Slave trade a disgrace regardless of the era

When the first slaves from West Africa were taken to Portugal, in August 1444, it marked a new phase in a trade as old as recorded history.

The entrepreneur responsible, the King of Portugal's brother, Henry the Navigator, could not have foreseen that he was opening a new chapter of the trade that would span more than four centuries, change Africa forever and cause misery to millions of innocent people.

Hugh Thomas is one of Britain's most celebrated historians. His Spanish Civil War is the definitive work on that bloody conflict and this book will be seen as having equal authority in its exhaustive study of its subject. The Slave Trade is made all the more powerful by Thomas' decision to avoid emotive rhetoric and instead present the damning and distasteful facts.

In 1444 Henry's boats were not looking for slaves, but for gold. When they failed to find any, they decided to kidnap more than 200 locals and sell them back home. Finding that such slaves were in demand, they returned and persuaded some African kings to start selling captives taken in internecine wars.

For many rich Europeans it became fashionable to have a black slave in the household. However, with Columbus' discovery of the New World in 1492, the Atlantic trade was raised to a new level. He was followed by Spanish and Portuguese colonisers. In January, 1511, Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, gave permission for 50 West African slaves to be sent to Hispaniola in the Caribbean. They were the first to be shipped to the Americas. He had been persuaded by a report declaring that 'one black slave was equal to that of four Indians'. The indigenous population simply could not stand the hard work and heat in the gold mines. Africans took longer to die.

Demand grew throughout the European nations' American colonies, as vast plantations were established growing coffee, cotton and most important of all, sugar.

The Portuguese and Spanish dominated the trade until the early 18th century, when British ships took centre stage. The Dutch and French also became heavily involved.

In West Africa, the trade was so widespread that some tribes gave up all other forms of commerce. They went deep into the interior to find captives, then marched them to the coast to be sold. They were sold to the European slave captains in exchange for many items, the most popular being printed cloth, cowrie shells (used as a form of currency in West Africa), iron bars and weapons.

Conditions on most slave ships were awful. Efforts to keep them clean with so many souls manacled together were difficult.

Says Thomas, 'The distant, but all the same vile, smell of vomit, sweat, stale urine and faeces wafting over the port concerned would let its citizens know that a slave ship had arrived.' The slaves were branded like cattle. A businessman from New England recalled seeing branding in the River Gallinas estuary, south of Sierra Leone, in 1817: 'Those white monsters, the French slavers, were branding them with a hot iron . . . I saw them brand a delicate female about 12 years old, I saw the smoke and I saw the flesh quiver, and turned away as I heard a suppressed scream.' The abolitionist movement began in Britain in the middle of the 18th Century. The most relentless of the early crusaders were the philanthropist Thomas Clarkson and the politician William Wilberforce. They met with stiff opposition, as did the abolitionists in all countries. The slave merchants of Liverpool, Nantes, New York, Rio and Havana, were fabulously rich and wanted to protect their wealth. They argued that the Africans were better off as slaves. As one merchant remarked slavery was a way of 'redeeming an unhappy people from inconceivable misery'.

Finally, in 1807, Wilberforce got Parliament to enact a bill abolishing the trade.

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British government 'embarked on one of the most moral foreign policies in British history, precisely intended to bring the slave trade to an end on a global scale'.

Other slaving nations eventually followed Britain's lead, sometimes only persuaded to change their ways by threat and use of force. Brazil and Spain, with its colony of Cuba, held out until 1870. By the time the Atlantic trade had ended, about 13 million slaves had been shipped from West Africa.

While the trade was abolished the practice of enslavement endured and as Thomas points out in a sobering epilogue, continues to this day.

It is fair up to a point to argue, as some historians do, that a person's actions should be judged within the context of his age, but that does not excuse slavery. From the very start, there were isolated voices of conscience, mainly from the church. The merchants, sitting in their posh drawing rooms in Europe, knew the torment they caused in the pursuit of wealth. Thomas is right when he concludes, 'The slave trade was a disgraceful business even if considered in relation to the other brutalities of the time.' The Slave trade by Hugh Thomas Papermac $130