Making Money. Colleen E. Kriger

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.