4

France and the Slave Trade

Before the end of the seventeenth century, French ships had played little part in the Atlantic slave trade. Indeed, until about 1673 Dutch vessels probably carried more slaves to France’s Caribbean sugar islands than the French themselves, and French slavers made little progress in non-French markets. Others forged ahead. Spain and Portugal were the nations most involved in slaving, while Britain’s slave trade expanded rapidly in the late seventeenth century. However, after the War of the Spanish Succession, this changed rapidly. From 1713, when the monopoly of the Guinea Company was ended, French ports invested seriously in slave voyages, supported by the Crown through generous subsidy schemes. Indeed, by the eve of the Revolution, foreign companies were registering their ships in France so that they might profit from them. The transformation was dramatic. Between 1716 and 1793, French vessels transported more than 1 million Africans to the Americas, and during the fifteen years to 1793 they were carrying an average of 24,000 slaves each year.¹ Slavery lay at the heart of a production system that supplied Europeans with increasing quantities of sugar, coffee, and indigo; and the French Empire, far more than the British, relied on slave labour for its continued prosperity. The French Atlantic became, in Silvia Marzagalli’s words, ‘more centred on West Indian production, less diversified, and less integrated than the British Atlantic’. This left it more vulnerable to fluctuations in trading conditions and less able to adapt to changes in the Atlantic world.²

This in turn led some merchants to turn to slaving in preference to less remunerative forms of colonial trade. Direct commerce with the Caribbean was profitable only if there was cargo for the outward journey, since the principal purpose of the voyage was to bring colonial goods back to France, to feed the voracious European market for sugar and other colonial produce. Captains seldom had difficulty in filling their holds for the trip back from the islands; indeed, the needs of the planters were such that they were under pressure to build ever bigger ships to transport their cargoes. But finding a full cargo for the journey from France was a more difficult problem, especially for ships coming out from the Loire. Nantes vessels often made the outward journey to the Caribbean very lightly laden, their cargoes too small to cover the costs of the voyage, far less to register a profit. And once there, the captains had to find freight for the return voyage, and pay for it in hard currency. If they could not raise sufficient money from the sales of the goods they arrived with, this raised further financial problems for the owners, who were tempted to turn instead to slaving. Many, indeed, were convinced that only by investing heavily in the slave trade could they hope to recoup their original outlay, since the margin between the price of sugar and coffee in Saint-Domingue and the price at which they could sell it back in France was seldom sufficient of itself to provide a satisfactory return.³

This trend was particularly marked in the years after the American War, when the competition between French ports became intense. Nantes, of course, as the leading slave port across much of the eighteenth century, resumed slave voyages after the lean years of the war, but it was not alone in looking to the slave trade to resolve the challenges it faced. The ports of the Seine estuary, especially Le Havre and Honfleur, resumed the triangular trade with obvious relish. In the years leading up to the Revolution, indeed, Le Havre risked becoming dangerously over-dependent on slaving at a time when merchants elsewhere looked to diversify their activities, especially into the Indian Ocean.⁴ Other ports also saw the slave trade as an opportunity for short-term profit in the post-war world. Between 1783 and 1792, Bordeaux became, briefly, the leading slaving port in France, knocking Nantes off a pedestal which it had occupied for most of the century.⁵ Marseille merchants also became more deeply involved in slaving in the years after the War of American Independence, though on a modest scale, sending no more than eight expeditions a year to the coast of West Africa.⁶ And in La Rochelle, which fitted out 13 per cent of French slaving voyages over the century, the years after the American War saw an increasing dependence on the triangular trade, to the point where slaving accounted for 58 per cent of the vessels it despatched outside France.⁷ Prices were high as the planters sought to increase their labour force after years of poor supply, and those who supplied them with slaves were tempted to take full advantage.

For merchants and commissioners, slaving was a commercial investment like any other. Few acknowledged any moral qualms about buying and selling their human cargoes, and in the course of the eighteenth century, the richest and most respectable merchant families engaged in the trade at times when there were profits to be made. Where they held back, it was generally for commercial rather than moral or religious reasons. The monarchy regulated the slave trade and itself extracted profit from it. In the early years of the century, the King had taxed the trade, levying a tax of ten livres on every slave transported to the West Indies. Then, in 1776, when it was thought necessary to relaunch slaving in a bid to compete more effectively with Britain, the monarchy offered inducements to merchants to encourage them to engage in slaving, offering a prime of fifteen livres for every African safely landed in the islands. After the end of the American War, the sums involved were hugely increased, until by 1786 merchants would earn 160 livres for every slave who disembarked in Martinique or Guadeloupe, and 200 livres for all those taken to Guyana and the southern part of Saint-Domingue.⁸ These sums not only help to explain the surge in the slave trade after 1783; they also, by indicating the King’s tacit approval for slaving, gave the trade an unexpected air of respectability. Who could be deterred by moral considerations if, as it seemed, the King himself had no such compunction?

A small number of merchants did admit to being affected by the moral doubts that were being expressed in society at large. In Bordeaux, a city that took pride in a cultural heritage that included both Montaigne and Montesquieu, there was some public disquiet about the morality of the slave trade and the assault on the dignity of man which it implied.⁹ Some questioned the source of the city’s new-found riches; a few even called for the trade to be abolished. But such voices were still relatively rare and they had little practical effect. Doubts might be raised in debates in Bordeaux’s two learned societies, the Académie and the Musée, where many leading négociants were members, but they did little to deter those who wanted to trade; and as soon as the American War was over, some of the most notable merchants in the port, men like Gradis, Saige, Baour, Balguerie, and Nairac, rushed to fit out new expeditions to West Africa. Those who desisted, or who continued to send their vessels to the Caribbean en droiture, did so because they knew that these voyages would still return a handsome profit. They were not moralists. They were men who prided themselves on their pragmatism and for whom slaving remained an option whenever commercial conditions demanded it.

Slaves, it was clear, were just another commodity to be bought and sold by men who judged every voyage by a single yardstick, that of profit. They were a cargo, the property of the merchant for the period of the voyage, and it is clear that their humanity bought no special consideration. Some said as much in print, like the merchant and maire-échevin of Le Havre, Dubocage de Bléville, who wrote that he saw no distinction between slaves and the other products, like coffee or rubber, which filled the holds of his company’s ships.¹⁰ To the modern ear this materialism can seem rather shocking, and the merchants’ indifference to the fate of their slaves brutal and callous. But to contemporaries it was unexceptional. The La Rochelle merchant Pierre-Jean Van Hoogwerff offered a telling insight into what was a widely held attitude in the merchant community when he assessed the success of the most recent voyage of his slave ship, L’Aimable Suzanne, to Africa and Le Cap.¹¹ He congratulated himself on its profitability, achieved, he believed, against the odds, since the ship had suffered an outbreak of smallpox that had killed a hundred Africans. For him this was not a human tragedy, merely an inconvenience that had lost him a great deal of money. The voyage had been very good, he said unhesitatingly; but for ‘that unhappy level of mortality’ he had no doubt that it would have been ‘superb’. The welfare of his slaves, it is clear, did not unduly concern him.

Yet in other respects Van Hoogwerff was not a cruel man. His correspondence shows a deep concern for his family, not least for his youngest child, Betsy, who suffered from chronic ill-health and who was a constant source of family anxiety. As a caring father, it is touching to see that he even named one of his slave ships after her: La Nouvelle Betsy made several triangular trips in the years before the Revolution. He was a religious man, too, like many of the leading merchants in La Rochelle, a practising and seemingly devout Protestant who on several occasions invoked his Protestant God to ask for good health or the safe return of his cargoes.¹² Indeed, religion and the liberties of Protestants would seem to have been important to him, conscious as he was of past persecutions, and he wrote to his brothers and sister elsewhere in Europe to tell them of the rights that French Protestants had won. They had built a new church in La Rochelle, he said, they could get married by their Protestant pastors, while their infants would be baptized by the Catholic priest to ensure their legitimacy. Tellingly, his detailed and enthusiastic account of these Protestant liberties followed closely on his unemotional reference to the slave deaths on his ships.¹³ The one mattered to him; the other did not.

The expansion of the plantation economy on Saint-Domingue and the islands of the Lesser Antilles meant that there was a seemingly insatiable demand for slaves, and where French ships did not supply them, others would step in to satisfy that demand. The rewards for transporting several hundred Africans from Senegambia to the Caribbean were always tempting, even for the most scrupulous. And with the government actively rewarding those who fitted out their vessels for slaving voyages, the risks they incurred could seem more acceptable, too. For risks there undoubtedly were, that ran far beyond the dangers that derived from war and enemy privateering, dangers which were shared by all merchant shipping on the Atlantic. Slave voyages were particularly long and hazardous. Crews were afflicted by fevers and a range of deadly tropical diseases between the coast of Africa and the Caribbean. In Africa itself, ships’ captains had to negotiate with duplicitous merchants and local princes, ready to cheat and defraud them, and face the possibility of long months spent in protracted negotiations, of ships becalmed in African waters, of sick and rebellious slaves, of crewmen mutinying against the conditions on board or absconding at the first opportunity to sell their services to a rival. There was nothing certain, nothing guaranteed about the returns they would make. But the opportunity to fill their holds with able-bodied Africans seemed to many an easy solution to the problem of finding an outbound cargo, and if they were lucky, there were huge profits to be made. Jean Meyer has pointed to some of the best returns from Nantes slave voyages in the years immediately before the Revolution; in 1785 one ship returned a 100 per cent profit, another in 1784 chalked up 110 per cent, a third, in 1789, an eye-watering 120 per cent. A storm-free crossing, a cargo free of disease, a rapid turn-around on Gorée island, and success would follow. This was the prospect that enticed so many to set sail westwards.¹⁴

It is clear from these statistics that high profits could be, and sometimes were, made from a single slaving voyage. But the conditions had to be right and the firm’s luck had to hold if such margins were to be achieved, and most historians are agreed that returns of 100 per cent were wholly exceptional. Hugh Thomas illustrates this by citing what he terms an ‘ideal voyage, the voyage of which merchants dreamed’. In 1783, the Nantes firm of Giraud and Raimbaud sent a 150-ton slaver, La Jeune Aimée, on a voyage to Angola and from there to Saint-Domingue. They had bought the vessel for the voyage at a cost of 6,000 livres, and when account is taken of other expenses—the crew, cargo, and food and drink for the voyage, presents for the slave-traders, and the equipment needed to sail across the Atlantic—the costs incurred before they had even crossed the harbour bar were already high. When the sum paid for the cargo of 264 slaves is added, they had spent around 156,000 livres before they turned west towards the Americas. All this required capital and credit before a single livre had been earned or any business had been concluded. On this particular voyage, the investors got their reward. When the slaves, along with some other cargo stacked in the hold, were sold in Le Cap, they raised more than 366,000 livres—a profit of some 135 per cent on outgoings.¹⁵ But there was nothing typical about the voyage. The ship reached the Americas in an unusually fast time. It did not encounter storms or hurricanes to hamper its progress. It was not delayed off the African coast by prolonged negotiations with African merchants. The slaves arrived in good condition instead of being decimated by fevers. And the prices they fetched at auction in the Caribbean were unusually high. All the conditions were in place to earn record returns.

But equally, things could go disastrously wrong, as the experience of another Nantes slaving firm shows. The family firm of Orry de la Roche had been successful merchants in the port; and they had engaged in a succession of unspectacular voyages, resulting in small to middle-sized commercial operations, in the period immediately before the War of American Independence. However, their business suddenly faced a series of overlapping problems. Orry’s family finances suffered a blow in 1776 when his ship, the Télémaque, was wrecked at sea, just at the moment when war in the Atlantic made it impossible for him to recoup his losses by sending out other vessels. He found himself forced to abandon his major activity, fitting out ships for the islands, in favour of domestic trade, and his profits suffered a disastrous collapse; indeed, in 1783 he had to pull out of the colonial market entirely. Five years later, the firm had no choice but to declare bankruptcy, and although Orry did resume some business dealings after 1788, the years of prosperity were behind him. He was a victim of the vicissitudes of the slave trade and of its capital demands on the merchant community, and, like many others, he lacked the robust financial base necessary to sustain his company through periods of dearth and misfortune.¹⁶

Owning and fitting out slave ships incurred heavy costs which not all were able to sustain. Engaging in the slave trade was impossible without considerable capital outlay before the ship even sailed, and this necessitated an easy access to credit which the slave ports could not command. The Paris banking system was not as developed as its counterpart in London, and local banks were in decline across the eighteenth century, making it difficult to obtain any privileged terms of credit. Indeed, Paris banks were only too well aware of the risks posed by the slave trade, and interest rates tended to reflect this: in 1786, for instance, one Nantes merchant house, the Chaurands, had to pay a rate of 10 per cent—double the current market rate—in order to unlock the funds they needed to finance their trade.¹⁷ But the part played by Paris finance houses was modest, in contrast to the role of City banks in the affairs of Bristol or Liverpool. In eighteenth-century France, banks routinely lent only a proportion of the merchant’s costs, often no more than 20 per cent of what was required, forcing him to look to different sources of finance, in his home port or through investments in the plantations, if his venture was to succeed. The decision to lend owed much to personal confidence—of the kind that could only be established through family links, through a presence on the Chamber of commerce, or through freemasonry—and it varied according to the prominence of the merchant and his commercial record in past voyages. Credit, in other words, was as much about confidence in the person raising the loan, his standing and reputation, as it was about monetary calculation, a judgement that could be applied equally to modern capitalism in general.¹⁸ Marriages between merchant families were common, and were a source of credit as well as of wealth. When Honoré Chaurand married the daughter of a leading Nantes trader, Marie Portier de Lantimo, for instance, he gained more than her hand in marriage. He was integrated into the inner circle of Nantes merchants, as a result of which he started taking shares in vessels outfitted by other Nantes commercial houses before going on to outfit vessels in his own name.¹⁹ Marriage was an important commercial investment, too, though its value might not extend into wartime. Indeed, when war was declared or there was a grave threat to the safety of commercial shipping—as happened in 1792—and banks refused to lend at all, the result was the almost total cessation of slaving in any form.²⁰

A successful slave voyage required more than credit. It required sturdy ships, capable of resisting the Atlantic swell and large enough to transport hundreds of captives in their holds. It demanded a high level of seamanship in treacherous waters, a skilled captain, and a degree of good fortune, if the voyage were to succeed. The choice of captain was especially critical given the range of responsibilities that fell on his shoulders. He had to take all the key decisions that affected the management of the ship, from loading and distributing its cargo to its preparation for sea; he had charge of the cargo while at sea and was responsible for the sale of the goods on board and the purchase of slaves during trading in Africa. In short, quite apart from his navigational skills, a good captain had to have commercial expertise, accounting skills, and an ability to impose rigorous discipline and manage a crew that could be insubordinate and close to mutiny over a lengthy and often difficult voyage. For this reason, the choice of crewmen for the voyage was often left to his sole discretion.²¹

An experienced captain with knowledge of Atlantic currents and trading conditions was much prized. Experience did not necessarily translate into age, however. The Atlantic was a young man’s world, and captains were often quite young, with an average age in the years 1763–78 of thirty-seven in Bordeaux and just thirty-two in Nantes. Many made only one slaving voyage, for to survive, a captain needed to be physically strong and enjoy good health—and a little luck as well. Death rates among captains were high, from fevers and tropical diseases or as a result of shipwrecks or slave insurrections on board. Christophe Grovellet calculates that during these years, whereas Le Havre lost only four captains from its slaving fleet (or 5.3 per cent of the total), Bordeaux lost six (9 per cent), Saint-Malo six (12.8 per cent), La Rochelle eight (at 16.7 per cent, the highest losses proportionally), and Nantes twenty-one (or 9.8 per cent of a much larger total).²² But for those who did return, the slave trade could bring unimagined riches and, with it, social esteem.

Slave ships demanded larger numbers of crewmen than other merchant vessels, and they remained at sea for much longer, incurring high seas and gale-force winds as well as the extreme heat of equatorial Africa. And as the century progressed, the leading slaving ports all required ever greater numbers of seamen. Nantes, for instance, was calling on the services of up to 5,500 men to crew its ships in the years up to the Revolution, many of them for slave voyages. Where, we may ask, were such unprecedented numbers of sailors to be found, men with the experience and the physical strength to handle a slave ship where nautical skills had to be matched by a capacity to contain possible rebellions on board? The circumstances of each port differed considerably. Nantes, with its long tradition of seafaring, provided a high percentage of the men needed to crew its ships, as many as 40 per cent of all those who signed on for slaving voyages; of the rest, a substantial number came from the smaller ports of the Loire estuary and from coastal villages in Brittany.²³ By way of contrast, the parishes of Le Havre closest to the port provided surprisingly few recruits in the second half of the century, with the consequence that slaving captains had to look further afield for crews—initially to Saint-Malo, then to other ports in Normandy, especially Honfleur and Rouen.²⁴ In Bordeaux, the recruitment pattern was different again, reflecting the city’s wide catchment area across the west and south-west of France. From a sample of slaving vessels sailing for the Caribbean in 1774, Éric Saunier concludes that the crews came principally from three regions: Guyenne to the south of the city, the Saintonge to the north, and, through Bordeaux’s strong trading connections with the region, Brittany. Bretons would seem to have manned slave ships from across the Atlantic littoral and beyond. Indeed, what is most striking is how few of those who manned Bordeaux’s slave expeditions came from the city itself. ²⁵ Unlike Nantes, Bordeaux had a diversified economy with the consequence that its sons did not need to go to sea.

Such was the lure of profit that many merchants were undeterred by the dangers and hardships involved. Those who engaged in the slave trade were well aware that their enterprise was of value to the nation, and they sought out the prerogatives and commercial privileges which they saw as their due. In particular, they valued the laws that gave them privileged access to colonial markets. In 1766, in response to a ministerial query about what would help to restore the slave trade at a moment when its future seemed threatened, the Nantes merchants insisted that their exclusive right to trade in slaves be maintained ‘by an express and irrevocable law’ and that foreign vessels be excluded from taking slaves into French colonies. They also wanted unlimited rights to re-export colonial goods free of all tariffs and demanded to be exempted of taxes and duties on all materials used to build, fit out and stock vessels leaving the city to engage in the slave trade. For them, there was nothing discreditable about their form of commerce, and they were adamant that the risks they took should be recognized and their work generously remunerated.²⁶ Repeatedly, in petitions and correspondence, merchants talked of their exposure to financial loss and the unpredictability of the slave trade as a source of profit.

There were certainly high stakes to play for, and the fact that different voyages reported contrasting fortunes might seem to favour the view that fitting out a ship for la traite represented something of a gamble. If occasional slaving voyages, like the ones cited above, resulted in a profit of 100 per cent or more, others ended in disaster or brought minimal returns on the capital invested.²⁷ Moreover, there were years when merchants gave up slaving entirely because it had become too risky or because other forms of commerce brought a quicker return.

Few merchant houses kept commercial records detailed enough to allow for any consistent comparison, but the most important one to do so, Chaurand frères in Nantes, reflects the unpredictability of the slave trade, even in years when it was not threatened by war at sea or by a blockade of the French coast. Slave ships had to be smaller and more manoeuvrable than other Atlantic cargo vessels if they were to transport their cargo of Africans to the Americas without heavy loss of life and to escape the attentions of pirates and corsairs.²⁸ It followed that few merchants risked sending vessels to the Bight of Africa during periods of war, even at times when ships were still trading with the islands en droiture. In practice, slave voyages were limited to peacetime only, with the consequence that, as soon as a war ended—as was the case with the American War in 1783—there was an explosion of activity in Nantes and the other slaving ports, as merchants jostled to get their vessels to sea early while high demand ensured a good return. They knew that the favourable trading conditions would not last, and that the price of slaves in the Antilles would soon fall. It was imperative that they recruit crews, fit out their ships, and purchase goods for the outward voyage as expeditiously as possible.

Robert Stein has examined the profitability of twenty-one slave ships fitted out by the Chaurands between 1783 and 1792, which together accounted for twenty-six expeditions to Africa and the islands, or about 7 per cent of all slaving expeditions in these years. Their very mixed results show that profits were far from being guaranteed, with only ten of the ships registering a clear profit—six of them of 20 per cent or more—across the period. On the other hand, six of the ships studied suffered substantial losses in these years, while one just about broke even. Four others, still trading when payments from Saint-Domingue planters ceased in 1792, saw their profit undermined by the outbreak of war and by insurrection on the island. In other words, though there were substantial profits to be made, they could not be taken for granted. Those who engaged in the slave trade understood that they were gambling, and that, even if the odds seemed stacked in their favour, they had to insure against possible disaster. Slaving was not a panacea for commercial uncertainty.²⁹ It called for higher investment and initial expenditure, and therefore greater exposure to loss if a ship were wrecked or captured. If they were to succeed in the slave trade, merchants had to have sufficient assets to be able to sustain such losses, and many failed.

Fitting out a slave ship required a higher level of investment than did direct voyages to the Americas, and, since the bulk of the trade fell to independent merchants after the demise of company trading in mid-century, that generally involved seeking out loans and raising new capital. This would cause difficulties for smaller merchant houses, which often enjoyed less credit with the banks and had less chance to spread risk across a number of voyages. The exact cost of a slaving expedition depended, of course, on the size of the ship and the value of the cargo; but as a general rule, it seems that merchants spent two to three times as much in preparing and fitting out a négrier as they did for a direct expedition to the Caribbean. Merchants found the capital they needed in a number of ways. The most traditional, and the cheapest, way would be to raise it privately, from family members or other traders who were prepared to buy a part-share in the voyage. Merchants would help one another out in this way, spreading their exposure over a number of different ships and slaving trips. But the ambitions of Nantes and Bordeaux merchants could not always be met in this way, and they increasingly had to seek loans from beyond their own port or their friends on the Chamber of commerce. The slave trade found its capital in a variety of ways, from regional, national, and international investors.³⁰ In Bordeaux, sources of finance varied greatly and evolved in the course of the century, as family networks in other ports and in the Caribbean allowed for the more efficient financing of expeditions. A network of brothers, cousins, and sons would take a share in fitting out the slave ships. Though based in France, they often owned sugar plantations in the islands which would be supplied by the ships on their outward journey and whose production would then provide cargo for the return; they would also help finance the voyage by business dealings with other colonists.³¹ Religious communities also provided welcome sources of finance for colonial trade, with Protestant and Jewish merchants able to look to their co-religionists—both in France and across Europe—for sources of credit. Protestant merchants benefited, for instance, from investment from Holland and Switzerland. The firm of Jean-Jacques Bethmann had associates in Geneva, and Baux, Balguerie in Geneva and Mulhouse, providing useful sources of additional capital for their slaving adventures.³²

For some the problem was not just the lack of capital for investment, but a lack of currency with which to make purchases, as the Atlantic economy expanded exponentially in these years. This was especially true of Marseille, which not only faced the challenge of a rapid explosion of colonial traffic but also maintained its traditional Mediterranean trade with the Barbary Coast and the Levant. Here merchants faced a different kind of problem. In the Levant in particular, they were forced to buy with cash while they were obliged to sell on credit, which created serious cash-flow problems. The merchant community found itself increasingly starved of foreign currency at a time when it was having difficulty meeting the needs of its growing domestic market in French currency, which the small mint in Aix was unable to satisfy. As a consequence, merchants turned to another form of commerce, importing piastres from Spain and the Americas and establishing Marseille as a major entrepôt for currency, which it would export onwards to the cities of Central and Eastern Europe, to Milan, Vienna, and the Levant. This trade contributed to Marseille’s commercial prosperity in the last years of the Ancien Régime and helped it to maintain its economic dominance in the region. Between 1785 and 1790, for one company, Roux, the trade in currency was worth as much as 28 million livres.³³

Fitting-out costs varied hugely from voyage to voyage and from ship to ship; indeed, the ultimate success of the voyage would depend greatly on the skills and perceptions of the outfitter. Of the twenty-six ships sent by the Chaurands after 1783, for instance, the costs varied between 180,000 and 460,000 livres, costs which had to be recovered before any profit was made on the voyage.³⁴ These often began with the purchase of a suitable ship and the charges incurred in converting it for use as a slave ship. For the ship’s owners would seldom engage exclusively in slaving; commercial shipping had to be flexible, and even on a slave voyage the ship had to serve very different purposes in the various stages of its journey: from the French port to West Africa with objects to trade, across the Atlantic on the Middle Passage with a cargo of slaves, and then the return to France when its hold would be stuffed with goods for the European market. Often the ship was bought for a single voyage and sold on after its return. The ship Le Joujou, for instance, left Bordeaux in September 1788 for Angola, before continuing to Saint-Domingue and returning to Bordeaux. It had been bought from a local shipbuilder for 12,000 livres, a sum that included the provision of an iron boiler—the ubiquitous chaudière à nègres—used to heat the slaves’ rations on board.³⁵ Preparing the vessel for an ocean-going voyage and providing the wooden planks needed to convert the hold to receive its cargo of slaves was another major capital expense, one that involved more than 500 working days for carpenters and other tradesmen. The cost of the conversion came to nearly 4,300 livres. Then there were the bills for ironworkers, sail makers, rope makers, stevedores, and all the other workmen whose expertise was needed to make the ship seaworthy and to prepare it for the slave trade. The crew had to be recruited and paid three months in advance of the ship’s departure. Surgical equipment had to be bought to prepare for medical emergencies on board. There were also the costs of pilots’ fees before the ship could nose its way down the Garonne. None of this came cheap. A basic insurance policy was bought for 2,217 livres, making the total cost of fitting out and preparing the voyage in excess of 50,000 livres.³⁶

Then there was the cargo, the first of the cargoes that would reflect the different stages of the life of the ship as it ploughed onwards on its slaving voyage. When it left Nantes or Bordeaux, the ship would be loaded with goods for the African market, to be traded when the ship arrived off Gorée, Ouidah, or the Angolan coast, as well as with the essentials for the Atlantic crossing, including considerable supplies of food and drink for the officers, crew and, of course, the slaves they would take on board when they reached Africa. For the Frenchmen on board—especially for the officers’ table—this involved a considerable variety of victuals: there are receipts for salt beef, dried cod, ham, flour, sugar, butter, cheese, oil, some vegetables, and spices.³⁷ Officers and crew members crew also drank copiously during the voyage: all slave ships were stocked with red and white wines, brandy and spirits, as well as some beer. The Joujou, for instance, was laden with alcohol to the value of more than 3,200 livres when it sailed out of port.³⁸ For the slaves, the ship carried ample supplies of beans and rice, a diet that did little to protect them against scurvy and the other forms of onboard sickness that blighted many slave voyages. These goods were purchased in port, before the ship sailed and, in the case of Nantes, acquired from across a hinterland that stretched from Brittany to the Pays de Loire, where towns like Tours and Cholet were notable beneficiaries of the trade with West Africa.³⁹

When they left the French coast, slave ships carried cargoes for several different markets and destinations. In Africa they would sell guns, ammunition and textiles of various kinds; in Saint-Domingue the market was for flour, fine wines, and industrial products from France and Europe. They also took care to carry the sorts of goods that African kings and princes would accept as presents, an essential part of the ceremonial surrounding trade in Africa. And they could not leave port without taking on board the equipment they might need to defend the ship from attack and to carry out emergency repairs in the event of a storm. So ships’ logs reveal a host of equipment which all ships’ captains deemed essential. They included a range of spare parts for the ship: sails, ropes, anchors, nails, replacement masts, candles, and firewood. They also carried a range of weaponry to use in the event of an attack or at the first sign of rebellion from the slaves in the hold: there were cannon and firearms, gunpowder and bullets.⁴⁰ There were always rich supplies of firearms on slave ships, to be used as presents for African traders, as merchandise to sell to planters and privateers in the Caribbean, or as means of self-defence against raiders, pirates, and mutinies by the slaves in the hold.

The captain had to decide where along the African coast to drop anchor, and, by the same token, how best to trade. His company might have long-established connections with African merchants, or seek the patronage of a local king or prince: hence the need to plan the journey, its trade and its gifts, with such care. But he might also adjust to the current trading conditions he found when he reached Angola or the Bight of Benin: the presence of other ships, of rival vessels from other ports and other countries, could cause costly delays, force up prices or threaten supply, while there were various prejudices about the health, physical strength, and moral character of the slaves that issued from the various African nations. Some were singled out as being prone to fever and disease, given to psychological ailments, or feared for their explosive and insurrectionary character. A prospectus from the 1760s raising capital for three voyages out of Le Havre and Honfleur shows the care that went into planning the ships’ arrival off the African coast. It was proposed to trade to the north of the Gold Coast, between six and ten degrees latitude north, though few French ships had previously gone there. Yet that part of the coast, it was maintained, could have decided advantages for the French: the climate was less oppressive and the voyage less laborious; certain colonial goods were easier to trade; and it was possible to find supplies of food for the slaves which were both cheap and of good quality, food that was familiar to them and would not cause the stomach disorders that so often occurred in Angola and other parts of Africa. The financier who had launched the operation held out the prospect of a profit of more than 318,000 livres.⁴¹

Few would deny that the slave trade was a tough, highly competitive business that allowed for few concessions to moral scruples or human frailties. The traders’ aim was to complete the voyage as quickly and efficiently as possible, avoiding profitless months spent at anchor off the African coast, conducting business with their African suppliers as swiftly as possible before setting sail with their human cargo across the Atlantic. Trade was usually conducted at one of the main comptoirs established along the West African coast, Ouidah, in the early part of the century, and later at Porto Novo or Badagry.⁴² Those sold into captivity had often been taken prisoner in the many wars that scarred the history of West Africa in these years, in many cases with the express aim of selling them for profit. Of slaves transported to Saint-Domingue on French vessels, the majority came from two regions: from West Central Africa, the largest single source, and from the Bight of Benin, where many were Yoruba, victims of wars between Oyo Yoruba and the king of Dahomey, who would leave a strong cultural and religious legacy in Haiti.⁴³ Accessing these comptoirs was not easy, however, as it required considerable navigational skills and a certain measure of good fortune. There were few natural harbours, while the sea along the entire coast of the Bight of Biafra enjoyed a fearsome reputation. The presence of a sandbar and heavy surf posed a danger to ships approaching the coast, and strong easterly currents presented an added peril. Traders and missionaries repeatedly commented on the frequent delays that were caused by storms and adverse currents in West African waters, where ships had to anchor off the coast and their crews use canoes to reach the shore to trade. Yet the currents and sandbanks were critical to the growth of the slave trade, since they created a navigable lagoon system linked to rivers that ran far into the interior. Many of those who were sold into slavery had been transported to the coast along these river networks.⁴⁴

The trade with Europeans involved complex rituals of exchange, and, like their British and Spanish competitors, French slave ships came well-equipped, loaded with the brightly coloured textiles, rolls of cloth, handkerchiefs, hats, guns, powder, iron bars, and alcohol that were the usual staples of trade, the goods favoured by African kings, princes, and slave masters.⁴⁵ But it was not all about trade. There were also ceremonials to be gone through and presents to be offered before exchanges could begin. The journal of one French slave ship, the Guerrier, which sailed out of Nantes in 1790 for West Africa, is especially instructive in this regard. It gives an account of a voyage to the Guinea coast, and describes the approach that was adopted by the captain as he arrived off Bany, anchoring offshore and—if, as with the Guerrier, he had a small ship—going immediately to meet the king, who was the principal supplier of slaves to visiting vessels. The ceremony, it was understood, started with present-giving; nothing would be achieved until he had opened the presents for the King’s wives—‘a good side of salted beef, around twenty pounds of biscuit, and an agreed amount of brandy’. Then the captain would press for the trading session to begin, as nothing could be purchased until the King solemnly performed the opening ceremony. But more was to follow. When the King came on board with his counsellors and his retinue, salt beef and biscuit should be prepared; ‘only the king and the principal princes are admitted to the banqueting table; the others should eat on the bridge’, where, the captain added, ‘due care should be taken to supervise them as they like to steal’. In the evening it was the captain’s turn to go ashore to visit the King and his court. Once more there was a ritual to be followed before any bargain could be struck. The captain must begin by asking about the captives whom they had acquired that day, and then offer presents. ‘The value of the presents offered to each courtier should reflect the number of captives whom, we believed, they were capable of delivering.’⁴⁶

Only then could they get down to business. The journal went on to enumerate the trading that was concluded, day by day, over the next six weeks—two slaves purchased here, three there—with a detailed listing of the articles that were traded in return and of the further presents that were needed to facilitate each deal. These mostly seem to have been for the King, but it is clear that there were other palms that needed to be greased, too: those of African merchants, slave-traders, princes, and courtiers, all those who could facilitate the transaction. When the ship’s holds were filled and trading was completed, the captain knew that there were other formalities still to complete which no slaving captain could overlook. Presents had to be distributed once again if the ship were to hope for a friendly welcome in future. The King had to be given what the captain calls ‘his customary presents when trading closes’, which he then lists: they include a cannon, caps and hats for the men who row his barge, and normally a stock of guns (though on this occasion he had run out of guns and so substituted other goods as his present). Presents had also to be given to the men who had worked on his ship during its weeks at anchor, and—on this voyage—to the captain of a Liverpool slave ship who had come to his aid by lending him some crew members in an emergency. West Africa, and with it the slave trade, was fuelled by a gift culture which a slave captain would ignore at his peril. When trading was finished, he noted that his supplies were exhausted: the goods that remained were valued at no more than 188 livres, along with a barrel and a half of brandy worth a further seventy-five livres.⁴⁷

Once the slaves had been loaded on board, the most dangerous section of the triangular voyage began, the notorious ‘Middle Passage’ between the African coast and the Americas, generally, in the case of French vessels, to Guadeloupe, Martinique or the ports of Le Cap and Port-au-Prince in Saint-Domingue. The hell that was the hold of a slave ship has been described in graphic terms, and the fetid air and squalid conditions below deck blamed for the spread of scurvy, fevers, typhoid, diarrhoea, vomiting, and the myriad illnesses that caused so much death and suffering during the crossing.⁴⁸ The slave ship was essentially a cargo vessel, its hold crudely adapted for its human cargo by the insertion of a second deck some three or four feet beneath the bridge on which children and those of small stature could be stacked with a bare minimum of air to breathe. Even the main section, where the fully grown adults lay, was only four or five feet high, so that they could sit up only with difficulty. It was in these confined spaces that several hundred slaves would be chained together in twos, often completely naked, so as to reduce their mobility. To avoid such physical and psychological damage as would lead to their loss or reduce their value at auction, it was imperative to provide fresh air and exercise. On the majority of slave ships, the captives were unshackled and taken on deck for exercise between their two daily meals, between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. Men and women remained strictly segregated, and while they were on deck they would be closely supervised by the crew, who were often armed to avert any sign of mutiny or rebellion. For, however putrid the air the slaves breathed, the captain’s aim was to get as many as possible of them to America unharmed. The slaves were regularly washed in sea water, their mouths cleaned, their hair and nails cut—all in a bid to ensure that what was for the ship’s owner a valuable cargo was not lost or damaged during the crossing.⁴⁹ A captain who lost a substantial part of his cargo would be held accountable by the armateur back in France; and in the most extreme cases, where slaves had been beaten to death or thrown overboard to the mercy of the sharks, he might find himself answerable to the admiralty and French justice.

Sometimes there was little the crew could do to preserve the lives of slaves who were determined to escape the misery of life on board or the prospect of the plantations that lay ahead. Self-harm and self-mutilation were regular occurrences on board; there were also numerous reports of suicides, both attempted and successful, when an opportunity presented itself. Indeed, in his Dictionnaire universel de commerce of 1743, Jacques Savary listed the principal methods of suicide employed by slaves during their shipment to the Americas. All involved violence, though of very different kinds: going on hunger strike, deliberately choking by swallowing their tongue, smashing their skull against the side of the ship, and—undoubtedly the most common method—jumping overboard into the sea. Especially when this occurred in mid-Atlantic, it cannot be seen as an easy option, and few, of course, survived. The witnesses called by the Admiralty of Nantes in one such case in 1740 admitted to being shocked by what they had seen. Two slaves who had thrown themselves into the sea together were seen by the rest of the crew as they battled with sharks in the water. ‘Straight away, part of our crew jumped into the ship’s boat to try to save them, others threw planks and ropes from the ship’s deck, but it was all in vain, and they were devoured by the fish before our very eyes.’⁵⁰

Violence was endemic on board all ships in the eighteenth century, and seamen expected to be treated brutally at times: it was part of the culture of maritime communities that a captain could order physical punishments to impose discipline on board, indeed that it was necessary for the safety of the ship that he should do so. But violence was probably at its most unforgiving on slave ships because they were at sea for such long periods with so many human beings packed into a small space—violence towards the slaves, of course, which was unremitting, but also violence towards crewmen, whether in the form of floggings carried out on board ship or of the many fights recorded between crew members themselves. Many of the men were drained of strength by the hot climate and the tropical maladies to which they were subject, but they often received scant sympathy from the officers, who were wont to mistake lethargy for idleness and malingering, and punish them accordingly. There was nothing exceptional about violence and ill-treatment of this kind; rather it was a daily event to which the young and sickly were especially exposed, as they were punched or flogged by sadistic officers for the slightest misdemeanour. In the view of Alain Cabantous, beatings of this kind could almost be classed as an initiation rite for the young crewman.⁵¹ But it helped to turn many slave voyages into a living hell, for the crew as much as for the slaves. And since they, unlike their cargo, had no market value, there is little doubt that, as a ship struggled to reach its destination in Saint-Domingue, their welfare was given the lowest priority. The voyage of the Nantes slaver La Georgette in 1788 may be an extreme case, but it is a salutary one which goes far to explain the frequent instances of mutiny on slave vessels. Of the thirty-five crewmen who had been taken on board in Nantes, only nineteen survived to reach Saint-Domingue the following year. And their Calvary did not end there. They were in such poor physical condition that all but four of them had to be taken immediately to hospital for treatment.⁵²

What the ships’ owners feared most was a slave rebellion on board, which could lead to the seizure of the ship or the death of crew members. Although the incidence of rebellion fell in the course of the century, the danger of a slave revolt remained sufficiently great that it alarmed both captain and crew. Indeed, Serge Daget estimated that, of the 3,134 slaving voyages undertaken by French ships, 138 (or 4.4 per cent) incurred a slave rebellion in some form, and though that number had declined to around 2 per cent by 1790, that still constituted a tangible threat.⁵³ Of course, these statistics can only be read as crude averages. Vessels sailing out of Nantes recorded significantly higher figures across the century, with seventy-four revolts on its 1,424 slaving expeditions, or a rate of 5.1 per cent. Just why Nantes, the principal slaving port, should have fared so much worse than the other ports is not clear, though Philippe Haudrère has suggested that it may be down to the avarice of those captains who sought to increase profits by piling their slaves more tightly into smaller spaces, making for conditions on board that were even more penal and finally became intolerable.⁵⁴ While this may explain some of the rebellions, especially those that took place in mid-ocean, it does not explain them all. The rebellions mostly took place off the coast of Africa before the crossing had even begun. Slaves broke loose to throw themselves into the sea, to run back on to African soil, to escape a fate of which they were already conscious and which they feared more than death itself. Figures suggest that as many as 75 per cent of rebellions took place while the ship was still in African waters, compared to 24 per cent at sea, and a paltry 1 per cent once it had reached the Caribbean.⁵⁵ If they were acts born of desperation and despair, they were also political acts by Africans unwilling to accept that they would be separated forever from their people and their continent. Those who did go, and who completed their journey to the New World, did not forget Africa; they took their memories and their culture with them, and these would do much to determine their attitudes to the French, to their work on the plantations, and to slavery itself.

¹ David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, in Eltis and Richardson (eds), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 26–7.

² Silvia Marzagalli, ‘The French Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 250.

³ Robert Stein, ‘The profitability of the Nantes slave trade, 1783–1792’, Journal of Economic History, 35 (1975), 780.

⁴ Edouard Delobette, ‘La traite négrière dans la croissance atlantique havraise du 18e siècle’, in Éric Saunier (ed.), ‘Villes portuaires du commerce triangulaire à l’abolition de l’esclavage’, Cahiers de l’histoire des mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions en Normandie, 1 (2008), 55.

⁵ Jean Mettas, Répertoire des expéditions négrières françaises au 18^e siècle (2 vols, Paris: Société française d’histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1978–84).

⁶ Gilbert Buti, ‘Commerce honteux pour négociants vertueux à Marseille au 18^e siècle?’, in Saunier (ed.), ‘Villes portuaires du commerce triangulaire à l’abolition de l’esclavage’, 209.

⁷ Brice Martinetti, ‘Les résistances du négoce rochelais à la première abolition de l’esclavage: les apports des correspondances’, Revue du Philanthrope, 4 (2013), 155.

⁸ Bertrand Guillot de Suduiraut, Une fortune de haute mer: François Bonnaffé, un armateur bordelais au 18^e siècle (Bordeaux: Confluences, 1999), 72.

⁹ Jean Mondot (ed.), L’esclavage et la traite sous le regard des Lumières (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2004); Jean Mondot and Catherine Larrère (eds), Lumières et commerce: l’exemple bordelais (Berne: Peter Lang, 2000).

¹⁰ Hervé Chabannes, ‘Entre prise de parole et occultation: les intellectuels havrais, la traite des Noirs et l’esclavage’, Revue du Philanthrope, 4 (2013), 146.

¹¹ Vanessa Martin, Pierre-Jean Van Hoogwerff: chronique d’une ascension sociale à La Rochelle, 1729–1813 (Paris: Association pour le développement de l’histoire économique, 2002), passim.

¹² Brice Martinetti, Les négociants de La Rochelle au 18^e siècle, 167.

¹³ AD Charente-Maritime, 4J 2848, ‘Lettres particulières de Pierre-Jean Van Hoogwerff, négociant à La Rochelle, 1784–1805’, letter sent to his sister in Edinburgh, 22 April 1789.

¹⁴ Jean Meyer, L’armement nantais, 394–411; Stein, ‘Profitability’, 782.

¹⁵ Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2015), 442.

¹⁶ Hervé Landais, ‘Une famille de négociants armateurs dans la seconde moitié du 18e siècle : les Orry de la Roche’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 1992), 42.

¹⁷ Stein, The French Slave Trade, 116.

¹⁸ Antoine Lilti, ‘Le pouvoir du crédit au 18e siècle, histoire intellectuelle et sciences sociales’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 70, 4 (2015), 958.

¹⁹ Albane Forestier, ‘A “considerable credit” in the late eighteenth-century French West Indian Trade: the Chaurands of Nantes’, French History, 25 (2011), 52.

²⁰ Edouard Delobette, ‘Mercure et Sosie’, Revue du Philanthrope, 6 (2015), 54, 56–64.

²¹ Christophe Grosvallet, ‘Les capitaines négriers bordelais entre 1763 et 1778’, Institut aquitain d’études sociales, bulletin, 76 (2001), 66–9.

²² Ibid., 56–7.

²³ Murielle Bouyer, ‘Les bassins de main d’œuvre des équipages négriers nantais au 18^e siècle’, Revue du Philanthrope, 6 (2015), 149–54.

²⁴ Éric Saunier and Florian Caillot, ‘Le recrutement des équipages de navires de traite havrais au 18e siècle’, Revue du Philanthrope, 6 (2015), 171–2.

²⁵ Éric Saugéra, Bordeaux, port négrier, 18^e–19^e siècles. Chronologie, économie, idéologie (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 221; Bouyer, ‘Les bassins de main d’œuvre des équipages négriers nantais’, 149n.

²⁶ Gaston-Martin, L’ère des négriers, 1714–1774 (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 418–19.

²⁷ Jean Meyer, ‘Le commerce négrier nantais, 1774–92’, in Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 15 (1960), 121.

²⁸ James Walvin, A Short History of Slavery (London: Penguin, 2007), 70.

²⁹ Stein, ‘The profitability of the Nantes slave trade’, 784.

³⁰ François Renault and Serge Daget, Les traites négrières en Afrique (Paris: Karthala, 1985), 86.

³¹ Butel, Les négociants bordelais, 194–5.

³² Herbert Lüthy, La banque protestante en France (2 vols, Paris: SEVPEN, 1959–61), vol. 2, 666n.

³³ Ferréol Rébuffet and Marcel Courdurié, Marseille et le négoce monétaire international, 1785–90 (Marseille: Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Marseille, 1966), 166; see also Charles Carrière and Michel Goury, Georges Roux de Corse: L’étrange destin d’un armateur marseillais, 1703–1792 (Marseille: Éditions Jeanne Lafitte, 1990).

³⁴ Stein, ‘The profitability of the Nantes slave trade’, 785–8.

³⁵ For an image of the chaudière à nègres on a Nantes slave ship, see Bernard Guillet, La Marie-Séraphique, navire négrier (Nantes: Musée d’Histoire de Nantes, 2009), 97.

³⁶ AM Bordeaux, S1, Compte de l’armement du navire Le Joujou, mis en mer le 8 septembre 1788.

³⁷ Aka Kouamé, ‘Les cargaisons de traite nantaises au 18e siècle. Une contribution à l’étude de la traite négrière française’ (thèse de doctorat, Université de Nantes, 2005), 9.

³⁸ AM Bordeaux, S1, Compte de l’armement du navire Le Joujou.

³⁹ Aka Kouamé, ‘Les produits des pays traversés par la Loire dans les cargaisons négrières nantaises au 18e siècle: une approche à partir des archives des armateurs et de la chambre de commerce’, Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire, 16 (2015), 103–11.

⁴⁰ Kouame, ‘Les cargaisons de traite’, 10.

⁴¹ Hervé Chabannes, ‘Les Havrais et la traite des Noirs dans le haut de la Côte d’Or du sieur Amand Le Carpentier’, Revue du Philanthrope, 4 (2013), 172–8.

⁴² Brigitte Kowalski, ‘Acquérir les bois d’ébène : les comptoirs de traite sur la Côte d’Esclaves’, in Saunier (ed.), ‘Villes portuaires du commerce triangulaire à l’abolition de l’esclavage’, 104–9.

⁴³ Kevin Roberts, ‘The Influential Yoruba Past in Haiti’, in Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (eds), The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 177–9.

⁴⁴ Caroline Sorensen-Gilmour, ‘Slave-trading along the lagoons of south-west Nigeria: the case of Badagry’, in Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt (eds), Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra) (Stirling: Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, 1999), 84.

⁴⁵ AM Bordeaux, S1, ‘Marchandises données en traite pour six captifs’, 20 May 1791.

⁴⁶ AD Loire-Atlantique, 1J679, Journal de traite du navire ‘Le Guerrier’ de Nantes, 1790.

⁴⁷ Ibid., folio 10.

⁴⁸ Jean-Philippe Platel, ‘La santé à bord des navires négriers de Bordeaux au 18^e siècle’ (diplôme d’état de docteur en médecine, Université de Bordeaux-2, 1988), 68–81.

⁴⁹ Guy Saupin, ‘La violence sur les navires négriers dans la phase de décollage de la traite nantaise, 1697–1743’, in Mickaël Augeron and Mathias Tranchant (eds), La violence et la mer dans l’espace atlantique, 12^e–19^e siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004), 202–3.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 204.

⁵¹ Alain Cabantous, Le vergue et les fers: mutins et déserteurs dans la marine de l’Ancienne France (Paris, 1984), 68.

⁵² Vincent Bugeaud, ‘La violence sur les navires négriers: une approche à partir de l’exemple nantais au 18^e siècle’, in Éric Saunier (ed.), ‘Villes portuaires du commerce triangulaire à l’abolition de l’esclavage’, Cahiers de l’histoire et des mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions, 1 (2009), 132.

⁵³ These statistics are taken from Jean Mettas, Répertoire des expéditions négrières françaises au 18e siècle (2 vols, Paris: Société française d’histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1978, 1984).

⁵⁴ Philippe Haudrère, ‘La révolte des esclaves à bord des bâtiments négriers français au 18^e siècle: essai de mesure’, in Augeron and Tranchant (eds), La violence et la mer dans l’espace atlantique, 191–2.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 193.