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
