they transported slaves. When French authorities unequivocally condemned the sale of slaves in France, as at Bordeaux in 1571, they did not prevent French merchants from shipping them to America. In fact, the crown openly encouraged the slave trade after France established its first colonies in the West Indies in 1626. The American Islands Company (Compagnie des Iles d'Amerique), founded by the king's chief minister, A. J. du Plessis de Richelieu, was commissioned in 1635 not only with settlement and trade, but also with the shipment of African slaves to the colonies. In the decades that followed, the French king authorized other chartered companies to ship slaves to the American colonies. In 1664 the existing companies merged to form the West India Company (Compagnie des Indes

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Occidentales), who gained the trade monopoly to Africa to the Cape of Good Hope and the West Indies. French Navy Minister J. B. Colbert wanted the company to not only import 2,000 slaves a year into the French colonies, but also supply slaves to Spanish America; However, the enterprise, which failed in 1674, was not even able to provide French colonists with sufficient numbers of slaves, who were instead provided by Dutch smugglers. Other chartered companies, such as the Senegal Company or the Compagnie de Guine'e, achieved a monopoly of the slave trade on a certain part of the African coast in the last quarter of the 17th century. The latter merged with the Compagnie de Saint Domingue in 1701 and obtained the Spanish asiento – i.e. the contract for the supply of slaves to Spanish America – and retained it until 1713. In 1719 the French Treasury Secretary John Law granted the Compagnie perpeteulle des Indes or East Indian Company (1719 –1769) a trade monopoly for Africa, Louisiana and Asia, including the slave trade. As chartered companies proved unable to provide the colonists with the quantities of French goods and slaves they needed, the French crown initially granted French merchants the privilege of shipping to the colonies on condition that they pay taxes to the colonies companies paid. Then, in 1717, it authorized merchants living in the major French ports to trade with the West Indies. Similarly, beginning in the second half of the 17th century, chartered trading companies occasionally sold the right to trade in slaves to individual French shipowners. In 1713 the merchants of Nantes obtained the right to import slaves into the West Indies by paying a sum to the Compagnie de Guine'e for each slave sold. By 1716 this was possible at Rouen, Saint Malo, La Rochelle and Bordeaux, and the number of French ports capable of outfitting slave ships increased. From 1720 to 1726 the East Indian Company provided 20 livres tournois for each slave brought into the French colonies, after which the sum was reduced to 10 livres. In 1767, this right was first exercised by the state and then suppressed. The French government attempted to encourage the slave trade through various means as the plantation economy developed in the West Indies. For example, no import duties were levied on goods imported into France and shipped onward in exchange for slaves, and from 1688 to 1767 colonial goods purchased with the proceeds of slave sales in the West Indies paid half the duty upon arrival in France. In 1776 shipowners who traded slaves south of Angola or east of the Cape of Good Hope were granted a bonus of 15 livres tournois per slave. The bonus was paid to induce the slave traders to provide more prisoners, and hopefully less expensive ones, to the French colonies. From 1784 the Crown moderately opened the West Indies to the foreign slave trade, but increased incentives for the French. French slave traders received a constant bonus - up to 200 livres - for each slave brought into the parts of the French West Indies that were considered the most sought-after for slaves, such as the southern part of Saint Domingue or Cayenne. Meanwhile, foreigners paid a duty of 100 livres for each slave they imported into the French West Indies. The duty was used to pay the bonus to the French slave traders. The French Revolution abolished all rewards for the slave trade on July 27, 1793, and slavery itself on February 4, 1794.

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The French slave trade revived during the Peace of Amiens (1802–1803) when Napoleon Bonaparte reintroduced slavery in the French colonies, but was hampered by naval warfare thereafter. By an amendment to the peace treaty of 1814, Great Britain obliged France to ban the slave trade within five years and to limit it to French colonies. To flatter Britain, Napoleon outlawed the slave trade on March 29, 1815, when he returned from the island of Elba. After Waterloo, Louis XVIII. on July 30, 1815, outlawing the French slave trade immediately, but no attempt was made to implement the law until the mid-1820s. The abolition of slavery in the French colonies (1848) put an end to French involvement in the slave trade. The last known French slave ship left Le Havre in 1849 and landed its slaves in La Bahia. The French fitted out about 3,500 slave ships from 1714 to 1793 and about 700 from 1814 to 1849. It is likely that French merchants were responsible for transhipping 1.5 million Africans to America from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The mortality rate on French slave ships declined in the 18th century but was still 12 percent in the last quarter of the century. The typical cargo of a French slave ship would include all manner of textiles (the sizeable proportion of Indian textiles may partly explain the relative advantage of the merchants of Nantes, where the returns of the East Indian Company's Lorient-based ships were sold). Arms and other French and foreign manufactured goods, as well as wines and brandies. The type of cargo was determined by the region where the ship intended to take the prisoners. Nantes was the main French slave port, and its merchants organized 42 percent of 18th-century slave voyages. Their share decreased over time, in parallel with the increasing involvement of Bordeaux merchants in the slave trade (192 shipments from 1783 to 1792). In 1789, the French slave trade peaked with 130 slave ships. From 1802 to 1804, Bordeaux dispatched twenty-one slave ships, eight more than Nantes. With 291 slave voyages from 1815 to 1830 (70 percent of all French shipments), Nantes regained its leading role among French slave ports. The loss of Saint Domingue, which became Haiti in 1804, and the progressive enforcement of the ban on the slave trade helped keep the number of slave transports lower than at the end of the 18th century. Nevertheless, between 1814 and 1830, the French made an average of about twenty-five shipments a year. Saint Domingue, particularly its north coast, was the main target of French slave ships. The island received 60 percent of the captives shipped to the Caribbean on French ships between 1714 and 1721, and approximately 90 percent in the 1780s, when foreign slave ships supplied slaves to other French colonies. At this time, French slave ships visited the entire African coast from Senegal to Mozambique, but the bulk of French slave traders still went to the region between Senegal and Angola. For example, half of the 27,000 slaves sold at Saint Domingue in 1789 were from Guinea. About 52 percent were men, 25 percent women, 15 percent boys and 8 percent young girls. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; French Caribbean; Haitian Revolution, The; Trading in commodities.

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Further reading: The Atlantic Slave Trade: New Approaches. Paris: French Society for Overseas History, 1976; Dayet, Serge. The slave trade. Rennes: western France, 1990; Daget, Serge, eds. From Slave Trade to Slavery. Proceedings of the international colloquium. 2 flights. Nantes: CRHMA, 1988; Deveau, Jean Michel. France in the time of the slave traders. Paris: France-Empire, 1994; Pe'tre'-Grenouilleau, Olivier. Money from the Slave Trade: Negative Environment, Capitalism and Development: A Model. Paris: Aubier, 1996; Sucker, Eric. Bordeaux, Port Ne'grier, 17.-19. Century. Paris: Karthala, 1995; The Rings of Memory. Website: http://www.lesanneauxdelamemoire.com/.

Silvia Marzagalli

G Galley Slaves The use of captives for forced, unpaid labor began in pre-Biblical times. In the 1500s, Europe began enslaving men for forced labor. References in French literature date back to 1532, but a 1561 law authorized the practice. It became an industry among the trading nations sometime in the 1600s. The year 1628 began a six-year reign of terror on French ships by Barbary corsairs. The English, Italians and Spaniards fared no better. Men, women and children were kidnapped. Women often ended up in harems, boys as pages in palaces, and men sold for trades or as labourers. Perhaps the worst were those who were forced to row on galleys. They were often stripped of all clothing and chained to long rows of benches where they spent more than twenty hours a day fighting with heavy oars. If the unfortunate man fell asleep while rowing, he was whipped until there was no sign of life and then thrown into the sea. These prisoners were rarely released without ransom being paid. Records from the 17th century show that the Spanish and Italians lost nearly 20 percent of their population to corsair raids. While the barbarian pirates wreaked havoc, galley slavery was not limited to the Algerians or anyone else. In Italy, it was common for convicts to become galley slaves: alongside paid rowers. Free men could abandon ship. A convict would easily face a sharp edge escaping his chains, possibly losing a nose or an ear. Not all criminal acts were monstrous; often misdeeds were (or even suspected to be) political. In an economic move that also corresponded to the theologically motivated call for penance, slaves provided the propulsion for naval ships, especially during war. La peine des gale`res is still used to describe the ultimate work. The retribution for sins should be a preamble to hell. Therefore, as Europeans built trading posts along the West African coast, receiving humans as cargo was a natural transition. The voyage across the Atlantic was called the Middle Passage. The merchants thought even less of the African slaves than of the convicts. The bodies were lined up

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and tied or chained in the ship's hold and any other space that might be filled. The captives were treated less favorably than cattle. Slaves were malnourished, slept in their own dung, and often were not born until the ship docked at its final destination. It is estimated that 11 million slaves were captured in Africa. Only 9.6 million survived the voyage to America. There is no doubt that such atrocities have occurred. As a result of a stroke of fate, European seafarers were often treated harshly by the ship's officers. Many were kidnapped themselves and sold to merchant ships to transport African goods. The quarters for these men were as harsh as those for the galley oarsmen. See also team; mortality, occupation. Further reading: Lane-Poole, Stanley. History of the Barbary Corsairs. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1896; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Corinna Richter

Gambia River The Gambia River served as an important transit route for slaves coming from the interior and as an embarkation point for slaves wishing to cross the Atlantic. It runs approximately 1,130 kilometers (700 miles) west from the Fouta Djallon Plateau in northern Guinea to the Atlantic Ocean at the town of Banjul. From the Fouta Djallon, the river flows northwest into the Tambacounda province of Senegal, where it flows through the Parc National du Niokolo Koba. It is then joined by Nieri Ko and Koulountou before entering The Gambia at Fatoto. At this point the river flows generally west but in a meandering course with a number of lakes. It gradually widens to more than ten kilometers where it meets the sea. The river's initial width of 600 feet is narrowed to a 20 foot channel by Barrow Kunda Falls. The river is best known for Gambia, the smallest country in Africa, made up of little more than the downstream half of the river and its two banks. Near the mouth of the river is James Island. This island was a place of slave trade. It is not named after the Dutch nobleman James, Duke of Courland, who built a fort there around 1651. It was named after James, Duke of York after the English conquered it in 1661 and the island became known as Fort James or James Island. Fort James Island is situated in the middle of the Gambia River about twenty-five kilometers upstream from Barra and was ideally situated to provide strategic defenses for anyone in control. It is located in the middle of the Gambia River, about two kilometers south of Jufureh and Albreda. It initially served as a trading base for gold and ivory. The trade stock then switched to slaves, the most notable of which was the legendary African slave Kunta Kinte, portrayed in the film Roots. He was one of 98 slaves brought to Annapolis, Maryland, aboard the ship Lord Ligonier in 1767. The island was held by the French, Dutch and British. The British used the fort as a collection point for slaves until slavery was abolished. The fortress was

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Styles of Dress, Houses and Musical Instruments, Gambia River Region, early 18th century. Tracy W. McGregor Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

completely destroyed and rebuilt at least three times. The remains of Fort James can be found on this island today. The island was so small that it had to be expanded to accommodate other buildings besides the fortress. This was done by creating embankments supported by piles.

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Jufureh is another town on the north bank of the Gambia River, near James Island. This village served as the main transhipment point from the mainland to James Island. Albreda was another slave trading center on the river and the most important French post. It became a French trading post in 1681 and, like the English fort at James Island less than a mile away, played a crucial role in the international competition for trade in the Gambia region. Later, when it came under English rule, many enslaved Africans were shipped from Albreda to America. Statues and works of art commemorating Gambian ancestors stand in front of the museum in Albreda. Janjanbureh City, whose name was Georgetown during the slave trade until it was changed in 1995, is a major port city on Janjanbureh Island. The island on which the city is located was originally called Lemain Island. It is 176 miles (283 km) upstream from Banjul in central The Gambia. It was ceded to Captain Alexander Grant of the African Corps in 1823, acting for the British Crown. He founded it in 1823 as a settlement for freed slaves. The island was renamed after Sir Charles MacCarthy, the British colonial governor (1814–1824). The island of Janjanbureh is ten kilometers long and two and a half kilometers wide and is mainly inhabited by the Malinke people. According to Alex Haley's account, it was the Gambia River that helped him trace his African roots to Juffureh in the 1760s. The Madinka words Kamby Bolongo were the few African words he knew to state that his ancestors referred to the flowing water (Bolongo) of The Gambia (Kambya). An estimated 3 million slaves were kidnapped from this region over the three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. The Portuguese had reached this region by the mid-15th century and had begun to dominate the profitable enterprise. Antonio, Prior of Crato, heir to the Portuguese throne, sold the trading rights on the river to English traders. In 1618, King James I of England granted a British company a charter to trade with Gambia and the Gold Coast. Part of The Gambia became a colony of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1651 and 1661. It was bought by the Kurland prince Jakub Kettler. During this period, Courland in present-day Latvia was a fief of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Kurlanders settled on James Island on the Gambia River. They named it St. Andrews Island and used it as a trading base from 1651 until it was conquered by the English in 1661. The Gambia itself was ceded to the British by the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, but the French retained a tiny enclave on Albreda on the north bank of the river. This area was finally handed over to the British in 1857, which was confirmed by Queen Elizabeth I in patented letters. During the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, England and France constantly competed for political and economic supremacy in the Senegal and Gambia river regions. In 1807 the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire and the British unsuccessfully attempted to end the slave trade in The Gambia. They established the Bathurst (now Banjul) military post in 1816. In the years that followed, Banjul

GARCIA II. OF THE CONGO (reg. 1641–1661)

was temporarily under the jurisdiction of the British Governor-General in Sierra Leone. The area was then known as the Senegambia region and included Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. See also British slave trade; French slave trade; Portuguese slave trade; trade forts; Volume. Further reading: Boubacar, Barry. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; "Breaking the Silence, Learning about the Slave Trade, Slave Routes." Anti-Slavery International Website: www.antislavery.org.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin

Garcia II of Congo (r. 1641–1661) Garcia II, also known as Nkanga a Lukem, was ruler of the Kingdom of Kongo (modern-day Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola) from 1641 to 1661. Don Garcia II based his power on political centralization, intense diplomatic activity with European powers, and state-controlled Catholicism. Under his rule, the Central African kingdom reached the peak of its prosperity and international standing. Garcia II seized power with the help of the military after the sudden death of his brother, King Don Alvaro VI, bypassing the traditional process of election of the Kongo king by high-ranking nobles. Its centralized government was based in the great city of São Salvador (also known as Mbanza Kongo), the kingdom's traditional political, economic, and courtly capital. Garcia II assumed an alliance with Holland early in his reign and the Dutch occupation of Portuguese territories in Brazil and Angola from 1641 to 1648. By siding with the Dutch while opposing the establishment of Protestantism in the kingdom, he wanted to regain control of Holland to denounce the Church in the Congo and the Portuguese-led slave trade for disregarding traditional enslavement laws and creating political and social instability in the region brings. During this time he conducted military campaigns to regain territories previously lost to Portugal. In 1645 the king, loyal to Catholicism, which had been adopted as Congo's state religion in 1512 by his predecessor Nzinga Nkuwa (also called Affonso I), received a delegation of Capuchin priests in Sao Salvador and facilitated their work in the country. The Italian missionaries were sent by the Vatican's newly created Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith at the request of several Kongo kings for three decades. They came to revive Christianity in the kingdom after fifty years of limited missionary activity. The Capuchins became active participants in Congo's regional and international diplomatic efforts, bolstered royal power by founding lay Christian congregations that supported the king, and enabled the kingdom to gain greater independence from Portugal and its clergy. Through them, Garcia II pursued a direct and successful diplomatic relationship with the papacy, culminating in his 1648 embassy trip to the Vatican, through which he obtained the appointment of a new Italian bishop in his capital, against the wishes of the Portuguese crown. Portugal's reconquest of Angola in 1648 marked the beginning of the decline of Garcia II's power with the dissolution of his alliance with

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Holland and the Vatican and Portugal's growing control over Congo territories. In the final decade of his reign, Garcia II faced a civil war against the burgeoning Congo province of Soyo and the rebellion of his firstborn son, Don Afonso, situations that heralded the decades of turmoil that would follow his death in 1661. He was succeeded by his second son Antonio I (1661–1665), whose short reign ended with his defeat by Portugal at the Battle of Mbwila (1665) and the dissolution of the Kingdom of Kongo. See also Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Hilton, Anne. The Kingdom of the Congo, Oxford Studies in African Affairs. New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; Thornton, John Kelly. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

Ce'cile Fromont Gender and Slave Exports The role of gender in the Atlantic slave trade is reflected in the gender structure of that trade. Two-thirds of the Africans sent into the slave trade from most African regions were men. Explaining this structure provides some basis for understanding important features of Atlantic Rim societies and must take into account both African and Euro-American processes. The well-documented tendency of Euro-American plantation owners to prefer male captives to females fueled the lower transatlantic demand for female captives and the correspondingly lower prices at which they were sold in transatlantic markets. But the African role went beyond simply assembling and delivering captives in the perfect combinations demanded by external markets. The Atlantic market was just one of three overlapping slave markets. The other two markets were the domestic market and the Saharan market, where African captives were sold for enslavement in Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean societies. Atlantic shoppers valued men, Saharan shoppers valued women, and domestic shoppers valued both women and children. The fact that women and children entered the Atlantic market at all underscored the mediating influence of intra-African processes on this market, as well as on the other two. Interregional differences in sex ratios were larger on the African side of the Atlantic than on the American side, suggesting greater diversity in attitudes towards gender in Africa, as well as a greater impact on the gender composition of the Atlantic slave trade. The high proportion of men among the prisoners exported to America reflected the important productive and reproductive role of women in African society. Female Dress Styles, Nigeria, 1820s. Special ties. Despite the important role played by women in America, American Plantation Collections, University of Virginia Library.

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Masters were reluctant to buy African women. This attitude reflected the European idea of ​​women's frailty, but the protections from physically demanding work normally afforded to European women were not extended to African women in the Americas, where labor and legal systems treated them just as harshly as men. Europeans exploited the labor power of African women, but underestimated this work in the slave market. This ambiguous attitude points to the influence of culture and ideology on the slave trade, as well as to fundamental differences in gender construction between Europeans and Africans. Africans placed a high value on female labor force and this was more important than Euro-American preferences in shaping the gender composition of prisoners bound in America. The widespread and extensive role that women played in African agriculture goes a long way to explaining why most African societies sent relatively small numbers of women into Atlantic slavery. Evidence from much of West Africa shows overwhelmingly that women did far more agricultural work than men. In Biafra Bay, however, the gender division of labor differed significantly from the above scenario. This difference explains why the pattern of female migration from the region differed from the general pattern in Atlantic Africa. Both men and women made significant contributions to agriculture in the region, but the gender division of labor was particularly evident among the two groups who cared for the overwhelming majority of the region's captives – the Igbo and Ibibio. Although women performed a variety of tasks, activities such as tilling the soil, planting and digging yams, building and climbing trees were reserved exclusively for men. Unlike most other regions, the people of Biafra Bay played a key role in agriculture. As the above case shows, division of labor was primarily an ideological construction. The Igbo valorization of yams as the king of crops and their exclusive allocation to males shaped the slave trade in the region. Yam was a measure of wealth, had wide-ranging ritual functions, and was the most favored food, although the so-called subsidiary crops surpassed yam in both quantity and nutritional quality. Yam farming was relatively labor intensive and required some female labor, particularly in weeding and harvesting. Since women did not primarily process yam and were not recognized as important in production, this region would have shown a greater willingness to forego their female labor force. Conversely, women were vital to the production of key agricultural products on the Gold Coast, Upper Guinea coast, and west-central Africa, which sent fewer women into the Atlantic slave trade. In Yorubaland, where men also did most of the agricultural work, the influence of the female-oriented Saharan market and different methods of enslavement would have kept female migration low. In the Bay of Biafra, the Saharan market was marginal and the specialized warrior societies focused on headhunting and beheading their male victims as a matter of honor. Surviving prisoners were more likely to be women and children than men. The sex ratio of enslaved Africans had a notable impact on African populations. The outflow of a high proportion of men left women in preponderance and increased the importance of women in national economies

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Atlantic Africa. The effect was negative because population growth is optimal when the sex ratio is close to parity. As historian John Thornton notes in his analysis of an 18th-century census in Angola, which is about the only place where a census was taken during the slave trade era, the export of mostly male captives increased the dependency quotient for all working people. and the burden of producing for the dependent populace weighed heavily on women. It also affected the gender division of labor. With men now 20 percent fewer, women came to do some male-only chores, or those chores were left undone. This development burdened women with subsistence production at the expense of production for the market and secondary employment. The model also showed that the more balanced the sex ratio of the prisoners who left a given society, the more balanced the sex ratio of the population left behind, allowing those who stayed behind to escape some fractures in the division of labor. Has trade created a surplus of women and encouraged polygyny in Africa? Information from 18th-century life in Benin, Dahomey, the Upper Guinea Coast and the Gold Coast suggests that polygyny was widespread in these regions, but European fascination with the institution gave it an exaggerated prominence in European sources. In truth, however, polygyny does not appear to have been an automatic consequence of the male-dominated slave trade and was not as widespread as is often assumed. Men married women primarily for the women's labor and reproductive resources and not simply because women were in excess. In a west-central African society, where the existence of a baptismal record for the years 1774 and 1775 allows for an accurate statement, the majority of marriages were monogamous. This is similar to the situation in Biafra Bay; Although west-central Africa sent the second-lowest proportion of women into the Atlantic slave trade (after the coast of Upper Guinea), Biafra Bay sent the highest. Among the factors shaping the gender structure of the Atlantic slave trade, the division of labor appears to have been crucial. The productive roles of gendered persons in freedom and slavery are located in the gendered division of labor, which is often at the center of gender construction. Differences in societal gender role assignments were reflected in different conceptions of gender, both between African regions and between them on the one hand and America on the other. The proven high labor rate of African women, both in Africa and in the Americas, never seemed to change the notions of Euro-American planters that enslaved men were more productive at plantation work than their female counterparts, and even significantly lower prices for women did not convince planters that that female captives were of great value. Although Africans, like Euro-Americans, place a higher value on the female workforce, their attitudes towards gender have been based on both economic calculations and cultural biases, with culture probably having the stronger influence. See also Slavery in Africa; Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. Further reading: Eltis, David, and Engerman, Stanley. “Was the slave trade dominated by men?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1992): 237–257; Eltis, David, and Engerman, Stanley. “Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1663–1864.” Economic History Review 46 (1993): 308–323; Green, Sandra. Gender,

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Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996; Morgan, Jennifer. Working Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; Nwokeji, G. Ugo. "African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic." William and Mary Quarterly 58, 1 (2001):47–66; Robertson, Claire and Klein, Martin, eds. Women and Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983; Weiss, Deborah Grey. Am I Not a Woman?: Female Slaves in Plantation South. Rev. Ed. New York: WW Norton, 1999.

G. Ugo Nwokeji Gold Coast During the transatlantic slave trade, the term "Gold Coast" was used by European and American slave traders to refer to the stretch of coast of West Africa roughly equivalent to that of present-day Ghana. Portuguese traders gave the area its name in the 14th century when their explorations along the West African coast revealed that Africans in the area held gold in abundance and were willing to barter it for slaves and foreign goods. European trading interests in this part of West Africa were primarily focused on gold for more than 200 years after the first Portuguese trade on the Gold Coast. Trade in enslaved Africans supplanted the gold trade around 1700. The slave trading companies of England and Holland had the most active presence on the Gold Coast during this period, but significant numbers of enslaved Africans were also traded to traders from Denmark, Portugal, France and the United States.

Karte der Goldküste, 1729. Tracy W. McGregor Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

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Gold Trade Societies living near the Gold Coast and in its hinterland have been dramatically shaped by the gold deposits in the soil on which they live. The gold mines of present-day Ghana were first integrated into the expanding Trans-Saharan trade around 1400 AD. The population of the forest region, which later became the center of the Asante Empire, became increasingly prosperous through this long-distance trade. At the same time, trade between the forest region and the coast also increased between 1400 and 1700. Trade between Gold Coast Africans and Europeans traveling by sea developed later and much more slowly than northbound trade across the Sahara. Despite this, around 1500 the king of Portugal was taking about 22,500 ounces of gold annually from the Gold Coast. During the 17th century Dutch, Swedish, Danish, English and Brandenburg traders established fortified outposts on the Gold Coast to secure their share of this lucrative trade. Most gold exports from Ghana's forest region continued overland to the Saharan and Mediterranean markets, but coastal trade set an important precedent for trade with enslaved people, which developed in the later decades of the 16th century. Slave Trade The economy of the Gold Coast engaged fully in the transatlantic slave trade later than neighboring regions of West Africa because European traders knew that the development of the slave trade in the Gold Coast would impede the gold trade there. Although neighboring Benin and Nigeria saw a sharp increase in the export of enslaved Africans in the last decades of the 17th century, it was not until the early decades of the 18th century that the coast of Ghana became primarily a slave coast. During the course of the transatlantic slave trade, the Gold Coast was the embarkation point for approximately 1 million enslaved Africans who entered the Middle Passage, approximately 9.4 percent of the total number of Africans forcibly expelled from Africa. Fante society The rise of the slave trade in the coastal cities of Ghana profoundly affected the societies closest to the coast. Today these people are known as Fante. As the slave trade in coastal markets increased, the Fante transformed their government from a series of sovereign mini-states into a coalition of chiefs able to regulate the prices of goods and enslave people along most of the Gold Coast. As a result, the coastal peoples became more culturally unified during this period and were able to resist conquest by their neighbors and rivals, the Asante Empire. Some Fante merchants and chiefs benefited from their role as intermediaries in trade between Asante and the coast. Asante Empire In the Gold Coast hinterland, the Asante Empire ruled from the early 17th century to 1896 over an area roughly the size of present-day Ghana. The Asante State was located in the heart of the forest region of Ghana towards the

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Late seventeenth century when a chief named Osei Tutu claimed leadership of several prominent families in the area. Raising a powerful army, Osei Tutu began to conquer neighboring states, taking control of the most important gold mines and trade routes. In 1701, Osei Tutu declared himself king of all conquered peoples and declared a golden chair to be the symbol of his divine kingship. As European and American traders on the coast began buying increasing numbers of enslaved Africans in the 17th century, the Asante Empire began exporting large numbers of people into the Atlantean slave trade. Enslaved people sold to coastal traders by the Asante Empire were mostly prisoners of war captured by the Asante army in their many wars of conquest and reconquest. Other humans became slaves of the Asante Empire through a tax system that required subject areas within the empire to give humans as tribute to the Asante King. Forts and Castles The Gold Coast is a unique part of the West African coast as it is home to an unusual number of fortified trading posts built by European trading companies. More than sixty such structures once stood within a 300-mile stretch of coastline. Most of these forts were built before 1700, when gold still dominated coastal exports to European traders. The structures were built to house administrators and soldiers whose main duties, besides trading, were to forbid competitors and invaders from trading in the locations claimed by the company. The largest and best known are Elmina Castle, former headquarters of the Dutch West India Company; Cape Coast Castle, former headquarters of the English Royal Africa Company and Company of Merchants; and Christiansborg Palace (Accra), former headquarters of the Danish trading company in Africa. Gold Coast Colony The Gold Coast was the site of one of the earliest movements toward colonial acquisition by a European power in sub-Saharan Africa. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Britain began trading in palm oil and other tropical products on the Gold Coast. As this trade developed, Britain expanded its influence in political and military affairs among the African population of the Gold Coast. Throughout the 19th century, British forces allied with coastal societies in numerous wars to limit the extent of Asante control over the coastal region. Along the way, Britain declared the Gold Coast a protectorate in 1874. After many other bloody wars, Britain finally conquered Asante and expanded what was then known as the Gold Coast Colony to include the former Asante Empire in 1896. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; Barbot, John (Jean); British slave trade; Dutch slave trade; Elmina; Fredensborg, Die; slavery in Africa; trade forts. Further Reading: Daaku, Kwame Y. Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Response to European Trade. London: Oxford University Press, 1970; Fynn, John Kofi. Asante and its neighbors. Legon History series. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971; Hernæs, Per O. Slaves, Danes and the African Coast Society: The Danish Slave Trade from West Africa and Afro-Danish Relations in the Eighteenth Century Gold Coast. Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and

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Technology, 1995; Meredith, Henry. An account of the Gold Coast of Africa, with a brief history of African society. 1967 ed. London: Kasse, 1812; Van Dantzig, Albert. Forts and Castles of Ghana. Accra: Sedco Publishing, 1980; Yarak, Larry W. Asante and the Dutch 1744–1873. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Rebecca Shumway Gore'e Island Gore'e Island is an important visiting destination for people of African descent, particularly from the black Atlantean societies of North America and the Caribbean, due to its prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade. Gore'e is a small island off the Senegalese port in the capital Dakar. It is about 45 hectares in size and about a kilometer from mainland Senegal. One half of a huge monument to slavery stands like a colossus on the island, while the other half of the same monument stands on the shore of the Senegalese coast. In September 1989, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared Gore'e Island a World Heritage Site. Part of the island is home to the infamous Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves), from which more than a million Africans were shipped to the New World during the Atlantic slave trade. On another part of the island stands Fort D'Estrees, probably the only circular fort in Africa. On the highest point of the island stands the castle, where a few heavy guns and batteries stand fearlessly. Although it looks dated and frozen in time, it stares menacingly at visitors and evokes the European struggle for dominance in West Africa between the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English. A huge bunker below this gun connects to trenches built by the French and converted into a fortress during the colonial era. Portuguese voyages of exploration in the 15th century in search of the "Gold of Guinea" and the legendary Prester John, the Christian king of Abyssinia, led the Portuguese to the west coast of Africa. They landed on the island of Gore'e in 1444. In 1588, the Dutch conquered the island of Gore'e from the Portuguese during a period of intense fighting for dominance between the Dutch and Portuguese on the West African coast. By this time the United Provinces had rebelled against Spain and begun a period of consolidation and expansion, culminating in the creation of the largest trading empire of the 17th century. Gore'e Island later changed hands between the Dutch and Portuguese before British admiral Robert Holmes captured it in 1664 as part of Britain's attempt to seize Dutch possessions on the West African coast. The French finally conquered the island in 1677 and made it an important slave trade center for merchants from Nantes and Bordeaux. These two French cities would eventually reap rich dividends from the slave trade on the island of Gore'e in the 18th century. The French held the island well into the colonial period, and from the 1850s, particularly the 1880s, Gore´e became the base from which the French military launched its invasion of West Africa. In fact, the French fortified the island, built bunkers and installed some of the heavy artillery that remains scattered around the island to this day.

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Gore´e Island, 1728. Tracy W. McGregor Library, Sondersammlungen, University of Virginia Library.

With the island as a base, Louis Faidherbe (1818–1889), and later Luis Archinard, Borgnes Desbordes and other members of the officers of the Sudan, began the creation of a Franco-West African empire from Gore´e that stretched to the end in Mali, Chad and Mauritania. In 1857 they initiated the founding of the Tirailleurs se'ne'galais, the first battalion of Senegalese infantrymen. The House of Slaves is one of the most important architectural structures on the island of Gore'e. This red building embodies the slave trade and thus documents the role of Gore'e as a transit point in the Atlantic slave trade. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, more than a million men, women and children were shipped from the slave home on Gore'e Island. Some historians dispute the claim that millions of slaves were shipped out of the House of Slaves because it looks so small compared to the massive Cape Coast, Elmina and Christiansborg Castles. But the House of Slaves compares well to most slave forts in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), including Fort de Santo Antonio de Axim, Fort S~ao Sebasti~ao, and several others. The Portuguese, Dutch, French and English all fought for control of the island of Gore'e during the Atlantic slave trade and as such Gore'e was not insignificant. The slave house was reportedly built around 1786 by an Afro-French family described by some as mixed-race descendants of Jean Pe'pin, a naval surgeon. Gore'e was a busy slave port and the Senegambia region became an important slave trading location during the first two and a half centuries of the slave trade. Like the forts and castles of the Gold Coast, the House of Slaves holding pens, all located on the ground floor of the building, could hold up to 200 slaves at any one time. A porch led to an open courtyard with rooms for house slaves, separate dungeons for male slaves, female slaves, and child slaves, and a place for slaves considered unruly or troublesome. Many were tied up to forestall this

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rebellion or escape. The top floor of the slave house, like similar slave stables elsewhere, had a wooden floor and it was here that "palais" were held between slave owners and slave traders. Buyers and sellers haggled over the price of slaves like commodities or cattle. There were also quarters for the European officials or merchants then living there, almost always with a small detachment of soldiers. In addition to the Maison des Esclaves, a number of other houses on the island of Gore'e were used as slave homes. Slaves from Gore'e went to France, the French colonies, and French-controlled areas such as Haiti and Martinique. The French also supplied other European powers with slaves. The Gore'e slave trade ceased in 1794, resumed in 1802, and ceased again in 1807. The first interruption was due to the impact of the French Revolution and the French National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Gore'e's slave trade came to a halt by 1802, when Napoleon Bonaparte, under pressure from the French sugar barons of the Caribbean, ordered the trade to resume. However, the British later took the island of Gore'e and effectively outlawed the slave trade. In 1831 the British made Gore'e the headquarters of the African naval squadron tasked with combating the illegal trade and smuggling of slaves. When Dakar became the capital of the colony of Senegal in 1895, Gore´e was one of the four communes founded by the French who were attempting to implement the administrative system known as assimilation. The residents of the communes of Gore'e, Rufisque, Dakar and Saint Louis could obtain French citizenship and be represented in the French Chamber of Deputies in Paris. Bliase Diagne would play this role during the world wars. Gore'e lost its importance and population at Dakar and in 1944 Gore'e was inscribed on the List of Natural Monuments and Sites. See also African Squadrons, The; British Navy; door of no return; Entrepots; French slave trade; historical memory; Museums; Tourism; trade forts. Further reading: Camara Abdoulaye and Benoist, Joseph Roger de. Goree: The Island and Historical Museum. Dakar: IFAN Cheikh Anta Diop, 1993; Webster, J.B., and Boahen, Adu, with Idowu, H.O. Revolutionary Years, The Growth of Afrian Civilization: The Revolutionary Years - West Africa since 1800. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1968.

Edmund Kings

Guerrero , The Die Guerrero (formerly San Jose) under Captain Jose´ Gomez was a Havana slave ship that was shipwrecked off Key Largo in the Florida Keys on the night of December 19, 1827. It collapsed while being pursued by HMS Flink, commanded by Lieutenant Edward Holland. The slaver had a crew of 90 with 561 captured Africans when she struck the Florida Reef, killing 41 Africans. The Nimble landed on the reef five minutes later, just two miles away. The next morning the American shipwreckers Thorn under Captain Charles Grover and Surprise under Captain Samuel Sanderson found the ships. They were joined by the trawler Florida under Captain Austin Packer.

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The Guerrero had turned on its side during the night and was full of water. The survivors were rescued and Packer sailed to Key West. En route, the twenty Spaniards on board hijacked the Florida to Santa Cruz, Cuba. The Surprise towed the British warship off the reef, but she could not sail as she had lost her rudder. That night the Thorn was hijacked to Santa Cruz with 54 Spaniards on board. The 252 Africans aboard the Thorn joined the 146 from the Florida on the Cuban coast, the 398 people condemned to a life of slavery. The Thorn and Florida were cleared by Gomez and arrived in Key West on Christmas Day. The repaired Nimble and the General Geddes, another wreck whose crew had attached the slaver's rudder to the Nimble, had arrived on Christmas Eve. The Surprise, with 121 African males on board, arrived on December 23. Customs officer William Pinkney claimed that the Africans were under American protection since they landed on American territory. A demand by the pests for an immediate salvage price through their arbitration court drove Holland out of Key West. The actions of the "court" - made up of vermin - in tiny Key West had been notorious for years. The salvage bonuses amounted to 50 to 90 percent of the ship's value. Holland would not submit to any proceedings in Key West and sailed away with 24 hours' notice on December 27 without paying the scrappers and leaving the Africans with the Americans. Thus began a saga of the exploits of US Marshal Waters Smith of St. Augustine and the inaction of Washington officials, chiefly Secretary of the Navy Samuel L. Southard and John Branch. Smith, unable to support as many freed Africans, hired those who could to work on plantations in the area, including Kingsley Plantation, now a National Park Service property. Eventually, after Smith made two trips to Washington to see President John Quincy Adams, Branch arranged for passage, and all but three of the survivors, twenty of whom had died in Key West and northern Florida, sailed to Liberia. They left Amelia Island, North Florida, on September 30, 1829 on Washington's Barge, after spending 23 months in Florida. After eighty-eight days at sea, Washington's Barge entered Carlisle Bay, Barbados, in distress. Governor James Lyon made arrangements for the voyage to continue on a Barbados ship, the Heroine. On March 4, 1830, the ninety-one who survived the voyage (nine did not) arrived in Liberia. There, their American first names were recorded and they were settled in New Georgia, the recaptured being rescued from the slave trader Antelope by a US tax exemptor off Florida. The remains of their floating prison, the Guerrero, still lay in the shallow tropical waters off Key Largo. See also drowning; Havana; returnees to Africa; shipwrecks. Further reading: Swanson, Gail. Slave ship Guerrero. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2005.

Gail Swanson

H Haitian Revolution The Haitian Revolution was the only successful slave rebellion in the western hemisphere. From 1791 in the French colony of Saint Domingue, it was persecuted by the enslaved and affranchi (mulatto) populations of the island. The Revolution was actually a series of conflicts between 1791 and 1804 involving temporary alliances between these two groups, native Whites and French, British and Spanish armies. Saint Domingue was founded in 1697 when Spain ceded the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola to France. In the 18th century it became one of the richest French colonies. Sugar was the main export item, but indigo, coffee, cocoa and cotton were also produced. The deadly conditions associated with sugar cultivation made the plantations heavily dependent on importing African slaves, and by the late 17th century the enslaved population numbered around 500,000, dwarfing the 32,000 white French colonists and 24,000 free mulattoes. Whites and affranchis were entitled to property (although race laws limited the privileges of the latter), but no legal rights were accorded to serfs on Saint Domingue. French revolutionary rhetoric, with its earnest promises of liberty and equality, resonated deeply with the colony's non-whites. But the revolt had a more local spark. Grands Blancs (the wealthiest whites) wanted representation in the French National Assembly to the exclusion of free mulattoes. As a declaration of intent, whites increased racial bitterness by excluding Affranchi representatives from colonial assemblies. In the late 1790s, mulatto discontent led to a rebellion. Led by Vincent Oge´, a wealthy affranchi, they followed his unsuccessful appeal to the French Assembly for electoral reform. The uprising was immediately crushed and Oge' was brutally executed. Although he did not fight to end slavery as such, enslaved rebels later cited Oge's treatment as the motivation for their August 1791 uprising. This first slave revolt allowed troubled serfs to quell long-held frustrations. Plantations were burned and brutal atrocities committed

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on all sides - slaves, affranchi and free - in a state that resembled a civil war. Rebellious serfs murdered many mulattoes, who owned a third of the colony's enslaved workforce. The slaves had help from outside. They were supported by Spanish colonists in Santo Domingo (on the east side of Hispaniola, later Dominican Republic) and by British troops from Jamaica. In April 1792, in an attempt at appeasement, the French Assembly granted citizenship to all Affranchis. In 1793, Le'ger Fe'licite' Sonthonax, sent from France to restore order, offered to free the slaves who joined his army. He soon abolished slavery altogether, and the following year the French government upheld his decision. The most notable leader of the revolution was Toussaint L'Ouverture, a self-taught former slave of Domestienne Laveaux. In May 1794, General E convinced Toussaint to fight for the French Republic and drive the Spanish and British out of Hispaniola. This expedition was successful. In 1795 Spain ceded Santo Domingo to France, although the war in Europe prevented the transfer. In 1797 Toussaint was made supreme commander of all French troops on the island and from then on, to the dismay of Paris, Toussaint attempted to rule Saint Domingue as the autonomous Toussaint L'Ouverture, a Haitian independence entity. By 1801 he had conquered Santo Domingo, the leader. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International. the eponymous capital of the former Spanish colony; declared all slaves in Hispaniola free; and enacted a new constitution providing for colonial autonomy and making Toussaint governor for life. In retaliation, Napoleon sent a force of 70 warships and 250 men. Toussaint was kidnapped by a ruse and imprisoned in France, where he died in 1803. The French, however, had little further success. Their army was decimated by yellow fever (to which their leader General Charles Leclerc succumbed), faced rebel attack and threatened by the Royal Navy. Leclerc's successor, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, led a campaign of such brutality that many loyalists defected to the rebels. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave and one of Toussaint's generals, finally defeated the French at the Battle of Vertrie`res in 1803. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines proclaimed Haiti (the island's original name, Arawak, was revived) as the first free black republic. The country's immediate history was marked by invasions, interregional disputes and the seizure of monarchical power by its leaders. The unbearable reparations it had to pay to former slave owners crippled Haiti forever. But his revolution would long be an omen to New World planters

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Bearers of hope for their slaves. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, France; French Caribbean; French slave trade; Force. Further reading: Geggus, David P., ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001; Ott, Thomas O. The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973.

Tristan Stubbs Handbooks for Slave Traders Handbooks, or other forms of slave traders' instruction manuals, provided guidance on various aspects of the slave trade, including obtaining, transporting, and selling slaves. Depending on the manual, instructions or advice relate to daily activities, the supervision and management of slaves, measures of disciplining, the care of the sick, the appropriate amount of food rations, and the housing of slaves. Other manuals discussed the commercial side of the slave trade, such as profit margins, overheads, and business practices in slave markets. Slave traders, ship captains, and slave owners consulted manuals. A manual carried aboard the 19th-century slave ship Bricbarca Lavigilante, dated 1822, contained illustrated pages showing the preferred distribution of slaves on the slave decks, as well as the placement of shackles, chains, beds, and other equipment. Edward Telfair, governor of Georgia and owner of a slave-trading company in the late 17th century, discussed in his writings the management of slaves, their purchase and sale, the problem of runaway slaves, the mortality rate of slaves, the difficulty of selling related slaves, and the Relationship between whites and free blacks. Further Reading: Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: The British Fight to Abolish Slavery. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005; "The Slave Age." [Online, November 2006]. Duke University website: http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/franklin/collections/af-am-mss/slavery.html; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Leslie Wilson Havana The city of Havana was founded in 1514 by the Spanish conquistador Diego Vela'zquez on the south coast of the island of Cuba. In 1519 the town was moved to its current location on the north coast. From the 16th century, African slaves were constantly present in the village, as testified by the records of the Iglesia Parroquial Mayor, now preserved in the archives of Havana Cathedral. However, it was not until the middle of the 18th century that the number of slaves in Havana and the surrounding area began to increase significantly. The expansion of sugar cultivation east of Havana and the British occupation of the city between 1762 and 1763 influenced the future of the Spanish colony. As early as the late 1780s, Cuban planters began pushing for a royal order allowing them to freely import African slaves. The economic collapse of the neighboring French colony of Saint Domingue bestowed upon them

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Dreikönigsfest, Havanna, 1850. Marion duPont Scott Sporting Collection, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

the perfect excuse to gain more and more privileges. After the Haitian Revolution broke out, Cuba replaced Saint Domingue as the world's leading sugarcane producer, while African slaves provided the labor force used to attain that status. During these years, the slave trade to Cuba, and especially Havana, intensified to unprecedented levels. Trade was mainly carried out by British (until 1807), American and Danish slave ships. After 1803, however, Cuban-Spanish merchants entered the business and within a few years eventually became the main traders. In the landscape around Havana, large plantations shaped the rural picture. In Havana, slaves worked primarily as domestic servants. Those who managed to gain their freedom settled on the outskirts of the city - mostly in the Manglar district - and worked in various trades. After 1820 the slave trade was outlawed and a new, illegal trade flourished. Once again, Havana was the prime destination for slave ships, along with Matanzas. Slave loads reached the city and its surroundings well into the second half of the 19th century. The slave population in Havana consisted of several different African ethnic groups, most of them from West and West-Central Africa. Lucumi, Carabali and Kongo slaves in particular left a huge cultural and historical legacy. For example, most of the slave conspiracies and uprisings that took place in Havana during the first half of the century counted Lucumi slaves among their leaders and participants. The most famous slave movements of the time in the capital were the Aponte Conspiracy of 1812, the Lucumi Rebellion of 1836 in the neighborhood of El Cerro, the Rebellion of the

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Lucumi Slaves by Domingo Aldama in 1841 and the Great Conspiracy of La Escalera in 1844. Havana's legacy of slavery is enormous. Music, religious practices, common wisdom and various other aspects of daily life in the city bear the obvious imprint of the cultures brought by the slaves from their distant African origins. See also British slave trade; Danish slave trade; ethnicity; Spanish Caribbean. Further reading: Barcia, Manuel. "Revolts Among Enslaved Africans in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A New Look at an Old Problem." The Journal of Caribbean History 39, 2 (2005): 173–200; Bergad, Laird W., Garcı´a, Fe Iglesias and del Carmen Barcia, Marı´a. The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Childs, Matt D. The Aponte Rebellion of 1812 in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantean Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Pakette, Robert. Sugar Is Made With Blood: The La Escalera Conspiracy and the Conflict Between Empires Over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.

Manuel Barcia

Henrietta Marie, The Shipwreck of a small English slave ship, the Henrietta Marie, was located in 1972 on New Ground Reef by well-known American salvage company Treasure Salvors about 35 miles west of Key West, Florida. A small collection of diagnostic artifacts was recovered in 1972 and 1973 under the auspices of the Florida State Salvage Program. The site then lay undisturbed for a decade, after which the wreck was re-examined. Archaeological control was initiated in 1983 and the site identified as the location of the ship's bell with the embossed inscription "The Henrietta Marie 1699", allowing historical research to be focused on a specific identified ship and time frame. Artifacts recovered in 1972–73, 1983–85 and 1991 offer a rare glimpse into the material culture of a typical small West Indian merchant ship and vehicle associated with the infamous African slave trade. Perhaps the most diagnostic items recovered from the site are the dozens of wrought iron shackles or shackles, last used in the 1700s to restrain up to 400 enslaved Africans within the confines of ship's hold. Other artefacts include copper cauldrons used to prepare meals for the crew and human cargo, thousands of glass beads, various types of weapons, numerous tools, scales and scale weights, elephant tusks, split logs, "travel iron" or iron ingots, and perhaps the largest archaeological collection of pewter ware of the time of William III ever recovered from an archaeological site. The artefacts represent a wide variety and cross-section of late 17th century naval furniture and slave trade goods. The first leg of Henrietta Marie's journey from London to Africa is represented by pewter, trade beads, iron bars and weapons. These items were identified as cargo through examination of inventories and accounts thereof

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Time as Henrietta Marie. Many of the tin bowls were recovered still stacked (seventeen in one case) with remnants of paper and straw packing between them. Most recovered pewter, including large bowls, jugs, bottles, plates, and spoons, had maker's marks attributed to several craftsmen in London, England, and dated to between 1694 and 1702. This tentatively identified the vessel as being of English origin and probably sailing in the late 17th to early 18th centuries. Perhaps the most common types of slave trade goods are the many styles, sizes, and colors of beads, which the African natives held in high esteem. Most slave ships carried an abundance of these beads, and this ship was no exception. A sample of more than 10,000 trade beads was recovered from the site, some were encrusted with various other artifacts, but most were found scattered in two separate areas of the site, buried in bottom sediment. Most are made of glass and colored blue, white, yellow, or green. A few pearls were the larger, striped varieties commonly referred to as "gooseberries." The diary of another slave ship gives a clue as to why Henrietta Marie had so much of this type of cargo left over after visiting the African coast, and perhaps even a clue as to where that visit took place. Another London slave trader, Albion Frigate, set sail for Africa in January 1699, some eight months before Henrietta Marie left the same port. John (Jean) Barbot, Albion's supercargo or in charge of slave operations, kept a report mentioning that at that particular time there was little demand among Africans for forged pewter or for the yellow and green beads. They instead chose the brass or copper rings called manillas worn around the legs and arms. It is reasonable to assume that two privately owned slave traders registered in the same port would naturally tend to trade in the same places along the African coast of Guinea. With such a large quantity of pewter ware remaining on the ship and more than 80 percent of the more than 10,000 beads recovered being yellow or green, it appears that Henrietta Marie likely faced the same harsh trading conditions Albion experienced earlier in the year. Interestingly, Barbot's father of the same name was reported to have placed goods on board Henrietta Marie in London shortly before her final voyage in 1699. Several examples of small lead mirrors or picture frames have been recovered at the site. Various manifestos indicate that mirrors or "mirrors" were carried by the dozen for commercial purposes, and so it is likely that Henrietta Marie also wore them. Perhaps the most revealing of all the artifacts recovered from the site are the many sets of iron leg and arm shackles used to shackle the slaves during the Middle Passage, or second leg of the voyage from the coast of Guinea to the West Indies. A large number of these shackles usually indicate that a ship was involved in the slave trade. In addition to the salvage of shackles and trade goods and the historical research made possible by the discovery of the ship's bell, there are other indications that the Henrietta Marie was in Africa. In addition to slaves and perhaps gold dust if available, slave traders were instructed to procure as much ivory as they could afford. Those "elephant teeth" got you high

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Wins in England, and the Henrietta Marie had a small number on board when she sank. The only evidence of the ship's final leg from the West Indies to England is numerous examples of dyewood, or logwood, commonly used as a red or purple dye. This wood was typically harvested in the Yucatan region of Mexico and what is now Belize and shipped to Jamaica and other islands for eventual sale and transport back to Europe. The other cargoes listed in various ship's records as carried by this ship - namely cotton, indigo and sugar - were perishable and probably dissipated shortly after the ship sank and broken up. In addition to the many artifacts related to actual slave trade practices recovered from the wreck of the Henrietta Marie, many representative items of ship fittings and equipment have been unearthed, including rigging elements, cannons, anchors and a sizeable portion of one of the ship's bilge pumps. Perhaps the most significant artifact associated with the shipwreck, however, is the remaining wooden hull structure. A relatively intact section of the slaver's lower stern provides insight into the building practice of shipbuilders in the late 17th century and provides valuable architectural clues to a little-known class of ship, the smaller transatlantic merchant ship. The configuration of the stern hints at a situation that has long been suspected by some historians and archaeologists - that due to the inherent problem of delivering living human cargo across the Atlantic, slave traders often used faster-than-normal sailing ships to make higher profits. Historical records indicate that the Henrietta Marie was a foreign-built square-stern ship of 120 tons load and registered in London. Archaeological evidence, as well as the fact that the English captured almost 1,300 prizes during the recently ended hostilities with France (King William's War, 1689-1697), point to a French origin of the ship. The earliest identified date of activity as an English slave trader (1697) is provided by one of six wills by persons associated with the Henrietta Marie. Sailing as a self-employed trader and therefore an invader, the slave trader left England in 1697 and set out for the West African coast on the first of two known voyages. She arrived in Barbados in July of the following year and picked up 114 barrels of sugar after unloading her cargo of 250 Africans. In 1698 the Royal Africa Company's monopoly on the English slave trade was opened to those who agreed to pay the Company a 10 per cent duty on goods used in trade in Africa. Thereafter, while still a separate dealer, the Henrietta Marie legally sailed as a "ten percenter". She appears to have been shipwrecked a few weeks after leaving Jamaica in July 1700 on the third leg of her second known slave voyage. In 1991, the National Association of Black SCUBA Divers (NABS), in partnership with the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, placed a bronze plaque on the site near the hull structure to commemorate the millions of lives lost during the transatlantic slave trade. In December 1995, an international touring exhibition featuring many of Henrietta Marie's artifacts began touring the United States and the Caribbean. As of 2006, they were viewed by an estimated 2 million people.

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In June 2001, another expedition took place at the Henrietta Marie site, conducted by the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, RPM Nautical Foundation, Inc. and the National Geographic Society. The research design included a more detailed study of the remaining fuselage structure than previously possible. These efforts eventually led to a pictorial article in National Geographic Magazine (August 2002). The shipwreck and associated artifacts preserve an irreplaceable archaeological record that directly supports and supplements a large historical database preserved through various letters, accounts, manifestos and other contemporary documents relating to the transatlantic slave trade. The physical remains of Henrietta Marie represent a rare collection of tangible evidence from the notorious Guinean trade and offer a unique insight into one of the most dramatic periods of our past. Further reading: Donnan, Elizabeth, ed. Documents Illustrating the History of the Slave Trade to America. 4 vols. New York: Octogon Press, 1965; Hair, P.E.H., Jones, Adam and Law, Robin, eds. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1992; Moore, David D. Anatomy of a 17th Century Slave Ship: Historical and Archaeological Investigations of "The Henrietta Marie 1699." Unpublished master's thesis. Greenville, NC: East Carolina University, 1989; Sullivan, George. Slave Ship, The Story of Henrietta Marie. New York: Cobblehill Books, 1994; Steinberg, Jennifer. "Last Voyage of the Slave Ship Henrietta Marie." National Geographic 202 (2 August 2002): 46–61. National Geographic website: http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0208/feature4/index.html; "A Slave Ship Speaks." Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society website: http://www.melfisher.org/henriettamarie/.

David D. Moore

Hispaniola La Hispaniola is the name Columbus gave to the island, which is now mainly known by the names of the two states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Before the arrival of the Iberians under Colo'n or Nicola's de Ovando, a local form of clan slavery called Naborı'a existed among the indigenous peoples. The Castilian, Genoese, and German elites of Santo Domingo used the natives as domestic slaves and as gold-digging slaves. La Hispaniola was the first center of Spanish rule in America, known as Las Indias, and from 1493 to 1508 it was the only one. From about 1495, La Hispaniola was the base for further expansion into other parts of the Americas (including Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Florida, and Mexico) and for the establishment of slavery and the first sugar ingenios nearby Santo Domingo and Azua. The first documented blacks arrived in Santo Domingo in 1502 as "Christian blacks" from the south of the Iberian Peninsula as slaves, servants, and household members of the conquistadors. Santo Domingo became the first center of slavery and the slave trade in America and between 1518 and c. In 1580, the island developed its first landscape of sugar engineering and mass slavery.

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By the late 16th century, Santo Domingo and Hispaniola were losing their place as slave centers and relatively few slaves from Africa or other parts of the Spanish Empire were sold as domestic slaves to the island's elites, mostly to Santo Domingo, seat of the Caribbean Audiencia and archbishop. From the beginning of the 17th century very few slaves arrived on the transports of official slave traders to the towns of the eastern part of the island, where a new cattle-raising agriculture developed. Most of the slaves who arrived in the 16th century became freedmen (libres de color) and part of the island's peasantry (mainly in the northern region of Cibao). The house slaves of the larger centers were bought by smugglers from other islands (Jamaica, St. Maarten or Curacao or later from the French parts of the island). Although the Spanish Crown tried to stop smuggling and privateering in the northwestern and western parts of Hispaniola, French corsairs, pirates and buccaneers began to occupy coastal parts of the island. From 1697 Saint Domingue, as the western part of the island became known, became an official French colony. Both parts, Saint Domingue and Santo Domingo, formed an economic, social and cultural symbiosis that complemented each other. In 1795 the crown in Madrid temporarily ceded the whole island to the French under Napoleon. In 1802 (under Toussaint L'Ouverture) and 1822 (Jean-Pierre Boyer), the Franco-Haitian abolition of the slave trade was extended to include slavery in Santo Domingo. See also French Caribbean; Haitian Revolution, The; plantations; Spanish Caribbean. Further reading: Moya Pons, Frank, "The Establishment of Primary Centers and Primary Plantations." In Pieter C. Emmer and Germa'n Carrera Damas, eds. General History of the Caribbean. 6 vols. Vol. II: New Societies: The Caribbean in the Long Sixteenth Century, 62–78. London: UNESCO publication, 1999; Rodrı´guez Morel, Genaro. "The Sugar Economy of Spain in the Sixteenth Century." In Stuart B. Schwartz, ed. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, pp. 85–114. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004; Turits, Richard Lee. "Fundamentals of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History." Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003; Vila Vilar, Enriqueta, and Klooster, Wim. "African Forced Settlement. The Basis of Forced Settlement: Africa and Its Conditions of Trade.” In Pieter C. Emmer and Germa'n Carrera Damas. General History of the Caribbean. 6 vols. Vol. II: New Societies: The Caribbean in the Long Sixteenth Century, 159-179. London: UNESCO Publishing, 1999; Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Michael Max P. Zeuske Historical Remembrance History was traditionally seen as an objective representation of the past. This view is now being questioned. Memory, considered closer to human experience, is gaining importance. Both are important considerations in the new approach to the past of transatlantic slavery. People in a globalizing world are looking for their identity. Historical tourism has increased enormously, especially in affluent parts of the world (Dorsman, 2000). People want to know about their past and want to be able to

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to identify the role their "group" played in it. This requires an approach to the past called 'heritage' (Lowenthal, 1996) or 'remembrance' (Nora in Dorsman, 2000). Until recently, history was primarily responsible for the past as seen through the eyes of those in power; Heritage and memory are more democratic concepts. They are considered authentic, while history is increasingly viewed as artificial, cold, and partisan (Nora in Dorsman, 2000; Peckham, 2003). For those interested in learning more about the experience of the enslaved, this bias is of particular concern: the story has traditionally been produced by those who originated transatlantic slavery. What is passed down through generations to become part of history or heritage is introduced into a new social context that transforms it. One could say that what we call tradition is actually what our contemporaries have chosen to symbolize their culture and their past. Many 'old traditions' were invented during the formation of nation states, a time when people were inventing their group identity (Anderson, 1985; Burke, 1997). In the transmission of history and traditions, three instances are distinguished: namely the selective view of those who produce memory; the interests of those who consume it; and the persistence of cultural traditions that frame accounts of the past (Kansteiner, 2002). Two types are perceived in memory. The first, "cultural memory", comprises the inventory of reusable texts, images, rituals, buildings and monuments that stabilize a society's long-term self-image. The "communicative memory" arises in everyday communication. It is not organized and has a limited time horizon of 80 to 100 years (Asmann in Kansteiner, 2002). Since cultural memory of the slavery past in this sense (like tangible history and imagery) is heavily influenced by Europeans, communicative memory is an important part of reinterpreting transatlantic history. The concept of lieux de memoire, or places, events and dates that form memory and identity, originally proposed for a nation-state (Nora), can also be applied to groups. As groups differ in their interpretation of the past, lieux de memoire can become highly contested areas of history (Van Stipriaan, 2004). This is certainly the case in the African diaspora: with the arrival of Caribbean and African migrants, the former colonial countries became involved in the legacy of slavery, as did the other countries involved and transnational organizations such as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) . The transatlantic slavery past is enjoying renewed contemporary interest because of its lasting legacies, such as the widely divergent economic situation of the three continents involved, racism and the African diaspora (Oostindie, 2005). Because the debate about the transatlantic past is relevant to politics and notions of social and economic justice today, some issues are avoided. These issues include, to name a few, “the involvement of Africans on the supply side”, “the background to the abolition and its very different timing” and “the problem of trauma suffered in the African diaspora and its consequences”. in contemporary societies” (Oostindie, 2005, p. 68). Because memory and identity are so closely linked, issues that would not escape a purely academic, historical debate have explosive results all at once

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politicized, moralistic "memory context". "Inheritance . . . has become a field of political struggle,'' ''memory has become a place of power where reparation makes winners out of losers'' and ''Europeans are being asked to remember what they have been taught has to forget: the outrages and losses on which Europe's prosperity depended” (Peckham, 2003, p. 210). “One consequence of this may be the dissolution of a unified past into multiple local pasts in which ghettoized and antagonistic styles of remembering, reflecting different group interests, compete” (Peckham, 2003, p. 214). It seems as if, after a period of relative silence, the issue of the transatlantic slavery past is now being reborn in an arena of dissonance. This is a response that can be observed in other traumatic events in history, such as World War II (Landzelius in Peckham and Cole, 1999). A plausible theory is that these transitions are necessary before groups are able to transcend the past. Another factor is the changing meaning of the concept of trauma. Before World War II, the word was mainly used in a physiological context. After the war it related more to psychological wounds (Peckham, 2003, p. 206) and gained prominence in depicting heritage. Approaching the realms of psychological and spiritual leadership and justice, historians disrupt the notion that critical historical inquiry and emotional memorial rituals are hardly compatible (Dorsman, 2000, p. 197). This acknowledgment of the trauma has been followed by several public expressions of regret made by world leaders on the world stages. The questions remain: What do these apologies mean? Can the past be declared closed? Can you buy guilt? Several authors agree that the past should never be set in the past. Both memory and critical, objective historical research should be kept alive, as should the debate between the two. Some claim it is the basis for new and just states built on the memory of crimes committed in the past. An unfinished memorial can guarantee that these questions will continue to be asked (Griffin, 2000). An ongoing debate about contested heritage, especially in a globalized world, is needed to remind participants that there is no such thing as a 'winning' argument. Today, the lieux de memoire of the transatlantic slavery past range from private initiatives such as rituals, awards, and beauty pageants (reminiscent of the cunning and courage of enslaved women) to national and transnational initiatives. Former colonies celebrate various aspects of the past in festive processions on traditional occasions, commemorating the official abolition of slavery or, in a proud twist, commemorating rebellion and marooning. Monuments are erected all over the Black Atlantic. The United States, the Caribbean, and even Europe cannot ignore the presence in their midst of descendants of the enslaved. In 2002 the Netherlands erected a memorial and since 2006 France has also been commemorating its slavery past. See also folklore; Museums; Oral history. Further reading: Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1985; Burke, P. Varieties of Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997; Dorsman, L. Het zoet en het zuur: divorced in the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Wereld Library, 2000; Griffin, M

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"Undoing Memory." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22, 2 (2000): 168-170; Kansteiner, W. "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies." History and Theory 41, 2 (2002): 179-196; Lowenthal, D. Obsessed with the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: The Free Press, 1996; Oostindie, G. "The Slippery Paths of Commemoration and Heritage Tourism: The Netherlands, Ghana, and the Rediscovery of Atlantic Slavery." New West Indian Guide 79, 1&2 (2005): 55–77; Peckham, Robert Shannan. Rethink heritage. Cultures and Politics in Europe. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2003; Peckham, Robert Shannan and Cole, Tim. Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler. How history is bought, packaged and sold. New York: Routledge, 1999; Van Stipriaan, A. "1. July, Day of Emancipation in Suriname: A Controversial Lieu de Memoire, 1863–2003.” New West Indian Guide 78, 3&4 (2005): 269–304.

Valika Schmeulders

History In its broadest sense, historiography is the systematic study of the records of human life, societies, and how historians have attempted to explain, reconstruct, understand, and give meaning to mankind's past. Using written, oral, and archaeological sources as primary tools, historiography seeks to understand and give meaning to events relating to people, society, and the socioeconomic and political milieu around them. Undeniably, the historiography of the Middle Passage poses the greatest challenge to historians, since written or oral records of the Atlantic crossing are non-existent or, when available, grossly inadequate. The task of the historians of the Middle Passage is to collect and record facts about the condition not only of the human cargo aboard the slave ships, but also of the crew, merchants, ships, the sea, and the types of experiences that all involved during of the time have witnessed travel. Only through the systematic application of accounts, accounts, memoirs, testimonies of living witnesses, narrative records (such as earlier stories, letters, and imaginative literature), legal and financial records of ships and ports, and unwritten information derived from physical remains of past civilizations ( including their relics and memorabilia, arts and crafts, etc.), Middle Passage historians can find meaning in a drowned past. The relationships between evidence and facts about the Middle Passage are seldom simple and direct. The records may be decidedly biased, intentionally distorted, entirely fragmentary, or nearly incomprehensible, due to the particular nature of the voyages. Historians must therefore evaluate their evidence critically and free themselves from prejudice and subjectivity. For nearly two centuries, slaves remained the primary means of contact between Europeans and Africans. When Europeans colonized America, a steady stream of Europeans migrated to America between 1492 and the early 19th century. Demographic issues related to the meeting of Europeans and Native Americans significantly reduced the number of Native American workers and increased demand for labor from other countries, particularly Africa. The shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was the largest transoceanic migration of any

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People everywhere, and while it lasted, it was morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar. Although it provided the Americas with a vital workforce for their socio-political and economic development, it nonetheless led to population hemorrhaging in Africa. Healthy African men and women, the very active lives of the continent, were displaced from their usual places of residence to be enslaved in Europe and America. The Atlantic slave trade is an important part of the history of several million Africans and their descendants who helped shape Europe and modern America socially, economically and culturally. The task of historians in reconstructing each part of this forced migration and the impact it had on enslaved Africans and slave-holding Europeans and on the Americas encompasses the three continents that felt the effects of the ignoble trade. This happened at a time when there were massive changes in technology as well as dramatic shifts in perceptions of good and evil. Most records contain thousands of names of ships, shipowners and captains, but no names of millions of enslaved Africans. plantation records; Church records of births, marriages, deaths, baptisms and confirmations; and court and military records contain lists of names, usually indicating the African national identity of these slaves. None of these records of any kind have provided direct genealogical information about Africans who arrived in America at a specific time and place, or about their African-American descendants. The available ship records, notwithstanding their shortcomings, require historians to develop new insights into the history of peoples of African descent; the forces that determined their forced migration; and cultural, demographic, and economic changes in the Atlantic world from the late 16th to the mid-19th centuries. Additionally, historians use these records to study relationships between slave communities, warfare in Africa and Europe, political instability, climatic and ecological changes, and other forces that shaped the history of people of African descent. The experience of the Middle Passage was not limited to the official records of such a crossing. It deals with the treatment of the human cargo that was segregated and held in stuffy and unsanitary quarters not high enough to enable a person to sit upright. During these horrific journeys, which lasted between two and four months, Africans were bound, in pairs wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle, and forced to lie naked and crammed together. They were made to lie on their backs with their heads between the legs of others suffering from smallpox, dysentery, yellow fever, and other diseases. Because medical care was inadequate, some of the sick were thrown into the Atlantic to prevent widespread epidemics. In order for historians to be able to make sense of these experiences and provide explanations, more is required than simply distancing evidence from facts. Fact finding is only the basis for the selection, arrangement, and explanation that make up historical interpretation and explanation. The historiography of the Middle Passage informs all aspects of historical inquiry, beginning with the selection of subjects, subjects, and experiences to study, such as:

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Choosing one particular experience over another is in itself an act of judgment-making that affirms the importance of such issues, issues, and experiences. Once chosen, the subject, subject, or experience itself proposes a preliminary model that guides the study and helps historians to assess and classify the available evidence and present convincing, intellectually sound, and satisfactory explanations and interpretations. See also Eric Williams thesis. Further reading: Bentley, Michael. Modern Historiography: An Introduction. New York: Penguin, 1998; Collingwood, R. G., and Van Der Dussen, W. J. Idea of ​​History. Np.: Newman, 2000; Shotwell, James T. The Story of History. Np.: Harold, 2005; Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Oyeniyi Bukola Adeyemi Hold Cargo hold is a storage area beneath the main (upper) deck of a ship, intended for storing (or holding) cargo. In a restricted sense, hold refers only to the area under the orlop, or lowest deck of the ship, but the term is usually used to refer to any storage area in a ship. What is referred to as cargo space also varies by ship type. Although the area below the orlop deck is generally the primary hold, it can be divided into different compartments and storage areas depending on the ship's function. Most historic ships had multiple decks, with part or all of the decks referred to as holds. Different holds were designed to store different goods, from ship's equipment such as anchors and water barrels to trade goods and slaves. Ships engaged in transatlantic trade harbor various processed goods from Europe (for trade in Africa), slaves and ivory (destined for the Caribbean or Americas), or sugar, rum and various other goods from the Caribbean (en route back to Europe). As ships were fitted out for voyages to Africa, the holds were made large and roomy to accommodate bulky goods. As soon as the ships arrived in the African port, the holds were converted for the "stowage" of slaves. This generally necessitated the fitting of bulkheads between decks and even the addition of additional shelving midway between the deck's floor ceiling to accommodate more people in the hold. Separate areas of the hold were designated for men, women, children, and the sick, and these areas were tightly controlled to prevent mutinies among the slaves. Regardless of position in the ship, the holds had notoriously poor ventilation. As a result, the goods stored in the hold often rotted and spoiled, including the slaves. The little circulation in the hold usually came from a couple of portholes and ventilation shafts from above. These portholes seldom provided enough air for the large numbers of people (sometimes in excess of 600) crammed into the hold. The lack of air in the hold created a stuffy atmosphere which, together with the rocking motion of the ship, greatly aggravated the sickness and discomfort of the slaves. Some ships had better designs and allowed more airflow, but that was the exception rather than the rule.

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As a common practice in calm weather, the holds were washed out at least once a day and sprayed with vinegar or 'cleaned' with smoke to mask the inevitable foul smell of so many people being forced into such small spaces. However, the inclement weather not only made it impossible to clean the holds, but the portholes and vents were closed to keep the water out, making the holds even more hideous and intolerable. When ships docked in the Caribbean or America, the holds were reconfigured to accommodate bulk cargo for the return voyage to Europe. See also trading in commodities. Further Reading: Inikori, Joseph, and Engerman, Stanley L., eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Implications for the Economy, Societies, and Peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992; Mouser, Bruce L. A Slave Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Record of the Sandown, 1793–1794. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002; Pope-Hennessy, James. Sins of the Fathers: The Atlantean Slave Trade, 1441–1807. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2004 (1967); Walvin, James. Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1994.

Rachel Horling's Humanitarianism Humanitarianism condemned slavery and the slave trade as inhumane and created a movement that fought for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. When the British Parliament passed legislation to make the slave trade illegal in 1807, abolitionists, acting in the spirit of humanity, declared victory. In the second half of the 18th century, a more sympathetic view of people and the world began to emerge. In England, humanists emphasized the rights of the individual and spoke about the principles of liberty and equality. Abolitionists called for an end to slavery, arguing that it violated people's basic rights. William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament, founded the Committee to Abolish the Slave Trade in 1787 with Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp. The campaign against slavery was vigorous for twenty years. Critical support came from Christian evangelicals and Quakers, many of whom rallied around the Clapham sect and the able leadership of Wilberforce. Wilberforce and the Evangelicals mobilized public opinion against the slave trade and worked to win the sympathy of the British Parliament and Prime Minister William Pitt. In the British Parliament, opponents of slavery founded the Abolition Committee, which worked to end the trade. Prime Minister Pitt believed the trade was evil and a disgrace to Britain. In the United States, Quakers took a humanitarian position against slavery. The Church questioned the morality of slavery and urged its members not to own slaves. Humanitarian religious dissidents formed an anti-slavery society in 1775. Abolitionists in the United States made connections with those in England. They encouraged the spread of slave tales such as that of Olaudah Equiano (1749–1797), who spoke eloquently of the horrors of the Middle Passage and the brutalities on the plantations.

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Humanitarianism was a moral campaign that recognized other important dimensions. First, abolitionists knew that slaves were resistant to bondage and prone to violence. Slave resistance showed a constant hostility to the institution and its own inhuman circumstances. In fact, the humanists encouraged freed slaves to speak out about their conditions. In addition, abolitionists benefited from changes in the economy. The Industrial Revolution made itself felt in Great Britain from the second half of the 18th century and created conditions in which production did not depend on slave labour. The industrialists' goal shifted to finding new markets for their manufactured products, and it has been claimed that the transatlantic slave trade was in fact a hindrance. New industrial centers required more raw materials from abroad. Ocean-going vessels previously used for the slave trade were now being converted to transport cotton, palm oil and other commodities. Changes in the economy of Britain and the British Caribbean gave rise to the alternative explanation, attributed to Eric Williams, author of Capitalism and Slavery, that abolition was not possible because of what the Humanists were doing, but because of the need to a new group of people reacting to economic circumstances. Humanitarians didn't talk about the economy. Rather, they talked about moral values, Christian goodwill and God's providence. They portrayed slavery and the slave trade as a moral failure and a deliberate act of malice. These humanitarians were successful in spreading their views. They were able to provide written and visual evidence in support of their anti-slavery propaganda. In Britain, between 1787 and 1792, they received about 1.5 million anti-slavery signatures out of a population of 12 million, making this the most successful petition at the time. The influence of the humanists in combating slavery was great, although the eventual success of abolition must explain the economic changes of the 18th century. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States; Christianity; closure of the slave trade; Eric Williams thesis; Religion. Further reading: Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810. London: Macmillan, 1975; Coupland, Reginald. Wilberforce: A Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923; Solow, Barbara L., and Engerman, Stanley L., eds., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Toyin Fola

Igbo The Igbo refer to the people and language of a large African ethnic group native to south-eastern Nigeria. They are best known as traders and entrepreneurs. In other parts of Nigeria, they are often the second largest group after the native ethnic group, and significant numbers of Igbo live throughout West Africa. Estimates of the Igbo population range widely from 18 to 35 million. Igbo-speaking people made up at least 60 percent of all captives who left Biafra Bay during the Atlantic slave trade era, with proportionately large numbers going to the British Caribbean, Haiti, and Virginia. With some exceptions, Igbo social organization was characterized by non-centralized political arrangements that gave prominent civic roles to elders, age groups, and in some cases secret societies. Before the 20th century, Igbo religion was dominated by a belief espousing 'Chi' (personal god), ancestors and a pantheon of local deities, all subordinate to 'Chukwu' (Great God). The Igbo believed in an afterlife where good people rejoiced and bad people suffered. This cosmogony appears to have contributed to the frequently reported Igbo tendency to commit suicide under American slavery to hasten their transition to a better life. The Igbo became predominantly Christian during the 20th century. Although the Igbo region has been continuously occupied since the Neolithic period, it is unclear when and how a self-identifying Igbo group emerged in present-day Igboland. Existing explanations usually look for a single origin, but these narratives of ethnogenesis are misleading and often ahistorical. Invariably, waves of immigrants - regardless of origin and arrival times - encountered people in the region, and some non-Igbo groups became so over time. Some claim that the Igbo ethnic identity of the Americas was forged through the activities of the Igbo diaspora and that this identity was strengthened during British colonial rule in the 20th century. Indeed, many groups that became Igbo in the 19th and 20th centuries were not Igbo in earlier times, but the existence of the pre-Atlantean slave-trading towns of Amaigbo (Igbo Square) and Igboukwu (Grand Igbo) indicates this

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The people of central Igboland, or at least some of them, had identified as Igbo for many centuries, and the notion of Igbo identity would have spread to America from Igboland rather than vice versa. The Atlantic slave trade and colonialism merely facilitated the spread of modern Igbo identity. The Igbo were relative laggards in Western education, but they quickly recovered in the first half of the twentieth century and achieved prominent positions in the civil service and military. The Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970 and the defeat of Igbo-dominated secessionist Biafra were major turning points in the Igbo experience. The war resulted from Igbo aspirations for security and self-determination following massacres of Igbo residents in northern Nigeria in response to a bloody 1966 military coup led primarily by Igbo Army officers. The defeat of Biafra led to declining Igbo influence in Nigeria, leading some frontier groups to reject Igbo identity. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; aro; Arochukwu; Slavery in Africa. Further Reading: Afigbo, Adiele E. Sandseile: Studies in Igbo History and Culture. Ibadan: University Press, 1981; Harneit-Sievers, Axel. Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006; Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of the Igbo People. New York: St Martins Press, 1976; Nwokeji, G. Ugo. "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Population Density: A Historical Demography of the Biafran Hinterland." Canadian Journal of African Studies 34 (2000): 616-655; Uchendu, Victor C. The Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965.

G. Ugo Nwokeji

Illegal Slave Trade, Brazil Technically, the illegal slave trade into Brazil began in 1815 when the Portuguese government signed a treaty with Britain to end all trade in slaves north of the equator. Although this treaty was aimed in a sense at curbing the slave trade between the Mina coast and Brazil, it was violated from the start. Violation of the 1815 treaty soon forced Britain and Portugal to sign an additional treaty in 1817 enforcing the partial ban on the slave trade. This measure did not stop the traffic either. Rather, like the earlier treaty, it encouraged both legal and illegal slave trades, much to the frustration of the British. Ultimately, faced with the failure of these landmark anti-slave trade agreements, Britain had to deal directly with the Brazilian authorities. Hence, in 1828, it urged the latter to sign a treaty to end the slave trade in all areas within its jurisdiction by 1831. Despite this new initiative, the illegal slave trade expanded into Brazil and by 1836 had gained sufficient approval to allow vessels engaged in the business to obtain insurance. At this point illegal slave traders were also encouraged and despised by the authorities. For example, they published announcements of their activities with impunity. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of Africans were abducted to Brazil in the course of the illegal slave trade. To achieve this extent, slave ships and slave traders employed various tactics to thwart enforcement

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the relevant legislation. For example, they bribed government officials, assassinated judges, used flags that gave them immunity from arrest on slave ships, and illegally constructed barracks and bluffs suitable for disembarking slaves in many places along the irregular coast of Rio de Janeiro province and elsewhere . However, it must be noted that illegal slave traders were not solely responsible for the failure of various anti-slave trade laws. Other factors include a strong general belief that slavery and the slave trade are essential to Brazil's economy, resentment of British interference in Brazil's internal affairs, unpopularity with the steps taken by the Brazilian government (voluntarily or otherwise) to Repression of the trade and continued demand for slaves in the Brazilian market (particularly in the coffee-growing provinces). Simply put, customs and economic forces, among others, made the Brazilian government reluctant to end the illegal slave trade. Faced with the Brazilian government's reluctance to end the illegal slave trade, Britain continued to take independent action to control the business. So in 1846 it finally passed legislation (commonly known as the Aberdeen Act) authorizing its navy to treat slave ships as if they were pirate ships and authorizing the trial of arrested human traffickers in Britain. Although these British efforts later contributed to the end of the illegal slave trade in 1851, other factors, such as escalating slave prices and increasing moral reluctance to do business within Brazil, influenced the process. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; Internal Slave Trade, Brazil; Portuguese slave trade; Supply and demand. Further reading: Conrad, Robert Edgar. World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

Mohammed Bashir Salau Illegal Slave Trade, Spanish Caribbean After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Spaniards were allowed to trade south of the equator until May 20, 1820; However, they were engaged in the slave trade for much longer. Because of demand in Britain and the United States, sugar plantations increased significantly, from 1,000 in 1827 to 1,650 in 1850. The exponential growth of sugar plantations created a demand for slave labor. Attempts by Cuban planters to mechanize the sugar industry failed to reduce labor needs. The profitability of the trade also provided an incentive for importing slaves. Cuba was the main destination of the illegal slave trade and thousands of Africans were brought there, despite British efforts to stop the trade and the knowledge of the Cuban authorities. The slave population in Cuba continued to increase. This was because many Cuban planters opposed the ban on the illegal slave trade, which could deprive the plantations of their labor force. An estimated 372,449 slaves were imported into Cuba before the slave trade legally ended, and at least 123,775 were imported between 1821 and 1853. The system of suppressing the slave trade was less effective in Cuba. Despite British efforts to end the slave trade, Spanish and Portuguese ships brought slaves to Cuba after the oppression in 1820. The British

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The government suggested continuing to import slaves as the demand for slaves was still high. Slave ships used fraudulent and secret means to bring Africans to the Caribbean. On June 28, 1835, the Anglo-Spanish Slave Trade Treaty was renewed and enforcement tightened. British cruisers were authorized to arrest suspected Spanish slave traders and bring them before mixed commissions set up in Sierra Leone and Havana. Ships with slave equipment were prima facie declared slave traders. In 1841, Nicholas Trist was dismissed as U.S. consul in Havana, accused of frequently assisting or failing to make efforts to quell illegal sales of U.S. ships to Spanish slave traders. Later Parliament. . . proposed a uniform system of punishment for anyone caught in the illegal slave trade on the high seas. Seven penalties were listed: 1. The master, master, pilot and crew of each Spanish vessel involved are found guilty of piracy and sentenced to ten years in the galleys. 2. The master, captain, pilot and crew of a ship willing to take slaves shall serve two years in prison if they have not left port. If they are at sea but not yet involved in the slave trade, they are sentenced to four years in the galley. When negotiations for the purchase of slaves have taken place, they will spend six years on the galleys. 3. The owner(s) of a ship engaged in the slave trade shall be penalized like the master unless they can prove that the object they proposed for the ship did not involve the slave trade and the object and cargo of the ship were changed after her departure from the port. 4. The buyer of African negroes is sentenced to six years in the galley. 5. The owner(s) of a vessel who knowingly outfit it for another outfitter for a voyage to Africa will suffer half the penalty charged to the outfitter. 6. All African negroes are declared free when they land in Spanish possession. 7. Crimes against Africans on ships are punishable by penalties set out in the Spanish laws against such crimes when committed against free white Christian peoples. (Irwin, "The Illegal Slave Trade to Cuba After Emancipation")

These consequences, if implemented, could have helped stop the slave trade. However, this list of penalties originated in Britain, and the penalties were to be implemented in Spanish areas. The Spanish government did not allow its government's sovereignty to be challenged, so it rarely enforced these penalties. The illegal slave trade to Cuba was no secret. It was many years before it was finally phased out in the 1860s. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; closure of the slave trade; Spanish Caribbean. Further reading: Irwin, Lynsey. "The Illegal Slave Trade to Cuba after Emancipation." University of Miami Digital Library: http://scholar.library.miami.edu/emancipation/trade1.htm; Martniez-Fernandez, L. "The Sweet and the Bitter: Cuban and Puerto Rican Responses to the Mid-Nineteenth Century Sugar Challenge." In VA Shepherd and H. McD. Beckles, ed. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, 506-517. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd., 2000).

Knocked out Olaniyi

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Indentured Servants Indentured servants were people contracted to work for a specified amount of time in exchange for education, living expenses, land, or some other form of remuneration. Like slaves, they were regarded as property and as such could be sold or traded like any other commodity. However, their fate was more favorable in that they regained their freedom after completing their term of service. The term of office was usually seven years, but varied conditionally. Debt bondage was a result of rampant unemployment in England in the early 17th century. Many Englishmen wanted to relocate to America in search of better financial opportunities, but lacked the funds to make such a migration plausible. Men and women of different ages, experience and financial backgrounds saw this as a prime opportunity, although the most common type of servant was the single male in his late teens to early 20s. As the English economy began to improve, officials came from other regions such as Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Germany. Although indentured servants volunteered for their posts, not all ended up there willingly: labor recruiters promoted Virginia as a paradise on earth and an open society where workers were certain to become landowners. However, in 1623 Richard Frethorne . . . made the bitter claim that many Englishmen would give one of their links to be back in England. . . . It's a reminder that after a decade and a half of establishment, contract staff were far from realizing their dream. . . this had tempted many to mortgage their future. (Shifflett, "Indentured Servants and the Pursuits of Happiness")

It was around 1620 when the Virginia Company first organized the indentured servant infrastructure. Company agents sponsored the transport of Britons across the Atlantic and arranged for them to be sold to planters in Virginia. The planters then reimbursed the company for transportation costs. The company managed to persuade hundreds of thousands of struggling Britons that forced labor was a worthwhile endeavor by promoting it as an investment in their own future. But if those contemplating a period of bondage knew exactly what they were getting themselves into, they probably would not have been willing to comply. Instead of working in pleasant places like gardens and orchards where they could hone their craft—which most were promised—they were sent to grueling manual labor in the tobacco and sugar fields of Virginia and Maryland. Their masters often scolded and beat them to force them to work more efficiently. Many servants died in these inhospitable conditions; those who survived often attempted to flee. This was risky, however, as unruly servants were punished by having their contracts renewed against their will. In fact, the lords often employed underhanded tactics, such as impregnating their female servants and accusing the men of stealing, to justify enforcing a contract extension. This created an uncomfortable living dynamic, as servants usually stayed in their masters' homes.

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The rights of contract staff have been severely restricted. They were not allowed to marry, travel, vote, or trade without the consent of their owners. Female servants were often raped or otherwise sexually assaulted by their masters, often without redress. However, it is not as if their rights are totally non-existent. They could own property, sue and testify in court. Although the inhumane conditions faced by many indentured servants evoke comparisons to slaves of the same period, the two groups were certainly at different levels. Servants entered into their contracts voluntarily and were more respected because of this autonomy. Some servants were more respected than others. Certain qualified adults would enter into a service contract to help get through tough financial times. These contracts could last as little as four years and involve less labor-intensive work. At the other end of the spectrum, unskilled youth agreed to contracts while trying to earn a living until they were old enough to marry; These contracts could run for ten years and required physically challenging field work. Furthermore, those who had agreed to treaties, or "indentures," with American colonists prior to transatlantic passage were far better off than those who were merely assigned treaties upon arrival. Those subject to auction would be advertised in the Virginia Gazette in a manner consistent with a modern classified ad. An example headline would read: "The ship Justitia has just arrived in Leedstown with about one hundred healthy servants, men, women and boys. . . . Sales begin Tuesday, April 2nd.” Servants played a crucial role in the development of America's economy. At first, farmhands were used mainly for the sugar and tobacco harvest. As these markets began to boom, planters began using cheaper slave labor to do field work, while servants shifted to supervisory roles. As slaves became more proficient at managing this field work, they began to assume these managerial roles, forcing indentured servants to perform their services in a new trade. Some servants branched out into areas such as construction, ironmaking, and shipbuilding, while others transitioned into precision or semi-artistic professions. Indentured servitude essentially ended in America around 1800. One reason is that transatlantic fares became much more affordable, reducing the need to sell oneself into servitude to afford the journey. Another reason was the growing racial tensions in America between African slaves and their Caucasian masters. Slaves were looked down on as pathetic specimens, and thus it would have been fair to volunteer for a period of servitude to choose such a supposedly pathetic existence. Contract servants who successfully made it to the end of their contracts were provided by their masters with clothing, two hoes, three barrels of corn, and fifty acres of land, although these specific allotments depended on the colony of the servant's residence. More servants died in poverty than ever achieved financial security or elite social status. It has been estimated that 75 percent or more of Virginia's settlers in the 17th century were servants. See also ethnicity. Further reading: Dabney, V. Virginia: The New Domain. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1971; Galenson, DW White Servitude in Colonial America. New York:

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Cambridge University Press, 1981; „Indentured Servants‘ Experiences 1600–1700.“ Januar 2006. [Online, 2. November 2006]. Website TeacherVision.com: http://www.teachervision.fen.com/slavery-us/american-colonies/3848.html; Menard, Russel. „Indentured Servitude.“ 30. Oktober 2006. [Online, 2. November 2006]. Answers.com-Website: http://www.answers.com/topic/indentured-servant; Shifflett, Crandall. „Indentured Servants and the Pursuits of Happiness.“ Folger Shakespeare Library: http://www.folger.edu/html/folger_institute/Jamestown/c_shifflet.htm; Smith, A. B. Kolonisten in Knechtschaft. Chapel Hill: Universität von North Carolina Press, 1947.

Michael Lombardo

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean had a longer history of the slave trade compared to its Atlantic counterpart. The history of the Indian Ocean slave trade dates back approximately 1,000 years before the transatlantic slave trade began in the 15th century. As early as the 18th Dynasty (1580 BC), ships were sailing from Egypt to northern Somaliland with the specific aim of acquiring slaves. There is evidence of the slave trade from East Africa to Alexandria in the early second century CE The large number of black slaves in the Persian Gulf area testifies to the existence of a slave trade that predated the rise of Islam. The slave trade intensified as Islam grew. Probably as early as the 9th century, Arab traders set up posts along the East African coast as far as Zanzibar. Slaves were captured and sold by Arabs, whose influence on the development of Swahili civilization in East Africa remains undisputed. The integral position that slavery held in medieval Islamic societies was a factor that facilitated the buying, selling, and transportation of slaves along the Indian Ocean. Slaves from East Africa found their way to the Middle East where they were called Zanj. Some were also shipped to India, China and Indonesia. When the transatlantic slave trade began in the 15th century, it marked the gradual decline of the ancient slave trade, dating back to the early second century CE. The old slave trade did not disappear entirely, but rather went hand in hand with the new trade. The slave trade in the Indian Ocean, which began to appear in the 16th century, is called "colonial" because it was run by the French, Portuguese, Danes and British. The Portuguese were instrumental in pioneering the colonial slave trade in the Indian Ocean. Their initial motives for exploring the Indian Ocean were similar to those of the Atlantic, i.e. searching for gold and spices. Visiting the cities along the East African coast in the early 16th century, they found slaves wearing simple loincloths. They reported that the buildings were beautiful and that the social elite wore silks and jewels. The Portuguese acquired slaves from the northern part of the island through the mediation of Malagasy chiefs. They tended to prefer the northwestern part of the coast as it was a stopover between Mozambique and Goa. The Portuguese were later joined by the French, Dutch, British and Danes. The Bay of Antongli (in Madagascar) was remodeled by the Dutch

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into a veritable haven for the enslavement and transport of slaves along the Indian Ocean. Their settlements in Mauritius in 1638 and the Cape in 1652 increased their role in the Indian Ocean slave trade. The Dutch began importing slaves to the Cape of Good Hope from the mid-17th century. The diverse sourcing areas in the Indian Ocean included the Indonesian archipelago, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Mauritius and mainland East Africa. In 1793 there were 14,747 slaves in the colony compared to 13,830 Europeans. Slaves had to be imported because, unlike the European portion of the colony's population, Cape slaves did not reproduce. Danes' slavery activities were noted at their outpost at Transquwbar while the French settled at Fort Dauphin. Driven out of the West Indies by the advance of colonialism, hundreds of privateers fled to the Big Island. They became intermediaries in the slave trade until about 1726. They bought Madagascar and resold it to the English in Bristol, the Dutch in Batavia and the French in Martinique. They also sold slaves to the Arabs of Biona and Majunga. The corsairs shipped their own goods and slaves to the neighboring island of Bourbon. Here the French governor signed a treaty with the natives. This treaty gave the governor the ability to buy and resell slaves to the people under his administration. The need for labor in the West Indies and the Americas facilitated an increase in slave trader activity and Indian Ocean voyages. The period between 1675 and 1725 represents a peak in the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. During this time, an estimated 12,000 residents of Madagascar went to the New World in bondage. In 1785, Mozambique provided about 3,000 to 4,000 slaves to Saint Domingue. The multiplier effect of European penetration into the Indian Ocean slave trade is best seen in the Mascarene Islands. As in the West Indies, the colonization of Bourbon and Mauritius created a need for additional labor. The French government turned to the Gulf of Guinea. Loads of slaves were brought from Madagascar. It was from these places that slaves were brought to Mauritius for more than fifty years. The Portuguese, with their trading posts south of Cape Delgado, appear to have monopolized the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. In the second half of the 18th century, slaves were bought from the Muslims on the Zanguebar coast, which runs from Cape Delgado to the Gulf of Aden. From 1670 to 1810 the Mascarene Islands seem to have imported about 160,000 slaves, 115,000 of them between 1769 and 1810. The early 19th century marks a significant period in the history of the Indian Ocean slave trade. The British extended their abolitionist campaign to the ocean. It was not easy to get the Portuguese, French and Arabs to abandon the slave trade. In the end, the struggle for Africa and the eventual partition of East African states and empires was required to put an end to the trade. The colonization of East African states did not end the slave trade in the Indian Ocean, as the economies of some parts of the Middle East were closely linked to slave labor. Until the early 20th century, African slaves were still clandestinely recruited for a variety of tasks:

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as laborers in the ports of the Red Sea, in the date gardens of Medina and in the coffee region of northern Hijaz. See also Danish slave trade; Dutch slave trade; French slave trade; Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: "The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century." Report of the documents of the expert meeting organized by UNESCO. Paris: UNESCO, 1979; Dorsey, Joseph. Slave Trade in the Age of Abolition. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2003; Patterson, Orlando. slavery and social death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982; Fool, Deryck. Slavery and Slavery in the Indian Ocean. London: Macmillan, 1998; Solow, Barbara, eds. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Saheed pendant

Insurance increased the slave trade by making risky journeys financially viable. By purchasing insurance, shipowners transferred their financial losses to insurers if a voyage went awry. Owners typically insured the ship and its slave cargo, as well as the ship's original cargo to the outside world. Less commonly, captains and crew members insured the "privileged" slaves they were allowed to transport and sell privately. The cost of insuring a slave voyage depended on the age and condition of the ship, the skill of the captain and crew, the route, the time of year, and the state of geopolitics, among other things. Policyholders provided letters of reference and detailed descriptions of the vessel and cargo, particularly when insurers were unable to carry out their own inspection. Premiums ranged from as little as 2 percent to as much as 50 percent of the value of slave cargo. Peacetime premiums typically did not exceed 10 percent. During the war they rose to 20 percent and more. The abolition of the slave trade by various governments and the rise of the abolitionist movement increased premiums, as did the likelihood of hitting the West African or Caribbean hurricane season. Some insurers offered up to 10 percent of the premium for successful trips back. Although some shipowners bought coverage for their entire voyage, most only insured part of the value of their cargo, or only the second leg - from Africa to the New World. Collision damage insurance became common practice due to the high cost of premiums and despite the availability of credit from insurers. Policies usually covered all losses with important exceptions. Insurers would not cover losses caused by "natural death" or "ordinary mortality". Death from negligence, accident, suicide, malnutrition, and disease came under these headings. In the late 18th century, English law only permitted shipowners to insure slave cargoes against loss by sea peril, piracy, insurrection, conquest by the king's enemies, barratry by the captain or crew, and destruction by fire. Compensation could not be demanded when slaves died as a result of mistreatment or were thrown overboard. The willingness of English insurers to cover riot losses increased during the eighteenth century. As a rule, they only covered

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Losses of more than 5 to 10 percent of the freight value. By the late 18th century, many French policies also covered insurrections and even collective suicide. Where the uprising could be attributed to the negligence of the crew, insurers attempted to refuse compensation on the grounds that it was a loss from "general mortality". During the time when the slave trade was legal, insurers generally excluded losses from illegal trade. After 1807–1808, when the slave trade was criminalized in the United States and British Empire, some insurers continued to insure illegal travel. It was not until 1815 that American courts ruled that insuring an illegal slave voyage was illegal. The deaths of slaves by drowning were generally covered. Storms or shipwreck could cause these deaths. Less commonly, death by drowning could be described as a "dangerous incident to navigation" or "danger of the sea." The throwing overboard of 132 sick slaves in 1781 by the captain of the British Zong was a deliberate attempt to maximize compensation from insurers: drowning was covered by the Zong's insurance policy, but death by disease was not. The English courts rejected the captain's claim for compensation. The incident became the béte noire of the abolitionist movement. It prompted legislation and was the subject of J.M.W. Turner's oil painting The Slave Ship (1840). Permissible routes have been carefully determined. Parts of the Berber Coast and the Caribbean were high-risk regions due to piracy. Also, confiscation by foreign powers was a threat in many areas, especially after British and American governments abolished the slave trade. Some insurers imposed penalties of up to 20 percent of the freight value for deviations from the approved course. Others refused to insure losses due to discrepancies. Destination markets and deadlines were also defined by the original agreement. In Britain, insurance of the slave trade was dominated by insurers at Lloyds of London. A campaign to sue Lloyds for insuring the slave trade is currently being waged by descendants of African slaves. Other UK insurers operated out of Liverpool and Bristol. Before American independence, British insurers underwrote slave voyages from the American colonies. After 1776 American underwriters in Boston, Newport, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and elsewhere underwrote American slave voyages. Nantes, Bordeaux and Marseille were French centers for slave trade insurance. Until at least the 18th century, Dutch insurers in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Middleburg insured slave traders. Other European insurers of the slave trade were based in Hamburg, Barcelona and Cadiz. See also Credit and Finance; reparation; Slave traders (slave traders). Further reading: Coughtry, Jay. The Infamous Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade 1700–1807, 90–102. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981; Weissbord, Robert. "The Fall of the Slave Ship Zong, 1783." History Today 19, 8 (August 1969): 561–567; Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery, 104–105. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Mitra Sharafi

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Invaders The term "invader" was used during the transatlantic slave trade to refer to persons or ships illegally buying or transporting enslaved Africans from an African port that was under the monopoly control of a European nation or trading company. The first European monopoly on the African coast was Portugal's claim to exclusive trading rights on the so-called Gold Coast from the 1470s. Thus, the first invaders of the slave trade were traders from England and elsewhere who, in violation of the Portuguese monopoly there, bought or kidnapped Africans on the Gold Coast. A famous early invader was the Englishman John Hawkins, who made three slave voyages and left an account of his voyages. Throughout the era of the transatlantic slave trade, invaders literally intercepted the trade that commercial corporations intended for themselves. In general, the ships that transported enslaved Africans through the Middle Passage can be divided into two categories: those on behalf of a corporation and those operating on behalf of a private individual. During the first two centuries of the slave trade from Africa, the cost of fitting out a ship for the voyage from Europe to Africa and eventually America, and the risks involved in such voyages, were beyond the reach of the individual. Slave voyages during this period were sponsored by governments and royal families with state funds. As the European merchant class accumulated its own capital throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, private companies were able to set up slave companies and compete with corporate commerce. Another segment of the 'private traders' category consisted of people dedicated to the confiscation and confiscation of ships and goods on the high seas. These are commonly referred to as pirates. From the perspective of corporate traders, any type of private vessel trading in a corporate port would be considered an intruder. Invaders had an advantage over corporate traders because they could buy their cargo of humans in less time by buying slaves wherever they were available on the coast. In contrast, company traders only had to buy slaves at company posts, which often meant stopping at several ports on the West African coast, and sometimes dropping anchor and waiting for the trading forts to accumulate enough slaves to fill the ships. Additionally, private traders were not hampered by the cost of maintaining forts and personnel on the African coast. Consequently, private traders usually offered higher prices for slaves and lower prices for imported goods - especially cloth, rum, and tobacco - than the company traders. Invader trade was much more difficult to quantify than corporate trade, as private traders and pirates were less likely to keep detailed records and correspondence. Historians are therefore forced to speculate on the number of private voyages and the composition of the human cargo that brought them to America. See also British slave trade; Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Rediker, Marcus Buford. Villains of All Nations: Atlantean Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004.

Rebecca Shumway

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Internal Slave Trade, Brazil After the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil finally ended in the early 1850s, an internal slave trade began affecting thousands of women and men. At that time, the coffee economy was booming in the province of Rio de Janeiro, soon to be followed by that of São Paulo and then southern Minas Gerais. Meanwhile, the international price of sugar stagnated and then fell precipitously, depressing the economies of northeastern Brazil, particularly those of Bahia and Pernambuco, provinces that for three centuries were the main destinations of Africans shipped to the New World. The result was a massive transfer of people from one part of the country to the other. It is likely that during the 1850s and 1860s the number of slaves coming south from the Northeast averaged 5,000 to 6,000 per year. This trade became even more intense in the 1870s, probably averaging 10,000 a year. By the 1880s, for reasons discussed below, trade dwindled to a trickle until the abolition of slavery in 1888 ended it entirely. Altogether more than 200,000 slaves were bought and sold from one province to another after 1850. Also, within each province, there was a great movement of slaves from the cities, from general farming areas, and from the gold and diamond fields (where the veins had run out) to the coffee plantations. If this intra-provincial trade were also counted, the number of those involved in internal trade would probably double. Given the large number of slaves shipped from Africa to northeastern Brazil over the past twenty years (about 150,000), many of those shipped from one province to another had inevitably already suffered the transatlantic trade. Twenty-eight percent of those who arrived in Rio in 1852 were recorded as having been born in Africa, and there is reason to believe that even some who were said to have been born in Brazil were actually African. For her, the nightmare of the Middle Passage had begun again. Over time, the proportion of Brazilian-born increased, and by the late 1870s they were almost the only slaves young enough to be worthy of being transported from province to province. Given the lack of good inland roads, the main route for trade remained a coastal route. In the 1850s, slaves were typically shipped from port to port in small groups, often four, presumably with other trade cargo, so not on slave ships. An 1854 newspaper in Bahia announced the departure for Rio of a ship "having good rooms for both passengers and slaves" and a schooner "taking small cargo and slaves." By the 1870s, however, far greater numbers of slaves were traveling together, and there are examples of 51, 78, and even 232 slaves being carried on a single ship. Nevertheless, in 1880 a white passenger complained that "One cannot travel on the [steam] packets of Brazilian society except in the company of this human cargo destined for sale in the South." Ships so severely enslaved do not seem to do so been the rule. A sea voyage from Bahia to Rio by steamship (the preferred mode of transport in the 1870s) took about four days, much less than the six weeks it had taken to trade from Africa, although the slaves may have been

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still chained. After slaves arrived at a southern port, they had to travel long distances to the plantations in the interior, at least 125 miles over a steep escarpment that rose 750 meters. Although many women were involved in the internal slave trade, the vast majority were men, especially young men. By 1884, men made up 55 percent of the slave population in the coffee-producing provinces, while their percentage in the exporting provinces of the Northeast was only 49 percent. In short, most of the women stayed behind while the men were sent south. The sale was almost always marked by a moment of painful separation and grief. A Brazilian politician condemned the deal, saying it was horrifying to “see children being torn from their mothers, husbands from wives, parents from children! Go to the [slave market] and you will be outraged and shaken at the sight of so much misery!'' Mothers, sisters, companions and children left behind must have been shaken by the gaping absence of those sent away and those shipped south found isolating themselves from their usual human contacts. Relatively young, predominantly male, no longer sewn into the social life of a particular locality, and forcibly denied contacts with family and friends who could have had a moderating influence on behavior, the transported men were likely to be angry, resentful, fearful, less constrained by societal expectations and certainly volatile. Men alone always had less to lose from active resistance than men with wives and children. Masters who bought such slaves could sense the unrest among them. Eventually, more and more coffee planters began to doubt the prudence of importing slaves from the Northeast, and in 1880–1881 they persuaded their legislatures to levy a prohibitive tax on those who brought slaves across provincial lines. The lawmakers made their reasons clear, speaking of how this is causing situations in small towns where robbers and assassins are keeping these families on constant alert. Another political leader explained that the slaves brought south in the internal trade "did not bring to the plantations the resignation or contentment with their lot indispensable to good discipline," and he hoped that restricting trade would help maintain the " order" and tranquility on rural farms." The new tax virtually ended the internal slave trade. However, the measure did not put an end to slave riots, and in 1887 and early 1888 slaves made specific and crucial contributions to the final end of slavery in Brazil. In those years, a massive flight of slaves from the plantations to the cities surprised the authorities; completely overwhelmed by their sheer volume, every effort was made to stem the flow. At first, fleeing slaves secretly left the country at night, but soon they did so openly, sometimes even confronting the authorities with firearms. When the army was called to help maintain order, its leaders scornfully declared that they did not want to be charged with "the capture of poor blacks fleeing slavery." May 1888 hastily passed legislation abolishing slavery. The main area of ​​these slave actions was the province of São Paulo, the province that had been the strongest in importing slaves from other regions. Another place to witness direct action - and more spectacular

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because here the slaves burned the sugar cane fields – was a sugar-producing county in the province of Rio de Janeiro. It was one of the few non-coffee areas in the province where the number of slaves increased between 1873 and 1882. On the sugar plantations of the Northeast, where the slaves were raised, there was no such mass exodus or general sabotage and remained more closely connected to local society and culture. In short, the dislocations caused by the internal slave trade greatly contributed to the actions of those in the South and hence the end of slavery. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; Escape and Runaway; families and family separations; Portuguese slave trade. Further Reading: Bethell, Leslie. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; Konrad, Robert Edgar. World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

Richard Graham Internal Slave Trade, United States The internal slave trade in the United States, or the Second Middle Passage, was part of a massive forced migration of slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries. Forced migration brought slaves to Georgia and South Carolina in the early nineteenth century, but the "Cotton Kingdom," spanning Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, became the primary destination for slaves after 1810. It is estimated that between 1810 and 1860 more than 1 million slaves had to leave their families and familiar surroundings and start a new life in the Deep South. Only the reclamation of new land and the declining agriculture in settlement areas created the necessary conditions for the international slave trade. Native Americans gave up lands that would become the "Black Belt," and whites who moved there were hungry for laborers who would convert the virgin lands into productive farms and plantations. They found these workers in the Chesapeake region, where slaveholders from Virginia and Maryland were making the transition from growing tobacco. These new forms of agriculture required fewer slaves, and so lords along the Atlantic coast were anxious to sell their slaves. The internal slave trade, which accounted for 50 to 60 percent of all forced migrations, was the largest enterprise in the South outside of the plantation enterprise. Itinerant speculators scoured the Chesapeake countryside. They visited farms and plantations and bought up slaves who had become disposable or were proving unruly. Slave traders could also be seen at auctions, acquiring slaves at a real estate sale or buying runaways from the sheriff on the courthouse steps. In the 1840s, slave traders established their own auction houses, specializing in the buying, selling, and renting of slaves. Slave traders sought out specific types of slaves and tailored their purchases accordingly. They dissolved families, and most slaves in the Upper South knew of the sale of at least one close family member. Slaves had a 30 percent chance of being sold to the Deep South until they were

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mid twenties. Speculators typically bought slaves between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five who appeared to be in good health. This "No. 1 Men, as they were called on the slave market, could be sold in Richmond in 1860 for $1,500. Slaves with certain skills, such as carpenters or blacksmiths, were worth even more on the slave market. The slaves who fetched the highest prices were known as "fancy girls". These attractive young women, often of mixed race, became reluctant concubines to their new masters and were sometimes sold for $1,700. Once purchased, the slaves were placed in pens or prisons, which could be found in cities like Baltimore, Alexandria, Norfolk, and Richmond. They can wait anywhere from a day to several weeks before beginning the southwest journey. Most prisons had a main office where slave traders would serve wine to potential customers. Behind the office was an open yard where slaves could be collected, either for practice or for inspection before sale. Large rooms bordered the courtyard, and here slaves slept on the floor, men in one room and women in another. The high walls around the prisons kept slaves and prying eyes back. After amassing a significant number of slaves, the slave traders arranged for shipment to the slave markets of the Deep South. The most common and visible way of moving serfs was a coffle. Anywhere between 50 and 150 slaves comprised a coffle, which was essentially a three-month forced march to Mississippi or Louisiana. Young male slaves were tied together in pairs, with one set of handcuffs cutting into each person's wrist. A rope or chain was threaded through the handcuffs, causing the slaves to move in two parallel lines. They typically remained handcuffed 24 hours a day for about a week until the threat of escape subsided. Women, children, and elderly slaves trudged alongside the cafe if they could keep up, or rode in supply wagons. Slaves slept on the floor at night and ate meager supplies from the slave traders' stores. Speculators also transported slaves in other ways. Coastal trade, voyages in sailing ships along the Atlantic Seaboard, Florida, and the Gulf of Mexico, was a quick and reliable way to send slaves from the Chesapeake to New Orleans. During the two-week voyage, serfs were tightly packed in cargo holds and usually not allowed on deck. Speculators also transported slaves on the rivers. Slaves from the Chesapeake marched to the western edge of modern-day West Virginia and boarded flatboats for a voyage to Natchez. In the 1850s, slave traders used railroads to ship their slaves to the Deep South. As soon as slaves arrived in the slave camps of the Deep South, slave traders prepared them for sale. Speculators increased the diet of these slaves and dressed them in better clothes to give the appearance of humane treatment. William Wells Brown, a slave working for a slave trader, recalled plucking gray beards, rubbing a blackening substance on gray hair, and smearing grease into the creases of slaves' faces. He recalled slaves looking decades younger after he finished with them. Since a slave's value declined with age, a slave trader could make a greater profit using such tactics. Speculators also trained slaves on what to say and how to present themselves to potential buyers.

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Slave traders quickly and deservedly gained a reputation for double-dealing, and potential buyers were cautious about their purchases. Whites customarily screened slaves before buying them. Male slaves may have to jump, run, or climb stairs to prove their strength. Women quickly opened and closed their hands to show they could easily pick cotton. Prospective buyers flexed muscles, jabbed in the stomach, and examined the teeth, all hoping to discover the truth about slaves. Slaves, including women, are customarily stripped to the waist for such inspection; Buyers saw scars on a slave's back as evidence of difficulty or unruliness. Women may also undergo a gross pelvic exam to determine whether or not they are capable of bearing children. Slaves who suffered these humiliations were not just passive actors in sales. They have often actively influenced their buyers. If a potential buyer seemed too tough or unattractive, slaves would sulk or accommodate requests with a minimum of effort. In contrast, when slaves encountered a potential buyer who seemed cheap, they presented a much more appealing front. Slaves also exchanged gossip and information in the slave markets. A number of slaves ran errands for slave traders and had access to outside information. It appears that slave markets became rallying points for the transmission of information, and news and rumors spread about the slave market on various plantations. The internal slave trade had significant consequences for white and black Southerners. The slave population of the "Cotton Kingdom" was young. In Alabama, for example, nearly 40 percent of slaves were under the age of 25, a number significantly higher than in the established Southern states. The domestic slave trade unified slave culture by softening regional differences. Dialects and practices that were conspicuous in eastern Virginia or Savannah became indistinguishable in Louisiana. Slaves caught in the clutches of the internal slave trade had to relinquish their regional identification and rely on one another to survive the shock of transport to the Deep South. In this way, the "Second Middle Passage" came very close to the first voyage across the Atlantic. See also languages ​​and communication. Further reading: Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; Gudmestad, Robert. A troublesome trade: the transformation of the interstate slave trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003; Johnson, Walter. Soul for Soul: Life in the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000; Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders and Slaves in the Old South. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Robert Gudmestad Islam and Muslims Slavery was practiced in Islamic societies for more than 1,400 years, and Muslims played a vital role in the transatlantic slave trade. Modern European slavery had its roots in the Muslim slave culture of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Islamic chiefs and merchants often served

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Fulani settlement and surrounding gardens, eighteenth century. Tracy W. McGregor Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

as suppliers for European slave traders along the west coast of Africa. Slavery continued in some parts of the Arab world in the 20th century. Like the Bible, the Koran, Islam's holy book, contains numerous passages dealing with slavery. For the most part, the Qur'an does not advocate or oppose slavery, but rather deals with a number of practical issues related to the conversion, liberation, and integration of slaves into society. Mohammad, Islam's founder and most important prophet, owned slaves, although some Islamic scholars argue that he advocated freedom for slaves who converted to Islam. Traditional Islamic law specifically regulates the treatment of slaves, including permits for the enslavement of non-Muslims and punishments for owners who mistreat their slaves (freeing the injured slave was one such punishment for cruel masters). Islamic law also permitted the use of slaves for their master's sexual pleasure and mandated that children born to a male owner and a female slave were free from bondage. Slaves in Muslim societies could attain a high level of social status. Warrior slaves, for example, were often given political office, while other slaves rose to become powerful advisors to reigning monarchs. Military slaves (commonly known as "janissaries") enjoyed a higher status than domestic servants. Large numbers of slaves were used as domestics, bodyguards, and concubines. There were also large numbers of military slaves. For example, Egypt's first Muslim leader had an army of 24,000 Arab and European slaves and 45,000 black slaves. Finally some rulers and elites

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Merchants had thousands of slaves who worked in mines, in large-scale agriculture, and on trade routes. According to Islamic law and tradition, there were a number of ways people could become slaves. Children of slaves could become slaves under certain circumstances. In addition, prisoners of war or conquest could be made slaves, especially if they were not Muslims. Captured soldiers were often turned into slaves, although it was common for warriors to be ransomed. Civilian women, men and children captured during raids or the conquest of territories were made slaves (there have been numerous historical examples of the men of a conquered territory being killed and the women and children being made slaves). Finally, non-Muslims could be sold into slavery. In the 1800s, Muslim societies gained most of their slaves through conquest. Initially, slaves from Europe and Russia were very popular; However, as the military strength of European powers increased with the Renaissance and Reformation, Muslim rulers increasingly turned to Africa to obtain slaves. Muslim slave traders organized large raids into Africa to capture blacks who were then sold in large slave bazaars. Until the peak of the European slave trade in the early 1800s, the world's largest slave bazaars were in Mecca, Baghdad, and Tripoli. Demand for African slaves accelerated as the Trans-Saharan slave trade routes became more profitable. Slaves were needed to transport goods along the routes, and the high mortality rate of the journey required a constant supply of new slaves (some contemporary accounts suggest that slaves on the routes or in the salt mines had a life expectancy of less than five years ). The harsh conditions and high mortality rate led to several major slave rebellions. One of the largest was the Zenj Rebellion in what is now Iraq. The revolt lasted from 863 to 883 AD and affected African slaves who had been transported to the Middle East to work on large farms. Islamic traders operated a sophisticated slave trade from the East African coast. Slaves were acquired in a variety of ways, including raiding, and as tribute to rulers from lowly chiefs. Beginning in the 7th century CE, slaves were transported and sold to owners in India, Ceylon, and China. In exchange for slaves, Arab traders received spices, gold, and silver. The East African slave trade lasted until European suppression in the 19th century. The Portuguese first interacted with modern slavery in their trade relations with the Arab rulers of North Africa. As Portuguese merchants established trading posts along the African coast, they became concerned with the profitable transportation of slaves for Islamic rulers, particularly the transportation of slaves from the southern outposts to points in the north where slaves are used on the Trans-Saharan routes could. In the 1480s, the Portuguese traded with local Muslim chiefs and merchants for gold, pepper and ivory in exchange for trade goods, weapons and the transportation of slaves. The Portuguese and later European slave traders established forts or trading posts along the coast and relied on local people to ambush and capture slaves from inland villages or opposing tribes. Europeans also traveled further south across the

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Islamic traders to avoid their higher costs. Despite this, Islamic traders remained an important part of the trade. Muslim rulers opposed European efforts to suppress the slave trade. After Britain abolished the slave trade within its empire, Muslim traders continued to raid, capture and sell slaves to illegal slave traders. Blockades, direct military action and the conquest of territories ended the West African slave trade at the end of the 19th century. See also Abolition of Slave Trade, UK; Accra; African rulers and the slave trade; calabar; closure of the slave trade; Dahomey; enslavement and procurement; Mozambique; Portuguese slave trade; rape and sexual abuse; Slave Coast; slavery in Africa; Wars, African. Further reading: Esposito, John L. Islam: the Straight Path. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; Lewis, Bernard. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Inquiry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990; Peter, Rudolph. Jihad in classical and modern Islam. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1996.

Tom Lanford

Ivory Wreck, The A shipwreck off the coast of the Middle Florida Keys, Florida was determined to be that of a slave trader in 1948. The wreck is located four miles off the coast of Key Vaca, at Delta Shoal, one mile east of the Sombrero Key lighthouse, in a spur and rill reef formation south of the shoal. This formation has gorges leading to the open sea. In one of these canyons, at a depth of 25 feet, the first artifacts were discovered. The wreck is one of seven slave ships known to have wrecked off the Florida Keys, a chain of tiny islands along the sailing route to Europe from Havana, the Gulf of Mexico and the western Caribbean. The others are (1) a Portuguese ship returning from Cartagena, Colombia, which was wrecked in a hurricane off the Dry Tortugas in 1622; (2) the English slave trader Henrietta Marie, who was shipwrecked in a storm near the Marquesas Keys while returning from Jamaica in 1700; (3) the English ship Nassau, returning to Bristol from Jamaica in 1741 at an unknown location on "the Martins" (the Martires, the old Spanish name for the Florida Keys); (4) the English slave trader Fly on his way from Jamaica to Africa, which burned down off "Cape Florida" in 1789; (5) the American coastal slave ship Cosmopolite, which ran aground and was lost in a storm off Key West in 1821 with twenty-seven enslaved people on board (all survived), en route from Charleston to New Orleans; and (6) the Spanish slave trader Guerrero, who was shipwrecked off Key Largo in 1827 (520 of the 561 prisoners on board survived). Local fishermen were generally aware of the Delta Shoal wreck, but none had examined it. Some interest in the wreck was sparked after a seventeen-year-old spearfisherman, Charlie Slater, came to the village on Marathon Island with an elephant's tusk. Two guns at the site were found by Marathon resident Halley Hamlin (with one brought to the surface) after being shown to him by bottom fisherman Harry Reith. Young Slater took the tusk to famous treasure diver Art McKee. McKee owned the Museum of Sunken Treasure in the Upper Florida Keys, and he

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interested in the find. The tusk, he knew, indicated that the site was definitely the wreck of a slave ship. After slave traders loaded ivory and men in Africa and sold the captives in the New World, they returned to Europe and sold ivory for additional profit. The day before Slater and McKee traveled to Marathon to charter a boat, Cleveland couple George ("Barney") and Jane Crile and their children discovered the unraised gun while filming underwater. The Criles were vacationing in the Keys, and when the owner (Bill Thompson) of the Marathon guest cabins where they stayed found out about their desire to dive wrecks, he suggested some before Marathon. McKee, an experienced hardhat diver, and Slater arrived on site the day the Criles intended to recover the cannon they had found the day before. Earlier that day, Barney Crile found a tusk near the cannon. Jane Crile wrote of the fantastic coincidence of McKee's presence that day in her popular 1954 book Treasure Diving Holidays. McKee found a coral-wrapped musket barrel with a brass trigger guard exposed. There were two cauldrons covered with brass corals, one heavily crushed, made using the technique of 'spun brass'. Stacks of brass pans glued together were also found. Other finds included dozens of round lead musket balls and water-worn pebbles, three-pound cannonballs, shot, a piece of a pewter spoon, a metal dinner plate and serving dish, partially burned stovewood, blue and white porcelain fragments (later identified by the Smithsonian Institution as part a Delft Ale jug made in Bristol, England), and a 16th century ''Cardinal Bellarmine'' wine jug.'' Twelve tusks (in addition to the one Slater recovered) and a bronze breech block for use with a Swing gun were recovered. Later, Bill Thompson found a pewter cup in perfect condition, and Hamlin found a 24-pound bronze breech cup that would have carried the powder in a breech-loading gun. In later years others found leg irons, brass bowls, balance weights for precious gems, a small copper cannon, brass dividers and five ornate sea dragon ornaments that once adorned musket shafts. In 1948, Hamlin and McKee towed the cannon, with a yellow sea fan growing out of the muzzle, off the reef onto a barge for the Criles. The iron gun was a saker, seven and a half feet long with a bore of three and a half inches. On land, markings were found on the gun after an inch of coral had chipped off: the letter P, below it in writing, JN and the numbers 170 1/11 24. A written agreement was reached between Bill Thompson, Art McKee, and George Crile regarding the division of artifacts. After the Criles returned to Cleveland, McKee and his partner Wesly Bradley discovered more ivory, which was divided between McKee and Thompson. None of the authors of the discovery mentioned ballast rock, so only part of the ship may have been found. In his 2001 book Galleon Alley, Bob Weller wrote of the discovery of four tusks, African copper coins, and "slave bracelets" (manillas used as trade goods for prisoners) elsewhere in Southeast Miami rescuer Art Hartman Page of Key Vaca. This side had a gravel pile. A quarter mile from Delta Shoal, inventor and explorer Ed Link raised a 1617 Spanish cannon called the Criles in 1951. That was it

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Iron, but with different markings. Although there are no fewer than seven wrecks on Delta Shoal, it could have come from the slave trader. Link recovered a small piece of tusk that is now in the Edwin A. Link Underwater Archaeological Collection at the Roberson Center for the Arts and Sciences in Binghamton, New York. The Criles shipped their cannon to Cleveland. Their artifacts were displayed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Criles made a color film about the wreck that was shown in the area. Her four tusks, brass cauldrons, and the cannon were then placed in her home in Cleveland. Left untreated, flake by flake, wrote Jane Crile, the cannon disintegrated. In his 1971 book Diving to a Flash of Gold, Martin Meylach wrote that not much could be seen from the first wreck site and that the wreck was scattered and mostly buried. He noticed that a second part of the wreck lay on the shoal where two more tusks had been found. It was not until April 2000 that another tusk was found by a marathon diver, and after being photographed and reported to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary office, it was reburied on site. Between 2000 and 2006, two museums in the Florida Keys received additional artifacts. The museums at Crane Point Hammock, Marathon, received a tusk recovered long ago, and the Mel Fisher Treasure Museum, Key West, purchased two brass bowls and two tusks from Karen McKee, daughter of the late Art McKee. Perhaps one day the wreck can be identified by name from the markings on the cannon. Since 1948 it has simply been called "The Ivory Wreck". Further reading: Crile, Jane and Barney. Treasure Diver Holidays, 160–176. New York: Viking Press, 1954; McKee, Arthur, Ben Hibbs. December 24, 1953, in Ed Link Correspondence File, Edward A. Link Collection, Special Collections, University Libraries, State University of New York, Binghamton, New York.

Gail Swanson

J Jamaica Jamaica, an island nation of 4,207.5 square miles in the Caribbean Sea, was once the largest British colonial possession in the Caribbean. It gained its independence in 1962 and derived its name from the Arawak word meaning "land of water and wood". After Christopher Columbus first landed on the island in 1494, which he named Santiago, Jamaica became a Spanish colony in 1509. It was later seized from the Spanish by the English in 1655 and officially became a British colony in 1670. In an effort to enslave the indigenous people, the Tainos, the Spanish decimated the population by either working them to death on farms or in China's relentless gold mines. Demand for labor on sugar and tobacco plantations in the New World led to the importation of Africans as slaves from the early 16th century. When the English fought for control of the island in 1655, the Spanish freed the African slaves who fled to remote regions of the island, where they lived in quasi-independent maroon communities. With the advent of British rule, imports of African slaves increased exponentially and Jamaica not only became the largest sugar producer (770 tons per year), but also served as a hub for slave ships bound for South Carolina, Barbados and New York. The transatlantic slave trade brought many demographic and cultural changes to the island over time. It is estimated that in 1770 there were 40,000 African slaves for every 7,000 English inhabitants and by 1800 the slave population had grown to 3 million. Although other immigrants from Asia and Europe largely arrived on the island after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, the African presence was and still is predominant: about 90.5 percent of the population is of African descent. The majority of slaves brought to Jamaica came from what is known as the Slave Coast (modern-day western Nigeria, Benin, and Togo) and the Gold Coast (Ghana), creating a diverse linguistic, religious, and cultural group. Certain forms of polytheistic religious practices (Obeah) and expressions (Creole) are thus partly rooted in the cultural orientation of this group.

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Slave rebellions in Jamaica, as in other slave-owning societies in the Americas and the Caribbean, took many forms: arson, foot dragging, and running away. Historians believe that the frequency of slave rebellions in Jamaica was unprecedented due to the huge slave population, the number of African-born slaves, and the Maroon communities. Led by figures such as Cudjoe, Accompong, Nany and Quao, the Maroons waged a guerrilla war of emancipation against the English for more than fifty years. When the English outlawed slavery in 1833, an estimated 311,000 slaves became free in Jamaica. The transatlantic slave trade, which forcibly brought many Africans into Jamaica through the Middle Passage, also brought religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity to the island nation. See also British Caribbean; British slave trade; Escape and Runaways (Maroonage). Further Reading: Knight, Franklin W., and Palmer, Colin A., eds. The Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989; Shepherd, Verene, and McD. Beckles, Hilary, eds. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000; "Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." Data and Information Services Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison website: http://dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/slavedata/index.html.

Mawuena Logan

K Key West African Cemetery In 2001, a historic Florida state marker was placed on a public beach in Key West, Florida Keys, in a cemetery that had previously been unmarked for 141 years. There, in 1860, 295 Africans were buried and then forgotten, all victims of the slave trade. In 1859 the US anti-slavery squadron was transferred to Angola from Cape Verde and four steamers added as a second network for the slave traders not caught off Africa. U.S. Navy Secretary Isaac Toucey's orders for commanders to patrol the coast of Cuba "the immediate object in sight was the suppression of the slave trade between that island and Africa, to the extent that it is carried on by citizens or under the flag of the United States." Since 1808 it was illegal for any US citizen to outfit or finance a slave ship operating out of a US port. The law was ignored by shipowners and captains because of the immense profit. In 1860, a human being bought in Africa for $10 to $34 could be sold to planters in Cuba for $1,000. On December 16, 1859, the Amesbury, Massachusetts-built clipper Wildfire (owner Captain Philip Stanhope, Pierre L. Pearce) sailed from New York toward the Congo, where on March 21, 1860, 608 Africans were forced into the ship's halt. Most were between six and twenty years old. The Wildfire had been at sea for thirty-five days when the USS Mohawk (under Lieutenant T. Augustus Craven) sighted her. Mistaking the Mohawk for a British cruiser, the Wildfire captain hoisted the American flag. The bark was towed to the nearest American port, Key West, where the 507 surviving Africans were turned over to a surprised US Marshal Fernando J. Moreno. Moreno acted with all haste, providing quarters and building a hospital for the Africans. Many were ill or blind from diseases caused by the conditions they endured while chained in the hold - blind from eye inflammation and sick from pulmonary diseases, typhoid and dysentery. This capture was followed nineteen days later by the capture of the William (under Capt. William Weston aka Washington Symmes of Philadelphia, Thomas W. Williams of Baltimore, owner) by the USS Wyandott (under Lieutenant

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Fabius Stanley) and 513 other Africans to Key West. A fortnight later, the USS Crusader (under Lieutenant John N. Maffitt) captured the Bogota (under Captain Faukner, owned by New York). A total of 1,433 Africans were brought to Key West with their human "cargo". The diseases continued unabated despite all care. The dead were buried at a point of land now called Higgs Beach, which has been an established burial site since the 1830s. The survivors were taken to Liberia. The Civil War began the next year, but Key West remained in Union hands. In 1861, anticipating the construction of fortifications, James C. Clapp drew a detailed map of Key West for Captain E. B. Hunt, Army Corps of Engineers. On the map discovered in Washington in 1994 by Keys historian John Viel, Clapp had marked "African Cemetery." When ordered to build a battery, the West Martello Tower, in the cemetery, Hunt disagreed. His superior in Washington, Joseph G. Totten, ignored this. Most of the remains were moved in 1862, possibly to an area about two blocks away where many human bones were found during a pipeline project in the 1940s. In 1992, a receipt for the burial of 294 Africans was discovered. Two years later, Many forwarded the map and this tragic place was discovered. It was marked five years after its publication in the March 2, 1997 issue of the Key West Citizen. In 2002, an uninterrupted ground penetrating radar survey was conducted around the battery by Lawrence B. Conyers. Conyers discovered an area that contained at least nine other undisturbed burials. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, United States. Further reading: Lynch, Marika. "Beneath the Beach, Bones of Slaves." Miami Herald, February 22, 1998; Blvin, Kip. "History Hidden under Higgs [Beach]." Citizen of Key West, Fla., May 8, 2000; Jenkins, Robert N. "Liberated, Then Forgotten." St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, December 26, 2003.

Gail Swanson Congo The Congo are a Bantu-speaking group from west-central Africa (modern-day Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola). The Congo consolidated into a centralized kingdom in the 14th century, characterized by its close contact with Europeans and Christianity from the late 15th century until its dissolution at the turn of the 19th century. The word Congo also refers to a set of cultural and religious practices shared by large numbers of people in Central Africa and the Americas since the era of the Atlantic slave trade. The origins of the kingdom are traced in oral tradition to a civilizing hero, military champion, inventor of blacksmithing and magic, the first Kongo king or Manikongo named Lukeni lua Nimi, believed to have lived around the turn of the 14th century. Over the next two centuries, under the leadership of royal matrilineal descent, the Kongo group consolidated a large territory of vassal provinces clustered around their capital, Mbanza Kongo (later São Salvador), through violence or deliberate alliances. At the height of its power, the kingdom stretched from across the Kongo River in the north to the Kwanza River in the south, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the

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Residence of the King of Congo, late 17th century. Tracy W. McGregor Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

west to east past the Nkisi River. Its economy was based on the production and trade of agricultural goods, copper and iron and was organized in a system of hierarchical taxation and tribute payments ultimately controlled by the house of the king. Its political system was formally organised, hierarchical and centralized in the hands of the Manikongo. In 1482, with the arrival of the Portuguese explorer Diogo Caao, the Kongo Kingdom entered European history. In 1512 the Manikongo Nzinga Nkuwa adopted Catholicism as the state religion, took the baptismal name Afonso I, and established economic and diplomatic relations with Portugal and the papacy. Congo involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in response to labor needs in the Brazilian countries, in turn controlled by its European allies Portugal and Holland, varied from province to province. It is generally admitted that a limited number of Kongo people were sold as slaves, while they shipped inland men and women to the coastal slave market. While not opposed to the trade, the various Manikongo protested its disruptive effects on the kingdom's political and social structures and European disregard for traditional rules of enslavement. After a century of prosperity, culminating in the brilliant reign of King Garcia II of Congo (1641–1661), the kingdom suffered the combined devastating effects of waves of invasion from neighboring peoples, civil war and the growing Atlantic slave trade. After the decisive Battle of Mbwila (1665), which the Congo lost to the Portuguese, the centralized, urban kingdom disintegrated and became a predominantly rural monarchy ruled by a provincial aristocracy and a weakened king. The strategic use of Christian rituals and the profits from the slave trade made this possible

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nobles to maintain their privileges and political status quo until the mid-19th century. In 1885, Congo's territories were divided between Portuguese Angola and the Belgian Crown by the European colonial powers. As part of the larger Bantu cultural and linguistic area, the Congo share important religious, linguistic and social characteristics with neighboring African populations. Kikongo, the language of the Kongo people (or Bakongo), is a Bantu language and is related to, and to a small extent mutually intelligible, the neighboring languages ​​Kimbundu (Angola), Lingala (Congo) and Swahili (Southeast Africa). . Kongo religion focuses on ancestor worship and belief in the relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The centuries-long relationship with European traders and missionaries has shaped the belief system and religious art of the Congo, both of which incorporate characteristics and icons of Christianity into their discourse. Socially, one of the long-lasting effects of the blending of Christianity and Congo worldview in Central Africa was the spread of prophetic or messianic politico-religious movements from the Antonians of the early 18th century to Kimbanguism of the 1920s. The larger Congo region was one of the main gateways for the deportation of Africans who were sold to America as slaves. In the New Continent, Bantu slaves from Central Africa created a culture based on the shared social, linguistic, and religious characteristics of their groups of origin, a phenomenon they identified with the word "Congo". Congo has taken different forms in different parts of the western hemisphere, but it has remained the common identifying name for the various living manifestations of shared beliefs through the centuries of the slave trade to the present day. Congo's spiritual and cultural heritage is manifested in the use of such religious artefacts as Paquets Congo in Haiti, Bottle Trees in the southern United States, or Prendas in Cuba. Congo has also served as a catch-all for social, cultural, and political movements of empowerment among members of the African diaspora. In Brazil, as well as in Cuba and Haiti, groups have formed that call themselves Congo nations and symbolically elect their own kings during week-long festivals. See also Dutch Slave Trade; Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Balandier, Georges. Daily life in the Kingdom of Kongo from the 16th to the 18th centuries. 1st American edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968; Hilton, Anne. The Kingdom of the Congo, Oxford Studies in African Affairs. New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1985; Thompson, Robert Farris, Cornet, Joseph and National Gallery of Art (USA). The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981; Thornton, John Kelly. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

Cecile Fromont

Kormantyn The name Kormantyn comes from a West African town that is now in the city of Abandze in modern Ghana. This city is home to Fort Amsterdam, a large fortified structure built by the Dutch West India Company in the 1660s to protect the Dutch gold trade. It was later

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used for this company's trade with enslaved Africans. The term 'kormantyn' (various spellings) was used between the 17th and 19th centuries to refer to enslaved Africans believed to have come from the Gold Coast region of West Africa. The first European outpost at Kormantyn was established by the English Company of Adventurers of London Trading to Guynney and Binney (Guinea and Benin). The English built a fort at Kormantyn in 1631 in hopes of improving England's gold trade on the Gold Coast. Built by the English, it was destroyed by fire in 1640 and then rebuilt. The new fort at Kormantyn contained what may be the first slave prison built on the Gold Coast. Kormantyn was the headquarters of the English trading company until 1664, when the English fortress was conquered by the Dutch. Fort Amsterdam continued to function as a Dutch trading stronghold on the coast of Ghana during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, but it was never more important to European trade on that coast than it was in the mid-17th century. During the middle decades of the 17th century, when Kormantyn was under English control, English plantation owners and slave buyers in America - especially Jamaica and Barbados - began to refer to all slaves bought on the Gold Coast as Coromantese or Coromantines. So-called Coromante slaves made up the majority of the slave population in Jamaica from the late 16th to mid-17th centuries and played a significant role in slave rebellions in Barbados and Jamaica. References to Gold Coast slaves as Coromantese after Kormantyn are misnomers in two respects. Enslaved individuals sold in Kormantyn or elsewhere on the Gold Coast most likely haild from a town or village far inland from the coast and had a cultural background markedly different from that of the Fante in Kormantyn itself. More importantly, by labeling enslaved persons sold in the Gold Coast as members of the Coromante ethnic group, records in the British West Indies created the false impression that enslaved persons sold in the Gold Coast shared a common ethnolinguistic or cultural had background. In fact, enslaved people who were sold on the Gold Coast were captured or bought in villages and markets that extended beyond the borders of present-day Ghana. They represented dozens of different linguistic and cultural groups. There are many alternative spellings of this term. In addition to those used above, one may encounter the following spellings: Kormantine, Kromantse, Cormantyn, Cormantyne, Cormantin/Kormantin, Cormentin, Coromonteen, and Koromanti. See also British slave trade; Dutch slave trade; British Caribbean; trade forts. Further reading: Craton, Michael. Empire, enslavement and freedom in the Caribbean. Princeton, NJ: Ian Randle Publishers, 1997; Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Van Dantzig, Albert. Forts and Castles of Ghana. Accra: Sedco Publishing, 1980.

Rebecca Shumway

L Lagos The port of Lagos (Nigeria) was one of the most important ports on the Slave Coast. Its formation is often explained by its geographical location in relation to the lagoon's inland routes. It was located at the only permanent mouth of the inland lagoons into the sea and between the Volta River to the west and the Mahin River (known to the earliest European navigators as the Rio Primeiro or First River) to the east. Oral and written sources indicate that the first European traders arrived in Lagos during the reign of Akinsemoyin, the fourth Oba (king) of Lagos. The date of Akinsemoyin's reign is not certain, but it is known that his successor, Ologun Kutere, sat on the throne in the 1780s and 1790s. During this time, human trafficking developed into a veritable commercial enterprise. Although Lagos was a latecomer in human trafficking compared to its neighbors in Dahomey, it developed into an important slave port in the first half of the 19th century. The Yoruba civil wars in the 19th century produced most of the slaves who were transported to the West Indies via Lagos. British interest in Lagos in the first half of the 19th century can best be appreciated in terms of its role in providing the market and facilities for human trafficking. The "Gun Boat Policy", the official British policy of patrolling the West African waterways to free captured slaves, was extended to Lagos Harbour. The second and third decades of the 19th century were marked by unhealthy relations between the British on the one hand and Africans and other European nations wishing to continue the slave trade on the other. In 1845 the events in Lagos developed into an episode that tested the depth of British policy towards the slave trade and local African politics. An inheritance dispute broke out between two princes, Akintoye and Kosoko. The British predominantly interpreted the rivalry as a struggle between pro- and anti-slave trading parties. Meanwhile, chief rivalry was a traditional problem that arose whenever new kings or chiefs were about to be enthroned in Africa. Just as African chiefs had long exploited

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the jealous rivalries of European traders on the coast had similarly exploited chieftainships by European traders from different nations. The British supported Akitoye, who had been crowned king in 1841, but he was overthrown in 1845 by Kosoko, a slave trader hated by the British. Between 1845 and 1851, when Kosoko ruled, his relations with the British were troubled because he continued to trade in slaves. Events took a very different turn when the British bombed Lagos in 1851 and restored Akitoye as king after assuring them that he would outlaw the slave trade. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, Great Britain. Further reading: Law, Robin. "Trade and Politics behind the Slave Coast: The Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos, 1500-1800." The Journal of African History 24, 3 (1983): 321-348; Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Rawley, James. The Transatlantic Slave Trade, a History. New York: WW Norton, 1981.

Saheed Aderinto Languages ​​and Communication By the 16th century a commercial language had developed on the West African coast. It was called "pidgin" and started out as "seaman's slang," a language of communication used among seafarers on a ship. Upon arrival on the African coast, it turned into “coastal lingo”. This was the acutely Africanized version of the language. It was the final stage in a metamorphosis of native African and European languages. The earliest version of Pidgin had a large Portuguese influence. Despite its varied forms, the vocabulary of trade languages ​​varied in content from place to place on the West African coast. The intensity of the influence of a particular European language depended on the presence of that nation on that stretch of coast. For example, where the English traded, “pidgin English” developed, as found in the towns of the Niger estuary. The development of this language from a convergence of different languages ​​is now referred to as Creole. Creole-Portuguese was the most common. Spoken mainly in Angola and the Congo, it extended all along the coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone, largely because they were the first Europeans to have contact with the African coast. The Portuguese Creole spoken in Guinea, Senegal and São Tomé shares characteristics similar to those spoken in Curaçao and Bonaire in the West Indies. Few Africans could speak a European language fluently. Those who could were usually the sons of African chiefs who were sent to join European merchants in their factories or trading forts along the coast. Some are even said to have been sent overseas for education at a time when their fathers were selling the children of other people in the same region into slavery. For prisoners, language was a major obstacle when coming to shore, as the enslaved were usually from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Some slaves acquired other native African languages. Olaudah Equiano was one who claimed that these dialects were not that difficult to learn and shared similarities with those of Europeans. That was to be expected, because the intonation of the Africans would have been much easier to understand than that of the Europeans. Some

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of the prisoners also learned a few European words while waiting for embarkation. That was hardly sufficient for communication. On board, the captains of slave ships segregated the slaves into tribal groups for better handling. Despite this, language barriers existed between slaves of different ethnic groups and between slaves and their masters. First-generation slaves spoke to people of the same tongue, but not to slaves from other tribes if they were all mixed. They arrived on European or American soil and spoke their languages. Upon arrival, they were called bozales in Latin America and "saltwater negroes" in the South. Mastery of a non-European language offered no advantage. Linguistic differences aside, different faiths - either Islam or traditional African religions - were viewed as fetishism, even by their predecessors who had learned the language and culture of their masters. These humiliations made it necessary to develop a means of communicating with their fellow slaves and masters. This also allowed new slaves to adapt. These new slaves had a hard time speaking Portuguese, English, Spanish or any other language their masters spoke. This led to the development of the pidgin languages ​​specific to slaves of different colonies. As African slaves developed these pidgins, the masters too often understood these languages ​​as a means of communicating with them. Derived from European languages ​​such as Portuguese, Spanish, French and English, the pidgins were not complete derivatives of languages ​​spoken on the African coast. At the same time, the pidgins in the diaspora were not fundamentally different from the languages ​​spoken on the African coast. Over time, the pidgins replaced the native African languages. The native languages ​​that were not as easily wiped out were those spoken in areas with large numbers of speakers of the same language and little European influence. With the differences in African dialects, it was easier to adopt European pidgin as a common language for slaves. Language barriers between slaves and between slaves and masters slowly crumbled. The developed African American pidgins are known as creole languages. The development of Creoles led to the formation of a black community in America. Gullah was a Creole dialect of the slaves of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. This language was a convergence of common elements in their native languages ​​with influences from European languages. A strong influence was the Wolof dialect. Other significant influences came from Fante, Ga, Kikongo, Kimbudu, Mandinka, Twi, Ewe, Ibo and Yoruba. As native dialects contributed to its composition, so did other European languages. Of them, English had a strong influence on Gullah. The various Creole languages ​​were widely spoken. Afro-English Creole was spoken in Barbados, Antiqua, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, South Carolina and Georgia. Afro-Portuguese Creole was mainly spoken in Brazil and Curacao. Afro-Hispanic Creole speakers were in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Colombia. Afro-French Creole speakers were in Louisiana, French Guiana, Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Grenada, while Afro-Dutch Creole was spoken in the Virgin Islands. These were the mother tongues of the children of first-generation slaves. They still spoke native languages ​​when meeting other Africans

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with the same tongue and as the opportunity arose. Given this, the first-generation African slaves were fluent in their native language and in Creole. As older slaves acculturated, they retained their native language. These African languages ​​were used to communicate with new slaves. Through the medium of language, African slaves preserved what they could of their culture, added to it, and passed it on to generations of their children. Further reading: Knight, F.W., ed. General History of the Caribbean. volume III. London and Basingstoke: UNESCO Publishing, 1997; Miller, Randall M. and Smith, John David, eds., Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin Leeward Islands The Leeward Islands are a series of Caribbean islands that form the northern end of the Lesser Antilles. In the seventeenth century the islands were colonized by the French, British, Dutch and Danes. Some of the islands, particularly some controlled by the British and French, became important sugar producers. By the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of slaves were imported from different parts of Africa to work on sugar plantations and other economic activities. By the eighteenth century, the population of all habitable islands had a large majority of slaves. From north to south, the group includes the nonvolcanic Anguilla, Saint Martin, Saba, and Sint Eustacius; and the volcanic St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, and Dominica (the latter is sometimes included as part of the Windward Islands). The Virgin Islands are not part of the Lesser Antilles geologically, but are mostly included in the group due to their proximity. The Leeward Islands were discovered by Europeans during Columbus' voyages. However, none grew into a larger colony until the French, British and Dutch began settling some of them in the 1620s. By the end of the seventeenth century all the islands were claimed. The British controlled the Northeast Virgin Islands, Anguilla, St Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, Barbuda and Montserrat; the Danes controlled the southwestern Virgin Islands; the Dutch-controlled portion of Saint Martin, Saba and Sint Eustatius; and the French controlled the other part of Saint Martin and Guadeloupe. From the beginning, some African slaves were brought to the new colonies. In the early years, however, whites made up the majority of settlers (about 55 percent as late as 1678 in England's Leeward Islands). In the last quarter of the 17th century, the English Leeward Islands began to adapt Barbadian methods of sugar production and created a large market for slaves. By 1708, 76 percent of the people of England's Leeward Islands were enslaved. French Guadeloupe and Saint Croix in the Danish Virgin Islands also became major sugar producers. Many other islands did not have the right environment for large-scale sugar production and only produced small crops of sugar or other commodities

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ˆ ts (e.g. Sint economically insignificant or became Eustatius trading company). Regardless, virtually all islands had slave majorities (though fewer in absolute numbers) by the late 18th century. Due to the low fertility and high mortality among African slaves in the sugar colonies, thousands of slaves had to be imported annually just to obtain the necessary labor. For the English Leeward Islands, slave imports increased from an estimated 1,300 per year in the last quarter of the 17th century to more than 3,000 per year after 1730. The total number of slaves imported into the English Leeward Islands has been estimated at more than 340,000. The slave population peaked at just 81,000. Similarly, Guadeloupe imported an estimated 291,000 slaves while having a slave population of nearly 100,000. Other parts of the Leeward Islands imported only a few tens of thousands of slaves. An estimated 7 percent of all slaves transported from Africa were brought to the Leeward Islands (Curtin, 1969, pp. 59, 62, 78, 80, 88). Records suggest that the largest African region of origin for slaves imported directly to England's Leeward Islands was Biafra Bay (more than 40 per cent), dominating the trade after an initial period in which Gold Coast Africans came to seems to have been the most common. Nonetheless, a diverse group of Africans came to the Leeward Islands with sizeable contingents from the Gold Coast (15 percent), the Windward Coast (12 percent), and Angola (10 percent). Direct imports of slaves into Guadeloupe appear to have been even more diverse, with the two largest groups coming from Angola (29 percent) and the Bay of Biafra (27 percent). Other well-represented groups were the Bay of Benin (13 percent) and Senegambia (10 percent). Earlier trade was characterized by a greater balance between the Bay of Benin and the Bay of Biafra, excluding Angola. Only at the end of the 18th century did Angola become more important and the Bay of Benin ceased to be a supplier. Many of the slaves on the English Leeward Islands and Guadeloupe were probably not directly imported but transshipped from other European colonies, which makes their origin unclear (African origin calculated according to Eltis, Behrendt, Richardson and Klein, 1999). See also British Caribbean; French Caribbean; Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Further reading: Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969; Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972; Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Stinchcombe, Arthur L. Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Patrick Luck Legitimate Trade “Legitimate trade”, also known as legitimate trade, is a term used to distinguish trade in African products such as hides, palm oil, peanuts and gold dust from the slave trade in the late 18th and 19th centuries Century. British abolitionists of the time hoped that legitimate trade would bring about the decline and eventual end of the Atlantic slave trade.

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Early support for legal trade developed in Britain in the 1790s, springing from a belief that trade in legal goods could not coexist with trade in slaves because the greater competitive advantage of legal trade would crowd out the slave trade. Abolitionists predicted that legal trade would boost local economies to such an extent that it would replace the need for the slave trade and also create a larger market for European imports. In reality, both legal trade and the slave trade expanded until the 1830s, when the slave trade began to decline. Most abolitionists in the early nineteenth century supported military or political intervention to end the slave trade, but legitimate trade theory remained influential. Proponents such as Swanzy and Hutton, British Gold Coast merchants, argued that, unlike the slave trade, which was limited to a small elite, the legitimate trade allowed for widespread participation by ordinary people. In the mid-19th century, official British colonial circles advocated the liberating potential of legal trade. Benjamin Campbell, British Consul in Lagos, and Richard Hutchinson, Consul for Biafra Bay, were notable key figures. Other factors contributed to the expansion of legal trade. European maritime and land laws abolishing the slave trade hastened the transition, as did military intervention. The new demands of the industrial revolution led European traders to turn their attention to commodities such as palm products, peanuts, cloves, rubber and cotton. Peanut and palm products were used to make cooking oils, machine lubricants, soaps and candles, further facilitating the expansion of European metropolitan areas and their industries. By 1830, palm oil had become the most lucrative commodity available on the west coast. The Ijo and Efik areas of the Niger Delta, once centers of the slave trade, were the most productive areas. Regions that already had an economy for such exports were well placed to take advantage of new trade opportunities. Biafra Bay, which had long established a small trade in palm oil, saw regular exports to Britain from the late 18th century. Trade grew steadily until the turn of the century and increased sharply from the 1820s. Despite this increase in legal trade, while British merchants had switched from slaves to palm oil, African merchants continued to engage in both trades simultaneously. Between 1842 and 1850, Britain negotiated more than forty treaties to encourage African rulers to refrain from engaging in the slave trade and to turn to an economy based on other trades. However, many African leaders found it difficult to honor the treaties, as the legal trade paid less dividends than the slave trade. Other African rulers, such as Agaja Trudo, one of the great kings of Dahomey, had little understanding of the slave trade. One of his motives for invading the coastal Aja kingdoms was to limit and eventually stop the slave trade and replace it with legitimate trade. He implored tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, and other trade workers to come to Dahomey in hopes of attracting businesses other than the slave trade. Throughout the nineteenth century, European

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Powers signed treaties with regional African rulers for rights to land and waterways, leading to the start of trading empires. In some areas of Africa, the expansion of agricultural commodities empowered peoples of slavish origin as they gained independent income, but the legitimate trade had negative side effects in other regions. European observers of the time expressed the view that legitimate trade in some cases led to greater inequality and bondage within Africa. Richard Burton, British Consul for the Bay of Biafra from 1861 to 1864, argued that the end of the overseas slave trade and the rise of the export trade in goods had strengthened the institutions of native slavery and worsened conditions for slaves. The expansion of new trade industries required labor to grow crops, produce palm oil and kernels, carry loads, paddle canoes, and work as trade assistants. In many societies, enslavement satisfied the demand for labor whenever possible. The expansion of legal trade has had profound political, economic and social implications for Africa. The abolition of the slave trade, the economic mainstay of the coastal states, brought about a radical change in the economic sphere that led to major social and political changes, including revolts in which former slaves demanded political and economic rights. The economic crisis in Europe in the 1870s caused falling prices for African commodities, which in turn created turmoil in areas dependent on those commodities. Such upheavals do not exhaust the many manifestations of the transformation from slavery to legal trade. Globally, slavery co-existed with legitimate trade for economic reasons until the early 20th century, when continued military interventions forced its abolition. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; African rulers and the slave trade; closure of the slave trade; Slavery in Africa. Further reading: Bowman, Joye L. “Legitimate Commerce” and Peanut Production in Portuguese Guinea, 1840s–1880s.” Journal of African History 28 (1987): 87–106; Korieh, Chima J. "The Nineteenth Century Trade Transition in West Africa: The Fall of the Hinterlands of Biafra." Canadian Journal of African Studies 34, 3, Special Edition: On Slavery and Islam in African History: A Tribute to Martin Klein (2000) : 588-615; McPhee, Allan. The Economic Revolution in British West Africa. London: F Cass, 1971 (1926); Northrup, David. "The Compatibility of the Slave and Palm Oil Trades in the Bight of Biafra." Journal of African History XVII, 3 (1976): 353-364; Reynolds, Edward. Stand the Storm: A History of the Atlantean Slave Trade. London: Allison & Busby, 1985.

Leslie Wilson

Lewis, Cudjo (? – 1935) One of 110 West African prisoners smuggled to the United States aboard the slave trader Clotilda, Cudjo Lewis was a co-founder and administrator of AfricaTown, Alabama, and made important contributions to the social, economic, and political life there life community. Slave raiders captured Lewis during the height of the Yoruba civil wars in the area also known as Nigeria and evacuated him to the coastal town of Ouidah, where Fon warriors sold him to Captain William Foster, commander of the Clotilda. In violation of Section 4 of the Piracy Act, Captain

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Foster smuggled Lewis and his fellow prisoners to Alabama, where Foster and his fellow smugglers divided up the prisoners and sold the rest of the load to several buyers. Timothy Meaher, the alleged mastermind of the Clotilda smuggling scheme, kept thirty prisoners, including Lewis, and dumped them on his property three miles north of Mobile. Land ownership was synonymous with captive survival, especially during the Reconstruction period when former slave states designed vagrant laws to capture and re-enslave landless, destitute black people and force them to work on plantations rather than pay fines or jail time. Land ownership offered blacks a minimum of protection from imprisonment, reenslavement, and domestic terrorism perpetrated against them by Klansmen and other white supremacists. Lewis and his shipmates preferred a life of freedom in their West African homelands to a life of slavery somewhere else. However, with no prospect of returning to their West African homelands, they wanted to found an African town in Alabama for themselves and their descendants. Lewis recognized the importance of land for the protection and survival of prisoners and led efforts to acquire land from Meaher. In 1868 Lewis was a co-founder of a community referred to as AfricaTown. Lewis earned respect from individuals in and outside of AfricaTown, where he built a one-bedroom home and raised a family. Lewis served as one of AfricaTown's governors, helping to maintain moral and social order among its residents. Like his West African ancestors, Lewis was a skilled farmer, cultivating one of the most prolific gardens in AfricaTown. People who knew Lewis described him as a generous person who shared food with others. In fact, AfricaTown is rooted in communalism and other West African ideals that have contributed to its viability. In 1872, Lewis played a key role in the founding of the Old Baptist Church and served as caretaker for several years thereafter. The building preserved as the Union Baptist Church is the architectural cornerstone of AfricaTown. The community still consists of the descendants of AfricaTown's founders. Lewis passed into ancestry in 1935 as the last survivor of the Clotilda smuggling expedition. Despite being the victim of a federal crime and being forced to spend the rest of his life in a country that does not recognize or respect his intelligence or humanity, Lewis lived his life as an upright man of exemplary character. Cudjo Lewis was a shrewd leader, a humanitarian and a model resident of AfricaTown, on whom he left an indelible impression. Further reading: Falola, Toyin and Oguntomisin, G.O. Yoruba Warlords of the 19th Century. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2001; Hurston, Zora Neal. "Cudjo's Own Story Of The Last African Slaver." Journal of Negro History 12 (October 1927): 648-663.

Natalie Suzette Robertson Liberia The founding of Liberia as an American colony in 1821 was the culmination of a concerted effort to bring free African Americans back to their ancestral homeland. In the early 19th century, a significant number of free people of color lived in the United States

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suspended for economic or moral reasons. There was a pervasive fear among many Southern whites that these free blacks would tend to incite slave rebellions, citing the Gabriel-led Virginia rebellion of 1800 and similar conspiracies in South Carolina, New Jersey, and New York. Many Southerners feared that increasing interactions between whites and freed people of color would lead to miscegenation. Urban northerners resented the competition that free African Americans represented in the labor market. To address these issues, a group of white Americans met in Washington, DC, in December 1816 and formed what became known as the American Colonization Society (ACS). The main goal of the ACS was to establish a colony on the West African coast and persuade Congress to allocate funds to facilitate the removal of willing African Americans. The ACS found support among white abolitionists, who suggested that returning African Americans to Africa would help reverse some of the injustices perpetrated by slavery. Missionaries saw an opportunity to spread Christianity to Africa. Most African Americans were strongly opposed to African colonization, but a small number saw repatriation to the newly formed colony as an opportunity to escape oppression and embarked on the first voyage in 1820. A growing number of free blacks would embrace the idea of ​​settling in Liberia when it became clear that full legal protection in the United States was still a long way off. Upon arriving in Liberia, the settlers, products of Victorian society, intended to establish a similar society in the West African colony. They continued the African American tradition of forming benevolent, professional, fraternal organizations, and missionary activities were encouraged. Freemasons, for example, played a prominent role as lodges became a forum for political issues and members acted as models of Christian values. The Liberian government encouraged moral behavior through the laws it enacted. Divorce, for example, had to be authorized by law, and unmarried births were punished. Although the settler population was mostly African Americans who had been free in the United States, the settlements were limited to the Atlantic Seaboard and existed largely separately from the native African population. The Africans who lived in their midst were required to wear western clothing and conform to the social norms of the settlers. Orphaned African youth were assimilated through apprenticeships with settler families. Partly due to the contributions of their protégés, American Liberians have been able to become more self-sufficient through agriculture. Liberia gained independence from the United States and the administration of the ACS in 1847. Further interactions between settlers and native Africans increased with the arrival of free, educated West Indians. Men like Edward Wilmot Blyden followed different traditions than those who had previously settled. In order to create an all-black republic, many of the arrivals in the 1850s advocated economic and social integration of the inland areas. This brought them into conflict with the older generation of settlers, who wanted to remain essentially separate from the inland peoples and limit trade to the coastal settlements in order to retain their power. Such tensions would characterize the volatile

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political situation in Liberia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meanwhile, however, American Liberians and missionaries pushed for a ban on rum and tobacco, realizing these commodities were vital to the slave trade. After importation of slaves into the United States was abolished, Liberians took in Africans freed from ships captured by the US Navy and incorporated them into settler communities through missions or the apprentice system. In this regard, the founding of Liberia proved important in challenging the system of tripartite slave trade. Additionally, along with Haiti and Ethiopia, the nation provided a strong example of black rule, which was rare at the time. See also returnees to Africa. Further reading: Moses, William J. Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850's. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998; Chic, Tom. Behold the Promised Land: A History of Settler African-American Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; Schmidt, James. Sojourners in Search of Freedom: The Settlement of Liberia by Black Americans. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987.

Carmen Lenore Wright Licensing Licensing was a part of the transatlantic slave trade, which took various forms. In its simplest form, it represented the form of authority bestowed on any corporation or individual or group of people involved in slave-trading activities. Slave trading activities included owning ships or plantations, and transporting, buying, and selling slaves. As the transatlantic slave trade developed into a true commercial enterprise, the homelands of individuals and groups of merchants began to establish policies and laws governing the activities of their citizens in Africa and America. Large slave trading companies had to obtain licenses from their home country before engaging in the transatlantic slave trade in Africa. Trade forts and slave ships were owned by individual traders or companies acting in the interests of their homeland. The most important aspect of licensing in the transatlantic slave trade was that when another country showed interest in trading at a stronghold or post that the other considered its sphere of influence, authority and approval were required. Therefore, licensing allowed fort owners to retain ownership and monopoly over the trading port. One nation's desire to trade in a fortress or trading post owned by another without a permit or license created tension and rivalry during the Transatlantic Slave Trade period. A classic example is Fort Saint Louis (in present-day Senegal), which sparked serious rivalry between France and Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. The list of chartered slave trade companies is long and inexhaustible. One of the most influential was a British public company called Royal Adventurers into Africa. This company was chartered in 1651 to

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supply 3,500 slaves to the Spanish colonies every year. In 1672 the company got into serious financial difficulties and had to go bankrupt. Its demise paved the way for the emergence of a more formidable slave trading company called the Royal Africa Company. The Royal Africa Company was licensed to monopolize the British slave trade. The license gave the company the ability to assert sole control of areas between Cape Blanco to the north and the Cape of Good Hope to the south. As a monopoly, it could seize the ships and prosecute illegal traders operating in its sphere of influence. The Dutch West India Company carried out the official policy of the Dutch government in Africa and the Americas. Chartered in 1621, the company, like its counterpart the Royal Africa Company, built and maintained forts in the coastal waters of western, eastern and southern Africa. It monopolized human trafficking until the 18th century, when attempts were made to allow individual traders to buy and sell slaves. The Dutch were not the only European nations to see the need to allow their nationals to freely trade in slaves. In fact, they succeeded the French and English, who had allowed individual merchants to buy and sell slaves until 1672 and 1689, respectively. The only condition was that individual slave traders, in the case of the British, had to pay 10 percent of their proceeds to the government. See also Dutch slave trade. Further Reading: Engerman, Stanley, and Genovese, Eugene. Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975; Palmer, Colin A. Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981; Postma, John. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Saheed Aderinto Life Expectancy "When few die, the gain is certain, but when many are lost, so is their possessor." This dictum profoundly influenced the way slave traders took measures to prevent high mortality rates in the Middle Passage. There were nutritional and epidemiological odds against slaves and sailors that affected their life expectancy. In general, slave deaths from disease, suicide, depression, and rebellion averaged 13 to 15 percent during the Middle Passage. There were two schools of thought among English slave captains, the loose-packers and the tight-packers. Loose-packers believed that by giving the slaves a little more space, better food and a certain degree of freedom, they reduced the mortality rate and got a better price or profit for each slave in the West Indies. Conversely, the packers cautioned that while the loss of life could be greater on each of their voyages, so could the net income from a larger load. If the survivors were weak and emaciated, they could be fattened in a West Indian slave farm before being offered for sale on the slave market. Many years after 1750 the packers were on the rise.

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Many factors influenced life expectancy during the Middle Passage. These included the time spent embarking, mutinies, disease, suicides, provisions, hygiene, and melancholy. Taking slaves was a process that could take up to a year, depending on geographic location. Crews often faced malaria, vengeance from angry natives, pirate attacks and the constant threat of slave mutiny. Mutinies were common and some of them were successful. The failed mutinies often resulted in heavy casualties among the slaves and the sailors. There are fairly clear accounts of 55 mutinies from 1699 to 1845 and references to more than 100 others. The records of the Middle Passage show that the Africans did not tamely submit to the Atlantic crossing. The cargo could be swept away by diseases. The longer the days at sea, the more dead there were in the slave cargo. Therefore, the captain often endeavored to shorten the voyage by ensuring an adequate supply of food and fresh water for at least three months. Slaves from the Windward Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were fed on rice, millet, or cornmeal, sometimes cooked with a few lumps of salt beef. Those from Biafra Bay at the eastern end of the Gulf of Guinea were fed braised yams. Slaves from the Congo and Angola states preferred cassava or plantains. They were all provided with half a liter of water served in a pan. After breakfast, a "joyless ceremony" called "Dancing the Slaves" followed. Dancing was prescribed as a therapeutic measure against suicidal melancholy. Slave captains sometimes advertised "A person who can play the bagpipes for a guinea ship." Slaves were told to sing. Their songs were not for amusement, but rather about grief, illness, fear of being beaten, their hunger and the memory of their country. Housekeeping was done to promote good health and proper nutrition. This approach was intended to ensure fewer slaves were lost in the Middle Passage. Some captains with dirty ships ran the risk of losing their slaves. While the slaves were on deck, they were monitored for suicide. Suicidal tendencies were high. Some slaves committed suicide by deliberately drowning or starving themselves to death. They believed that when they died, they would return to their homes and friends. This belief was popular among the Igbo slaves of eastern Nigeria. To prevent the idea from spreading widely, captains often cut off the heads of the dead, implying that they must be headless in their next life. This was done in the presence of the slaves. Another deadly scourge was a phenomenon called "solid melancholy" in the Guinea cargo. In the cargoes of Guinea, slaves who were well fed, treated kindly, and kept under a certain degree of good sanitary conditions often died simply from losing the will to live. Solid melancholy was a contagious disease among the slaves. Her symptoms were depression, dejection, and hunger strike. Some human cargoes were overcrowded, filthy, malnourished, and frightened with a desire to live. Perhaps the greatest cause of death during the Middle Passage was disease. The Middle Passage was a marketplace for diseases. Smallpox, measles, gonorrhea and syphilis came from Europe. Including the African diseases

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yellow fever, dengue fever, blackwater fever and malaria, as well as amoebic and bacillary dysentery (blood flow), guinea worms, hookworms, yaws, elephantiasis and leprosy. Smallpox was greatly feared because the ship could be infested, although dysentery often caused more deaths overall. The average mortality in the Middle Passage is impossible to state. Some voyages were made without the loss of a single slave. The English Privy Council in 1789 estimated the average mortality among slaves in the Middle Passage at about 12 percent. The mortality rate among slaves in the Middle Passage was probably no greater than that of white indentured laborers or even free Irish, Scottish and German immigrants in the North Atlantic crossing. The increasing sophistication of slave transport was reflected in the declining mortality rates, particularly in the post-1700s period. Ships often demanded a 10 percent mortality rate due to the standardization introduced in the trade, especially the specially constructed slave ships. The increasing demand for slaves has been attributed to the low life expectancy of the African American slave population. It has been found that African American slaves lived an average of seven years. Joseph Miller has pointed to the critical effects of age and sexual imbalance among Africans as causative factors in the negative population growth of slave labor. However, recent studies show positive population growth among native slaves and a life expectancy exceeding the average of seven working years in all American societies. The average life expectancy of male slaves was in the upper twenties in Brazil and in the mid-thirties in the United States, suggesting an average working life of at least twenty years in Brazil and twenty-five years in the United States. The average working life was at least twenty-five years for Brazilian slaves and thirty years for North American slaves. There was a high mortality rate among the newcomers. This has been referred to as the "seasoning process" where newcomers acclimate to the climate. Many of the young slaves in the American tropics died at about twice the rate expected for their African peers. Europeans with lower resistance to yellow fever and malaria died 10 times as often as expected in Europe. This partly explains why planters preferred Africans to Europeans. Slaves were imported to fill the deficit between births and deaths. See also trapping. Further reading: Cowley, Malcolm and Mannix, Daniel P. "The Middle Passage." In David Northrup, ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Lexington, MA: DC Heath and Company, 1994; Miller, Joseph C. "Deaths Before the Middle Passage." In David Northrup, ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Lexington: DC Heath and Company, 1994.

Rasheed Olaniyi Lisbon During the Portuguese Age of Exploration (1415-1478), Portugal initially, together with its neighbor Spain, dominated the Atlantic with its many shipping fleets and colonies along the west coasts of Africa and America. In the 1470s, Lisbon became the country's most important slave port. The Portuguese slave

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Trade then did not begin as a transatlantic trade, but as an Old World trade that shipped slaves to Lisbon and from there on to Spain and Italy. In 1539, 12,000 slaves were sold in the city's markets. Lisbon prospered from the trades associated with slavery, with Portuguese goods bartered for slaves, goods traded for slaves, and goods manufactured by the slaves. People invested in and profited from trade, and the royal family took their share through taxes. African slaves were employed in a variety of occupations, but increasingly they could be found in urban occupations such as domestic servants. On January 8, 1455, a papal bull entitled Romanus Pontifex, issued by Pope Nicholas V, was read in both Latin and Portuguese at Lisbon Cathedral. This document, one of enormous importance, justified slavery. After reading this document, Prince Henry was permitted to conquer, search, conquer and conquer all non-Christian subjects - especially those living in West Africa. As enemies of Christ, these groups of people were considered eternal slaves. Prince Henry the Navigator, the third son of the King of Portugal, was instrumental in early Portuguese explorations from Lisbon. He helped finance and organize many expeditions, such as that in 1415 to the north and west coasts of Africa, where he learned about the trade in spices, gold and silver. In 1441 the first groups of black slaves were brought to Lisbon for Prince Henry. Initially, slaves were captured through cruel means, including kidnapping and banditry. However, Prince Henry ordered a change in practice, creating a new system of slave trade between Africans and Europeans. Prince Henry also established a slave market and fort in Arguin Bay in 1445. From this fortress, black slaves were brought back to Lisbon and then, if necessary, distributed to nearby Portuguese cities. Portugal's long tradition of slavery dates back to the 12th and 13th centuries, when Muslims were captured and then enslaved by Christians in wars. Although enslavement of Muslims declined over the following centuries, a new trade in slaves from sub-Saharan Africa was established in the early 15th century. Initially, the slave trade developed with Portugal as a trading hub, with goods and human cargo being traded to and from Lisbon. Black slaves worked not only in Lisbon but also in Vora and the southern region known as the Algarve. During the mid-16th century, more than 32,000 African slaves lived in Portugal, with the majority being owned by the aristocracy, judicial and religious officials, and religious institutions. However, due to the declining number of slaves in Portugal, the country's African population - particularly in Lisbon - declined. Ultimately, Brazil's economic importance - fundamentally linked to slavery - overtook Portugal's. Slave fortresses were built on small islands off the coast of West Africa, the most important being Cape Verde and São Tomé. These two islands were used to collect slaves who were traded from the mainland and then sent to Lisbon. The development of sugar cultivation on Sao Tome' provided the blueprint for America's larger plantation economy. There is no doubt that Lisbon was involved in the Atlantic slave trade from an early date, at least around 1512, and indeed it was often Portuguese

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Traders who supplied African slaves to Spanish colonists and slave traders. The Portuguese established the first trading fort in West Africa (Elmina) in present-day Ghana and took Africans with them to work on the plantations in Madeira and São Tomé. Over the centuries, ships from Lisbon brought more slaves to America than any other European port. See also Europe, enslaved Africans in; Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Williams, Eric Eustace. capitalism and slavery; with a new introduction by Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 (1944).

Nicholas Jones Liverpool Liverpool, England, emerged as the dominant British slave trading port in the 1750s and was the leading slave port in the transatlantic world in the decades that followed. Located at the junction of the Mersey River and the tidal bay known as the Pool, Liverpool was an unpromising location for a deep sea port. In addition to growing trade with northern Europe, particularly Sweden and Russia, the Mediterranean coast and other parts of the continent, after 1660 Liverpool merchants began to develop a keen interest in transatlantic trade, particularly in West Indian sugar and Chesapeake tobacco trades. Trade in Liverpool grew slowly from the mid-16th century to the early 18th century, partly because commercial development was hampered by an almost total lack of quays, docks and other basic port facilities, a shortage which began with the opening of the das first wet dock in 1715. An unprecedented system of docks and shipyards, roads and canals were built in the following decades, a development that supported the expansion of the slave trade throughout the 18th century. Liverpool's first slave traders were invaders, who often used harassment to circumvent the Royal Africa Company's slave trading monopoly. Although the sinking of the Royal Africa Company in 1712 led to an explosion in the growth of the British slave trade, the slave trade in Liverpool remained insignificant for many years thereafter. Although Liverpool's slave traders did not pose a serious threat to their Bristol competitors before 1740, a decade later, by 1750, Liverpool had eclipsed both Bristol and London to become the leading slave port in the Atlantic world. This dominance was particularly pronounced between 1751 and 1775, when 1,713 slave ships left Liverpool for West Africa, while only 485 ships left Bristol for Africa and 458 from London. Between 1695, when the first known slave ships left Liverpool for Africa, and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, more than 4,800 slave companies left Liverpool Harbour. Traditional interpretations of the rise of the slave trade in Liverpool are varied. Some attribute the rise to easy access to Lancashire and Midlands manufactures, while others point to the construction of a dock system; an extensive regional trade in coal, salt, fish and Irish goods; the safety of

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North Canal during the war; the availability of investment capital; the low cost of slave operations; the role of commercial and social relations; and a long maritime tradition on Merseyside. Important as these factors were, however, the rise of the Liverpool slave trade can equally be attributed to the appearance after 1700 of a diverse group of slave trade entrepreneurs, men whose business acumen, social connections, business connections and wealth led to a competitive advantage over their competitors in France, the Netherlands, Portugal and elsewhere in the UK. Often referred to as a fishing village before 1700, the rapid rise of the Liverpool slave trade around 1750 was one of the great socio-economic developments in 18th-century British history. Further reading: Clemens, Paul G.E. "The Rise of Liverpool, 1665-1750." Economic History Review 29 (1976): 211-225; Francis, Hyde, Parkinson, Bradbury and Marriner, Sheila. "The Nature and Profitability of the Liverpool Slave Trade." The Economic History Review (1953): 368-377; Parkinson, CN The rise of the Port of Liverpool. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1952; Williams, Gomer. History of the Liverpool privateers and letters of marque giving an account of the Liverpool slave trade. London: F Cass, 1966 (1897).

Brian W. Refford Loango By the 15th century, the Vili kingdom of Loango stretched along the west-central African coast from the Congo River to Cape Lopez in the north. The earliest accounts of Loango come from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European explorers and traders, who describe a highly centralized kingdom made up of four provinces ruled by a powerful Maloango from the royal capital of Buali, near present-day Pointe Noire . Although Loango was never a source of slaves on the scale of its southern neighbor Angola, by the 18th century Loango was supplying European traders with many thousands of slaves, mainly for the Caribbean markets. With the decline of the transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century and a corresponding rise in legal trade, the kingdom's political structure became increasingly fragmented. The wealth and power of the merchants and traders replaced that of the Maloangos and paved the way for the decline of the kingdom and French colonization in the 1880s. Early European traders encountered well-established trade networks linking villages on the Loango coast with those inland. Regional specialization and production provided the Vili merchants with a wide range of products including sugar cane, redwood, palm nuts, salt, copper and ivory. Especially after the founding of Luanda in 1576, Vili traders maintained regular trade with European merchants. What began in the early 17th century as a small trade in fabrics, ivory and copper with Portuguese and Dutch traders had become largely a slave trade by the 1670s. The Portuguese increasingly faced competition from other European powers for their share of the Loango trade. By the 18th century the English, followed by the French, had overtaken the Portuguese and Dutch as Loango's largest trading partners. As the demand for slaves increased meanwhile

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In the 18th century, Loango became an important source of New World labor in the Americas and the Caribbean. By the 1780s, Loango accounted for almost two-thirds of the French slave trade (10,000 to 15,000 slaves a year), which secured labor for the booming sugar industry in Saint Domingue and other Caribbean islands. However, Portuguese trade in Loango increased in the first half of the 19th century when American, Brazilian, Cuban and Spanish slavers joined Portuguese smugglers in evading British and American naval squadrons patrolling against transatlantic slave voyages. The kingdom's three major trading ports, Loango Bay, Malemba, and Cabinda, attracted slaves from different regions, including Mpumbo, Congo, and Angola. A highly structured, hierarchical organization of the slave trade in Loango enabled the Vili rulers to trade with Europeans largely on their terms. The Maloango generated revenue by taxing the sale of slaves through a system that empowered local officials (mafouks) to regulate local brokers, who gained exclusive bargaining rights with Europeans. Despite attempts by the Portuguese to subvert this system, the Vili rulers managed to create a free trade zone that for three centuries welcomed (and benefited from) trade with a number of European powers. See also Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Martin, Phyllis M. The External Trade of the Loango Coast 1576-1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Edward D. Maris-Wolf

London London, the earliest center of the British slave trade, was the largest slave trading port in Britain until it was eclipsed by Bristol after 1725. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the first known slave ship to leave London for Africa was the Dragon, sailing in 1633; while two others, the Bonadventure and the Mary, left in 1644 and 1645 respectively. After the mid-17th century, the growing profitability of the African slave trade inspired a group of mainly London investors to found the Royal Adventurers of England Trading to Africa (1662). Although granted a royal trade monopoly from Sallee to the Cape of Good Hope, the Royal Adventurers were never profitable and the company ceased trading in 1672. A group of creditors and shareholders of the Royal Adventurers banded together in 1672 to found the London-based Royal Africa Company, a royally sanctioned slave-trading monopoly. Most of the slave trade, whether under the Royal Africa Company or free traders, remained in London well after 1700. Although London continued to dominate the British slave trade after 1700, by 1725 Bristol had overtaken London as the dominant port in the trade. Although London was surpassed by Bristol after 1725, it remained the center of slave trade finance for the outer ports (both Bristol and Liverpool), the main source of East Indian textiles and other goods traded for slaves, and the main market for tropical products imported from western India by returning slave traders. In fact, London remained the main port of the British

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transatlantic trade during the 18th century, although they never specialized in the slave trade like Bristol or later Liverpool did. However, London's share of the slave trade did not decline as much between 1726 and 1776 as previously thought. Recent historians such as James Rawley have argued that London's role in the transatlantic slave trade has long been underestimated. Between 1676 and 1725 more than 1,140 slave companies left London while only 399 left Bristol. This changed in the following half century. Between 1726 and 1776 only 880 ventures left London, while more than 1,380 set out from Bristol. After 1750, especially after 1776, the London slave trade experienced a resurgence, supplanting the Bristol trade after 1776. In all, 2,700 slave companies left London for Africa between 1633 and 1807, a number which compares favorably to the 2,060 that left Bristol between 1676 and 1807 (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database) as the home of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect as well Parliamentary defenders of the slave trade, London developed after 1775 into the center of the British abolitionist movement. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK. Further Reading: Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Small, Herbert. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantean Slave Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Rawley, James. London, capital of the slave trade. Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 2003; Richardson, David. Bristol, Africa and the 18th Century Slave Trade to America. Vol. 1: The Years of Expansion, 1698–1729. Gloucester: Produced for the Bristol Record Society by A. Sutton Pub., 1986.

Brian W. Refford

Luanda Luanda was founded in 1575 by the Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias Novais and was active from c. 1550 to c. 1850. In the early 17th century, the Portuguese developed the port of Luanda and turned the expanding city into a main camp of the slave trade: Luanda became a terminus where slaves captured inland were collected for sale to traders en route to Brazil. The Portuguese government officially ended the slave trade in 1836. Unfortunately, slavery continued as long as there was demand from Brazil and São Tomé. The Mbundu inhabited the area around Luanda, which the Portuguese referred to as Angola. Plagued by internal instability, Mbundu leaders failed to control local chiefs, leading to civil war. The Portuguese created subterfuges and maneuvers between the rival groups that exacerbated rising social and economic tensions in Angola. Internal warfare intensified, leading to social disintegration that led to increased trade in slaves. In the 1570s, Portugal attempted to establish a formal colony in Angola by appointing a royal governor and building forts. Portuguese control eventually weakened, leaving the colony vulnerable to the military

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Dutch incursions in the 1640s. The growing demands of the Atlantean slave system, internal squabbles between local chiefs and competition between foreign powers left Angola in a perpetual state of disarray, which seeped into Luanda throughout its history and was finally eased by the First World War. Slavery and the slave trade dominated 88 percent of all commercial and economic activity in Luanda until at least the late 18th century. Luanda achieved the distinction of becoming a "full" African slave port. Portuguese merchants provided the slave traders with the credit they needed to buy food and other supplies for the inland slave-sourcing expeditions. Merchants in Luanda provided financing for the acquisition of African-owned slaves. Although African slave traders owned the slaves during the transatlantic voyage, Brazilian shippers transported and delivered their cargo to the slave markets in South America. Luanda's beginnings as a major slave port are linked to the history of Sao Tome Island. Sao Tomé, a small island off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, became an integral part of transatlantic trade. As a sugar plantation, Sao Tome' also served as a staging point for the slave trade, with slaves mainly coming from the Congo. In the 16th century, conflict broke out between official Portuguese slave traders and private traders. To avoid taxation by the Portuguese Crown, invaders moved their slave trades to Luanda. In 1576, the Portuguese crown wanted to stem the invaders and established a base at Luanda, allowing the crown to increase its share of the trade. Luanda became a major gateway into the interior, providing several thousand slaves a year and shipping the human cargo directly to America. Similar to the slave trade in general, slaves were acquired through tributes paid by a subordinate chief to other African elites or to Portuguese traders or officials. Luanda shipped slaves from the immediate area. As slavery exhausted the nearest inhabited areas around Luanda, slave traders moved further inland to meet the increased demand for labor in America. As the demand for slaves increased, African rulers established slave markets inland, but constant warfare produced the most slaves. Neither the local African kings, the Portuguese slavers, nor the Imbangala war chiefs were able to maintain order. The need to procure more prisoners led to increasing internal strife between the monarch and his tributary kings. Nobles in need of money would raid their own peasants and force them into slavery. Even pledging it to pay off a debt could lead to slavery and export. Constant turmoil between the three groups not only created political and economic instability, but also intensified the confrontations that gave rise to enslavement on a colossal scale. Portuguese slave traders supported opposing African factions, leading to heightened conflicts. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, local African states and the Portuguese administrative colony in Luanda attempted to regulate the slave trade. An intense commercial rivalry developed, creating a trade network with its main export terminal at Luanda. The inner-African states, in turn, developed as a source of slaves. Other goods such as textiles, salt and copper changed hands, but many slaves found their way

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to the waiting European ships in Luanda. Foreign ships scoured the west coast to obtain slaves for transport and found other entry points, but the Portuguese successfully retained control of Luanda and thus their profits remained quite high. Many slaves appeared to be offered for sale elsewhere, but Luanda remained crucial as a valuable source of captives. Historical sources vary as to the number of slaves exported from Luanda and the surrounding Angolan environs. However, 4 million slaves, or an average of 11,000 slaves per year for 350 years, remains a reasonable estimate. With these estimates, it appears that Luanda exported more slaves than any other port during the time of the Atlantic slave trade. See also Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Curtin, Philip, Feierman, Steven, Thompson, Leonard and Vansina, Jan. African History. Boston: Klein, Brown, 1978; Henderson, Lawrence W. Angola: Five Centuries of Conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979; July, Robert W. A History of the African People. 5th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998; Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Manny, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Western, Oriental, and African Slave Trade. African Studies Series, ed. J.M. Lonsdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Michael Bonislawski

M Manqueron Manqueron, also Makron or Macron, is a term referring to an African slave considered unsaleable by Dutch slave traders. Africans from the Gold Coast and Angola were transported by slave ship to the island of Curacao off the coast of Venezuela in the Lesser Antilles by the Dutch West India Company. There, slaves were sold under the rules of asiato, the monopoly permits given by the Spanish to sell slaves to their American colonies. Under the terms of this agreement, Africans were evaluated in Pieza de India. The standard value for a healthy person between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five was a pieza or a pe¸a. Those between eight and fifteen or twenty-five and thirty-five were rated two-thirds pec¸a. Individuals who appeared to be older than thirty-five and those with physical or mental disabilities were classified as manquerons. The number of Africans imported into America and classified as manquerons by the Dutch is estimated at nearly 20 percent, although 10 percent is considered a more accurate figure. Many Africans who could not be sold were given time to recover from their transatlantic voyage and then re-evaluated to see if they could meet the Spanish's terms. Many of the Africans who did not meet these conditions were sold elsewhere in America or illegally to Spanish colonies at reduced prices. These Africans, illegally sold by the Dutch, would have been favorable in terms of the Pieza de India. Africans who could not be sold to the Spanish at any price were sometimes destined for delivery to other places, although it is not clear whether these deliveries always took place. A significant number of African manquerons remained on Curacao. These Africans were often used as domestic servants by the island's colonists. After slavery was abolished by the Dutch in 1863, many of these former slaves migrated to other Caribbean countries in search of work. The Manquerons' contributions were important in the creolization of the Lesser Antilles islands. Musically, their participation in Caribbean cultural production led to the emergence of the Antilles waltz. Spoken in Aruba, Bonaire and Curac¸ao, the Papiamentu language combines elements of the West African languages ​​of the Manquerons with Dutch,

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Portuguese, Arawak and other languages. Today's population of Curaçao reflects this Creole history, as almost 85 percent of the population report having African ancestry. Many of these ancestors are believed to have been Manquerons. See also Dutch slave trade. Further reading: Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1850. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Eric Covey

'Middle Passage' (1966) 'Middle Passage' is a poem by Robert Hayden, former Poet Laureate of the United States and Senegal. Written in 1945, it was revised several times before its final publication in 1966. It is a fictionalized tale of the circumstances of the Amistad Mutiny of 1839. Hayden's research provided the backbone for the stories in the poem. The statements, ship's logs, and ledgers that Hayden referred to in writing his poem validated the words of his speakers. What "Middle Passage" achieves with this material, however, are vague characters, ambiguous themes and an indefinite sequence of events. The historical event is retold in three parts with a distinctive modern wry detachment, drawing in European voices to disempower them and discreetly unravel the justifications for the slave trade. Hayden was aware of how an inherently hegemonic language shaped African-American identity and history. Therefore, rather than attempting to reconstruct the events of "Middle Passage" by assigning that language to a non-European, Hayden assigned words to the slavers, whose speeches and writings give direction to the poem. In the "Middle Passage" no Africans can be heard directly; the reader merely gets a feeling for the turmoil experienced and is informed of what has been said through translators or hearsay. Rather than portraying the triumph of good over evil, "Middle Passage" shows how the slave trade self-destructed. "Middle Passage" deals with several aspects of the Middle Passage: its historical and conceptual existence, a specific event that occurred during its time, and its reversal. Themes and devices throughout the poem reflect this difficult combination of meanings. The prominent concepts of life and death can hardly be deciphered consistently with each other. Indeed, in the first stanza of the poem, the first mention of life through death is immediately followed by an account of African suicide. The sense of time and space is complex as different settings are presented to the speakers and the action. The final stanza of the poem comes after the missing climax and introduces the poem's hero, Cinquez, who is given no language, description, or plot. “Middle Passage” is essentially about the transformative undoing of the middle passage. This notion is subtly hinted at in the first part, during the second log excerpt, in which the units of time written about decrease from eight to four to three, while the actual amounts increase from hours to days to weeks. Hayden struggled with issues addressed in his "Middle Passage," including personal identity and history. Next to the historic middle passage

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This was the origin of Hayden's existence as an African American, dealing with the metaphorical middle passages of life. Because of his race, Hayden was considered a black poet. However, because he did not view art primarily as a tool for social change, many members of the African-American literary community in the mid-20th century questioned Hayden's blackness. Certainly 'Middle Passage' exemplifies the influence that poets like T.S. Eliot had on Hayden's style, and the poem's literary allusions draw on Shakespeare and Coleridge. Hence his literary persona was undefinable; At the same time, he was marginalized and rejected by this fringe. This struggle for a professional identity was compounded by a similar lack of personal identity as he continually faced issues surrounding his adoption, including a midlife discovery that "Robert Hayden" was not his real name. See also historical memory. Further reading: Fetrow, Fred M. Robert Hayden. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984; Kutzinski, Vera M. "Changing Permanences: Historical and Literary Revisionism in Robert Hayden's 'Middle Passage'." Callaloo 26 (1986): 171–183; Murphy, Jim. "Here Only the Sea Is Real": Robert Hayden's Postmodern Passages." MELNUS 27 (2002): 107-127; Nelson, Cary, and Smethurst, Jim. "Robert Hayden." [Online, January 2006]. Modern American Poetry Website: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hayden/hayden.htm.

Jessica M. Kubiak

Middle Passage, The (2000) The Middle Passage (2000) is one of the few attempts in the French-speaking world to tackle the painful subject of the slave trade. This film, directed by Guy Deslauriers, attempts to give a realistic portrayal of transatlantic trade based on a screenplay written by famed Antilles novelist and Prix Goncourt winner Patrick Chamoiseau and author Claude Chonville. The story is told through the voiceover of a dead African slave narrating the voyage of a slave ship traveling to America from Senegal on the west coast of Africa. The voice used for the French version is that of Maka Kotto; The English version includes the voice of Walter Mosley. The film's title evokes the infamous Middle Passage, so called because it was the middle leg of a three-stage journey that began in Europe, from where ships departed to reach the west coast of Africa. The second stage was going to America - the focus of this film. The third part of the journey was the return to Europe from the colonies, hence the usual triangular shape attributed to trade. The film opens with a view of a tropical beach where a child stares out to sea, symbolic of a new generation of African and Caribbean people who may not be familiar with the history of slavery. The didactic purpose of the film is clear from the start. It is, in the words of Toni Morrison, "a story to pass on". Through the eyes of the anonymous slave, the viewer journeys through a journey of torture, sexual abuse, hunger and despair. The story begins with an African prince selling slaves and depicts the horrors of the voyage on ships to America. The depiction of the eighteen-week voyage alternates between scenes filmed inside the boat and, less frequently,

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Scenes from the deck where the tied slaves are brought in to "get some exercise" and dance for the crew. There are occasional moments of hope and visions of Africa that linger in the minds of the slaves throughout the journey until they become a faint memory. Passage du Milieu (the original French title) was first screened in North America at a film festival in Toronto, Canada in 2000 and is now used by many teachers across America as a documentary about slavery. Although The Middle Passage is technically a French film (Martinique is part of France), it wasn't very successful there as the role of French ports like Bordeaux, Nantes and La Rochelle in the slave trade is still taboo. For Guy Deslauriers, the film had two aims: (1) to inform a populace that may not know much about the conditions in which these transatlantic voyages took place, and (2) to engrave certain images in the viewer's memory and to acknowledge the fact that these ships are still part of the collective unconscious. The film manages to create a haunting atmosphere that lingers long after the film has ended, while the narrator's voice successfully conveys the fears of millions of Africans. See also historical memory. Steve Puig

Smaller European Nations Smaller nations involved in transatlantic trade included Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. First there was trade competition between Sweden and Denmark in the 16th century. Sweden On the part of Sweden, King Gustav III. 1771 the throne. He wanted Sweden to assert itself as a world power again. Economically, he craved the same enormous gains that Denmark made with its colonies in the West Indies. Both nations established trading posts on the West African coast. In 1784 Gustav bought the West Indian island of Saint Barthélemy from the King of France. After this transaction, he informed a surprised Swedish Privy Councilor that Sweden now owned an island in the West Indies. However, the island's council report said it was not economically viable. Its only good quality was a good port. The report recommended making it a free trade zone. Since France was having some difficulties getting slaves into its colonies, Gustav saw this as a profitable endeavor. In 1786 the Swedish West India Company was founded. In March 1790, Saint Barthélemy received a further boost with a new tax law and a new constitution. Slave traders could sell slaves directly to the island without paying taxes. However, traders who bought slaves from the island would pay a fee. At this time agitation for the abolition of trade was growing in England. England feared that after its abolition, other nations would expand their lands

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own slave trade. The king sent a letter to Gustav imploring him not to encourage his subjects to trade. Gustav replied that none of his subjects were engaged in trade. Shortly thereafter, Sweden abandoned the slave trade to pursue other economic goals. The nation has never contributed anything significant to commerce. Denmark and Norway Denmark, on the other hand, continued trading. The Danes established their first trading fort on the Gold Coast in 1658, but are reported to have entered the trade in 1651. It was really a Danish-Norwegian company. Fort Frederiksborg (Kpompo), the commercial headquarters, was built near Cape Coast Castle near Fetu. Fort Christiansborg followed in Osu in 1661. In 1685, after the British took over Frederiksborg, Christiansborg became the commercial headquarters. There were other forts like Fort Fredensborg in Old Ningo built in 1736, Fort Kongensten in Ada built in 1783 and Fort Prinsensten in Keta built in 1784. Augustaborg was built in Teshie in 1787 and an equally small fort, Isegram, was under construction in Kpone. Christiansborg extended its influence to the eastern Gold Coast in the 18th century. The Danes aimed to control the Volta Delta and the western Gold Coast (now known as Togo and Benin). To this end they established lodges along the entire coast from Labadi, Teshie and Kpone to Aflahu on what is now the Togo-Ghana border. While gold was traded in the first half of the century, by 1660 the trade in slaves was dominant. Like other European nations, the Danes were eager to send African slaves to their holdings in the West Indies. Between them, Danish and Norwegian slave ships transported between 85,000 and 100,000 African captives, making 340 voyages across the Atlantic. This was between 1660 and 1806. Human trafficking lasted until 1802. Ernst Schimmelmann, who was finance minister for Denmark from 1784 to 1813, observed a decline in the slave trade. Then he proposed having plantation economies in the African colonies. Attempts were made to develop cotton and coffee plantations around Fort Frederiksborg. But neither this nor the trade in “legitimate” exports flourished. This enterprise and the forts were eventually abandoned. Denmark also lost Norway in 1814, and the nation sold all of its Gold Coast holdings to Britain in 1850. The Netherlands The Netherlands was a small country that was the center of European commercial activity in the 17th century. The Dutch, because of great advances in navigation and because they had plenty of financial backing for their trade, were able to transport more slaves faster and at a lower cost than their European counterparts. The first documented trade was in 1619 when a trader sold twenty African slaves to Virginia in North America. Dutch trade took on commercial proportions in 1630, responding to the acute demand for slaves on the plantations of northern Brazil. The Dutch acquired quite a bit of territory on the West African slaves

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Coast during their wars of confrontation with Portugal between 1620 and 1655. The Netherlands made a late decision to join in the trafficking. The Dutch West India Company, considered the largest retailer of slaves, was founded in Amsterdam in 1621. Their first commodity was African gold. It was the conquest of the sugar plantations in northern Brazil that made them realize that the slave trade was lucrative. In order to establish their presence, they had to fight with the Portuguese, particularly in their quest to capture their trading center, São Jorge da Mina on the Gold Coast. This was conquered in 1637. She was renamed Elmina. It wasn't as successful as they expected and the Dutch continued to look the other way. This led them to Angola and as far as Sao Tome'. Even after the Brazilian colonies were returned to Portugal in 1654, the Dutch continued to control the supply of slaves to other European nations, particularly Spain, until the 1690s. Their influence stretched from the Cape of Good Hope to the Indonesian archipelago. Incessant wars between the Netherlands and other nations like France, Great Britain and Spain weakened the nation. Its control over the trade began to wane, and by 1795 it had ceased trading entirely. By the end of the slave trade and slavery in 1863, Dutch traders had exported 540,000 African slaves to America. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; Danish slave trade; Dutch slave trade. Further reading: "Breaking the Silence, Learning about the Slave Trade, Slave Routes." Anti-Slavery International Website: www.antislavery.org.

Oyekemi Olajope Oyelakin

Monopoly The European concept of monopoly during the slave trade era was to own a "balanced set of colonies" with unrivaled access to slaves, provisions, ships, and plantations for the metropolis. For two hundred years, from 1440 to 1640, Portugal enjoyed a monopoly on the export of slaves from many parts of Africa. It is estimated that Portugal alone transported more than 4.5 million Africans (about 40 percent of all slaves) during the time of the transatlantic slave trade. When the African slave trade began in the late 15th century, the Portuguese and Spanish dominated it. Portugal claimed a monopoly over the South Atlantic slave trade because of its settlements in South America, particularly Brazil. Spain claimed a trading monopoly in the North Atlantic due to its previous exploration of the islands of the Caribbean Sea. England and many other European countries sought to compete in the highly profitable North Atlantic trade. Portugal maintained its monopoly for a long time, but Spain could not long hold England back. By the 18th century, when the slave trade had transported more than 6 million Africans, Britain was responsible for almost 2.5 million. France and Britain had colonies in North America and Tropical America, as well as slave trading posts on the African coast. Many European countries monopolized the slave trade by issuing permits and licenses

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into a single, chartered, public company, endowed with state laws and regulations and subsidies. It was expected that corporations would use their monopoly profits as a subsidy to offset the cost of running fortified trading posts in Africa. Monopoly rights were less effective because planters preferred to buy slaves cheaply from private traders rather than pay monopoly prices. The most consistent challenge to the monopoly came from private traders, both African and European. They often violated monopoly regulations by conducting their business outside the control of chartered companies. Competition with invaders led to the collapse of chartered companies unable to maintain their trade forts. The Portuguese could not fully enforce the royal monopoly over their own nationals and other Europeans. After 1530, the English and French challenged the monopoly that the Portuguese had enjoyed for the previous fifty years. By the 17th century, independent boatmen, competing with each other, carried out most of the slave trade. Further Reading: Curtin, Philip D. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973; Curtin, Philip, D. "The West African Coast in the Era of the Slave Trade." In P Curtin, S Feierman, L Thompson, and J Vansina, eds. African History: From the Earliest Times to Independence. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1995; Russell-Wood, A.J.R. "Before Columbus: Portugal's African Prelude to the Middle Passage and Contribution to Discourse on Race and Slavery." In V. Shepherd and H. McD. Beckles, ed. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd., 2000.

Knocked out Olaniyi

Mortality, crew Although mortality is one of the most studied areas of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, little has been written about slave ship crews. A large amount of data was scanned into the Du Bois Institute's dataset, which allows analysis of crew mortality during the five stages of slave voyages: the outward voyage, the time on the African coast, the Middle Passage, the time in America, and the journey home. Results so far indicate that there were differences in crew mortality by year, leg of voyage, sailing season from Africa and trading region on the African coast. It is clear that disease was the major cause of death: the vast majority of deaths resulted from fever (yellow fever and malaria), scurvy, smallpox, and "fluxus" (mainly dysentery). A small number were shipwrecked, drowned, or killed by slaves. Some routes were known to be particularly hazardous to crew health. For example, mortality and morbidity on the Middle Passage skyrocketed after French crews entered the Bay of Benin and west-central Africa. The Gold Coast and Southeast Africa (Madagascar and Mozambique) had much lower health risks. Those slave traders who lived in Africa during the rainy season (when the disease was widespread) faced a significantly higher risk of mortality during the Middle Passage. British slave traders who sailed to the Gambia River died three times more often than those who traded along the Gold Coast.

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Not surprisingly, among the crew, surgeons were the most likely to die, while experienced seamen were the least likely to die. The former had most contact with the sick, and experienced seamen probably built up immunity to many of the diseases. Although there are important differences by nationality (British crews died more frequently than their French counterparts), overall crew mortality declined in the 18th century. This was in part due to a concerted effort to improve onboard conditions for maximum profits. Thus, there have been improvements in regulations and conditions on board. It was common for slave ships to transport surgeons, but they were powerless to contain infectious diseases. The British Parliament passed the Dolben's Act (1788) along with subsequent amendments; This law reduced the accumulation of slaves, which meant fewer sailors were needed. Fewer people may have reduced the level of contagion between slaves and crew. The law also mandated that seafarers be kept on a regular diet (although it still did not ward off malaria or yellow fever) and that at least half the crew could sleep below decks. This law allowed for better qualified ship's doctors. Other changes limited the time crews spent ashore in Africa, which helped preserve their health. The biggest factor in the decline in mortality seems to have been change in routes. Both French and British slave traders shifted their attention from the region of Senegambia and the Bay of Benin to the lower mortality coast of Angola in the 18th century. Despite this, crews on slave voyages still had higher mortality rates than crews on other types of voyages. With good reason, abolitionist Thomas Clarkson claimed that the slave trade was not a “seafarers' nursery,” but rather a “grave.” See also mortality, slave. Further reading: Behrendt, Stephen D. "Crew Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century." Slavery and Abolition 18, 1 (1997): 49-71; Cohn, Raymond L. "Maritime Mortality in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Survey." International Journal of Maritime History 1, 1 (1989): 159-189; Haines, Robin, Shlomowitz, Ralph, and Brennan, Lance. "Maritime Mortality Revisited." International Journal of Maritime History VIII (June 1996): 133-172; Klein, Herbert, Engerman, Stanley L., Haines, Robin, and Shlomowitz, Ralph. "Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective." William and Mary Quarterly 58, 1 (2001): 93-117; Steckel, Richard H., and Jensen, Richard A. "New Evidence on the Causes of Slave and Crew Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade." Journal of Economic History 46 (March 1986): 57–77.

Cheryl Fury

Mortality, slave mortality is one of the most controversial aspects of research into the transatlantic slave trade. The abundance of opinions and theories shows that there is little consensus among scientists on how best to analyze the existing data or interpret the results. Exact figures remain elusive and estimates vary widely. Particularly contentious is the debate over mortality during the Middle Passage, whether it decreased over time, and the factors that may have influenced this decrease. Some historians claim that the mortality was scandalous

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high and remained so until the trade was abolished. Other scholars accept the notion that mortality declined particularly after the mid-18th century, although it may have increased after 1830. Some ships reported losses of a third or more of their slaves on board; Losses in the single digits have been recorded on more random voyages. However, when the slave trade was abolished in the 19th century, conditions deteriorated and mortality rates rose again. Explanations for why this happened vary greatly among scholars who accept a decrease in the numbers "lost in transit". It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the causes of slave mortality in the Middle Passage from its antecedents: to what extent did pre-voyage conditions affect mortality at sea? After their capture, slaves may have changed hands several times as they marched to the coast for transit. their terms would also vary. Some slaves were also made to carry goods. Distance traveled, diet, and exposure to different disease environments were important variables. The nature and duration of their containment prior to boarding were important determinants of their overall health. Overcrowded, unsanitary conditions combined with poor treatment, malnutrition, exhaustion and exposure to new diseases could be a deadly combination. If this happened during the rainy season, the chances of illness and death were much greater. In addition, factors such as age, gender, pre-enslavement socioeconomic circumstances, and place of origin (as well as climate) were key variables. Abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton produced one of the earliest studies of the human cost of slavery; He analyzed slave mortality in the context of capture, march to shore, imprisonment before sailing, the Middle Passage, and subsequent “seasoning” (entry into New World slavery). Buxton and some later historians argue that losses in this initial phase of slavery were as significant as those at sea. For the survivors, their treatment early in their enslavement would have a significant impact on their ability to survive the Middle Passage. Poor pre-sailing treatment may have preordained high mortality at sea. Conversely, those who were healthy at the start of the journey had a better chance of surviving. Conditions on board affected the slaves and ship's crew. All sea voyages were risky in the early modern period, but slave ships had some of the highest per-voyage-per-day mortality rates. The enslavement caused such agony that some committed suicide. Rebellious slaves could expect harsh treatment. However, it was in the interests of the crew to preserve the health of as many slaves as possible. Disease was the leading cause of death on board. Some slaves brought diseases on board. Scurvy was the plague of all transatlantic voyages well into the 18th century. Bacterial infections, smallpox, yellow fever and malaria were constant threats; They were widespread in the rainy season and in certain geographic areas. Most slavers carried medical staff, but they were generally ineffective. Scholars have analyzed the various slaver routes and found that the time of sailing and the route itself were important determinants of mortality. Stopovers and shorter trips were an advantage. Also correct

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The supplies and conditions on board were critical to keeping the slaves healthy. As the slave trade flourished, improvements were made to reduce mortality and generate greater profits. A number of scholars agree that the decline in mortality after the mid-18th century was the result of a complex interplay of variables. For example, measures have been taken to combat diseases. Some slaves were vaccinated against smallpox, but vaccination was in its infancy and its effectiveness is questionable. In addition, vaccinations may not have been carried out until there was an outbreak at sea. There was a concerted effort to get better food and water and to keep the ships clean. The level of cleanliness varied from ship to ship; Crews from competing nations prided themselves on having the highest standards. Vinegar, tar, and whitewash were all used as part of a strategy to improve sanitation and ventilation. To some extent, faster ships and technological changes in the 18th century made faster travel possible. The copper plating of the hulls made the ships a little faster and reduced the humidity inside the ship. Efforts to reduce crowding may also have had an impact. Dolben's Act (1788) and its subsequent amendments improved the lot of slaves on British ships. This law can be seen as part of a larger effort by Europeans to regulate trade by regulating ships' carrying capacity, the amount of provisions and medical care on board. Not all laws were enforced or affected mortality, but it is clear that trade has come under scrutiny from lawmakers, investors and abolitionists. In addition to these improvements, mortality rates at sea were reduced by being more selective about who was transported. Bonuses for crews on ships with low mortality rates provided more incentive to take care of the slaves. Shorter trips to and from destinations with a lower probability of illness were also important. Despite these changes, mortality and human misery on such voyages exceeded other types of transatlantic migrations. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; mortality, occupation; overcrowding. Further reading: Buxton, Thomas Fowell. The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy. London: Dawson's, 1968 (1840); Cohn, Raymond L. "Deaths of Slaves in the Middle Passage." Journal of Economic History 45 (September 1985): 685–692; Gemery, Henry A. and Hogendorn, Jan S. The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Academic Press, 1979; Haines, Robert, McDonald, John, and Shlomowitz, Ralph. "Mortality and Voyage Length in the Middle Passage Revisited." Explorations in Economic History 38 (2001): 503-533; Klein, Herbert, Engerman, Stanley L., Haines, Robin, and Shlomowitz, Ralph. "Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective." William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 93-117; Steckel, Richard H., and Jensen, Richard A. "New Evidence on the Causes of Slave and Crew Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade." Journal of Economic History 46 (March 1986): 57–77.

Cheryl Fury Mozambique African tribal chiefs, Arab traders and Portuguese traded slaves in Mozambique. Portuguese merchants bought gold and slaves along the coast of Mozambique in the early 17th century. Lacking sufficient capital and manpower, the early Portuguese explorers and traders, they

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was only able to establish permanent settlements in Mozambique later in the 17th century. In the 19th century, this Portuguese colony on the east coast of Africa became a major source of valuable human goods destined to be shipped to America as plantation and mining workers. Europeans' desire to bypass the Muslim-controlled Mediterranean route to India led to Vasco da Gama's 1498 voyage around the Cape of Good Hope (the southern tip of Africa). The late 15th century marked the entry of Europeans into India's ocean trading system. Due to the high cost of transporting slaves from Mozambique to the Atlantic slave trade, the Portuguese's main interest was in procuring gold. After establishing a trading depot and fort on the island of Mozambique, the Portuguese added a steady supply of ivory to the gold shipments sent to India in exchange for spices. Europeans and Africans practiced slavery on the east coast of Africa, but the transport of slaves outside of Mozambique did not occur until the mid-18th century. Inhambane became known for its exports of ivory, pitch, amber, rice and other lesser products; However, Inhambane's commercial success can be attributed to the port becoming the first port of Mozambique to export slaves. In the 1760s, French sugar plantation owners on Reunion Island in the French Indian Ocean bought slaves at Inhambane in Mozambique. Slave traders also transported slaves from Quelimane to São Tomé, Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion and the Comoros. Slave exports increased to 3,000 a year by the 1780s. Although Mozambique became a major exporter of slaves, Portuguese slave traders failed to bring slaves to Rio de Janeiro on the coast of Brazil until 1797. Over the next fourteen years, Portuguese slave traders managed to bring 3,800 slaves from Mozambique to Rio de Janeiro. During the Middle Passage, the high mortality rate of 24 percent prevented slave transport from Mozambique to Brazil. The rise in slave exports can be traced back to the 1560s, when drought and famine encouraged increased migrations that sparked armed raids. Famine played a crucial role in filling the barracks on the Mozambique coast. With the dwindling food supply, the inland population migrated to the coast. Additionally, the purchase of food by the slave ships reduced the amount of food available to the native Mozambicans. Plantation owners in Mozambique were more interested in supplying the commercial market than producing food for local consumption. The ensuing series of severe droughts and internal migration led to an increased supply of prisoners of war. In addition to prisoners of war, mocambazes (slave traders) procured slaves in a manner similar to Atlantean slave traders. Sources of slaves included kidnappings, raids, and purchases. Tribal chiefs who raided warring tribes sold their captives to the slave traders. Slavery in Mozambique took a unique turn when 1800 strange seagoing vessels appeared off the coast. Raiding fleets of ten-foot canoes were gathering at the northern tip of Madagascar. These raiding fleets attacked along the Mozambique coast from Kilwa to the island of Mozambique in the north. By 1808 the raiding fleet grew from three boats in 1800 to 500 war

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boats and 8,000 armed raiders. Pirates have attacked and harassed the coast of Mozambique for twenty years. Attacks by the Nguni chiefs resulted in unusual circumstances. The Afro-Portuguese, Indian and Swahili coastal peoples adapted to live off the slave trade and never experienced the misery and war that accompanied slavery. Mozambique's coastal communities experienced first-hand the cruelty and inhumanity of the slave trade at the hands of slave-taking pirates. Events in Mozambique led to coastal attacks. Drought, famine and migration destabilized coastal communities and made them easy prey for pirates. After 1800, the New World demand for slaves increased, and slave traders viewed Mozambique as an important source of slaves. The Portuguese government responded to the increasing availability of slaves, combined with increased demand and rising prices, by allowing Brazilian slave traders to trade freely along the East African coast. Within five years (1825–1829), 85 ships carrying more than 48,000 slaves from Mozambique arrived in Rio de Janeiro. Mozambique exported 9,000 in 1790. By the 1830s, 15,000 Mozambican slaves were being exported a year. After 1811, slave traders transported more than 380,000 to the Atlantic slave system, making Mozambique the third largest supplier of slaves in the 19th century. In all, the East African slave trade accounted for 400,000 slaves in the 18th century. Slave traders shipped about 270,000 slaves to the Muslim world, while the remaining 130,000 slaves ended up in the Mascarene Islands or the Americas. In the 1770s, slave exports increased from a small trickle to an average of 5,400 per year by the 1780s (Curtin, 1978, pp. 393–394; Lovejoy, 1993, p. 60). See also Enslavement and Procurement; Portuguese slave trade. Further reading: Curtin, Philip, Feierman, Steven, Thompson, Leonard and Vansina, Jan. African History. Boston: Klein, Brown, 1978; Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Newitt, Malin. A History of Mozambique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Michael Bonislawski Museums History as presented in museums can never be complete or cover all perspectives: it is a selection from a selection. Heritage has a personalizing factor: it is appropriated by people to identify with a particular group and differentiate themselves from others. Inevitably, therefore, heritage in museums must tell the story of a particular group from a particular perspective. However, in a globalized world, audiences are more diverse and demanding. Museum curators face the difficult task of dealing with different expectations and sensitivities. Throughout the Black Atlantic there are museums dedicated to the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. What these institutes show varies. Since the idea of ​​a museum is a European invention, traditional museums have always painted the world from a western point of view (crepes,

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2003). Traditionally, museums displayed history deemed relevant by those in power. Exhibitions showed the (technical) economic history and those "heroes" who had contributed to the economic and political success of the country. In order to present history from the perspective of the African diaspora, museums had to reinterpret their objects and add new objects and research to their collections. In the United States, where ex-enslaved people lived side by side with ex-enslaved people and there was an ongoing struggle for further emancipation, changes in museum representation can be observed as early as the 1950s, albeit only in small museums. Twenty years later, the Smithsonian became the first major museum to organize an African American exhibit and work with African American consultants and managers. Colonial Williamsburg was the first to touch on the subject of slavery in 1979. Forty such attractions were inventoried in the southern United States in 1994 (Dann and Seaton, 2001). In Europe, the arrival of Caribbean immigrants led to changes in heritage policies. Their presence led to the need to represent them in exhibitions and to attract them as visitors. From the 1990s, museums in the UK and the Netherlands changed the tone of their regular exhibitions and dedicated (temporary) exhibitions to the theme of slavery. How to tell history that fairly includes all constituent variants soon became a topic of discussion. Some museums argued that maintaining dissonance in heritage (debates about ownership, control, and representation) would ultimately heal the diverse community. In the Caribbean, a central question is the authenticity of the exhibitions. Mass tourism as an important source of income sets the tone and leads to an often nostalgic depiction of the colonial past. Some museums do just the opposite: they confront visitors with the horrors of the slave trade. Perhaps the greatest changes are taking place in Africa. With tourism growing faster than ever on the continent, museums are struggling to accommodate a diverse audience. In post-apartheid South Africa, this growing diversity is also evident within the country due to a higher level of democracy than during the apartheid regime. Museums that want to attract African Americans must choose between placing the transatlantic experience at the center or presenting it as an event in their overall history. See also Historical Memory; historiography. Further reading: Bruner, E. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005; Dann, G., and Seaton, AV Slavery, Disputed Heritage, and Thana Tourism. New York: The Haworth Hospitality Press, 2001; Duncan, James. "Presenting Empire at the National Maritime Museum." In Robert Shannan Peckham, ed. Rethink heritage. Cultures and Politics in Europe. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2003; Kreps, Christina F. Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2003; Lowenthal, D. Obsessed with the Past. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: The Free Press, 1996.

Valika Schmeulders

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Music, Song and Song A people's music, song and song not only nourish their particular traditional beliefs, but also reflect their collective and individual aspirations, particularly in times of dislocation and crisis. Music has always been a crucial part of the lives of Africans on the continent. During the Middle Passage its meaning expanded. Many of the Africans transported as slaves came from cultures that valued oral, auditory, and musical activities as part of ceremonies, religious rituals, and daily life. Creating and broadcasting songs was a public and expressive phenomenon, but it was also a private and covert activity. The cultures of Africa that lost their citizens to transatlantic trade created music for marriage ceremonies, deaths, wars, and for private activities such as advertising. Commentators on African music and song have highlighted the role of songs of worship, satirical songs, dirges and historical compositions in African society. As slaves were captured and taken to the exit point, they were confined to a redefined physical location and space. The experience of bondage had traumatic effects on their physical, psychological and cultural disposition. However, since music, song and song were important parts of African life, it was impossible to silence their outer and inner voices with physical restraints. Despite the traumatic experience of enslavement, slaves were able to preserve important aspects of their cultural practices. The squalid environment, the close supervision of slaves on board, and the cramped quarters for people of diverse linguistic, religious, social, and cultural traditions argued against the spread of singing and music-making, but individual slaves responded to their imprisonment in different ways. These reactions included chanting, moans, screams and pounding rhythms while still tied below deck during the six to eight week voyage. The slaves sang religious songs and songs of despair, defiance, and lamentations throughout the Middle Passage. Despite (or because of) the cramped conditions below deck, every available device was a potential musical instrument. The enslaved used their voices as the dominant instrument, sometimes drowning out their defiant songs amid the roar of the ocean pounding against the side of the slave ship. The working chants of the ship's crew could often be heard on and below deck. Some slaves brought on deck were forced to dance, sing and drum. According to some written accounts of the Middle Passage, a single-headed drum was used. The spread of African tonal languages ​​and the differences between African and Western scales led some Western observers to interpret African songs as nothing more than laments, screams, and moans. Not all of these songs were like that. During the Middle Passage, some slaves masked their inner ambitions and plans behind audible sounds. For example, while a measured performance of some songs would be interpreted as 'melancholic lamentation at her exile from her homeland' (Falconbridge, 1788), this performance might disguise the singer's intention to provoke a mutiny on board.

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Music Group, Brazil, 1846. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

It's the same subversive strategy that became widespread among slaves, even after they got off the slave ship and were forced to work on plantations. The Middle Passage was therefore the birthplace of reappearances by Africans trying to come to terms with their captivity. The slaves were forced to struggle for survival while confined to the bowels of the slave ship. Some used song, music, and chant as a survival mechanism to keep their spirits up and survive the passage. Others used these activities to shield their inner plan of revolt. Olaudah Equiano's interesting narrative (despite questions about Equiano's birthplace) recounts the horrors of the passage, as well as the bathos and perseverance of many African survivors who carried their songs and customs across the Atlantic. Sir John Newton's experience as a sea captain and the impact of the slaves' lamentations influenced his composition of the thoughtful song "Amazing Grace". Scholars have debated the extent to which the Middle Passage influenced African culture as it was transported to the New World. Some have suggested that the trauma of the passage led to a shift and discontinuity in traditional activities such as singing and music making. Others have argued that the Middle Passage facilitated the strengthening of traditional practices and even forged new forms of musical expression. The songs, music, and chants of slaves raised (and in some cases reconfigured) during the Middle Passage found a number of places

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Contexts and situations in which they survived, thrived and changed in the New World. Historiography, oral history, and maritime accounts have helped us better understand the nature of African musical continuities. Since the Middle Passage did not destroy slave cultural practices, many acts of slaves in America reveal some truths about the music of the Middle Passage. Although slave traders and plantation owners were aware of the use of song and music for communication, the range of challenges involved in managing a slave ship made it impossible to dissuade the slave from such activities. Work songs and spirituals were sometimes seen by the slave masters as having a positive effect on the experience of slaves and their psychological state. Therefore, planned singing and drumming among slaves was encouraged on some slave ships. The revolutionary quality of some African songs is well documented. Music and singing are considered central activities within covert mass uprisings and revolts. On an individual and interpersonal level, slave songs are highly regarded for their deception, use of wit and satire, veiled threats, and merciful curses. Some New World musical genres are believed to have evolved from traditional African forms that underwent some transformation en route to the Americas. These forms developed through exposure to musical forms from European and other cultures that lived on the slave ship. Forms of music and song such as blues, negro spirituals, rumba and calypso are some of the New World genres and styles born and reconfigured during the Middle Passage. Some characteristics of traditional African songs can also be found in some genres of music that have evolved over the centuries. Polyrhythm, syncopation, call and response, and free improvisation are some of the defining characteristics of African musical styles that spread through the Middle Passage. A form of music like calypso, for example, still has similarities with African music. Calypso is notable for its use of lyrical wordplay and call and response, among other things. A defining characteristic of such African New World genres is a tendency to conceal their subversive intent. Even if the Middle Passage experience forced many Africans to retreat to the solace of song, it also forged a music that captures the intense emotions of a people determined to use any strategy to regain full liberation. See also Dancing and Sports; Falcon Bridge, Alexander. Further reading: Equiano, Olaudah. The interesting tale of the life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. Essex: Longmans, Green and Company, 1789; Diedrich, Maria, Gates, Henry Louis, and Pedersen, Carl, eds. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Falcon Bridge, Alexander. An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa. New York: AMS Press, 1973 (1788).

curves best

N Nancy, The The Nancy was a Rhode Island brig that experienced an unsuccessful onboard slave rebellion during an illegal slave voyage of 1793 while crossing the Atlantic from Senegambia (West Africa) to Paramaribo (Suriname). The rebellion was one of only three Middle Passages Between 1730 and 1807, riots broke out among the Rhode Island slave traders and were reported in newspapers throughout New England. It happened sometime between August 6 and October 29, 1793. Four of the original 121 slaves on board were killed. Another eighteen died during the Middle Passage of other causes. Rhode Island outlawed the slave trade in 1787, but legislation went largely unused until the federal abolition of the trade in 1808. The Nancy's captain, Joseph B. Cook, was a moderately experienced slave captain who had made only one slave voyage prior to the 1793 voyage. The average Rhode Island slave ship captain made an average of 2.2 slave voyages over the course of his lifetime. Cook would do at least three. Three factors may have contributed to the occurrence of the revolt. First, the slaves on board were probably of Upper Guinean origin. Ethnic groups such as the Fulbe, Wolof, Serer and Malinke of the Senegambia region had the highest insurgency rate of any West African, a rate three to five times higher than the average. One explanation may have been the spread of Islam in the region: Muslim slaves may have banded together in a slave revolt aboard a transatlantic slave trade revolt despite ethnic differences. Second, at least three of the Nancy's nine crew members are on board. Courtesy of Anti-Slavery International.

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were black. It is possible that they identified with the enslaved Africans and facilitated the revolt. Third, Captain Cook's ship's log indicates that he maintained poor crew discipline on the Nancy. It is possible that the disorder and disobedience of the crew members gave the slaves an opportunity to rebel. Rhode Island slave ships typically transported a single cargo of rum to Africa to purchase slaves. Rhode Island rum was so coveted in the region that West African slave prices were often expressed in gallons of rum. Unusually, the Nancy carried a mixed cargo of goods, including rum, on her voyage in 1793. The Nancy made at least one other slave voyage. Joseph Cook transported 121 slaves from the Gold Coast of West Africa to the Caribbean in 1795–1796, losing 16 during the Middle Passage. The Nancy likely spent the remainder of her seafaring in coastal trade, trading Rhode Island cattle and dry goods for molasses, sugar, and coffee in Suriname. The brig was a medium-sized slave ship by Rhode Island standards. It weighed 110 tons and was 63 feet 2 inches long, 20 feet 4 inches wide and 10 feet 5 inches deep. It was built in North Providence in 1784, nine years before its 1793 voyage. The Nancy was not registered with the District of Providence until six years after its construction, on July 13, 1790. All ships engaged in foreign trade had to be registered. It is therefore unlikely that the Nancy transported slaves across the Atlantic before this date. At the time of the 1793 voyage, the Nancy was owned by merchants Zachariah and Philip Allen of Providence. By 1801 it had been sold to Providence seamen Cornelius G. Bowler and John Cook and had a new captain, Benjamin Taylor, Jr. Further reading: Behrendt, Stephen D., Eltis, David, and Richardson, David. "The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-modern Atlantic World." Economic History Review 54, 3 (2001): 454-476; Coughtry, Jay. The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade 1700–1807, 151, 157, 266, 268. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981; Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Sharafi, Mitra. "The Slave Ship Manuscripts of Captain Joseph B. Cook: A Narrative Reconstruction of the Brig Nancy's Voyage of 1793." Slavery and Abolition 24 (April 2003): 71-100.

Mitra Sharafi Nantes Nantes, a trading town on the Loire River in western France, was the main French slave trading port. Its merchants outfitted a total of 1,424 slave ships in the 18th century - that's 42 percent of all French slave ships - and were responsible for the shipment of 450,000 African captives. About one in five ships equipped in Nantes in the 18th century was a slave trader. This percentage is consistently higher than other modern ports. Nantes retained its pre-eminence as a slave-trading port through the first half of the 19th century, outfitting 290 slave ships (70 percent of French slave ships) between 1815 and 1830, at a time when France had already outlawed the slave trade.

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The city has been a busy port since the Middle Ages, trading mainly in salt, wine and grain. In the 17th century, Nantes sold these goods from southern Spain to the Baltic Sea. However, the local trading community mainly ventured into local and regional trade, which combined with the Newfoundland fisheries ensured a regular if not spectacular increase in wealth and commercial know-how. Long-distance trade from Nantes was still in the hands of foreign merchants and ships. It was the slave trade that by the late 17th century enabled the city's merchants to take a more active part in the burgeoning Atlantic economy and venture into long-distance trade and shipping. Nantes equipped eight slave ships from 1688 to 1698. The emergence of Nantes as France's main slave-trading port in the 18th century is closely linked to the rise of the plantation economy in the French West Indies in the 1660s and 1670s, and to the present strengthening of French policies excluding foreigners, especially Dutch, from French colonial trade. French West Indian planters had been demanding African slaves from the beginning of colonization, and by the 1660s black slaves were as numerous as white colonists. The development of sugar production led to a steady increase in the number of slaves in the late 17th century, when the French West Indies imported 5,000 captives each year. Foreign ships supplied the majority of these slaves, but French ships had begun to enter the slave trade and Nantes was emerging as the leading port. In the first two decades of the 18th century, Nantes fitted out about two out of every three French slave ships. Until the 1730s, most slave ships went from Nantes to Ouidah; thereafter they increasingly visited the coasts between the Niger and Angola. In the 1780s, almost three quarters of Nantes' slave ships took prisoners in this region. Back then, 85 percent of ships sold their human cargo at Saint Domingue. Most of the captains and crew came from the region around Nantes; likewise the capital for equipping the ships, which the merchants sometimes amassed on a large scale by selling shares. Two out of three shipowners in Nantes were sons or grandsons of merchants. Eighteen percent were sons of captains or artisans, and 14 percent were nobles. For the impoverished nobility of Brittany, the slave trade in Nantes was a means of gaining both social status and wealth. See also Bordeaux; French Caribbean. Further reading: Meyer, Jean. L'armement nantais dans la deuxie`me moitie ' du XVIIIe sie`cle. 2nd ed. Paris: EHESS, 1999; Pe'tre'-Grenouilleau, Olivier. L'argent de la traite: milieu ne ' grier, capitalisme et de ' veloppement: un mode`le. Paris: Aubier, 1996; Pe'tre'-Grenouilleau, Olivier. Nantes au temps de la Traite des Noirs. Paris: Hachette, 1998; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Silvia Marzagalli Tales of Slavers The trade in people snatched from their homes on the African continent was not the kind of activity that the organizers of that trade wanted to see published in the popular literature of the time. Yet here and there, over the centuries, enslavers and slave traders

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chronicled their activities, sometimes in all the deeply dehumanizing details associated with their business. These tales of the slave trade offer different perspectives than the traditional view and help provide a broader view of the realities that governed this trade of Africans. The different narratives available cover the different nationalities involved in the trade. There are, for example, the letters from Paul Erdman Isert, a Danish slave trader. His story was first published in German and later translated into English. Then there is the account of John (Jean) Barbot, a Frenchman who was once in self-imposed exile in England because of prejudice against his Protestant faith. Barbot wrote a journal of his voyages in African waters in the 1680s. His first voyage took place sometime between 1681 and 1682, after which he submitted a diary to the shipowners. Although this diary appears to have been lost, Barbot chronicled the events of his voyage in a later publication. Barbot began this work in 1683 and completed it in 1688. In addition to the tales of Isert and Barbot, there is the tale of Captain Theodore Canot, an Italian employed by an American company in their slave-trading operations to Africa. Canot's report was dictated during a series of interviews granted to a Brazilian journalist, Bratnz Mayers. Mayers subsequently published this narrative in the form of a biographical story written in the first person. Apparently he had access to Canot's journals and other written accounts, which helped verify much of what this slave trader wrote about conditions on the African coast and about the slave trade. Other narratives available for this brief survey include the following: John Atkins (1721), John Newton (1750–1754), Samuel Gamble (1793), and Alexander Falconbridge (1792). One of the commonalities shared by the various tales is that they were mostly written by merchants commanding ships owned by others, or by other employees on such ships, such as the surgeons. In the latter case, they are generally written in the format of a ship's log intended to report to the owners on various aspects of the voyage(s). Hence these accounts contain many descriptions of natural phenomena, for example navigational hazards off a coast, and in some cases, as in Barbot's account, descriptions of the flora and fauna of the African coast. In fact, his account is accompanied by several sketches of birds and fish typical of West Africa. Once the ship was on the Middle Passage to the New World, the descriptions were generally accompanied by references to the ship's latitude and longitude at various points in the voyage and to statistical data such as the number of enslaved deaths. It is not to be expected that the slave trader's tales would express sympathy for the human cargo. Any descriptions of conditions on board a slave trader were written from the point of view of a businessman interested in the bottom line rather than from a social perspective. Yet, as recorded in John Newton's tale, the human suffering wrought by a slave trader's conditions could draw the attention of all but those whose consciences had been singed by long involvement in the trade. Newton wrote some thirty years after his last voyage, and even then the memories were so strong that he found it difficult to write with them

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"Coolness" on the topic. He was eventually forced to describe the slave trade as an unjust, cruel, oppressive, and destructive business. These various narratives represent first-hand accounts of people deeply involved in trading and as such help in understanding how trading works. As more research continues into what some have dubbed the “African Holocaust,” such narratives — along with other accounts written from other perspectives, including those of the enslaved who suffered in the holds of slave traders — will all be addressed remember people's ability to treat life as a mere commodity. Further reading: Atkins, John. A trip to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies. London: Frank Cass, 1970 (1735); Falcon Bridge, Alexander. An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa. New York: AMS Press, 1973 (1788); Hair, P.E.H., Jones, Adam and Law, Robin, eds. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1992; Martin, Bernard and Spurrell, Mark, eds. The Journal of a Slaver (John Newton) 1750–1754. London: The Epworth Press, 1962; Mayer, Bratz. Captain Canot, an African slave trader. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968; Mauser, Bruce. A Slave Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: the Protocol of the Sandown, 1793–1794. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002; Wisnes, Selena Axelrod, eds. and trans. Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade: Paul Erdman Isert's Voyage to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in Colombia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Pedro Welch Nbena Nbena, an Ndombe woman and a native of Katumbela near Benguela, was a slave owner who regularly traded in agricultural products. In June 1817, during one of her business trips to Benguela, an old slave woman took her and her daughter into slavery. More specifically, the old slave in question tactfully presented her to her master, Antonio Leal do Sacremento, as her replacement. However, the following day after this incident, the mother and child fled back to their village from Sacremento's estate, where they had been assigned to perform official duties. About six months after this escape, Nbena and her daughter again made their way to Benguela to sell produce. This time they have successfully arrived at their destination. However, Sacremento, learning of their presence in Benguela, soon enslaved them there again. He also eventually sold Nbena and her daughter to Joao de Oliveira Dias, captain of a slave ship from Lisbon that was soon to leave for Brazil via Luanda. The Ndombe community strongly challenged the enslavement and expulsion of Nbena and her daughter from Benguela. In fact, the Ndombe launched a public hearing against Sacremento. During the trial, they argued that Nbena and her daughter were freeborn and therefore illegally enslaved. Partly influenced by this argument, the Portuguese governor of Benguela ordered Mello e Alvim, Sacremento, to bring Nbena and her daughter forthwith from Luanda (where they were then) at their own expense. He also took other administrative measures that eventually led to the successful return of Nbena and her daughter to Benguela. Sacremento was not satisfied with the governor's decision and therefore persistently challenged it. Ultimately, his actions not only led to the imprisonment of the two female subjects, but also to a long-term imprisonment

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Litigation as to the applicability of the principle of "principal liberty" on which they proclaimed their liberty in the ongoing proceedings against them. Sacramento's spirited efforts to repossess what he perceived to be his slaves later led to a direct confrontation between him and Mello e Alvim. It also sparked a conflict between that particular governor of Benguela and his counterpart in Angola, Motta Feo. In the course of these engagements, Mello e Alvim partially freed Nbena and her daughter to further his personal commercial interests in Benguela. A few months after this development, however, Motta Feo found that the 1796 instructions on which Mello e Alvim officially based his release of Nbena and her daughter in 1818 were not in force and had not been in force for twenty years. Following this discovery, Mello e Alvim was removed from office and subsequently arrested and transported to Luanda for further action. Taken together, the story of Nbena offers insight into the relationship between ethnicity and the mechanisms of protection against enslavement during the Atlantic slave trade era. It also shows the mutability of ethnicity during this period. For assuming Nbena had been successfully shipped to Brazil, her ethnic identity would most likely have been known as "Benguela". See also Portuguese slave trade. Further Reading: Curto, Jose´. "The History of Nbena, 1817–1820: Unlawful Enslavement and the Concept of 'Original Freedom' in Angola." In Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds. Transatlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, 43–64. London: Continuum, 2003.

Mohammed Bashir Salau New England Romantic notions of innate anti-slavery puritans notwithstanding, New England was a major nexus in England's and North America's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. This involvement had enormous consequences, not only for the West Indian colonies, which they supported with labor and the slaves involved, but also for New England itself. Although slave labor and the slave trade were not essential to New England's survival, historian Edgar McManus aptly put it, when he wrote that they were "transforming rickety outposts of the empire into areas of permanent settlement" (1973, p. 17). New England's first recorded involvement in the Oceanic soul trade was in 1638, when traders traded captured Native American slaves for black slaves from Providence Island and the Tortugas in the Pequot War of 1637. This 1638 trade initiated a long-lasting connection between New England and the West Indies via the slave trade. The more typical connection involved the triangular trade, in which New Englanders traded rum for African slaves and then sold them in the West Indies for molasses, which they then took back to New England to distill rum. Such was the profit from this trade that the New Englanders proved themselves intrepid slave traders of their own accord. As early as 1644, Boston merchants were attempting to connect directly with Africa in an attempt to attract Africans to sell in Barbados. They were so determined to exploit the West Indies' demand for slaves that they went to Madagascar as early as 1676 to circumvent the influence of larger slave companies in West Africa.

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These 17th-century forays proved to be just the beginning. As England's participation in the slave trade increased over the next century, so did New England's. Massachusetts and Rhode Island became the leading centers of the slave trade, but more and more industries across the region focused on outfitting ships for the triangular trade and processing the products. The social importance of the main slave traders in these colonies was a measure of how lucrative and important they were. In the port cities of Massachusetts and Rhode Island in particular, most of the early families participated in the slave trade. As moral and political uneasiness about slavery arose with the American Revolution, many New Englanders faced a serious struggle between economic interests and the principles they now proclaimed. Yankee disagreements on this issue came to light, particularly in their differing responses to the compromise in the 1787 Constitution, which permitted the Atlantic slave trade until at least 1808. Many of them - particularly but by no means limited to Quakers - refused to support the proposed constitution because of this clause. These anti-slavery people supported various state and federal measures to limit or prohibit America's participation in trade in the years to come. But the New England votes in the Convention were vital to getting this delayed abolition in the first place because it served the interests of both the Lower South and New England. Individual Yankees flouted restrictions on engaging in this trade in the years after the restrictions were enacted. In short, it was not as easy for New England as some modern readers would imagine to sever its extensive and lucrative connection to the African soul trade. See also British Caribbean; Nancy, Die. Further reading: Coughtry, Jay. The Infamous Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981; Donnan, Elizabeth, eds. Documents Illustrating the Slave Trade to America. Vol. 3: New England and the Middle Colonies. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930-1935; Greene, Lorenzo J. The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942; Kaminski, John P., eds. A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Constitutional Debate. Madison: Madison House, 1995; Manus, Edgar J. Black Servitude in the North. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973.

Matthew Mason

New Orleans New Orleans' involvement in the slave trade went through three phases between 1718 and 1860. Between 1718 and 1730, the French West Indies Company imported nearly 6,000 slaves from Africa to their fledgling Louisiana colony via New Orleans. The transatlantic slave trade declined sharply after 1730, and it was not until the 1760s that planters revived the international slave trade to New Orleans. Between 1810 and 1860, New Orleans' involvement in the slave trade entered a third phase when it became a major terminal for the "second middle passage" that carried slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South. In 1718, the French Company of the West Indies established the city of New Orleans as the center of their Louisiana colony. Between 1718

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and in 1730 planters and company officials imported approximately 6,000 slaves in hopes of quickly establishing a profitable plantation-based staple economy. Despite these imports, the New Orleans plantation economy faltered. New Orleans was simply too remote from the main trade flows in the colonial Atlantic world, a situation made worse by Native American and African resistance to the plantation regime. By 1731 Crown officials had seized control of the colony from the bankrupt company and then all but abandoned it. France now focused on providing slaves to its more lucrative Caribbean colonies. The transatlantic slave trade to New Orleans virtually ended between the 1730s and the 1760s, when only a few hundred slaves were imported to New Orleans from the Caribbean. New Orleans and its hinterland began transitioning to a full-fledged plantation economy dependent on the slave trade only after Spain took control of Louisiana in 1763. From then until 1815, the international slave trade was both irregular and sporadic. Spanish officials encouraged the expansion of the plantation economy and the slave trade, but increases in both proved modest until the 1790s. Between 1763 and 1785 perhaps 3,800 slaves were imported into Louisiana, most being bought in small batches of twenty to thirty slaves from Spanish and French traders in the Caribbean. After 1790, the expansion of sugar and cotton production into the lower Mississippi Valley led to an explosive growth in plantation slavery in the region. From 1790 to 1815, New Orleans became the main port for African slaves imported into the lower Mississippi Valley. Perhaps 3,000 additional slaves were imported between 1785 and 1803, most again being bought from traders in the Caribbean. Only after the United States took possession of Louisiana in 1804 was the transatlantic slave trade regulated to any degree. Between 1804 and 1808, slave traders from Charleston, South Carolina, became the major suppliers of African slaves to the New Orleans slave markets. Charleston slavers imported nearly 40,000 slaves between 1803 and 1808, and many were immediately shipped to New Orleans in ships carrying 70 to more than 200 slaves. The United States outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, but by 1810 the slave trade and natural increase had pushed the slave population around New Orleans to over 55,000. After 1815, American slavery shifted from the Chesapeake to the Deep South. A domestic slave trade quickly developed. New Orleans slave markets became the primary destination for slaves involved in what historian Ira Berlin has termed the "second middle passage," d Deep South between 1790 and 1860. In the "second middle passage" of the native slave trade, slaves experienced the same harsh, humiliating conditions as in the first Middle Passage. See also Internal Slave Trade, United States. Further reading: Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African Americans? Slaves. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003; Ingersoll, Thomas N. Mammon, and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

John Craig Hammond

294 NEWTON, JOHN (1725–1807) .

Newton, John (1725–1807) Born in London in 1725, John Newton's early life was associated with the sea. He became known as a slave ship captain, minister, hymn writer and abolitionist. His father was a merchant shipmaster who frequently took his son to the Mediterranean after the death of John's mother. After a brief toilsome sojourn aboard a British naval ship and three years on the African coast, Newton underwent a Christian conversion experience. Newton married in 1750 and made three more voyages to Africa and the Caribbean as captain of a slave ship before leaving the trade in 1754. After a brief career as a customs agent for the port of Liverpool, Newton entered the Anglican service in 1764, serving congregations in Olney and London. Newton showed his affinity with the burgeoning evangelical movement, most notably with his composition of the Olney Hymns in 1779, which included his most famous work, Amazing Grace. While in London, Newton entered the burgeoning abolition movement. His death in 1807 coincided with Britain making the slave trade illegal. John Newton's importance in the study of the Middle Passage comes from his numerous narratives, which provide insight into the material and mental circumstances of slave ships. In 1763 Newton published his autobiography The Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of John Newton. Primarily a conversion narrative, the account does not detail the experiences of slaves, but does show Newton's activities, including the study of Latin and the Bible. He also held personal and public worship during the transatlantic crossing. His ship's letters to his wife, published in 1793, gave a darker picture, describing the ship as overcrowded and dirty. Most insight into slave ships comes from Newton's logs as captain, first published in 1962 as the Journal of a Slave Trader. Newton's daily entries provide a clear account of the purchase and transportation of Africans. In addition to the quantified descriptions of illness and death, Newton records attempted mutiny by the crew and rebellion by the enslaved cargo. During his third and final voyage as captain of a slave ship, Newton became seriously ill and was imprisoned for the entire Middle Passage. This illness, coupled with his weariness of being a "prison leader," provided Newton with his external reasons for retiring from the slave trade. Although he expressed no theological qualms about the slave trade, later in life Newton's Christianity led him to advocate its end. At the age of 63, Newton published his last reflection on the Middle Passage, an influential tract entitled Thoughts on the African Slave Trade (1788). In this work Newton combined his "public confession" and his "humiliating reflection" with the main emphasis of the British abolitionist movement - the moral and physical harm the slave trade was inflicting on Africans and Europeans alike. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; Slave traders (slave traders). Further reading: Hindmarsh, Bruce. John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; Neuton, John. The Journal of a Slaver, eds. Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell. London: Epworth Press, 1962; Neuton, John. The Works of the Rev. John Newton. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1820.

Stephen R. Berry

O Oral History Oral history in history refers to the verbal transmission of information relevant to the day-to-day well-being of society. Oral tradition is as old as time itself. It was the first kind of history and has long since established itself as a historical source of a special kind. This peculiarity derives from the fact that it is an unwritten source of information in a form suitable for oral transmission. Its preservation depends on the preservation power of succeeding generations of people. The social importance of some oral traditions led to the creation of reliable systems for passing them from generation to generation with a minimum of distortion. Such practices as group testimonies at ritual occasions, disputations, schools for the teaching of traditional folklore, and the recitations upon assuming office could preserve the exact texts, including archaisms, for centuries even after they were no longer understood. Traditions of this kind resemble legal documents or sacred books, and their bearers became highly specialized officials in many African royal courts. The African oral tradition can be divided into the following five categories: . . . . .

Formulas poetry lists stories comments

Formulas Formulas are stereotyped expressions used in various special circumstances. Formulas consist of titles, slogans, didactic formulas and ritual formulas. Titles are formulas that describe a man's status. They keep a memory of the past. These formulas often contain laudatory features. Usually, slogans are recited on occasions that emphasize the distinctive characteristics of the group. There is no guarantee of accurate reproduction of theirs

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Content due to its frequent repetition. Slogans are often only understandable in the light of accompanying explanatory comments. They are a source from which to extract information about the family, clan, district or country that characterize them. Didactic formulas are proverbs, riddles, idioms and epigrams. They are the storehouse of ancient wisdom. They are meanings in themselves and sometimes contain historical information. Ritual formulas are used in religious or magical rites. It is generally believed that if not repeated word for word, supernatural sanctions will fall upon all involved in the ceremony. They are learned with special care and are usually spoken by specialists such as priests, watercallers, and sorcerers. Poetry Poetry includes all traditions in a fixed form, the form and content of which are considered artistically valuable in the society in which they are passed on. Poetry should meet aesthetic demands. Their preservation and dissemination are often in the hands of specialists, and the language must conform to some fixed law or convention. Poetry broadly includes the following forms: historical poetry, which provides an account of historical events and is often composed for propaganda purposes; Panegyric poetry, a poem of praise written during the person's lifetime or immediately after their death; religious poetry that includes stereotyped forms or prayers, hymns and dogmatic texts; and personal poetry composed to give free expression to the feelings of the person who composes it. Lists Lists contain the names of places or people and are usually kept by specialists belonging to an institution. These lists are announced at a public ceremony such as the death or accession of a chief. They generally form an official tradition intended as a historical record, although the main purpose of the recorded facts is to substantiate claims to political, social and economic rights. Lists are usually the only sources available for creating a chronology. Narratives Narratives are a form of free-text testimony, ie written in prose. This category contains different types, the common denominator of which is that they are all in narrative form. To some extent, their primary purpose is to teach, edify, bring joy, or defend rights. Stories are the only sources that give detailed accounts of a series of events. They are usually recited by specialists at ceremonial occasions and passed on within a specific social group. Three types can be distinguished: those for general history, those for local history, and those for family history. They try to explain the world, culture and society. When such explanations are given in terms of religious causes, the story in question is called a myth.

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Comments Traditions of this type have two things in common: (1) they are presented in the form of brief information, and (2) they supplement other sources or are closely related to a particular situation and are only passed on in the context of that situation. They never primarily serve to write history, but have either a legal or a didactic purpose. Any type of oral tradition has its biases and limitations. They can be garbled and overdone. They are distant in time and have problems with semantics and archaisms. They can be difficult to understand when taken out of context. But it is precisely their diversity that makes it possible to overcome the particular shortcomings of each one by comparing the information that can be obtained from the different types. All oral traditions are more or less linked to the societies and cultures that produce them. Therefore, all are influenced by the particular culture and society on which their existence depends. See also historical memory. Further Reading: Carretta, Vincent, and Gould, Philip, eds. Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001; Diedrich, Maria, Gates, Henry Louis, and Pedersen, Carl, eds. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Rice, Alan. Radical Tales of the Black Atlantic. New York: Continuum, 2003.

Reginald Clarke

Ouidah During the 18th century Ouidah, also spelled Whydah and originally called Ajuda, became the main port of embarkation on the Slave Coast for millions of enslaved Africans who were driven from their homelands and communities and shipped to the New World. The Portuguese, who first arrived in Ouidah in 1580, were followed by the Danes, English and French. These European powers built fortresses (some of which still stand today or have been converted into museums) to protect their slave efforts. It is estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of all Africans sold into slavery passed through the port of Ouidah. Both Ouidah and Allada were coastal kingdoms that controlled the export of slaves until the 18th century, when the hinterland kingdom of Dahomey under King Agaja Trudo (1708–1732) conquered both kingdoms in 1724 and 1727, respectively, to gain access to the coast, monopolizing the Deliver slaves to European slave ships and gain access to the arms market. The king's army began expanding the kingdom, encouraged by the availability of rifles and other firearms traded with the French and Spanish slave traders for prisoners of war. The kingdom of Dahomey had long been at odds with the neighboring kingdom of Oyo, which it tried in vain to subdue; Dahomey later conceded defeat and became a tributary of Oyo. Historians have argued that the slave trade in Dahomey was state-controlled primarily because the kingdom

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sold only prisoners of war. Apparently it was against custom to sell someone from Dahomey, and King Vebaya (1645–1685) made it a capital offense. William Snelgrave, an English slave trader, agreed that the King of Dahomey never sold slaves on his farms unless they were found guilty of serious crimes. However, research also shows that in addition to selling its POWs and foreign slaves, Dahomey sold imported slaves from the hinterland to European slave traders via the port city of Ouidah. With the conquest of the port city of Ouidah, Dahomey became the main supplier of slaves on the Slave Coast as the kingdom developed into a predominant military slave state in the region following the collapse of the Oyo Empire. During the battles to conquer Ouidah, King Agaja established the female military unit known as the Amazons after his regular all-male army suffered heavy casualties. The Amazons trained for battle through vigorous dancing and hunting, and were not allowed to have children or become pregnant. Recent research shows that although the empire prospered during Agaja's rule, the raids and disciplined military were designed for self-defense and to control the slave trade that threatened to engulf the kingdom. After Dahomey took partial control of the trade under Agaja, the number of Africans transiting Ouidah declined from 20,000 to 5,500 a year. However, King Agaja was unable to interest European traders in any type of trade other than slaves, but resorted to selling people. His immediate successor, Tegbesu IV, tried to revive the slave trade during his reign and made Ouidah the main port of departure for the enslaved Africans, but by the 1760s Dahomey and the port of Ouidah were rapidly falling into disrepair, being supplanted by other ports such as Porto Novo. As well as being a notorious gateway for slaves en route to the New World, Ouidah is important for other reasons as well. Ouidah has been called the World Capital of Voodoo (Vodun), where voodoo sympathizers and believers, mostly from the diaspora (US and Brazil), and curious tourists celebrate voodoo, a belief in life fueled by physical and spiritual forces. Once oppressed, banned, and considered a barbaric religion by both colonial administrators and Mathieu Kerekou's Marxist regime (1973–1991), the government recognized this religious observance in 1996 and instituted a national voodoo day. A member of the Voodoo Supreme Chief family underscores the importance of Ouidah and voodoo specifically to those whose Ouidah ancestors passed through the Door of No Return when he says that “the annual celebration for us in Ouidah is an opportunity to remember to remember the hundreds of thousands of blacks who were deported to America as slaves.” Ouidah has inspired historical, fictional, and travel narratives including Frank Yerby's The Man from Dahomey (1971), Bruce Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), and Sharon Caulder's Mark of Voodoo: Awakening to My African Spiritual Heritage (2002). Chatwin's historical novel tells the story of a Brazilian slave trader who helped a Dahomey prince ascend to the throne but ended up dying poor and destitute despite being granted a monopoly on the slave trade in the kingdom. Mark of Voodoo is an autobiographical travelogue that documents the author's physical condition

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and spiritual journey to Ouidah. Though knowledgeable and practicing voodoo, Caulder found her spiritual roots in Ouidah: the Voodoo Supreme Chief became her mentor. Ouidah's legacy is unenviable given his role in the transatlantic slave trade; It stands today as a testament to both the dehumanization of Africans and a commemoration of the spirits of those who made the journey into the unknown. See also returnees to Africa; Slave Coast; trade forts. Further reading: Caulder, Sharon. Mark of Voodoo: Awakening to my African Spiritual Heritage. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2002; Chatwin, Bruce. The Viceroy of Ouidah. London: Penguin Books, 1980; Dalzel, Archibald. History of Dahomey, a landlocked kingdom of Africa. London: Heinemann, 1793; Falola, Toyin, and Childs, Matt D., eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantean World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004; law, robin. Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slave Port, 1727–1892. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005; Yeby, Frank. The man from Dahomey. London: Heineman, 1971.

Mawuena Logan

Ounce Trading The term ounce trading refers to a specific type of transaction that arose when West Africa transitioned from a gold-exporting to a gold-importing region. By the 16th century, gold was already an accepted currency between European Atlantic merchants and African coastal societies, largely because Europeans had initially purchased large quantities of African gold. Thus, ounces of gold and one-sixteenth-ounce divisions (or ackies) were understood as mediums of exchange that could easily be applied to the slave trade. In the early 17th century, buyers and sellers in many regions commonly negotiated an ounce value for each captive. However, trading ounces was far more complex as gold did not change hands in most cases. European and American merchants realized that the demand for trade goods in West Africa was greater than the demand for cash, and that they could make greater profits by using arbitrage to get firearms, alcohol, manufactured goods, and especially fabrics, in West Africa at a price sell higher price than it costs to buy these goods in Europe. However, Africans did not continuously or ubiquitously value all of these commodities at the same price. Instead, whenever a European (or American) ship traded with an African community or individual, the value of the goods they had to offer had to be negotiated between the ship's officers and the leaders of the community or the slave traders. This created the need for a method of determining the value of slaves in terms of trade goods. The solution was to develop an artificial unit of trade, the "ounce of trade". Through negotiation, each commodity offered by the merchants was assigned a value in trade ounces. Each captive for sale was similarly assigned a value in trade ounces. Generally, the seller could then select the goods that would make up payment for individual slaves. The economics of the ounce trade were complex and reflected the agency of both buyers and sellers. The destination of the ships

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Officers, investors and captains should buy cheap goods in Europe and create great value for them in Africa. These efforts were sometimes confused by Africans' selectivity in the goods they accepted, based on their personal needs and potential inland resale value. Also, competition could shift the balance. The arrival of competing ships, for example, sometimes allowed African participants to force buyers to price the ounce of trade fairly high in relation to their wares. As a last resort, European and American buyers sometimes offered to include gold in the trade ounce. However, this was undesirable, since the price of gold in Europe was similar to its value in Africa, and thus the profit from the arbitrage disappeared. Pricing was similarly complicated by the overall supply and demand for slaves, and the health, age, and sex of the captives. In addition to direct payment for slaves, the ounce of trade facilitated the negotiation of the "tariff," a fee paid by ship captains to African administrators and elites to secure the right to trade in that region. See also trading in commodities. Further reading: Metcalf, George. "Gold, Assortments and the Trade Ounce: Fante Merchants and the Problem of Supply and Demand in the 1770s." The Journal of African History 28, 1 (1987): 27-41; Polyani, Karl. "Sorting and 'ounce trading' in the West African slave trade." The Journal of African History 5, 3 (1964): 381–393.

Trevor Getz Overcrowding After being captured, transported ashore, and sold to European traders, the next harrowing experience for African slaves was boarding the slave ships and the horrifying sea voyage across the Atlantic. On board the ships, human cargo was packed or stored below decks, often according to the ship's "stacking plan", which was designed to pack the maximum number of slaves into the holds. The ships were crowded from bow to stern with men, women and children. In the big business of the slave trade, slavers often debated the merits of packaging strategies and tried to make as much profit as possible from each voyage across the ocean. The trader's goal was to cram as many slaves into ships' holds as possible and get as many of the slaves across the Atlantic alive and well as possible to allow for maximum resale. These two goals were not necessarily compatible. Slave captains generally fell into one of two categories on this issue. One school of thought, the "Loosepackers," argued that providing the slaves with a little more space and better food would reduce the Middle Passage's mortality rate and bring healthier slaves ashore who would be sold at a higher price, yielding a greater profit . Most slavers, however, were "tight packers" who stowed the holds as full as possible, often cramming the slaves so tightly together that they were forced to lie on top of one another without as much room as in a coffin. This allowed for larger slave loads, but the loss of life on these voyages was often greater than on ships with smaller cargoes. Packers reckoned that despite the higher death rate, the larger loads would offset the deaths and so

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overall higher net profits. The high demand and price for slaves in the mid-18th century meant that most slave captains were willing to risk great loss of life to transport as many slaves as possible. Before laws were passed to control the person-to-ton ratio of slave ships, scholars estimated that for every ton of cargo hold, four more slaves were commonly carried. The infamous slave trader Brookes was a 320 ton ship whose stowage plan showed where 451 slaves could be stowed using every available space. However, evidence shows that the Brookes transported more than 600 slaves on several voyages. Another British slave trader from Liverpool took almost 700 slaves, more than three slaves per ton, for his crossing across the ocean. Such tight packing was the norm rather than the exception as traders sought to reap the riches of the human trade. Overpacking led to severe physical and mental stress. Slaves grabbed belowdecks and forced into such close proximity with their fellow sufferers kicked and even bit each other in their slave deck on the barge Wildfire, 1860. Special attempts to maneuver enough space for them - Collections, University of Virginia Library . himself. Rough weather made a terrible situation even more appalling because slaves were not taken from the holds to spend time on the decks. As they were held captive below decks, they were thrown against the ship and against each other, bruising themselves with every punishing sea wave. Slaves packed in this way, who did not have enough space to sit up straight, had to crawl on top of each other to reach the toilet buckets. Few would bother to try, and so slaves would lie in their excrement and other bodily fluids. Such conditions encouraged the spread of disease and resulted in mortality rates of between 10 and 20 percent, depending in part on the length of the voyage and the level of overcrowding. To reduce mortality, the British Parliament passed the Dolben's Act of 1788, which limited the person-to-ton ratio of slave ships to five slaves per three tons up to 200 tons, and one slave per ton thereafter. In 1799, a revised law called for minimum space standards for each slave carried. Male slaves were to be provided six feet by one foot four inches; females, five foot ten by one foot four; boys, five feet by a foot two; and girl, four foot six by one foot. However, slaver overcrowding continued as unscrupulous traders circumvented space requirements by altering the ship's registered tonnage or openly ignoring regulations. In 1814 the Spanish 200-ton brig Carlos was captured with 512 slaves on board, almost 180 more than the law allowed. In the same year, another slaver, the 40-ton schooner Aglae, was captured with a cargo of 152 slaves, nearly four to the ton. The high profit margin

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of the Atlantic slave trade ensured that traders would continue to overload their cargo holds in spite of all regulatory laws and regardless of the suffering and death of their victims. Further reading: Dow, George Francis. Slave Ships and Slavery. New York: Dover Publications, 1970; Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Garland, Charles and Klein, Hebert S. "The Allotment of Space for Slaves on Eighteenth-Century British Slave Ships." William and Mary Quarterly 42 (1985): 238-248; Northrup, David, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2002; Rawley, James A. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. New York: WW Norton, 1981.

Sharon A. Roger Hepburn

P Phillips, Thomas Thomas Phillips was the captain of a slave ship named 'Hannibal' which made a voyage to Whydah (Ouidah) in 1693–1695. He was a member of the cartel that owned the ship. Thomas Phillips kept an account of the voyage entitled A Journal of a Voyage made in the Hannibal, which provides excellent source material for reconstructing the history of the slave trade, particularly the Middle Passage experience. His ship sailed to Whydah with European manufactured goods, mainly Welsh fabrics. In his journal he notes that a slave captain did not begin the trade without paying customs duties, and that it was customary for the captains to buy the king's slaves before buying them from other African merchants. Other people to whom the captain had to make payments were the interpreter, the person guarding the ship's stores, the porters who carried the stores out to sea, and the people who rang the bell signaling the start of trade. Phillips bought about 692 slaves. Aside from bartering, another currency recorded by Phillips was cowries. He mentioned that smaller cowries are more valuable than larger ones. Phillips described how slaves were packed into the ship and made to dance at night. The slaves were not made to dance primarily for entertainment purposes, but to mobilize them. Like most slave ships, Phillips' Hannibal suffered casualties. He lost about 300 of his slaves and noted the economic misfortune of this loss. The slave captain lost £10 for each slave died. See also African Rulers and the Slave Trade; mortality, slave; Tales of Slavers; Trading in commodities. Further Reading: Rawley, James. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981; Stone, Robert. The French Slave Trade in the 18th Century: A Business of the Old Regime. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979; Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantean Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Saheed pendant

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Plans and Diagrams Among the most powerful and chilling records depicting the cold-hearted and calculating nature of those who controlled the for-profit transatlantic slave trade are the plans and diagrams drawn up and consulted by slave captains for the loading and storing of human cargo on board their ships for the voyage across the Atlantic to the slave societies of the New World. These records, often referred to as "the stacking chart," testify to the plight of Africans who were forcibly displaced from their homes and taken to the New World as slaves. Slave ships were fitted out to best accommodate their human cargo, and great care was taken to utilize every available space. Because slaves were considered commodities, their owners kept relatively accurate manifests for each ship and followed their stowage plan to literally cram as many slaves into the holds as possible. The space for human cargo, as shown in the stacking plans, was determined by precise mathematical calculations, with the main focus on maximum profit. When dividing the room, particular attention was paid to the size. The larger slaves were to be housed in the widest beam area of ​​the ship, while the smaller ones were to be housed near the bow. To maximize the number of slaves to be transported, the holds were divided by purpose-built shelves or platforms in such a way that the normal 4–5 foot distance between decks was halved. Slaves were therefore not even allowed to sit up straight. The mathematical calculations used to design the stacking plans typically allocate a space of six feet by sixteen inches for males and five feet ten inches by sixteen inches for females. Many of the charts were used by abolitionists in their campaign to end the Atlantic slave trade to illustrate the horrors endured by the victims of the trade. The most notorious of the stacking plans was that of the Brookes, used by the Plymouth Committee of Abolitionists in a 1788 pamphlet to document the heinous nature of the transatlantic slave trade. The Brookes' plan showed where 451 slaves could be stowed under the slaver's decks, seemingly without sparing an inch. Nevertheless, an Act of Parliament permitted the Brookes to carry 454, so the stacking plan concludes that three more slaves could be jammed into the number shown in the plan to reach full capacity. The slave trader charts were drawn up according to the regulations of the European nations that control the slave trade; However, compliance with these laws was often lax. Slave ships often carried more slaves than the law allowed and indicated in the stacking plan. The plans and diagrams of slave ships dispel any doubt about the inhumanity of the centuries-long trade in human lives. Further reading: Clarkson, Thomas. The Story of the Rise, Progress and Enactment of the British Parliament's Abolition of the African Slave Trade. 2 vols. London: Cass, 1968 (1808); Donnan, Elizabeth, eds. Documents Illustrating the History of the Slave Trade to America. 4 vols. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–1935; Garland, Charles and Klein, Hebert S. "The Allotment of Space for Slaves on Eighteenth-Century British Slave Ships." William and Mary Quarterly 42 (1985): 238-248; Dow, George Francis. Slave Ships and Slavery. New York: Dover Publications, 1970; Northrup, David, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Sharon A. Roger Hepburn

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Plantations The plantation was an economic unit in which, among other things, the high-yield crops of sugar, tobacco and cotton were grown and processed beyond the subsistence level. A large landowner, also a slave owner, cultivated crops solely for profit. The source of profit was based on the extensive and exploitative use of slaves or indentured labor. The slaves could be organized as gang work, a situation where they worked in groups and were locked up in specific places for a specific amount of time. Others worked as farmers and were given daily chores. In Brazil and the Caribbean, African slaves worked on sugar cane plantations. A plantation economy based on growing sugar cane and producing sugar in factories known in Brazil as engenho (the "engine") exploited slaves to their maximum capacity. In the southern United States, slaves produced cotton, tobacco, rice, and some other crops. The slave master lived in the plantation house, where he had close access to oversee the slaves. Shops were also conducted in plantation houses - the sale of produce, including slaves, and the manufacture of small items. Plantation houses were places where slaves were disciplined and social events were conducted. A combination of plantations resulted in a so-called plantation economy based on large-scale profitability. Such crops could be traded within national borders or converted into finished goods for international trade. The majority of the slaves involved in the Middle Passage ended up on the plantations. They were part of a global Atlantic economy in which Europe brought manufactured goods to Africa in exchange for slaves. The slaves were then taken to plantations to make items that circulated in America and Europe. Much of the extreme brutality of slavery occurred on plantations. The hours were long, the supervision intense, and the rewards for the slaves no more than the huts they slept in. growing and picking cotton,

Master of the Plantation Slaves, Brazil, 1867. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

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Separating the seeds from the fluff (ginning) and baling the cotton took hours. To produce more cotton, a slave owner needed more labor, which in turn created a greater demand for slaves. Since many of the slaves were farmers in Africa, they adapted to the plantations, with some slaves even introducing new ideas for growing rice. Plantations had cottage industries where slaves could work as artisans making baskets, pottery, utensils, and other small items. There were also those who did household chores such as child rearing, sewing and dairy farming. Slaves with artisan skills were valued the most because their owners could earn more money from their produce and even rent their services to other plantations. An apprenticeship system developed that allowed slaves to pass their skills on to their children. Slaves, where conditions permitted, raised families on plantations, even though their children were also slaves. The children were admitted to the labor market early, as early as the age of seven, when they could be asked to run errands all day. If a plantation owner died or for other economic reasons, slaves could be driven away forever. Slaves survived on small food rations, supplemented by growing vegetables and raising livestock. Slaves wore a minimum of clothing and enjoyed a minimum of privacy. See also British Caribbean; Cuba; French Caribbean; Hispaniola; contract staff; Saint Domingue; Spanish Caribbean. Further reading: Hamilton, Virginia. Many Thousands Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991; Hopkinson, Debora. Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993; Lester, Julius. be a slave. New York: Scholastic, 1968.

Toyin Falola Ports A network of ports formed an essential part of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. The main trading ports were in Europe and the profits were invested in trading ports and industrial areas. The system of transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans connected the Americas, Africa, the Mediterranean and parts of Asia. Key elements of business in many European Atlantic ports were based on Atlantic connections associated with 18th-century dependence on slavery. English ports involved in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans included the ports of London, Bristol and Liverpool, which grew with the increase in trade between the 1700s and 1800s. Banks were opened by merchants who were prospering, thus facilitating trade in Britain and Britain overseas. Liverpool were making £1million each year from trading until 1700. In such port communities, the chief slave traders were the financial leaders, and they rose to the top of political offices, influencing policy-making at both the local and national levels. Such was the case with leading slave traders in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol. Bristol slave traders dispatched 14 per cent of all ships leaving port in the last quarter of the 18th century. In the case of Liverpool, 33 percent of the ships that left the port in the 1770s were slave ships from the city.

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Ships sailed from British ports such as Liverpool to the west coast of Africa, where they offloaded goods brought from Britain and bartered them for enslaved Africans. Liverpool was a port where ships were specifically designed and built for the sole purpose of ferrying Africans across the Atlantic. However, these ships could easily be adapted to carry other types of cargo. The economic development of the areas outside of Liverpool was aided by the slave trade. Manchester's manufactured goods, such as cotton, made it famous, and the city was heavily involved in the transatlantic trade with enslaved Africans. Through trade, Manchester grew into an important export city. Nantes and La Rochelle were examples of slave trading ports in France integrated into the global trading system. The ports of La Rochelle, Nantes and Bordeaux have been described in urban settings as elegant reminders of the labors of enslaved Africans in the French West Indies, whose exports were becoming increasingly valuable. In 1789, the slave trade became essential to the economy of Nantes. Investment in slavery outstripped investment in other business activities, and trade sustained Nantes as a major distributor of goods from the colonies. Bordeaux also became an important port with a huge re-export trade fueled by the colonial economy. This trade allowed Nantes to keep up with Bordeaux. Nantes' industrial development was also stimulated by transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. In the 1770s, Nantes was France's largest shipbuilding port. Slave traders had heavy investments in the textile and shipbuilding industries and local hardware, funded by profits from transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. See also entrepreneurs; shipyards. Further reading: Byrom, Jamie. heads and machines; Britain 1750-1900. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1999; mcd Beckles, Hilary, "Slave Voyages, the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans." Unpublished manuscript prepared for the UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network's Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project. Paris: UNESCO, 2000; Walvin, James. Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1994.

Sandra Ingrid Gift Portuguese Slave Trade The emergence of the Atlantic slave trade was a secondary result of the Portuguese Atlantic expansion in the first half of the 15th century. Despite this fact, the slave trade became a significant interest for Portugal and its merchants over the next four centuries, contributing to the emergence of the Portuguese Atlantean Empire. As part of a complex project that involved religious, political, and economic concerns, Portugal encouraged southern Atlantic navigation from the early 15th century (its success was owed in large part to foreigners such as the Genoese seamen). After discovering the Atlantic islands - Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde - the Portuguese continued their search for African gold, which they found off the coast of Guinea, on a stretch of coast that soon became known as the Gold Coast.

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The first slaves bought by Portuguese traders on the Gold Coast were transported to Portugal to work as domestic servants. During the first 200 years of the Portuguese slave trade, slaves came from two main regions: Guinea Coast (West Africa) and Congo and Angola (West-Central Africa). From the former region, the slaves came from the mainland (Senegambia), but almost all passed through the Cape Verde archipelago, and increasingly thousands were trafficked from southern ports, mainly from the Bay of Benin, via the island of São Tomé. For this reason, early on, Portuguese traders and settlers spoke of Africa as "Guinea" and of Africans as "Guinea Negroes". By the mid-19th century, Portugal prefigured the plantation model of the New World colonial economy, which consisted of large-scale sugar production based on African forced labor. This pattern was further improved in Portuguese South America. Brazil emerged as the mainstay of the Portuguese overseas empire from the mid-17th century, but had been one of two important Portuguese slave trade destinations since the last quarter of the 16th century. Between the years 1620 and 1640, the Portuguese slave trade from the Congo and Angola solidified, transforming west-central Africa into the main Atlantic slave export region. From Luanda, the Portuguese invaded the hinterland and mixed with the indigenous people, creating a Portuguese-speaking African population. Portuguese control of Luanda and later the Benguela slave trade was partly due to the formation of this mixed population, which supported the increasing demand for slaves on Brazil's sugar plantations. During the unification of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns under the Habsburg kings (1580–1640), Portuguese traders controlled the supply of slaves to Hispanic South America through treaties or asiatos granted by the king. Brazil's plantation owners had to compete with Hispanic-South American miners by buying slaves from Portuguese-speaking traders, as sugar became a rival to silver during this period of high prices in the European market. At this time, the Crown regulated the slave trade with its colonies by issuing licenses (licenses) to trade slaves in Iberian possessions overseas. The 1640 rebellion against the Habsburg King restored a Portuguese dynasty to the Portuguese throne and led to an Iberian War with overseas repercussions. For the Portuguese slave trade, the most important result was the loss of the asiento, which denied the Portuguese direct access to the Spanish-South American market and thus to the source of silver. Only in the last years of the 17th century did the slave trade with Spanish South America regain importance. Meanwhile, the slave trade between Brazil and Africa became increasingly important due to the need for Portuguese-Brazilian slave labor plantations not adequately provided by metropolitan merchants more attracted by South American silver. Ordinary Portuguese migrants from Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Recife, who were newly settled as merchants in Brazil's ports, invested in the direct import of forced African migrants. The appointment of Brazilian settlers and former governors from captains to rule Angola in the second half of the 17th century was also an important means of penetrating Portuguese-Brazilian interests in the slave trade.

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This tendency, begun around 1650, was reinforced by the combined effect of the downward trend in the Portuguese-Brazilian economy and fierce competition with the northern European powers (in the sugar market and hence the Atlantic slave trade) in the second half of the century. Portuguese traders struggled to offer a diverse range of manufactured goods (most were not manufactured in the kingdom) at the lowest prices demanded by African slave traders. Therefore, cheap goods produced in Portuguese South America replaced metropolitan consumer goods in the Portuguese slave trade. Brazilian sugarcane alcohol (jeribita) took over the role of wines and spirits in Angola, and third-grade tobacco was also exported to West Africa. This trade pattern had different characteristics depending on the African region of slave exports. On the coast of Guinea, particularly in the ports known as the Costa da Mina (Mine Coast or Bay of Benin), Portuguese and Luso-Brazilians competed with Dutch, English, and French slave traders. Although these rivals had several factories and forts in the area, a Portuguese fort was not built until 1721. However, no one could monopolize the trade as the local kingdoms and merchants exercised control over the flow of slaves. Portuguese traders from Brazil, who became established in this branch of Brazilian slave imports, were also taxed by the Dutch at 10 percent of their cargo as grants. Regardless, Luso-Brazilian traders traded tobacco and gold to buy manufactured goods from European rivals so they could procure slaves. Despite the minimal interest of Lisbon merchants in this branch of trade, the metropolitan government tried to increase official control over Brazilian trade with Costa da Mina. Concerned about the smuggling of tobacco - and later gold - to European rivals on Africa's shores and the illegitimate colonial imports of manufactures in return, and Luso-Brazilian prominence in Luanda, Portugal enacted a Pioneer Law in 1684. This law limited the permitted number of slaves loaded per ship's hold ~ and later (1699) it established the number of ships authorized (lei da arqueac¸ao) to purchase slaves on the Costa da Mina (24 of Salvador and 12 of from Pernambuco). Ironically, although the former law succeeded in its aims, the latter rule served to strengthen the monopoly of a few Bahian merchants on the Costa da Mina's slave market. It was not until 1756 that this branch of the slave trade became free for all of the king's subjects within the Portuguese Atlantic Empire. In Angola, where Portugal had effective control of exports and some inland regions, big-city and colonial traders shared slave exports to Brazil. The former exercised its control over Luanda's exports mainly during the Brazilian gold boom, providing local slave traders with cheap manufactures and long-term credit, while Luso-Brazilian merchants, whose main commodities were sugarcane alcohol and smuggled manufactures, moved to Benguela, which in turn became one of the largest slave exporters in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. The settlers on Luanda also played an important role in trade. Supported by Portuguese loans, they organized the caravans and fairs in the hinterland

310 POTOSI

to buy prisoners. In the 18th century, however, the Portuguese Crown found itself increasingly in trouble because of the share of colonial settlers (Luso-Brazilians and Luso-Africans) in Angolan trade. To protect the interests of metropolitan Luanda, Portuguese ministers introduced some mercantilist measures, such as giving priority to offloading slave cargoes to those whose ship and cargo belonged to the same owner—usually Lisbon merchants. The simplest royal attempt to guarantee metropolitan control over some branches of the slave market in Angola and Brazil was the establishment of two chartered Royal Trade Companies during the reign of Prime Minister Marquis of Pombal. The Real Companhia do Gáao-Para ´e Maranháo (1755) and the Real Companhia de Pernambuco e Paraı ´ba (1759) had the monopoly on the slave trade tied to these Brazilian captains (Para´, Maranháao, Pernambuco and Paraiba) . The latter trading company conducted most of its trade in Luanda. Thus, the Portuguese slave trade in Angola showed the classic triangle pattern alongside a bilateral colony-to-colony trade. After Brazil's independence (1822), some Portuguese merchants - most of whom were probably settlers in African colonies - continued the slave trade to Brazil and Cuba, despite pressure from the British abolitionist movement and strong Brazilian competition. The Portuguese flag was seen on slavers' ships at least until 1836, when Portugal abolished the slave trade with its colonies. For over 400 years, urban and maritime Portuguese slave traders carried out much of the Atlantic slave trade, which was tied to Europe, the Atlantic islands and the Americas. Slave exports to Portuguese South America from the mid-16th century to the break of Brazil's colonial ties amounted to nearly 2,900,000 souls, nearly a third of all people deported as captives in the Atlantic slave trade. ~ further reading: Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de. O trato dos viventes: a formac¸ao ^ Brasil no Atlantico Sul. Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000; Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969; Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death. Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988; Verger, Pierre. Trade relations between the Bay of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1976.

Gustavo Acioli Lopes and Maximiliano MacMenz

Potosı´ African slaves lived within a few years of their founding in 1545 in Potosı´, a silver mining town 13,000 feet high in the Andean plains. Up until the 1590s, African populations were generally criollo, born in Seville, Santo Domingo, Panama, Lima, or Mexico City. After the 1590s, African-born Angolan slaves dominated the city. These slaves were sold for an average price of 500 pesos. Silver was Potosı´s main trade, and Spanish mine owners usually rejected costly slave labor in favor of the Crown-backed indigenous labor scheme. The general opinion was that slaves could not adapt to high altitude or mining work. Instead, slaves were considered symbols of wealth for theirs

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owners and worked in the household, handicrafts or in bakeries. Although few mined silver, slaves in Potosı´ had the unique job of making silver coins. About fifty slaves worked from 1572 to 1683 in Potosı's Mint (Casa de la Moneda), the only one in Peru. The journey of the slaves to Potosı´ shifted over time. 16th-century slaves, mostly Wolof and Biafra, came via an official route through Crown-sanctioned ports (such as Nombre de Dios in Panama), where slave traders paid Crown taxes. This was a long and often fatal journey from Africa or Spain through Panama and down the Pacific coast. Slaves who came to Potosı´ from the Pacific were equally likely to have been born in Spanish America as in Africa. In some cases, African-born slaves paired up during the journey and arrived in Potosı´ awaiting the birth of a child. By 1580, a growing circuit of illicit trade between Potosı´ and the Atlantic coast changed slave voyages to Potosı´ and dramatically increased the number of African-born slaves. Tucuman became a bridge between the Atlantic and silver-rich Upper Peru, and Brazilian merchants known as Peruleiros traversed this route. In 1592 the Spanish Crown gave permission for traders to sell some slaves from the port of Buenos Aires. Around 1600 an estimated 450 African slaves came to Potosı´ from the Atlantic every year. This new route meant a shorter journey for the slaves, but remained exceptional in its demands. Traders brought Angolan slaves to Brazil and then to Buenos Aires. Once on land, slaves traveled more than 1,000 miles. Along the way, the slaves had plenty of beef in the meadows and good springs of water in the forest, but little food from the mountains. Passing through cities like Salta, Jujuy, and Tucuman, slaves encountered Spaniards and indigenous peoples like the Guaranı´. The new route bypassed Spain and Panama and offered a more gradual climb up the eastern side of the Andes, making altitude sickness less debilitating. The journey by land and sea took more than 120 days. After 1623, the Crown again suppressed this Atlantic route because it harmed Panamanian merchants. The number of Africans (free and slave) peaked at 6,000 when Potosı´ reached its peak of 120,000 inhabitants around 1620. Reasons of distance, price and labor requirements account for the low percentage of Africans in Potosı´. Although the Africans were never fully assimilated into the mining industry, they played a significant role in the city's economy and influenced the burgeoning colonial society of Potosı´. Further Reading: Boxer, C. R. Salvador de Sa´ and the Battle for Brazil and Angola, 1602-1686. London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1952; Wolff, Ing. "Slavery and the Trade of Blacks in Upper Peru 1545–1640." Yearbook for the History of State, Economy and Society of Latin America 1 (1964): 157–186.

Jane Mangan Price There was no common trading currency throughout the Atlantic world. The value of slaves was determined by local characteristics and economic systems. For example, on the Windward Coast, slaves and European imports were generally valued relative to iron bars; in Ivory Coast, too

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pieces of cloth; on the Gold Coast to gold dust; between Accra and Keta for cowrie shells; on the Slave Coast for both iron and copper ingots; in the oil rivers to brass basins; and in Cameroon to pieces of cloth. Iron and copper were imported from Europe in standard size bars. On the Slave Coast, cloth was imported in standard lengths. Aside from cowrie shells and gold dust, these means of exchange were consumer goods that varied according to need. More often, the trade in slaves was complicated and lengthy. Large trading companies, which had depots stocking enough imported goods, attempted to fix prices. The price could tip over if an invader came to shore and his or her trade caused a flood of guns or ingots. Again, African tastes tended to change when it came to European goods, so maintaining inventory could be a tricky business. Because of the fluctuations in supply and demand from time to time and from place to place along the coast, as well as the complicated trading system, it is difficult to find a representative example of the prices Europeans pay for slaves in West Africa. At the beginning of the 18th century the equivalent of £3 was the price of a healthy male slave in the prime of life, at the beginning of the 19th century perhaps the equivalent of £25. The price of a slave was paid in goods whose value on the coast might have been out of proportion to their cost in Europe. Slave prices in Africa were relatively low. In 1455 it was possible to buy 18 moors for a house in Arguin. Half a century later, near Senegal, a horse bought only twelve Negroes. In Rio dos Sestos the price of a slave went from two shaving basins to four or five. The native merchants of Porto d'Ali demanded one horse for six slaves in 1505. The first shipment of Negroes was bought in Lisbon for the West Indies in 1510 and a licensing system was introduced three years later. An edict of March 15, 1518 regulated the price of slaves and prohibited merchants from entering the interior of Guinea to obtain them. The original currency was a type of cowrie known as a njimbu or zimbo found on the island of Luanda and imported from Brazil on a large scale. The zimbo was gradually replaced by the use of panos, or palm leaf cloth, and by rock salt, brandy, gunpowder, and other relatively cheap European goods. The gains in slaves between West Africa and South America were immense, as all foreign visitors to Brazil and Peru discovered. Slaves sold in Angola for a few squares of palm cloth fetched between 400 and 600 pesos in Peru, depending on their age and condition. But the profit varied in different markets and locations. In the southern United States, a male cost $325 in 1840 and $500 in 1860. In Cuba, the average price was £20 in 1821 and £125 in 1847. In 1847 the Brazilian price was £50. Ten years later, when the suppression took effect, the Cuban price rose to £200. Across the Atlantic a slave could be bought for £1.10 on the Gold Coast in 1847, but in Whydah (Ouidah) a slave cost £10 for the same period. The price of slaves in Africa increased fivefold between 1680 and 1840. See also invaders; slave traders (slave traders); Textiles; Trading in commodities.

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Further Reading: Curtin, P., Feierman, S., Thompson, L., and Vansina, J., eds. African History: From the Earliest Times to Independence. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1998; Fage, J.D. A history of Africa. London: Routledge, 1997; Inikori, J.E. "The Slave Trade and the Atlantic Economies, 1451-1870." In V.A. Shepherd and H. McD. Beckles, ed. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantean World: A Student Reader, 290–308. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd., 2000; Martinez-Fernandez, L. "The Sweet and the Bitter: Cuban and Puerto Rican Responses to the Mid-Nineteenth Century Sugar Challenge." In V. A. Shepherd and H. McD. Beckles, ed. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantean World: A Student Reader, 506–517. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd., 2000.

Knocked out Olaniyi

Profits and Investors The slave trade was crucial to early capital accumulation. Profits from the slave trade figured prominently in Portuguese trade with West and Central Africa, stimulating the search for new areas of trade in the 16th century. Many of the European investors profited enormously from the slave trade. For every slave who landed alive in the new world, a huge profit was made to the slave traders. The gains were so great that few captains refrained from loading their slave ships to the limit. There was no gain on a slave voyage until the slaves were landed alive and sold. Due to the high profitability, many slave captains took great care of the cargo. In 1826, Theophilus Conneau (also known as Canot) made a profit of more than $41,000 (after investing more than $39,000) in four months. Aside from the profits of individual investors, European nations made huge profits from the slave trade. Investors in the slave trade kept careful records, paying detailed attention to births, deaths, morbidity, fertility, and obstetrics, which determined slave population reproduction and plantation profits. The dominant decision was the calculus that it was cheaper to work a slave to death and buy a new replacement from Africa than to provide food and provisions that promoted the biological reproduction of the labor force. In fact, the perception of profits has not entirely eradicated abuse in the slave trade. To ensure low prices, the slave traders and investors bought slaves in bulk and stored them on the African coast to await shipment. To avoid high investment risk, slave traders attempted to buy when prices were low and ship when conditions were favorable and prices high. The Atlantic slave trade marked a "rosy dawn" in the age of capitalist production. Although it was acknowledged that the gains from the slave trade were fabulous, they could not be quantified with the actual monetary gains of Europeans. In Central and South America, the gold and silver mined by Africans was indispensable for the minting of coins for the monetary economy of Western Europe. Slaves produced the raw materials (e.g., fish, indigo, cam wood, brazilwood and cochineal, rubber, and ivory) that were vital to manufacturing in Europe and America. The Atlantean slave trade was responsible for advances in maritime technology and served as a training ground for

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British sailors. Among the spectacular features of slavery's profits are the rise of seaport cities - Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes, Bordeaux and Seville - the emergence of manufacturing centers and the Industrial Revolution. Also, the gains in the oppression period were quite high. At every stage of the triangular trade there were profits for the European merchants who invested in the voyage. Cheap European goods, especially cotton fabrics and guns, were exchanged for slaves. Dependence on European goods inevitably contributed to the decline of African native industries and led to the resumption of supplies of slaves captured during the wars. Slave prices were static for most of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but increasing European competition provided the impetus for a rise in slave prices in the 1780s. In the New World slaves were sold for two or three times their price in Africa. In the 1780s, all European nations exported about 75,000 slaves a year from West Africa, about half of them transported by British merchants. The annual average 'official' value of British exports to Africa in 1783-1787 was £691,000. The gross income from the sale of slaves in America was almost double the value of exports to the coast, about £1 million a year. Scholar Herbert Klein has argued that the gains from the slave trade were not extraordinary by European standards. To him, the average 10 percent rate of eighteenth-century French and English slavers was considered a good profit rate at the time, but not beyond the reach of other contemporary investments. In the 19th century, profits doubled due to rising slave prices in the United States, compounded by British suppression of the slave trade. Investors required high initial costs to get started and a long period to fully realize the profits (roughly five years of slave voyages), which meant that only large-cap companies could enter the trade. Slave traders often spread their investments by offering stocks for slave voyages to protect against catastrophic losses. The cost of entry and the complexity of negotiations and contacts limited the number of slave traders. Large studies show that industrial capital in Europe came locally from agriculture and European trade. Some aspects of European trade, notably the French armaments industry, depended overwhelmingly on African trade and were paid for by slave exports. Some English industries depended on the African market and these markets also supported the growth of some European baby industries. The number of slave ships made available for African trade in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Rhode Island meant a dramatic growth in local capital. In considering the impact on British capital formation, it has been suggested that only 15 per cent of Britain's gross capital formation during its industrial revolution could be generated from the profits from all of Britain's overseas trade, including the Atlantic slave trade. The slave trade was a profitable trade, but it wasn't the largest capital-generating retail trade of Europeans during the Industrial Revolution. It has been argued that the slave trade and American slavery were important in providing the capital for Britain's Industrial Revolution. In fact, overproduction and a drop in the selling price of sugar together

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with higher prices for the sale of slaves, the profit level of European investors decreased. Slave traders could no longer repay their debts to European bankers. The banking sector had invested in sugar and the slave trade and found it more lucrative and profitable to invest in manufacturing in Europe. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; Eric William Thesis; Insurance. Further reading: Cowley, Malcolm and Mannix, Daniel P. "The Middle Passage." In David Northrup, ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Lexington: DC Heide, 1994; Holt, Thomas C. The Racial Problem in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; Klein, Herbert S. "Profits and the Causes of Mortality." In David Northrup, ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade, 112. Lexington: DC Heath, 1994; Rodney, Walter. "How Europe Became the Dominant Part of a World Trading System." In V. A. Shepherd and H. McD. Beckles, ed. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd., 2000; Russell-Wood, A.J.R. "Before Columbus: Portugal's African Prelude to the Middle Passage and Contribution to Discourse on Race and Slavery." In V. Shepherd and H. McD. Beckles. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd., 2000; Sanna, Lamin. Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Knocked out Olaniyi

R Rape and Sexual Abuse Rape is any form of sexual intercourse against a person's will. Most experts believe that the root cause of rape is an aggressive desire to dominate the victim rather than an attempt to achieve sexual fulfillment. Rape was viewed as an act of violence rather than primarily as a sexual encounter. Sexual abuse occurs when adults use children for sexual gratification or expose them to sexual activity. Sexual abuse can begin with kissing, breast caressing, and progress to more intrusive sexual acts such as oral sex and vaginal or anal penetration. During the Middle Passage, which described the transatlantic slave voyages between Africa and America that claimed the lives of some 1.8 million slaves over a period of about 350 years, there were numerous instances of rape and sexual abuse. The Middle Passage was indeed physical and psychological torture for the estimated 15 million slaves packed like animals aboard slave ships. This second leg of the transatlantic slave trade marked the beginning of a horrific experience. Usually, slaves were tied in pairs and men separated from women and locked below deck and in slave quarters in the ship's hold. These quarters were no longer than 1.8 meters (6 ft) and not high enough to enable a person to sit up straight. The conditions were miserable and the slaves had to lie naked on wooden boards. Many received bruises and open wounds, and the human excrement and vomit created an overpowering stench in the unbearable heat below decks. These unsanitary conditions became breeding grounds for diseases such as dysentery, smallpox and measles, which spread like wildfire among the unfortunate Africans. An estimated 5 percent of the slaves aboard these ships died from these diseases, while many more died from malnutrition. Women and children were often allowed to roam freely, a practice that gave the ship's crew and some slavers free and unlimited opportunities to sexually abuse the children and rape the women. Under this unrestricted and unhindered access to women and children, rape and sexual abuse served as a means of gratifying the aggressive

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Desire to dominate victims and satisfy the crew's sexual pleasure. It has been suggested that the institutionalized pattern of rape during the Middle Passage and even during slavery in the New World reflected nothing about men's sexual drives; rather, it was an aberration unrelated to dysfunctional behavior. But when you look at it from the perspective that the crew and slavers were away from their homes where they could easily have satisfied their sexual desires and may have been filled with pent-up desires for many months, then it becomes apparent that sexual abuse was taking place and The Rape During the Atlantic Voyage served both to let off steam and to gratify the desire to dominate Africans. While this is true of rape and sexual abuse during the Middle Passage, it cannot explain miscegenation in the New World. Cases of rape and sexual abuse remain under-reported and therefore accurate and reliable data are not available. During the Middle Passage, both the crew and the slavers attacked the slaves, but there are no official records other than a tacit mention in some ship logs. Slave accounts, however, are replete with stories of rape, sexual abuse, and sex-related sports practiced by crew members and slave traders en route to America. Sexual abuse could be described as having sex with a person under the age of consent. According to W.E.B. The Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research database on the transatlantic slave trade, in a traveler sample of 25,686 slaves, 3,088 were girls. When this is compared to the estimated 15 million Africans transported from Africa, excluding those who died during the slave raids, the voyages to the coast, and the long wait at the Middle Passage, this gives a total female population of about 27.90 percent. How many of these women and girls were sexually abused and by whom? The proportion of women over the age of majority who would have rejected such sexual advances and would have done everything possible to prevent violent assault if they had the opportunity must have quadrupled compared to children under the age of majority. In another sample of 2,281,690 African slaves, 28.70 percent were women. The fact that they were enslaved refutes the argument that the only condition under which cases of rape could be established is when the rapist has forcibly subdued the victim. In addition to being violently raped and sexually abused, African slaves were also forcibly moved from their usual place of residence to a place other than their own. Under normal circumstances, rape and sexual abuse perpetrated on African slaves would have been serious crimes. The practice was accepted as the norm, however, because the slaves were procured for primarily non-sexual purposes, and rape and sexual abuse were used as weapons of domination and oppression, the covert aim of which was to quench the slave's will to resist, and in doing so, to to demoralize men. Further Reading: Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David, and Klein, Herbert S., eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; McElroy, Guy C. Faced with History: The Black Image in

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American Art 1710-1940. San Francisco: Bedford Art Publishers, 1990; Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Liberty: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995; Mullane, Deirdre, eds. Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African American Writing. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1993; Mullin, Michael, ed. American Negro Slavery: A Documentary History. Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976; Neuton, John. The Journal of a Slaver (John Newton) 1750–1754, eds. Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell. London: The Epworth Press, 1962; Owen, Nicholas. Journal of a slave trader, ed. Eveline Martin. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1930.

Oyeniyi Bukola Adeyemi

Recaptured and Freed Africans Before the formal start of colonial enterprise in Africa, Sierra Leone had had contact with Britain as early as 1787, when the first group of freed slaves were returned to that settlement by a treaty between the indigenous Temne owners of the country and British philanthropists (Sierra Leone Weekly News, 1892-1895). The repatriation of these ex-slaves to this newly acquired territory opened the way for further philanthropic experimentation in Sierra Leone. After the resettlement of this first group of freed slaves, often referred to as the black poor because of their destitute situation in Britain, a total of three other groups of freed slaves were returned to this settlement. The settlement, later referred to by the settlers as Freetown, became a British Crown Colony in 1808 (Crooks, 1903, pp. 10-30). With the formal abolition of the slave trade in British-controlled areas in 1807, the British government was determined to end the trade at all costs. It therefore signed treaties with other governments authorizing it to patrol international waters in search of slave shipments. With the signing of these treaties, the British also established mixed commission courts in Sierra Leone to try captains and slave traders transporting slaves to Europe and America. In particular, the naval squadrons unleashed by the British government to patrol the Atlantic led to the capture of numerous slave ships carrying slaves (Alldridge, 1910; Bangura, 2001, pp. 12–18). The British seized these ships and freed the slaves in Freetown, while the captains of these ships were tried in the Courts of Mixed Commission. The freed slaves—who were known as recapturers because they were once captured by slave traders to sell in Europe and America, and then recaptured by British philanthropists who released them in Freetown—became one of the progressive settlers . Between 1808 and 1860, the British resettled more than 40,000 recaptured, making them the fourth and final group of freed slaves to be returned to the colony of Sierra Leone (Wyse, 1989). The presence of these ex-slaves changed the socio-religious and politico-economic dynamics in the colony. The progressive nature of the recaptured led to their full acceptance in wider Freetown society, which eventually led to intermarriage between them and the earlier settlers, who had previously neglected them because they perceived the recaptures as lacking European alignment. The children born of the intermarriage between the recaptured and

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The early settlers produced a unique society referred to as the Creoles. This group dominated some of colony life until Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961 (Horton, 1857, pp. 62–64; Porter, 1963, pp. 3–10). See also Abolition of the Slave Trade, UK; African Squadrons, The; returnees to Africa. Note: The use of the term "Creole" has caused some controversy in Sierra Leonean historiography, and many scholars prefer the term "Krio" to Creole. The historical documents describe Creole society as descendants of ex-slaves, while the krio is a matter of dialectical variation referring to the same people. Further reading: Alldridge, T.J. A Transformed Colony, Sierra Leone, as it was and as it is. London: Seeley, 1910; Bangura, Joseph Yusuf. Ethnic Invention and Identity Formation in Sierra Leone: A Case Study of Creoles in Sierra Leone, 1870–1961. Master's thesis, Dalhousie University, 2001; Crooks, JJ A History of the Colony of Sierra Leone: Western Sierra Leone. London: Browne and Nolan, Ltd., 1903; C.S.O. Treaty between the Governor of Sierra Leone and King Tom. London, 1801; Horton, James Africanus Beale. West African countries and peoples, British and local. London: W.J. Johnson, 1857; Porter, Arthur. Creoledom: A Study in the Development of Freetown Society, 1787–1870. London: Oxford University Press, 1963; Sierra Leone Weekly News, April-June, 1892-1895; Wyse, Akintola. The Sierra Leone Krio: An Interpretive History. Freetown: WD Okrafo-Smart Publishing Co., 1989.

Joseph Jusuf Bangura re-export scholars use the economic term re-export to refer to the sale and forced movement of enslaved Africans from the first port of disembarkation to the second and subsequent destinations in the Atlantic slave trade era. In general, re-exportation took place shortly after their arrival on islands off the coast of West Africa, southern Europe, particularly the Iberian Peninsula, and the Caribbean islands. Therefore, enslaved Africans were disembarked at a slave port (transshipment point) such as the islands of Fernando Po, S~entrepo ao Tome´, Prı´ncipe or Gore´e in West Africa. In the early stages of the slave trade to America, port cities in Spain and Portugal were used as commercial slave markets for enslaved Africans. In America, there were slave shelters in Barbados, Curacao, Jamaica, and Martinique. Upon arrival, the enslaved were temporarily housed and taken to work, or they were refreshed before embarking on the next slave ship. In the first case, enslaved Africans were forced to work on nearby plantations controlled by a particular European charter company, or were hired out to a local plantation in the Entrepoˆ. However, when sick or ill due to the overcrowded and unhealthy conditions on board, they were sent to an infirmary to recover from their illness. In this case, the Entreˆ t functioned as a “refreshment station”. In general, the enslaved stayed in these places for no more than a year. Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and other slave traders regularly traveled to the Entrepoˆt to buy enslaved Africans. Many enslaved Africans were re-exported in smuggling rings so the slave traders would avoid paying taxes. Further reading: Elbl, Ivana. "The Volume of the Early Atlantic Trade, 1450-1521." Journal of African History 38, 1 (1997): 31-75; Palmer, Colin A. Human Cargoes: The

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British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1981; Postma