Free ride from Africa to America
In 1815, the Dutch nobleman Dirk van Hogendorp emigrated to Brazil. The reason was his connection with Napoleon, who had finally lost his war against the rest of Europe. Van Hogendorp had had different posts under King Louis Napoleon Bonaparte of the Netherlands, and, later, his brother, Napoleon himself. When Napoleon lost his power for the first time in 1813, van Hogendorp had tried to ally himself with William I, King of the Netherlands, replacing the Napoleonic dynasty. However, when Napoleon had a comeback soon after and Van Hogendorp tried to join the French cause again, his prospects in the newly formed Dutch kingdom were poor. He had to leave.
House on the island of Goerée, Senegal
Van Hogendorp was a controversial character. He had been born into a rich Dutch family who owned an immense country estate called Sion in the town of Rijswijk, close to the court in the Hague. One of his official posts before the arrival of the French was as colonial governor in Surabaya on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. He increasingly criticized the system of slavery. That was not well received with the conservative colonial authorities. Eventually Van Hogendorp was imprisoned. In 1798 he fled to the Netherlands. Under the French revolutionary government ruling under the banner of “liberté, egalité and fraternité” his ideas were better received. However, when, in 1800, he published a theater play adapted from a novel written by his father and the play was first performed in the theater in the Hague, it caused a riot. Like in the colony, the conservative forces in the Hague had no intention of abolishing their profitable slave trade and slavery. The uproar in the theater was such that the performance had to be stopped even before the first interlude.
Former entrance to the Sion estate in Rijswijk. The Hogendorp estate has disappeared. The area is covered with development
Van Hogendorp’s story is one of 10 told in an exhibition about the Dutch role in slavery and slave trade in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Slaves were used as work force in all the Dutch colonies in East India, Ceylon, South Africa, Guyana and the Caribbean islands. Trading slaves was an important business for the two Dutch colonial trading companies, the VOC (Dutch East India Company) and the WIC (Dutch West India Company).
The modern fortress on Goerée
To get a grip on the slave trade, the Dutch not only bought slaves and provided ships, but they also conquered important slave trading centers. In a military campaign along the West coast of Africa they took the fort of Elmina from the Portuguese in 1637 and the important slave market in Luanda in 1641, After this campaign they had control of the slave trade on the West coast of Africa between Senegal and Angola.
One of the places established for the slave trade by the Dutch was the island of Goeree in the bay of what is now Dakar in Senegal. The name is a contraction for the Dutch words “goede reede”, which stands for a good anchorage. The place changed owners numerous times. After the first colonization by the Portuguese it was conquered by the Dutch. Between 1663 and 1664 the British had briefly taken over. In 1677 the Dutch finally lost the island to the French and British. From then on it was part of the French colonies in West Africa, although the British came back regularly. An impressive collection of the rusty remainders of weaponry decorates the ramparts and beaches of the island.
Abandoned artillery parts on Goerée
The island is in particular famous for the slave house (Maison des F.sclaves) said to be built in 1776-1778 which today is a Museum of the history of shipping slaved from West Africa. In the basement are dungeons in which the slaves were “stored” before shipment. The aisle ends at the porte sans retour (“door without return") which opens to the sea, from where the slaves were loaded onto the ships to America.
In the streets of Goerée
Meanwhile there are doubts that the island really was a center for the trade of slaves. Supposedly only 500 slaves were shipped annually from Gorée. The alleged “House of Slaves " probably is a bourgeois French trading house with apartments and office space on the first floor. On the ground floor the house slaves worked. It is also highly doubtful that ships were able to moor safely at the rocky coast in front of the door of no return. Of more importance for the slave trade probably were ports like Saint-Louis in Senegal and the places in the Gulf of Guinea and in Angola mentioned earlier.
The slave trading house in Goerée
St. Louis was the capital of the French colony in West Africa from 1643 to 1902. In contrast to the island of Goerée it had a perfect connection to the backcountry. The Senegal river is navigable until far inland. Before the railroad was built between Dakar and Bamako in Mali, the river was the main means of transportation inland. Numerous slaves were brought to St. Louis on river boats and from there shipped to the Americas. The French revolution ended the slave trade on French territory: in 1794, slavery was abolished in all French territories and possessions. The silting up of the river mouth and the construction of the railroad ended the prosperity of St. Louis. The town fell into eternal sleep. The old colonial houses along the dusty streets in the old town slowly decay.
In the streets of St. Louis, Senegal
Staircase of a merchants mansion in St. Louis
In total the European traders brought around 12.5 million slaves from Africa to north and south America. Of these the Dutch transported 600000. 660000 to 1.1 million slaves were transported to regions under control of the VOC, mainly to nutmeg plantations on the Banda islands, sugar plantations in Java, silver mines in Sumatra and farms in South Africa. Not all of these poor victims came from Africa; slaves were also brought from Asian countries like China.
A canon protects the ruined cathedral of ciudade velha on the Cabo Verde Island of Santiago
The loss of some of their most important slave trading centers did not discourage the Portuguese. They needed slaves for their plantations in Brazil. In 1654 the Portuguese had been able to retake the last possessions of the Dutch in Brazil. The Cabo Verdian islands, and in particular the island of Santiago, became the main trading hub. The islands were ideally located to ship slaves from the African continent and then put them aboard the slave ships that crossed the Atlantic to be used as labor in plantations in the Caribbean, North America, and Brazil. Around 3,000 slaves a year took the terrible and often deadly voyage across the Atlantic. On the return journey, these ships brought back trade goods which were then marketed through Cape Verde and on to Africa and Europe.
Like the Dutch in their fortresses along the African coast, the Portuguese used the islands to collect the slaves before shipping them to America. During the waiting time they were examined, branded and – set to work. They built all the paved mule paths and roads, sometimes hacked out of the cliffs along the coast. These paths still exist and are used. Slaves also worked on the sugar and cotton plantations on the islands and in the industry producing indigo die. These products were exported to the African mainland and exchanged for slaves again. Slaves were also given lessons in Portuguese and Christianity to make them more valuable for the customer. It also eased the traders’ consciences since the slaves had the opportunity to obtain eternal salvation.
The streets of Ciudade Velha
In 1594 the florentine merchant and slaver Francesco Carletti visited the Islands and gave the following description of the slave trade on Santiago:
Extracting the juice from sugar cane
“…we bought seventy-five slaves, two-thirds men and one-third women, both young and old, large and small. All were mixed together according to the custom of the country in a flock, just as in our country we would buy sheep, having first taken all the necessary precautions to make sure that they were in good health, had good constitutions and had no bodily defects. Each owner then marks them, or to say it more appropriately, brands them with his own brand mark. This is made of silver and is heated in the flame of a candle made of tallow with which the burn is anointed. The mark is made on the breast, or the arm or the back so that they be recognized.
A distillery to produce rum from sugar cane
…The slaves were embarked in the ship we had hired, the men below decks pressed and squeezed together one against the other in such a way that they had great difficulty in turning from one side to the other when they wanted to. The women were lodged after their own fashion on deck wherever they could find room in the ship.”
Market on the island of Santiago
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At the time, the capital of Cabo Verde was its oldest city, Ciudade Velho (formerly Ribeira Grande), found in 1462. The city was destroyed on seven occasions, for example in 1598, when a Dutch fleet attacked the islands. Later a big fort protected the town and its center, an enormous cathedral. At that time the number of slaves had already outnumbered the number of islanders. A census carried out in 1582 counts as populations of the islands of Fogo and Santiago 1,600 whites and mixed-race mulattoes, 400 free blacks, and 13,700 slaves. A 16th century marble column still remains in the old center of the tiny village. It was the symbol of colonial power. In the times of slavery public punishment of slaves was carried out at the column.
The end of the slave trade in the 19th century meant an end to much of the economic activity on Cabo Verde and the archipelago was increasingly ignored by the Portuguese.
The bay of Tarafal, Santiago
Besides the Dutch and the Portuguese also the French, English and Spanish profited from the trade in slaves. One of the main slave trading sites in South America was Cartagena de las Indias in what today is Colombia.
Plaza de la Yerba, the slave market in Cartagena de las Indias
Cartagena was found in 1533. Soon the first plantations were created and the city developed into a market place for the slave trade, which took place at the Plaza de los Coches (formerly de la Yerba), where the slaves could be taken directly from the ship to the market. Most of the slave traders were English or Portuguese. Also the famous pirate John Hawkins took part. In Colombia, slavery only ended in the 19th century, 30 years after independence. Today the Plaza de los Coches with its bell tower of 1888 is one of the main attractions of Cartagena for tourists. Ice sellers, wandering traders and the colorfully dressed women selling fruit sellers offer their products. The fruit sellers probably make more money from the photos tourists take from them than from their fruits. They remind of the slaves which managed to escape from the walled town and settled in the inaccessible hinterland in so-called Palenques. walled villages. Their ancestors came into town to sell their produce.
Descendants of escaped slaves in Cartagena
The miserable fate of the slaves was not indifferent to everyone. After arriving from Spain, the Jesuit monk San Pedro Claver (1580-1654) tried hard to ease the suffering of the slaves. He went on the ships arriving from Africa to help them. By own abstinence he gathered food which he collected in his cell in the convent next to the port. The convent is now a museum and one of the few monasteries in Cartagena which resembles its former function. All the others are misused today and host, for example, luxury hotels, parts of the university or cultural institutions.
The convent of San Pedro Claver
The descendants of colonists, slaves and indios soon turned the residents of the city into a colorful bunch. In the 18th century, only 18% of the population was white, 8.7% slaves, 17.6% Indians and the rest of mixed race.
In 1851, the centralist unitary republic of New Granada, the state on the territory of future Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador and Peru, abolished slavery. Before, in 1821, the government of Gran Colombia had passed a law of emancipation, setting free the children born to slave mothers. At about the same time, the federal republic of Central America, on the territory of the future states of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the southern Mexican state of Chiapas abolished slavery.
The paradisiacal island of Roátan off Honduras
Slaves had been brought to Honduras to work in the mining industry. The first slaves arrived in 1542. 165 slaves came via Portugal and 150 from Santo Domingo. Most of the slaves coming to central America originally arrived from West Africa and Angola and might well have spent time in slave trading centers like St. Louis, the ile de Goerée or Cabo Verde.
Later, slaves arrived from French colonies in the Caribbean and from British colonies. In 1797, the British “exported” between 2,000 and 4,000 Black Caribs - mixture of Carib Indians and African Blacks - to the island of Roatán in Honduras, because they had rebelled against them. These Garifuna, as they called themselves, migrated along the coasts of all the Central American mainland trying to escape the prosecution they were subjected by the Spanish authorities.
Garifuna village close to Tela, Honduras
Segregated communities of these former slaves still live in villages along the coast of central America. In 1994 I made a trip to some of these villages outside the town of Tela in Honduras. It felt like arriving in anther world. While the men were working in vegetable and fruit gardens, women in colorful night gowns with curlers in their hair populated the streets. At their feet naked toddlers were playing in the mud of the road. It was such a peaceful, pastoral scene that I would have felt guilty to take pictures.
Campesino hut near Tela
It is remarkable that at a time, when many of the spanish former colonies already had abolished slavery, some of the so called “civilised“ and developed European countries like the Netherlands and the United States still stuck to it. In the Netherlands, this only applied to the colonies. Slaves who had been able to reach the cold and wet motherland had to be set free. So in the middle of the 19th century the southern United States were one of the few countries where slavery was permitted and it had to take a violent and long civil war to convince these states to abandon it.
Slavery in these states was wide-spread. Even an intellectual, learned and sophisticated leader as Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), one of the founding fathers and president of the United States, who openly argued against the slave trade, owned slaves himself. Their cottages can still be seen on his lovely country estate Monticello outside the town of Charlottesville, Virginia. From the 600 slaves owned by Jefferson during his life-time, he himself only set free 2. 7 more were set free after his death.
In the deep south of the US numerous plantations still give an impression how life was before the civil war ended slavery. Boone Hall plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina, has preserved some of the former slave cottages and turned them into a museum inside the museum. Descendents of the slaves perform a play about their ancestors. It can be assumed that life in the times of slavery by far was not as peaceful and quiet and the cottages as neat as today.
Boone hall plantation
A list on the wall names more than 800 slave trading ships which have arrived in Charleston between 1711 and 1858 with name of the captain and number of slaves on board. Most of the traders have English names. The British crown had banned slavery in 1833, long before 1858, and actively persecuted slave traders on the Atlantic, probably also to hinder economic development in the United States. So probably all the ships listed in the years after were American. The freed slaves were settled in Liberia.
The slaves and their descendants working on the plantations developed their own culture and language related to Creole called Gullah. Due to their isolation and separation from whites on the huge plantations the Gullah preserved lots of their african traditions. The Gullah culture stretches all along the coast from Jacksonville, Florida to Cape Fear, North Carolina.
Most of the plantation owners did not (and still don‘t) live on the plantation and had a luxury mansion in town and the historic centers of Charleston, Beaufort and Savannah owe their beauty to the wealth of these people. Little remains that reminds of the slaves, which, as house servants, made the life of luxury possible for their owners. Therefore the Aiken Rhett house is unique.
Aiken Rhett house, Charleston, North Carolina
Most of the historic mansions open for visitors in Charleston are renovated and in a perfect state. The exception is the Aiken Rhett house. It was built in 1820 by John Robinson and is the best preserved example of anti-bellum mansions in Charleston. Its next owner was William Aiken, the owner of the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company. Mr. Aiken was killed by the explosion of his first engine, the “best friend of Charleston”. The Aiken family owned the property for 142 years. In 1975 it was sold to the historical society.
The backyard of the Aiken Rhett house with the former slave quarters
Inside the slave quarters
The house preserves many original features and to maintain the impression, no restoration work was done. It is the last house in Charleston where the slave quarters are preserved although most of the time after the civil war they were used by servants. Even the outdoor toilets are still there. In 1850 only 7 slaves worked for the Aiken family in the house while in total they owned 858 slaves in the area. When the civil war broke out, 13 slaves lived in the house including 6 children.
It is difficult to understand that paradise on earth, Samosir island in Sumatra, was the last Dutch property to end slavery
The southern states grudgingly had to abolish slavery as result of the civil war but the consequences last to the day today. By that time Great Britain (1833), France (1848), Sweden (1847) and Denmark (1848) all had abolished slavery also in their colonies. Besides the United States, after that time only the Netherlands remained. The fact that the neighbors enabled them to be free tempted many slaves to flee. Good opportunities they had in places like Suriname in South America and the Island of St. Maarten, where the frontier was next door.
Samosir is inhabited by the christian Batak people
In 1863 slavery finally was abolished in the Dutch colonies. 33,000 got their freedom in Suriname, 12,000 in Curaçao and an unknown number in the East Indies. Slave owners received 300 guilders as compensation from the government, in St. Maarten 100 guilders. The free slaves were obliged to pay back that money to the government – by continuing to work for their former owners without pay for another 10 years. However, in some parts of the Dutch colonial empire slavery ended much later: 1877 on the island of Bali, 1910 on the island of Soembawa and finally in 1914 on the island of Samosir in lake Toba in Sumatra.
Rice fields on Samosir
Already when living on the island of Java Dirk van Hogendorp had owned 153 slaves. After he had emigrated to Brazil, van Hogendorp bought a plantation at the base of the Corcovado outside Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. He called it Nuovo Sion after the family estate in Rijswijk. He had coffee and orange trees and intended to export liquor to Europe. His financial records have survived and are shown in the exhibition in the Rijksmuseum. For the works on his plantation he hired workers from other plantations, but his books also show that he himself owned slaves. The slaves are also shown on paintings of his plantation house. Descriptions of visitors to his plantation are also preserved.
Merchants at a market in Santiago, Cabo Verde
Dirk van Hogendorp did not enjoy his plantation for a long time. In 1822 he died, 61 years old. After his death, during his funeral, it turned out that his entire body was tattooed in the polynesian style.
Fresh sausages at a market in Santiago
Sources:
Slavery, Rijksmuseum, 2021, Atlas contact
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