The Dutch Republic and the slave trade

This is another post about my research into the background for my new book ANANSI, which will be published during the summer.

Around the year 1600, the Dutch Republic was at war with Spain and Portugal. Slavery was forbidden by law in the Netherlands, but not on the Iberian peninsula and in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The Netherlands didn’t have colonies at the time, but this would soon change after the Dutch East India Company was floated in 1602. The war with Spain and Portugal was suspended between 1609 and 1621 due to a twelve-year cease-fire, a period which allowed Dutch overseas trade to flourish and many colonies to be started in Asia. The Dutch EIC was largely a military organisation aimed at displacing the Portuguese in Asia, and existed under a warrant from the Dutch authorities. The trade followed on the heels of the military.

The gunshot (Willem v/d Velde the younger, 1707)

The cease-fire came to an end in 1621, and it cannot have been a coincidence that in the same year the Dutch West India Company was inaugurated, set up after the model of its East India counterpart. The WIC also began as a military organisation, rather like a mercenary army. Nowadays we’d see a parallel with the infamous Russian Wagner Group! Similar to the EIC, the WIC was meant to drive the Portuguese from their African and American colonies, which partially succeeded. We have to take into account that as early as 1494 a line had been drawn in the Atlantic by the Tordesillas Treaty, a meridian through the mouth of the Amazon river, which separated Spanish and Portuguese colonial claims. The Spanish weren’t allowed to trade east of the line, and the Portuguese and other nations would have no peace beyond. This incidentally is why Brazil, much of which is east of the Amazon, still speaks Portuguese.

A charter of the Dutch West India Company

During most of its existence, the WIC was in financial difficulty. It had to be rescued with Government funds in 1647 and eventually succumbed in 1674. Then the remains were swept up and the second WIC set up. This, apart from trading in plantation products, was strongly focused on the slave and gold trade. Military expansion was off the cards since peace had been signed with Spain and Portugal in 1648.

As early as 1623, the first WIC had considered entering the slave trade. Slavery being forbidden by law in the Republic itself apparently didn’t come into the picture. The Board ordered an investigation into the slave trade in Angola, the coast of which by then had been in Portuguese hands for a century and half. Later, the Company tried to oust the Portuguese from the entire West African coast. Luanda was occupied in 1643, and a few years earlier in 1637, the WIC took the fort of St George of Elmina from the Portuguese. Elmina was destined to be the African headquarters of the WIC, next to a few other so-called ‘trade posts’.

The Portuguese had been deep into the slave trade as early as the start of the 16th Century, but Elmina initially was established for the gold and ivory trade, its name meaning ‘the mine’, being situated on the Gold Coast. The slave trade eventually would develop all along the coast, reaching from Angola to as far as present-day Nigeria and even further west and north towards what is now Senegal.

Elmina: the slave fort

Demand and supply are what drive any trade, including the slave trade. Discussing the slave trade in its entirety in this short treatise would take things too far, so I will restrict myself to the supply of enslaved people in what is now Ghana, and the demand for slaves in the Dutch colonies west of the Amazon River, the Caribbean and the Spanish Main.

The first thing to remember is that slavery was a common fact of life in Africa. People used to sell themselves or their children into slavery to escape from debt or poverty. Apparently sometimes slavery offered more security than life in poverty, even though slaves were treated badly in Africa as well as elsewhere. Apart from that, tribal strife was an important source of captives. The area which is now called Ghana was and is largely occupied by mutually related Akan tribes, such as the Ashanti, the Denkyira, the Akyem and the Fante. They still speak several dialects of the Akan group of languages, the most important of which is Twi, and their cultures are very similar.

Ashanti settlement, c. 1810

Despite the similarities between the various Akan peoples, they waged war amongst themselves, which must have been comparable to present-day atrocities in eastern Congo or Rwanda. Mutual slaughter and slave taking was rife. The Ashanti, at the end of the 17th Century, were a very warlike people led by the asantehene (king) Osei Kofi Tutu. His high priest, the okomfo Anokye, created a personality cult and mythology around the asantehene. Their expansion war made the Ashanti an important supplier of African captives to the Dutch West India Company. They were paid with trade goods - cheap textiles, firarms, ammunition and hard liquor.

The demand side of the equation was the plantation economy of the Caribbean, the Spanish Main and the fertile forested coastal plains west of the Amazon delta. As soon as the Dutch had learned the secret of sugar refinement from the Portuguese, sugar became the new gold. Production of sugar needed a great amount of manpower, which was provided by African captives imported from overseas.

arrival of a slave ship

West of the Amazon, the Spanish were lord and master, apart from the wild coastal areas where British, French and Dutch colonies had been established. The carriage of enslaved workers to Spanish America needed an independent supplier, because the Spanish weren’t allowed to trade east of the Tordesillas line including Africa. That supplier was found in the Dutch West India Company. 

The trade charter was given by the Spanish Court, who granted an asiento (a monopoly) to a single Spanish or foreign trader to deliver slave labour from an intermediate port to Spanish America. The asiento meant that the contractor obtained enslaved people on a Caribbean island, where they had been taken by foreign vessels. For a long time, the WIC was that supplier, using Curaçao as a transit port. Incidentally there still is a neighbourhood on Curaçao named Asiento!

 

Apart from that, the WIC sailed to Surinam and Berbice (in present-day Guyana) to supply the local plantations with slave labour. The WIC had been assigned a monopoly by the Dutch authorities, but there was a brisk trade by slave smugglers, many hailing from the Dutch southwestern province of Zeeland. The WIC had its hands full trying to control them, more so as the smugglers didn’t hesitate to open fire on the Company’s patrol vessels!

After the Dutch mercenary Admiral Abraham Crijnssen had taken Surinam from the British in 1667, the WIC despite being in financial trouble governed the colony. Even so, there was a dispute with the provincial Government of Zeeland, who had paid for Crijnssen’s fleet and therefore claimed ownership of the colony. Eventually this was settled by the inauguration of the Suriname Society (SvS) in 1683, which was to pay the Province for ownership. The three shareholders were the West India Company, the city of Amsterdam, and Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck, a former cavalry officer who’d take Governorship of the colony. He paid for his share with money borrowed from Amsterdam-based financiers.

Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommeldijck

Economically, the colony was a disaster. Many British planters had departed from the colony after the take-over by the Dutch, moving to Jamaica together with their entourage of slaves. As a consequence, there was a great shortage of manpower in the colony, where new Dutch planters were arriving, who gradually grabbed power from the colonial government. There wasn’t only a shortage of manpower, but of almost everything - horses, cattle and food supplies. Part of the problem was the condition that supplies had to be routed through Amsterdam, which levied a duty on anything going in and out of the city. This caused a logistic problem due to the supply route taking many months, instead of looking towards neighbouring areas for food supplies and cattle.

This was compounded by the unwillingness of the planters to reserve land and manpower for food production. The garden plots of the plantation population were for local use only and hardly adequate to supply the garrison and townspeople of the capital of Paramaribo. Eventually, Van Sommelsdijck occasionally had to allow in British vessels from New England with emergency supplies. The eternal shortages led to rationing of the garrison, which in 1688 mutinied and shot Van Sommelsdijck.

 

The supply of enslaved manpower from Africa was unstable. The planters obtained their workforce at auction in Paramaribo, which was held as soon as a slave ship came in. Usually trade was done on the basis of bartering, as cash money was scarce and the plantations made little profit. The people were sold against a certain weight of sugar, sometimes even against ‘futures’ - a cheque based upon the expected proceeds of the next harvest. The shortage of manpower meant that the people were often worked beyond their limits, and some scarpered into the bush as soon as they arrived on the plantation. These were mercilessly prosecuted, and runaways once caught were cruelly punished.

restored plantation house at Mariënbosch

The mean life expectancy of a healthy young African labourer on a Surinamese plantation was between 8 and 10 years, which says enough of life and work conditions. It isn’t exactly clear whether they were only worn out by that time or actually dead of disease and abuse. Once worn out and unsuited to hard labour, they were freed and sent away - the usual term was being ‘manumitted’ (Latin for sent away by hand) - to lead a dismal life outside the plantation grounds.

Slavery was mainly kept going by absentee plantation owners or shareholders, who expected a steady income from sugar and other tropical products. I haven’t been able to find any clues, but my hypothesis is that most of the profit on tropical produce came not from the plantations but from the intermediate trade - transport and refinery. The price paid for sugar, coffee and indigo produced on the plantations may well have been as low as the price paid to present-day coffee producing smallholders in Central America. In those days they didn’t yet know the principle of Fair Trade...

The WIC and the SvS were wound up when the Batavian Republic was established in Holland under French patronage in 1795. Regrettably, after the demise of Napoleon and the establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815, the new State allowed the planters to merrily continue their practice of exploitation and humiliation.

To be continued.