point about the Agents. I am not quite sure on what principle they
are paid. According to the Decree of 1903, they are appointed by the
local committee in San Thomé, consisting of four officials and three
planters, chosen by the central government Committee of Emigration in
Lisbon. The local committee has to fix the payment due to each Agent,
and of course the payment is ultimately made by the planters, who
requisition the local committee for as many slaves as they require,
and pay in proportion to the number they receive. Now a planter in San
Thomé gives from £26 to £30 for a slave delivered on his plantation in
good condition. The Agent at Benguela will give £16 for any healthy
man or woman brought to him, but he rarely goes up to £20. From this
considerable profit balance of £10 to £14 per head there are, it is
true, certain deductions to be made. By the Decree, each Agent has to
pay the government £100 deposit before he sets up in the slave-dealing
business, and most probably he recoups himself out of the profits. For
his license he has to pay the government two shillings a slave (with
a minimum payment of £10 a year). Also to the government he pays £1
per slave in stamp duty, and six shillings on the completion of each
contract. He has further to pay a tax of six shillings per slave to the
port of landing, and from the balance of profit we must also deduct
the slave’s fare on the steamer from Benguela to San Thomé. This, I
believe, is £2--a sum which goes to enrich the happy shareholders in
the “Empreza Nacional,” who last year (1904) received twenty-two per
cent. on their money as profit from the slave-ships. Then the captain
of the steamer gets four shillings and the doctor two shillings for
every slave landed alive, and, on an average, only four slaves per
hundred die on the voyage, which takes about eight days. There are
probably other deductions to be made. The Curador will get something
for his important functions. There are stories that the commandants of
certain forts still demand blackmail from the processions of slaves as
they go by. I was definitely told that the commandant of a fort very
near to Benguela always receives ten shillings a head, but I cannot say
if that is true.
In any case, at the very lowest, there is £4 to be deducted for fare,
taxes, etc., from the apparent balance of £10 to £14 per slave. But
even then the profit on each man or woman sold is considerable, and the
point that I am uncertain about is whether the Agent at Benguela and
his deputies in Novo Redondo and Bihé pocket all the profit they can
possibly make, or are paid a fixed proportion of the average profits
by the local committee at San Thomé. The latter would be in accordance
with the Decree; the other way more in accordance with Portuguese
methods.
Unhappily I was not able to witness the embarkation of the slaves
myself, as I had been poisoned the night before and was suffering all
day from violent pain and frequent collapse, accompanied by extreme
cold in the limbs.[13] So that when, late in the evening, I crawled on
board at last, I found the slaves already in their place on the ship.
We were taking only one hundred and fifty of them from Benguela, but we
gathered up other batches as we went along, so that finally we reached
a lucrative cargo of two hundred and seventy-two (not counting babies),
and as only two of them died in the week, we landed two hundred and
seventy safely on the islands. This was perhaps rather a larger number
than usual, for the steamers, which play the part of mail-boats and
slave-ships both, go twice a month, and the number of slaves exported
by them yearly has lately averaged a little under four thousand, though
the numbers are increasing, as I showed in my last letter.
The slaves are, of course, kept in the fore part of the ship. All day
long they lie about the lower deck, among the horses, mules, cattle,
sheep, monkeys, and other live-stock; or they climb up to the fo’c’s’le
deck in hopes of getting a little breeze, and it is there that the
mothers chiefly lie beside their tiny babies. There is nothing to do.
Hardly any one speaks, and over the faces of nearly all broods the look
of dumb bewilderment that one sees in cattle crowded into trucks for
the slaughter-market. Twice a day rations of mealy pap or brown beans
are issued in big pots. Each pot is supplied with ten wooden spoons and
holds the food for ten slaves, who have to get as much of it as each
can manage. The first-class passengers, leaning against the rail of the
upper deck, look down upon the scene with interest and amusement. To
them those slaves represent the secret of Portugal’s greatness--such
greatness as Portugal has.
[Illustration: “ALL DAY LONG THEY LIE ABOUT THE LOWER DECK”]
At sunset they are herded into a hold, the majority going down the
hatchway stairs on their hands and knees. There they spread their
sleeping-mats, and the hatch is shut down upon them till the following
morning. By the virtuous Decree of 1903, which regulates the transport,
“the emigrants [i.e., the slaves] shall be separated according to sex
into completely isolated compartments, and may not sleep on deck, nor
resume conjugal relations before leaving the ship.” Certainly the
slaves do not sleep on deck, but as to the other clauses I have seen
no attempt to carry out the regulations, except such measures as the
slaves take themselves by dividing the hold between men and women.
It may seem strange, but all my observation has shown me that, in
spite of nakedness and the absence of shame in most natural affairs
of existence, the natives are far more particular about the really
important matters of sex than civilized people are; just as most
animals are far more particular, and for the same reasons. I mean that
for them the difference of sex is mainly a matter of livelihood and
child-getting, not of casual debauchery.
Even a coast trader said to me one evening, as we were looking down
into the hold where the slaves were arranging their mats, “What a
different thing if they were white people!”
The day after leaving Benguela we stopped off Novo Redondo to take on
more cargo. The slaves came off in two batches--fifty in the morning
and thirty more towards sunset. There was a bit of a sea on that day,
and the tossing of the lighter had made most of the slaves very sick.
Things became worse when the lighter lay rising and falling with the
waves at the foot of the gangway, and the slaves had to be dragged up
to the platform one by one like sacks, and set to climb the ladder as
best they could. I remember especially one poor woman who held in her
arms a baby only two or three days old. Quickly as native women recover
from childbirth, she had hardly recovered, and was very sea-sick
besides. In trying to reach the platform, she kept on missing the rise
of the wave, and was flung violently back again into the lighter. At
last the men managed to haul her up and set her on the foot of the
ladder, striking her sharply to make her mount. Tightening the cloth
that held the baby to her back, and gathering up her dripping blanket
over one arm, she began the ascent on all-fours. Almost at once her
knees caught in the blanket and she fell flat against the sloping
stairs. In that position she wriggled up them like a snake, clutching
at each stair with her arms above her head. At last she reached the
top, bruised and bleeding, soaked with water, her blanket lost, most
of her gaudy clothing torn off or hanging in strips. On her back the
little baby, still crumpled and almost pink from the womb, squeaked
feebly like a blind kitten. But swinging it round to her breast, the
woman walked modestly and without complaint to her place in the row
with the others.
I have heard many terrible sounds, but never anything so hellish as the
outbursts of laughter with which the ladies and gentlemen of the first
class watched that slave woman’s struggle up to the deck.
When all the slaves were on board at last, a steward or one of the
ship’s officers mustered them in a row, and the ship’s doctor went
down the line to perform the medical examination, in accordance with
Chapter VI. of the Decree, enacting that no diseased or infectious
person shall be accepted. It is entirely to the doctor’s interest to
foster the health of the slaves, for, as I have already mentioned,
every death loses him two shillings. As a rule, as I have said, he
loses four per cent. of his cargo, or two dollars out of every possible
fifty. On this particular voyage, however, he was more fortunate, for
only two slaves out of the whole number died during the week, and were
thrown overboard during the first-class breakfast-hour, so that the
feelings of the passengers might not be harrowed.
Next day after leaving Novo Redondo we reached Loanda and increased our
cargo by forty-two men and women, all tricked out in the most amazing
tartan plaids--the tartans of Israel in the Highlands. This made up
our total number of two hundred and seventy-two, not reckoning babies,
which, unhappily, I did not count. Probably there were about fifty. I
think neither the captain nor the doctor receives any percentage for
landing babies alive, but, of course, if they live to grow up on the
plantations, which is very seldom, they become even more valuable than
the imported adults, and the planter gets them gratis.
Early next morning, when we were anchored off Ambriz, a commotion
suddenly arose on board, and the rumor ran that one of the slaves had
jumped into the sea from the bow. Soon we could see his black head
as he swam clear of the ship and struck out southwards, apparently
trusting to the current to bear him towards the coast. For he was a
native of a village near Ambriz and knew what he was about. It was
yearning at the sight of his own land that made him run the risk. The
sea was full of sharks, and I could only hope that they might devour
him before man could seize him again. Already a boat had been hastily
dropped into the water and was in pursuit, manned by two black men and
a white. They rowed fast over the oily water, and the swimmer struggled
on in vain. The chase lasted barely ten minutes and they were upon
him. Leaning over the side of the boat, they battered him with oars
and sticks till he was quiet. Then they dragged him into the boat,
laid him along the bottom, and stretched a piece of old sail over his
nakedness, that the ladies might not be shocked. He was brought to the
gangway and dragged, dripping and trembling, up the stairs. The doctor
and the government Agent, who accompanies each ship-load of slaves,
took him down into the hold, and there he was chained up to a post or
staple so that he might cause no trouble again. “Flog him! Flog him!
A good flogging!” cried the passengers. “Boa chicote!” I have not the
slightest doubt he was flogged without mercy, but if so, it was kept
secret--an unnecessary waste of pleasure, for the passengers would
thoroughly have enjoyed both the sight and sound of the lashing. The
comfortable and educated classes in all nations appear not to have
altered in the least since the days when the comfortable and educated
classes of Paris used to arrange promenades to see the Communards shot
in batches against a wall. They may whine and blubber over imaginary
sufferings in novels and plays, but touch their comfort, touch their
property--they are rattlesnakes then!
We stopped at Cabinda in the Portuguese territory north of the Congo,
and at one or two other trading-places on the coast, and then we put
out northwest for the islands. On the eighth day after leaving Benguela
we came in sight of San Thomé. Over it the sky was a broken gray of
drifting rain-clouds. Only now and again we could see the high peaks
of the mountains, which run up to seven thousand feet. The valleys at
their base were shrouded in the pale and drizzling mists which hang
about them almost continually. Here and there a rounded hill, indigo
with forest, rose from the mists and showed us the white house of some
plantation and the little cluster of out-buildings and huts where the
slaves were to find their new home. Then, as on an enchanted island,
the ghostly fog stole over it again, and in another quarter some fresh
hill, indigo with forest, stood revealed.
[Illustration: THE WOMEN HARDLY STIRRED AS WE APPROACHED SAN THOMÉ]
The whole place smoked and steamed like a gigantic hot-house. In
fact, it is a gigantic hot-house. As nearly as possible, it stands upon
the equator, the actual line passing through the volcanic rocks of its
southern extremity. And even in the dry season from April to October
it is perpetually soaked with moisture. The wet mist hardly ceases to
hang among the hills and forest trees. The thick growth of the tropics
covers the mountains almost to their summits, and every leaf of verdure
drips with warm dew.
The slaves on deck regarded the scene with almost complete apathy.
Some of the men leaned against the bulwark and silently watched the
points of the island as we passed. The women hardly stirred from their
places. They were occupied with their babies as usual, or lay about in
the unbroken wretchedness of despair. Two girls of about fifteen or
sixteen, evidently sisters, whom I had before noticed for a certain
pathetic beauty, now sat huddled together hand-in-hand, quietly crying.
They were just the kind of girls that the planters select for their
concubines, and I have little doubt they are the concubines of planters
now. But they cried because they feared they would be separated when
they came to land.
In the confusion of casting anchor I stood by them unobserved, and in
a low voice asked them a few questions in Umbundu, which I had crammed
up for the purpose. The answers were brief, in sobbing whispers;
sometimes by gestures only. The conversation ran like this:
“Why are you here?”
“We were sold to the white men.”
“Did you come of your own free will?”
“Of course not.”
“Where did you come from?”
“From Bihé.”
“Are you slaves or not?”
“Of course we are slaves!”
“Would you like to go back?”
The delicate little brown hands were stretched out, palms downward, and
the crying began afresh.
That night the slaves were left on board, but next morning (June 17th)
when I went down to the pier about nine o’clock, I found them being
landed in two great lighters. One by one the men and women were dragged
up on to the pier by their arms and loin-cloths and dumped down like
bales of goods. There they sat in four lines till all were ready, and
then, carrying their mats and babies, they were marched off in file
to the Curador’s house in the town beside the bay. Here they were
driven through large iron gates into a court-yard and divided up into
gangs according to the names of the planters who had requisitioned for
them. When the parties were complete, they were put under the charge
of gangers belonging to various plantations, and so they set out on
foot upon the last stage of their journey. When they reached their
plantation (which would usually be on the same day or the next, for the
island is only thirty-five miles long by fifteen broad) they would be
given a day or two for rest, and then the daily round of labor would
begin. For them there are no more journeyings, till that last short
passage when their dead bodies are lashed to poles and carried out to
be flung away in the forest.
[Illustration: LINED UP ON THE PIER AT SAN THOMÉ]
NOTE.--I have no direct evidence that the poison was given me
intentionally, but the “cumulative” evidence is rather strong. While
still in the interior I had been warned that the big slave-dealers had
somehow got to know of my purpose and were plotting against me. On the
coast the warnings increased, till my life became almost as ludicrous
as a melodrama, and I was obliged to “live each day as ’twere my
last”--an unpleasant and unprofitable mode of living. One man would
drop hints, another would give instances of Portuguese treachery. I
was often told the fate of a poor Portuguese trader named De Silva,
who objected to slavery and was going to Lisbon to expose the system,
but after his first meal on board was found dead in his cabin. People
in the street whispered of my fate. A restaurant-keeper at Benguela
told an English fellow-passenger on my ship that he had better not be
seen with me, for I was in great danger. My boy, who had followed me
right through from the Gold Coast with the fidelity of a homeless dog,
kept bringing me rumors of murder that he heard among the natives.
Two nights before the ship sailed I was at a dinner given by the
engineers of the new railway, and into my overcoat-pocket some one,
whom I wish publicly to thank, tucked a scrap of paper with the words,
“You are in great peril,” written in French. If there was a plot to
set upon me in the empty streets that night, it was prevented by an
Englishman who volunteered to go back with me, though I had not told
him of any danger. Next night I was poisoned. Owing to the frequent
warnings, I was ready with antidotes, but I think I should not have
reached the ship alive next day without the courageous and devoted
help of a South-African prospector who had been shut up with me in
Ladysmith. The Dutch trader with whom I was staying was himself far
above suspicion, but I shall not forget his indignant excitement when
he saw what had happened. Evidently it was what he had feared, though
I only told him I must have eaten something unwholesome. The tiresome
sense of apprehension lasted during my voyage to the islands, and I
was obliged to keep a dyspeptic watch upon the food. But I do not wish
to make much of these little personal matters. To American and English
people in their security they naturally seem absurd, and as a proof
how common the art of poisoning still is in Portuguese possessions I
will only mention that I have met a Portuguese trader in San Thomé who
carries about in his waistcoat a little packet of pounded glass which
he detected one evening in his soup, and that on the Portuguese ship
which finally took me from San Thomé to Lisbon a Portuguese official
died the day we started, from an illness due to his belief that he was
being poisoned, and that during the voyage a poor Belgian from the
interior gradually faded away under the same belief, and was carried
out at Lisbon in a dying condition. Of course both may have been mad,
but even madness does not take that form without something to suggest
it.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] I find that the latest published Consular Report on San Thomé and
Principe (1902) actually repeats the hypocritical fiction about the
redemption of slaves. After speaking of the “enormous mortality” on the
two islands, the Report continues: “So large a death-rate calls for
constant fresh supplies of laborers from Angola, the principal ports
from which they are obtained being Benguela, Novo Redondo, and Loanda,
where they are ransomed from the black traders who bring them from the
far interior.” Mr. Consul Nightingale, who wrote the Report, was, of
course, perfectly aware of the truth, and no doubt he wrote in irony.
But English people do not understand irony--least of all in an official
document.
[12] There is a well-known carriers’ song with the refrain, “She has
crossed Ondumba ya Maria,” that being the name of a dry brook on this
road from Katumbella to Benguela. It means, “She has gone into slavery
to be sold for San Thomé”--“Gone to the devil,” or, “Gone to glory,” as
we say, almost indifferently.
[13] See note on page 185.
X
LIFE OF SLAVES ON THE ISLANDS
They stand in the Gulf of Guinea--those two islands of San Thomé and
Principe where the slaves die--about one hundred and fifty miles from
the nearest coast at the Gaboon River in French Congo. San Thomé
lies just above the equator, Principe some eighty miles north and a
little east of San Thomé, and a hundred and twenty miles southwest
of Fernando Po. San Thomé is about eight times as large as Principe,
and the population, which may now be reckoned considerably over forty
thousand, is also about eight times as large. It is difficult to say
what proportion of these populations are slaves. The official returns
of 1900 put the population of San Thomé at 37,776, including 19,211
serviçaes, or slaves, with an import of 4572 serviçaes in 1901. And the
population of Principe was given as 4327, including 3175 serviçaes. But
the prosperity of the islands is increasing with such rapidity that
these numbers have now been probably far surpassed.[14]
It is cocoa that has created the prosperity. In old days the islands
were famous for their coffee, and it is still perhaps the best in
Africa. But the trade in coffee sank to less than a half in the ten
years, 1891 to 1901, while in that time the cocoa trade increased
fourfold--from 3597 tons to 14,914--and since 1901 the increase has
been still more rapid. The islands possess exactly the kind of climate
that kills men and makes the cocoa-tree flourish. It is, as I have
described, a hot-house climate--burning heat and torrents of rain in
the wet season, from October to April; stifling heat and clouds of
dripping mist in the season that is called dry. In such an air and upon
the fine volcanic soil the cocoa-plant thrives wherever it is set,
and continues to produce all the year round. Nearly one-third of the
islands is now under cultivation, and the wild forest is constantly
being cleared away. In consequence, the value of land has gone up
beyond the dreams of a land-grabber’s avarice. Little plots that could
be had for the asking ten years ago now fetch their hundreds. There
is a story, perhaps mythical, that one of the greatest owners--once a
clerk or carrier in San Thomé--has lately refused £2,000,000 for his
plantations there. In 1901 the export trade from San Thomé alone was
valued at £764,830, having more than doubled in five years, and by
this time it is certainly over £1,000,000. There are probably about
two hundred and thirty plantations or “roças” on San Thomé now,
some employing as many as one thousand slaves. And on Principe there
are over fifty roças, with from three hundred to five hundred slaves
working upon the largest. All these evidences of increasing prosperity
must be very satisfactory to the private proprietors and to the
shareholders in the companies which own a large proportion of the land.
For the most part they live in Lisbon, enjoying themselves upon the
product of the cocoa-tree and the lives of men and women.
One early morning at San Thomé I went out to visit a plantation
which is rightly regarded as a kind of model--a show-place for the
intelligent foreigner or for the Portuguese shareholder who feels
qualms as he banks his dividends. There were four hundred slaves on
the estate, not counting children, and I was shown their neat brick
huts in rows, quite recently finished. I saw them clearing the forest
for further plantation, clearing the ground under the cocoa-trees,
gathering the great yellow pods, sorting the brown kernels, which
already smelled like a chocolate-box, heaping them up to ferment,
raking them out in vast pans to dry, working in the carpenters’
sheds, superintending the new machines, and gathering in groups for
the mid-day meal. I was shown the turbine engine, the electric light,
the beautiful wood-work in the manager’s house, the clean and roomy
hospital with its copious supply of drugs and anatomical curiosities
in bottles, the isolated house for infectious cases. To an outward
seeming, the Decree of 1903 for the regulation of the slave labor had
been carried out in every possible respect. All looked as perfect and
legal as an English industrial school. Then we sat down to an exquisite
Parisian _déjeuner_ under the bower of a drooping tree, and while I was
meditating on the hardships of African travel, a saying of another of
the guests kept coming back to my mind: “The Portuguese are certainly
doing a marvellous work for Angola and these islands. Call it slavery
if you like. Names and systems don’t matter. The sum of human happiness
is being infinitely increased.”
The doctor had come up to pay his official visit to the plantation that
day. “The death-rate on this roça,” he remarked, casually, during the
meal, “is twelve or fourteen per cent. a year among the serviçaes.”
“And what is the chief cause?” I asked. “Anæmia,” he said. “That is a
vague sort of thing,” I answered; “what brings on anæmia?” “Unhappiness
[tristeza],” he said, frankly.
He went on to explain that if they could keep a slave alive for three
or four years from the date of landing, he generally lived some time
longer, but it was very difficult to induce them to live through the
misery and homesickness of the first few years.
This cause, however, does not account for the high mortality among the
children. On one of the largest and best-managed plantations of San
Thomé the superintendent admits a children’s death-rate of twenty-five
per cent., or one-quarter of all the children, every year. Our latest
consular reports do not give a complete return of the death-rate for
San Thomé, but on Principe 867 slaves died during 1901 (491 males and
376 females), which gives a total death-rate of 20.67 per cent. per
annum. In other words, you may calculate that among the slaves on
Principe one in every five will be dead by the end of the year.[15]