Slave Trade

• Triangular Trade


  The transportation of enslaved Africans to the West Indies was part of the triangular trade. Ships travelled from Britain to West Africa, then to the West Indies and then back to Europe.
• The West Indies were discovered by Christopher Columbus on behalf of Spain in 1492. In the following three centuries, these islands in the Caribbean were fought over by different European countries, including Britain and France.
• Throughout this period, the West Indies were very important for growing and processing sugar.
• By the start of the eighteenth century, sugar had become one of the most in-demand products in Europe. People used it to sweeten a number of products such as chocolate and tea.
• Sugar cane grew very well in the islands of the West-Indies. However, extracting the sugar from the cane involved lots of people to grow, harvest and process the cane.
• Labour used for sugar production


  • Native Arawak people
  • Bond servants (European forced labourers)
  • English and Scottish convicts
  • Enslaved Africans
• The harsh working conditions meant that most labourers died within 4-7 years. There were never enough workers to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for sugar and Europeans began looking for new sources of workers.
• Soon Europeans looked to the African coast for labour. Africans were captured, transported to the West Indies and forced to work on those islands.
• The Atlantic Ocean is huge. The distance between West Africa and the West Indies is also enormous. How was it that the trade in captured people could be organised from Britain? The answer to this question lies in something called Triangular Trade.
• Triangular Trade


  The Atlantic slave trade is often called the triangular trade because there were three sides to it. When the routes taken by the ships involved in the trade were drawn onto the map they looked like the three sides of a triangle.
• Goods transported in the Triangular Trade


  • Trade goods such as cloth, metal pots and pans, and guns (Britain to Africa)
  • Enslaved Africans (Africa to West Indies)
  • Valuable goods such as sugar (West Indies to Britain)
• Although European traders did capture Africans in raids along the West coast most enslaved people were bought from Africans themselves.
• The rulers of West African tribes played a key part in the Atlantic slave trade. In West Africa there were many different tribes who were competing against one another for territory. The winning tribe would often capture the women and children of other tribes and any men whose lives were spared. They would use these prisoners as their own slaves or exchange them for valuable goods brought over from Europe.
• As the European demand for labour increased powerful tribes led kidnapping raids into the territory of rival tribes. There were also some cases where Africans were sold into slavery for debt or as punishment.
• Initially people were captured from communities along the coast of West Africa (this became known as the Slave Coast) but soon so many had been taken from these areas that it was necessary to capture slaves from further inland.
• Europeans lacked the local knowledge needed to be able to negotiate the dangers of the African interior, so they used African 'middlemen' for this task. These local traders would capture men, women and children and sell them to Europeans.
• The slave trade had a profound effect on the economy and politics of West Africa, leading, in many cases, to an increase in tension and violence between the tribes. Tribal rulers often exchanged people for guns from Britain; this increased their power against weaker tribes and allowed them to expand their territories even further.
• Two African tribes involved in the trading of Africans


  • The Ashanti
  • The Dahomey
• The Ashanti


  • One of the most feared tribes on the Gold Coast, they regularly raided other tribes to take prisoners. These prisoners would be enslaved and used to provide labour in their gold mines as well as being traded with Europeans for goods.
• The Dahomey


  • Became rich and powerful by trading exclusively in enslaved people with Europeans. They frequently organised raiding parties against weaker tribes. Trading in people bought them guns from Europe.
• Enslaved Africans were marched to the coast where they were imprisoned in large stone forts or in smaller wooden compounds.
• When the slave ships arrived from Europe they were laden with trade goods. Captains offered gifts to local African leaders and paid taxes for the right to trade. They then began the business of barter and exchange, offering a wide variety of trade goods such as textiles, firearms, alcohol, beads, manillas and cowries for the captured slaves.
• Manillas


  Used extensively as currency in West Africa from the 15th to the 20th century. During the Transatlantic slave trade manillas were a frequent medium of exchange for slaves.
• Money cowries


  Used as a form of currency and exchanged directly for slaves. Approximately 6,000 cowries would be enough to purchase one slave.
• Olaudah Equiano: 'Olaudah Equiano was a former slave. What follows below is an extract from his autobiography written in 1789. He describes his capture and transportation from his home to the west coast of Africa.'
• From the time I left my own nation I always found somebody that understood me till I came to the sea coast. The languages of different nations did not totally differ, nor were as many as those of the Europeans. They were therefore easily learnt; and while I was journeying through Africa, I acquired two or three different tongues.
• After many days travelling, during which I had often changed masters, I got into the hands of a chieftain and was sold again. I was now carried to the left of the sun's rising, through many different countries and a number of large woods until I came to a town called Tinmah, in the most beautiful country I had yet seen in Africa. Here I saw and tasted for the first time sugar-cane. Their money consisted of little white shells, the size of a fingernail. I was sold here for one hundred and seventy two of them. Thus I continued to travel, sometimes by land and sometimes by water until, six or seven months after I had been kidnapped, I arrived at the sea coast.
• Once the captured Africans arrived at the Atlantic, they were taken to one of the many slave forts that could be found along the coastline, where they would wait to be transported by ship to the Americas. These slave forts were built by powerful European nations of the period: Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, France and Britain.
• The ship's surgeon helped the captain select and agree a price for the captives. The Africans had to remove their clothes so that every part of them could be pinched, poked and examined to ensure they were healthy. Their height was measured, they were made to jump up and down, and their teeth were examined to guess their age. Africans with any sign of disease were rejected to prevent them infecting the rest of the ship. Once they had been purchased captives were often branded with their owner's mark, and some were even baptised before boarding ship.
• In 1664, Cape Coast Castle became the headquarters in Africa of the entire English involvement in the transatlantic trafficking of Africans. From here enslaved African men, women and children were sold to slave ships and carried to the where they were put to work on plantations, in mines, as soldiers or as domestic servants.
• The castle itself was like a small city. It had its own postal service, connected to other forts along the coast. Its guns protected ships from attack by Britain's enemies. There was even a garden where oranges, mangoes, cherries and bananas were grown. The fruit was made into a drink that was sold to slave-ship captains to give to the enslaved Africans and the crew during the Atlantic crossing to reduce the risk of scurvy.
• The governor's quarters were at the very top of the castle, where he was able both to look out to sea and to survey the goings-on of the whole building. These quarters were expensively furnished and included a library. The ground level was taken up with warehouses containing vast quantities of imported goods such as brandy, tobacco, muskets, knives and gunpowder. There was also a hospital, cook-house and barracks. Also on this level were the dungeons, with a single entrance. Kept in constant near-darkness, they were known as 'slave holes'. A visitor to Cape Coast Castle in 1785 described how the slaves were 'chained day and night, and driven down to the sea twice a day to be washed.
• More than 2,000 miles away were other British forts for example in Gambia and Sierra Leone. These forts were all integrated into a network of ships and shore settlements that formed the African end of the British slave trade.
• Bunce Island was the largest British slave fort on the West Coast of Africa. Founded around 1670, it exported tens of thousands of African captives to America and the West Indies until the British Parliament finally closed it down in 1808.
• Sitting at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River Bunce Island was ideally situated for the slave trade. It was in a safe location as it was completely hidden from the sea and had a good vantage point over the only way that ships could approach it, making pirate attacks and family rescue missions very difficult.
• As well as the imprisoned Africans, dozens of people also lived in the fort, including European employees of the company (many of whom were Scottish) and many Africans who were responsible for overseeing and running the trade. The governor of the fort stayed in a grand mansion on the island. On the ground floor of the slaver's mansion goods such as gold, ivory and rum were stored. These were traded in exchange for Africans.
• The conditions in the fort for the enslaved people were inhumane. Men, women and children were crowded inside the island's stone fort, shackled together, and forced into holding pens (barracoons). As a result of the suffocating and unhealthy conditions in these barracoons, many Africans died while waiting to be collected. There were also gender differences in the experiences of the enslaved, for example the women were targets for rape and physical abuse. Conditions were made worse by the long waiting period, which could vary from days to weeks to months.
• The voyage from West Africa to the West Indies became known as the Middle Passage.
• The lack of space, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced great perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for breathing, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died…
• Some wet and blowing weather having caused the port-holes to be shut, fluxes (diarrhoea) and fevers among the Negroes followed. I often went down among them, till at length their apartments became so excessively hot as to be bearable for only a very short time… The floor of their rooms was so covered in the blood and mucus which had come from them because of the flux that it was like a slaughter-house.