SOURCES AND NOTES

Bibliographical Note

THE MOST IMPORTANT collections of documents are J. W. Blake, Europeans in West Africa 1466-1559, Hakluyt Society, 2 vols. (London, 1942), V. Magalhães-Godinho, Documentos sobre a expansão portuguesa, 3 vols., (Lisbon, 1943-46); and above all Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, (Washington, 1930), a superb work even if it does neglect the Portuguese trade and the nineteenth century, and is fairly skimpy on the Spanish Empire. For antiquity there is Thomas Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery, (London, 1981). For the Arab middle ages, there is J. M. Cuoq, Recueil des sources arabes concernant l’Afrique occidentale du Ville au XVI siècle (Paris, 1985). Jean Cuvelier and Jadin, L’Ancien Congo d’après les archives de la Vaticane(Brussels, 1954), has some interesting material, as does Frédéric Mauro, Le Brésil au XVIIéme siècle, documents inédits (Coimbra, 1963). Useful documents for the North American trade in the nineteenth century can be found in Norman Bennett and George E. Brooks Jr., New England Merchants in Africa (Boston, 1965). One day let us hope a historian will publish selected documents from that wonderful source, FO 84, on British policy to the slave trade, as well as from some Spanish sources such as the division Estado in the Archivo Histórico Nacional for the nineteenth century.

First hand accounts can be found in the works of many travelers and traders. But no slave trader seems to have written his memoirs with the possible exception of Nicholas Owen’s Journal of a Slave Dealer, ed. E. C. Martin (London, 1930); Owen was an Irishman established in West Africa. Captains did, for example, Jean Barbot (A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea, 2 vols., ed. P. E. H. Hair, Hakluyt Society [London, 1992]), Thomas Phillips (A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London 1693-1694 in Churchill’s collection of voyages, 1732, VI, 173-239), Francis Moore (Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa [London, 1738]), Captain William Snelgrave (A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea [London, 1734]), and John Newton (“Thoughts on the African Slave Trade,” in Letters and Sermons, 3 vols. [Edinburgh, 1780]). Others who wrote of the trade from personal observation or participation included Olfert Dapper, Nouvelle description des pays africains (Amsterdam, 1670), Willem Bosman (A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Eng. tr. [London, 1705]) and Père Labat (Voyages aux îles, new ed. [Paris, 1993]). Later there were a number of fascinating travelers’ tales, especially by French officials or other visitors (Antoine Biet, Ducasse, Pruneau de Pommegorge, Pierre du Caillu). In the illegal age, the unreliable but interesting works of Theodore Canot (Memoirs of a Slave Trader [New York, 1854]) and Richard Drake (or was he Philip?), Revelations of a Slave Smuggler (New York, 1860), are useful.

A good introduction to the study of slavery in antiquity is Moses Finlay, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London, 1981), but see also Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man, Eng. tr. (London, 1974). For Greece, there is Yves Garlan, Les Esclaves dans la Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1982), Eng. tr. (Ithaca, 1988). There is also M. L. Bush, ed., Serfdom and Slavery (London, 1996). For the position of Africans, see J. R. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), and Mary Lefkovitz, Not Out of Africa (New York, 1996).

The sources for the study of slavery in the middle ages are: Europe, Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, vol. I (Bruges, 1955), a marvellous book. In addition there is Marc Bloch, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe, Eng. tr. (London, 1966); Pierre Dockés, Mediaeval Slavery and Abolition, Eng. tr. (London, 1982); Georges Duby and R. Mandrou, L’Histoire de la civilisation française, vol. I (Paris, 1958); and Pierre Bonnassie’s excellent From Slavery to Feudalism in South-western Europe(Cambridge, 1991).

For Islam, see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford, 1990), and also Raymond Mauny, Tableau géographique de l’ouest africain au moyen age (Dakar, 1961); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge, 1982); and Mervyn Hiskett, The Development of Islam in West Africa (London, 1984).

For the Portuguese penetration of West Africa, the best work in English is Bailey Diffie and George Winius, The Foundations of the Portuguese Empire (Minneapolis, 1977). Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo, La exploración del Atlántico (Madrid, 1992), is, however, a most distinguished work. There are excellent essays in G. Winius, ed., Portugal the Pathfinder (Madison, 1992). V. Magalhães-Godinho, Os Descobrimentos e a economia Mundial (Lisbon, 1963) is the best Portuguese introduction, but also see hisL’economie de l’empire portugais au XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 1969), and A economia dos descobrimentos henriquinos (Lisbon, 1962). See too the first chapters of C. L. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (London, 1973). Alberto Vieira’s Ocomerciante interinsular (Funchal, 1986), and Portugal y las Islas del Atlántico (Madrid, 1992), deal with the islands, as does, very well, Manuel Lobo Cabrera, La Esclavitud en las Canarias Orientales en el siglo XVI (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1982). For Portugal, see A. C. de M. Saunders’s admirable A Social History of Black Slaves in Portugal (Cambridge, 1982). The best description of the building of Elmina is now P. E. H. Hair’s The Founding of the Castelo de San Jorge da Mina (Madison, 1994), but it is still worthwhile to read the relevant chapter in A. W. Lawrence’s Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (London, 1963).

The first generations of the Portuguese slave trade can be pursued in V. Magalhães-Godinho, Os Descobrimentos, especially chapter 9, but see too José Gonçalvez Salvador, Os Magnatos do Trafico Negro (São Paulo, 1981), and the same author’s Os Cristãos Novos e o comercio no Atlântico meridional (São Paulo, 1978). Edmundo Lopes Correia’s Escravatura: subsidios para a su historia (Lisbon, 1944), is a general study of the Portuguese slave trade. See too Mauricio Goulart’s Escravido africano no Brasil (São Paulo, 1950).

Virginia Rau, “Notes sur la traite à la fin du XVe siècle et le florentin Bartolommeo di Domenico Marchionni,” Bulletin de l’Institute Historique Belge de Rome XLIV, 1974, 535-43, touches tantalizingly on the life of that great entrepreneur. The early days of Brazil are masterfully considered in the early chapters of John Hemming’s Red Gold (London, 1978), and in Stuart Schwartz’s excellent Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia 1550-1835 (Cambridge, 1985). For the trade from São Tomé, see John Vogt, “The Early São Tomé Trade with Mina,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, 1973; and the same’s book, Portuguese Rule in the Gold Coast (Athens, 1979). Fr. Dieudonné Rinchon, La Traite et l’esclavage des congolais par les européens (Brussels, 1929), is still useful.

Other works of value for the Portuguese empire and slavery are by C. L. R. Boxer, Portugal Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire (Oxford, 1963), and Portuguese Society in the Tropics (Madison, 1965). For Portuguese trade in the seventeenth century, there is Frédéric Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au xviième siècle, 1570-1670 (Paris, 1960), and two other works by the same author: “L’Atlantique Portugais et les esclaves, 1570-1670,” in Revista da Faculdade de Letras xxii (Lisbon, 1956), andLe Brésil du XVème siècle à la fin du xviiième siècle (Paris, 1977).

Gilberto Freyre’s The Mansions and the Slaves, tr. Harriet de Onis (New York, 1970), remains an immensely rewarding work. See too two important books of C. L. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil (Berkeley, 1962), and The Dutch in Brazil (Oxford, 1957). For the Cacheu company there is Cândido da Silva Texeira, “Companhia de Cacheu,” Boletim do Archivo Historico Colonial (Lisbon, 1950). There is a fine study of Pombal’s new monopoly companies of Brazil by Carreira, As companhias pombalinas de navegaçao . . . (Bissau, 1969). Joseph Miller, Way of Death (Madison, 1988), is a pathbreaking work of distinction about the trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Angola. José Honorio Rodrigues, Brazil and Africa, Eng. tr. (Berkeley, 1964), is one of the best works on the whole subject of the trade to Brazil.

The early Spanish slave trade can be followed in Vicenta Cortés Alonso, La Esclavitud de Valencia durante el reino de los reyes católicos (Valencia, 1964), and in Antonio Rumeu de Armas, España en la Africa Atlántica, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1956). For the astonishing trade in Caribbean Indians, see Carlos Deive, La Española y la esclavitud de los Indios (Santo Domingo, 1995). Georges Scelle’s La traite negrière aux Indes de Castille, 2 vols. (Paris, 1906), is still essential and even José Antonio Saco’s Historia de la Esclavitud, 5 vols. (Paris, 1875-1893), is still useful too. Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 refer to African slavery and were separately republished in 1938 in Havana with an introduction by Fernando Ortiz. There is much useful information in Consuelo Varela, Colón y los florentinos (Madrid, 1988). For Seville in the sixteenth century, see Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Los Corzos and los Mañara (Seville, 1991); and Ruth Pike’s two admirable volumes, Enterprise and Adventure (Ithaca, 1966), and Aristocrats and Traders (Ithaca, 1972). For Spain’s intellectual life, see Bernice Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth Century Spain (Oxford, 1963); and for the mercantile life generally, Eufemio Lorenzo Sanz, Comercio en España con América, en la época de Felipe II, 2 vols. (Valladolid, 1979).

The early days of the Caribbean can be examined in Carl Sauer’s pessimistic study, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley, 1966), and several works of Luis Arranz (El Repartimiento de Albuquerque en 1512 [Santo Domingo, 1992], and Diego Colón I [Santo Domingo, 1993]). The Spanish relations with the Indians is followed in Lewis Hanke’s The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the New World (Philadelphia, 1949). Frederic Bowser’s The African Slave in Colonial Peru (Stanford, 1972), is far the best introduction to that theme. The best study of Las Casas is the remarkable work of Manuel Giménez Fernández, Bartolomé de las Casas, 2 vols. (Seville, 1953-1960), but see also Benjamin Keen and Juan Friede, eds., Bartolomé de Las Casas in History (De Kalb, 1971). There is as yet no good life of Bishop Fonseca. For pre-Conquest slavery, there is Carlos Bosch García, La esclavitud prehispánica entre los Aztecas (Mexico, 1944).

For the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Pierre and Huguette Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, 12 vols. (Paris, 1957), of which vol. 3, pp. 35-163, lists ships approved for slave voyages; Eufemio Lorenzo Sanz, Comercio en España con América, en la época de Felipe II, 2 vols. (Valladolid, 1979); Ruis Rivera et al., Los Cargardores de Indias (Madrid, 1992); Jonathan Israel’s Empires and Entrepôts (London, 1990). The asientos of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are magisterially analysed by Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos (Seville, 1977). For the diplomacy, see Jonathan Israel, Empires and Entrepôts (London, 1990).

For the Spanish empire generally, see Leslie B. Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America (Cambridge, 1976). For Mexico, there is Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México (Mexico, 1972), and Jonathan Israel’s Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico (London, 1975). See also Eleanor Melville, A Plague of Sheep (Cambridge, 1994), and D. M. Davidson, “Negro Slave Control in Colonial Mexico,” HAHR xlvi, 1966. For Chile, see Rolando Mellafe, La introducción de la esclavitud negra en Chile(Santiago, 1959). For New Granada, see Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu, Esclavos Negros en Cartagena (Bogotá, 1982). See too two works of Jorge Palacios Preciados, La Trata de Negros por Cartagena (Tunja, 1973) and Cartagena de Indias, gran factoria de obra esclava (Tunja, 1975). For the trade to Buenos Aires there is Elena Scheuss de Studer, La Trata de Negros en el Rio de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1958).

For the Spanish trade in the late seventeenth century, see Marisa Vega Blanco, El Tráfico de Esclavos (Seville, 1984), and Irene Wright, “The Coymans asiento,” in Bijdragen voor Vaderlandische Geschiedenis en Oudeheidkunde, reeks vi, deel I, afleverung 1-2 (Arnhem, 1924). For Spain in the eighteenth century, there is Bibiano Torres Ramirez on the Cádiz company, La Compañía Gaditana de Negros (Seville, 1973).

The opening up of Africa can be studied in Philip Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975); and Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast (Oxford, 1970), though the latter underestimates the number of slaves in Africa. Benin can be studied in A. J. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans (London, 1969), and Dahomey in I. A. Akinjogbin’s Dahomey and Its Neighbours (Cambridge, 1966). See also Robin Law’s excellent books, The Oyo Empire (Oxford, 1977), The Slave Coast of West Africa (Oxford, 1991), and his extraordinary The Horse in African History (Oxford, 1980). For the region of the delta of the Niger, see Kenneth Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Valley (Oxford, 1956), which illuminates the whole period (even if it concentrates on the nineteenth century); and David Northrup’s Trade without Rulers (Oxford, 1978). The best work on the Congo seems to me to be Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Congo (Oxford, 1985). Trade with Central Africa can be studied in David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola (Oxford, 1966); and J. Vansina, Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison, 1966). See too Phyllis Martin’s excellent The External Trade of the Loango Coast (Oxford, 1972). There is also John Thornton’s very interesting Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (New York, 1992), which illuminates the whole region. Evelyn Martin, The British West Africa Settlements (New York, 1970), has much to commend it. For a general introduction, see The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 3, ed. Roland Oliver (Cambridge, 1977), and vol. 4, ed. Richard Gray (Cambridge, 1973). See too J. D. Fage, A History of West Africa (Cambridge, 1969); and A. G. Hoskins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973).

For the beginnings of the French slave trade, there is J.-M. Deveau’s France au temps des Négriers (Paris, 1994) and the same author’s La Traite Rochelaise (Paris, 1990). Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade (Madison, 1979), is still useful. See also Gaston Martin’s pioneering Nantes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1931), and his L’Histoire de l’Esclavage dans les colonies françaises (Paris, 1948). For the late seventeenth century, see E. F. Berlioux’s André Brüe (Paris, 1874), Jean-Baptiste Ducasse, Rélation du voyage du Guinée, ed. P. Roussier (Paris, 1935), and Marcel Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français (Quebec, 1960). See too Abdoulaye Ly’s La Compagnie du Sénégal (Paris, 1958).

For the eighteenth century, there is also Éric Saugera, Bordeaux Port Négrier (Paris, 1995). For the French trade generally there is also Jean Mettas’s remarkable Répertoire des expéditions françaises au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1978-1984). The study is completed by Serge Daget’s no less remarkable similar work on the nineteenth century, Répertoire des expéditions négriers françaises à la traite illégale (Nantes, 1988). See also Jean Meyer, L’armement nantais (Paris, 1967) and Pierre Dardel, Navires et marchandises dans les ports de Rouen et du Havre au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1963), Maurice Bégouen-Demaux, Une famille de marchands de la Havre, 2 vols., 1948-51; for Honfleur, there is J. C. Benard, “L’armament honfleurais et le commerce des esclaves à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,”Annales de Normandie 10, 1960, 249-64; and Jean Mettas, “Honfleur et la traite des noirs au XVIIIe siècle,” RFHO lx, 1973.

For the Dutch trade there is the formidable book of Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1990). See also Cornelius Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean (Assen, 1971), J. F. Jameson, Willem Usselincx, Papers of the American Historical Association, 1887, and Jonathan Israel’s fine general work The Dutch Republic (Oxford, 1995). For the Dutch in Brazil there is C. L. R. Boxer’s work of that title mentioned above, and H. Wätjen, Das Hollandische Kolonial Reich in Brasilien(Berlin, 1921), of which there is a Portuguese translation. For the Dutch in New York, there is Oliver Rink, Holland on the Hudson (New York, 1986). For sugar see Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York, 1985).

For the English trade, there is G. F. Zook, The Company of Royal Adventurers (Lancaster, Penn., 1919), and K. G. Davies, The Royal Africa Company (New York, 1970). For Hawkins’s voyage, apart from the account in the Hakluyt volume, there is Antonio Rumeu de Armas’ accomplished Viajes de Hawkins a América (Seville, 1946), and J. A. Williamson, Sir John Hawkins (Oxford, 1927). Nigel Tattersfield, The Forgotten Trade (London, 1991), is an outstanding work on the slave trade from smaller English ports. For the slave trade aspect of the South Sea Company there is Colin Palmer’s excellent Human Cargoes (Urbana, 1981). For Liverpool, there are many works, such as C. N. Parkinson’s The Rise of the Port of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1952), and, still interesting, Agnes Mackenzie-Grieve’s The Last Years of the Liverpool Slave Trade (London, 1941). For Bristol, there is the great work of David Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade, 3 vols. (Bristol, 1986-1990). There is nothing satisfactory on London, though much can be found in David Hancock’s splendid Citizens of the World (New York, 1996), a study of Richard Oswald and his partners. Roger Anstey’s The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (London, 1975), covers a lot of ground. For the eighteenth-century Caribbean, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1964), is still good to read, but his economics about the decline of Jamaica are corrected by, for example, B. W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed (Kingston, 1988).

The best work on the slave trade to North America is Jay Coughtry’s The Notorious Triangle (Philadelphia, 1981), but he concentrates on Rhode Island, and J. A. Rawley’s The Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1981), corrects this emphasis, especially chapters 10 to 25. See also Roger Anstey, “The North American Slave Trade 1761-1810,” RFHO LXII, 1975, 226-27. For the slave trading of individual territories in the United States, there is James G. Lydon on New York (“New York and the Slave Trade,” inWMQ 35, 1978), Darold Wax on Pennsylvania (“Quaker Merchants and the Slave Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXVII, 1962) and Maryland (“Black Immigrants,” Maryland Historical Magazine 73, no. 1, March 1978). For Maryland see, too, the letters of Mary and Henry Tilghman in Maryland Historical Magazine, xxi, 20-39, 123-149, and 219-240, and Elizabeth Donnan on New England (“The New England Slave Trade,” New England Quarterly III, 1930). Philip Hamer’s wonderful collection of Henry Laurens’s papers (Columbia, S.C., 1968 onwards), are a constant pleasure and source of information for South Carolina. For Aaron Lopez, there is a poor biography by Stanley Chyet, Lopez of Newport(Detroit, 1970), and B. M. Bigelow, “Aaron Lopes, Merchant of Newport,” in New England Quarterly IV, 757, as well as Virginia Platt, “And Don’t Forget the Guinea Voyage,” WMQ, 3d series, XXXII (1975). The de Wolfs are considered rather lightly in George Howe’s Mount Hope(New York, 1959).

The history of the British Caribbean is rich, and many excellent works have been written about it, though the treatment of the slave trade is less complete, and the introductions to Donnan’s splendid volumes of documents are probably the most instructive, especially Volume II.

For the Danish entry into the trade, see Georg Norregåard, Danish Settlements in West Africa (Boston, 1966). For the Brandenburgers, see Adam Jones, Brandenburg-Prussia and the Slave Trade in Daget’s Colloque, cited below. For the Swedes, see Ernst Ekman, “Sweden, the Slave Trade and Slavery,” in RFHO LXII, 1975, 13.

BOOK V: ABOLITION

Thomas Clarkson’s history of abolition (The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Africa Trade, 2 vols. [London, 1888]) repays reading even now. John Francis Maxwell’s Slavery and the Catholic Church (London, 1975) reminds us of innumerable statements which the churchmen made against slavery. The works of Benezet, Granville Sharp, Jonathan Woolman, and all the Scottish philosophers, Hutcheson, Ferguson, Smith, and Wallace are all still very interesting. The great writer on the subject of slavery seems to me to be Montesquieu, though Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau of course repay examination. Raynal is still remarkable. See also David Davies’s Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966).

For England there is Roger Anstey’s book cited above, and Seymour Drescher’s excellent Econocide: British Slavery in the Age of Abolition (New York, 1977) and Capitalism and Antislavery (London, 1986). The study of Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Pitt is best approached by means of biographies (R. I. and S. Wilberforce, but also Robin Furneaux for the first, and now John Ehrman for the last), though Clarkson’s life by Earle Leslie Griggs (Thomas Clarkson, The Friend of Slaves [London, 1936]) now seems old fashioned. The various reports for the Privy Council (1789), for the House of Commons (1790) are invaluable, as are the debates in the Houses of Commons and Lords, 1788-1807.

The best book on United States abolition remains, astonishingly, W. E. B. Dubois’s The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade to the United States (New York, 1896). The debates on the Constitution in 1787 have now been conveniently published in the Library of America, 1993. The subject of the French revolution and abolition has to be approached by a host of specialist monographs about the main characters, though the beginning of Serge Daget’s thesis on abolition in France is penetrating.

BOOK VI: THE ILLEGAL ERA

The most important general secondary work is David Eltis’s excellent Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987). He knows that mine of information, FO 84 in the Public Record Office better than anyone. For Spain (and Cuba) there is David Murray’s masterly Odious Commerce (Cambridge, 1983), which led me to several interesting discoveries in the Spanish archives. The financial side of Spanish slaving is well considered in Angel Bahamonde and José Cayuela’s Hacer las Americas (Madrid, 1992), and a Cuban angle is to be seen in José Luciano Franco’s Comercio clandestino de esclavos (Havana, 1980): the author has used several interesting Havana archives, such as the papers of Joaquín Gómez. Rolando Ely’s Cuando reinaba el rey de azúcar (Buenos Aires, 1963), is a good study of social life in nineteenth-century Cuba. Pío Baroja’s novel Los Pilotos de Altura, new ed. (Madrid, 1995), gives a vivid impression of the reality of sailing on slave ships from Cuba. Arthur Corwin’s Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba (Austin, 1967), is still much the best picture of the complicated Spanish political impact of abolition, but H. S. Aimes’s A History of Slavery in Cuba (New York, 1907), cannot be overlooked. Rebecca Scott’sSlave Emancipation in Cuba (Princeton, 1985), argues interestingly how slavery and modern technology can be compatible.

The end of the Brazilian slave trade is admirably treated in Leslie Bethell’s The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1970), which directed me to many interesting sources. It may be supplemented by Joseph Miller’s Way of Death mentioned above, Mary Karasch’s Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro (Princeton, 1987) and Peter Conrad’s World of Sorrow (Baton Rouge, 1986); Conrad’s The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (Berkeley, 1972), is also excellent. José Honorio Rodrigues’s Brazil and Africa, Eng. tr. (Berkeley, 1965), is the best study by a Brazilian, its chapter 6 being a good study of abolition from a Brazilian angle.

The French slave trade in the nineteenth century is now possible to study thanks to the homeric work of Serge Daget, both his admirable Répertoire of ships, cited above, and his unpublished thesis, La France et L’abolition de la traite des noirs (Paris, 1969).

The British naval patrol is still best considered in Christopher Lloyd’s The Navy and the Slave Trade (London, 1949), but there is also W. E. F. Ward’s The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London, 1969), not to speak of E. Philip Leveen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies (New York, 1977), and Raymond Howell’s The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (London, 1987). A United States study on the same theme is Warren Howard’s. Many naval officers (Andrew H. Foote, Africa and the American Flag [New York, 1862]) also wrote memoirs.

For Africa in the nineteenth century, there is Suzanne Miers’s Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (London, 1975), and there are also innumerable travelers (James Tuckey, Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire [London, 1818]; John Adams, Sketches Taken During the Ten Years’ Voyage to Africa Between the Years 1786-1800 [London, 1827]; Pierre du Chaillu, Voyage en Afrique Équatoriale [Paris, 1863]). The evidence to Hutt’s committee of the House of Commons (London, 1849-1850), is the best of many British enquiries, for which there remains no equivalent in any other country. There is no adequate study of the United States illegal slave trade after 1808.

General works on the slave trade are headed by Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade, A Census (Madison, 1969). There is also James Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, cited above, which has many virtues, but it concentrates on the North American trade and omits the post–1807 era. Herbert Klein’s The Middle Passage (Princeton, 1978), illuminates the whole field. Robin Blackburn’s volumes on slavery unfortunately appeared too late for me to take them into account.

A number of collections of essays are useful; for example, Serge Daget’s Actes du colloque internationale sur la traite des noirs, 2 vols. (Nantes, 1985); Henry Gemery and Jan Hogedorn’s The Uncommon Market (New York, 1979); Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair’s Liverpool, the African Trade and Abolition (Liverpool, 1976); the UNESCO publication, The African Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Paris, 1979); David Eltis and James Walvin, The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison, 1981); and Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988).

Chapter Notes

In these notes I have tried to give the sources for all important direct quotations. I have abbreviated many names of books. Thus David Birmingham’s Trade and Conflict in Angola is so rendered without the explanatory subtitle, “The Mbundi and their neighbours under the influence of the Portuguese 1483-1790.”

The first time that a reference is given, the full title of the source is given; the second time, the title is not given, but a reference is made to the first time it was mentioned, with chapter and footnote named. For example, Ca’da Mosto [1, 2] means that the first mention and full reference is given in chapter 1, note 2.

ABBREVIATIONS

AEA: Anuario de Estudios Americanos

AEA(t): Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos

AGI: Archivo General de Indias, Seville

AHN: Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid

AHR: American Historical Review

APS: Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla

BFSP: British and Foreign State papers

BHR: Business History Review

CDI: Colección de Documentos Inéditos por la Historia de España Ultramar, 42 vols., Madrid 1864 onwards

C: Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, A Census (Madison, 1969)

D: Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, 1935)

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography

EHR: English Historical Review

f: folio

FO: Foreign Office

FRUS: Foreign Relations of the United States

HAHR: Hispanic American Historical Review

Hutt committee: Four reports of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Slave Trade, November 1847 to September 1848, chaired by Sir William Hutt M.P.

JAH: Journal of African History

JMH: Journal of Maritime History

JIH: Journal of Interdisciplinary History

JNH: Journal of Negro History

Muñoz: the collection of papers of Muñoz in the library of the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid

PD: Parliamentary Debates

PH: Parliamentary History

Qu: Quoted in

R de I: Revista de Indias

R & P: reports and papers, that is, British parliamentary series

RFHO: Revue française d’histoire d’outremer

WMQ: William and Mary Quarterly

INTRODUCTION

1. Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade (London, 1623), 89.

BOOK I: GREEN SEA OF DARKNESS

1. WHAT HEART COULD BE SO HARD

1. Zurara (Azurara)’s Chronicle of the Discovery of Guinea, Eng. tr. ed. C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage, Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., vols. 95 and 100 (London, 1896 and 1899). Zurara, vol. 95, 81-83.

2. Alvise Ca’da Mosto (Cadamosto), ed. by G. B. Ramusio as vol. I of Naviggationni et Viaggi (Venice, 1551), Eng. tr. ed. G. R. Crone, Hakluyt Society, 2d ser., vol. 80 (London, 1937), 18.

3. Qu. Mervyn Hisketts, The Development of Islam in Africa (London, 1984), 6-7.

4. Zurara [1,1], 114.

5. Zurara [1,1], 62.

6. Egidio Colonna, Li livri du Gouvernment des rois, facs. ed., Samuel Paul Molenauer (New York, 1899); Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford, 1990).

2. HUMANITY IS DIVIDED INTO TWO: THE MASTERS AND THE SLAVES

1. André Piganiol, L’empire chrétien, A.D. 325-395, in vol. iv (2), 404, of L’Histoire générale de G. Glotz, Hist. Rom. (Paris, 1947).

2. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. vii (New York, 1907), 244.

3. Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 3 vols. (London, 1920), vol. 1, 220.

4. Martial, Epigrams, 2 vols. (London, 1919), vol. 1, 103.

5. Song of Solomon I:5-6.

6. Herodotus, Everyman’s Library ed., 2 vols. (London, 1924), vol. 1, 220.

7. Aristotle, Politics, ed. by Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1946), 91253 b.

8. Plato, Republic, ed. Francis Cornford (Oxford, 1941), 168.

9. Matthew 7:12; Acts of the Apostles 17:26.

10. Ephesians 6:5; I Corinthians 7:20-21.

11. All these matters are discussed at length in Charles Verlinden, L’Esclavage dans l’Europe médiaévale, I (Bruges, 1955), chapters 1 and 2.

12. St. Augustine, The City of God, Everyman ed. (London, 1945), xix, 15.

13. PH, vol. VII, 581, June 19, 1806.

3. THE SLAVES WHO FIND THE GOLD ARE ALL BLACK

1. Pierre Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-western Europe (Cambridge, 1991), 35.

2. Saint Isidore, qu. Bonnassie [3, 1], 57.

3. Austin Lane Poole, From Doomsday Book to Magna Carta (Oxford, 1935), 40.

4. Bonnassie [3, 1], 341.

5. PH, 28, 60-61, May 12, 1789.

6. Qu. Richard Fletcher, Muslim Spain (London, 1996), 75.

7. Lewis [1, 6], 65.

8. Verlinden [2, 11], 253.

9. Los Códigos Españoles, Los Siete Partidas, part 4, tit. 21, ley 1.

10. Verlinden [2, 11], 1, 320, 337, 349, 352.

11. Verlinden [2, 11], I, 358-62; see M. Gual Camarena, “Una cofradía de negros libertos en el siglo XV,” Estudios de edad media en la Corona de Aragón XV, 1952; and also for Seville, Isidoro Moreno’s La Antigua Hermandad de los Negros de Sevilla(Seville, 1997).

12. Alfonso Zuazo, in a letter to Charles V in CDI, I, 292.

13. Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, ed. R. Brown, Hakluyt Society, ser. I, vol. 93 (London, 1890), 309.

14. Qu. Ralph Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Trade,” in Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn, The Uncommon Market (New York, 1979).

15. Qu. Lewis [1, 6], 57.

16. Leo Africanus [3, 13], 145.

17. Ibn Hawkal, qu. J. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (London, 1958), 97

18. Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, ed. H. A. R. Gibb, Hakluyt Society, 4 vols. (London, 1958-1994), III, 321.

19. Valentim Fernandes, Description de la côte occidentale d’Afrique, 1506-1510, ed. Theodore Monod and Raymond Mauny (Bissau, 1951).

20. Ca’da Mosto [1, 2], 36, 49.

4. THE PORTUGUESE SERVED FOR DOGS TO SPRING THE GAME

1. Bailey W. Diffie and George Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire (Minneapolis, 1977), 34.

2. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in G. Winius, ed., Portugal the Pathfinder (Madison, 1992).

3. Diogo Gomes, De Primea Inventione Guinée, in Raymond Mauny’s edition of his chronicle, as told to Martin Behaim (Bissau, 1959).

4. Ca’da Mosto [1, 1], 2.

5. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, ed. Raymond Mauny (Bissau, 1956), 27.

6. Zurara [1, 1], 40.

7. Zurara [1, 1], 85.

8. Zurara [1, 1], 59.

9. Ca’da Mosto [1, 2], 18.

10. Zurara [1, 1], 121.

11. Ca’da Mosto [1, 2], 28.

12. Zurara [1, 1], 107 ff. The Portuguese called the place Arguim, of course.

13. Ca’da Mosto [1, 2], 41.

14. Es-Sadi, qu. Bovill [3, 17], 102.

15. Al-Bekri, in Philip Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa (Madison, 1975).

16. Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Eng. tr. (London, 1705), 82.

17. Fernandes [III, 16], 41.

18. Filippo Sassetti, Lettere edite e inedite (Florence, 1855), qu. A. C. de M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves in Portugal (Cambridge, 1982), 168.

19. Florencio Pérez Embid, Los descubrimientos en el Atlántico (Seville, 1948), 163.

20. Gomes [4, 3], 52.

5. I HERDED THEM AS IF THEY HAD BEEN CATTLE

1. Gomes [4, 3], 22-23.

2. Fr. Martín de Córdoba, Un jardin de las doncellas (Valladolid, 1500), qu. Peggy Liss, Isabel the Queen (Oxford, 1992), 304.

3. Qu. A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (London, 1963), 32.

4. Gabriel Tetzel and Václáv Sasek, Travels of Leo of Rozmital, tr. by Malcolm Letts, Hakluyt Society (London, 1957).

5. Hernando de Pulgar, Crónica de las Reyes Católicos, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1943).

6. Antonio Rumeu de Armas, España en la Africa Atlántica, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1956), I, 103.

7. Eustache de la Fosse, “Voyage a la cóte occidentale de’Afrique,” Revue Hispanique 3 (Paris, 1896).

8. Bailey and Winius [4, 1], 317.

9. Anthony Luttrell, “Slavery and slaving in the Portuguese Atlantic,” Edinburgh conference on the Transatlantic slave trade, Edinburgh, 1965, Mss.

10. Ruy de Pina, Crónica del Rey João II (Coimbra, 1950), 74; Pacheco [3, 5], 134.

11. Documentos sobre relaciones internacionales de los reyes católicos, ed. Antonio de la Torre (Barcelona, 1968), IV, 46-48.

12. Thomas Münzer, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid, 1924), 63.

13. See too Bartolommeo Marchionni, but see Virginia Rau, “Notes sur la traite à la fin du XVe siècle et le florentin Bartolommeo di Domenico Marchionni,” Bulletin de l’Institute Historique Belge de Rome XLIV (1974), 535-543. Two letters from Marchionni in the Ricardiana Library in Florence (MS 1910) were printed in the Hakluyt ed. of Cabral’s voyage, ed. W. B. Greenlee (London, 1938), 147-50.

6. THE BEST AND STRONGEST SLAVES AVAILABLE

1. Alice B. Gould, Nueva Lista documentada de los tripulantes de Colón en 1492 (Madrid, 1984), 304ff.

2. Qu. Carl Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley, 1966), 88.

3. Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (Mexico, 1966), II, 173.

4. Vespucci to Lorenzo Pierfranceso de’ Medici, in Frederick Pohl, Amerigo Vespucci (New York, 1944), 77.

5. CDI, XXXI, 104.

6. Ovando’s instructions are in Juan Pérez de Tudela, Las Armadas de Indias, y los origenes de la política decolonización (Madrid, 1956).

7. Georges Scelle, La traite negrière aux Indes de Castille, 2 vols. (Paris, 1906), I, 124. There is much useful information in Consuelo Varela, Colón y los florentinos (Madrid, 1988).

8. Casas [6, 4], III, 273.

9. AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 418.

10. CDI, XXXI, 453.

11. AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 418, 1.2., f. 98 and f. 104 v.

12. Niccoló Macchiavelli, The Prince, ed. George Bull (London, 1961); Victor Pradera, El Estado Nuevo (Madrid, 1941), 276.

13. Ferdinand to Lizarazo and Miguel Pasamonte, in Muñoz, 1, 1695, item 605.

14. José Antonio Saco, Historia de la Esclavitud Africana en el Nuevo Mundo, 3 vols. (Paris, 1879), I, 67.

15. CDI, IV, no. 3; Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, ed. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City, 1953 onwards), XII, 19; Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Historia de la Nación Chichimeca, ed. (Madrid, 1988), 270.

16. Judge Zuazo to the King, in CDI, V, 292.

17. Manuel Giménez Fernández, Bartolomé de las Casas, 2 vols. (Seville, 1953 and 1960), II, 434.

18. Giménez Fernández [6, 17], II, 552.

19. Casas [6, 4], III, 129.

20. The grant in AGI, Indif. gen. 1.7, of Oct. 21, 1518, is published as an appendix to Scelle [6, 7], I, 755.

21. Qu. Scelle [6, 7], I, 174.

22. AGI, Justicia leg. 7, no. 3. Braudel in his La Mediterranée au temps du Philip II mistakenly gave this date as 1526. The lawsuit is no. 4 of that legajo.

23. Frederic Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru (Stanford, 1972), 4.

24. AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 422, no. 16, f. 99 (I am grateful to Doña Enriqueta Vila Vilar for directing me to this legajo); and Ruth Pike, Enterprise and Adventure (Ithaca, 1966), 89.

25. Manuel Fernández de Oviedo, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela (Madrid, 1959), bk. 4, ch.8.

26. Saco [6, 14], I, 158.

27. In Greenlee’s Cabral [5, 13].

28. Antonio Rumeu de Armas 9 [5, 6], I, 418.

29. Qu. A. J. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans (London, 1969), 47.

30. Ryder [6, 29], 52.

31. Letter of July 6, 1526, in the Vizconde de Paiva Manso, Historia do Congo (Lisbon, 1877), 54.

32. C 99-101 gives a larger figure.

33. Diego Angulo Iñigues, Alejo Fernández (Seville, 1906), 110.

34. Antonio Moreno Ollero, Historia de Sanlúcar de Barrameda a fines del la Edad Media (Cádiz, 1983), and Loic Mananteau et al., Los Pueblos de la Provincia de Cádiz, 32, Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz, 1991).

35. Qu. John Hale, The Italian Renaissance (London, 1993), 359.

36. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Historia de la decadencia en España (Madrid, 1910), 19.

37. Nicolas Clenard, Correspondence, ed. A. Roersch (Brussels, 1940).

7. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GIVE US A PAIR OF SLAVE WOMEN

1. These figures derive from C, 18, 101, but corrected by reference to, for example, Colin Palmer’s Slaves of the White God (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 70, 112, and Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispanoamerica y el comercio de esclavos (Seville, 1977).

2. Cortés’ will is in Antonio Muro Orejón, Hernando Cortés, Exequías, . . . (Seville, 1967); Peruvian figures derive from Bowser [6, 23].

3. Clenard [6, 37], III, 32.

4. Veturino in Herculano Opusculos, vi, 64, qu. Saunders [4, 55].

5. Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Los Corzos y los Mañara (Seville, 1991).

6. Nicolas Clenard [7, 3], III, 36.

7. John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (London, 1970), 150.

8. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, La Niña de Embistes (Madrid, 1929), 126, cit. Pike [6, 24], 190-191.

9. Alonso de Zorita, Brief Relation of the Lords of New Spain, Eng. tr. Benjamin Keene (London, 1965), 205.

10. Qu. Colin Palmer [7, 1], 70.

11. Francisco Paso y Troncoso, Epistolario de Nueva España (Mexico, 1939-42), iv, 96.

12. Mariano Cuevas, Documentos inéditos del siglo xvi para la Historia de México (Mexico, 1914), 115.

13. John Hemming, Red Gold (London, 1978), 37.

14. Sir Thomas More, Utopia (New Haven, 1964), 108.

15. Lewis Pastor, History of the Papacy, 40 vols. (London, 1891), viii, 447.

16. Lewis Hanke, Spain’s Struggle for Justice in the New World (Philadelphia, 1949), 72-73.

17. Moses Finlay, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London, 1981), 23.

18. Giles of Rome, De Regimine Principium, ed. H. Samaritani (Rome, 1607), qu. Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler, Cambridge History of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 407.

19. Luther, qu. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966), 106.

20. Domingo de Soto, Tratado de la justicia y el derecho, tr. into Spanish by Jaime Torrubiano, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1922).

21. Silvio Zavala, La Filosofia política en la conquista de América (Mexico, 1947), 98.

22. Scelle [6, 7], I, 205; F. Cercada in “Asiento de Esclavos para América en el año 1553,” in Misionalia Hispanalia, Madrid III, 580-97.

23. F. de Oliveira, Arte de Guerra no mar (Coimbra, 1555).

24. Martin de Ledesma, Commentaria in Quartum Sententiarum (Coimbra, 1560).

8. THE WHITE MEN ARRIVED IN SHIPS WITH WINGS

1. Letter of Father Gouveia, qu. David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola (Oxford, 1966).

2. Letter of Father García Simães of Nov. 7, 1576, qu. Fr. Dieudonné Rinchon, La Traite et l’esclavage des congolais par les européens (Brussels, 1929), 59.

3. Andrew Battell, Hakluyt Society, series II, vol. vi, ed. E. G. Ravenstein (London, 1901).

4. Willy Bal, ed., Description du royaume de Congo et les contrées environnantes, par Filippo Pigafetta et Duarte Lopes, 1591 (Louvain, 1963).

5. Samuel Purchas (Hakluytos Posthumus), Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1905-07), vi, 444.

6. Cit. C. L. R. Boxer, Portuguese society in the tropics [8, *], 2.

7. João Lúcio de Azevedo, Os Jesuitas no Grão Para . . . , (Coimbra, 1930), 65.

8. Qu. Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Slaves, Eng. tr. (New York, 1970), 178.

9. R & P, House of Commons Select Committee report, 1790, 211.

10. P. Hentzer, A Journey into England, 1598, tr. Horace Walpole, ed. (London, 1757), 109.

11. R & P, 1790, vol. 67, 316.

12. C. J. Abbey and J. H. Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1878), II, 106.

13. Higgins in Hutt committee, 535.

14. AGI, Mexico leg. 258, qu. Palmer [8, 1], 81.

15. Freyre [8, 8], xxiii.

16. Ambrosio Fernandes Branão, Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, ed. José Antonio Gonçalves de Mello (Recife, 1968), 44.

17. Letter April 6, 1570, in Coll y Toste, Boletín Histórico de Puerto Rico XI, 199f.

18. Emilio A. Coni, Agricultura, comercio e industria coloniales (Buenos Aires, 1941), 15.

19. Here the figures of C, 166-77, have been again corrected by the estimates imaginatively suggested by Doña Enriqueta Vila Vilar.

20. Hugh Crow, Memoirs (London, 1830), 21.

21. Tomás de Mercado, Suma de Tratos y Contratos (Salamanca, 1569), lib. 2, cap. 20.

22. Bartolomé Frias de Albornoz, Arte de los contratos (Valencia, 1573), cit. Saco [6, 14], 1, 237.

23. Discussed in Marcel Bataillon, Bulletin Hispanique 54, 368.

24. Juan Suárez de Peralta, Noticias Históricas de la Nueva España (Madrid, 1878), 50. (“No hay otra diferencia más de ser más subidos de color y mas prietos.”)

25. Letter of July 24, 1604, qu. in Francisco Rodrigues, Historia da companhia de Jesus na assistência da Portugal, vol. iii, 2 (Porto, 1944), 458.

26. Alonso de Sandoval, S.J., De Instauranda Aethiopium Salute, Historia de Aethiopia . . . , ed. Enriqueta Vila Vilar (Madrid, 1987).

27. J. Gabriel de Lurbe, Chronique bordelaise (Bordeaux, 1619), 42, qu. Gabriel Hanotaux and Alfred Martineau, Histoire des colonies françaises . . . , 6 vols. (Paris, 1920-34), iv, 7.

28. Jean Bodin, The Six Books of a Commonweal, facs. ed. of Eng. tr. of 1606, ed. Kenneth McRae (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 42.

29. Qu. in UNESCO, The Atlantic Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Paris, 1979), 165.

BOOK II: THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE TRADE

9. A GOOD CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE BLACKS

1. Jean-Michel Deveau, La Traite Rochelaise (Paris, 1990).

2. A. W. Lawrence [5, 3], 35 and 280fn.

3. The Hawkins Voyages, ed. Clements Markham, Hakluyt Society, vol. LVII (London, 1878), 5. See also Antonio Rumeu de Armas’ Viajes de Hawkins a América (Seville, 1947). See too J. A. Williamson, Sir John Hawkins (Oxford, 1927).

4. Jean Barbot, A Description of the Coasts of Guinea, 2 vols., ed. P. E. H. Hair (London, 1992), 194.

5. De Werken van G. A. Bredero, II (Amsterdam, 1890), qu. Jan Postma’s The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1990). I failed to find an English translation of The Little Moor.

6. Enriqueta Vila Vilar [7, 1], 214.

7. Loc. cit.

8. Johann Gregor Aldenburg, Reise nach Brasilien, 1623-1626 (The Hague, 1930).

9. J. F. Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherland (New York, 1909), 129; also Broadhead and E. B. O’Callaghan, Colonial History of the State of New York (New York: 1858), vol. 2, 759-76.

10. C. L. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil (London, 1957), 83; Manuel Calado, O balersoso Lucideno e triumphe da libertade (Lisbon, 1648), 30, qu. C. L. R. Boxer Golden Age of Brazil (London, 1962), 16.

11. Phyllis Martin, External trade of the Loango coast (Oxford, 1972), 58; Ralph Delgado, Historia do Angola, 4 vols. (Benguela and Lobito, 1948 onwards), II, 281, n. 62, qu. J. Vansina, Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison, 1966), 142.

12. D, I, 97.

13. D, IV, 2.

14. Richard Jobson [Introduction].

15. D, IV, 49.

16. Qu. K. G. Davies, The Royal Africa Company (New York, 1970), 41.

17. J. T. Scharf, History of Maryland (Baltimore, 1878), I, 66.

18. John Winthrop’s journal, qu. D, III, 6.

19. Cambridge History of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1920), I, 69.

20. Cadereita, qu. Vila Vilar [7, 1].

21. Diary of Guijo, qu. Solange Alberro, Inquisition et société au Méxique (Mexico, 1988), 295.

22. William Atkins, A Relation of the Journey from St Omer to Seville (London, 1652), ed. Martin Murphy in Camden Fifth Series (London, 1994), 245.

10. THE BLACK SLAVE IS THE BASIS OF THE HACIENDA

1. AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 2796.

2. See Vila Vilar [9, 20] for further discussion.

3. H. Wätjen, Das Hollandische Kolonial Reich in Brasilien (Berlin, 1921), 487.

4. Alberto Vieira, Cartas, ed. J. Lúcio d’Azevedo, 3 vols. (Coimbra, 1925-28), I, 243.

5. C, 106-107, corrected by Vila Vilar.

6. E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (New York, 1856), I, 162.

7. Qu. D, I, 125 fn 2.

8. Loc. cit.

9. Trends and Forces of World Sugar Consumption (Rome, 1961), 11.

10. Fr. Antoine Biet, Voyage de la France équinoxiale (Paris, 1664).

11. Jean Clodoré, Rélation de ce qui s’est passé dans les Isles et Terre Ferme de l’Amérique (Paris, 1671).

11. LAWFUL TO SET TO SEA

1. D, I, 125.

2. D, I, 128-31.

3. Samuel Pepys’ Diary, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London, 1971), iv, 152.

4. D, I, 88.

5. Pepys [10, 3], v, 352-53.

6. Charles Davenant, Reflections on the Constitution and Management of the Trade to Africa (London, 1709). For James II, see John Miller, James II (London, 1990), 44.

7. Davies [10, 15], 179-80; Curtin, 7, 119, 122; David Galenson, ed., Markets in History (Cambridge, 1986); Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves (Williamsburg, 1972), 155.

8. Jacob Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” New York Historical Society Quarterly LV, 1971.

9. D, I, 271.

10. David Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade to America, 3 vols. (Bristol, 1986-1990).

11. For the lesser ports see Nigel Tattersfield, The Forgotten Trade (London, 1991), 208, 221, 281, 349.

12. Qu. E. D. Ellis, An Introduction to Sugar as a Commodity (Philadelphia, 1905), 82.

13. Calendar of state papers, Col. 17080-17090, cit. D, III 2.

14. N. B. Shurtless, Topographical and Historical Description of Boston (Boston, 1871), I, 48.

15. D, III, 1.

16. Governor Berkeley, qu. D, IV, 6.

17. D, IV, 1-2.

18. D, II, 241; Maurice Cranston, John Locke (London, 1985), 178.

19. D, I, 124.

20. D, IV, 243, 250-56.

21. The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1988), iv, 521.

12. HE WHO KNOWS HOW TO SUPPLY THE SLAVES WILL SHARE THIS WEALTH

1. Cit. Roberto Arrazola, Palenque, primer pueblo libre de América (Cartagena, 1970), 68-70.

2. Memorial of Captain Fernando de Silva Solís 1642 in AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 2796 published by Enriqueta Vila Vilar in “La Revolución de Portugal y la Trata de Negros.”

3. I. A. Wright, “The Coymans Asiento,” Bijdragen voor Vaderlandische Geschiedenis en Oudeheidkunde, reeks vi, deel I, afleverung 1-2 (Arnhem, 1924).

4. Enriqueta Vila Vilar, “La Sublevación de Portugal y la trata de Negros,” Iberoamerikanisches Archiv, ns. 2, 3 (Berlin, 1976), 175; also Jonathan Israel, Empires and Entrepôts (London, 1990), 439.

5. Davies [9, 15], 329.

6. D, I, 329, 341.

7. AGI, Indif. gen. 153-7-10 (old categorization), qu. D, I, 50.

8. D, I, 280, 350, 370.

9. Barbot [9, 4], I, 273.

10. Scelle [6, 7], 125.

11. Mauricio Goulart, Escravido Africano no Brasil (São Paolo, 1950).

12. Boxer [9, 9], 47.

13. Goulart [12, 10], 203. See too C, 209.

14. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (London, 1891), 38-39: “they desired to make but one voyage, to bring the negroes on shore privately and divide them among their own plantations and, in a word, the question was whether I would go their super-cargo in the ship to manage the trading on the coast of Guinea . . .”

15. Le Gentil de la Barbinais, Nouveau Voyage autour du monde (Paris, 1728-1729) qu. Freyre [8, 8], 445.

16. Adam Jones in Serge Daget, ed., Actes du colloque internationale sur la traite des noirs (Nantes, 1985), I, 285.

17. Qu. H. A. Wyndham, The Atlantic and Slavery (1935), 59.

18. E. W. Martin, The British West Africa Settlements (London, 1927), 48-49.

19. C, 119.

20. Jean Bazin and Emanuel Terry, “Guerres des lignanges et guerres d’état en Afrique,” Archives Contemporaines (Paris, 1992), 9-32.

21. Qu. Postma [9, 15], 85, 96.

22. Saint-Simon on Ducasse in Pléiade ed. (Paris, 1988), vol. V, 211, also II, 403.

23. The grant is in AGI, Santo Domingo leg. 2515.

24. Cal. state papers qu. D, I, 3 fn.

25. D, II, 4.

26. D, II, 82.

BOOK III: APOGEE

13. NO NATION HAS PLUNGED SO DEEPLY INTO THIS GUILT AS GREAT BRITAIN

1. Elizabeth Donnan, “Early Days of the South Sea Company,” Journal of Economic and Business History II (3), May 1930. See Victoria G. Sorsby, British Trade with Spanish America Under the Asiento, 1713-1740, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1975.

2. Daniel Defoe, “An Essay on the South Sea Trade” (London, 1711).

3. As recalled by the Duke of Clarence in PH, 34 1094.

4. Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes (Urbana, 1981), 10.

5. D, II, 295, 159.

6. D, II, 171-73

7. Qu. Lord Erleigh, The South Sea Bubble (London, 1935), 36. See Irwin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (London, 1983).

8. Far the best work on the Bubble is that of John Carswell (London, 1993), on which I have leaned heavily for these paragraphs.

9. Palmer [15, 4], 75-76, 85-86.

10. D, II, 195.

11. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Complete Letters, ed. R. Robert Halsband (Oxford, 1965), I, 232.

12. Qu. Leslie Stephen, essay on Chandos in DNB.

13. D, II, 256.

14. J. A. Rawley, “Humphrey Morice,” in Daget ed. [12, 15], I, 269.

15. David Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade to America, 3 vols., Bristol Record Society, nos. 38, 39, 42, 1986-90.

16. C, 140, 215-16.

17. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Inland of England, 3 vols., 1724-1727.

18. A General and Descriptive History of Liverpool, 1798, qu. Donnan, II, 49.

19. James Picton, Memorials of Liverpool, 2 vols. (London, 1873), I, 182, 185-86.

20. David Richardson, The Bristol Slave Traders, A Collective Portrait (Bristol, 1985).

21. Folarin Shyllon, Black People in England (London, 1977), 6-7.

22. Jean-Joseph Expilly, in his Dictionnaire Géographique (Paris, 1762), V, 17.

23. A. Perret, “René Montaudoin,” in Bulletin de la société d’Archeologie d’Histoire de Nantes, t. lxxxviii, 1949, 78-94.

24. Expilly [13, 21], V, 80.

25. George Collas, René-Auguste de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1949), 39.

26. L. Peytraud, L’Esclavage aux Antilles Françaises avant 1789 (Paris, 1897), 380.

27. C, 170; Gaston Martin, Nantes au xviiième siècle (Paris, 1931).

28. Goulart [12, 10] 203; Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Benin et Bahia de todos los santos (Paris, 1968), 100.

29. D, IV, 235 fn.

30. D, IV, 263, 273.

31. D, IV, 236.

32. Boston Gazette, May 22, 1721.

33. D, IV, 236.

34. Boston Gazette, 1721.

35. D, IV (Amory).

36. Hedges, The Browns of Provincetown Plantation (Providence, 1968).

37. James G. Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade,” WMQ 35 (1978).

14. BY THE GRACE OF GOD

1. Malachy Postlethwaite, The African Trade, the Great Pillar (London, 1745), 4.

2. D, II, 474-84.

3. Philip Hamer et al., The Letters and Papers of Henry Laurens (Columbia, S.C., 1964), I, 202, 313.

4. D, III, 320, iv, 313, 321.

5. D, IV, 321.

6. Hamer, Laurens [14, 3], II, 123.

7. Ibid., II, 177.

8. Francisco de Arango, Obras completas (Havana, 1952), I, 117.

9. Hamer, Laurens [14, 3], III, 412.

10. D, II, 514-15.

11. Gaston Martin [13, 26].

12. Op. cit.

13. Collas [13, 24], 128.

14. E. Saugera, Bordeaux, port négrier (Bordeaux, 1995), 69.

15. Letter of Silva, October 18, 1781, cit. José Honorio Rodrigues, Brazil and Africa (Berkeley, 1964).

16. Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal (New York, 1996), 54.

17. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde (Paris, 1958).

18. AGI, Indif. Gen., leg. 2819.

19. Bibiano Torres Ramírez, La Compañía Gaditana de Negros (Seville, 1973), 35.

20. Loc. cit.

21. D, IV, 245.

22. D, IV, 471.

23. For Oswald see David Hancock, Citizens of the World (New York, 1995).

24. For Clement Noble, see Sir Andrew Noble, The Nobles of Ardmore (privately printed c. 1973).

25. Richard Brooke, Liverpool as It Was During the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool, 1853), 328.

26. House of Lords MSS Feb. 14-19, 1778.

27. Richard Miles in D, II, 522.

28. B. W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed (Kingston, 1988).

29. George Howe, Mount Hope (New York, 1959), 87.

30. Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade (Madison, 1979), 180.

31. Jean-Philippe de Garran-Coulon, Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue (Paris, Year V-VII), iv, 18.

32. J. F. Landolphe, Mémoires du capitaine Landolphe, 2 vols. (Paris, 1823).

BOOK IV: THE CROSSING

15. A FILTHY VOYAGE

1. W. E. Minchinton, “The Virginia Letters of Isaac Hobhouse,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 66 (1958), 279.

2. D, III, 195.

3. Hancock [14, 23], 1995, 432-445; I. A. Wright [12, 3], 50.

4. For Isaac Norris, see Darold Wax, “Quaker Merchants and the Slave Trade,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography LXXXVII (1962) and the same author’s “Negro Imports into Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History XXXII (1965).

5. For the Galtons, see B. M. D. Smith, The Galtons of Birmingham, Business History, 138.

6. Qu. C. L. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne (London, 1963), 271.

7. Minchinton [15, 1], 278.

8. Jean Mettas, Répertoire des expéditions négriers françaises au XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1, Nantes (1978); vol. 2, Ports autres que Nantes (1984).

9. Cit. Palmer [15, 4], 21.

10. Pierre Boule, “L’origine du racisme en Europe,” in Daget [12, 16], I, 535.

11. Darold Wax, “A Philadelphia Surgeon on the Coast of Africa,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography XC (i) (1968).

12. Maurice Bégouen-Démeaux, Une famille de marchands de la Havre, 2 vols. (Le Havre, 1951-71), I, 20.

13. Hamer [14, 3], VI.

14. D, II, 82.

15. Collas [13, 24], 177.

16. Crow [8, 20], 176-77.

17. D, IV, 496.

18. Thomas Phillips, A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal, 1694 (London, 1746), 233.

19. John Newton, “Thoughts on the African Slave Trade,” Letters and Sermons, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1780), 103.

20. J.-M. Deveaux, France au temps des négriers (Paris, 1994).

21. Barbot [2, 11], xcviii.

22. R & P, 1790, vol. 82, 27.

23. R & P, 1790, vol. 73, 163.

24. R & P, 1790, vol. 82, 29.

25. Edouard Corbière, Le Négrier (Paris, 1832).

26. D, III, 229.

27. D, II, 327.

16. GREAT PLEASURE FROM OUR WINE

1. D, III, 269-70.

2. D, II, 274.

3. For Malemba see Rinchon [8, 2], 32.

4. For Loango Bay see ibid., 71, 74.

5. Barbot [9, 4], II, 493.

6. Captain William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea (London, 1734), 88.

7. Bosman [4, 16], 174.

8. Lord Edward Fitzmaurice, Life of William, Earl of Shelburne, 3 vols. (London, 1875), I, 400, 404.

9. Fernandes [3, 16], 17.

10. Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London, 1738), 87.

11. Barbot [9, 4], 172.

12. As put by Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1942), 81.

13. Qu. Verger [13, 27], 30.

14. D, II, 541.

17. SLAVE HARBORS I

1. Fernandes [3, 16], 7.

2. N. Bennet and G. Brooks, New England Merchants in Africa (Boston, 1965), 15.

3. R & P, 1790, vol. 72, 39.

4. Sir George Collier’s Report, in PP 1821, vol. xxiii.

5. Qu. John Thornton, Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (New York, 1992), 66.

6. Olfert Dapper, Nouvelle description des pays africains (Amsterdam, 1670), 471.

7. C. L. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Empire (Oxford, 1963), 11.

8. Barbot [9, 4].

9. Barbot [9, 4], II, 404.

10. D, II, 520.

11. Davies [9, 15], 178-79.

12. See Saugera [14, 14].

13. Albert van Dantzig, Les Hollandais sur la côte de Guinée (Paris, 1980).

18. SLAVE HARBORS II

1. I. A. Akinjogbin, Dahomey and Its Neighbours (Cambridge, 1966), 134.

2. Pieter Marees, Beschrynge end historische vergael, vant gout koninckrijck van Guinea, tr. and ed. by Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones (Oxford, 1987), 224.

3. Antoine-François Prévost, Histoire Générale des Voyages (Paris, 1746 onwards). For an interesting study of Prévost see Shirley Jones, “Les esclaves sont des hommes,” in R. J. Howells, Voltaire & His World, Studies Presented to W. H. Barber (Oxford, 1985).

4. D, I, 399.

5. Pruneau de Pommegorge, Description de la Nigritie (Amsterdam, 1789).

6. Qu. Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa (Oxford, 1991), 262-63.

7. Lambe’s letter in William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London, 1744), 169-81.

8. Qu. Akinjogbin [18, 1], 164.

9. Macgregor Laird, qu. in Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa (New Haven, 1991).

10. D. Forde, ed., Efik Traders of Old Calabar (London, 1956), 81.

11. John Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending . . . (London, 1823), 129.

12. R & P, House of Commons Report of 1789, evidence of James and Penny.

13. Abridgement of the minutes of evidence taken before the whole House [of Commons], III, 1790, 53-54.

14. Cit. Vansina [9, 10], 181.

15. Louis-Marie-Joseph Count Degrandpré, Voyage a la côte occidentale d’Afrique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1801), I, 223.

16. William Beckford in the House of Commons, 1752, cit. John Latimer, Annals of Bristol (Bristol, 1893), 128.

19. A GREAT STRAIT FOR SLAVES

1. D, II, 255.

2. Barbot [9, 4], I, 106.

3. Bosman [4, 16], 363.

4. Francis Moore [16, 10], 41.

5. R & P, 1790, 73, 207.

6. R & P, 1790, 73, 213.

7. Palmer [13, 4], 20.

8. D, II, 527.

9. Qu. D, II, 570.

10. C. B. Wadstrom, Observations on the Slave Trade (London, 1789), 1.

11. Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade (London, 1788), 16.

12. Vansina [9, 10], 248.

13. Qu. Postma [9, 15], 90.

14. John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West-Indies (London, 1735), 71-72.

15. Wadstrom’s evidence to the Privy Council enquiry.

16. Olaudah Equiano, Equiano’s Travels, 2 vols., ed. Paul Edwards (New York, 1967), I, 47.

17. Wadstrom [19, 10], 16-20.

18. Bosman [4, 16], 364.

19. Francis Moore [16, 10], 20.

20. Phillips [16, 18].

21. Wadstrom [19, 10], 18.

22. William Towerson, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations 1598-1600, II, part II, 23-52.

23. Bosman [4, 16], 475.

24. Palmer [13, 4], 39.

25. Richard Drake, Revelations of a Slave Smuggler (New York, 1860), 3.

26. D, IV, 148.

27. Mungo Park, The Travels of Mungo Park, Everyman ed. (London, 1907), 221, 244.

28. Barbot [9, 4].

29. Bosman [4, 16], 364.

30. Xavier Golbéry, Fragments d’un voyage en Afrique fait pendant les années 1785-1787 (Paris, Year X, 1802) in D, II, 567.

31. Wadstrom [19, 10], 16.

32. Park [19, 27], 149.

33. Park [19, 27], 249.

34. Luiz Antonio de Oliveira, Memoria a respeito dos escravos e tráfico da escravatura . . . (Porto, 1977), 48.

35. The historian was Joseph Miller whose Way of Death (Madison, 1988) is the best introduction to the Anglo-Brazilian trade c. 1800.

20. THE BLACKEST SORT WITH SHORT CURLED HAIR

1. Bosman [4, 16], 1, 441.

2. Phillips [15, 18], 216.

3. Op. cit., 218-19.

4. Snelgrave [17, 6], 39.

5. Postma [9, 15], 87; Phillips [15, 18], loc. cit.; Barbot [9, 4], 374.

6. Gaston Martin [13, 26], 91-92; Mettas [15, 8], 1, 206-7.

7. D, II, 567.

8. Phillips [16, 18], 220.

9. D, II, 265.

10. D, II, 186.

11. D, 1, 399; Drake [19, 25], 43.

12. Rinchon [8, 2], 162.

13. Phillips [16, 18].

14. Palmer [15, 4], 69.

15. Martin [13, 26], 112.

16. Adam Jones, in Daget [12, 16], I, 289.

17. Letter from Pedro de Espinosa, S.J., to Fr. Diego Ruiz, 1622, in Pablo Pastells, S.J., Historia de la Compania de Jesús en la provincia de Paraguay (Madrid, 1912-49), I, 300-301.

18. Prévost’s voyage cit. Shirley Jones [18, 3], 225.

19. Degrandpré [18, 15], II, 25.

20. Qu. Palmer [15, 4], 61.

21. Qu. Palmer [15, 4], 63.

22. Karasch, 22.

23. Qu. James Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1981), 272.

24. Phillips [16, 18], 212.

25. Postma [9, 5], 107-8.

26. “Considerations on the Present Peace,” London, 1763, in D, II, 515-16.

27. Ryder [6, 29], 169.

28. William Smith [18, 7].

29. Hutt committee, 421.

30. Martin [13, 26], 104.

31. D, IV, 372.

32. Qu. Palmer [15, 4], 35.

33. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Abolition . . . of the Slave Trade, 2 vols. (London, 1808), I, 307-8.

34. Qu. Dantzig in Daget, ed. [12, 16], 1, 591.

35. Phillips, D, 1, 402.

36. Bosman [4, 16].

37. Phillips [16, 18], 219.

38. Snelgrave [17, 6], 162.

39. D, IV, 498.

40. Martin [13, 26], 117; John Newton, Letters and Sermons, 3 vols. (London, 1780), I, 75.

21. IF YOU WANT TO LEARN HOW TO PRAY, GO TO SEA

1. Equiano [19, 20], I, 76.

2. Jacques Savary, Le Parfait Négociant (Paris, 1757), cit. Gaston Martin [13, 26], 111.

3. Phillips [16, 18], 230.

4. R & P1790, vol. 83, 35.

5. Bosman [4, 16], 364.

6. Dionigio Carli de Piacenza, A Voyage to Congo, etc. . . . in 1666 and 1667, with Michael Angelo Guattini, in Churchill’s collections of voyages (London, 1732).

7. Report of the House of Commons enquiry, 1792.

8. Barbot [9, 4].

9. Wadstrom evidence to the Privy Council.

10. Wadstrom evidence to the Privy Council.

11. Equiano [19, 20], I, 78.

12. Lady Knutsford, Life and Letters of Zachary Macaulay (London, 1908), 87-89.

13. R & P 1790, vol. 72, 84.

14. Thomas Clarkson, Essay on the Comparative Efficiency of Regulation or Abolition as Applied to the Slave Trade (London, 1789), in D, II, 573.

15. D, I, 272.

16. See for example H. S. Klein, The Middle Passage (Princeton, 1978).

17. Barbot [9, 4], II, 779.

18. Phillips [16, 18], 229; Hutt committee, II, 7.

19. Postma [9, 57], 308.

20. Barbot [9, 4], I, xcvii.

21. London Magazine, XXVIII, 162.

22. Mettas, Répertoire [16, 8], 123.

23. Hutt committee, I, 472.

24. Phillips [16, 18], 221.

25. Phillips [16, 18], 232.

26. Barbot [9, 4], II, 790.

27. Speech by Wilberforce in PH, vol. 28, col. 258.

28. D, I, 462.

29. Barbot [9, 4], II, 791; Phillips [16, 18], 233.

30. Mercado [8, 21].

31. Barbot [9, 4].

32. Phillips [16, 18].

33. Bosman [4, 16], 365.

34. This was in John Atkins’s A Voyage to Guinea . . . (London, 1753), qu. D, II, 266.

35. William Smith [18, 7], 19.

36. D, III, 321.

37. D, III, 213.

38. Georg Norregåard, Danish Settlements in West Africa (Boston, 1966), 89.

39. Martin [13, 26], 120.

40. Newton [16, 19], 104.

41. Park [19, 27], 271.

42. Marcel Delafosse, L’Histoire de la Rochelle (Paris, 1991), 169.

43. D, II, 494.

44. D, IV, 118.

45. Boston News letter, May 9, 1723, in D, IV, 186 fn. 6.

22. GOD KNOWS WHAT WE SHALL DO WITH THOSE THAT REMAIN

1. Amadée-François Frézier, Voyage to the South Sea, Eng. tr. (London, 1717), 301.

2. Qu. Boxer [9, 9], 7.

3. Qu. Robert Edgar Conrad, World of Sorrow (Baton Rouge, 1986), 49.

4. Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu, Esclavos negros en Cartagena (Bogotá, 1982), 95.

5. Sandoval [8, 28], 109.

6. Drake [19, 25], 44.

7. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Voyages aux îles (Paris, 1993), 228.

8. Martin [13, 26], 130.

9. Op. cit., 125.

10. W. R. Gardner, History of Jamaica (London, 1909), 165.

11. D, III, 273.

12. Equiano [19, 20], 63.

13. Barbot [9, 4], 550.

14. R & P 1790, vol. 72, 160.

15. D, 11, 460.

16. Hamer [14, 3], I, 255.

17. Loc. cit. Bostock later became a successful slave merchant.

18. Loc. cit.

19. Qu. Darold Wax, “Black Immigrants, the Slave Trade,” Colonial Maryland 73, no. 1, March 1978, 43.

20. Newton [20, 39], I, 81.

21. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (London, 1975), 47.

BOOK V: ABOLITION

23. ABOVE ALL, A GOOD SOUL

1. D, II, 627.

2. PH, 34 1798-1800, col. 1092 (July 5, 1792).

3. Arthur Young, Travels in France (London, 1929), 116.

4. Francis Lefeuvre, Souvenirs nantais et vendéens (Paris, 1913).

5. PH, 19, col. 305 (May 23, June 2, 1777): “Mr Burke was against revising the state of the trade to Africa in general.”

6. Milton, Paradise Lost, vii, 64.

7. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), 302. Laslett’s note 24 explains that Locke seemed to suppose that the RAC’s slave raiding forays were just wars and the slaves captured had previously forfeited their lives by “some act that deserves death.”

8. Philip had in 1601 prohibited the use of Indian labor in any capacity on plantations which had the effect of forcing planters to buy African slaves.

9. John Francis Maxwell, Slavery in the Catholic Church (London, 1975), 71.

10. Père Labat, Voyages aux îles d’Amerique, 8 vols. (Paris, 1722), vol. iv, 435.

11. Davis [7, 9], 201.

12. D, III, 4.

13. D, III, 108.

14. D, III, 7.

15. Lawrence Towner, “A Fondness for Freedom,” WMQ, 2d series, xix, April 1962.

16. D, III, 36.

17. Aphra Behn, Oronooko, or the History of a Royal Slave (London, 1688).

18. Qu. Tattersfield [11, 10], 18.

19. Thomas Aubrey, The Sea Surgeon, or the Guinea Man’s Vademecum (London, 1729).

20. James Thomson, Summer, Complete Works (Edinburgh, 1853), 67.

21. William Shenstone, Complete Works (Edinburgh, 1852), 233; Pope, “Essay on Man,” 1, 107.

22. Fr. Jerome Merollo da Sorrento, A Voyage to Congo, tr. into English, in John Pinkerton, A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages (London, 1814), qu. Donnan, I, 319.

23. Qu. Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast (Oxford, 1970), 120-21.

24. D, 1, 319.

25. Labat [22, 7], 219.

26. Clarkson [19, 33], I, 112, 134.

27. Darold Wax, “Quaker Merchants and the Slave Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography LXXXVII, 1962, 143-59.

28. Qu. Tattersfield [111, 10], 119.

29. Albert Matthews, “Protests Against Slavery in Massachusetts,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts viii, Transactions (Boston, 1906), 288.

30. Clarkson [19, 32], I, 148.

31. Op. cit., I, 140.

32. John Woolman’s Journal, ed. Philips Marlton (New York, 1971), and Clarkson [19, 33], I, 162.

33. Clarkson [19, 33], I, 114.

34. D, IV, 132.

35. D, IV, 131.

36. Clarkson [19, 33], I, 184.

37. D, IV, 289.

38. D, IV, 294.

39. D, IV, 321.

40. D, III, 291.

41. André João Antonil, Cultura e Opulencia do Brasil (Lisbon, 1711); Manuel Ribeiro da Rocha, Ethiope Resgatada (Lisbon, 1758).

42. Jorge Palacio Preciados, La trata de esclavos por Cartagena de Indias (Tunja, 1973), 349.

43. Pierre Marivaux, L’lle des esclaves (Paris, 1753).

44. Voltaire, Romans et Contes, in Pléiade ed. (Paris, 1954), 104-5.

45. Voltaire, “Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations,” ed. René Pomeau (Paris, 1963) II, 805.

46. Voltaire, Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman (Banbury, 1974), vol. 117, 374.

47. Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Edouard Laboulaye (Paris, 1877), vol. iv, I, 330.

48. Rousseau, “Du contrat social,” in Oeuvres complètes, Pléiade ed., vol. I, iv.

49. Encyclopédie, vol. xvi (Neuchatel, 1765), 532.

50. Brief Immensa Pastorum of December 20, 1741, addressed to the Bishops of Brazil and other Portuguese dominions; Pastor [7, 15], 36, 10.

24. THE LOUDEST YELPS FOR LIBERTY

1. Horace Walpole, Letters II, Cunninghame ed., 149.

2. Gentleman’s Magazine X, 341.

3. London Magazine VII, March 1738, 129.

4. Horace Walpole, Correspondence, Yale ed., 20, 126.

5. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (London, 1755), II, 213.

6. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), 402.

7. Gentleman’s Magazine XXXIV, 493.

8. George Wallace, The System of the Principles of the Laws of Scotland (London, 1761), I, 91.

9. Adam Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1769), 223.

10. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765, I, 411-12.

11. As discussed in Shyllon [13, 20], 55ff.

12. “The London Stage,” no date, The Padlock, 3.

13. An Account of Giants Lately Discovered (London, 1766), 15. I am grateful to Gina Thomas for drawing my attention to this work.

14. Anthony Benezet, A Caution to Great Britain and Her Colonies . . . (London, 1767), 11.

15. R & P, 1788, vol. 67, 308, 316.

16. Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery (London, 1769), 9.

17. Peter Hutchinson, The Diaries and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson Esq. (Boston, 1884), II, 277.

18. Richard Pares, A West-India Fortune (London, 1950), 121.

19. Benezet qu. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, 1975), 406.

20. John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (London, 1774), 10-14.

21. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. Augustine Birell (Boston, 1904), IV, 202.

22. Op. cit., IV, 207.

23. Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny, an Answer to the Resolutions and Addresses of the American Congress (London, 1774), 89.

24. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York, 1994), 415.

25. History of Parliament 1754-1790, ed. Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke (London, 1964), II, 593.

26. Qu. Latimer [18, 16], 412.

27. Massachusetts Archives CCXV 96. I am grateful to David Hancock of the University of Michigan for this reference.

28. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Southern Slave States (New York, 1856), 125.

29. W. E. B. Dubois, The Suppression of the African Trade to the United States of America (Cambridge, 1899), 48; Jefferson, Works, ed. H. A. Washington, 1853-1854, 1, 23-24.

30. PH, vol. 18, col. 486 (March 22, 1775).

31. David Cooper (“A farmer”) A Serious Address to the Rulers of America (London, 1783).

32. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, L’An 2440 (Paris, 1977).

33. Abbé Guillaume Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des Indes, ed. Yves Benot (Paris, 1981), 193-211.

34. Recueil des pièces présentées à l’Academie de Marseilles 1777, qu. Charles Carrière, Négociants marseillais au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Marseilles, 1973), I, 349.

35. Peytraud [13, 25], 390.

25. THE GAUNTLET HAD BEEN THROWN DOWN

1. Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 344, suggests that Franklin inspired the idea that Britain had imposed slavery on the colonies.

2. Dieudonné Rinchon, Les armements négriers au XVIIIe siècle (Brussels, 1955) [8, 2], 360.

3. D, III, 335; L. V. Briggs, History and Genealogy of the Cabot Family (Boston, 1927), II, 478.

4. D, II, 555.

5. Thomas Day, A Fragment of a Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes (London, 1785).

6. Cit. in Clarkson [19, 33], 1, 120; PH, XXIII, 1026-27.

7. Jacques Necker, De l’administration des finances de la France, 3 vols. (Paris, 1784), qu. Clarkson [19, 33], 1, 104.

8. William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Dublin, 1785).

9. Clarkson [19, 33], I, 284.

10. PH, vol. vii, 580 (June 10, 1806).

11. Clarkson [19, 33], 1, 332.

12. R & P 1788-89, March 6, 1788.

13. Boston Gazette, March 26, 1788.

14. Sharp, Sept. 4, 1788, in P. Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp (London, 1820), 329.

15. E. C. Martin [12, 17], 126.

16. Congressional Debates on the Constitution, Library of America, 2 vols. (New York, 1993), I, 645-46.

17. Ibid., 395.

18. P. L. Ford, Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States 367 (Brooklyn, 1887).

19. Congressional Debates [25, 16], II, 65.

20. Ibid., 21, 117.

21. Loc. cit.

22. D, IV, 480 ff.

23. W. E. B. Dubois [24, 29], 198.

24. Add. MSS. 38416, ff. 24-27, 216 in D, II, 577.

25. Picton [15, 19], I, 219.

26. Robin Furneaux pointed out (Wilberforce, London, 1974, 238) that this must be the explanation of the comment of Clarkson ([19, 33], II, 506). See too G. R. Mellor’s evidence, British Imperial Trusteeship (London, 1950), 69-70; Wilberforce’s life by his sons, R. I. and S. Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), 165; and Anstey [22, 21], 300-302. Fuller’s comment is in his papers at Duke University.

27. Williams [16, 12], 148.

28. Clarkson [19, 32], II, 504.

29. Qu. ibid., I, 536.

30. The Dolben debate is in PH, vol. 27, col. 495ff and 573ff (May 21, 1788).

31. Jeremy Bentham to Jeremiah Bentham, November 9, 1785, in Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Ian R. Christie, III (London, 1971), 386.

26. MEN IN AFRICA OF AS FINE FEELING AS OURSELVES

1. Clarkson [19, 32], II, 26.

2. PH, vol. 28, May 12, 1789.

3. Latimer [18, 16], 477.

4. A general and descriptive history [13, 18], 229.

5. Qu. Davis [24, 18], 33.

6. D, II, 601-10.

7. Loc. cit.

8. Smith’s failure to discuss the trade should be examined.

9. R & P 1790, vol. 72, 224.

10. Ibid., 35.

11. Ibid., 138.

12. R & P 1791-92 v. 83 125-26.

13. Annals of Congress, I Congress, 1 session, 336-41, 903.

14. See Marcel Chatillon, La diffusion de la gravure du Brooks, in Daget [12, 16], 141.

15. Saugera [14, 13], 331.

16. Chatillon [26, 14], 145; Mirabeau, Mémoires Bruxelles (1836), vol. 10, 146-49.

17. Saugera [14, 13], 340.

18. Saugera [14, 13], 116.

19. Clarkson [19, 32], II, 141.

20. Qu. Furneaux [25, 26], 98.

21. PH, v. 28, col. 359; Peter Fryer, Staying Power, The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), 64.

22. Horace Walpole, Letters, IX, 306 (to Mary Berry).

23. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 2207. This Captain Courtauld may have been that individual listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry as of Delaware, merchant 1752-1821. The second captain’s name was given in Havana as Hugo Tomás. Compare seven ships only in 1790.

24. Hans Christian Johansen, in David Eltis and James Malvin, ed., The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison, 1981), 221ff.

25. PH, v. 29, cols. 1055-57.

26. PH, v. 29, col. 1349.

27. Philip Ziegler, King William IV (London, 1971), 98.

28. B. W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed (Kingston, 1988).

29. Maria Nugent, Journal of a Residence in Jamaica, ed. Philip Wright (Kingston, 1966), 26.

30. Postma [9, 5], 118.

31. I. B. Richman, Rhode Island, 2 vols. (New York, 1902), I, 261; Samuel Hopkins, Works, 3 vols. (Boston, 1852), I, 122.

32. Condesa de Merlin, La Havane, 3 vols. (Paris, 1844), II, 88.

33. José Pablo Valiente and Diego de Gandóqui to the Council of Indies, September 5, 1792, AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 2827, f. 1315; for the second voyage, see f. 1318.

34. Briggs [25, 2].

35. Essex Institute MSS letters, in Elizabeth Donnan, “The New England Slave Trade,” The New England Quarterly III (1930), 266.

36. Hope [14, 21], 107-9; also Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle (Philadelphia, 1981), 47.

37. Federico Brito Figueroa, Estructura ecónomica de la Venezuela colonial (Caracas, 1963), 128; see for Barry, AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 2827 f. 1-199.

38. James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, 2 vols. (London, 1790).

39. Hopkins, Works [26, 31], I, 152.

40. PH, 30, 1439.

41. Shelburne’s autobiography in Lord Edward Fitzmaurice’s Life (London, 1875-1876).

27. WHY SHOULD WE SEE GREAT BRITAIN GETTING ALL THE SLAVE TRADE?

1. PH, 31, 1321.

2. The Letter Journal of George Canning 1793-1795, ed. Peter Jupp, Royal Historical Society (1991), 215-16.

3. PH, 32, 737, 866.

4. Clarkson [19, 32], II, 469.

5. Furneaux [25, 26], 180.

6. PH, 33, 563-79.

7. James Stephen, The Crisis in the Sugar Colonies (London, 1802), 137.

8. Seymour Dreschler, Econocide, British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977), 27.

9. Qu. Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (Cambridge, 1985), 341.

10. James Stephen’s annotation on a copy of the Foreign Slave Bill, cit. Dreschler [27, 7], 73.

11. AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 2827, April 15, 1803.

12. Annals of Congress, April 26, 1800, X, 686.

13. Ibid.

14. Qu. George Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters, and African Middlemen (Boston, 1970).

15. R. I. and S. Wilberforce [25, 26], 1, 343.

16. Knutsford [21, 12], 258.

17. Pierre Labarthe, Voyage à la côte de Guinée (Paris, 1802).

18. Saugera [14, 13], 128.

19. Saugera [14, 13], 134.

20. D, IV, 248.

21. D, IV, 249.

22. Isidoro Antillón, Fragmentos de la conferencia pronunciada en la Real Academia matritense, de derecho Español y público el día 2 de abril de 1802 (Mallorca, 1811). There is a copy in the British Library.

23. Bernardino de Andrade, Planta da Praça e Bissau, 50, cit. Rodney [23, 23], 257.

24. PD, v. 2, 1803-4, 439.

25. R. I. and S. Wilberforce [25, 26], Life, III, 1802.

26. Annual message of President Jefferson, 1806, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. H. A. Washington (New York, 1853-1854).

27. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1955), 162-63.

28. Dubois [24, 29], 103-4.

29. House Reports, 21 Cong., 1 sess., III, no. 348, 77. See The Life of William Harris Crawford, by Philip Green (Charlotte, 1965).

30. Clarkson [19, 33], II, 352.

31. A. Aspinall, The Later Correspondence of George III (London, 1962), vol. 4., 517-18.

32. PD, vol. 7, June 19, 1806.

33. PD, vol. 9, March 23, 1807.

34. Loc. cit.

35. Loc. cit.

36. Loc. cit.

37. Crow [8, 20], 137.

38. Clarence to Sir Samuel Hawker, qu. Ziegler [26, 27], 99.

39. PD, vol. 7, col. 31-34.

40. Henry Brougham, An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1803), vol. 2, 490-91.

BOOK VI: THE ILLEGAL ERA

28. I SEE . . . WE HAVE NOT YET BEGUN THE GOLDEN AGE

1. Park [19, 27], 9.

2. Lords select committee, 1843, 199.

3. Ibid., 226.

4. Béraud, Note sur le Dahomé (1866), cit. Law [18, 6], 67.

5. René Caillé, Journal d’un voyage à Temboteu et à Jenne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1830), I, 460.

6. Al-Nasiri, qu. Lewis [1, 6].

7. E. C. Martin [12, 27], 153.

8. See James Tuckey, Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire (London, 1818).

9. J. Adams, Sketches Taken During the Ten Years Voyage to Africa Between the Years 1786-1800 (London, 1822).

10. Crow [8, 20], 137; Verger [13, 27], 274-75.

11. In his “Analysis,” qu. Rev. R. Walsh, Notices of Brazil (London, 1830), 318.

12. H. M. Brackenridge, Voyage to South America . . . , 2 vols. (London, 1819), I, 139.

13. Alexander von Humboldt, Viaje a los regiones equinoctiales . . . (Caracas, 1966), I, 63.

14. D, III, 101, and Briggs [25, 2], II, 517.

15. “The Rhode Island Slave Trade in 1816,” Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society VI (Jan. 1899), 226.

16. Howe [14, 21], 191.

17. House Journal, 11 Cong., 3d session, VII, 435.

18. D, IV, 249.

19. John L. Spears, The American Slave Trade (London, 1900), 122.

20. Drake [19, 25], 52. “Picanninny” is of course a word deriving from the Spanish pequeno niño.

21. R & P 1790, vol. 73, 16.

22. R & P 1790, vol. 83, 43.

23. R & P 1790, vol. 82, 53.

24. Hutt committee, I, 422.

25. PD, 1st series, vol. 19, 233.

26. James Prior, Voyage Along the Eastern Coast of Africa [etc.] . . . (London, 1819), 99.

27. James F. King, “The Latin American Republics and the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” HAHR XXIV (1944), 391.

28. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions (London, 1986), 85.

29. Archivo Nacional de Cuba real consulado, leg. 74, no. 2836, qu. José Luciano Franco, Comercio clandetino de esclavos (Havana, 1985), 121.

30. AGI, Indif. gen. leg. 2827, f. 1303-27. Aguilar said that he approached “al principal socio de la mencionada compañia don Pedro de la Cuesta y Manzanal intersandolo para que me ayudase a llevar adelante el . . . commercio directo de Negros a la costa de Africa desde nos puertos con buques capitaines y tripulación española.”

31. Speech printed in Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Los abolicionistas españoles, siglo XIX (Madrid, 1996), 106.

32. “Se trata de nuestras vidas, de toda nuestra fortuna, y de nuestros descendientes”). In Cuba, there was not a hacienda which had “los negros que deba tener” (AGI, Indif., gen. leg. 2827, ff. 1436-84).

33. Ramirez, Instrucciones a Power, in Luis Díaz Soler, Historia de la esclavitux md negra en Puerto Rico (Madrid, 1953), 126.

34. See commentary in H. G. Soulsby, The Right of Search and the Slave Trade in Anglo-American Relations (Baltimore, 1933), 17.

35. Davis [26, 5], II, 69.

36. Duke of Wellington, Supplementary Despatches, 15 vols., ed. by the 2nd Duke (London, 1858-72), vol. 9, 165 (July 29, 1814); see also Betty Fladeland, “Abolitionist Pressures on the Concert of Europe,” Journal of Modern History XXXVIII (1966), 361.

37. Castlereagh to Henry Wellesley, August 1, 1814, in Memoir and Correspondence of Castlereagh, 3rd series, ed. by the Marquis of Londonderry, 2 vols. (1848-53), vol. 2, 73.

38. Francis Dorothy Cartwright, ed. The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, 2 vols. (London, 1826), 2, 84.

39. Earl Leslie Griggs, Clarkson, the Friend of Slaves (London, 1936), 116.

40. General Treaty signed in Congress at Vienna (London, 1816), 132.

41. Serge Daget, Répertoire des expéditions françaises a la traite illégale (Nantes, 1988), 4.

42. Daget [28, 41], 10; also Charles Cunat, Pierre Surcouf (Paris, 1847).

43. J. Dodson, Report of Cases Argued Before the High Court of Admiralty (London, 1828), ii, 263-64; see also Daget [28, 42], 21-22.

44. Archivo nacional de Cuba, Asuntos Políticos, leg. 110, no. 73 qu. Franco [28, 29], 261.

45. PD, 1st ser., vol. 31, 172.

29. THE SLAVER IS MORE CRIMINAL THAN THE ASSASSIN

1. Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (London, 1903), 198.

2. The Diary of John Quincy Adams, ed. Allan Nevins (New York, 1928), 177-78.

3. Memoir . . . of Castlereagh [28, 37], 1853, xi, 309.

4. Ibid., xii, 361.

5. Stern, Gesichtes Europas, 1, 474, qu. Sir Charles Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh (London, 1925), 168.

6. W. E. F. Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London, 1969), 44.

7. Ward [29, 6], 84-86.

8. Ward [29, 6], 98.

9. Qu. Deveaux [16, 20], 290.

10. Canning to Stratford Canning in Washington, BFSP X, 254.

11. Goethe, in Conversations with Eckermann (London, 1930), 329 (Sept. 1, 1829).

12. PD, 1st ser., vol. 37, col. 251.

13. Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, ed. Howard T. and Marion Hall Fisher (New York, 1966), 26.

14. David Murray, Odious Commerce (Cambridge, 1983), 56.

15. Tacón to the ministers of foreign affairs and the navy, in AHN Estado, Leg. 8035, June 27, 1844. The paragraph is one of the most important in the history of the slave trade: “al efecto creé deber observar que al concluirse el tratado de 1817 se comunicó una Rl. Orden reservada á los capitanes generales de las Islas de Cuba y Puerto Rico, y al Intendente, superintendente delegado de ellas, para que se disimilase le importación de negros procedentes de Africa, fundandose en que se consideraban necesarios para la conservación y fomento de la agriculture.” I found this document thanks to David Murray’s reference in Odious Commerce.

16. Howe [14, 21], 210.

17. Op. cit., 208.

18. Saco [6, 14], III, 141.

19. Memoria presented by Fr. Varela in ibid., 1-17.

20. Juan Bernardo O’Gabán, Observaciones sobre la suerte de los negros . . . (Madrid, 1821), 7.

21. Kilbee to Canning, February 25, 1825, published in PP, 1825.

22. Foreign Slave Trade: abstract of the information, 36-37, qu. Conrad [22, 3], 63.

23. Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1970), 32-47.

24. Qu. Rodrigues [14, 14], 148.

25. Walsh [28, 11], 1, 465; II, 328, 322.

26. Conrad [22, 3], 80-81, for commentary.

27. Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brazil (São Paulo, 1933).

28. Larry Yarak, Asante and the Dutch (Oxford, 1990), 123; for Duboissee, Daget [28, 14], 291 ff.

29. Ward [29, 6], 82.

30. FRUS, vol. V, 72.

31. William Wetmore Story, Life and Letters of Joseph Story, 2 vols. (Boston, 1851), I, 336-47.

32. House Docs., 16 Cong., 1 sess., III, no. 42, 7.

33. Drake [19, 25].

34. C, 232 ff.

35. For the relationship, see Howe [14, 21], 213; see also Samuel Eliot Morison, Old Bruin (Boston, 1967).

36. Ward [29, 6], 77.

37. BFSP, 1820-21, 397-400.

38. Memoirs of John Q. Adams Comprising Portions of His Diary . . . , 12 vols., ed. C. F. Adams (Philadelphia, 1874-1877), V, 416.

39. Daget [28, 42], 37ff.

40. Op. cit., 43.

41. Serge Daget, “L’abolition de la traite des noirs en France,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 11 (1971), 14-58. The speech of Broglie is in his “Discours prononcé le 28 mars 1822.”

42. Duchesse de Duras, Ourika (Paris, 1825).

43. Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal (Paris, 1833).

44. Daget [28, 42], 126-27.

45. Op. cit., passim.

46. Serge Daget in La France et L’abolition de la traite des noirs (Thesis) (Paris, 1969), 304.

47. C. Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (London, 1949), 50; an excellent account which inspired this one.

30. ONLY THE POOR SPEAK ILL OF THE SLAVE TRADE

1. A lavoura da Bahia . . . (Bahia, 1874), qu. Conrad [22, 3], 68.

2. George Gardner, Travels in the Interior of Brazil, 1836-1841 (London, 1846), 1.

3. Thomas Ewbank, Life in Brazil (New York, 1856), 282.

4. Cit. Conrad [22, 3], 86.

5. Freyre [8, 8], 49.

6. Qu. Bethell [29, 23], 84.

7. Freyre [8, 8], 346.

8. Humboldt [28, 13], 212.

9. Commons select committee 1850, 80.

10. Commons select committee 1853, 96.

11. Rafael Labra, La abolición de la esclavitud en el orden económico (Madrid, 1873).

12. Kilbee and Macleay to Canning, January 1, 1827, in PP, 1827.

13. Palmerston’s comments in 1849, Hutt committee II, 19.

14. Archivo Nacional (Havana) Reales Ordenes y Cédulas, leg. 178, no. 40, qu. Franco [28, 20], 325; Vives to minister of foreign affairs, Jan. 6, 1825, qu. Murray [29, 14], 85.

15. PRO Commissioners in Havana (Kilbee and Maclean) to Canning, March 19, 1827, FO 84/68, item 10. The letter included a translation of one from Vives which said that from the examination of the logbook of the ship concerned, it could not be suspected that the vessel had touched at any port in Africa, much less had carried slaves to Cuba.

16. George Villiers to the Foreign Minister, in AHN, Madrid, Estado leg. 5034/4.

17. L. M. Sears, “Nicholas P. Trist, A Diplomat with Ideals,” Miss. Valley Hist. Rev., June 1924.

18. Evidence of Judge Macaulay, in The Trial of Pedro de Zulueta (London, 1844), 11.

19. Merlin [26, 32], 1, 310.

20. Corbière [16, 25], 192.

21. All these references in Calderón de la Barca [29, 13], 9-29.

22. Loc. cit.

23. Merlin [26, 32], 1, 302.

24. Edward F. Atkins, Sixty Years in Cuba (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), 12.

25. Carlos Martí, Los Catalanes en América (Cuba) (Havana 1921), 26.

26. Angel Bahamonde and José Cayuela, Hacia las Américas (Madrid, 1992), 201-22.

27. See the will of Don Tiburcio in Angel Mari Arrieta, La emigración alavesa a América en el siglo XIX (Vitoria, 1992), 461, kindly shown me by Don Julián de Zulueta of Ronda. Also see Murray [29, 11], 313; Franklin Knight, “Origins of Wealth and the Sugar Revolution in Cuba,” HAHR 57 (1977); A. N. Gallenga, The Pearl of the Antilles (London, 1873); and also Franco [28, 21], 251.

28. Ward [28, 20], 144.

29. Bahamonde and Cayuela [30, 26].

30. For the trial of Pedro de Zulueta, see Appendix 2.

31. Herbert Maxwell, Life and Letters of George Fourth Earl of Clarendon (London, 1913), I, 94.

31. ACTIVE EXERTIONS

1. A. E. M. Ashley, Life of Palmerston (London, 1846-65), II, 227.

2. Joseph Denman, West India Interests, African Emigration and the Slave Trade (London, 1848), 12.

3. PP, 1842, XI, pt. 1, Appendix and Index, No. 7, 29.

4. CO 82/6 1143 FP Nicolls to Hay, Dec. 10, 1833, in Kenneth Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Valley (Oxford, 1956), 65.

5. Spears [28, 19], 145.

6. Denman evidence in Lords Select Committee on West Africa 1842, 405.

7. Murray [29, 4], 93ff, and also W. L. Mathieson, Great Britain and the Slave Trade (London, 1929), 13-17.

8. AHN, Estado leg. 8035/4. A typical letter from George Villiers in Madrid included statements such as “I deeply regret to have . . . to communicate to your Excellency that certain authorities of Her Catholic Majesty in the Havannah instead of zealously endeavouring to carry into effect the Treaty of 1835 . . . appear to countenance the means which are reported to for its evasion.”

9. Sir Charles Webster, The foreign policy of Lord Palmerston, 1830-1841, 492.

10. PD, 3d series, vol. 50, col. 309, 383. The Duke’s protest is in col. 386.

11. Commander Riley in Hutt committee, II, 25.

12. Francis Swanzy in Lords select committee, 1843, 67.

13. Webster [31, 9].

14. Miller [29, 11], 366.

15. Palmerston to Stevenson, August 27, 1841, in Soulsby [28, 34], 54.

16. Palmerston to Stevenson, August 27, 1841, in Soulsby [28, 34], 60.

17. Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston (London, 1982), 596; Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London, 1970), 281-82.

18. Qu. Bethell [29, 23], 207.

19. David Turnbull, Travels in the West (London, 1840), 60.

20. Arthur P. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba (Austin, 1967), 70.

21. Mariano Torrente, La cuestión importante sobre la esclavitud (Madrid, 1841), 4-7.

22. AHN, Estado leg. 8035, June 27, 1844.

23. Centón epistolario, vol. v, 14, 24, 31.

24. Murray [29, 4], 177.

25. Hutt committee, 1, 109.

26. Hutt committee, 1, 88.

27. Soulsby [28, 34], 100ff.

28. The letter is published in Commons Select Committee 1850, 130.

29. Hutt committee, I, 88.

32. SLAVE HARBORS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1. Daget [12, 16], 419.

2. J. C. Furnas, “Patrolling the Middle Passage,” American Heritage IX, 6 (October 1958).

3. Hutt committee, 1, 170.

4. Tacón’s comment is in a report by him in AHN, Estado.

5. PRO 84/95, f. 82, where Lord Ponsonby is shown to have reported that British capital was indirectly concerned in the Brazilian slave trade on a vast scale: there were few merchants in Rio “who do not annually receive large shipments of goods for the carrying on” the trade in slaves (June 27, 1829). This is qu. by David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 83 and 326. He discusses these links with perspicacity. “It is calculated,” Lord Ponsonby continued, “that one third of all British manufactures imported into this harbour [Rio] consists in articles eventually used in the commerce with the coast of Africa.”

6. Lords select committee, 1843, 210.

7. Lords select committee, 1843, 767.

8. Hutt committee, II, 212.

9. Wise to Buchanan, Mar. 6, 1846, Despatches XV, qu. L. F. Hill, in Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Brazil, (Durham, N.C., 1932), 141.

10. Lords select committee, 1843, 767.

11. Hutt committee, II, 21.

12. Theodore Canot, Memoirs of a Slave Trader (New York, 1850), 50. For this interesting figure see also the following: L. G. Bouge, “Théophile Conneau, alias Theodore Canot,” Revue d’Histoire des colonies XL (1953), 1, no. 138, 249-63; Roger Pasquier,RFHR LV (1968), no. 200, 352-54; and, S. Daget, “Encore Théodore Canot . . . ,” Annales Université d’Abidjan ser. I (histoire) V (1977), 39-53; and, Svend E. Holsoe, “Théodore Canot at Cape Mount,” Liberian Studies Journal 44 (1972), 263-81.

13. George Coggeshall, Second Series of Voyages to Various Parts of the World (New York, 1857), 123.

14. Temperley [18, 9], 74.

15. Loc. cit.

16. Lords select committee, 1843, 523.

17. Brooks [27, 9], 186.

18. Hutt committee, II, 4.

19. Capt. Blount evidence in Lords select committee, 1843, 408-9.

20. Ward [29, 6], 48-49.

21. Lords select committee, 1843, 527.

22. O. George in Daget [12, 16], 565.

23. See Carol McCormack in Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1983), 278. His death is described in Canot [32, 12], 226; C. Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (1962), 66, 185.

24. Hutt committee, II, 8.

25. Lloyd [29, 47], gives a vivid picture, on which I have drawn freely, 132.

26. Hutt committee, 1, 402.

27. Brooks [27, 9], 61.

28. Hutt committee, II, 184.

29. Canot [32, 12], 326.

30. Ward [29, 6], 73-75.

31. Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Misc de Libros no. 11408, Franco [28, 20], 242.

32. Bennet and Brooks [17, 2], 87.

33. Commons select committee 1843, 466.

34. Bennet and Brooks [17, 2], 35, 38.

35. Van Dantzig in Daget [12, 16], II, 601.

36. Edward Reynolds in Daget [12, 16], 1, 576.

37. Brooks [27, 9], 235.

38. Reynolds [32, 36].

39. Hutt committee, II, 57.

40. Prince de Joinville, Vieux Souvenirs, new ed. (Paris, 1986), 230.

41. Andrew H. Foote, Africa and the American Flag (New York, 1862), 82.

42. Hutt committee, II, 70-71.

43. See Verger [13, 27], 467-74; David Ross, “Diego Martínez in the Bight of Benin,” JAH VI (1965), 79-90.

44. Ward [29, 6], 109.

45. Joseph Wright, c. 1825, in Philip Curtin, Africa Remembered (Madison, 1967), 320.

46. PRO CO 82/6 Fernando Po 67, Nicholls to Hay, Oct. 28, 1833, qu. Dike [31, 5], 53.

47. PRO FO 84/383 HMS Viper at sea, Burslem to Tucker, Sept. 10, 1840, qu. Dike [31, 5], 83.

48. Papers relating to this treaty can be seen in FO 84/383, 87ff; also PP 1842, XI, 551.

49. Lords select committee 1843, 430.

50. The Treaty was enclosed in a letter from Captain William Tucker in PRO FO 84/385, Aug. 22, 1841.

51. Evidence in Lords select committee, 43, 340.

52. Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-nine Years in the West Indies (London, 1863), 429.

53. Sir C. Hotham to the Admiralty, April 7, 1847, in RC 16, XXII (1847-48), 2.

54. Paul du Chaillu, Voyages et aventures dans l’Afrique Équatoriale (Paris, 1863), 45.

55. Surgeon Peters in Lords select committee 1843, 355.

56. Brooks [27, 7], 145.

57. Peter Knickerbocker, Sketches in South Africa (1850-51), vol. 37, 38, 39.

58. Parker in Knickerbocker, vol. 39, 134.

59. Georg Tams, A Visit to the Portuguese Possessions in South West Africa, tr. from German (Hamburg, 1845), vol. I, 116

60. Capt. A. Murray in select committee 1850, 38.

61. Bennet and Brooks [17, 2], 192.

62. Ibid., 262.

63. Ibid., 427.

64. José Capela, O escravismo colonial em Moçambique (Porto, 1993), 180.

65. Lords select committee 1850, 239.

66. Canot [32, 12], 252.

67. Admiral Dacres in Commons select committee 1850, 14.

68. Bennet and Brooks [17, 2], 9; see too George Francis Dow, Diary and Letters of . . . Benjamin Pickman (Newport, 1928).

33. SHARKS ARE THE INVARIABLE OUTRIDERS OF ALL SLAVE SHIPS

1. PD, 3d ser., vol. 109, col. 1093-95.

2. Hutt committee, I, 322.

3. Qu. Temperley [18, 9], 4.

4. Hutt committee, I, 2.

5. Hutt committee, 1, 401.

6. Warren Howard, American slavers and the Federal law, Berkeley, 1963.

7. Hutt committee, I, 82.

8. Hutt committee, I, 623.

9. Hutt committee, 1, 655.

10. Narrative of Joseph Wright, in Curtin [32, 44], 330-31.

11. Hutt committee, 1, 211.

12. Capt. Bailey in Lords select committee 1843, 138.

13. Evidence of Macgregor Laird in Lords select committee, 1843, 363.

14. Hutt committee, II, 257.

15. PP, 1822, 561, 633.

16. PP, 1824, 261.

17. Hutt committee, 1, 106.

18. G. F. Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Salem, 1927) xxviii ff., and PD 2nd series 5 1288 1821; also Daget [28, 41], 88.

19. Madden [30, 11], 228-41; Dubois [24, 29], 142; William A. Owens, Slave Mutiny (London, 1953).

20. Jas. Badinel in Hutt committee, 1, 256.

21. PP, 1865, vol. v, 165, 171.

22. T. R. H. Thomson to Hutt committee, 1, 397.

23. Log of Fantôme in PRO Adm 51/3718, nos. 7-10, Oct. 31, 1839-Oct. 20, 1834; Memoirs of Sir W. Symonds, ed. J. A. Sharp (London, 1858), 651.

24. Hudson cit. Mathieson [31, 8], 199.

25. Ward [29, 6], 122.

26. Nautical Magazine 1834, 649, qu. Lloyd [29, 47], 77-78.

27. Ward [29, 6], 116.

28. Summarized in Lloyd [9, 47], 87-88.

29. Hutt committee, 1, 168.

30. Commons select committee, 1850, 108.

31. Lords select committee, 1843, 168.

32. Lords select committee, 1843, 770.

33. Lords select committee, 1843, 283.

34. Canot [32, 12], 107.

35. Gladstone in Hutt committee, 1, 212.

36. Canot [32, 12], 107.

37. These figures derive from Howard [33, 6] but the most interesting calculations of cost and profit in the trade in the nineteenth century are those of Eltis [32, 5], appendix E, but see also E. Philip Le Veen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies (New York, 1977).

38. Hutt committee, II, 57.

39. Drake [19, 25], 92.

40. Crawford to Russell, Feb. 5, 1861, in FO 84, 1135, 20 v. The last estimate here is that of Howard [33, 6].

41. Hutt committee, II, 13.

34. CAN WE RESIST THE TORRENT? I THINK NOT

1. Spears [28, 19], 155.

2. Mason to Skinner, in Lawrence Cabot Howard, American Involvement in Africa South of the Sahara (Garland, 1989), 118.

3. Horatio Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, 1845), 53.

4. See Palmerston’s evidence in Hutt committee, II, 6-7.

5. Foote [32, 41], 218.

6. Qu. Bethell [29, 23], 245.

7. Ibid., 270.

8. PP, vol. 49 (1845) 593-633, gave a list of 2, 185 slave voyages. David Eltis, in Henry Gemery and Jan Hogedorn, ed., The Uncommon Market (New York, 1979), pointed out that the Foreign Office had record of another 914 probable expeditions.

9. T. Nelson, Remarks on Slavery and the Slave Trade (London, 1846).

10. Wise despatch, Feb. 18, 1845, XIII, qu. L. F. Hill, Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Brazil (Durham, N.C., 1932), 114.

11. Qu. Bethell [29, 23], 289.

12. House Exec. Doc., 30 Cong., 2 sess., VII, no. 61, 18.

13. Freyre [8, 8], 429.

14. Rodrigues [14, 14], 186.

15. Qu. Bethell [29, 23], 290.

16. PD, 3rd ser., vol. 93, col. 1000 (June 24, 1845); PP, 1847-48, xxii, appendix.

17. PD, 3d ser., vol. 96, col. 1096 (Feb. 22, 1848): the figures are for 1843. Cf. A. K. Manchester, British Pre-eminence in Brazil (Chapel Hill, 1933), 315.

18. PD, 3d ser., vol. 77, col. 1290.

19. PD, 3d ser., vol. 96, col. 41.

20. Bethell [29, 23], 297.

21. PD, 3d ser., vol. 109, 1160-70.

22. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), xviii.

23. PD, 3d. ser. vol. 93, col. 1076, July 16, 1844.

24. See Hutt committee, II, 123.

25. House of Commons, Accounts and papers, Slave Trade, 22, session Feb. 4-Aug. 9, 1845, vol. xlix.

26. PD, 3d ser., vol. 109, 1850, col. 1093.

27. Op. cit., col. 1185.

28. Dunlop evidence in Lords select committee 1850, 135ff.

29. A partial list of British agents, which included at least one foreign minister (Caetano Mario Lopes Gama, and one vice president of the parliament, Leopoldo Muniz Barreto, can be seen in Eltis [32, 5], 115. Alcofarado was still being paid an allowance by the British in 1860: see his letter of March 9, 1860, to Lord Palmerston requesting the continuance of this stipend, where he says that he had by then worked for Britain for twenty years. He says the proof of this is not only in the archives of the Foreign Office, but also in “the personal knowledge which your lordship possesses of such services” (FO 84/1130, f. 79). In Palmerston’s papers now in the University of Southampton there are receipts for secret service payments though they do not indicate what the services were.

30. Schomberg’s evidence in Lords select committee, 1853, 58ff; letter from Under Secretary of the Foreign Office to Admiralty, April 22, 1850, published in Commons select committee, 1853, 60.

31. Qu. Rodrigues [14, 14], 170.

32. Rodrigues [14, 14], 190-92.

33. Verger [13, 27], 437.

34. Ashley [31, 1], II, 263-64.

35. David A. Ross, “The Career of Domingo Martinez,” JAH VI, 1, 1965.

35. THEY ALL EAGERLY DESIRE IT, PROTECT IT AND ALMOST SANCTIFY IT

1. Murray [29, 4], 167.

2. Aberdeen to Bulmer in BM Add. Mss. 43146 f. 343.

3. Qu. Corwin [31, 20], 82.

4. Murray [29, 4], 202.

5. Irving to Calhoun, April 23, 1844, in William Ray Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence (Washington, D.C., 1925), vol. XI, 339.

6. Webster [31, 9], 462.

7. Pío Baroja, Los Pilotos de Altura (Madrid, 1995), 247.

8. H. Vidal Morales, Iniciadores y primeros martires (Havana, 1916), 1, 165.

9. Qu. Murray [29, 4], 227.

10. Qu. Murray [29, 4], 230.

11. PRO Russell to Howden in FO 84/871, Jan. 31, 1853.

12. Qu. Murray [29, 4], 250.

13. Manning [35, 5], 789.

14. Qu. David Potter, The Impending Crisis (New York, 1976), 182, fn. 15.

15. Amos Ettinger, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé (London, 1932), 390-412.

16. Murray [29, 4], 244.

17. Consul Crawford in Havana in evidence of Capt. Hamilton in Lords select committee, 1853, 19.

18. Lords select committee, 1843, 457.

19. North American Review, Nov. 1886, 447 ff.

20. James and Patience Barnes, Private and Confidential (Selinsgrove, 1992), 165.

21. Ward [29, 6], 318.

22. Wise to the secretary of the Admiralty, October 28, 1858, in BFSP 1859-60, 763-65.

23. Ward [29, 6].

24. PD, 3d ser., vol. 186, col. 1492-1501 (1857).

25. Ward [29, 6].

26. Soulsby [28, 34], 168.

27. Ronald Takaki, A Pro-slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York, 1971).

28. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York, 1966).

29. Letter of Charles Lamar to Trowbridge in North American Review, Nov. 1886, 456.

30. Barnes [326, 20], 209.

36. CUBA THE FORWARD SENTINEL

1. Corwin [31, 20], 127; Soulsby [28, 34], 159.

2. Corwin [31, 20], 128 fd 67.

3. Cass to Dallas in London qu. Soulsby [28, 34], 155.

4. Report of the secretary of the navy, 1860, 9.

5. Friends’ appeal on behalf of the coloured races, 1858.

6. Howard [33, 6], 302.

7. Continental Monthly, January 1862, 87.

8. Frederick C. Blake, ed., Secret History of the Slave Trade to Cuba . . . JNH LV, no. 3, 1970, 229.

9. Wilson letter to Lord John Russell, Sept. 12, 1860 in PRO, FO 84/1130, f. 85. Wilson, who had spent twenty-seven years in Havana, thought Spaniards were “similar to Moors.”

10. PRO, Crawford to Palmerston in FO 84/1135 of February 5, 1861 (f. 14). Crawford complained that some slave merchants had even been ennobled. The calculation in chapter 33, fn 40, appears in this essay.

11. PD, 3d ser., 1861, vol. 161, cols. 950-89.

12. Lloyd, [29, 41], 69.

13. FO 84/1150, October 5, 1861.

14. C. F. Adams Jr., Life of C. F. Adams (Boston, 1900), 241.

15. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York, 1918), 56.

16. Sir Richard Burton, ed., A Mission to Gelele King of Dahomey (London, 1966).

17. FO 84/1135, 21. An official wrote on April 20, 1860: “if it should be considered advisable to take possession of the place, no consideration founded on the insalubrity of the climate should be allowed to have any weight.”

18. Murray [29, 4], 311.

19. Antonio Barras y Prado, La Habana a mediados del siglo xix (Madrid, 1925), 52.

20. Diario del Congreso, 1864-65, May 6, 1865.

21. Corwin [311, 20].

22. Diario del Congreso, 1865-66, April 20, 1866.

23. Diario del Senado, 1865-66, April 20, 1866.

24. New York Times, April 3, 1866.

25. Franco [28, 20], 256.

26. These calculations derive from Eltis [32, 5], 97-101.

APPENDIX 3. STATISTICS

For many years, it was supposed that the Atlantic slave trade was of the order of 15 million persons shipped between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century. Historians, journalists, even demographers (such as Kuczynski) based their theories on this statistic. In one of the most brilliant chapters of recent historical writing, Philip Curtin, in his admirable work The Atlantic Slave Trade, A Census (Madison, 1969) showed that that estimate was based on a nineteenth-century guess. Curtin made a more modest estimate. A serious, though neglected, estimate of the dimension of the African slave trade had been made in 1950 by Noël Deerr, in his History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London, 1950): on the basis of an analysis country by country, Deerr suggested a figure of about 11, 970, 000 might be right (Vol. II, 284). Curtin also looked meticulously at estimates for different countries and suggested that the total might be lower: about 10 million, certainly not less than 8 million, probably not more than 10, 500, 000: say, 9, 566, 100 (The Atlantic Slave Trade, 268).

But Joseph Inikori in 1975 suggested that the old guess of 15 million—15.4 million was his estimate—might be nearer the truth than Curtin’s figure: he repeated his suggestion in 1982 (Forced Migration [London, 1982], 13-60; also, Inikori, D. C. Ohadikhe, and A. C. Unomah, The Chaining of a Continent [UNESCO, Paris, 1986]). But a year earlier, in 1981, James Rawley, in a general survey, put the figure at 11, 345, 000 (The Transatlantic Slave Trade [New York, 1981], 428). After a careful new look at the evidence (for after 1700 only, however), Paul Lovejoy suggested in 1982 that 11, 698, 000 slaves might have been sent from Africa, of whom perhaps 9, 778, 500 may have arrived (“The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,” JAH 23). Then, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch talked in terms of 11.7 million, between 1450 and 1900 (in Daget’s Actes du colloque internationale sur la traite des noirs, vol. 2 [Nantes, 1985], 58). In 1989, a further revision was suggested by David Richardson, the historian of the Bristol trade (“Slave Exports from West and West-central Africa,” JAH 30) and, later that same year, Paul Lovejoy provided yet another figure of 11, 863, 000 (“The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa . . . ,” JAH 30 [1989]). David Henige (“Measuring the Unmeasurable,” JAH27 [1986]), and Charles Becker (“Notes sur les chiffres de la traite atlantique française au dixhuitième siècle,” Cahiers d’études africaines 26, 633-79) have also made overall estimates. The historian of La Rochelle, Jean-Michel Déveaux, in 1994 gave his total as 11, 500, 000 (France au temps des négrier [Paris, 1994]).

The diversity of these estimates is explained by the fact that some of Curtin’s detailed country-by-country estimates, especially by his own admission those in the Spanish Empire, were full of uncertainties. Even on something so apparently important as the number of slaves imported illegally into the United States after the abolition of the trade in 1808, he was rather general; and he would, I think, now question his own suggestion that evidence that 54, 000 slaves were imported illegally into the United States after abolition: 5, 000 might now seem to him a good guess. Curtin, like most of his successors in seeking a grand total, had been understandably baffled as to how to face the vast Portuguese-Brazilian slave traffic.

Inikori’s criticisms of Curtin were based on the judgment, echoing Leslie Rout (The African Experience in Spanish America [Cambridge, 1976], 65), that Curtin underestimated both the illegal Cuban and Brazilian trades in the nineteenth century; and these figures are certainly difficult to decide upon. Similar corrections have been made by Enriqueta Vila Vilar in respect of the contraband Spanish deliveries in the early seventeenth century (Hispanoamerica y el comercio de esclavos [Seville, 1977]). Magalhães-Godinho (Os Descobrimentos e a economia mondial [Lisbon, 1963]) like C. L. R. Boxer (The Portuguese Seaborne Empire [London, 1963]) would double Curtin’s figures for 1440 to 1500. There are other such revisions to be considered, especially in relation to the hard-to-estimate Cuban figures of the 1850s.

In 1999, it appears that the Dubois Institute of Harvard will present a so-called “Data set” which will record about 27, 000 slave voyages, which, it is said, will cover 90 percent of British, French, and Dutch slave ships, and “more than two thirds of the total.” That suggests that that total must have been about 40, 000. That may turn out to be an underestimate—50, 000 may be nearer the mark.

The attempt by many meticulous historians to decide figures to the last digit in a number is a vain one. I am not even sure that it is necessary. I prefer to think that the approximate figure would seem to be something like eleven million slaves, give or take 500, 000.