Death before Being Sold

In the days following the arrival of slave ships sailing from African ports to the Americas, death was still a great threat to enslaved Africans, who came ashore weak, malnourished, dehydrated, and ill.

Consider the case of Venture Smith, whose African name was Broteer Furro. Like other Africans who published narratives about their enslavement in Africa and transportation to the Americas, such as Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Smith was captured when he was still a boy of between six and twelve years of age. Although his exact place of birth on the Gold Coast is unclear, he was captured during an episode of warfare and transported to the coast. At Anomabu on the Gold Coast, he boarded the ship Charming Susanna that sailed to Barbados (and subsequently to Rhode Island) in 1739.³³ Smith reported that 260 captives were boarded on the vessel, but during the voyage a smallpox outbreak killed nearly sixty enslaved Africans. The other 200 enslaved persons who arrived alive in Barbados were all sold, except for Smith and two other captives who were brought to Rhode Island.³⁴ Based on old personal memories and dictated to a literate individual who made possible its publication many years after his arrival in the Americas, Smith’s account does not provide any details about what happened to the men and women who died during the Middle Passage, even though it is possible to imagine that most bodies were either thrown overboard or removed from the ship and buried in a common grave not far from the place of disembarkation.

A few years later, in 1754, Equiano also landed in Barbados. He omitted slave mortality during the Middle Passage but explained that when the merchants came to examine the captives, they were terrified of being eaten: “We thought by this we should be eaten by these ugly men, as they appeared to us; and, when soon after we were all put down under the deck again, there was much dread and trembling among us and nothing but bitter cries to be heard all the night from these apprehensions.”³⁵ African fears of white cannibalism were probably unfounded. But at least one documented case, that of the Portuguese schooner Arrogante, apprehended by the British Royal Navy nearly one century later in 1837, suggests an instance in which crew members literally ate an enslaved African on board a slave ship.³⁶

Maria Graham spent the first weeks of her stay in Recife, the third-largest Brazilian slave port in the nineteenth century. In an entry from September 28, 1821, she narrated a promenade in the adjacent city of Olinda. While walking along the beach, she witnessed a dog dragging “the arm of a negro from beneath the few inches of sand, which his master had caused to be thrown over his remains.”³⁷ Such incidents were very similar to what other observers from that time reported in Luanda and Benguela, where the bodies of enslaved Africans, simply discarded along the beach and barely covered with sand, were left exposed to the elements and eaten by hungry animals. Graham also reported the lack of any funeral ceremonies: “When the negro dies, his fellow-slaves lay him on a plank, carry him to the beach, where beneath high-water mark they hoe a little sand over him.” But Graham also noted that the fate of newly arrived Africans was even worse: “To the new negro even this mark of humanity is denied. He is tied to a pole, carried out in the evening and dropped upon the beach, where it is just possible the surf may bear him away.”³⁸ A few days later, also in Olinda, after observing the sumptuous burial procession of a monk, she could not help comparing the ceremony that followed all rites prescribed by the Catholic Church with the way the bodies of enslaved persons were carelessly abandoned on the beach.³⁹ Even in death, enslaved Africans and their descendants were destined to be discarded, attacked by animals, and swallowed by the sea, their memory consigned to oblivion.

Not surprisingly, bondspeople in Rio de Janeiro were submitted to comparable mortuary practices.

British Army officer Henry Chamberlain described how bondspeople were buried in the Field of Mercy (Campo da Misericórdia), in early nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. This burial ground, comparable to Campo da Pólvora in Salvador, was maintained by the Holy House of Mercy Catholic brotherhood. In 1821, the city’s population reached 333,000 persons, of which nearly half were enslaved.⁴² Chamberlain explained that the cadaver was “sewn up in a coarse Bag, put into a Hammock slung to a Pole, and an old Blanket flung over all,” then transported to the grave by two enslaved men. With no “ceremony or Mourners; a short Prayer is then muttered over the Body, and the Earth is thrown in by one of the Polebearers, whilst the other with his Feet and a heavy wooden Stake, beats it down compactly over the Body.”⁴³ The watercolor portraying the funeral that accompanies the text reveals the city’s scenic mountains and seashore where the cemetery was situated, in an area not far from today’s Santos Dumont Airport.

Irish clergyman and physician Robert Walsh, who spent almost one year in Rio de Janeiro between 1828 and 1829, published a travelogue reporting his sojourn in Brazil. He also explained how enslaved people and poor persons were interred in common graves in the Field of Mercy’s burial ground, where according to him there were also four or five bodies waiting to be buried. The burial process consisted of depositing the corpses in a “trench without coffins; sometimes naked, but more usually sewed up in coarse canvass, or the fragment of a mat, and their bodies are laid across, generally the head of one to the feet of the other.”⁴⁴ According to French physician Joseph François Xavier Sigaud, the founder of the Society of Medicine of Rio de Janeiro, in 1830, just one year before the ban of the introduction of Africans to Brazil, the Holy House of Mercy buried between seven hundred and eight hundred enslaved persons every month in Rio de Janeiro.⁴⁵ But because the shallow graves generated increasing hygiene concerns, in 1839 the burial ground was transferred to a surrounding area that later accommodated the Caju Cemetery (São Francisco Xavier Cemetery), one of the largest cemeteries of today’s Rio de Janeiro.⁴⁶