Eyewitness to the Middle Passage

The Atlantic trade in slaves and slave produce in the 18th century is sometimes wrongly associated with the state-organized world of colonial mercantilism rather than with the birth of free trade. The Spanish trade in silver did furnish the basis for a well-organized colonial system. In the early days, royal monopolies played some role in the slave traffic but, before long, “interlopers” proved better able to supply the planters with the captive labor force they craved and Europe with the sugar, tobacco and coffee of the plantations.

The Diligent was a vessel engaged for slave-trading purposes by two French interlopers, the Billy brothers of Vannes. As an independent venture, it illustrates the waning ability of the chartered slave-trading companies to engross the traffic. The Billy brothers were grain merchants who aimed to break into a profitable traffic, one that had already been sanctioned by royal authorities and, on the grounds that it would foster conversion, even by the church.

Robert Harms’ account of the voyage is based on the journal of a French mariner, Robert Durand, who took part as first lieutenant aboard the Diligent’s first voyage in 1731-32. There are scores of firsthand narratives of slave trading voyages, and Durand’s is not particularly vivid. Yet, in the hands of Harms, the laconic entries, the evocative drawings and the records of a court case brought against the captain by the ship’s owners furnish a compelling and illuminating narrative.

Harms supplies a context to the voyage and supplements journal entries that carry the story forward and help to explain the workings of the largest and most sustained forced migration in history. The result is an indispensable work of history. Yale University had asked Harms to assess the authenticity of Durand’s manuscript. Not only was it genuine but it also concerned a major branch of the slave traffic and many of the issues that it poses. The author’s ability to bring out the significance of the story stems, however, from his impressive command of the trade’s Atlantic history and skill at opening up the narrative.

None of those directly concerned in this expedition recorded any qualm or doubt. Yet, as Harms explains, the status of slaves in France had recently been tested by Pauline Villeneuve, a young woman who had been taken as a slave servant from the French West Indies by her mistress, then left in a convent in Nantes. Before her mistress could reclaim her, Villeneuve requested acceptance in the order. The nuns and abbot helped her to win the subsequent court case, arguing that though slavery was legal in the colonies, it was incompatible with the free air of France. Freedom suits set limits to the system but didn’t give pause to the planters or slave traders.

The Diligent arrived on the West African coast at a time when King Agaja of the kingdom of Dahomey was establishing control of the major slave trading outlets at Whydah and Jakin. The European forts there offered scant protection, so the traders are shown as supplicants, dependent on the favor of intermediaries and monarchs.

Agaja had an English slave, Bullfinche Lambe, whom he had acquired as a captive from another ruler and refused to ransom. Agaja is sometimes seen as an opponent of the slave trade because the effect of his military moves was to interrupt the traffic from Whydah, source of more than half of all the captives carried from West Africa.

From Harms’ account, it seems that Agaja was attempting to cut out mercantile middlemen and had framed the plan of establishing sugar plantations in Dahomey. He sent Lambe with a letter to the English king proposing that the Royal Africa Co. join him in setting up plantations and marketing their produce in Europe. The British authorities declined but sought to remain on good terms with the increasingly powerful monarch.

The power behind the throne of Whydah, we learn, was an African commander known as Captain Assou, who successfully imposed a peace agreement on the European forts and traders based in this coastal state. According to this agreement, the Europeans were bound to remain at peace with one another on the African coast at all times. The African rulers were also loath to award special privileges to particular nations or companies. John Konny, the African ruler of Fort Friederichsburg, wished his territory to be a “free port where all nations could trade.” The activities of Assou and Agaja showed that free commerce, especially a commerce in captives, required good order and mutual trust. Once they fell out, the trade suffered.

Harms’ account shows Africans not simply as victims but also as protagonists of the drama. But the responsibility for what befell the captives once they left Africa lies with the Europeans. At the book’s outset, Harms made clear that the impulse to trade slaves was rooted in Europe’s consuming passion for exotic plantation goods. Thus Harms supplies a vignette of adventurer John Law’s famous attempt to reorganize French finances on the basis of a colonial monopoly. The failure of Law’s system was one more proof that pure monopoly did not work. Around this time Legendre, a financier, coined the term “laissez faire” in pleading with authorities to relax the colonial system.

The Diligent with difficulty purchased 256 slaves and lost nine in the course of the “middle passage”--slave deaths were usually much higher. But because of high prices paid on the African coast and low prices received in Martinique at a time of commercial depression, the voyage did not make money for its backers. Harms mentions another voyage involving Durand that made a profit despite eventual loss of the vessel. Slave traffic was highly competitive. To be sure of a profit, a merchant needed to spread his investment over many voyages, a circumstance favoring the larger traders.

Harms has no difficulty establishing the atrocious conditions facing the captives, and Durand sparely records a signal act of resistance on board the Diligent leading to a bloody and ceremonial execution. Harms also mentions several shipboard uprisings that might have been known to Durand, all of which were suppressed with great ferocity. He cautiously speculates about the captives’ fears and hopes but there is little to go on. And because of the matter-of-fact nature of Durand’s journal, little is known of the inner life even of the protagonist.

Yet the book successfully transports us to another epoch with assumptions we find, by turns, strange and familiar as the ancient institution of human bondage is refashioned to serve modern-seeming entrepreneurs responding to modern-seeming consumers. Harms is not the first to convey the cruelty of the slave traffic, but his vivid re-creation of this period is a remarkable achievement. By all means, read Barry Unsworth’s well-researched novel “Sacred Hunger” or Hugh Thomas’ compendious history “The Slave Trade.” But for a sense of what the trade involved and how it was made possible, Harms’ story is unrivaled.

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From ‘The Diligent’

The air was dank and stifling hot because the refashioned cargo bay of the Diligent had not been built with ventilation in mind. After the women had all been loaded, the men were loaded onto the front part of the slave deck and shackled together two by two. The slave irons carried by the Diligent, which had been manufactured in Nantes, consisted of two U-shaped bars of iron held together by an iron rod that was passed through openings on the ends and locked into place. The slave iron bound the left ankle of one captive to the right ankle of another, making it difficult for either of them to walk unless they moved in perfect harmony. As their eyes grew accustomed to the semidarkness, they began to look around for comrades from the warehouse who had gone out before them.