Rape on African Shores and Slave Ships
European men and African male agents also introduced new forms of sexual exchanges, often shaped by violence.25 In regions such as the Gold Coast, as early as the fifteenth century, either in their own homes or confined in forts, African women and girls provided sexual services to fulfill the demands of European traders established in the coastal areas.
Flemish trader Eustache de la Fosse sailed to the Gold Coast in 1479. He walked the streets of Elmina, a coastal town in present-day Ghana, trying to sell two bowls. When he stopped at one of the houses, a young woman reportedly invited him to have sex with her while already taking off her loincloth, though apparently, he declined the offer.26 During the eighteenth century, as the slave trade intensified on West African coastal areas, travelers and slave traders increasingly described the activities of African women who provided paid sex in other ports of the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin.West African rulers sent African women and girls onto slave ships anchored at their ports to provide sex to ship captains. Sometimes, although free, these women were sent into slavery to the Americas.27 Men, women, and children remained vulnerable to sexual abuse during the entire time they remained confined in coastal trading structures waiting to board the slave ships. Amid hunger and exhaustion, sexual activity, once voluntary and private, was relocated in the shared spaces of dungeons, pens, and barracoons. As one historian has noted, the trading posts where slave merchants and ship captains resided during their long stays in the coastal area of Sierra Leone during the nineteenth century were “replete with food, wine, and sex slaves handpicked from the barracoons.”28 This forced and painful proximity exposed captives to continuous sexual abuse, even though the surviving records produced by European and American slavers obviously rarely provided explicit accounts of how they violated the bodies of enslaved women.
After the long waiting period in coastal enclosures ended, a new nightmare started. Enslaved men crossed the Atlantic Ocean attached in chains and shackles to prevent uprisings. Women of all ages and children traveled unchained, occupying a separate and more spacious compartment in the lower deck. In French slave ships, a rule prevented ordinary sailors, always in greater numbers, from having access to the women’s quarters. Similar provisions were also applied in Dutch slave ships, confirming the dangers of enslaved women being raped by multiple men. Yet, in French slave ships, officers had “easy access to the women’s compartment.”29 This context favored by the organization of various compartments surely allowed crewmen to sexually exploit enslaved women during the Middle Passage.30 In Dutch slave ships, the women’s quarters were referred to as the “whore hole” (hoeregat). Sailors and ship officers carefully selected not only women but also children and men as the most suitable sexual partners.31 La Rochelle’s mariner Jacques Proa, who sailed to Ouidah aboard the ship Duc de Laval in 1777, explains that as soon as the slave ship left the coasts of Africa transporting its human cargo, the ship captain and crew members selected their preferred African women to serve them “at the table and in bed.”32
African men who published narratives of their harrowing lives under slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reported episodes of sexual violence during the Middle Passage. For example, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano retained a vivid memory of the weeks he spent in the hold of the slave ship, which included a countrywoman “who slept with some of the headmen of the ship” as “it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies.”33 In 1785, La Rochelle’s slave ship Caraïbe returned from the Bight of Benin carrying 351 enslaved Africans. Upon anchoring in Port-au-Prince, a main port of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the ship captain Etienne Dufaud brought to the hospital a sailor and the vessel’s cook, who had both contracted a sexually transmitted infection, presumably either during their stay in West Africa or during the Middle Passage.34
Crew members did not spare pregnant women or young girls from their appetite for sex and violence.
Although rape was rarely reported by captains until the rise of the movement to abolish the inhumane trade, a few written accounts denounce these violations. On May 11, 1776, the slave ship L’Aimable Françoise left from Nantes to GorĂ©e Island and then to the Gambia. According to the report by ship captain Lazare-Antoine Peroty, the second captain Philippe Liot was arrested after mistreating the crew and the enslaved people on board the ship. Despite his detention, he managed to violently attack an African woman, described as “very beautiful.” He broke two of her teeth and left her in such a bad condition that upon arrival in Saint-Domingue she was sold for a very low price and died fifteen days later. Liot also raped an African girl between the age of eight and ten for three consecutive nights, covering her mouth to prevent her from screaming, nearly killing her.35A decade after Liot’s crimes, abolitionist James Field Stanfield published a poem and a series of letters addressed to his friends, including the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, in which he only alludes, without any details, to what might have been the rape of a young enslaved girl by a ship captain.36 British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge, who participated in four slave voyages to Africa before becoming an abolitionist, noted in his account that “common sailors are allowed to have intercourse with such of the black women whose consent they can procure. And some of them have been known to take the inconstancy of their paramours so much to heart, as to leap overboard and drown themselves. The officers are permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure, and sometimes are guilty of such brutal excesses, as disgrace human nature.”37
Although initially framing these encounters as consensual, and even suggesting that enslaved women died by suicide after falling in love with their rapists, the surgeon ended up admitting that British sailors raped captive African women.
Likewise, British slave ship captain John Newton, who later became an evangelical priest and abolitionist, noted that women and girls were taken on board a ship “naked, trembling, terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue, and hunger.” Regarded by the crewmen as prey, the women were “divided, upon the spot, and only reserved till opportunity offers.”38 During the voyage of the British slave ship African, Newton also reported in his journal that William Cooney, a member of his crew, publicly raped a pregnant African captive, identified only as number 83, whom he forced “into the room and lay with her brutelike in view of the whole quarter deck.”39Bondswomen and children were victims of sexual violence in slave ships flying flags of all nations involved in the Atlantic slave trade. After the prohibition of the British slave trade in 1807 and the end of slavery in its colonies in the West Indies, Britain continued to pressure all countries that persisted in transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas, not only through the signature of treaties but also by patrolling Atlantic waters to search and apprehend vessels that violated these agreements. Consider the case of the Portuguese brigantine Arrogante. The vessel departed from Gallinas River in Sierra Leone to the port of Havana in Cuba in 1837 carrying 407 enslaved persons. The British Royal Navy intercepted the ship approaching the Cuban coast and brought the case to the Anglo-Spanish Court of Mixed Commission (a slave trade court based on British law) at Sierra Leone, where in 1838 the vessel was adjudicated and condemned for illegally practicing the trade in enslaved Africans.40 During the voyage of the Arrogante, 75 slaves were killed. The 332 men, women, boys, and girls who survived the ordeal to the point of the British interception were disembarked in Jamaica and emancipated from slavery. Nearly 60 were reported to be very sick, having endured repeated beatings and rapes.41 Abolitionist newspapers also reported the sexual violations against enslaved women on board slave ships during the nineteenth century. In January 1841, the British Royal Navy captured the overcrowded Spanish schooner Jesus Maria, which was carrying 252 enslaved Africans in deplorable conditions to Cuba. Upon rescuing the survivors, British officers found out that “instances both of rape and murder had taken place in the vessel and that the captain of the slave vessel had been guilty of those crimes.”42 With the rise of the abolitionist movement, sexual violence perpetrated by crew members on enslaved women, men, and children gained recognition for the first time.