794,275 " 555,992
Roucou,5 {To France, 352,216 " 220,369
{Abroad, 153,178 " 95,838
Cotton, {To France, 3,407,157 " 11,017,892
{Abroad, 102,011 " 255,027
This table, with its alluring figures, that seem to glean gratefully after the steps of labor, is the negro's manifesto of the French slave-trade. The surprising totals betray the sudden development of that iniquity under the stimulus of national ambition. The slave expresses his misery in the ciphers of luxury. The single article of sugar, which lent a new nourishment to the daily food of every country, sweetened the child's pap, the invalid's posset, and the drinks of rich and poor, yielded its property to medicine, made the nauseous palatable, grew white and frosted in curious confections, and by simply coming into use stimulated the trades and inventions of a world, was the slave's insinuation of the bitterness of his condition. Out of the eaten came forth meat, and out of the bitter sweetness.
In 1701, Western San Domingo had 19,000 negroes: in 1777, a moderate estimate gives 300,000, not including 50,000 children under fourteen years of age,—and in the other French colonial possessions 500,000. In the year 1785, sixty-five slavers brought to San Domingo 21,662 negroes, who were sold for 43,236,216 livres; and 32,990 were landed in the smaller French islands. In 1786, the value of the negroes imported was estimated at 65,891,395 livres, and the average price of a negro at that time was 1997 livres.
But we must recollect that these figures represent only living negroes. A yearly percentage of dead must be added, to complete the number taken from the coast of Africa. The estimate was five per cent, to cover the unavoidable losses incurred in a rapid and healthy passage; but such passages were a small proportion of the whole number annually made, and the mortality was irregular. It was sometimes frightful; a long calm was one long agony: asphyxia, bloody flux, delirium and suicide, and epidemics swept between the narrow decks, as fatally, but more mercifully than the kidnappers who tore these people from their native fields. The shark was their sexton, and the gleam of his white belly piloted the slaver in his regular track across the Atlantic. What need to revive the accounts of the horrors of the middle passage? We know from John Newton and other Englishmen what a current of misery swept in the Liverpool slavers into the western seas. The story of French slave-trading is the same. I can find but one difference in favor of the French slaver, that he took the shackles from his cargo after it had been a day or two at sea. The lust for procuring the maximum of victims, who must be delivered in a minimum of time and at the least expense, could not dally with schemes to temper their suffering, or to make avarice obedient to common sense. It was a transaction incapable of being tempered. One might as well expect to ameliorate the act of murder. Nay, swift murder would have been affectionate, compared with this robbery of life.
Nor is the consumption of negroes by the sea-voyage the only item suggested by the annual number actually landed. We should have to include all the people maimed and killed in the predatory excursions of native chiefs or Christian kidnappers to procure their cargoes. A village was not always surprised without resistance. The most barbarous tribes would defend their liberty. We can never know the numbers slain in wars which were deliberately undertaken to stock the holds of slavers.
Nor shall we ever know how many victims dropped out of the ruthless caravan, exhausted by thirst and forced marches, on the routes sometimes of three hundred leagues from the interior to the sea. They were usually divided into files containing each thirty or forty slaves, who were fastened together by poles of heavy wood, nine feet long, which terminated in a padlocked fork around the neck. When the caravan made a halt, one end of the pole was unfastened and dropped upon the ground. When it dropped, the slave was anchored; and at night his arm was tied to the end of the pole which he carried, so that a whole file was hobbled during sleep. If any one became too enfeebled to preserve his place, the brutal keepers transferred him to the swifter voracity of the hyena, who scented the wake of the caravan across the waste to the sea's margin, where the shark took up the trail.
The census of the slaves in San Domingo was annually taken upon the capitation-tax which each planter had to pay; thus the children, and negroes above forty-five years of age, escaped counting. But in 1789, Schoelcher says that the census declared five hundred thousand slaves; that is, in twelve years the increase had been two hundred thousand. How many negroes deported from Africa do these figures represent! what number who died soon after landing, too feeble and diseased to become acclimated!
Here is the prospectus of an expedition to the coast of Guinea in 1782 for the purpose of landing seven hundred slaves in the Antilles. They were shipped in two vessels, one of six hundred tons, the other a small corvette.
Outfit of large vessel, 150,000 livres
" " corvette, 50,000 "
Purchase of 700 negroes at 300 livres per head, 210,000 "
Insurance upon the passage at 15 per cent., 61,500 "
" " " premiums at 15 per cent., 9,225 "
––
Total cost of the passage, 480,725 "
The passage was a very prosperous one: only 35 negroes spoiled, or 5 per cent, of the whole number. The remaining 665 were sold in San Domingo at an average price of 2,000 livres, making 1,330,000 "
Deduct commissions of ships' officers and correspondents in West Indies, at 11-1/2 per cent 152,950 "
––
1,177,050 "
Deduct expenses in West Indies, 17,050 "
––
1,160,000 "
Deduct exchange, freight, and insurance upon return passage of the vessels, 20 per cent., 232,000 "
––
928,000 "
Deduct crews' wages for 10 months, reckoning the length of the voyage at 13 months, 55,000 "
––
873,000 "
Add value of returned vessels, 90,000 "
––
963,000 "
Deduct original cost of the whole, 480,725 "
––
The profit remains, 100 per cent., 482,275 "
Two hundred and seventy-four slavers entered the ports of San Domingo, from 1767 to 1774, bringing 79,000 negroes. One-third of these perished from various causes, including the cold of the mountains and the unhealthiness of the coffee-plantations, so that only 52,667 remained. These could not naturally increase, for the mortality was nearly double the number of births, and the negroes had few children during the first years after their arrival. Only one birth was reckoned to thirty slaves. There was always a great preponderance of males, because they could bear the miseries of the passage better than the women, and were worth more upon landing. Include also the effects of forced labor, which reduced the average duration of a slave's life to fifteen years, and carried off yearly one-fifteenth of the whole number, and the reason for the slaver's profits and for his unscrupulous activity become clear.
Out of the sugar, thus clarified with blood, the glittering frosted-work of colonial splendor rose. A few great planters debauched the housekeeping of the whole island. Beneath were
This was the scarlet dye of the Caribs, which they procured from the red pulpy covering of the seeds of the
