Saltwater Slavery

A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

Stephanie E. Smallwood

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780674256781
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market.Smallwood's story is animated by deep research and gives us a startlingly graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. Ultimately, Saltwater Slavery details how African people were transformed into Atlantic commodities in the process. She begins her narrative on the shores of seventeenth-century Africa, tracing how the trade in human bodies came to define the life of the Gold Coast. Smallwood takes us into the ports and stone fortresses where African captives were held and prepared, and then through the Middle Passage itself. In extraordinary detail, we witness these men and women cramped in the holds of ships, gasping for air, and trying to make sense of an unfamiliar sea and an unimaginable destination. Arriving in America, we see how these new migrants enter the market for laboring bodies, and struggle to reconstruct their social identities in the New World.Throughout, Smallwood examines how the people at the center of her story-merchant capitalists, sailors, and slaves-made sense of the bloody process in which they were joined. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.

1

The Gold Coast and the Atlantic Market in People

When the captives boarded the Sarah in the winter months of 1721, at least some of those consigned to the ship had an idea where they were headed.¹ After several centuries of commercial and cultural exchange with Europeans, people from the coastal polities of the Gold Coast possessed an understanding of the wider Atlantic world unmatched in other African regions. Whereas many other Africans feared that their captors had cannibalistic intentions, most residents of the Gold Coast understood that Europeans planned not to eat them but rather to put them to work in distant homelands. No less than for Europeans, the “world” had become, for coastal Africans at least, Atlantic in scope.²

Even “sensible” captives from the Gold Coast, however, would find their geography of the Atlantic world woefully inadequate when it came to following its slave routes. By the eighteenth century, the practices of forced Atlantic migration and chattel slavery had grown to such proportions, that departure from the Gold Coast aboard a slave ship in 1721 could lead a captive to no fewer than fourteen American destinations. Topping the list was Jamaica: a third of ships sailing from the Gold Coast in the period between 1721 and 1725 delivered their human cargoes to work in the cane fields of England’s premier sugar-producing colony. Next in the line of likely destinations were the mainland Dutch Guiana colonies (Suriname and Berbice), where nearly 20 percent of the people exported from the Gold Coast in this period ended their journeys. At least a thousand (10 percent) went to Barbados, and another thousand to each of the Dutch Caribbean island colonies, Curaçao and Saint Eustatius, while the remainder went in varying numbers to the Danish Virgin Islands, Virginia, Antigua, Cuba, Rio de la Plata, Saint Christopher, mainland Spanish America, or Montserrat.³

Moreover, if English traders had their way, captives from the Gold Coast were soon to be en route to Brazil. The scheme was to persuade Brazilian slavers to bring gold from that colony’s newly developed mines at Minas Gerais and exchange it for slaves at English forts on the Gold Coast.⁴ Through this alchemy, proceeds would return to English hands in the form of the gold that African labor had extracted from Brazilian mines, and that gold would in turn be converted back into (embodied in) commodified labor, now available to begin the process anew. In this way, England’s Royal African Company would enjoy the greatest possible gain (in hard currency) while avoiding the great expense and risk associated with transporting human commodities to American markets.

Neither Brazil, Barbados, nor Virginia was represented on the captives’ own mental maps of the Atlantic world. But that is not to say that the African concept of space was static and unchanging. On the contrary, the geographical context of those who inhabited the Gold Coast had changed dramatically in the two and a half centuries since strangers displaying excitement at the sight of gold and overzealous interest in it had first appeared in those parts. So much so that through the alchemy of the transatlantic commerce in people captives from the Gold Coast were intricately bound to a geography of American places whose coordinates they could not know.

The Gold Coast in the Atlantic World

When they rounded the promontory they would call Cabo das Tres Pontas (Cape Three Points) early in the year 1471, Martim Fernandes and Alvaro Esteves encountered villagers whose lives centered on extraction of fish and salt from the sea—and something else: men whose personal adornment signaled their possession of, and perhaps willingness to trade in, gold. A half century of eager exploration had passed since Afonso Gonçalves Baldaia found an inlet some three hundred miles south of Cape Bojador and declared it to be the mouth of the legendary “River of Gold,” known since the thirteenth century to both Christian and Arab geographers as the gateway to “fabled lands where spices and precious metals were as common as salt was in Portugal.”⁵

In 1442, a decade after Baldaia turned geographic myth into cartographic reality, Antão Gonçalves had become the first Portuguese mariner to lead an exploratory expedition that actually yielded gold. When captives who had been seized the previous year in the vicinity of Baldaia’s Rio do Ouro (the southern coastal boundary of the present-day territory of Western Sahara) had revealed some familiarity with Sudanese and Saharan trade routes, their possession of such priceless knowledge earned them their release from European slavery. Returning with those lucky few from this first group of people exported from Africa aboard European ships, Gonçalves ransomed two of the captives in exchange for “a buckler, several ostrich eggs, and a small quantity of gold dust.”⁶

Three decades later, the expedition led by Fernandes and Esteves in 1471 proved the merit of Portugal’s long exploratory enterprise in Africa. For these two mariners had come upon a place where “huge quantities of the purest gold could be exchanged for cheap trade-goods of cloth and metal.” The site entered into European cartography accordingly, as a mina do ouro (the gold mine), or simply El Mina (the Mine).⁷

Extending from the western side of Cabo das Tres Pontas to the promontory the Portuguese designated as Cabo das Redes, “because of the many nets that were found here when this land was discovered,” the so-called mine occupied more than a hundred miles of coastline when mariner Duarte Pacheco Pereira surveyed the region before the close of its first decade of European contact.⁸ By the end of the sixteenth century, the Afro-European gold trade reached as far east as Accra, and the whole region from Axim (just west of Cape Three Points) to the Volta River, encompassing 230 miles, was known as the Gold Coast.⁹

More than two thousand miles distant from the coastal Saharan site that first received a Portuguese name associated with gold, this forested region between the Tano and Volta Rivers that was drawing Portuguese attention held one of the world’s richest deposits of gold ore. For this reason, the territory that entered the European geographic imagination as the “Mine of Gold” in the second half of the fifteenth century also occupied an important place among the major trading centers of the western Sudan.

In the main, West Africa’s impenetrable southern forest belt did not attract long-distance traders from the ancient urban centers of the western Sudan. Such sophisticated commercial and cultural hubs as Awdaghust, Timbuktu, Jenne, and Gao thus marked the southern termini of the great trans-Saharan trade routes. Forest peoples brought kola nuts and dried fish to market in Timbuktu and the other trading centers situated at this point where the northern reach of the forest met the southern edge of the savanna, and they carried away textiles and other goods received in exchange. Sudanese trade goods thus traveled south beyond the savanna deep into the forest belt, but for a long time Sudanese traders on foot did not.¹⁰ Gold, however, had made the area that would draw Portuguese interest the exception to that broader pattern, giving Sudanese traders reason to venture deep into the forest pocket that became known as the Gold Coast. Far less is known about this period than about the centuries following European arrival, but by using archaeological evidence and traditional histories, together with contemporary European sources, it is possible to sketch, at least in broad outline, some key elements of the region’s social and political landscape.

On the basis of archaeological evidence indicating a marked shift in pottery style, it is thought that Akan-speaking peoples entered the forested region between the Ofin and Pra Rivers beginning around the turn of the eleventh century. They absorbed or displaced Guan-speaking groups already there and developed a social order dedicated to meeting the Sudanese demand for gold.¹¹ From the eleventh century to the time of Portuguese arrival, commercial and cultural ties to the Sudan brought material resources from outside the forest zone (Saharan textiles and other luxurious imports, salt, and slaves). Those ties encouraged development of a settled social order and a sedentary agricultural society in the forest, along with the accompanying sociopolitical institutions.¹² That this had taken place by the time Europeans came to the region is evidenced not only by the Portuguese mariners’ encounter with men (probably merchants) who wore gold ornaments, but also by a system of gold weights and measures derived from those in use at Jenne, Timbuktu, and other Sudanese commercial centers.¹³

The historical shift from more nomadic hunter-gatherer communities to permanent agricultural settlements that was under way at this time received a powerful impetus from commercial and cultural interaction with the Euro-Atlantic system in the fifteenth century. The beginning of Afro-Portuguese exchange opened a period characterized by an intensified pace of migration and settlement, following the adoption of maize (the American cultigen introduced by the Portuguese), and by the southerly pull of Atlantic commerce. It was this mixture of dynamic forces that tipped the historical balance, so to speak, in favor of sustained settlement, formation of towns, and ultimately transition to the landscape of centralized polities represented on European maps of the African landscape.

The two centuries that passed after the arrival of the Portuguese were a time of dramatic change in nearly every facet of life in the region: much of the political, economic, social, and cultural terrain of African life in the seventeenth century would have been unfamiliar to the people who greeted the first Portuguese ships in the fifteenth century. At the outset of the Afro-Portuguese encounter, the locus of urban settlement and state formation was the northern fringe of the forest—at such places as Begho and Bono Manso, some two hundred miles distant from the coast.¹⁴ When the Dutchman Pieter de Marees visited the area at the turn of the sixteenth century, the tiny coastal fishing and salt-making villages Pereira described had been replaced by proliferating dense urban port towns. Where Pereira had identified only a handful of villages and towns beyond Cape Three Points, no fewer than seventeen settlements now stood along the coast from Axim as far as Chinka, just short of the Volta River. Many port towns, such as Shama, Elmina, Cabo Corso, Mori, Kormantin, Accra, and Chinka, were outlets for gold; others were marketplaces for agricultural produce, fish, or cattle.¹⁵

The maize Portuguese mariners brought from the Americas quickly attained a prominent place among the agricultural staples in the Gold Coast. It could be seen growing “in abundance” all along the coast, together with other New World plants such as pineapples and sweet potatoes.¹⁶ Its high yield and protein content made maize a food staple far superior to the sorghums and yams that were indigenous to West Africa. By the substantial boost it gave to average caloric intake, the New World import fueled dramatic population growth throughout the southern forest region. No longer the periphery to a Sudanese center, the region’s Atlantic littoral now was a center in its own right: a magnet that drew people and trade from all sides to its burgeoning “central places,” it was the leading edge of a social order characterized by the population density, ethnic plurality, and economic diversity typical of urban centers.¹⁷ Thus, in addition to the fishermen, salt makers, and common peasants who dominated the coastal towns, it was not uncommon to find intermingled with them “interpreters,” “toll-takers,” and representatives (batafo) of upland traders.¹⁸

The Place of People in the Atlantic Market

From the beginning, slavery and slave trading played crucial roles in the Afro-European commerce that developed in the Gold Coast. Indeed, from 1475 to 1540, more than 12,000 people passed through its coastal ports as human commodities.¹⁹ These, however, were not slave exports from the region. Rather, people were among the goods that African merchants wanted to buy from their new Portuguese trading partners.

Within the first decade of establishing commercial relations with the Portuguese, the Gold Coast had become an importer of people enslaved elsewhere in Africa. Gold-bearing African merchants traveling to the coast from upland forest territories required large retinues of porters to transport the bulky European goods they purchased. To meet this need, it was a simple matter for Portuguese traders to supply slaves alongside the textiles and metals they sold to African buyers.

Making their way to “the Mine” in 1479, for example, an interloping Spanish fleet stopped on the Windward Coast, where local traders presented items they hoped would draw European trade, offering “women and children for sale.” Eustache de la Fosse, a Flemish adventurer traveling with the fleet, reported that the Spanish ships purchased the slaves and subsequently “resold” them “without difficulty” when they reached the Gold Coast.²⁰ Indeed, an established routine for bringing slaves into the region had already taken sh...