slave trade

slave trade. In its maritime context, the shipping of slaves by sea. Slave trading by this method was practised in the Mediterranean from the late Middle Ages, particularly by the Genoese who bought, or captured, inhabitants of the Balkans and Black Sea and shipped them to Mediterranean slave markets, though long before then the Arabs had been shipping slaves to India, and elsewhere, from East Africa. The indigenous inhabitants of the Canaries were sometimes enslaved by raiding Europeans in the 14th century, and Henry the Navigator established the first Atlantic long-distance slave trade in the mid-15th century when he traded slaves in Guinea. The Barbary pirates thrived on the slave trade. They took their victims from captured ships, or during raids on the coasts of Christian countries, and sold them in the slave markets of Tunis and Algiers, or put them to row in their galleys. Christian corsairs, mainly based on Malta, were equally keen to acquire Muslim slaves for their galleys.

In 1501 Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain gave Spanish colonists permission to import black slaves into Hispaniola from West Africa—mostly sold by the victors in local wars there —and the practice quickly spread to other parts of the Caribbean, and to Central and South America. But although they were the first to purchase slaves, and to have them transported by sea, the Spaniards did not themselves start trading slaves in West Africa until the late 1700s.

From 1520 onwards slaves were shipped regularly to the New World by several European countries, but by the 18th century the British dominated the trade. Sir John Hawkins was the first Englishman to have the dubious distinction of being involved in it and by the 1770s nearly 200 ships, with a capacity to cram aboard 45,000 slaves, were based at Bristol, London, and Liverpool. They undertook a triangular voyage. On the first leg they were loaded with goods that were exchanged for slaves along the coast of West Africa. These were loaded on board in appalling conditions and the slavers then sailed on the next leg, known as the middle passage, to North and South America and the West Indies. There, the survivors of these voyages were sold to the owners of tobacco, cotton, and sugar plantations. These goods, and rum (see grog) and logwood as well, were then loaded aboard for the final leg across the Atlantic.

It was a very lucrative business as a profit was made on each stage of the voyage, but the slaves suffered a very high mortality rate and the cruelties inflicted on them were horrendous. Crew members, who often turned to piracy when they had the chance of escaping, were equally at risk, and were described by one clergyman as being ‘a third sort of persons, to be numbered neither with the living nor the dead; their lives hanging continually in suspense before them’ ( P. Earle , Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650–1775 (1998)
, 133–4).

It has been calculated that between 1795 and 1804 about 400,000 slaves were shipped from Africa by ships operating from British ports, and the total for the 18th century may have reached 6 or 7 million. The British abolished the trade in 1807 and the USA in the following year, though of course slavery continued there until after the Civil War (1861–5). Other European countries outlawed it, too, but it remained legal in Brazil until the 1850s.

The British made slave trading a felony in 1811, but it was not at all easy to stamp out the practice. Warships of both the Royal and US navies were deployed along the African coastline to intercept those flouting the law. It has been estimated that during the first 40 years of trying to suppress the trade only about one in eight slaves were freed, and the methods used were often questioned. It was even suggested that the British Navy were causing even greater suffering, as slaves were often dumped overboard when a British warship was sighted. However, by 1850 it had been stamped out on the west coast. It continued on the east coast until Zanzibar became a British Protectorate in 1890, though the advent of steam propulsion made it progressively more difficult for the slaving dhows to evade British naval patrols. Even then, the unsavoury business of blackbirding continued in the Pacific, a practice that was not halted until the start of the 20th century. See also doghouse.