The Space of Slave Sales

Physical structures where slave markets operated ranged widely. Consider the example of Cartagena, a slave-trading port established by Spanish colonizers on the Caribbean coastal area of present-day Colombia, where nearly 150,000 enslaved Africans came ashore between 1501 and 1867.

Seventeenth-century observers described Cartagena’s open-air market as a site surrounded by barracoons separated by palisades. Slave auctions were public spectacles and the most common way used to pay debts and liquidate estates. To hide scars and other wounds, slave dealers covered the naked bodies of enslaved men, women, and children with palm oil. Traders and buyers forced enslaved persons to walk, dance, sing, speak, and laugh. Women amounted to nearly 30 percent of customers in Cartagena’s slave market during the eighteenth century. Although female buyers likely acquired one or two enslaved persons to perform domestic service, their significant presence in the market suggests that they engaged in reselling captives to other customers. Like the men, these buyers of human flesh manipulated, touched, and smelled the bodies of the Africans on display. In this arduous process, most enslaved persons, including men, women, children, and babies, were sold individually and in pairs, even though sales in groups also occurred, in numbers ranging from five to one hundred.²⁸ Although the slave trade to the region was legally banned in 1812, the internal trade persisted.

Slave markets and auction blocks were major landmarks in most slave-trading port cities in the Americas. In important slave ports such as Cap Français (Le Cap) in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, through which one-third of the French imports of enslaved Africans arrived, most captives were sold on board the slave ships. As noted by David Geggus, African captives in poorer health were brought ashore and, as elsewhere in the Americas, they were gathered by the dozens in depots close to the shore, where they died in public view. In the late eighteenth century, French administrators ordered slave traders to transfer these barracoons to a new slave market in the south of the town, but the order apparently went unheeded, and mortality remained high. Depending on the year, as many as 18 percent of these newly disembarked enslaved Africans could die while waiting to be sold at Cap Français.³⁰

Sites of slave sales also changed in Brazil, as the international slave trade was gradually banished. Starting in the early eighteenth century, when Portuguese colonizers uncovered mines of gold and diamonds in the interior of the colony, the coastal city of Rio de Janeiro gradually became the Brazil’s largest slave-trading port and then the colony’s capital in 1766. Slave merchants imported Africans, especially from the West Central African ports of Luanda and Benguela who, once disembarked in Rio de Janeiro, remained in the city and neighboring areas. During the period when most Africans were disembarked at Fish’s Beach, the captives entered the city to be sold in the slave shops of Direita Street, but few descriptions of these early sites exist, as very few foreign travelers visiting Rio de Janeiro during that time published their accounts. During the last decades of the eighteenth century, most shops selling newly arrived enslaved Africans were located in Valongo, an area corresponding to today’s neighborhoods of Gamboa and Saúde.

Several travelers visited the Valongo slave market, the site with the largest concentration of recently arrived Africans available for sale. They often expressed shock at the horrible conditions of men, women, and children. British clergyman Robert Walsh described the infamous slave market in his travel account Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829. He explained that, after coming ashore, as in Cartagena, most slaves were sold by intermediaries in the slave market.³¹ In Rio de Janeiro these intermediaries were Roma, a people originated in north India who had lived in Europe since the fifteenth century. Because of their nomadic lifestyle, language, and culture, they had been rejected since their arrival in Europe. In the eighteenth century, Portugal ordered that the Roma population be deported to its overseas colonies. In Brazil, the Roma initially integrated with the white lower classes. In Rio de Janeiro, the Roma not only became slave owners but also specialized in buying and reselling enslaved people, thereby making some of these Roma wealthy.³² Eventually, their presence in Rio de Janeiro’s slave market was so visible that several European travelers reported their activities in the text and images of their travelogues.³³

Walsh explained that “almost every house in this place is a large ware-room, where the slaves are deposited, and customers go to purchase. These ware-rooms stand at each side of the street, and the poor creatures are exposed for sale like any other commodity.”³⁴ He noted that the warerooms were spacious and could accommodate three hundred to four hundred enslaved men and women of various ages: “Round the room are benches on which the elder generally sit, and the middle is occupied by the younger, particularly females who squat on the ground stowed close together, with their hands and chins resting on their knees.”³⁵ White Brazilian women also shopped in Valongo slave market.

Walsh’s description of Valongo perfectly corresponds to two lithographs published in the travel account Voyage pittoresque et historique au BrĂ©sil by French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret, who spent sixteen years in Rio de Janeiro and kept a studio in the Catumbi neighborhood, where the Roma slave dealers were based. For example, the lithograph Shop of Valongo Street (Boutique de la Rue Val-Longo) shows a large, neat depot where emaciated enslaved men, women, and children are sitting on benches or lying on the floor waiting to be sold under the supervision of a Roma dealer. The horrible scene represented in the lithograph is confirmed in the text accompanying the image, in which Debret explained that the “auction room, most often silent, is still infected of castor oil escaping from the pores of these wrinkled walking skeletons, whose look, curious, shy, or sad, reminds you of the interior of a menagerie.”³⁶ Still, in spite of the horrible environment, he noted that sometimes the slaves waiting to be sold would sing and dance “turning on themselves and clapping their hands to mark the beat, a kind of dance quite similar to the savages in Brazil.”³⁷ Music and dance were ways to cope with trauma, to collectively remember their homelands. Despite extreme despair, Africans were able to show resilience.

Bavarian painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, who sojourned in Brazil from 1822 to 1825, also observed the unhealthy and inhuman conditions of Africans kept in the various shops of the Valongo slave market, which in his travelogue is described as “a shocking and almost unbearable spectacle: all day these unfortunate, men, women, children, stand sit or lie close to the walls of these huge buildings, and mixed with each other; or, if the weather is good, we see them in the street.”³⁸ His illustrated travelogue referred to the slave pens as “cowsheds” and described the horrible condition and odor of enslaved Africans who had been recently disembarked from slave ships.