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
