Illegal Slave Research Articles

The French Flag in Zanzibar Waters 1860s–1900s: Abolition and Imperial Rivalry in the Western Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT Between 1860 and 1900 British authorities repeatedly accused the French government of fostering the Indian Ocean illegal slave trade as France allowed dhows to fly her flag. This article intends to question the idea, still dominant in today's historiography, that the French flag was the key element explaining the persistence of the Indian Ocean slave trade and the failure of the British navy in stopping it. Using both British and French archives, this article confronts these arguments with new historical data. It will make clear that if dhows under the French flag played a substantial role in the Indian Ocean slave trade, they were far from being the crucial actor of this nefarious traffic. It also brings a new light on the history of the Indian Ocean slave trade and its abolition in showing the importance of British and French imperial preoccupations as well as its important impact on international law.

Masters, Apprentices, and Kidnappers

Although it was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850, labor-starved gold-rush California permitted employers to bind Native Americans as unfree leased convicts, minor custodial wards, debt peons, and, between 1860 and 1863, indentured servants or “apprentices.” As a key component of California's elaborate system of unfree Native American labor, Indian apprenticeship flourished for three years until its abolition during the Civil War in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. Little remembered today, much remains obscure regarding the essential details of Indian apprenticeship and the illegal slave trade that emerged to supply the considerable market demand for bound labor. This essay focuses on Humboldt County in northwestern California, where significant numbers of white residents made extensive use of Native American apprentices at the same time that many of their neighbors demanded—and began carrying out—the forced removal and outright extermination of local Indian peoples. Building on valuable data that the anthropologist Robert Heizer extracted in 1971 from the unique but now missing cache of over a hundred surviving indentures discovered in 1915 by the historian Owen C. Coy, this study offers two detailed group profiles of Humboldt County's white employers and their legally bound Native American workers. These collective portraits reveal the social, economic, and demographic compositions of frontier California's master and servant classes while simultaneously tracing both the rise and the fall of Indian apprenticeship within the violent racial context of Humboldt County during the gold rush and the Civil War.

Emma Christopher. Freedom in White and Black: A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy.

Emma Christopher. Freedom in White and Black: A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy.

Freedom in White and Black: A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy by Emma Christopher. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Pp. 328, $29.95 (pbk).

Freedom in White and Black: A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy by Emma Christopher. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Pp. 328, $29.95 (pbk). - Volume 57 Issue 2

Death records of anonymous Africans rescued from illegal slave ships and held at the House of Correction in Rio de Janeiro

Death records of anonymous Africans rescued from illegal slave ships and held at the House of Correction in Rio de Janeiro

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." by Zora Neale Hurston

Reviewed by: Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." by Zora Neale Hurston Randy J. Sparks Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." By Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Amistad, 2018. 208 pp. $24.99. ISBN 978-0-0627-4820-1. Once largely forgotten, Alabama native Zora Neale Hurston is now widely regarded as a "genius of the South," as writer Alice Walker put it, and her best-known works are now featured on college syllabi across the country. A new book by her is a major event, and Barracoon is sure to join Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) on any list of her most important works. The book grew out of a series of interviews she conducted in 1927 with Cudjo Lewis or Kossola, as he was known in his Yoruba homeland. Lewis was a survivor of the Clotilda, the last African slaver to arrive in the United States, which landed outside Mobile in 1860. When she completed the manuscript in 1931, Viking Press expressed interest, but only if she rewrote Cudjo's distinctive English to make it more palatable to white readers, something she refused to do. She shopped it around to other publishers, but none were willing to publish it without those revisions. As a result, the manuscript went unpublished and remained in Hurston's papers until now. There can be little doubt that Hurston was right to refuse those publishers' demands, for Lewis's voice is a powerful one and fundamental to the book's success. Lewis was not an easy subject—sometimes he was willing to talk, but other times he was more reticent, more interested in weeding [End Page 246] his garden than in taking questions from Hurston who bribed him with cured ham and other treats. His story is a remarkable one. Even though over twelve million Africans crossed the Atlantic as victims of the international slave trade, firsthand accounts of African captivity and the Middle Passage are extremely rare, making Lewis's narrative an invaluable historical document. He was captured during a bloody military conflict between the kingdom of Dahomey and the Isha, a small sub-group of the Yoruba to which he belonged. Once the Dahomey army captured his hometown, he and the other captives were marched to the coast and sold from the port of Ouidah, located on the Bight of Benin, a major entrepot in the illegal slave trade of the nineteenth century. United States shippers played an important role in that trade, but primarily in voyages to Cuba and Brazil. There are only thirty recorded voyages to the U.S. mainland from the closing of the trade in 1808 until 1860 when the Clotilda landed its human cargo. The expedition was the brainchild of the three Meaher brothers, Jim, Tim, and Burns, who operated a shipyard on the Alabama River, and a business associate, Captain William Foster, who was listed as the ship's owner. After a difficult voyage Foster arrived at Ouidah and negotiated for the purchase of 130 captives, equally divided between men and women, but he was forced to sail with only 116 onboard (the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database gives a lower number of 110 captives). He narrowly avoided capture by British naval cruisers and successfully crossed the Atlantic without a single loss of life. When the ship arrived in Mobile Bay, it sailed to an isolated located where it was burned and the captives were transferred to a steamboat and taken up the Alabama River to a plantation. (After years of searching, the remains of the ship were discovered in May 2019.) Some of the enslaved Africans were sold, the rest divided between the Meahers and Foster. According to Hurston, the Meahers were tried and convicted in federal court and fined for their role in the expedition, though in fact they and Foster were tried and acquitted. When Kossola, renamed Cudjo, and the other enslaved Africans learned that they had been freed in 1865, they dreamed of [End Page 247] returning to Africa, but lacked the means to do so. They demanded land from Meaher, who scoffed at that demand, but agreed to...

A Transatlantic Slavery Narrative: Work Sketches of a Nineteenth-Century Bristolian-Cuban Sugar Cane Plantation and President Barack Obama’s “Black Speech” in Cuba

After the Haitian Revolution in 1804, Cuba became the world’s largest producer of sugar and the United States its principal buyer. There was a close commercial relationship between Cuba and Bristol, Rhode Island, which supported an illegal slave trade for Bristolian-owned ingenios, or sugarcane plantations in Cuba.This paper examines two outstanding testimonial accounts in the context of that shared transatlantic slave trade spearheaded by the United States. George Howe, a Bristolian manager of an ingenio, wrote in 1833 a work diary that recorded select operational details performed by enslaved workers. Howe’s travelogue provides the critical foundations for a literature of the plantation, a discursive narrative that served him well to reflect upon the impact of enslaved workers as the true underpinnings of Ingenio New Hope. American travelers to Cuba also documented racialized cultural practices. In President Barack Obama’s public address as part of his official three-day visit beginning on March 20, 2016, which impacted ongoing negotiations surrounding the US embargo to Cuba, Obama spoke about the racial heritage shared by both countries and stemming from slavery practices. Obama not only referred to the convoluted diplomatic relationship between both countries, but he also highlighted an Atlantic, Pan-American racial legacy.Through a racialized narrative allusive to the impact of plantations, Obama set himself as an African-American, a hybrid identity through which he examined the colonial histories of both countries. The intertextual conversation between Howe's diary and Obama’s speech ultimately illustrates the latter’s own struggle with the negative heritage of a hideous slave trade.

Plagio y anacronismo deliberado en la novela antiesclavista cubana

Plagiarism—the crime of stealing a slave or kidnapping and enslaving a free person—was widespread in nineteenth-century Cuba, yet it has been completely neglected by literary scholars. When examined through the prism of plagiarism, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes (1882) and Francisco Calcagno’s Romualdo, uno de tantos (1891) allow us to perceive the anachronism and replaceability of bodies; that is, the experience of the long chain of deferrals, denials, and displacements required to treat some lives as disposable, according to the logic of globally asymmetrical structural inequalities. Plagiarism was simultaneously the concrete act of kidnapping a human being and the manifestation of an abstract economic process that endowed that body with value as both commodity and capital. As a socially constitutive vulnerability, this crime evinced the social prac-tices—including violence, the forgery of documents, hypocrisy, disavowal, and sheer indifference—that sought to deny certain lives the protections commonly associated with freedom and being from somewhere or having an origin. Both Cecilia Valdes and Romualdo pay close attention to these practices, showing how increasingly fundamental they were to eliding slaves’ past in the context of the illegal slave trade

We don’t recognize your freedom: Slavery, imperialism, and statelessness in the mid-nineteenth century Atlantic World

ABSTRACTThis article explores the stateless realities of the mid-nineteenth century Atlantic World through a case of illegal slave trading that occurred between the British colony of Trinidad and the newly independent Venezuela. The ideologies of abolitionism subscribed to by both the British and Venezuelans did not help the victims of the slave trade that persisted throughout the Atlantic World. This essay extends the narratives of chattel bondage into the mid-nineteenth century using this case study as a prosopographical example of Atlantic life in the Age of Emancipation. Doing so demonstrates that as long as states continued to make use of unfree labor, the Atlantic remained a world defined principally by its contested attitudes toward freedom and not the impact of the relationships between states. The result of these Atlantic-wide divergences was the existence of stateless individuals and groups who were neither protected nor influenced by empires or nation-states, and therefore existed primarily as subjects of the Atlantic World.

The British Empire and the Suppression of the Slave Trade to Brazil: A Global History Analysis

This essay examines the connections between the British free trade experiment, the reorganizing of the British Empire and the ultimate suppression of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil in its fully global operative context. While most analyses of the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade focus on bilateral diplomatic relations or national decision-making processes, this essay puts forth a broader analytical framework. It places the end of the transatlantic illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1850 within the dynamics of the world-economy. In a broader sense, this essay sheds new light on debates about capitalism and slavery as it reveals nineteenth-century capitalism not as a static background for historical analysis, but rather as a dialectical process moving through a sequence of disruptive commodity market integrations, each of which posed specific economic and political challenges for slaveholders and antislavery actors alike.

Innovation and entrepreneurship as strategies for success among Cuban-based firms in the late years of the transatlantic slave trade

This article examines how Cuban-based firms and entrepreneurs circumvented ever- increasing risks in the illegal slave trade. The article sheds light to this question by analyzing new qualitative information of 65 Cuban-based firms against the Slavevoyages database. Our findings indicate that Cuban-based firms were entrepreneurial as they exploited the opportunities arising from the volatility of the slave trade by: (a) internalizing networks of agents which allowed the rapid diffusion of information, (b) diversifying trading goods and expanding the number of partnerships to reduce transaction costs and risk, and (c) adopting technological innovations that modified the design and use of vessels.

Blind Justice: The United States's Failure to Curb the Illegal Slave Trade

On March 2, 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed a bill outlawing the African slave trade. Opponents of the traffic rejoiced that the bill was passed at almost the same time as a similar anti-slave-trade bill in Britain. As one Philadelphia newspaper put it, “Thus, will terminate, on the same day, in two countries of the civilized world, a traffic which has hitherto stained the history of all countries who made it a practice to deal in the barter ofhuman flesh.” Efforts to end the African slave trade in the British colonies of North America dated back to the 1760s, proceeded in fits and starts, and resulted from a wide range of motives. In contrast to Great Britain, the United States 1807 bill was not the result of a long, hard-won, popular abolition campaign. However, despite a series of laws intended to curb the trade, eventually making the United States laws the world's toughest, smugglers continued to bring enslaved Africans into the South after 1808, and, more significantly, American vessels played a crucial role in the massive illegal slave trade to Cuba and Brazil during the nineteenth century. The impact on the United States economy was not inconsequential, but even more important was the trade's impact on the Atlantic economy, fueling the rapid economic growth of Cuba and Brazil in the decades that followed.

Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett

Reviewed by: Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett Scott Heerman (bio) Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade. By Sharla M. Fett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 312. Cloth, $35.00.) Sharla Fett's splendid book on illegally enslaved Africans is at once readable and accessible, while making several key contributions to scholarship on slavery, the slave trade, and emancipation in the nineteenth century. The book will interest a wide cast of scholars and would be appropriate for advanced undergraduate students. Before a few years ago there was relatively little scholarship on the slave trade after its abolition took effect in 1808, and historians have actively been working to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Fett is one of them, and her most recent book helps fill a crucial one. The book offers a tight chronology, mostly between 1857 and 1861, and traces the experiences of roughly eighteen hundred captive African slaves on four vessels: the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota. All four vessels embarked from Africa and were intercepted on the high seas, whereupon the human cargo was detained in various U.S. ports and the [End Page 650] would-be slaves were returned to apprenticeship, and eventually freedom, in Liberia. While Fett's narrative and argument are confined to a handful of ships over a few short years, the book is anything but narrow. Fett uses this history to offer different ways to conceptualize slavery and freedom in the wider Atlantic world. First among these is her framework for understanding the captives' harrowing journey. During the nineteenth century, African shipmates like those on the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota were typically called "liberated Africans," or emancipados, to mark their movement from slavery to freedom. Yet Fett's story confounds this simple binary and offers a careful history of enslaved people's experiences after their capture, detention, and repatriation. Fett prefers the term "recaptured Africans," which emphasizes "the constraints of death and suffering, containment and racialization, that African shipmates endured" (4). With this conceptual innovation, Fett analyzes the liminal zone that recaptured Africans occupied, and brings a deep knowledge of slavery in West Africa to bear on the history of emancipation in the Americas. The result is an erudite transnational history of the complexities of human bondage and emancipation. A second key conceptual contribution is the way in which Fett's study of the slave trade informs the history of U.S. slavery. Often, historians separate the Atlantic trade in African captives from the history of plantation production in the U.S. South. Yet Fett convincingly shows that slave smuggling "exerted a significant impact on nineteenth-century U.S. public debates and popular culture" (6). She situates the politics of slavery globally, highlighting that the 1850s was a period when slavery retreated in newly independent Latin American nations and in the British and French Caribbean, while also seeing an unprecedented reinvention that birthed new plantation complexes in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. The simultaneous abolition and expansion of slavery shaped debates over race and racial hierarchy, which in turn propelled the rise of scientific racism and theories of polygenesis to justify the institution of slavery. By examining the experiences of these recaptive Africans, Fett unearths new dimensions of this history. She does the bulk of that work in chapters 2 and 3. First she looks at the slave trade tourism at Fort Sumter, which brought paying tourists into close contact with the recaptives. Next, in chapter 3, she offers a careful reading of print culture. Looking in particular at Harper's Weekly, De Bow's Review, and other prominent publications of the time, she shows how recaptives' experiences in detention provided fodder for proslavery ideologies. In this way it becomes evident that the politics of race and slavery went beyond the halls of Congress and the statements of lawmakers, into popular print and culture. [End Page 651] After opening chapters that set out the contours of the illegal slave trade after 1808, the second half of the book focuses on...

Circuits of wealth, circuits of sorrow: financing the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the age of suppression, 1850–66

AbstractSlave traders forced more than 1.65 million captive Africans aboard illegal transatlantic slave ships during the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the final phase of this brutal traffic, between 1850 and 1866. It argues that slave traders sustained their illicit industry, in large part, by strategically coordinating their financial arrangements against a rising tide of international suppression. One key tactic was for slave trade investors in the United States, Cuba, Africa, and Iberia to lower the risks of interdiction by joining forces and co-financing voyages. Another was to combine with an international cast of merchants and bankers, who helped them launder slave trade capital and transmit it to their distant allies. This capital was concealed within broader currents of global commerce, which was, in turn, spurred by the growth of free trade in the nineteenth century. These myriad alliances and capital flows undergirded the trade until its final extinction in the 1860s.

Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling by Benjamin N. Lawrance

Reviewed by: Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling by Benjamin N. Lawrance Craig Hollander (bio) Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. By Benjamin N. Lawrance. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. 376. Cloth, $85.00.) Many scholars are already familiar with the saga of the Africans from La Amistad. But don’t let such familiarity with the episode keep you from reading Benjamin N. Lawrance’s new book, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. Focusing on African child slaves, the book provides a fresh perspective on both the Amistad affair and the illegal African slave trade to Cuba during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With good reason, Lawrance takes issue with those who characterize the period as an “age of abolition.” On the contrary, he argues that it constituted “the beginning of an age of child enslavement” (7). In 1997, the superstar director Steven Spielberg released the film Amistad, which portrayed the ordeal of 53 African slaves who staged a successful insurrection onboard a Cuban slave ship called La Amistad in 1839. Although the Africans sought to sail the ship to Africa, they wound up near Long Island. They were detained in Connecticut and then subjected to a drawn-out legal battle for their liberty. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Africans, enabling 35 of them to journey back to Africa in 1842. Not surprisingly, Spielberg’s spotlight on the Amistad affair drew both popular and scholarly attention. David Brion Davis began his book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006) with a description of the famous revolt and the various legal issues surrounding it. And it was only a couple years ago that Marcus Rediker published The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, 2013). Lawrance recounts in Amistad’s Orphans the same narrative as previous works concerning the Amistad affair. And, at times, he tries to relitigate the case on behalf of the Africans (perhaps if only to demonstrate his exhaustive research into African dialects). For the most part, though, Lawrance’s book is only about the Amistad affair insofar as it produced sources about six children from Sierra Leone: Covey, Antonio, Ka’le, Te’me, Kag’ne, and Margru. Lawrance employs the extant information about these children—“Amistad’s orphans,” as he refers to them [End Page 846] collectively—to explore “the African child slave experience and [reevaluate] the centrality of child mobility to the massive illegal trafficking enterprise undergirding the nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic slave trade” (5). “With the requisite contextual information,” he assures, “the lives of Amistad’s orphans can, and do, speak to the broader experience of tens of thousands of others enslaved during the nineteenth century” (46). In Amistad’s Orphans, Lawrance asserts that the experience of African child slaves in the illegal slave trade has been “misunderstood” (5). He is being too generous. Few scholars have ever sought in earnest to understand whether African child slaves experienced the traffic differently than their adult counterparts. Yet children comprised a significant portion of the African slave trade (roughly one-fifth of the total number of captives). Moreover, the percentage of children in the traffic increased over time. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century—when the African slave trade to Cuba was purportedly illegal—children constituted more than a third of the total number of captives. Several scholars have suggested that this demographic shift must have resulted from a change on the supply (African) side. After all, wouldn’t most slave traders prefer to purchase adult males, rather than women and children? Not so, says Lawrance. “Slave children,” he contends, were “highly prized, specifically targeted, and exceptionally valuable investments” (29). The question, then, is why would traffickers want them? According to Lawrance, slave traders sought to purchase African children because they viewed child slaves as more “coercible” than adults— meaning that they were easier to enslave, more controllable, and less likely to rebel. It also stands to reason that such “coercibility” became more desirable during the illegal...

Alphonso Lisk-Carew: Imaging Sierra Leone through His Lens

In Freetown in Clarkson’s day—1792—the author gives two of the best contemporary views ... in the Freetown of 1894 one discovers the palpable dissimilitude between some of the pictures and the scenes they are said to represent. The author of the work before us declares that hardly anything has been done since Clarkson’s day and his word must stand, even if the sun has to be pressed into the service to give misleading photographs. Photographs never make mistakes ... but photographers may misrepresent! (Sierra Leone Weekly News 1894).

The Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil and the Dynamics of US Participation, 1831–1856

AbstractThis article explores the US contribution to the illegal transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and the tensions generated by this hemispheric connection in the mid-nineteenth century. It combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, based on diplomatic records and Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in order to assess the size and variety of forms of US participation in the traffic to Brazil. More generally, the article examines the tensions caused by the rise of abolitionism and the limits to the enforcement of anti-slave trade legislation in the free trade international environment that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars. By framing the attitudes of the US government within a broader Atlantic context, this work shows why certain forms of US participation in the contraband slave trade (such as providing US-built ships) became more predominant than others (such as directly financing and organising slave voyages) by the mid-nineteenth century.

Employing archaeology to (dis)entangle the nineteenth-century illegal slave trade on the Rio Pongo, Guinea

Archaeological research conducted on the Rio Pongo, Guinea, has explored the setting of the nineteenth century “illegal” slave trade and its consequences for the European, American, and African traders engaged in that commerce. Excavated material, coupled with mapping of archaeological features, is employed to investigate the degree to which the trading entities and the local residents were entangled in the Atlantic World that spanned four continents.

Afro-European trade in the Atlantic world: the western slave coast, c.1550-c.1885

From 1550 to colonial partition in the mid-1880s, trade was key to Afro-European relations on the western Slave Coast (the coastal areas of modern Togo and parts of what are now Ghana and Benin). This book looks at the commercial relations of two states which played a crucial role in the Atlantic slave trade as well as the trade in ivory and agricultural produce: Hula, known to European traders as Great or Grand Popo (now in Benin) and Ge, known as Little Popo (now in Togo). Situated between the Gold Coast to the west and the eastern Slave Coast to the east, this region was an important supplier of provisions for Europeans and the enslaved Africans they purchased. Also, due to its position in the lagoon system, it facilitated communication along the coast between the trading companies' headquarters on the western Gold Coast and their factories on the eastern Slave Coast, particularly at Ouidah, the Slave Coast's major slave port. In the 19th century, when the trade at more established ports was disrupted by the men-of-war of the British anti-slave trade squadron, the western Slave Coast became a hot-spot of illegal slave trading.Providing a detailed reconstruction of political and commercial developments in the western Slave coast, including the transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce, this book also reveals the region's position in the wider trans-Atlantic trade network and how cross-cultural partnerships were negotiated; the trade's impact on African coastal 'middlemen' communities; and the relative importance of local and global factors for the history of a region or community. Silke Strickrodt is Research Fellow in Colonial History, German Historical Institute London. She is co-editor (with Robin Law and Suzanne Schwarz) of Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (James Currey, 2013).

Marcus Rediker. The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom.

In his review of Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997), film critic Roger Ebert identified the film's chief weakness when he observed that “[i]t is too much about the law and not enough about the victims.” It is a shame that Spielberg did not have Marcus Rediker's moving account of the Amistad rebellion, which puts the focus where it always belonged: on the illegally enslaved Africans who rose up against their captors, won their freedom, and eventually returned to their homeland. While Spielberg found his drama inside the courtroom, Rediker demonstrates that the real drama took place elsewhere. The Africans come to life more fully in Rediker's gripping narrative than they ever did in Spielberg's dreary courtroom drama. Using the biographical information available for 44 of the 53 Africans on board the schooner, Rediker argues persuasively that “everything the rebels did, from the moment of enslavement to the moment of repatriation and afterward, was based to a large extent on their experiences in Africa before capture” (p. 21). The Africans were enslaved through a variety of means; some were captured in war, others were kidnapped, while others were enslaved because of crimes or debts. From near and far, slave traders brought captives to the barracoons owned by the Spaniard Pedro Blanco, one of the most notorious and successful slave traders on the West African coast in the 1830s. The captives came from at least nine different ethnic groups, but the Mende predominated, and that shared ethnicity along with the Poro Society, a secret society open to men in the Gallinas region from which most of the Africans originated, provided a basis for cooperation. Blanco sold them, along with hundreds of other captives, to Portuguese or Brazilian slavers on an illegal slave ship bound for Havana. The slavers landed them by night and hustled them into barracoons located right outside the city walls, and over the next few weeks they were sold to various buyers including the group who were loaded onto La Amistad for shipment to another part of the island.