The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade

285 Pages·3.346 MB·English

by  William St. Clair

The Door
of No Return
The Fitstory of Cape Coast Castle
and the Atlantic Slave Trade
William St Clair
BlueBridge
LO nn,
Jacket design by Stefan Killen Design
Cover image top: Getty Images
Cover image bottom: Cape Coast Castle today, from Kwest J. Anquandah,
Castles and Forts of Ghana (Atalante, 1999)
Text design by Sue Lamble
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the Publisher.
Copyright © 2006, 2007 by William St Clair
Published in Great Britain under the title
The Grand Slave Emporium by Profile Books Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
St. Clair, William.
The door of no return : Cape Coast Castle and the slave trade / William St Clair.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-933346-05-2
ISBN-10: 1-933346-05-1
1. Slave-trade—Ghana—History. 2. Slavery—Ghana—History. 3. Cape Coast
Castle (Cape Coast, Ghana)—History. 4. Cape Coast Castle (Cape Coast,
Ghana)—Sociological aspects. 5. Slave-trade—Great Britain—History. I. Title.
HT1394.G48873 2007
306.3’6209667—dc22 2006031398
First published in North America in 2007 by
BlueBridge
An imprint of
United Tribes Media Inc.
240 West 35th Street, Suite 500
New York, NY 10001
www.bluebridgebooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
10987654321
Contents
Introduction
= The sea
NH Outside
O Inside
W
hk The officers
HOH The soldiers and the workers 128
DH The women 147
The fort 181
n
O The emporium 200
o The wide wide world 245
O
Bibliographical note 265
List of illustrations 273
Index 275
Acknowledgements 282
SAHARA THE GOLD COAST OF AFRICA
DESERT
during the slave trade era
hme NS

WS, Jou! ‘TODTH, > COAST Ss LAV, * a }

WN COAST GO 3

a
ATLANTIC OCEAN
)

Oo ey BP Milles
go oo tem ASANTE EMPIRE
eSt —

O The three Castles
© British, Dutch, and
Danish forts
Introduction
Am the western coast of Africa, from where the Sahara desert
ends in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, are
the remains of many castles, forts, and temporary lodges built by the
Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the Germans of
the Duchy of Brandenburg, the Danes, the Swedes, and the British.
Other countries, notably the United States and Brazil, which had
no slaving forts, had fleets of slaving ships. However, nowhere are
there such vivid monuments to the transatlantic slave trade as along
the coast of Ghana, where about sixty forts were built, some within
sight — and even cannon range — of each other. Although that stretch
of the African coast was difficult for sailing ships to approach, it was
more accessible than cither the coast to the west, which was skirted
by shallow sandy lagoons, or the coast further to the east, where
the deltas of the rivers Volta and Niger caused other problems for
mariners. Most of these forts still stand, either adapted for later uses
or in various states of ruin.
Cape Coast Castle, which lies almost on the same meridian
as London, was the headquarters in Africa of the entire British
involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. For 143 years (1664-
1807) it was, in the words of one of its British governors, the grand
emporium of the British slave trade. From this building perched on
The Door of No Return
the shore of the South Atlantic Ocean, men, women, and children
born in Africa were sold to British slave ships and carried to the
West Indies, to North and South America, and to destinations
elsewhere. Most were then put to work in tropical plantations,
growing sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee, cotton, indigo, and other crops,
or were employed in mines, in the industrial workshops in which
the crops were processed, as soldiers, or as domestic servants.
The British slaving fort at Whydah in Dahomey (modern Ouidah
in Benin), nearly 300 miles to the east, was administered from the
Castle. Many hundreds of miles from the Castle in the other direction
were the British forts in the Gambia and Sierra Leone (and for a
time Gorée Island in Senegal), at times formally subordinate to the
governor in Cape Coast Castle, but mostly administered directly from
London, and all integrated into the same oceanic network of ships
and shore settlements that formed the African end of the British
slave trade. Henry Meredith, a fort governor, who stayed on after the
trade was made illegal in 1807 and who wrote a book recommend-
ing that it should be resumed, looked back nostalgically to the days
he remembered when ‘it was common to see twenty or thirty sailing
ships of different nations at one time.’
The Castle today is well preserved, partially restored, and excellently
presented, with an informative museum. Along with other castles
and forts in Ghana, it is designated a UNESCO World Heritage
Site. Although the building has been altered since the slave trade era,
much remains the same: the heat and the damp, the unceasing crash
and spray of the Atlantic breakers on the rocks, the long canoes by
which the local coastal peoples make their living from the sea, and the
vultures, which are seldom out of sight. Visitors need no longer fear
the malaria, the yellow fever, and the other tropical illnesses that long
made West Africa the white man’s grave. However, to appreciate the
claim of the Castle on the memory of the entire modern world, the
journey must take place in the imagination. There is no other way.
Introduction
The transatlantic slave trade was the greatest forced migration in
history. From the mid-fifteenth to the late nineteenth century, over
11 million people born in Africa were carried across the ocean. About
3 million were taken by ships belonging to British merchants and
those of the British settlers in North America and the West Indies.
Nearly a million enslaved Africans went to Jamaica alone. During
the 1790s, when the British slave trade was at its height, a slaving ship
left London, Bristol, Liverpool, or one of half a dozen other British
ports every second day. There was also a huge inter-American slave
trade — to, from, within, and between mainland North and South
America and the Caribbean. The ancestors of innumerable people
living today in the United States, Canada, the English-speaking
Caribbean, Britain, and many other countries passed through the
‘door of no return’ in Cape Coast Castle or in one of its subsidiary
forts. Louis Armstrong, for one, believed his family left Africa
through the gate of the British fort at Anomabu nearby, although,
like others, he only had uncertain traditions to go on.
Thousands of men participated directly, traveling far from
their homes in order to do so. But many other men, women,
and children, Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Asians, were
indirectly employed near where they lived, in making the building
materials for the castles and forts, in designing and constructing the
specialized sailing vessels, in manufacturing the armaments, chains,
and instruments of coercion, in providing the financial capital, the
credit, the insurance, the foreign exchange, and the other complex
services that were essential to the operation of the trade. Many
thousands more were employed in spinning, weaving, dyeing,
and packing the fabrics, in casting and forging the metalwares,
in distilling the brandy and the rum, and in the manufacture and
processing of the many other goods and commodities that were
taken to Africa to be exchanged for slaves. Even the peoples of
The Door of No Return
North America who traded deerskins to the incoming European
settlers were drawn into the oceanic economy.
Among those who received dividends from the slave trade
were the British royal family, the British aristocracy, the English
church, and many institutions, families, and individuals. Plantation
owners in North America and the West Indies prospered from the
sale of commodities produced by slave labor, as did some of their
employees and business partners, and profits remitted to Britain
and British settlers overseas supported others who never left home.
A similar reckoning could be made for the other slaving nations.
But it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every person in the
Europeanized world who put sugar in their tea or coffee, spread
jam on their bread, who ate sweets, cakes, or ice cream, who smoked
or chewed tobacco, took snuff, drank rum or corn brandy, or wore
colored cotton clothes, also benefited from, and participated in, a
globalized economy of tropical plantations worked by slaves forcibly
brought from Africa.
When in the 1830s Brodie Cruikshank, a governor of Anomabu
fort, contemplated the map of West Africa with the European
slaving forts dotted along its coast, he saw parasitic leeches that
had stuck themselves on to the skin of Africa, ruthlessly sucking its
blood and draining away its vitality. At that time illegal slave trading
was still rife. But, to others, the same dots on the same maps were
already being reimagined as beacons of light, outposts of civiliza-
tion, and as beachheads for an army of Christian missionaries eager
to make the peoples of Africa conform to their own beliefs and
customs. As the anonymous author of West-African Sketches wrote
in 1824, ‘The present may be the time decreed by the counsels of the
Most High for the ray to go forth which is to enlighten those who
sit in darkness, and through the medium of a small British colony
on the shores of that vast continent . . . the beam shall pierce the
inmost recesses of superstition and idolatry.’
Introduction
Within a generation of the ending of the legal British slave trade
in 1807, the Castle had become one of the advance posts of the
sustained and, in human as well as financial terms, costly British
policy of ending the slave trade both in West Africa and round
the world — an enterprise that can still be seen, even by the most
cynical, as among the least ambiguous examples of national altruism
in history. The memory of one early-nineteenth-century governor,
George Maclean, who promoted peace, schools, and economic
development in the locality, is still honored in the Castle, where he
is buried. In late Victorian times it was Robert Baden-Powell, who,
as a result of his experiences in what had then become the colony
of the Gold Coast, founded the Boy Scouts, an organization that
aimed to persuade young people to adopt the ideals recommended to
Victorian officers and gentlemen. And in the 1950s A. W. Lawrence,
a professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge University, then
director of the National Museum and Monuments in the Gold
Coast, wrote The Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa. Inspired by
the pioneering researches on the European castles in the Middle
East made by his brother T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia),
A. W. Lawrence and his colleagues ensured that Cape Coast Castle
and the other castles and forts were surveyed, photographed, and in
many cases preserved and restored, as an enduring testimony to the
era of direct British involvement in the government of Ghana that
was then drawing to a close.
20000
For a century and a half after the legal British slave trade was
brought to an end British historians ignored, downplayed, or
brushed aside the slaving era as a regrettable preliminary to the
glorious British Christian imperialism that followed. It was a small
step to suggest that the trade had not been so bad after all. Mary
Kingsley, for example, who visited the Castle and its slave dungeons
The Door of No Return
in late Victorian times, thought abolition had been ‘a grave mistake.’
W. Walton Claridge, a colonial medical official, who in 1915 wrote
a two-volume History of the Gold Coast, still occasionally referred to
as the standard work, devoted only about 200 pages out of 1,300 to
the slaving era. ‘Most of the hysterical nonsense that was written
at the time of the agitation for the abolition of the trade,’ Claridge
wrote, ‘consisted of gross exaggerations of isolated cases of abuse.’
As recently as 1952 W. E. F. Ward, who had also lived in the country
and was also both knowledgeable and sympathetic, wrote in his
own History of the Gold Coast that Claridge’s ‘great work’ could not
be superseded.
Every modern generation rediscovers the horrors of the ‘middle
passage,’ the five- or six-week voyage of the slaving vessels from
Africa to the Americas during which many enslaved Africans (and
crew members) died. In recent years, however, much careful historical
research has been published on many other aspects of the slave trade,
including the nature and history of indigenous slavery in Africa, the
other oceanic and land slave trades, the impact of the exchange of
pathogens and illnesses among the three continents, the effects of
the migrations out of Africa on African and on American societies,
and the contribution of the slave trade to economic development.
Since 1999 it has been possible to consult an electronic database of
over 27,000 transatlantic slave voyages, thought to include about
75, percent of the total, compiled by a team of scholars from the
archives of many countries. According to Bernard Bailyn, one of
the modern school of historians who study oceanic exchanges, the
impact of the publication of this database, with the opportunities
for research that it has opened up, can be compared to that of the
Hubble telescope on our understanding of the universe.
With the main outlines now established, those who dare to write
face another problem. How can we escape from the assumptions
about the relative value of human lives, European and African,