Death on the Coasts of Africa
Detailed information about what happened to the cadavers of enslaved Africans who died before being boarded on slave ships on African shores and upon arrival in the Americas remains scarce.
Consider the example of the West Central African ports of Luanda and Benguela, two Portuguese colonies, which were, respectively, the largest and the third-largest ports from which African captives were transported to the Americas. In Benguela, cadavers of enslaved Africans were deposited on the beach until the end of the eighteenth century. Despite the creation of a cemetery for slaves who remained unbaptized or who died before boarding slave ships, the number of dead was so huge that cadavers of captive Africans kept accumulating, serving as food for the local fauna, forcing gravediggers to burn the corpses.4 On the coast of West Central Africa, as late as in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, slave merchants “expressed the valuelessness of dead slaves... by dumping the bodies in a heap in a small cemetery adjacent to the Nazareth chapel near Luanda’s commercial district, or depositing them in shallow graves in numbers far greater than the ground could cover decently.”5 Greedy and careless, traders left the remains to be eaten by hyenas and other animals in order to avoid paying fees to have the bodies taken into the charge of the Roman Catholic Church.Death also occurred when European and American slave ships were trading on the African coasts. Crew members obviously treated their own dead differently from the enslaved people on board their vessels. Seamen from Europe and the Americas had no burial rights on most African coasts. When possible, ship captains made efforts to bury them ashore in shallow graves. In the logbook of the British slave ship Sandown, which traded on the coast of present-day Guinea, West Africa, ship captain Samuel Gamble recorded the interment of seamen ashore in several instances.
An entry of August 5, 1793, reports that two crewmen were deceased. To bury them aground, he had “to pay the King a duty of 15 Barrs a[nd] ¾ for every Whiteman that died in the River.”6 Later, on September 23, 1793, another young crewman died. As no white individuals were available to help Gamble bury the seaman, he paid grometas (African employees of local traders) with brandy in addition to the duties requested by the local ruler to perform the interment.7In Bonny, one of the main slave ports of the Bight of Biafra, on the coastal region of present-day Nigeria, seamen were buried ashore, probably because, as put by one ship captain, Bonny River had so many sharks that even washing one’s hand over the boat’s side was dangerous.8 In the late eighteenth century, British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge even reported that because the bodies were buried just “below the surface of the land, the stench arising from them is sometimes noxious.”9 Not surprisingly, most dead crew members were “buried at sea.”10 Thrown overboard, their corpses were immediately attacked by sharks who took advantage of the abundant human flesh offered by slave vessels. To avoid this carnage, when navigating in high seas, seamen attempted to prevent sharks from eating corpses by wrapping the dead bodies of their fellow crew members in their own hammocks. As previously emphasized in chapter 4, however, enslaved people had none of these privileges. Sailors usually waited until nighttime to throw the dead bodies of enslaved Africans overboard, mainly to prevent commotion among the human cargo.11 In countless cases, sharks ate the corpses.
Eighteenth-century British slave ship captain Hugh Crow, who completed several voyages to purchase enslaved people in West Africa, noted in his memoirs that during funeral rites in the Bight of Biafra, African men and women gathered around the body “crying, leaping, clapping their hands, and making a terrible noise.” In these ceremonies, an “animal is killed, and the fetish of the deceased is sprinkled with the blood as propitiatory offering to the priest.” Crow also observed that “it is customary to put into the coffins of great men some articles of value...
which are buried, after two or three days, under the ground of their houses.”12 Danish merchant Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer, who worked for the Danish West India and Guinea Company through the first half of the eighteenth century, reported on the funeral practices of the Gold Coast. In his account, he explains that people “weep during the first day, but then play and dance for eight days.”13Music and musical instruments such as drums, horns, hollow irons (called “klink klink”) and a sort of flute (called a “kitt”) also played a crucial role during the funerals, even those of ordinary people.14 The grandness of these ceremonies is just one indication of how seriously West Africans took the transition from life to death. Burial grounds were and still are sacred sites connecting the dead to the world of the living. Graves memorialize the ancestors by creating an ancestral connection to the land. Marked with a tree, a stone, and even carved figurines representing deities and ancestral persons, they physically and spiritually connect African communities and individuals to their lineages. Therefore, discarding dead bodies in the sea had profound social, cultural, and spiritual consequences for African men, women, and children, who had already been violently separated from their communities of origin.