The slave trade
and the peopling of Santo Domingo275
order to find out the origins of the West Indian slaves, he also consulted the
even rarer bills of lading of slave-ship owners, but came to the conclusion that
these documents threw no light on the subject. None of the bills of lading
consulted so far has shown the cargoes broken down in terms of ethnic groups,
though they do tell us the names of the slave-ships' home ports (Nantes,
La Rochelle, Le Havre, Bordeaux, Lorient, Marseilles, St Malo, Honfleur)
and sometimes the ship's tonnage and the length of the crossing.
There still remain the announcements and advertisements in the Santo
Domingo press. These notices are of two kinds. One group refers to slaves who
are up for sale as the result of the temporary or permanent return of some
settler to France. Unfortunately, these advertisements do not give exact
descriptions of the slaves. Moreover they relate to only a tiny fraction of the
total number of slaves, and generally to domestics. More interesting for us
are the notices about slaves who had run away, who were in prison or were up
for sale for having attempted to run away. These advertisements are numerous
enough to provide a very serious basis for investigation. We possess no fewer
than 48,000 of them spread out over some thirty years. With a few exceptions
they all indicate the 'nation' the fugitive belonged to. It might be objected
that, since such advertisements refer to maroons, they necessarily make no
reference to the 'peoples' who were not given to running away. But there were
no such peoples. A more serious drawback is that the lists of runaways do not
show the actual proportion of each 'nation' in relation to the total slave
population of Santo Domingo, but merely the proportion of each 'nation'
in relation to the total number of runaways. But this information is in itself
very important, because it reveals that Kongo slaves were in a clear majority
among the runaways. This remained true almost without exception from 1764
to 1793, i.e. throughout the last phase of the colonial period.
So were Kongo slaves in general in the majority, or were they merely
the 'people' most given to escaping, despite their reputation in the colony for
being 'the most lively and the readiest to submit to servitude'?
The table appended to this paper shows how Kongos were in the majority
among the runaways for the years 1764, 1765 and 1766 for example, while in
the same years the slaves imported came largely from the Guinea and Gold
Coasts.
The notices of slave-ship arrivals in the colony provide another source
of information. These represent the actual voices of the colonists, the evidence
of the slave-traders themselves, the day-books of Santo Domingo's trade in
slave labour.
Here too there will be certain instances of lack of precision, but fortu-
nately these do not invalidate the overall information supplied; and the great
majority of these notices are absolutely exact. Only the professional scruples
of the historian compel me to quote the few exceptions.