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CHAPTER TWO

“Artificers” and Merchants

Making and Moving Goods

MISSING FROM historical maps showing trade routes and networks of the past are the complex and crucially important human dimensions of commerce. Much of what went into trade was essential work, though unnoticed and therefore unrecorded, for it was labor folded into the daily and seasonal routines of people’s lives. Countless numbers and varieties of people—compatriots and foreigners in towns and countryside and on rivers and seas—became intricately interconnected through increasingly distant exchanges of what they made, often without their even knowing. In this respect, the early modern Atlantic trading system in Africa was no different from any other. Many disparate people played a role in creating it, and it took a far-flung host of other individuals with the complementing knowledge, skills, labor, and experiences to keep the circuits replenished. Merchants, often considered to be the primary actors in commerce, spent their lives and careers developing, revising, and exercising valuable intelligence about these makers of the goods they moved—the news and knowledge that enabled them to connect manufacturers with far-off markets of consumers.

These groups they connected—consumers as well as manufacturers—are equally important actors in commerce, although they can all too easily be overlooked. This chapter focuses on both groups, especially the producers of trade goods, in order to place Euro-African trade on the Upper Guinea Coast into the wider intercontinental contexts of the people who created and maintained it. They represent a wide range of ongoing human investments in training and skills that powered the preindustrial toolkits and labor-intensive workshops of artisans or “artificers.” Workers of all kinds—men, women, children, unskilled, semiskilled, skilled, free, and unfree—generated and processed raw materials and turned them into semifinished goods, transportable commodities, or finished products of one kind or another. Tracking the supply chains that Atlantic trade commodities followed thus provides a more complete view of the geographical scale and social complexity of early modern commerce on the Guinea Coast. And taking into account the varied ways artificers’ work was organized, how their working conditions changed over time, and how well or how poorly workers profited is a necessary part of the story.

European and Asian Makers of Western Africans’ Imports

The general classes of overseas commodities that England’s Royal African Company (RAC) brought to the Guinea Coast in the second half of the seventeenth century centered on textiles and metalwares. These remained the two most important categories of trade goods into and throughout the eighteenth century.¹ Looking more closely at the most important major products in each category sharpens the picture. By identifying them and tracking where and by whom they were made, it becomes possible to better understand both the full extent of Anglo-Atlantic trading networks in this early period and the reasons behind their reach. For in striking contrast with the eighteenth century, England did not herself produce many of the goods the RAC shipped to the Guinea Coast. Following on the Dutch example, whose supremacy in seventeenth-century commerce depended heavily on reexporting products that others made, the company instead tapped into established supply centers in the Baltic region and in South Asia to build the range of goods they had on offer. The opening of Atlantic trade had brought European mariners into direct contact with the tropics—tropical climates and seasonal patterns, tropical products such as cotton and dyewoods, and communities of people who lived and worked there. Thus, in this early period England relied on producers and suppliers in locations spread widely across the temperate and tropical zones of Afro-Eurasia (see map 2.1). Only very gradually and aided by their customers in Africa and the deliberate management of their Court of Assistants and Committee of Goods, the RAC was able to encourage and support English manufacturers (some of whom were shareholders in the company) in producing some of these reexport goods at home. And in doing so the RAC contributed in part to launching Britain’s later and well-known successes in manufacturing in the eighteenth century.²

MAP 2.1 Major Afro-Eurasian exports in Anglo-African North Atlantic trade, seventeenth c. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.

Someone reading today the loading lists and invoices of RAC cargoes would find the export trade to the Guinea Coast utterly incomprehensible. Products were known by a seemingly endless number of particular and sometimes peculiar names with strange and varying phonetic spellings that have long since lost whatever familiar meanings they once had. But setting aside these obscure names and focusing instead on precisely what the goods were like makes it possible to see a relatively coherent pattern of what the RAC had learned about which goods they needed to trade successfully on the Guinea Coast and from whom they could get them. An example is cotton textiles from India, which West African merchants and consumers consistently favored for purchase alongside the lower-priced cotton textiles made in West Africa. Among their different weaves and patterns, the most important were known as allejaes, baftes, brawles, Guinea stuffs, long cloths, longees, nicconees, pautkes, and tapseels.³ If taken at face value, the specificity of these names might suggest that each of these textiles was markedly different from the others. That was not at all the case. These nine Indian textiles can be broken down into just two main types of cotton cloths produced in three distinct regions of the subcontinent. Long cloths were, as the name suggests, long lengths of plain white cotton, while allejaes were loom-patterned cottons, that is, with woven stripes or checks. Both were made on South Asia’s east coast in Bengal and on the Coromandel (southeast) Coast. Baftes and pautkes were also plain white cottons (or sometimes dyed a solid color), whereas nicconees, tapseels, brawles, and Guinea stuffs were loom-patterned cottons, all produced in Gujarat (now northwest India) (see map 2.1).

The human dimension of these Atlantic trade textiles extended deep into the hinterlands of ports where more and more people came to experience the stimulus of this expanding market. Individual merchants and textile wholesalers who supplied export cottons to England’s East India Company agents in Madras (Coromandel Coast) and Surat (Gujarat) were among the most obvious beneficiaries of this trade as long as prices were in their favor and weavers worked productively at their looms. The latter, who were male and usually worked as full-time professionals, were not rich by any means, but they were able to earn modest and relatively secure incomes by negotiating cash advances directly from local merchants to buy cotton fiber or thread and other supplies. In return they would agree to produce a specified quantity of one or another type of cotton textile. And as long as the prices they paid for raw cotton were not too high, these weavers might do reasonably well. Independent suppliers in the rural areas of Gujarat, Bengal, and south India could also profit from Atlantic trade, albeit in smaller ways. Men in agrarian households grew their own cotton, and their wives and daughters cleaned it, spun it into thread, and sometimes prepared the warps, or lengthwise threads, that weavers dressed onto their looms to make the cloth. Cleaning and spinning cotton was extremely labor-intensive, which meant that cotton manufacture relied on an enormous number of spinners. Estimates are that women accounted for more than half of the labor force in the production of Indian export cottons.⁴ Modest cash payments for all of these essential preparatory tasks must have made noticeable differences in income for small farmers and their families in towns and in the countryside.

Another major textile product that the RAC sold in Upper Guinea was a linen known by them as sletias, after Silesia, the central European region of the Habsburg Empire where these cloths were made (see map 2.1).⁵ Linen manufacture for export to world markets had been organized in rural areas there since the sixteenth century. But in this case, and in contrast to Indian cotton manufacturers, the producers hardly benefitted at all from their basic contributions to this labor-intensive process. Production of linen cloth began with the families harvesting home-grown flax, a fibrous grass that they then steeped, crushed, beat, and brushed to break down the stalks and soften the fiber for spinning.⁶ Both men and women worked at preparing flax fibers and spinning them into thread, but the bleaching of thread was done by women of the household.

Deprivations these workers experienced under increasing pressures to produce more linens for export were dramatically more onerous than the experiences of their counterparts who produced cotton textiles in India. Silesian workers were serfs and peasants under the control of their feudal landlords and bound by a set of harshly extractive obligations and taxes. Male weavers, for example, had to pay fees to their lord just to be able to continue working at their trade, and they owed other fees for their marriages, for having children, and even for death. It was the lords, not the weavers, who entered into direct commercial agreements with English and Dutch merchants, and it was they who set the conditions of production. Yet despite the servile status and low incomes of workers, the volume of Silesian linen output and sales rose steadily over the seventeenth century. Workers resisted these miserable and worsening conditions by refusing to meet their obligations. At times, they even resorted to violent uprisings. One such instance in the late seventeenth century had to be put down by military force. Meanwhile, landlords were able to keep up production by settling even more desperate landless immigrant spinners and weavers onto their estates. However, the severe constraints of this feudal arrangement led to a contraction and stagnation of Silesian linen manufacture in the eighteenth century—at the time when British textile manufacture was embarking on fundamental technological changes.⁷

Of the RAC exports to Africa that were made domestically in England, woolen textiles were the most steady and significant. Broadcloth, a mainstay of English weaving, was inappropriate for far-off tropical markets because it was too heavy and too high in price. Lighter, cheaper woolens, however, served better in the Guinea trade, among them the simple plain weave textiles known as Welsh plains and bays, which the company bought in modest quantities on advance contracts (see figure 2.1). It was, above all, the development of a product line called “new draperies,” copying a major export of the Low Countries already in the sixteenth century, that allowed English woolens to become a successful commodity in warmer climates, including on the West African coast. These textiles, known generically as serges, had a sturdy, combed-wool warp and a soft, carded-wool weft. Their particular names varied widely based on the specifications and locality of their production. The two that were most important to the RAC were the perpetuana and the say, both of them recognized and highly valued on the Guinea Coast for being hard wearing, lightweight, and relatively cheap woolens.⁸

FIGURE 2.1 European floor loom and weaver. Denis Diderot, et al., Encyclopédie (Paris, 1762). Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC.

Supplies of these new draperies came to the RAC in London mostly from the towns and countryside of Devonshire in southwestern England, where they were made by smallholders or landless artisans, many of whom worked seasonally—either independently or under putting-out arrangements with merchants in Exeter (see map 2.1). In the putting-out system, a merchant would sell or lend raw wool to a male weaver who then arranged for it to be cleaned, prepared, and spun into yarn. Shipments of Irish wool with the long fibers requisite for spinning strong worsted thread for weaving serges came in on the northern coast of the peninsula to be carried overland to Exeter. The Irish sources of the weavers’ basic raw material thus put merchants in control of weavers’ fortunes. Wool with shorter fibers for the weft thread arrived via the coasting trade from the southeast, mainly Kent and Sussex, as well as from around the local countryside. Women and children were the ones who engaged in the primary work of preparing wool and spinning it, and skill levels, as well as wages, varied widely. Then, once a weaver wove the cloth, he sold his yardage either in the serge market or directly back to the merchant who had supplied the wool. It would then be the merchant who had the cloth finished and dyed.⁹

The RAC entered the process at this point. Serges came to them undyed and unfinished, and the company arranged with either an agent in Exeter or a representative in London to manage the transport of their woolen goods to London, where they contracted with specialists in the city to dye, set, press, and pack them for export. Perpetuanas were hard wearing and relatively cheap, and according to over twenty-seven years of reported figures, the company exported more than 170,000 pieces of them to the Guinea Coast. RAC officials, determined to maintain quality controls necessary to prevent spinners and weavers from pilfering wool or thread, instituted standards specifying a certain weight per measured length of woven yardage. The company exported says as well, especially during their first twenty years, when records show they shipped two thousand to three thousand pieces annually. RAC agents on the Gold Coast complained when lack of perpetuanas and says resulted in a falloff in their trade. They also faced keen competition there from the Dutch, who were adept at maintaining their own supplies of serges even into the first years of the 1700s.¹⁰

Among the RAC exports in the general category of metalwares, its second-most important category of goods, bar iron was the most significant, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century. For example, company records show that of the thirty-five vessels the company sent to Africa in 1685, twenty-nine of them carried the iron bars that supplemented the output of African smelting furnaces. During this period, at least, they did not export any English-made iron. Instead, regular supplies of bar iron came to them from importers in London who specialized in the Baltic trade and who also were shareholders in the company. Export iron circulated in trading networks as intermediate or semifinished goods, which meant that producers worked it into hammered iron bars that could later be turned into tools or other implements elsewhere, sometimes an ocean away. The RAC’s main source of iron in the seventeenth century was Sweden (see map 2.1), where ironworkers produced bar iron for export in the form of bars of standardized dimensions and weight. In the mid-1680s, the company’s contract with their supplier stipulated that the bars had to be stamped with a trade mark and weigh in at seventy-five to eighty bars per ton, or twenty-eight to thirty pounds per bar. Between 1673 and 1704, the RAC reexported well over five thousand tons of Swedish bar iron (around four hundred thousand bars) to the Guinea Coast.¹¹

Sweden had only recently shifted production of iron toward the export trade. Previously, between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, iron ore had been mined and smelted into iron metal in communally held blast furnaces and then processed yet further into units of workable iron for local and regional users. Agrarian households living in the ore resource areas carried out this work seasonally and on a relatively small scale. In the early seventeenth century, however, larger-scale specialized ironworks began to be set up by individuals who acted on new economic policies that were put into place by the Swedish Crown. Outside the areas of ore deposits, merchants and noblemen set about establishing privately owned estates designed to combine agricultural production with the production of bar iron for export. These new ironworking estates generated more refined and standardized iron in greater quantities than ever before. And as iron exports rose steadily during the seventeenth century, the Crown also set up a Board of Mines to monitor and regulate them.¹²

Although some independent peasant ironworkers continued to produce bar iron on a small scale, a majority of agrarian households produced iron for export and found themselves working under a much more rigid and restrictive division of labor. Crown regulations divided the stages of mining, smelting, and forging more sharply from one another by geography and by workforce. This scheme restricted peasant ironworkers to just the primary stages of mining and smelting the ore. Secondary manufacture, that is, refining smelted iron and forging it into bars, was far more profitable. Under the new regulations, it was carried out separately in workshops on the private estates. These were strategically located in provinces adjacent to where the ore deposits were and where the mining and smelting went on. Some of the larger estates also began to operate their forges year round.

In this new arrangement, the peasant workers came under much closer scrutiny and direct control. Royal decrees restricted access to iron ore only to those farmers who were engaged in pig-iron production for the estates, and each mining district was put on a work schedule. Labor in mining—the extracting of ore from the pit mines, sorting it and loading it into horse-drawn carts, and transporting it to the blast furnace—was shared by the farmer’s household. So, too, was the work of making the charcoal fuel used in smelting the ore. But since most of this work, including the actual smelting process, was carried out in winter, peasant households could potentially realize noticeable economic benefits in the form of either subsistence or cash by entering into contracts to supply the ironworks estates with pig iron. Over time, however, as ironmasters running the estates sought to increase production and lower costs, peasant workers came under harsher conditions and constraints. More of them found that the terms of their contracts that laid out the amount and price of the pig iron they were to produce ended up leaving them bound to an ironmaster by debt. And if they were able instead to contract with merchants who sold pig iron to the estates, indebtedness would more often be the result in that case as well. Thus, for most Swedish ironworkers, intensification of iron production for Atlantic trade was clearly not a boon, and so those who could do so retaliated by embezzling raw materials or working on their own accounts.¹³

Second in significance among RAC exports of metalwares was a wide variety of drinking vessels, plates, and containers made of copper, brass, or pewter. Copper- and brasswares of English manufacture were not exported at this time, and so, as with iron bars, the company relied on reexports from elsewhere, in this case mainly northern Germany via the Baltic trade (see map 2.1). Cast copper bars, an intermediate good, were one important category of these wares, as were finished copper basins that the company acquired from suppliers in Amsterdam. Containers made of brass required several stages of manufacture, beginning with the alloying of the metal, then the pressing of it into sheets, next the skilled battery work of hammering the sheets out over specially designed anvils and molds, and finally turning out the finished trade good (see figure 2.2). The RAC brasswares were mainly basins, pans, and kettles made in a variety of shapes and sizes especially for the Guinea trade and known by particular names such as tackings, neptunes, diglings, wire-bound kettles, and driven kettles. Pewter, an alloy of tin, had been made in England since the eleventh century, and by the mid-fourteenth century pewter craftsmen had formed a guild in London. They, too, hammered out their pewter sheets into a variety of wares such as basins, jugs, plates, tankards, and porringers. It is unclear how much of England’s domestic pewter actually contributed to the Guinea trade, as there were ongoing problems with foreign competitors who sold at much lower prices but did so by cutting back the alloy’s tin content. Another problem faced by English pewterers was a custom fee that was added to discourage exports. It is therefore likely that the RAC at this time had to rely on reexports of pewter as well.¹⁴ All of these metal goods were significant in the seventeenth-century RAC trade on the Upper Guinea Coast, where local people put them to many uses ranging from important social and ceremonial presentations to the productive work of processing beeswax and intensifying the making of sea salt.

FIGURE 2.2 A coppersmith at work. Image after Jost Amman, 1568, H. Hamilton, The English Brass and Copper Industries to 1800 (London, 1926).

Firearms were a third significant component of RAC exports of metalwares, supplied in the early years of their trade mostly by the Dutch. English guns were difficult to sell as exports, and even when London gunsmiths produced copies of the popular Dutch models, their asking price was not competitive. Undeterred, they petitioned against the company for importing cheap trade guns and in 1685 succeeded in getting the practice prohibited by an act of Parliament. The RAC managed to avoid the prohibition by sending ships to Amsterdam, where they were laden with guns and powder and then sent directly on to the Guinea Coast. But in just over a decade a variety of firearms, including muskets, were being produced for the export trade in England—due in large part to Europe’s wars in the 1690s and early 1700s, which brought expansions in arms production. Between 1701 and 1704, the RAC was able to send over thirty-two thousand muskets, carbines, pistols, fowling pieces, and fusees (light muskets) to the Guinea Coast, many of them purchased on contract.¹⁵

Trade guns, however, as well as gunpowder, were notoriously inconsistent in quality, and buyers on the Guinea Coast were quick to notice. They deemed guns and powder offered by Dutch and Danish traders to be the best. Moreover, the parts of firearms that were made of iron, even those that were polished steel, corroded quickly in the high humidity of the tropics. Thus, buyers came to prefer special mountings made of brass.¹⁶ It was therefore not uncommon for RAC factors at the trading forts to find themselves with old or damaged firearms on hand and in some cases choosing to send them back to the company in London. Attempts to have repairs done were not entirely successful. In one instance in 1704 the company asked a group of ten London gunsmiths to evaluate the condition of five hundred fusees they had contracted to be repaired in Plymouth. The gunsmiths declared in a deposition that the weapons in question had not been cleaned and repaired in a workmanlike manner and were therefore not suitable for market.¹⁷ This incident demonstrates how troublesome it was for the RAC to monitor the condition of and repair its goods, adding yet another set of costs the company had to absorb.

The third major category of goods that the RAC sent to Upper Guinea, after textiles and metalwares, was beads, arguably one of the most misunderstood items in world trade, frequently characterized disparagingly as “trinkets.” Eric Williams, famous historian of Britain’s African trade, presented a particularly contemptuous version of this stereotype: “The slave cargoes were incomplete without the “pacotille,” the sundry items and gewgaws which appealed to the Africans’ love of bright colors and for which, after having sold their fellows, they would, late in the nineteenth century, part with their land and grant mining concessions.”¹⁸

So goes the “gewgaw myth” that ignorant primitives could be hoodwinked into giving up valuable goods, property, and even people with the offer of worthless trinkets.¹⁹ Of course the myth makes no sense economically and is an artifact of cultural chauvinism. A more appropriate approach would be to consider instead why people desired and chose certain trade goods over human labor and access to land. In this case, why was it that so many people in Africa valued beads so highly?

Beads were a form of money. The long history and prominent role of beads in ancient and Islamic trade made strong cultural imprints throughout the world, including in Africa. Whether made of stone, organic material, or glass, beads were acquired, circulated, hoarded as a store of wealth, worn as jewelry, buried as treasure, then perhaps unearthed by scavengers and polished to be exchanged anew. As was noted in chapter 1, imported beads were prominent among trade and burial goods found in some of the earliest archaeological sites in West Africa, which show evidence of the Islamic caravan trade across the Sahara. With the rise of the Atlantic era, Europeans built on and adapted to this long-standing commercial and cultural foundation.

In their dealings on the Guinea Coast, the RAC noted the well-established markets there for particular kinds of beads. On the Upper Guinea Coast, people used coral (a red organic material), crystal, and glass beads as well as cowry shells as cash to purchase food or drink or to pay a person for labor or services. People also hoarded these small currency units for making larger purchases or for major family investments. Crystal beads were desired up the Gambia River, where they were necessary in the trade assortments for captives and export goods. Coral and amber also served as jewelry on the Upper Guinea Coast, worn by prominent titled women and valued by them as highly as gold and silver. Beads of coral were also in great demand farther down the coast in the Benin Kingdom, where they were displayed ceremonially as part of the royal regalia. And cowries were an essential item in Euro-African trade all along the Bight of Benin.

The Dutch East India Company brought cowries—a shell currency originally from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean that circulated in and around Islamic trading zones—in quantity as ballast for its ships on their voyages homeward. In the early years of the RAC monopoly, they purchased their cowries in Amsterdam, but it did not take long for London dealers who specialized in other Indian Ocean goods to become the company’s main suppliers. For their early supplies of clear crystal and colored glass beads, the company relied on Holland until London dealers developed reliable contacts to get them direct from producers in Venice. The RAC managed to acquire a direct supplier of German amber, a fossilized yellowish resin that is hard as stone, when one of their dealers in Baltic goods put them in contact with an associate in Danzig (see map 2.1). Beads made of coral also came from various sources via London dealers.²⁰ Together, these efforts demonstrate that the RAC had clearly learned the high value and importance of beads in their trading even though they were far from easy to store and transport. There was always a potential for losses when loose beads were packed in barrels for shipment, an expense which had to be considered alongside the labor costs of having them strung.²¹

RAC: Shipping and Coasting in Northern Guinea

Atlantic trade along the Upper Guinea Coast in the second half of the seventeenth century followed a complex and shifting set of overland, riverine, and coastal traffic patterns. In the interior of western Africa, the thriving trans-Saharan systems continued to move captives and goods such as salt, gold, and kola interregionally, primarily on routes running along north–south axes. Meanwhile, the newly developing Atlantic system intensified a regional east–west commerce that previously had been relatively small in scale. Formerly the riverways attracted inland merchants to the coast, eager to exchange their locally made cotton textiles with producers of sea salt. Now the maritime traffic from Europe was turning these networks into major corridors of overseas global trade.²² Employees of the RAC stationed on the Upper Guinea Coast thus encountered and worked within an increasingly complicated network of multilateral trade in western Africa and, no matter what their employers in London might have wished, had no choice but to adapt.

Company employees conducted their operations from three island trading forts: James Island at the mouth of the Gambia River; Bence Island in the Sierra Leone estuary to the south; and York Island a bit beyond at Sherbro.²³ The RAC presence, however, was not simply confined to these forts. Staff at each main station established additional satellite out-factories in various locales and also developed contacts at regular ports of call. When combined, these extended their influence all along the coast from Cape Verde in the north to Cape Mount in the south, a stretch of over seven hundred miles (map 2.2). This vast trading network made waterborne traffic in, out of, and around the forts and factories an ongoing logistical challenge. It involved not only the heavily fitted and armed ocean-going sailing vessels coming in from London and departing for London or the Americas but also all sorts of smaller sloops and smacks engaged in shorter voyages to and from offshore islands or along coastal waters. Still smaller work boats and canoes propelled manually by oarsmen were essential for transporting people and small cargoes along rivers and between ship and shore. Thus, the trading forts served as hubs for a much broader sphere of commercial traffic and activity.

MAP 2.2 Royal African Company forts, outstations, and coasting destinations, Upper Guinea Coast, seventeenth c. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.

The forts operated both independently and in cooperation with one another at various times. Ocean vessels from London would periodically arrive on the Guinea Coast loaded with provisions, supplies, and trade goods along with company instructions on where to put in and unload, what return cargoes to seek, and where to take them. Agents at the forts had their own plans and pressing needs, oftentimes in their own interests, which could delay a vessel in port or divert it into local affairs or business. As the northernmost fort, James Island was usually the first stop for supply ships arriving from London on the Upper Guinea Coast. This priority caused resentments at times among the agents downwind at Bence and York Islands to the point where they sent letters of complaint when they felt they were not getting their fair share of goods or when vessels were being delayed in continuing southward. In one instance in 1679, the agent at Bence Island reported that he had received letters and invoices from the company for the last three ships they had sent down but that most of the trade goods they covered had been unloaded at James Island. He claimed that as a result he had not been able to take an active part in that year’s trade in captives and ivory.²⁴

Ship captains followed their instructions when it was possible or when it best suited them, but unpredictable events and changing conditions had a way of intervening and altering their courses. One voyage of the Benjamin serves to illustrate these kinds of complications. This particular vessel was recorded arriving from London at James Island, Gambia, in early November 1685. Its incoming cargo was relatively small, having been selected and organized specifically for the Cape Verde Island market where the overseas goods were to be exchanged for “high cloths,” the elaborately patterned cotton textiles produced at Santiago. They presumably were to be sent to Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast. However, for unknown reasons the captain decided to go instead to Gambia. Captain, crew, and vessel apparently remained there for the next nine months. A company scribe at James Island recorded in late January that a funeral had taken place for John Samuel, a crew member of the Benjamin, and his unsold personal effects (including one boy captive) were entered into the James Island stores.²⁵ In June the Benjamin joined with one of the company yachts in a coasting voyage north to Joal on the Petite Côte, returning with forty-eight captives, ivory, several thousand hides, and a cake of wax. While there they lost a “company slave” on salary by drowning—whether by accident or in attempting to escape is not known. Then in August 1686 the Benjamin was loaded up with a cargo of captives and provisions for the middle passage to the West Indies. Half of the captives were branded to identify them as coming from the fort at Sierra Leone, having been brought to James Island in July on the Charles, with the other half branded to identify them as “Gambia negroes.” The Benjamin then set sail for Antigua, even though the company had consigned the Charles’s captives to Barbados.²⁶ RAC officials in London frequently complained about such drastic changes in their orders and questioned why they occurred.

The Atlantic export trade at the forts was variable and also multilateral. Although Atlantic trade is conventionally described as trans-Atlantic, emphasizing crossings between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia, vessels leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the late seventeenth century did not always follow that pattern. Neither was it the case that they specialized in one particular route. An example to illustrate the variety of voyages and shipping destinations is the vessel Delight, under the command of Captain William Barton, which delivered captives to Barbados in March 1683. Later that year he brought the Delight into port at James Island, although the exact date was not recorded. In late January and early February 1684, Barton took her up the Gambia River in search of exports, bringing back to the fort six captives and a load of ivory tusks, beeswax, and hides. Made ready for her return trip and laden with this substantial cargo of ivory, wax, and hides (the fate of the captives is not known), the Delight set off soon thereafter in the middle of March for London. By October, after a six-month turnaround, Captain Barton had brought the ship back to James Island with another cargo of overseas goods. Loaded up again with ivory, wax, hides, damaged guns and muskets, as well as some samples of local indigo, the Delight left in mid-December for London. This time, however, her captain was James Bardwell. What had happened to Barton is unclear, but Cleeve, the company agent at Gambia, wrote to them that aboard the ship were two of Barton’s “negroes.”²⁷ If these captives managed to survive the voyage, they would have joined the small but growing number of people of color who in one way or another landed in England, not the Americas, after having been torn from their families and homelands.

RAC officials in London designed their cargoes of overseas goods specifically for certain markets on the Guinea Coast and sent their ships with instructions to load up and deliver equally specific types of cargoes. Depending on what these cargoes were, a ship would either return to England or sail across the Atlantic. Exports varied from place to place and over time. Records of voyages in the late seventeenth century show that all of the forts on the Upper Guinea Coast were exporting to both European and American markets, and each had a clear profile of available exports. James Island sent captives and provisions to the Caribbean and to Virginia and also had a strong trade in ivory, beeswax, and hides back to England. Fewer records exist for Bence Island, but there, too, captives and provisions were exported, mainly to Barbados, while ivory, beeswax, camwood (a red dyewood), and gum went to England. York Island in Sherbro was primarily an exporter of camwood and also sent ivory and occasionally gum to England. Fewer and smaller cargoes of captives crossed over from Sherbro to either Jamaica or the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean.²⁸

A significant feature of this time period was the company’s interest in expanding this range of export commodities. Its most energetic and costly effort was an attempt to organize large scale export-oriented indigo production on the Upper Guinea Coast in the 1680s and ’90s, but they also requested samples of Senegal gum, cleaned raw cotton, and lime, among other things, which agents from time to time sent to London for their inspection.²⁹ Thus a view of Atlantic trade from the perspective of the Upper Guinea Coast at this particular time reveals it as an export trade in captives, mostly to the Americas, and in intermediate goods, commodities, and occasionally captives directly to Europe. It was not simply and only an Atlantic slave trade.

Logistically on the coast, export-oriented commerce from Upper Guinea was both a fort-based trade and a ship-based trade. Local African merchants and all sorts of other individuals regularly traveled from the interior to the forts to trade on a small scale or sometimes in bulk. This fort trade was limited and subject to fluctuations, especially in the face of serious competition from “interlopers,” that is, independent European or Euro-African merchants who were an alternative source of overseas imports. Company agents who were most effective in serving their London employers’ interests had to work hard to stay well-informed about interlopers and their whereabouts, for they were often believed to be offering local sellers superior goods and better export prices. Some were even known to be direct threats to the security of the company’s employees and property and were willing at times to risk seizing or even destroying ships and their cargoes. For all of these reasons it made sense to RAC employees on the Upper Guinea Coast to supplement the fort trade with ship trading. Agents at each island station organized visits to their out-factories and also periodically sent their small craft on coasting voyages or up rivers to known bulking centers on their banks where goods could be had at prices that were lower than on the coast. Carrying overseas goods out to these inland points and then bringing export goods back to the fort required having a variety of small craft on hand and in good repair as well as having sufficiently loyal and armed manpower to ward off thieves and interlopers and, in the case of the transport of captives, to prevent escapes or insurrections.