SOURCE: “The Slave Trade and Abolition in Travel Literature,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 34, No. 2, April-June 1973, pp. 185-208.

[In the following essay, Heffernan surveys the depiction of the slave trade in travel literature by eighteenth-century white authors, which he argues provides greater insight into public opinion than does imaginative writing of the same period. Travel writing about Africa, he maintains, was a genre that shaped white attitudes toward blacks and provided the substance for pro- and anti-abolitionist arguments.]

Much has been written about the relationship between the anti-slavery poems, plays, and novels that appeared with extraordinary profusion in the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the abolition movement. Thomas Clarkson's history of the abolition movement contains a long bibliography of imaginative literature which aided the cause of abolition, and modern studies by Wylie Sypher, Hoxie Neal Fairchild, Eva Beatrice Dykes, N. Verle McCullough, and Richard M. Kain have unearthed, and studied in detail, all such examples of imaginative literature from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹

Only passing attention, however, has been paid the relationship between travel literature and the arguments both for and against abolition of the slave trade. Even a cursory survey of the travel literature reveals that much of the evidence used to support both sides of this controversy was drawn from travellers to Africa. Clarkson, himself, records in exacting detail the number of copies of travellers' accounts published by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. He notes, for example, that between January and February 1788, the Committee published three thousand copies each of Alexander Falconbridge's An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London, 1788) and John Newton's Thoughts on the Slave Trade (London, 1788).²

Clarkson also watched with great avidity for the arrival of travellers fresh from Africa, and employed many of them in giving evidence on the abolitionist side. Two Swedish travellers, one of whom was to play a prominent part in the Sierra Leone expedition, and both of whom were later to publish their travels, were sought out by Clarkson upon their arrival in England from Africa late in January 1788. Employed by the King of Sweden to go on a scientific expedition, Dr. Andrew Sparrman (professor of physics and inspector of the Royal Academy of Stockholm) and C. B. Wadstrom (chief director of the assay-office in Stockholm, and later author of an influential essay proposing the colonization of Sierra Leone) agreed to give testimony for Clarkson; Sparrman to do so before the privy council, Wadstrom before the privy council and the Commons. Chiefly, they aided him in proving the existence of a productive society in Africa, thus countering the claim of the slavers that the natives were mercifully being removed from a barbaric unproductive society, and were being civilized and made productive in the West Indies. Their contribution to abolition was summarized by Clarkson who wrote:

I had not long been with them before I perceived the great treasure I had found. They [Wadstrom and Sparrman] gave me many beautiful specimens of African produce. They showed me their journals, which they had regularly kept from day to day. In these I had the pleasure of seeing a number of circumstances minuted down, all relating to the Slave-trade, and even drawings on the same subject. I obtained a more accurate and satisfactory knowledge of the manners and customs of the Africans from these, than from all the persons put together whom I had yet seen. I was anxious, therefore, to take them before the committee of council, to which they were pleased to consent; and as Dr. Sparrman was to leave London in a few days, I procured him an introduction first. His evidence went to show, that the natives of Africa lived in a fruitful and luxuriant country, which supplied all their wants, and that they would be a happy people if it were not for the existence of the Slave-trade.³

Alexander Falconbridge's account of the slave trade was directly solicited by Clarkson. While gathering evidence for the abolitionists in Bristol, Clarkson had met Falconbridge, a ship's surgeon who had been on four voyages aboard a slaver on the coast of Africa; when asked by Clarkson to contribute information in support of abolition, Falconbridge readily agreed. Clarkson asked Falconbridge to accompany him on what might be called a fact-finding mission to Liverpool, the center of the slave trade in England, where Clarkson hoped to gain further evidence against the trade. Falconbridge, whom Clarkson describes as “an athletic-looking man,”⁴ not only acted as Clarkson's bodyguard, for Clarkson was threatened and insulted everywhere he went, but also supplied Clarkson with first-hand evidence against those who drew Clarkson into arguments about the trade. Falconbridge was persuaded by the Committee of the Abolition Society to write his account of the slave trade because “the facts and circumstances, which had taken place but a little time ago, were less liable to objections (inasmuch as they proved the present state of things) than those which had happened in earlier times.”⁵

Not all the travellers, however, were as cooperative as Falconbridge. Others appeared in behalf of the other side; among the travellers who appeared before the privy council or the Commons to give testimony in support of the slave trade were three whose accounts were published between 1780 and 1800: Robert Norris, a former captain in the trade whose Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee (London, 1789) was the most damaging book to the abolitionist cause; John Matthews, a former lieutenant in the Royal Navy turned slave trader whose A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone (London, 1788) contained, in addition to a description of that country based on information gathered during his residence there between 1783-87, an essay defending the slave trade; and Archibald Dalzel whose The History of Dahomey, An Inland Kingdom of Africa (London, 1793) was largely a compilation of materials from other sources chiefly Norris' travels, early works by Captain William Snelgrave, A New Account of Guinea and the Slave Trade (London, 1754), William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London, 1744), and an account written for Dalzel by Lionel Abson, Governor of Ouidah.⁶ While Dalzel's work is hostile to the Negro, and is an anti-abolition work, ironically it is the first history of a Negro nation; and, in this respect, is enlightened, recognizing as it does that African states do have histories.

Matthews and Norris appeared before the privy council as delegates from Liverpool in support of the slave trade; and, with Dalzel, the latter reappeared before the Commons. Norris' testimony was particularly irksome to Clarkson, not only because his book had created such a stir with its pictures of African brutality and cannibalism, but because Clarkson had met him in Liverpool shortly after Norris had finished his travels, had interviewed him five or six times “at his own house,” had read his travels, and had received evidence from him in support of abolition. Clarkson was so convinced from these interviews that Norris would give testimony for the abolitionists that he tried to persuade William Pitt, the prime minister, to summon him before the privy council then meeting to consider the effects of abolition. Discovering Norris was in London, Clarkson sought him out, only to receive a letter from Norris “full of flattery” which, while recognizing “the general force of [the abolitionists'] arguments,” and that “justice and humanity” were on the abolitionists' side, admitted that “he had found occasion to differ from me, since we had last parted, on particular points, and that he had therefore less reluctantly yielded to the call of becoming a delegate,—though notwithstanding he would gladly have declined the office if he could have done it with propriety.”⁷ Pitt, who by now had been persuaded to take the abolitionists' side, tried to weaken the force of Norris' testimony by spreading word that he had formerly given evidence for the abolitionists, so that when Norris later appeared again before the Commons, Clarkson records he could scarcely hold up his head, or look the abolitionists in the eye.

In content, African travel books include not only lurid descriptions of the conditions of the trade—the brutality of the slave ship, mortality among slaves and seamen, the debilitating effects of the trade on the morality of blacks and whites—but also discussions of such broader subjects as the character of the Negro, the nature of racial and cultural differences, and the concepts of primitivism and progressivism as they relate to different societies. The conditions aboard the slave ships, however, were cited by abolitionists more frequently than any other evil of the trade, since these obviously would excite public outrage against the conditions of the trade. Both Newton and Falconbridge had first-hand experience on the slave ships, and Clarkson had visited many of them. Yet the charges of these writers were denied in travel books written by such supporters of the trade as Robert Norris and William Snelgrave. Norris denounced such abolitionist authors as Newton and Falconbridge as “hireling scriblers, profligate common sailors, and the scum of the people”;⁸ and Norris called the publications of the abolitionists “gross mistatements of facts, and misrepresentation of characters.”⁹

The descriptions of the slave ships in abolitionist travel literature were also used to corroborate the abolitionists' testimony before the privy council and Commons. Clarkson described two ships' holds which he had seen and in which slaves were stacked in tiers on platforms allowing just three or four square feet for each slave.¹⁰ Clarkson's cross-examination of hostile witnesses revealed, “the height from the floor to the ceiling, within which space the bodies on the floor and those on the platforms lay, seldom exceeded five feet eight inches, and in some cases it did not exceed four feet.”¹¹ The single most effective piece of propaganda released by the Committee for Abolition was a print of the design of a slave ship which made “an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it.”¹² Clarkson records that the Bishop of Chartes once told him that he doubted the truth of the abolitionists' accounts of the horrors of the slave trade until he saw the print, after which “there was nothing so barbarous which might not readily be believed.”¹³

Falconbridge's travels confirm Clarkson's testimony and add to it an account of the physical suffering of the Negroes as seen by a medical man aboard the slave ships. Falconbridge complained that eight foot high barricades, erected around the ship to prevent suicides and to protect against the frequent rebellion of the slaves, excluded fresh air from the holds making the rooms intolerably hot. “The confined air, rendered noxious by the effluvia exhaled from their bodies, and by being repeatedly breathed, soon produces fevers and fluxes, which generally carries off great numbers of them.”¹⁴ Due to a lack of sanitary facilities in the holds, Falconbridge recorded “the deck, that is, the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter house.”¹⁵ Nor were these the only horrors of the scenes below the deck. As the ship rolled and pitched in the sea those Negroes lying on the floor

frequently have their skin, and even their flesh entirely rubbed off, by the motion of the ship, from the prominent parts of the shoulders, elbows, and hips, so as to render the bones in those parts quite bare. And some of them, by constantly lying in the blood and mucus, that had flowed from those afflicted with the flux … have their flesh much sooner rubbed off, than those who have only to contend with the mere friction of the ship. The excruciating pain which the poor sufferers feel from being obliged to continue in such a dreadful situation, frequently for several weeks, in case they happen to live so long, is not to be conceived or described. Few, indeed, are ever able to withstand the fatal effects of it. The utmost skill of the surgeon is here ineffectual.¹⁶

The abolitionists produced mortality figures to document their case against the unhealthy conditions on the slavers. Falconbridge cited one voyage during which 105 out of 380 died in the middle passage, a proportion which was not uncommon since sometimes “one half [to] two thirds and even beyond that have been known to perish.”¹⁷ Others confirmed Falconbridge's claim. A Captain Harry Gandy of Bristol claimed to have been aboard a slave ship in 1740 on which 90 of 190 slaves were killed during a mutiny, or thrown overboard afterwards. Captain Newton lost 62 of 218 slaves on a voyage to South Carolina. Anthony Benezet, the American abolitionist whose writings stirred Clarkson's interest in abolition, claimed that 30,000 slaves died annually among the British, either in the middle passage, or in the seasoning in the West Indies. In the Barbadoes alone, Benezet claimed that of the 35,000 slaves brought there annually, 12,000 died. Captains of slavers who had turned against the trade volunteered statistics: a Captain Morley lost 313 of 1325; a Captain Town 115 of 630; a Captain Claxton 132 of 250; and a Captain Withers lost 360 slaves or more than half his “cargo” from the smallpox. Clarkson set the mortality figures more conservatively at less than 12[frac12] per cent on the middle passage, and 4[frac12] per cent in the harbors, but computed that within two years not half survived the seasoning.¹⁸

Falconbridge's portrait of the slave ship describes other kinds of cruelty, confirmed by other abolitionist writers, which was inflicted on the Negroes. His description of the shackles placed on the Negroes and used to confine them in groups of fifty or sixty is confirmed by Dr. Trotter's testimony before the Commons, which described the men being secured on deck by a large chain “run through a ring in their shackles,”¹⁹ and being forced to jump in their chain for exercise, a practice called “dancing” by the slaves. The practice of chaining the slaves was so odious to John Newton that he later, in his autobiography, An Authentic Narrative (London, 1764), described himself as “a sort of gaoler or turnkey and I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts and shackles.”²⁰

Falconbridge's claim that aboard some ships “common sailors are allowed to have intercourse with such of the black women whose consent they can procure,” and that “officers are permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure,”²¹ is corroborated by an entry dated January 31, 1753 in Newton's journal kept aboard the slave ship African, an entry which demonstrates, paradoxically, both Newton's humanity, and, in its concluding remark, his gradual brutalization by the trade:

William Cooney seduced a woman slave down into the room and lay with her brutelike in view of the whole quarter deck, for which I put him in irons. I hope this has been the first affair of the kind on board and I am determined to keep them quiet if possible. If anything happens to the woman I shall impute it to him, for she was big with child. Her number is 83. …²²

Most of the charges of cruelty were denied by the anti-abolitionist writers. They claimed that neither the Captain of a slaver nor a West Indian planter was likely to risk the destruction of his own property by acts of cruelty. Snelgrave's account of the slave ship admitted frequent mutinies occasioned by “ill usage” from the sailors, but he argued it was more often due to the Negroes' fear of being eaten by the white men who had bought them. Once out of sight of land where the danger of mutiny was lessened, aboard Snelgrave's ship the Negroes' chains were removed and they were allowed on deck from morning until sundown.²³

Norris, on the other hand, admitted none of the atrocities the abolitionists described. His travel book, with its appendaged defense of slavery, scarcely mentions the details of the slave ship, except to claim that the ships employed in the trade were specially constructed “for the accommodations of the Negroes,” and that “every possible attention [was] paid to their health, cleanliness and convenience,” even making the captain's cabin available to the sick.²⁴ Clarkson recorded Norris' testimony before the privy council and Commons in which, according to Clarkson, Norris “painted the accommodations on board a slave-ship in the most glowing colours.” Their rooms were “luxurious, … fitted up as advantageously as circumstances could possible admit,” and their “apartments were perfumed [daily] with frankincense and lime-juice.”²⁵ In his travels, Norris denied that the punishment meted out to slaves was not justifiable. “If a Negro is slothful or flagitious,” Norris wrote, “he is like rascals and drones of society in every well regulated community, poor and miserable; and subject to correction, as a punishment for his own vices, and for the instruction of others.”²⁶

The anti-abolitionists did not content themselves merely with answering these charges about the conditions of the trade; rather they sought to justify the trade and the reported high mortality rates among the slaves by positive arguments. For example, they contended that the slave ships acted as a nursery for English seamen,²⁷ and thereby insured the continuance of British supremacy on the seas. It was argued that abolition would weaken both the strength of the navy and the mercantile interests of the nation which depended on trained seamen.

However, this claim was challenged by the abolitionists who proved conclusively that the mortality rates among British seamen was so high that England was actually losing trained seamen as a result of the trade. When Archibald Dalzel claimed in his testimony that mortality among seamen was not high, he was publicly embarrassed in cross-examination by Thomas Clarkson who had checked the muster-rolls of Dalzel's and other ships. “He confessed with trembling, that he had lost a third of his sailors in his last voyage.”²⁸

Clarkson's examination of the muster-rolls of slave ships leaving British ports revealed that half the seamen who went out failed to return, and that one-fifth of the crews died during the voyage, a figure which was repeated by John Newton.²⁹ Between 1784 and 1790, 350 slave vessels carrying 12,263 seamen left British ports. Of these crews, 2,643 died during the voyages and only 5,760 seamen returned to their home ports.³⁰ Falconbridge, who noted the absence of apprentices on the ships, wrote that many ships were unable to leave the West Indies for want of crew members, and concluded, “this trade may justly be denominated the grave of seamen.”³¹ So widely publicized were these mortality figures, that the image of Africa as “the white man's grave,” with its unhealthy climate, began to emerge during the abolitionist controversy.

The chief claim of the pro-slavery faction was that slavery was a merciful act, removing the Negro, as it did, from barbarism, and introducing him to Christianity and an enlightened way of life. Since it was an accepted myth that the unhealthy tropical environment made labor impossible for whites, but not for Negroes, the argument from necessity was used to prove that slavery was part of a divine plan for the conversion of Africans to Christianity. Archibald Dalzel wrote that, “Asiatic pomp, and European necessity for labourers enured to a tropical sun, appear to have been the only effectual instruments of mercy, the only means whereby the lives of many of those unfortunate people have been saved.”³² Furthermore, slaves, so the argument went, were happier in the state of slavery in the West Indies than with freedom in their native lands, and as proof, pro-slavery advocates reported that planters often effectively threatened unmanageable Negroes with return to Africa.³³

Slavery was merciful in other respects as well. Oddly the current of benevolence in England was appealed to when it was claimed that slavery rescued the inhabitants from tyrannical rulers who not only exercised despotic powers over the Africans, but who often wantonly killed them; instead, slavery delivered them into the “cherishing hands of Christian masters.”³⁴ Also, slavery prevented overpopulation and ultimate starvation in Africa. While in Jaqueen in 1727, Captain William Snelgrave records receiving a letter from a Captain Dagge of the slave ship Italian, who wrote Snelgrave of his success in obtaining slaves in Ouidah where “the People being in a starving Condition, [are] obliged to sell their Servants and Children for Money and Goods to buy Food.”³⁵ This last argument was based on the notion that polygamy was responsible for Africa's populousness, and that Africa could, “not only continue supplying all the demands that offer for her surplus inhabitants, in the quantities it has hitherto done, but, if necessity required it, could spare thousands, nay millions more, to the end of time, all of whom may be considered as rescued by this means from that certain death, which awaited them in their own country.”³⁶ Clarkson answered the argument that slavery was merciful with an ironic question, “How many have pined to death, that, even at the expence of their lives, they might fly from your benevolence?”³⁷ John Atkins, who had seen conditions both in Africa and the West Indies, also rejected the argument. He found the conditions in the West Indies worse than those from which Africans had been transported, for in Africa, “they get Ease with their spare diet,” but in the West Indies, “they get the brown Bread without the Gospel.”³⁸

As part of the argument from benevolence, claims and counter-claims about the methods of obtaining slaves were made. Snelgrave listed four ways in which a freeborn Negro might become a slave: by being made a prisoner of war, as punishment for a crime, as a result of debt, or by being sold into slavery by one's parents. Anti-abolitionists claimed that most slaves were prisoners of war, and that slavery rescued them from certain execution at the hands of their blood-thirsty captors: Norris in his Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee drew a picture of the kinds of mass-executions and bloody human sacrifices from which slavery reprieved captured Africans. His description of these sacrifices, resulting from the conquest of Ouidah (“Whydah”) by Dahomey challenged Atkin's claim that the Dahomian king wished to put an end to the slave trade; instead Norris' description concludes, “the conquest of it [Ouidah], by the king of Dahomey, has diminished the traffic in slaves; not by the substitution of one more innocent, but by a carnage, and depopulation, the most horrible that ever occurred, perhaps, in the history of mankind.”³⁹ When Norris repeated his narration before the privy council, Clarkson described his testimony as “most frightful.”⁴⁰

The most conclusive argument that such prisoners would be executed, were it not for the slave trade, was offered in Archibald Dalzel's History of Dahomey in which he related a speech by Adahoonzou, who became king of Dahomey after 1774, to Lionel Abson, then governor of Ouidah; the speech answers the charge made by abolitionists that such wars were incited by Europeans for the purpose of procuring slaves. The abolitionists, for example, had called such wars “a monster of British growth, transported thither by avarice.”⁴¹ Benezet wrote that white slave traders furnished Negroes with “prodigious quantities of ammunition and arms,” and have thereby “incited them to make war one upon another”;⁴² and Alexander Falconbridge observed that enmity among Negroes had been fostered by white men, and “all social intercourse destroyed,”⁴³ in order to procure slaves. But the speech of Adahoonzou laid to rest these arguments for most of the British public. “In the name of my ancestors and myself,” the king swore,

no Dahomian ever embarked in war merely for the sake of procuring wherewithal to purchase your commodities. I, who have not been long master of this country, have without thinking of the market, killed many thousands, and I shall kill many thousands more. When policy or justice required that men be put to death, neither silk, nor coral, nor brandy, nor cowries, can be accepted as substitutes for the blood that ought to be spilt for example sake. Besides, if white men chuse to remain at home, and no longer visit this country for the same purpose that has usually brought them hither, will black men cease to make war? I answer, by no means. And if there be no ships to receive their captives, what will become of them? I answer for you, they will be put to death.⁴⁴

After reading this speech, the reviewer in the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1796 predicted that “If the speech of King Aduhoonzon [sic] to the present governor of Whydah does not exculpate Europeans from the horrid charge of exciting war to get slaves, we despair of convincing the advocates for the abolition of the slave trade.”⁴⁵ However, Falconbridge's travels offered proof to contradict Norris. At Bonny on the West Coast, Falconbridge had observed that during a three year suspension of the trade, when England was at war with France, the only bad effect of the suspension was the poverty of black traders. “It was a very bad thing,” one black merchant had complained to Falconbridge, for the temporary suspension of the trade was “making us traders poorer, and obliging us to work for our maintenance.”⁴⁶

The legal case for slavery resulting from war was based on Locke's notion of a just war. “Captives taken in a just and lawful war,” Locke had written, “are subject to a despotical power”;⁴⁷ thus, the despotic King of Dahomey was free to sell his captives to the English. Benezet rejected the applicability of Locke's ideas to African slavery on two grounds: first, Africans participated in war involuntarily, following their commander under pain of death; secondly, even in a just war, once the war was over, the conqueror had no right to deprive prisoners of their liberty, or “sell them for Slaves for Life.”⁴⁸ In Oroonoko, Aphra Behn has Oroonoko, or as he is called in the West Indies, Caesar, deliver an impassioned speech to his fellow slaves against slavery, since those who are now their masters were not their conquerors: “And why,” said he, “my dear friends and fellow-sufferers, would we be slaves to an unknown people? Have they vanquished us nobly in fight? Have they won us in honourable battle? And are we by the chance of war become their slaves? This would not anger a noble heart; this would not animate a soldier's soul. No, but we are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools and cowards.”⁴⁹

Most abolitionists rejected out of hand their opponents' contention that the bulk of slaves purchased were prisoners of war; rather they contended that most slaves had been kidnapped either by marauding black traders, or were “panyared,” i.e. forcibly taken aboard a Guineaman, by some unscrupulous captain. Falconbridge, as surgeon of a slave ship, did not observe among those who it was claimed were prisoners of war, the least sign of any one's having been recently wounded,⁵⁰ and Nicholas Owen, an Irish sailor who settled near Sierra Leone as an independent trader from 1757 until his death in 1759, recorded in his daily journal instances of kidnapping along this section of the Guinea Coast.⁵¹

Another strong argument for the continuance of the slave trade was based on its commercial value. Norris, for example, pointed out that Britain's economic well-being depended on the continuance of the slave trade. He assessed the annual value of slave labor in the West Indies at five million pounds annually, of which one and one-half million formed part of England's annual revenue. One thousand ships and fifteen thousand sailors were involved in the African trade, while Africa and the West Indies consumed the value of three million in domestic manufactures. Norris warned of the “fatal consequences that would inevitably ensue from a check given to this extensive commerce.”⁵²

But Clarkson had carefully examined the dock duties at Liverpool, and he had found that in 1772 when a hundred vessels sailed for the coast of Africa, the duties amounted to £4552, and that in 1779 during a war when only eleven vessels were engaged in the slave trade, the duties rose to £4957. He concluded that neither the West Indies, nor Liverpool had been affected by what he termed “a practical experiment with respect to abolition.”⁵³ Both David Hume and Adam Smith also rejected the idea that slavery was economically beneficial. Both argued that free labor would always be more productive than slave labor, because free men were always more ambitious.⁵⁴

It did not require special training in economics to see that the South Atlantic system of transporting slaves was wasteful; consequently, there was a great deal of discussion, in the final decades of the century, about establishing plantations in Africa itself as a way of stimulating an effective economy in Africa. There had been some minor experimentation along these lines already, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with the growing of indigo on Bence Island near Sierra Leone and of corn on the Gold Coast for the supply of slave ships.

Joseph Corry's scheme for colonizing the interior of Africa combined both the new theory of economic development and the idea that Africa could develop its own plantations. Corry's aims were threefold: 1) to maintain England's ascendancy in Africa; 2) to extend her commerce by drawing upon the resources of the interior of Africa; 3) to improve the natives. While Corry claimed to be a “zealous advocate of the radical abolition of the slavery of mankind,”⁵⁵ he was opposed to any legislative act which would immediately abolish slavery. Corry accepted the notion that great bloodshed in Africa would follow such abolition, and to avoid this, “the intellectual powers of the people [must be] improved by civilization.”⁵⁶

Corry proposed establishing a colony on the West Coast of Africa, preferably at Bence Island, to be worked by slave labor brought from the interior. Corry accepted the myth that laborious work was harmful to whites in a tropical environment, but not to natives. He suggested that children aged 5-7 be purchased and given an education which would include “letters, religion and science [and would be] adapted to the useful purposes of life.”⁵⁷ Upon completion of their education, they were to be returned to their countries and “employed as agents”⁵⁸ to disseminate the values of civilization. Corry foresaw that the end of the slave trade was imminent, and concerned about French influence in Africa, he warned his English contemporaries that the fate of “one-fourth of the habitable globe and its infinite resources”⁵⁹ hung in the balance. “Let example first encite their admiration,” Corry wrote, “and their barbarism will bow before the arts of civilization, and slavery will be gradually abolished.”⁶⁰

Even the most rabid anti-abolitionists accepted the idea of the civilizing influence of commerce on the African. Norris wrote of Ouidah and other “maritime states,” that “in proportion as these states became improved in civilization, and addicted to agriculture and trade, they declined from their ancient ferocity of temper: they had grown voluptuous and effeminate, and lost every spark of martial fire.”⁶¹ There is, paradoxically, in Norris and other travel writers a recognition of a loss of something in civilizing the natives—a simultaneous progressive view of history, seen in the assumed superiority of European culture, and a primitivism evident in the acknowledgement of the corrupting influence of luxury. The same ambivalence is evident forty years earlier in the travels of John Lindsay. Lindsay, writing early in the century when Africa still allured travellers with prospects of abundant gold mines in the interior, believed that the most effectual way of getting gold out of the mines was through trade which would civilize the natives. Lindsay could not help but acknowledge “an unfairness in endeavouring to debauch a hardy people with effeminacy.”⁶² Copying the English and learning to desire conveniences “they knew not before, they must of course grow more polish'd,”⁶³ and must work harder to get more gold; thus, inevitably, the gold mines would be opened to Europeans.

It is rather obvious then that the abolition question and conflicting opinions about Africans in travel books raised important questions about the place of the African in the scheme of nature: was he a noble savage, or a cruel barbarian? What was the origin and significance of his color? Was his character distinct from that of the European, and if such differences existed, were they caused by his environment, or were they essential to his race? Answers to these and other questions like them could, of course, only be theoretical, but travel literature helped give these answers an empirical base, and a pretext for claiming a pseudo-scientific authority. Throughout most of the century, however, an open-mindedness prevailed, i.e., until the decades of the abolition controversy when self-interest and positiveness led to biased reports and these, in turn, to the beginnings of racial prejudice at home.

At one extreme, some thought the Negro to be a noble savage, but as both Hoxie Fairchild and Wylie Sypher have pointed out, this belief was not at first accepted. Sir John Hawkins and other early explorers thought nothing of selling Negro slaves in the West Indies, while at the same time considering the Indians as ennobled creatures. It is only afterward, toward the close of the seventeenth, and in the early eighteenth centuries, that the Negro came to be regarded as a noble savage according to Fairchild's definition of the term: “any free and wild being who draws directly from nature virtues which raise doubts as to the value of civilization.”⁶⁴ At first, however, this ennobling of the Negro was largely due to confusion about the identity of Negroes and Indians. Pope's often cited couplets from “Windsor Forest” on slavery: “O stretch thy reign, fair Peace! from shore to shore, / Till Conquest cease, and slavery be no more; / Till the free Indians in their native groves / Reap their own fruits, and woo their sable loves” (407-10), illustrate this confusion, as does a passage in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko in which a humane planter describes the virtues of modesty and innocence in the Negro:

And though they are all thus naked, if one lives for ever among ‘em, there is not to be seen an undecent action, or glance: and being continually us'd to see one another so unadorn'd, so like our first parents before the fall, it seems as if they had no wishes, there being nothing to heighten curiosity; but all of you can see, you see at once, and every moment see; and where there is no novelty, there can be no curiosity. Not but I have seen a handsome young Indian, dying for love of a very beautiful young Indian maid; but all his courtship was, to fold his arms, pursue her with his eyes, and sighs were all his language: whilst she, as if no such lover were present, or rather as if she desired none such, carefully guarded her eyes from beholding him; and never approach'd him, but she look'd down with all the blushing modesty I have seen in the most severe and cautious of our world. And these people represented to me an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin.⁶⁵

Benezet thought the confusion in racial identity between the Negro and the Indian degrading to the Negro. Using the accepted means of evaluating societies, he argued that Indians were nomadic, hence inferior and less capable of being civilized than Negroes who lived in an agrarian society. “The Natural Disposition of the Generality of the Negroes,” he concluded, “is widely different from the roving Dispositions of our Indians.” Clarkson, too, noted the Indians' “unbending ferocity,” in contrast to the Negro's “softness, and plasticity, and pliability.”⁶⁶

From favorable reports of travellers, certain stock Negro traits began to emerge, particularly as these reports were absorbed and interpreted by philosophers and other men of letters; such characteristics, for example, as courage, hospitality, stoicism, respect for the aged, compassion for the unfortunate, filial reverence, benevolence, and love⁶⁷ helped eulogize the Negro as a noble savage. William Smith's travels, for example, presented the proposition upon which much of this noble savagery was based. Citing the superiority of natural law over human law, Smith wrote: “Whether it is better to be a Negro in Morality or a European with me is easily decided. A Guinean by treading in the Paths prescrib'd him by his Ancestors, Paths natural, pleasant and diverting, is in the plain Road to be a good and happy Man; but the European has sought so many Inventions, and has endeavour'd to put so many Restrictions upon Nature, that it would be next to a Miracle if he were either happy or good.”⁶⁸

At the other extreme, however, were the anti-abolitionist travel books which recorded only the barbarism of the Negro. The most graphic accounts of African barbarity came from those who wrote about the kingdom of Dahomey, viz., Norris, Dalzel, and Snelgrave. Each focused his attention on the destructive wars, on the extensive human sacrifice, and on reported cannibalism, although none of these travellers actually witnessed cannibalism being practiced. Snelgrave who visited the country of Ouidah in 1727, shortly after its conquest by the Dahomians, described the fields being strewn with the bones of the slaughtered prisoners of war. Both Norris and Dalzel, who it will be remembered argued that slavery rescued such prisoners from certain death, contended that as a result of this war the traffic in slaves amounted to less than a fourth of what it had been.⁶⁹ Norris, borrowing his description of the formerly prosperous and populous maritime kingdom of Ardrah from Smith's travels, and the account by Dutch traveller William Bosman, contrasted the kingdom's industriousness in the past with its present desolateness after the destructive war with Dahomey: “The elysium had vanished; the fields lay uncultured, overrun with weeds, and strewed with human skeletons; and the very air of the place was impoisoned with exhalations pestiferous to the lives of European visitors.”⁷⁰ The final impression left by these travellers was one of a barbaric despot triumphing over an African civilization enlightened by contact with Europeans. Such a description rejected the abolitionists' contention that the barbarism of the Negro was a result of the slave trade; rather, the civilization of Ardrah, Norris implied, was built upon the slave trade, and was destroyed by a naturally barbarous people who had no former contact with the trade.

Norris visited the Dahomian king, Bossa Ahádee, in 1772 and 1773 at a time when annual ritualistic sacrifices were being performed in honor of their ancestors, sacrifices which Norris contended involved not only the murder of humans, but also cannibalism. His descriptions of the king's palace and of the ceremonies helped contribute to the hardening of reaction against abolition in the 90's. Like Snelgrave before him, he was shocked to find the numbers of human skulls placed atop stakes and used to adorn the palace; at the door itself, he noted on each side “a human head, recently cut off, lying on a flat stone, with the face down, and the bloody end of the neck toward the entrance.”⁷¹ Snelgrave had recorded heaps of human skulls gathered to build a monument, and palace guards adorned with long necklaces of human teeth.

Such shocking details were repeated on page after page, as Norris sought to rebut point for point the abolitionists' contention that the debasement of the African was the result of the conditions of the slave ship and West Indian plantation life. Norris was overwhelmed by “an insupportable stench” from the bodies of those who had been sacrificed earlier; he describes the air thick with flies, vultures eating the carcasses, and mutilated bodies hanging from gibbets.⁷²

But the stories which outraged the eighteenth-century audiences most were the tales of cannibalism. Norris described the conclusion of the Dahomian ceremonies which, he was careful to explain, was never witnessed by the whites. The ceremony consisted of throwing from a stage into a crowd “a man tied neck and heels, an alligator muzzled, and a couple of pigeons,” which were then torn to pieces by the crowd. Whoever carried off the heads of the victims was rewarded. “If report may be credited,” Norris concluded, “the carcase of the human victim is almost wholly devoured, as all the mob below will have a taste of it.”⁷³

Snelgrave described a similar ceremony in which “the Head of the Victim was for the King; the Blood for the Fetiche [Fetish], or God; and the Body for the common People.”⁷⁴ While Snelgrave admitted depending upon the king's translator for proof that the common people took away the sacrificed bodies and “boiled and feasted on them, as holy Food,” he asserted with assurance the truth of an anecdote he had from a surgeon aboard a slave ship, that he had seen “human Flesh sold publicly in the great Marketplace [in Ouidah].”⁷⁵ That these anecdotes must have been generally accepted as true in England, is attested to by James Bruce, normally skeptical of African anecdotes, who repeated with confidence that cannibalism and devil worship were widely practiced over Africa until the beginning of the slave trade.⁷⁶

The only traveller who recorded serious doubts about cannibalism was John Atkins who claimed, “this Man-Eating must be an Imposition on the Credulity of the Whites.”⁷⁷ Atkins neither accepted Snelgrave's argument that human sacrifices were barbaric, nor acknowledged that such sacrifices inevitably led to cannibalism; Atkins cited the practice of human sacrifice recorded in scripture to refute the charge of barbarism; and noted, furthermore, that cannibalism was not practiced on Bullfinch Lambe, an Englishman who was a captive of the Dahomians. Atkins concluded that “the [only] true Anthropophagi are the diverse Insects infesting us in diverse countries.”⁷⁸ With amusement, Atkins dismissed most stories of cannibalism with an anecdote from a French travel book which boasted, with a strange kind of chauvinism, that Indians living on the American-Canadian border were partial to “the Flesh of a Frenchman as of finer Taste than that of an Englishman.”⁷⁹

While Atkins dismissed Snelgrave's and other traders' reports as biased, asserting that he doubted if such a practice as cannibalism existed “on the face of the Earth,” he did acknowledge belief in ritualistic cannibalism, as an expression of “intense Malice against a particular Enemy, and in terrorem,” or as a way to conclude “with a Bond of Secrecy some very wicked Societies of Men.” Snelgrave, himself, had attested to the extreme terror the idea of being eaten held for the Dahomians' enemies.⁸⁰

Dalzel's history began where Norris' had left off. He described the continuation of similar practices into the reign of Bossa Ahádee's son, Adahoonzou. Dalzel's narrative included one scene where Adahoonzou displayed with pleasure the shrunken head of an enemy, and another in which Adahoonzou demonstrated, for the benefit of his executioners, the proper methods of cutting off prisoners' heads.⁸¹ All this, Dalzel pointed out, was the more surprising because prior to coming to power, Adahoonzou had shown some revulsion toward the cruel practices of his father.

The cumulative effect of the horrid details narrated by Norris and Dalzel was to leave in their readers' minds no doubt about the Negro's barbarism; and ultimately, of course, to condone enslaving those who did not feel the loss of liberty. This last point, which denied any sensibility to the Negro, was emphasized by Norris and repeated by Anna Maria Falconbridge.⁸² The reputed benevolence of the Negro toward the white man was also dismissed as mere self-interest, and the virtue of strong filial attachments, for which the Negro was noted, was challenged⁸³ by Norris who claimed that principles of state in Dahomey required mothers to give up their children to be raised by others, so children would know no other attachment than to the king. While there was no attempt, in these travel books which were hostile to Negroes, to assert that the Negro was not fully a human being, his customs which broke many European social taboos, marked him as different, as barbaric. The Negro, himself, was made to condemn any attempt to impose European standards on his behavior. Dalzel recorded a speech of Adahoonzou's which claimed that humanitarian whites did not understand “blacks, whose disposition differs as much from that of the whites, as their colour. The same Great Being formed both; and since it hath seemed convenient for him to distinguish mankind by opposite complections, it is a fair conclusion to presume, that there may be as great a disagreement in the qualities of their minds.”⁸⁴

While the anti-abolitionists were denying that the Negro had any sensibility, abolitionists were making him into a genuine man of feeling. Both the Negro's sense of pity and his benevolence toward others, as well as his ability to feel pain, were documented not only to show he was the moral and intellectual equal of the white man, but also to show his sensitivity to slavery. Thus Benezet both asserted that the Negro had “the same natural affections” as well as the same susceptibility to “pain and grief” as whites.⁸⁵ African poetry was often printed in magazines to prove the former.⁸⁶ Clarkson, for example, pointed to the writings of Phillis Wheatly and Ignatius Sancho as examples of Negro sensibility.⁸⁷ Defoe characterized the Negro as a man of feeling in Robert Drury's Journal, a portrait probably drawn from many such examples in African travel books:

the best character I could give myself to recommend me to my wife's mother was, that I had as tender a heart as a black; for they certainly treat one another with more humanity than we do. Here is no one miserable, if it is in the power of his neighbours to help him. Here is love, tenderness, and generosity which might shame us; and moral honesty too.⁸⁸

Of the latter, the Negro's ability to feel the pains of slavery, there are numerous instances in Alexander Falconbridge's travels. He records the frequency of suicide among the Negroes, and mentions incidents in which Negroes went insane when they realized they were being sold. He saw, for example, a woman chained to a post outside a trader's door “in a state of furious insanity,” and described another young woman “chained to the deck, who had lost her senses soon after she was purchased.”⁸⁹ The point of these examples was, of course, that the Negro could scarcely lose what his detractors claimed he never had.

In their attempts to defend the Negro from racial prejudice, abolitionists drew upon contradictory systems of thought. As primitivists, they argued that the Negro was the intellectual equal, and perhaps the moral superior of the white man, but, as progressivists, they acknowledged that he had been denied the advantages of enlightenment. The most often cited explanation for African barbarism, for example, contended that the African “barbarian” was similar to the Anglo-Saxon barbarian; that is, due to geographic isolation, wars, and climate, Africa's development had been retarded, and the African, rather than being inherently inferior, was simply representative of an earlier culture. Such a view drew upon two basic presumptions of eighteenth-century thought, viz., that all men are everywhere essentially the same, and that the history of nations can be viewed as a progression upward. Thus, in his speech for abolition before the Commons, Pitt offered his analysis of African “backwardness”:

We were once as obscure among the nations of the earth, as savage in our manners, as debased in our morals, as degraded in our understandings, as these unhappy Africans. But in the lapse of a long series of years, by a progression slow, and for a time almost imperceptible, we had become rich in a variety of acquirements.⁹⁰

And, a contributor to the Universal Magazine in 1781 wrote: “… the Goths and Vandals, from whom we boast our high descent? Uninformed barbarians, in a state of nature, with scarce one beam of reason or of virtue.”⁹¹ Bringing commerce and Christianity to Africa would close the gap existing between Europe's and Africa's progress. Implied in all these judgments about Europe's relative superiority was, of course, a technological standard of excellence.

Those who found the progressive view of history unacceptable could still argue about African equality from the degenerationist point of view. The editor of The Bee wrote in 1791, that while “Europe shall sink into the abyss which luxury at length prepares for all mankind, then may Africa prove an asylum to the virtuous part of mankind; and after an interval of ages, she may once more, as she has already done, diffuse the light of knowledge upon Europe.”⁹² And traveller John Atkins wrote that as the glory of Greek and Turkish civilizations had once been great, perhaps the “Revolution of as many ages would raise it again, or carry it to the Negroes and Hottentots, and the present possessors be debased.”⁹³

Despite their efforts, however, abolitionists knew that racial prejudice was beginning to grow in England and America; in England a generation was being raised that judged the Negro on the basis of the effects of slavery. As Clarkson observed, “They judged only from what they saw; they believed the appearances to be real.”⁹⁴ Clarkson was calling attention to the public's association of the physical features of the African, especially his color, with the slave trade's debasing effects, the inferior status of slaves, and the African way of life. That such color consciousness was becoming widespread in the eighteenth century can be seen in the frequent references to color in the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano or, as he was known by his Christian name, Gustavus Vassa, an African living in England. In one instance, for example, Equiano recalls growing up among white children, and being made to feel ashamed of his complexion as compared with that of a white playmate.

I had often observed that when her mother washed her face it looked very rosy; but when she washed mine it did not look so: I therefore tried oftentimes myself if I could not by washing make my face of the same colour as my little play-mate (Mary), but it was all in vain; and I now began to be mortified at the difference in our complexions.⁹⁵

It followed, of course, that if black races were inferior, then white races were superior. In Robert Drury's Journal, one of Defoe's characters says that since God has not created us equal, “He is pleased to distinguish those whom he designs for the government of mankind, by making them in such … colour that no man can be ignorant of their superiority.”⁹⁶ Anatomist J. F. Blumenbach's theory of three primary races—Caucasian, Ethiopian, and Mongolian—left disagreement as to their ranking, until biologists used color as the sole factor in ranking races, whiteness of skin marking the highest race, and gradations of darker skin marking orders of inferiority.⁹⁷ Such racist theories were easily squared with other concepts, notably the climatic theory of national behavior and the great chain of being. Climatic theorists who accepted the notion that the further south one went the greater the national inferiority, also ranked the Negro at the bottom of the chain of being.

Since color was solely the accident of climate, it followed that color could be reversed in either direction by a change in climate. George Roberts, for example, wrote that “if a white man and woman were to come and live with them [Africans], and go naked, and exposed to the scorching sun, as they were, perhaps, their Posterity, in three or four Generations, might be changed to their Complexion”;⁹⁸ and conversely, Thomas Salmon wrote that “Blacks, in a few generations, would become white, if brought over hither.”⁹⁹ Clarkson failed to see miscegenation as the obvious cause of lightening skin tone in successive generations of Negroes, and instead quoted Abbé Raynall who wrote:

The children which the Africans procreate in America, are not so black as their parents were. After each generation the difference becomes more palpable. It is possible, that after a numerous succession of generations, the men come from Africa would not be distinguished from those of the country, into which they may have been transplanted.¹⁰⁰

Although theologically unorthodox, polygenesis was the most generally accepted theory of racial origins. According to this theory black and white men were created separately, and therefore comprised separate species. Atkins, for example, wrote that black Africans would not lighten by a mere change in climate for “tho' it be a little Heterodox, I am persuaded the black and white Race have, ab origine, sprung from different-coloured first Parents.”¹⁰¹ This theory appealed to the diversitarianism of the age, which focused on differences between men, rather than their similarities, and the theory could also be easily adapted to the great chain of being, where as a result of Buffon's work in comparative anatomy, the missing link between men and apes was being sought. While monogenesis resulted in ranking the races, it was less unfavorable than polygenesis to Africans, and other “degenerate” races, for they were all included in humanity, and even the most “degenerate” were capable of improvement; but polygenesis established a permanent distinction between the sons of Adam and other races.¹⁰²

Travel literature on Africa proved to be an important source of information for both abolitionists and anti-abolitionists in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Since travel literature enjoyed such popularity during this time, and since the statistics supplied by travellers make their way into periodical literature, it is safe to conclude that African travel literature greatly influenced popular thinking about abolition, and, through its creation of myths, helped shape racial and imperialistic attitudes for the next century.

African travel books both fed already existing myths, and created new ones. The myth of Africa as the dark continent—a phrase which described Europe's lack of information about the continent as well as the barbarism of its inhabitants—was confirmed by eighteenth-century travellers who were shocked at the cultural dissimilarity of European and African. Early in the century barbarism did not necessarily imply racial inferiority; however, myths of racial inferiority grew out of the travel literature related to the abolition movement of the 1790's. Conversely, abolitionists tended to depict the African in terms of another myth, the myth of the noble savage.

The contradictory image of the African as cruel barbarian, or noble savage, is only one example of many contradictory myths about Africa which found their way into the travel literature. In West Africa, for example, the myth of tropical exuberance conflicted with the myth of the “white man's grave.” Some travellers depicted West Africa as an Edenic land where food was provided without the necessity of work; others depicted West Africa as a disease-ridden land where white men could scarcely set foot with impunity. Some saw in Africa confirmation of the unity of the chain of being; the variety of species extended even to mankind when men could be found in different colors; others emphasized the separateness of the links in the chain. In West Africa, progressivists saw a land of potential, a land ready for proselytizing and uplifting; degenerationists saw in Africa confirmation of the cycles of history: once great states had, following the inevitable cycles of history, fallen into a state of degeneracy.

In studying the history of the abolition movement in the late eighteenth century, scholars, it would seem, have misspent their efforts for, having attributed undue importance to imaginative literature as a barometer of public opinion on abolition, they have inadvertently neglected travel literature; African travel books are at once a widely read genre, and, as I have shown, a genre which shaped the attitudes toward Africa and Africans, while providing the substance of the arguments for and against abolition.

Notes

1. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London, 1808); Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill, 1942); Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York, 1928); Eva Beatrice Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought (Washington, D.C., 1942); N. Verle McCullough, The Negro in English Literature (Devon, 1962); and Richard M. Kain, “The Problem of Civilization in English Abolition Literature, 1772-1808,” Philological Quarterly, 15 (Jan. 1936), 105-25.

2. Clarkson, I, 463.

3. Ibid., I, 489-90.

4. Ibid., I, 388.

5. Ibid., I, 459-60.

6. Archibald Dalzel, The History of Dahomey. An Inland Kingdom of Africa (London, 1793), Preface, v-vii.

7. Clarkson, I, 478-79.

8. Robert Norris, Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee (London, 1789), 181.

9. Ibid., 169.

10. Clarkson, I, 327-29.

11. Ibid., I, 537-38.

12. Ibid., III, 111. The print is reproduced facing this page.

13. Ibid., II, 152-53.

14. Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London, 1788), 24.

15. Ibid., 25.

16. Ibid., 27-28.

17. Ibid., 28.

18. For mortality figures among the slaves see Falconbridge, 29; Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea, 126-29; A Caution to Great Britain and Her Colonies (Philadelphia, 1785), 39-40; A Short Account of that Part of Africa, Inhabited by the Negroes, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1762), 48; and A Short Address Originally Written to the People of Scotland, on the Subject of the Slave Trade (Shrewsbury, 1792), 14-15; Clarkson, History, II, 59, and An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1786), 140.

19. A Short Address, 15.

20. Quoted in John Newton, The Journal of a Slave Trader 1750-1754, ed. by Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell (London, 1962), 95.

21. Falconbridge, 23-24.

22. Newton, The Journal of a Slave Trader 1750-1754, 75.

23. William Snelgrave, A New Account of Guinea, And the Slave Trade (London, 1754), 162-64.

24. Norris, 170-72.

25. Clarkson, History, II, 48-49.

26. Norris, 176.

27. Ibid., 170.

28. Clarkson, History, I, 541-43.

29. Ibid., I, 247-48; Newton, 102.

30. For the annual figures see A Short Address, 29.

31. Falconbridge, 11.

32. Dalzel, 24.

33. See Norris, 179-80.

34. Anna M. Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone during the Years 1791-1793, 2nd ed. (London, 1802), 236; 1st ed. 1794.

35. Snelgrave, 86.

36. Norris, 156-57.

37. Clarkson, Essay, 113.

38. John Atkins, Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies, 2nd ed. (London, 1737), 62; 1st ed. 1735.

39. Norris, 147.

40. Clarkson, History, I, 480.

41. A Short Address, 5.

42. Benezet, Some Historical Account, 82.

43. Alexander Falconbridge, 14.

44. Dalzel, 218.

45. Quoted in Sypher, 23.

46. Alexander Falconbridge, 9-10.

47. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, in Works (London, 1823), V, 442. Although Locke was against slavery (“Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.” Ibid., V, 212), nevertheless, in his exposition of the limited power of a conqueror over the rights of a conquered people, Locke (arguing inconsistently) supported slavery which resulted from a “just war.”

48. Benezet, A Short Account, 44-45.

49. Aphra Behn, Two Tales: The Royal Slave and The Fair Jilt (Cambridge, 1953), 63.

50. Alexander Falconbridge, 16.

51. Nicholas Owen, Journal of a Slave Dealer, ed. Eveline Martin (London, 1930), 37-38.

52. Norris, 164-65. Historian Philip D. Curtin lists the value of British goods sold in Africa itself at £69,000, and income from the sale of slaves alone at £1,000,000 (Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action 1780-1850 [Madison, 1964], 6).

53. Clarkson, I, 374-75.

54. Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1875), I, 390, n. 2; Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1826), 363.

55. Corry, Observations upon the Windward Coast of Africa (London, 1807), 53.

56. Ibid., 71.

57. Ibid., 81.

58. Ibid., 82.

59. Ibid., 89.

60. Ibid., 100.

61. Norris, 130.

62. Lindsay, A Voyage to the Coast of Africa in 1758 (London, 1759), 101.

63. Ibid., 104.

64. Fairchild, 2.

65. Behn, 3.

66. Benezet, A Short Account, 72; Clarkson, Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies (London, 1823), 21.

67. McCullough, 65-66.

68. William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London, 1744), 249-50. See R. W. Frantz, “The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas 1660-1732,” The University Studies of the University of Nebraska, 32-33, 1932-33 (Lincoln, 1934) for the persistence of this primitivism in travel literature of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. Frantz concludes: “This belief in the existence of a fixed moral law known to all peoples who remain unspoiled by corrupting traditions led many a voyager painstakingly to record those virtues which he considered to be natural to man” (106).

69. Norris, x-xi; Dalzel, 26-27.

70. Norris, 142-44.

71. Ibid., 94; Snelgrave, 31-38.

72. Ibid., 100-01.

73. Ibid., 125-26.

74. Snelgrave, 44.

75. Ibid., 52-53.

76. James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 (Edinburgh, 1790), I, 393-94.

77. Atkins, 129.

78. Ibid., xxv.

79. Ibid., xxiv-xxv.

80. Ibid., 123-24; Snelgrave, 42.

81. Dalzel, 154-55, 172-73.

82. Norris, 159; Anna M. Falconbridge, 238-39.

83. Smith, 22; Norris, 88-89.

84. Dalzel, 217.

85. Benezet, A Short Account, 78.

86. Kain, 107, n. 13.

87. Clarkson, Essay, 175-76.

88. Daniel Defoe, Madagascar, or Robert Drury's Journal, During Fifteen Years' Captivity on that Island, ed. Captain Pasfield Oliver (London, 1890), 172-73; 1st ed. 1729. For references to Defoe's disputed authorship of the Journal see Oliver's introduction; William P. Trent, Daniel Defoe: How to Know Him (Indianapolis, 1916), 262-64; Arthur W. Secord, Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe (New York, 1963), 207; John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago, 1958), 343, 354.

89. Alexander Falconbridge, 31-32.

90. Clarkson, History, II, 444-45.

91. Quoted in Kain, 115.

92. Quoted in Kain, 119.

93. Atkins, xviii.

94. Clarkson, Essay, 23.

95. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 2nd ed. (London, 1789), I, 109.

96. Defoe, 156.

97. For the discussion of Blumenbach's work and related racial theories see Curtin, 37-46, and Sypher, 54-58.

98. George Roberts, The Four Years' Voyage of Captain George Roberts (London, 1726). Reprinted in Thomas Astley, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745), I, 599-627; citation is from A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. Thomas Astley, 4 vols. (London, 1745), I, 619. Some think Roberts' Voyage is by Defoe. See E. G. Cox, A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel (Seattle, 1935-38), I, 370.

99. Thomas Salmon, Modern History: or, the Present State of All Nations, 3rd ed. (London, 1746), III, 59.

100. Clarkson, Essay, 202.

101. Atkins, 39.

102. The best account of the monogenetic and polygenetic theories of the origin of race can be found in Curtin, 40-43.