Negro resistance to slavery and the Atlantic
slave trade from Africa to Black America109Slaves and slave-ships across the Atlantic—life on board—
resistance in the holdMany revolts broke out on board the slave-ships which transported all these
unwilling workers from Africa to America. Few voyages were completed
without the Negroes in the hold attempting, sometimes desperately, to get
free. Many of them preferred death to captivity and the sources record many
cases of suicide, achieved by a variety of means, after unsuccessful attempts to
escape. A study of the revolts on board the slave-ships remains to be made,
chiefly on the basis of the considerable volume of British records, in particular,
the log books or slave-trade ships' journals and the tales and letters written
by slavers. The greater part of these sources is at present lying dormant in
London, in the National Maritime Museum, the British Library, the Public
Record Office, and in Bristol, Liverpool, Oxford and Edinburgh. The important
place occupied by Great Britain from the time of the first voyages undertaken
by Francis Drake and John Hawkins in the reign of Elizabeth I,^16 but more
especially from 1713 on, after the Treaty of Utrecht and the Asiento, which
gave that country the possibility of providing Hispanic America with an annual
supply of African workers, explains the great wealth of material to be found
in the British records.
In Dutch, French, Portuguese, Danish and American records, too, docu-
ments are to be found concerning voyages of slave-ships across the Atlantic,
which sometimes came to a tragic end as a result of the Negroes in the hold
breaking their chains and fighting furiously for their freedom.^17
The first known landing of slaves from Africa on Brazilian soil took
place in 1552, although the documents lead one to suspect that there had been
earlier ones. Some thirty years later, in 1580, after the founding of Loanda
in 1575 and just before the rise of the sugar industry, there were at least 10,000
Africans in Brazil. Of course this represents far less than the 4,000 slaves
imported annually to Pernambuco fifty years later. Before the time of the
bandeiras (1590-1625), that of the entradas was a period during which fugitive
Negroes, few and far between, were captured in the course of 'reconnaissance
expeditions to the interior or along the coast by the Nordeste colonists'. The
Negroes were already mixing with the Indian tribes pursued by colonists in
search of labour, despite the famous 'law on the freedom of the indigenous
inhabitants of Brazil' (1570), which they had amended and revised.
The Negro revolts were a great nuisance to the Governor of Pernambuco,
Diogo de Meneses, for in a letter to the king dated 23 August 1608 he requested
that aldeas be organized in the capital near the sugar-mills. In this way the
Negroes, who were so expensive and revolted against their masters, could be
advantageously replaced by Indians.