Survivors were marched through the ‘doors of no return’ into the
While the traders had every interest in not killing or damaging their merchandise, they also wanted to make as much money as possible, packing them into holds and feeding them just corn, olive oil and water. The journeys were hellish, marked by unbearable suffering: an estimated 6–10 per cent, sometimes 20 per cent, died during the voyages – fifty days to Rio – mostly from gastroenteritis, but there were also many suicides, the bodies tossed to a ravening escort of sharks. ‘That ship with its intolerable stink, the lack of space, the continual cries and infinite woes of so many wretched people,’ recalled Friar Sorrento, an Italian Capuchin on such a voyage with 900 slaves in 1649, ‘appeared to be hell itself.’ This hell was intensified because Africans generally believed that to join their ancestors after death they had to die among their own, but death on a slave ship, thrown into the sea, meant their spirits could never rest, their souls lost.
On arrival, they were washed and oiled and given ginger and tobacco to overcome their sadness; they were then auctioned, with the rule that if they became ill within a fortnight, they could be returned. A further 3 per cent died at this stage. As few as 50 per cent of those attacked in that African raid started work.
Sugar plantations were labour-intensive, the work brutally hard, the loss of life demanding ever more slaves. It was often easier to work slaves to death and import more than to let them have families. Known like cattle as ‘self-moving goods’, enslaved Africans started work at eight years old. After eight hours in the fields, they toiled in the mills. Average life expectancy was twenty-five. One plantation manager recorded that 6 per cent of his slaves needed to be replaced annually. The women were constantly raped by prowling masters, sexual abuse being endemic, even essential, to the psychology and practice of slavery. Slave masters propagated the myth that slaves were promiscuous, but actually slaves often abstained by choice so as not to bring children into this life. Suicides were frequent, often by eating earth. Slave masters feared tribal solidarity would lead to rebellions, so they suppressed tribal and family connections, separating clans and renaming slaves as if they had not existed before.* Every enslaved person dreamed of liberation, if not revolt. Submission required the constant threat of violence. Planters deployed an array of punishments: the whip, the iron collar, the slow death by iron mask. Slavery could not be sustained without violence, and ultimately both the violence and profitability could not be justified to white planters without a sense of natural racial superiority that later became a pervasive ideology.
Back in a Europe benighted by the spreading religious war, the Habsburgs, led by Emperor Ferdinand, performed well, conquering northern Germany thanks to an irrepressible, mercurial and mysterious Czech warlord, Albrecht von Wallenstein. But the Habsburg victory destroyed the balance of power, while the meteoric Wallenstein threatened to overwhelm the uncharismatic Ferdinand, who cautiously dismissed him.
In 1628, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, Lion of the North, who had already taken Livonia (thus excluding Muscovy from the Baltic for a century), stormed into northern Germany with a small but superb army and turned the tide back towards the Protestants. Heralding the Swedish empire –
It was now that Garcia of Kongo appealed to the Dutch who, allied with France, put into action their
