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THE ENGLISH PORTS AND THE SLAVE TRADE 449 difficulties with Spain did not greatly affect the progress of the English slave trade and hardly at all the English African holdings. As the South Sea Company had no trading places in Africa of its own it entered into a contract with the Royal African Company to supply it with the slaves it needed for importation into the Spanish colonies.1 The contract did not restore the fallen fortunes of the Company, and its position after 1713 was far from happy. The 10 per cent. duty had ended in that year, and as it was not renewed, the Company had to depend upon what profits it could make in the open market and by the Asiento. Such profits were quite insufficient for the upkeep of the forts. From this time, and possibly from 1697 onwards, the history of the Company ceased to be the history of the English slave trade, as the progressive elements in the trade were to be found in the groups of independent merchants, in the growing ports of Bristol, Liverpool, Plymouth as well as London, and in the colonies. The separate traders claimed, and were not convincingly answered by the Company, that before the 1697 Act came to an end they had beaten the Company in the trade and had secured the larger part of it themselves,2 to the advantage of the woollen manufacturers and of the West Indian planter. This open trade of the early eighteenth century, built up from a number of comparatively small groups, helped not only to develop the English ports, but also to establish English naval supremacy.

The numbers of vigorous free-traders were increasing in London, and adding considerably to the volume of ocean-going craft from that port, but progress in Bristol and Liverpool was more striking. The mutually contradictory figures with which the disputants adorned their arguments in Parliament to show the vast extent of their shipping and the numbers of negroes carried by them cannot be accepted as a trustworthy guide to the progress they had made, but historians of both Bristol and Liverpool maintain that on this trade the fortunes of those ports were built in the eighteenth century. Bristol prospered so well in the slave trade that in 1713 her mayor declared it to be the "great support of our people", and Liverpool made such successful use of the open trade that it was said to have become by the second half of the eighteenth century "the principal slaving port not only in England, but in Europe". In this connection it may be noted that in 1772, Lord Mansfield, in his famous judgment on the case of the slave Somersett, pronounced that slavery was "so odious that nothing could be suffered to support it but positive law". Somersett thereby became a free man, and slavery was henceforward illegal on the soil of England.

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1 Correspondence of the Royal African Company with the South Sea Company 1713-5 (P.R.O. T. 70/38).

2 An account of the number of Negroes delivered in the islands of Barbadoes, Jamaica and Antego (Brit. Mus. 8223, e. 4).

• Muir, Ramsay, A History of Liverpool, p. 192.

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3 Hunt, W., Bristol, p. 214.

5 See Howell, T., State Trials, xx, 82. 29

While accepting the principle of free trade in Africa Parliament retained a well-founded belief that the Royal African Company's forts were of great importance in defending the English claim to certain of the African slave trade areas, and therefore when the Company presented a petition in 1730 setting forth that, though the trade had been open, it had maintained the forts for seventeen years without assistance, and that it was in urgent need of relief from its "insupportable burden", the petition was followed by renewed examinations in Parliament of the conditions of the slave trade. Resolutions on the matter were agreed to, in which the Commons declared their opinion that the forts were necessary for the promotion of the trade and that an allowance from the national Exchequer should be made towards their upkeep.1 From 1730 this policy was continued, and the Company received annual grants of £10,000 till 1747, when no grant was made, and the Company had once more to become self-supporting. The impossibility of keeping up the forts without assistance provoked another petition to the Commons, and the Board of Trade was instructed to collect information and report to Parliament its conclusions. In 1749 the Board, well-informed and able as it was, reported itself unable to come to a conclusion from the evidence submitted to it as to the best means of carrying on the trade. It therefore presented to the Commons a number of papers which summed up the chief conflicting views.

In choosing between the rival nostrums for the restoration of vigour to the slave trade Parliament finally declared in favour of a compromise embodied in an Act of 1750.2 This solution departed from the wishes of those who opposed all Company rule by providing for the erection of a new Company to which the management of the forts was to be entrusted, and departed from the desires of the jointstock Company supporters by forbidding the new Company to hold any joint stock or to undertake any trading in its corporate capacity. A project for the assumption of direct control by the Government was not favoured, probably because the work of supervising the forts would be too heavy a burden on it.3

The Act provided that the forts and other possessions held by the Royal African Company on the West African Coast should be vested in a regulated company, the "Company of Merchants trading to Africa". Admission to the new Company was to be open to all His Majesty's subjects on payment of a fee of forty shillings, and the government was to be in the hands of a Committee of nine annually elected, chosen by the freemen of the Company in the three ports principally concerned with the slave trade, Liverpool, Bristol and London. This Committee was made responsible for the management 2 23 George II, c. 31.

1 C.J., XXI, 522.

3 Martin, E. C., The British West African Settlements 1750-1821, p. 27.

COMPANY OF MERCHANTS TRADING TO AFRICA 451

and upkeep of the forts. It was to appoint all necessary servants and officers for the service, and to make annual returns to Parliament of its expenditure. Nothing was said in the Act as to the source of the income from which the Company was to defray its necessary expenses, though provision was made as to the way in which it was to be accounted for. For supervision of the work of maintaining the forts it was provided that the captains of the vessels of the Royal Navy on the African coast should report to the Admiralty on the state and condition of the forts.

As the Company of Merchants trading to Africa was incorporated to prevent the evils of a close trading corporation, careful provision was made that the Committee should not become an exclusive autocratic body, and in addition to the rule of annual election it was provided that no member of the Committee might be elected for more than three successive years. This regulated company was not in its corporate capacity a trading company, but an organ of local government in West Africa. The slave trade, after the Committee of the Company entered fully upon its powers, was left entirely free and open to all His Majesty's subjects, and the new Company was stringently debarred from exercising any restrictive authority whatever over traders on the coast. Those who engaged in the slave trade were therefore free to pursue it as they chose, and entitled to the protection of the forts, which were to be maintained out of an annual parliamentary vote. The Committee appointed to undertake the management of the forts was representative of all the traders who chose to pay the small admission fee and thus the victory of the separate traders was complete. "Free Trade to Africa by Act of Parliament" was the motto on the Company's seal, and under this motto the slave trade was carried on until its abolition in 1807.

An Act passed in 1752 "for making compensation and satisfaction to the Royal African Company for their charter, lands, forts",1 provides an opportunity for surveying the extent to which the English slave trade had added to the English possessions. It included a list of the forts which were handed over to the 1750 Company, namely one fort on the Gambia and seven on the Guinea Coast, thus affording evidence of the decline in the Company's power from the days of its brief prosperity in the seventeenth century. By 1750 the slave trade had fallen into the hands of small groups of independent traders, and the government of the British West African holdings was passing from the Company control of the seventeenth century towards the direct assumption of authority by the Crown which was to come in the nineteenth.

Though the coasts had been frequented by British vessels from the fifteenth century, not much addition to the knowledge of the interior of Africa had been gained by the middle of the eighteenth. The slave

1 25 George II, c. 4.

trade was to a large extent responsible for this ignorance. Peaceful penetration was difficult in a continent where strangers were liable to be captured and sold as slaves, and armed penetration was not possible for the small groups of Englishmen who frequented the coast either as representatives of a trading company, or as individual adventurers. Nor did the English traders greatly desire to undertake the work of exploration. Their position in the slave trade was that of one of the many middlemen between the Muhammadan or other slave raiders and the English planters in the West Indies. For this occupation adventures into the interior would have been a great additional danger and expense, without providing compensating financial gain. The safest method of penetration for Europeans, strategically, was by the rivers, but the climate of the rivers of tropical Africa exacted so heavy a mortality from Europeans that the protection given by the ships' walls against human enemies was offset by the decimation of the crews in their cramped quarters and the unhealthiness of the moist atmosphere. For these reasons the English, in company with other European Powers, left the exploration of the interior until conditions changed at the end of the eighteenth century.

By 1750 the Africa that was known to Western Europe, apart from Mediterranean Africa, consisted of a well-defined coastline and a number of regions in which the Europeans had their trading posts, with some features of the interior sketched in, according to hearsay or imagination. The region of the Senegal and Gambia rivers was well known, for traders had penetrated some considerable distance up these rivers; the coastline and islands between the Gambia and the coast of the Gulf of Guinea were also accurately known and charted, as was the Guinea Coast itself. The French had a fort on the island of Goree guarding the approach to the Senegal, and one on the island of St Louis in the mouth of the river, and many factories up its course. The British, in addition to a fort on James Island in the mouth of the Gambia, had a number of factories up the river the entrance of which they commanded. The Portuguese had trading stations on the Bissagos islands, and the Guinea Coast was dotted with European holdings. This shore was divided, from west to east, into the Grain Coast, Tooth (or Ivory) Coast, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, the majority of the forts being concentrated on the Gold Coast, where the Dutch and English together had some twenty-five forts and factories, the Brandenburgers two, and the Danes one. Other trading posts were established and abandoned, so that the number of places in effective occupation varied from time to time. All these Guinea forts were erected on a strip of coastal plain separated by a range of mountains from the little-known interior.

The power of the native kingdom of Ashanti was being built up, but it was still an inland power only, and the coast was in possession

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DEFECTIVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE INTERIOR 453

of a number of small native powers of which the Fantis were the strongest. From the coast to the Ashanti borders there was communication by trading paths down which the slave coffles came, except in time of native wars when these were blocked. Behind the Ashanti territory lay a region about which there was no accurate knowledge. The most disputed feature of this distant interior was the great riverway of the Niger, concerning which men made interesting speculation. The most accurate cartographer of Africa in the early eighteenth century, the Sieur d'Anville, who was employed by Louis XV, made no guess at the course of the river, and left the Niger out of his maps, inscribing "on n'a aucune connoissance de ce qui est plus avant dans les terres" on the land just north of the coastal region, but others who followed him had less restraint. An Englishman who published a map in 1760 depicted the Niger as a river flowing between two lakes about longitude 3° East and a marsh in longitude 10° West, with no egress to the sea.2 This was more accurate than a commonly accepted view, which was expressed in the Annual Register in 1758, that the source of the Niger was in East Africa, and that it flowed westward to the coast dividing into three branches, the Senegal, the Gambia, and the Rio Grande, by which it entered the Atlantic. Until the time of Mungo Park's explorations, however, this view remained current in England. To the east of the Gold Coast the native kingdom of Dahomey, where the British had a fort at Whydah, was a synonym for barbaric tyranny, and knowledge of the interior was possible only so far as it was allowed by the native ruler. Though there were no English settlements in the Congo region there was some knowledge of that interior due to the Portuguese settlements there. In the eighteenth century East Africa belonged to an entirely different sphere from that of West Africa, the latter pertaining to Atlantic commerce, the former to that of the East Indies. Oceans, not continents, made unities in the eighteenth century, and the English thought of Africa from 1750 to 1787 as the Atlantic coastline opposite the West Indies, an essential part of an important triangular trade.

The Company of Merchants had not long been established before rivalries with the French in the Gambia and with the Dutch on the Gold Coast disturbed its peace. French rivalry, though it was strongest in the Gambia region, was also felt on the Gold Coast, and the English traders sought to secure a footing farther north than the Gambia, so that they might have free entrance to the gum trade from which the French were attempting to exclude them.

The Seven Years' War stimulated the rivalry of English and French, and the wishes of the English traders were met by the prosecution of a vigorous African campaign in 1758. The English forces captured the

1 d'Anville, J. B., Carte particulière de la partie principale de la Guinée, 1729.

2 Bennett, R., Africa according to Sieur d'Anville, 1760.

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