Slave Wales

The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery, 1660-1850

Chris Evans

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783161201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Atlantic slavery does not loom large in the traditional telling of Welsh history. Yet Wales, like many regions of Europe, was deeply affected by the forced migration of captive Africans. Welsh commodities, like copper and brass made in Swansea, were used to purchase slaves on the African coast and some Welsh products, such as woollens from Montgomeryshire, were an important feature of plantation life in the West Indies. In turn, the profits of plantation agriculture flowed back into Wales, to be invested in new industries or to be lavished on country mansions. This book looks at Slave Wales between 1650 and 1850, bringing the most up-to-date scholarship on Atlantic slavery to bear on the Welsh experience. New research by Chris Evans casts light on previously unknown episodes, such as Welsh involvement with slave-based copper mining in nineteenth-century Cuba, and illuminates in new and disturbing ways familiar features of Welsh history - like the woollen industry - that have previously unsuspected 'slave dimensions'. Many Welsh people turned against slavery in the late eighteenth century, but Welsh abolitionism was never a particularly powerful force. Indeed, Chris Evans demonstrates that Welsh participation the slave Atlantic lasted well beyond the abolition of Britain's slave trade in 1807 and the ending of slavery in Britain's Caribbean empire in 1834.

1The Atlantic slave system was so vast and endured over such a long period of time that it has no one history. It is a tangle of histories. There are few points on the ocean’s circumference that did not feel the gravitational drag of slavery, but no two places felt it in the same way. Some locations participated very directly. They were the ports through which slaves passed or from which slave ships sailed. Some of these had a very prolonged involvement with the traffic in human beings. The export of slaves through Luanda on the Angolan coast, first documented in 1582, only ended in 1850. During those 268 years over 1.3 million men, women and children were embarked for the New World. Luanda’s history as a slave port was an epic of suffering that few other places could match.

Other places had a far more distant or tangential connection to the world of slavery. Some connections are completely unexpected. Gammelbo, a tiny land-locked community in central Sweden, may seem as far removed from Atlantic slavery as it is possible to be in Europe, yet every summer in the 1730s and 1740s workmen at its four forges set aside their normal work and turned to making iron bars of very precise dimensions. Precision was important because these bars were exported via Stockholm to Bristol, sold there to slave merchants and then shipped on to West Africa where this so-called ‘voyage iron’ was used as a form of currency in slave markets. Just as some remote locations supplied commodities that could be exchanged for slaves, so others, even more distant, were recipients of slave labour. Black slaves first came to Peru in the 1530s with the Spanish conquistadors. By the end of the sixteenth century large numbers of Africans were being landed on the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, trans-shipped across the Isthmus of Panama and then consigned to a second ‘middle passage’, over a thousand miles in length, down the west coast of South America. The ocean best known to the 20,000 Afro-Peruvian slaves living in Lima in 1640 was the Pacific, not the Atlantic.

Everywhere has a different tale to tell about the slave trade. Because the churning, slave-centred Atlantic economy was so immense it was also varied. It brought together regions that made highly specialised contributions. South-west Ireland, for example, became a major exporter of beef, butter and other salted provisions in the eighteenth century. The stimulus for Cork’s rise as a meat-packing centre was quite specific: it was the escalating demand for barrelled beef to feed slaves in the Caribbean. A similar story can be told of many places in the Atlantic’s hinterland (and some way beyond) that produced the things needed to buy slaves, or to feed them and clothe them. The fiercely salted beef of Munster joined linens from Silesia, muskets made in Liège, cottons from Gujerat, Clyde herrings, cachaça (the sugar-cane liquor of Bahia in Brazil) and much, much else besides in a huge swirl of commodities. The trade in Africans required them all.

So what of Wales? Direct involvement in the slave system – in the sense of fitting out slave voyages – was very limited. Wales was flanked by two of the largest slave ports in Europe – Bristol and Liverpool – but it is doubtful that a single slaving expedition left a Welsh harbour. (Not one of them had a merchant class of sufficient weight to raise the capital.) Nor did Wales contribute much in the way of maritime hardware to the slave Atlantic. A few Welsh-built ships did engage in the Guinea trade, but they were not many: just fourteen between the 1730s and the close of the legal trade in 1807. Of these, some made one-off contributions, like the Nancy, a 70-ton brig launched at Conway in 1755, which made a solitary venture into the trade. Departing Liverpool in July 1763, she was to land 131 Africans at St Kitts later that year.1 Other vessels had more extended slaving careers. The 130-ton John, built at Milford Haven in 1765, made four slave voyages in the decade before the American Revolution. More than a thousand of her victims were delivered alive to the British sugar islands: 283 to Antigua, 266 to St Vincent, 245 to Dominica, others to Tobago, still others to Grenada.2 But what did this amount to? A good many individual ports did more. The fourteen ships that are known to have been launched in Welsh yards (there may be others, of course, among the many whose place of construction is never specified in the official record) are outnumbered even by those of Newport, Rhode Island. Indeed, the 3colony of Rhode Island, a patch of New England coastline only one-fifth of the size of Wales, built over sixty slave ships in the course of the eighteenth century.

The part played by Wales in Atlantic slavery was oblique rather than direct, but it was nonetheless important. Eighteenth-century Wales was the source of certain commodities that were of considerable importance for the acquisition of slaves or that played a role in the lives of enslaved peoples in the Americas. By the same token, wealth accumulated in the slave trade or through the labour of coerced Africans had an impact on Wales. Its traces remain visible on the landscape. These issues are explored in the pages that follow. The Welsh dimension will be threaded through a broadly chronological narrative that follows the rise of England’s slave empire in the mid-seventeenth century, through the heyday of the slave Atlantic in the eighteenth century, through the challenges to slavery that erupted at the end of the century and on to the stubborn vitality of the slave system in the nineteenth century, still flourishing across huge areas of the New World in the 1840s and 1850s. The events will be told from the perspective of Welsh actors.

The story begins in Santiago de Cuba in the 1660s; it concludes at the same Cuban city 180 years later.

5Even in 1662 Santiago de Cuba was an old town. Its founder, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, had sailed with Columbus in the fleet of 1493, the first European expedition to make landfall in Cuba. The city that Velázquez established in 1514 quickly became an important political and ecclesiastical centre, with handsome, stone-built public buildings and fine churches. It was (and remains) the seat of Cuba’s archbishop. And it served as the island’s capital for much of the sixteenth century. Hernán Cortés, the great conquistador, was an early mayor (alcalde); it was from Santiago that he set out for Mexico in 1519.

The English flotilla that appeared menacingly off Santiago de Cuba in October 1662 stood off, therefore, one of the Spanish empire’s more important centres. On one of the eighteen ships under the command of Christopher Myngs was a young Welshman, Henry Morgan – or so most of Morgan’s biographers have assumed. Hard evidence for the early life of the man who would become the most notorious freebooter of the age and the lieutenant-governor of Jamaica is hard to come by. Even so, it would have been extraordinary if Henry Morgan had not been present. He had come to the Caribbean as a soldier of fortune. He joined the growing band of privateers that operated out of Port Royal, Jamaica, hoping to get rich by raiding the Spanish Main. The Royal Navy provided the core of the fleet led by Vice-Admiral Christopher Myngs in the autumn of 1662, but the expedition also included every privateer fit for muster. That in itself suggests Morgan’s participation. The speed, audacity and ruthlessness that Myngs showed in his assault is also suggestive, for here in embryo was the modus operandi that the Welshman would later make his own in sacking Portobello, Maracaibo and Panama. The attack on Santiago, whether witnessed first-hand or not, would certainly have taught Henry Morgan a contemptuous disregard for Spanish readiness.

The citizens of Santiago de Cuba would have felt no immediate alarm when the English fleet bore down on their coast. The wide bay on whose eastern shore the city sat could only be entered by a narrow twisting channel through which just one large vessel at a time could pass. It would be a rash commander who ran his ships under the guns of San Pedro de la Roca, the state-of-the-art fortress that occupied a promontory at the entrance to the channel. Christopher Myngs was a redoubtable, fighting captain, popular with his crews, but he was not rash. He chose a more oblique approach. Disembarking his men at a small and poorly defended wharf some miles to the east, he marched them without pause through the night. They fell upon a city whose garrison was in disarray and easily put to flight. Ten days were spent in plundering, reducing the cliff-top fortifications at San Pedro de la Roca, and – so the Spanish claimed – vandalising the cathedral, Cuba’s oldest. This was a pattern that Henry Morgan would make his own, albeit with more emphasis on plunder. In the decade that followed the capture of Santiago de Cuba the privateers of Port Royal, under Morgan’s command, would terrorise the coastal cities of Spanish America.

The Caribbean to which Henry Morgan came offered rich possibilities for a young man with a taste for violence and booty. The English had seized the island of Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, the only significant outcome of Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’, the ambitious naval thrust whose principal target had been the larger and richer island of Hispaniola. Jamaica was still largely uncultivated, its interior given over to trackless forest. But Jamaica’s potential as a base for further offensive action against the Spanish empire was considerable, lying as it did astride the principal shipping routes that criss-crossed the Caribbean. The Anglo-Spanish war ended in 1660 – but only in Europe. For both sides there was ‘no peace beyond the line’. The Spanish refused to recognise English possession of Jamaica and the English had no intention of halting their attacks on Spanish shipping and settlements. The harassment of Philip IV’s empire was not carried out by regular naval forces, however; the task was left to licensed predators like Henry Morgan.

Morgan was a privateer, not a pirate. There was an important legal distinction between the two, although not one that Morgan’s Spanish victims readily acknowledged. European states habitually issued privateering commissions to merchant captains in time of war, allowing them to intercept and seize enemy shipping. The taking-out of such a commission, a letter of marque, allowed attacks on ships flying the flag of a belligerent power – not shipping at large – and only in time of war. Any ‘prizes’ that were captured were submitted to an admiralty court to be condemned. Once condemned, the cargo and the vessel itself could be auctioned off and the proceeds shared out – a proportion going to the state, the remainder to be split amongst the privateers.

The privateer, in other words, operated within certain legal limits. Pirates did not. They raided indiscriminately, oblivious to peace treaties, formal declarations of war or other niceties. In the semi-lawless Caribbean of the 1650s and 1660s, however, reasons of state made the blurring of these distinctions convenient. Edward Doyley, Jamaica’s governor from 1657 to 1662, was so conscious of the island’s vulnerability to Spanish attack that he invited buccaneers from Tortuga to settle at Port Royal. Villainous though they were, they were a valuable deterrent. It was from their ranks, 1,500 strong by the early 1660s, that Henry Morgan recruited his crews.

This unstable and brutal world, into which Morgan stepped at some point c.1660, was one for which he was well prepared. Violence was his family’s trade. Henry Morgan was born into the minor gentry of south-west Monmouthshire in the mid-1630s. The Llanrumney Morgans were a cadet branch of the rather more powerful Tredegar family of the same name. But whereas the Tredegar Morgans were an eminent county dynasty, their Llanrumney cousins were a far more modest, threadbare little clan. Short of acres, the Llanrumney Morgans dedicated themselves to the activity that was always open to men of lengthy pedigree but abbreviated rent rolls: the profession of arms. Several of Henry Morgan’s uncles were career soldiers; both temperament and training pushed the future privateer in the same direction. He was, he later allowed, ‘more used to the pike than the book’ as a boy. Be that as it may, his sanguinary family background cannot in itself explain the extraordinary impact that Henry Morgan of Llanrumney had in the Caribbean. What Morgan also brought to Port Royal was charisma, cunning, a willingness to undertake missions that many hard-bitten members of the privateering fraternity baulked at, and abundant luck.

These qualities were evidently on display in the first expedition on which Henry Morgan was indisputably present: the raid on the town of San Francisco de Campeche on the Yucatán coast of Mexico and the prolonged and profitable incursion into Central America that followed. Morgan was not listed as one of the commanders who left Jamaica in 1663 but he returned as one in 1665. Thereafter the Jamaican authorities smiled on Morgan and issued a sequence of commissions to him, authorising him to torment the Spanish in Cuba and elsewhere. And so began a sequence of ‘almost incredible Enterprizes and Successes’.1

The habit of command came naturally to Morgan and he began to allow himself considerable latitude in interpreting the terms of his commissions. Few could have anticipated the boldness of his actions in attacking Portobello in July 1668. The city, on the Caribbean side of the Isthmus of Panama, was a transit point for Peruvian silver en route to the royal treasury in Spain. Accordingly, it was strongly fortified and reputed to be impregnable. It was not so. Henry Morgan stormed the fortifications with a force that was just 500 strong; he incurred only eighteen fatalities in doing so. A vicious saturnalia ensued. ‘The Place now being in their Power’, Charles Leslie, the eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica was to claim, ‘they fell to their usual Debaucheries, committed the most horrid Rapes and Murders, tortured their Prisoners, and barbarously derided them in their Miseries’.2 The looting of the city realised between £70,000 and £100,000 – more than the entire annual agricultural output of Jamaica.

The sack of Portobello was a sensational exploit, giving the man from Llanrumney, who was still in his early thirties, a notoriety that was European wide. He wasted no time in adding to that reputation. Within a year he had laid waste to Maracaibo in modern-day Venezuela, cannily evading what seemed certain capture and death on his retreat. Then, in January 1671, he launched a raid on Panama, Portobello’s twin city on the Pacific coast of the Isthmus. This was the most audacious of all his undertakings. Over fifty miles of matted jungle separated Morgan’s objective from his Caribbean beachhead. Hacking a path through the fetid tangle took seven days. The privateers who staggered, ragged and rank, out of the forest were half-starved and much depleted by fever, but they were still too formidable a force for the civic militia that faced them. So secure from attack had Panama been assumed to be that it was not walled; so thorough and so traumatic was the destruction that Morgan visited upon the city that the site was abandoned and a new settlement, the present-day Panama City, built further down the coast.

The sack of Panama was Morgan’s crowning achievement as a privateer. It brought him wealth (although the pickings were disappointingly small when compared to those of Portobello), honours (he was knighted in 1675) and political authority in Jamaica (he was appointed lieutenant-governor in 1674). In that sense Henry Morgan defined his era. Yet Morgan was also a transitional figure in the history of England’s American empire. The imperial model he exemplified – predation upon the far larger Spanish empire – was not to endure. Indeed, even in Henry Morgan’s heyday there were many who argued for a different model, one based upon a grudging co-existence with the Spanish. Advocates of this view acknowledged that the privateering at which Morgan excelled could bring immense profits, but profits that were irregular and unpredictable. Moreover, as with any military enterprise, defeat was always a possibility, and failure meant the writing-off of almost everything invested in an expedition. Was it not better to opt for the less spectacular but more certain gains that could be had from trade? Especially the trade in slaves?

There had long been a ready market for slaves in Spanish America. They had been used extensively in both Peru and Mexico since the sixteenth century. Some 135,000 captive Africans were landed at the Caribbean port of Cartagena between 1595 and 1640, most of them for transhipment to Peru. Another 70,000 were inducted into bondage in Mexico on the quayside at Veracruz; 44,000 more were disembarked at Buenos Aires. The asiento – the licence to supply the Spanish empire – was a highly lucrative prize, one that rival Portuguese and Dutch cartels periodically wrestled over. The asiento also caught the eye of British merchants, a group of whom were incorporated by royal charter in 1663 as the ‘Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa’. The company’s regal title was more than ornament. Shareholders included Charles II himself, Catherine ...