THE RISE OF GALINHAS: THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ABOLITION, THE UNITED STATES, AND CUBA

Since its first mention in 1485 by the cartographer Pedro Reinel, Europeans have used the term Galinhas (meaning chickens in Portuguese) to refer to various lands and rivers on the southernmost coast of present-day Sierra Leone (Fig. 1).Footnote ¹² In its broader definition, Galinhas encompassed the coastal region between the Kerefe and Mano Rivers.Footnote ¹³ The term also referred to the rivers’ estuaries, which converged on the Atlantic, forming an interconnected system of lagoons and waterways. For most of the nineteenth century, Galinhas meant the Kerefe River in particular.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the inhabitants used the Mande term dsáia (mangrove country) due to the predominant coastal vegetation (Fig. 2).Footnote ¹⁵ Galinhas incorporated the present-day chiefdoms of Galliness-Perri or Peri-Massaquoi, Kpaka, and Soro-Gbema in the district of Pujehun on the Liberian border.

Figure 1. The Republic of Sierra Leone and Galinhas.

Source: A. Jones, Slaves to Palm Kernels, 1. Reproduced by permission.

Figure 2. The Galinhas country.

Source: A. Jones, Slaves to Palm Kernels, 3. Reproduced by permission.

Environmental circumstances, low population, and poor slaving markets ensured that the Atlantic slave trade was not commercially significant until the late eighteenth century. Furthermore, it was not until after 1808 that it took center stage (Fig. 3).Footnote ¹⁶ Historian Adam Jones wrote that ‘the circumstances which attracted slave dealers to Galinhas at the end of the eighteenth century are likely to remain a mystery.’Footnote ¹⁷ However, if we zoom out from local to global events, the mystery fades. As a slave-trading region, Galinhas emerged at the point of coalescence of events in Europe, America, and Africa — from the conjunction of intertwined Atlantic and local processes.

Figure 3. Slave trade in Galinhas, 1730–1856.

Source: STDB, (https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/O7UPnaum), accessed 7 Oct. 2020.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the British intensified their slaving operations along the African coast as they searched for more forced labor for their West Indian colonies. Slave markets spread out from long-established depots such as Bunce Island, Sherbro, and Cape Mount to marginal regions such as Rio Pongo and Galinhas.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet it was not until the last decade of that century that British traders settled in more significant numbers in the region.Footnote ¹⁹ The further expansion of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1790s attracted British traders to Galinhas, including William Crundell, John Lascelles, John McQueen, Lancelot Bellerby, and Robert Bostock.Footnote ²⁰ They cleared the path for the arrival of US slavers in the early nineteenth century.

After the American Revolution, US merchants rebuilt their national branch of the transatlantic slave trade. Following their British forefathers, they established trading partnerships along the African coast, including at Galinhas. One early example are the D'Wolfs, the most prolific slave-trading family in US history. They sent at least six ships to Galinhas between 1804 and 1808.Footnote ²¹ Increasing US legal restrictions on the trade meant that not every American ship returned to the United States. Three of them, Nancy (1804), Hiram (1805), and Charlotte (1805), unloaded their human cargo in Havana. They were not exceptional but were examples of the growing US involvement in the Cuban slave trade, which ultimately led to the Spanish/Cuban presence in Galinhas.Footnote ²²

In 1789, Spain had deregulated the slave trade, and slave ships from all over the Atlantic world came to Cuba, with the British and Americans leading the list.Footnote ²³ The opening responded to the expansion of Cuba's sugar production, which was further favored with the demise of Saint-Domingue after 1791. During the European and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), the neutral status of the US facilitated American dominance in the Cuban slave trade. American slavers occupied the vacuum left by the European competitors during the Franco-Spanish (1793–5) and Anglo-Spanish Wars (1796–1802, 1804–8). The 1803 reopening of the slave trade in Charleston boosted the US role as the leading supplier of captives to Cuba. In 1807 alone, of the 5,400 slaves that disembarked in Cuba, 80 per cent came from Charleston.Footnote ²⁴ In fact, ‘Cuba received almost as many slaves from US vessels as did Charleston before 1820.’Footnote ²⁵ With this high presence of US slave traders in Cuba, it is not surprising that American ships from Galinhas ended up in Havana. A new transatlantic slave trading corridor had emerged.

The British and American ban on the transatlantic slave trade sealed the intertwined Cuban-Galinhas slave-trading fate. The abolition prompted a relocation of slave-trading actors, networks, and routes in the North Atlantic. Within the Americas, many US slave traders transferred their operations to Havana, a familiar city where they had numerous trading networks. Others relocated to Galinhas, where they also had British connections. During the following years, they conducted trade between both Atlantic regions. One typical example was the American Charles Mason, a D'Wolf agent who joined the British merchants Robert Bostock and William Crundell in Galinhas and eventually relocated to Cuba.Footnote ²⁶

The abolition also prompted relocations within Africa. In 1808 the British government turned the abolitionist settlement of Freetown, one hundred miles north of Galinhas, into a colony complete with a Vice-Admiralty Court and two Royal Navy vessels to enforce abolition.Footnote ²⁷ These abolitionist initiatives drove slave traders to move to regions still free of trading restrictions, such as Rio Pongo and Galinhas, north and south of Freetown, respectively. Thus, Galinhas received from different sources more settlers, trade, and slave ships. In sum, Cuba and Galinhas concurrently welcomed those interested in continuing trading slaves in defiance of their nation's laws. For half a century, both regions shared a common interest in the human trade.

A grounded example of how the post-1808 relocation enabled the new transatlantic slave-trading route is the trajectory of US captain William Richmond. For years, Richmond commanded D'Wolf slave ships between Bristol-Charleston-Upper Guinea-Havana. His brig Jane, fitted in Bristol by James DeWolf, disembarked slaves in Havana in 1806 and Charleston in 1807.Footnote ²⁸ After the U.S. Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, Richmond set sail to Cuba to acquire Spanish papers, which permitted him to trade slaves ‘legally’. He transferred his schooner Dos Amigos nominally to a Spanish merchant and installed a Spanish captain on board to go to Galinhas.Footnote ²⁹ The British were aware of the strategy commonly used by US citizens to circumvent the law:

President James Madison himself admitted to Congress ‘that American citizens [we]re instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity, and defiance of those of their own country’.Footnote ³¹ The dozens of slave ships captured by British vessels in the Caribbean or off the African coast between 1808 and 1815 indicate a high ratio of ‘Spanish’ ships with thinly-veiled American ownership.

On 7 November 1810, HMS Crocodile intercepted Richmond's vessel Dos Amigos as it was approaching Galinhas. Since it did not have slaves aboard and was under the Spanish flag, the British released the vessel.Footnote ³² In Galinhas, Mason and Bostock loaded the ship with 328 slaves.Footnote ³³ On 11 March 1811, the Dos Amigos weighed anchor in Havana with 295 African survivors and a single passenger.Footnote ³⁴ Charles Mason had relocated to Cuba to serve as the agent in Havana of his Galinhas partners. One week later, when the Dos Amigos sailed again to Africa, it probably carried some letters from Mason to Bostock reporting the safe arrival and the profits made from the cargo's sale.Footnote ³⁵ Between Mason's move to Havana in 1811 and his return to Africa in 1815, several Cuban-based but American-owned voyages went to Galinhas.

Since the British seized three of them, their documents, currently in Cuban, Spanish, and British archives, shed light on Americans’ role in creating the trading circuit Havana-Galinhas. In June 1811, the British captured the schooner Paloma off of Galinhas. The vessel, the Vice-Admiralty Court found, had been built in the United States, had been nominally sold in Havana to Cuban merchants, and had sailed from Havana to Norfolk, Virginia, to load merchandise.Footnote ³⁶ In 1813, the bilander Juan was seized before reaching its destination. Prosecutors discovered that James White, a native from Germantown, New Jersey, who had lived in Charleston for the past seven years, co-owned the vessel along with Cuban-based Luis Martínez and Cornelio Souchay.Footnote ³⁷ Freetown's court condemned the ship for ‘being the property of an American enemy’ and ‘trading in the universally illicit, illegal, and inhumane traffic in slaves’, a legal position based more on a humanitarian idealism than reality.Footnote ³⁸ Finally, the schooner Maria Josefa had undertaken six voyages to Africa, three of them to Galinhas, between 1811 and 1814.Footnote ³⁹ For what would be its final expedition, the British found that the nominal Cuban owner of the vessel, José García Álvarez, was working on behalf of an American as well.Footnote ⁴⁰

The British not only captured ships but also raided slave-trading outposts from Rio Nunez to Cape Mesurado. In 1813, Freetown's Governor Charles Maxwell sent an armed force to destroy the settlements of Robert Bostock and John MacQueen in Cape Mesurado. Both were captured and transported to Australia.Footnote ⁴¹ After discovering his partners’ fate, Charles Mason purchased the former US privateer Commodore Perry, acquired Spanish papers, and renamed it the Rosa.Footnote ⁴² On 13 November 1815, the Rosa left Havana loaded with rum, tobacco, and gunpowder and captained by the experienced Bartolomé Marcelino Mestre.Footnote ⁴³ The alleged owner of the Rosa was José García Álvarez, the same man that the year before had served as nominal owner of the schooner María Josefa.Footnote ⁴⁴

The following June, HMS Mary spotted the Rosa in Galinhas, and after ‘an active fire between both parties’, the ship was captured and carried to Freetown.Footnote ⁴⁵ On the grounds of using faux Spanish papers to disguise American ownership, the Vice-Admiralty Court condemned the Rosa.Footnote ⁴⁶ Mason found himself stranded in Freetown and surrounded by dozens of sailors and captains from other ‘Spanish’ ships adjudicated by the British.Footnote ⁴⁷ The shipless men managed to get a small vessel, the Bella Maria, to sail them to Cuba. Near the Bahamas, they were shipwrecked, and Charles Mason was one of the 21 men who perished.Footnote ⁴⁸

The American merchant Jacob Faber replaced Mason in Galinhas. A native of Baltimore, Faber had been conducting business in Cuba since before 1808. After US abolition, he relocated to Rio Pongo, in the present-day Republic of Guinea, which had also become a hub for American slave merchants.Footnote ⁴⁹ Like Galinhas, Rio Pongo was part of the broader trend of new transatlantic regions that expanded the trade and connected with Cuba after the abolition. Americans like Faber played a pivotal role in linking that African region with the Cuban slave market. For seven years, Jacob Faber sent loaded vessels from Pongo to Havana. In 1814, after the British burned down his factory, Faber returned to Cuba.Footnote ⁵⁰

In 1816, six of Havana's merchants — the brothers José Ricardo, Juan, and Antonio O'Farrill, Juan Espinosa, Martín Zavala, and Cornelio Souchay — asked Faber to join a slave-trading venture. These men were part of a growing Cuban-based transatlantic slave-trading corridor with Upper Guinea. The German Huguenot Souchay, for example, had lived in Baltimore, knew Mason, and had already sent ships to Galinhas, such as Juan, in 1813. The six men planned to install Faber in Galinhas to establish a trading outpost. They would finance the enterprise, purchase a vessel in the United States, and supply everything Faber needed to start up the factory. The contract, signed on 10 April 1816, stipulated that they would provide merchandise and a fleet of six ships to conduct the slave trade between Galinhas and Havana. Faber would be responsible for managing the factory, gathering the captives, loading the vessels, and sending them to Cuba. In return, he would receive a quarter of the profits.Footnote ⁵¹ Galinhas was the first African slave-trading factory financed from Havana.Footnote ⁵²

From the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, the transportation of Africans to the Spanish Americas had been in Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British hands. Thus, by the time Madrid deregulated the slave trade in 1789, Spaniards did not possess trading outposts in Africa, networks, a slave-trading fleet, or any experience in the transatlantic human trade. Eager to tap into that commerce to more effectively supply the expanding plantation economy, Cuban-based traders took advantage of the presence of ‘foreign’ slave traders on the island. With American assistance, Cubans acquired ships, learned about the trade, trained captains and pilots, acquired commercial connections along the Upper Guinea coast, and established factories such as the one at Galinhas. Faber's trajectory embodies the transfer of technologies, expertise, and networks that enabled the creation of the Cuban-based transatlantic slave trade.

Faber's first stop was Baltimore. There, he acquired the schooner Iris, a former US privateer with ports for eighteen guns described as ‘an excellent ship for the type of voyage it will be employed’.Footnote ⁵³ On 28 May 1816, the Iris arrived in Charleston captained by William Murphy, who was accompanied by Faber and Stephen Goss, the latter a slaver from Liverpool who had lived for nearly ten years in Galinhas and was transferring his factory to Faber.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Iris was loaded with everything needed for an extended stay in Africa. Letters sent by Faber from Charleston to his partners in Havana listed the price, quantity, and descriptions of the merchandise and the suppliers’ names in Boston, New York, and Charleston. The list included a variety of dry food, alcoholic beverages, tobacco, coffee, cookware, furniture, fabrics, firearms, ammunition, carpentry tools, medicines, candles, construction materials, tableware, and much more.Footnote ⁵⁵

By the time Faber sailed to Africa on 3 July 1816, a new trading system was in place. In violation of their country's laws, American merchants took over and expanded the trade from Galinhas to the Americas, particularly Cuba. After the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, the transatlantic slave trade peaked on the island as Cuban-based merchants consolidated their foothold in Galinhas. The redeployment of slave-trading actors, networks, and routes in the North Atlantic, the simultaneous relocation of US slave traders to Cuba and Galinhas, the shutting of long-established trading centers and the opening of new ones in Upper Guinea, the growth of Cuba as a slaving market and outfitting region, and the creation of a transatlantic corridor between Havana and Galinhas would shape the sociopolitical landscape of southern Sierra Leone for the next half-century. The consequences within Galinhas were immediate.

WARFARE, THE SLAVE TRADE, AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE GALINHAS KINGDOM

Galinhas's early-nineteenth-century social composition is critical to understanding the nature of the events that unfolded in the region. After the sixteenth-century disintegration of the Mali Empire, Mande-speaking people from the Upper Niger moved to the coast of present-day Sierra Leone and Liberia, where they conquered, partially assimilated, and intermarried with the Mel-speaking inhabitants of the coast, such as the Bullom, Krim, Gola, and Kissi.Footnote ⁵⁶ The newcomers, the Mande-speaking Vai people, grew to become the most influential people at the coast and the leading slave traders in coastal Galinhas.Footnote ⁵⁷ By the early nineteenth century, the Vai were surrounded by the Mende to the north, the Bullom and Krim to the northwest, and the Gola to the northeast.

The descendants of unions between European settlers and African women added another critical social component to Galinhas. As was customary in the relationship between landlords and strangers in West Africa, white merchants, to be granted access to the land and become part of the community, established kinship ties by marrying women related to the ruling elite. Those unions resulted in a progeny of people labeled by historians as ‘mulattos’, ‘Eurafricans’, or ‘lançados’, who achieved power as cultural and commercial middlemen or brokers between European merchants and African rulers.Footnote ⁵⁸ The oldest Eurafrican lineages in Galinhas were the Clevelands, Gomezes, Rogerses, Caulkers, and Tuckers.Footnote ⁵⁹

Vai peoples’ central political units were nucleated villages made up of extended family or members of the same clan or descent group. Each village had big men, called kpakoisia in Mende.Footnote ⁶⁰ Individuals reached these positions of power through kinship ties, conquest in wars, and trading connections.Footnote ⁶¹ The community measured their leaders’ prestige and authority by the wealth they accumulated in the form of dependents, such as wives, offspring, or slaves, as well as the control they exerted over other territories. Demographic pressures, economic and trading growth, the threat of common enemies, military expansions, and family unions often brought clusters of villages together, forming more complex political systems that could be better described as confederations. European sources labeled the heads of those confederations of villages or chiefdoms as ‘kings’, and indeed, many Vai chiefs appropriated this term to negotiate with the white newcomers. However, among themselves, the Mende word mahawai or ‘big chief’ was used.Footnote ⁶² Patrilineal kinships and a narrative of common ancestry and history bound those larger chieftaincies.Footnote ⁶³ According to a report submitted to Zachary Macaulay by a British slave trader who lived in Galinhas in the late 1790s,

The growing early-nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade shattered the balance of power among Galinhas villages as described above. From a domestic standpoint, increasing tensions were another episode in a long history of commercial rivalries, this time propelled by the emergent trade in human bodies. Around 1805 two big men (kpakoisia), Fan Souner and Siaka, stopped paying tribute to their overlord (mahawai), Carribil. To settle the dispute, Mattier Roger, the eldest leader, summoned a palaver, an official council attended by the ruling elite to administer justice and reach consensus on legal, political, economic, and religious matters affecting community members.Footnote ⁶⁵ Each faction sought support from their respective British tenants. Fan Souner went to John Lascelles, who provided him with forty slaves and puncheons of rum; Siaka received the same from William Crundell, while ‘prince’ Carribil got support from a Mr. Willing. Carribil, knowing that Siaka and Fan Souner had bribed Mattier Roger and that his enemies had planned to assassinate him, ‘removed all his goods that night, and the women and children, and dug up the bones of his father and carried them with him’.Footnote ⁶⁶ One of the warriors loyal to Carribil, Stephen Rogers, who descended from an old lineage of Eurafricans, was killed and dismembered. Carribil, followed by the Krim people, returned to Galinhas and burned down some towns and factories. The people from Mano and Tewo, allied to Carribil, addressed the ‘confederate chiefs of Galinhas’:

As a result of the war, ‘the white people were all driven away; and none got off without great loss.’Footnote ⁶⁸ A letter from an American slaver confirms the expulsion of the British slave traders from Galinhas. In 1807, captain Joseph Wood of the US slave ship Mary wrote to the commercial firm Gardner and Dean, owners of the vessel in Newport, Rhode Island, that ‘the natives have driven all the white traders from the Gallinas, which of course must be injurious to the trade.’Footnote ⁶⁹ With some interruptions, the war continued for more than a decade until its final resolution in the 1820s.

Two supporters of Carribil related the events to John Kizell, a former slave from South Carolina living in Sherbro as an abolitionist.Footnote ⁷⁰ Kizell, in turn, sent a report to the British authorities in Freetown, which remains the only known existing account about the conflict. In Kizell's story, the war was caused by ‘white people with respect to the prices of slaves and the duties’, who encouraged the conflict because ‘it would furnish them with the means of getting slaves.’ These words are consistent with the abolitionist narrative and the broader European perception of Africans as easily susceptible to white manipulation. It is difficult to assess the veracity of Kizell's account, nor should we accept his claims that African chiefs were subordinate to ‘whites’. Many Africanist historians now agree that precolonial African landlords controlled most regions during the transatlantic slave trade age. The Vai saying ‘sunda ma gara, ke a sunda-fa’, or ‘a stranger has no power but his landlords’, summarized Galinhas's power relations.Footnote ⁷¹ Finally, as shown below, wars did not necessarily mean more profit for the slave traders.

Around 1809, warring parties had reached a truce, and the white traders were allowed to return. This coincided with the settlement of US traders in the region. In 1810, Chiefs Siaka, Fan Souner, Dewara Soba, Mattier Roger, and Senhor Medeina granted the American Charles Mason ‘and his factory every protection in the country, and free permission to cut wood, thatch, and get water and mud and anything requisite to the Factory’ in exchange for fifty bars of tobacco, one cask of rum, and gunpowder.Footnote ⁷² Siaka was Mason's main landlord. Thus, when Mason sailed to Cuba in 1811, he had left behind his British partners and a network of Vai chiefs’ loading vessels with captives bound for Havana. As already explained, the number of slave ships heading from Havana to Galinhas increased by the years.

In mid-1816, the Iris transporting Faber to Africa arrived at Sherbro, between Freetown and Galinhas, where the renowned ‘mulatto’ slave dealer William Tucker welcomed the crew. During a dinner of fowls and rice hotly peppered and yellowed with palm oil, Tucker confessed that he met Jacob Faber when he managed his Rio Pongo factory. This revelation indicates the extensive network of traders traversing the West African coast. On 25 August 1816, the Iris anchored off the Kerefe River, where there were ‘several schooners under Spanish, French, and Dutch colors waiting for slaves, all clippers built in Baltimore’.Footnote ⁷³

By the time Faber disembarked in Galinhas, the region was on its way to becoming a thriving slaving hub supplying the increasing demand from Cuba. People searching for new living opportunities migrated to the coast to find employment in the service economy surrounding slave markets. We can only guess the demographic impact of the growing commercial activity on a region with relatively infertile soils and a politically fragmented society. Competing chiefs wanted to get what they considered a fair share of the trade. Thus, demographic pressures and preexisting political tensions boosted by the increased demand for slaves were ingredients for the soon-to-come sociopolitical turmoil.

On 13 November 1816, a few days after disembarking in Galinhas, Jacob Faber wrote to his partners in Havana: ‘A civil war has broken out between both sides of the river.’Footnote ⁷⁴ The conflict that Faber described manifested between two African chiefs, Siaka and Amara Lalu. It was not motivated by ethnolinguistic or religious considerations; both Siaka and Amara Lalu were Vai by birth and Islamic in belief.Footnote ⁷⁵ Instead, the war was a rupture between members of the same lineage, descent group, or clan: Siaka from the Passii Massaquoi chiefdom and Amara Lalu from the Kiajua Massaquoi chiefdom.Footnote ⁷⁶ According to inconsistent oral traditions, Siaka was either Amara's father, stepfather, or possibly uncle.Footnote ⁷⁷ Theodore Canot described the war as a ‘family feud’:

Faber sided with his landlord Siaka. ‘I have taken residence in the strongest side,’ he wrote to Havana, ‘the kings and chiefs here are very happy I have come to live with them.’Footnote ⁷⁹ By December, Jacob Faber had moved to Siaka's village, Gendema, Galinhas's future capital. Gendema, located less than four miles from the mouth of the Kerefe River, was the main stop along the routes taken by caravans coming from the interior. In 1819, the British missionary John B. Cates described it as a prosperous town:

In exchange for protection, Jacob Faber had to supply Siaka with resources, restrain from trading with the enemy, and take up arms on his behalf if needed. A contract signed on 22 December 1816 between Siaka, other chiefs, and Faber set the tone of the relationship:

As this contract shows, Faber had to respond to Siaka and other principal chiefs in the region, such as Gomez and Roger. The Gomez family descended from a Portuguese lançado who settled in Bissau in the late seventeenth century.Footnote ⁸² By the early nineteenth century, branches of the family were scattered along the Upper Guinea coast. In Galinhas, there were two principal Gomez brothers, William and Charles, who had taken different political paths during the war. While William had pledged alliance to Siaka, Charles supported Amara Lalu.Footnote ⁸³ The missionary Cates described his impressions of a visit he paid to Charles Gomez in 1819:

The Rogerses descended from the British merchant Zachary Rogers, who settled in Sherbro in the late seventeenth century. Like the Gomezes, Rogerses could be found on both sides of the conflict and all over Galinhas. After generations of marriages and alliances, some were closely related to the Pasii Massaquois, while others were linked to the Kiajua Massaquouis, each with a separate territory.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the early nineteenth century, the Rogerses allied with Siaka lived in Mina, a village located in the mouth of the Kerefe and the final stop on the slaving path coming from the interior.Footnote ⁸⁶

Despite what seems a clear-cut division between political groups, the reality of the war was more complicated. Alliances among villages, chiefs, and merchants shifted frequently. Behind the scenes, new coalitions were forged, and allies could quickly become enemies. It is impossible to reconstruct the details of shifting alliances, but documents produced by Faber and others offer glimpses. For example, Howland's description shows a much more complex picture of the relationship between the Gomez brothers:

Jacob Faber himself, despite agreements with his landlords, provided merchandise to the opposing faction. In a letter from January 1817, Faber asked his partners in Havana for goods for ‘two brothers, the main chiefs in Mano's party’, William and Charles Gomez, supposedly enemies.Footnote ⁸⁸ Years later, he paid the price for his duplicity. Despite his shady business, Faber considered himself a fair judge of others’ political conduct. In a letter to his partners from July 1818, Faber wrote that ‘the natives here do not have any law or customs to make them accountable for any moral or serious obligations, they are divided among different towns, each chief does not have any other law for his behavior than his own will.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Even though Faber's words reflected the condescension of most white men in Africa, his attitude was grounded in the profound instability in the region:

With such a predisposition towards his neighbors amidst a very hostile environment, Faber got ready for worst-case scenarios. He continuously asked his partners in Havana for resources to protect himself and his properties. Most of his original companions, such as Stephen Goss, had died from diseases, and Faber asked in many letters for six or eight men to ‘protect the factory and the merchandise’. He believed that such numbers of whites would cause an ‘impression’ among the natives.Footnote ⁹¹ The replacements, however, never arrived.Footnote ⁹² He did receive more resources — boats, cannons, and muskets. Yet without loyal men, as he soon realized, firearms were at best futile and, at worst, a magnet for plunderers.

Faber plied his landlord Siaka with cannons, grenades, catapults, gunpowder, boats, and luxuries such as tobacco, sugar, fabrics, wines, or cheese. On one occasion, Siaka sent to Havana the tail of an elephant, a sign of royal authority, to be embroidered in silver. The request was fulfilled in the spring of 1817, as noted in the ledger of the schooner Circasiana.Footnote ⁹³ A letter on board explained that ‘Ciaca's [sic] orders are inside a tin box except for the hat that is outside wrapped in paper, [on] which costs are listed. We hope that they are of his liking.’Footnote ⁹⁴ Adam Jones has assessed the importance of these goods for Siaka in winning the war:

In addition to fulfilling Siaka's material needs, Faber had to join forces in case of an attack. On 2 March 1817,

We have no details for most battles, but a decisive one took place in mid-1818 when Siaka attacked Amara Lalu's village on the Moa River's west bank. Siaka plundered the place and captured ten prisoners whose heads were fixed on the posts forming the fence.Footnote ⁹⁷ Defeated, Amara Lalu resettled on the opposite side of the river, close to today's town of Male.Footnote ⁹⁸ Siaka achieved control over the most critical commercial channels in Galinhas, the estuaries of the Kerefe and Moa Rivers, where most slave-trading transactions took place. Amara's region of influence was restricted to the area between the Moa and Mano Rivers. However, the war was far from over.

The support that Faber lent to Siaka is a typical example of the relationship between landlords and strangers, as observed everywhere in West Africa. In this case, it was the beginning of many decades of partnership between Siaka, his descendants and many Spaniards who joined, in the 1820s, the slave trade in Galinhas. The consequence of this cooperation is evident. Cuban resources and the increasing demand for captives played a pivotal role in the victory of Siaka and the foundation of the Galinhas kingdom. The expansion of this transatlantic partnership also made possible Siaka's inland expansion.

Faber's records also offer unique insight into the interplay between warfare and the slave trade during the formation of what we could consider a predatory state. Based on what the abolitionists claimed and most historians have argued, we might believe that warfare was the ideal environment for the slave trade to thrive since it would generate more prisoners to fill the slave ships. Although this was true for already established political entities with well-defined slaving frontiers, the argument is less tenable when we look at the origins of a predatory state. When war broke out, Faber, a man with a long career as a slave trader, felt that the war was good news. On 13 November 1816, days after the beginning of the war, he wrote a reassuring letter to his partners:

Faber soon realized that he had miscalculated the consequences of warfare for both his business and personal wellbeing. He never fulfilled the number of slaves he had committed to deliver to Havana; the captives’ ‘quality’ — defined in physical health and appearance — was undesirable, and their costs were higher than usual. Years later, he had to explain to an ill-informed Cuban court the consequences of the war. Faber, contrary to his initial hopes, had learned that wars were disruptive when they occurred on his doorstep.

The transatlantic slave trade relied on a fragile equilibrium between peace on the Atlantic shore, where the factories were located, and warfare in surrounding regions, where most slaves were captured. An illustration of that assertion is what a British trader visiting Freetown from Galinhas told Macaulay in the 1790s. The slave trade, he said, ‘caused wars and accumulation of miseries’ in the hinterland, but not on the coast, where peace was maintained to keep the ‘path open for the trade from the interior’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Jones has rightly concluded that ‘too much warfare was bad even for the slave trade, especially if fought near the coast since it prevented interregional commerce.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ The consequences of the war were immediately felt not only in the interregional or Atlantic commerce but, most importantly, in the everyday life of ordinary people working on the production and service economy underpinning the slave trade.

Coastal slave trading operations required security to access, purchase, imprison, feed, guard, and sell the captives. Inhabitants of neighboring villages depended on social peace to provide necessary services such as farming, transportation, security, maintenance, and trade. War drove many people out of the region, while others were drafted or otherwise withdrew from productive activities. Since the land remained uncultivated and crops were not harvested, there was no food for the local population, the merchants, the slaves, the visitors, and the ships leaving for the Americas. At his arrival at Galinhas in 1816, George Howland vividly described the situation:

To illustrate the social disruptions caused by wars, we can follow a typical slaving operation from the moment the caravans arrived from the interior to the loading of the captives onto the ship. Slaving caravans arrived at Galinhas by foot from Mandingo, Mende, Krim, and Gola territories or in canoes from neighboring regions such as Sherbro and Cape Mount.Footnote ¹⁰³ Records describing the wars in the interior and the ethnogeographical origins of the captives are scarce. To fill this historiographical lacuna, scholars have used the lists of ‘liberated Africans’ rescued by the British from slave ships, which contain the captives’ African names and ethnicities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Philip Misevich has found that Africans sold between Sherbro and Cape Mount originated within sixty miles of the coast with ‘a heavy concentration of captives coming from Mende- and Sherbro-speaking areas’ — a regional pattern of captures identified in other regions in West Africa.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Of 4,567 enslaved persons identified by Misevich, 54 per cent were Mende/Sherbro, 19 per cent Kissi/Kono/Kuranko, and 9 per cent Temne, followed by minor numbers of Limba, Fula, Mandingo, Loko, and Susu. The Vai, in sharp contrast, constituted only 2 per cent of the liberated Africans.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The low numbers of Vai confirm the historical nature of the system of enslavement in Africa.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As elsewhere, enslavement in the Galinhas kingdom relied upon the distinction between the ‘we’ (the insiders, those holding full kinship status) and the ‘others’ (the outsiders who were potentially subject to captivity).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It was crucial for the social stability, legitimacy, and acceptance of slavery in Galinhas that the Vai inhabitants of the region were sure that they were unsuitable for enslavement in ‘normal’ circumstances. However, wars made those cultural boundaries more diffuse, creating confusion and a sense of social insecurity. Misevich's data comprises mostly slaves ‘liberated’ after Galinhas's slaving frontier was already established. However, before 1820, the number of enslaved Vai people might have been higher due to the coastal war.

After reaching the slave depots in Galinhas, caravan leaders discussed business with chiefs and traders. The head of the caravan, Faber said, ‘is treated with courtesy and civility. A portion of the rich merchants are Mohammedans, and they see as a particular demonstration of respect that a glass of wine is given to them.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While the factors inspected the slaves, the head of the caravan and his people made sure the quality of the merchandise received in exchange, such as fabrics, cloth, spirits, coffee, tobacco, iron, firearms, gunpowder, metallic pots, sea salt, or any luxury good, was worthy. During each of these transactions, men and women entertained the visitors, transported the merchandise, cared for the slaves, secured the factories, built and maintained the barracoons, and ensured the captives remained under control. War disrupted these seemingly mundane activities.

War also caused severe shortages of food. ‘The country’, Faber wrote in December 1816, ‘is in a state of misery’ for which it was ‘impossible’ to find rice, a staple that had been for centuries the most important crop produced in Galinhas. A sense of fear and instability made its cultivation and harvesting impossible. On several occasions, Faber had to sell the slaves reserved for his partners in Havana

For the rest of his stay in Africa, the situation did not improve:

When the ships — mostly small schooners between 70 and 150 tons — arrived in Galinhas, the merchandise was unloaded and carried to different factories and villages along the river. While the factor gathered the slaves, the ship sailed to neighboring regions such as Cape Mount or Sugary to obtain wood, water, and rice and preserve the crew's health by keeping a distance from the coast. For a vessel expecting to carry 150 slaves, the time to complete the cargo was usually from forty to fifty days, while two months were required for 200 captives.Footnote ¹¹¹ Once the human cargo was assembled, the ‘shortage or necessity of boats’, Faber said, made all these activities extremely difficult. The people that took care of this job, such as the Kroomen, refused to do it because they ‘were scared of being apprehended’.Footnote ¹¹² Ships remained longer in the region, which meant increased mortality for sailors. Thus, surviving crew members of the Iris were stranded in Galinhas for ten months before embarking for Havana, and half of them died. The captain wrote:

For the return voyage, slave ships required food, water, and firewood supplies for at least six weeks. These items became hard to acquire, and Faber often traveled to other regions such as Cape Mesurado to get them. However, as Faber frequently complained, not even imported supplies were sufficient. On some occasions, he had to send the slave ships ‘without a sufficient amount of water and firewood’, for which they had to stop in other places, which increased the risk of capture.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Extended stays in Galinhas, losses among the crew, and the purchase of malnourished captives eroded profits.

The rampant violence in Galinhas not only disrupted business, but it also increased the risk for traders and visitors. As his requests for protection show, Faber was well-aware of the dangers. Did he exaggerate the situation to receive more resources from his financiers or, later on, to make his case in court? George Howland profoundly disliked Faber, but he wrote that ‘Faber feared the native might plunder him if he kept a large quantity on hand.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ His fears became a reality on several occasions. In December 1816, Faber's factory was plundered while he was in Cape Mesurado searching for rice. A few months later, a group of men stole a canoe, some tobacco, and one slave. ‘I am sure’, he wrote, ‘that they could commit more depredations if attempted’. By July 1818, Faber's relationship with neighboring chiefs worsened. ‘Currently’, he wrote, ‘there is in this country a preying and thieving spirit [I] never saw before.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ The war, in sum, added to usual insecurities.

In 1818, Faber learned about a plot orchestrated by Amara Lalu, other chiefs, and a group of Freemason US traders and captains to take over his trading outpost in the Kerefe, ‘fortify the mouth of the river[,] and establish a monopoly’. Among the conspirators was William Gomez, his supposed ally. In March, as described at the beginning of this article, Faber's factory was attacked; he was imprisoned and carried to a village in the enemy's territory close to the Mano River. After a few days, he was released and went to Gendema to request justice from Siaka for ‘the cruel manner [of treatment] he had been subjected to, and the abominable and barbarian way he was robbed’. After receiving from Faber 500 bars to take care of the matter, Siaka summoned a palaver, which concluded that William Gomez had colluded with Amara Lalu in the attack. The perpetrators were only fined. Faber had fallen out of Siaka's favor.Footnote ¹¹⁷

On top of local disruptions, British suppression policies added another layer of challenges to Galinhas's commercial operations. Portugal in 1815 and Spain in 1817 agreed with Britain to ban the slave trade north of the equator, which de jure made illegal the presence of Spanish slave ships and traders in Galinhas. Faber knew, as he had experienced in 1814 when the British had burned down his factory in Rio Pongo, that it was just a matter of time before Freetown took more direct actions against Galinhas.

In July 1818, he wrote to his partners that ‘the mistreatment, bad faith, and betrayal that lately I have received do not allow me to stay here longer. I beg you not waste time in getting me out of here.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ In September 1819, Faber returned to Cuba, where he had to face multiple lawsuits from his disgruntled business partners. Nevertheless, despite all the obstacles he faced in Africa between 1816 and 1819, Faber managed to send 1,691 captives to Cuba. He died in his home country before a final settlement for the legal case was reached.

In the early 1820s, Siaka gave Amara Lalu his daughter in marriage in exchange for political loyalty.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Peace was achieved in Galinhas, and the kingdom consolidated and expanded in the following decades. Siaka pushed the slaving frontier inland, and, on the coast, the socioeconomic activities that made the transatlantic slave trade possible returned to some sense of normalcy. While the conflict lasted, slave ships could only complete their cargoes by calling at different markets in surrounding ports. The conditions had changed. A British report from September 1822 acknowledged that ‘the slave trade has much increased in the last four years’ and that a ship could now embark her slaves in ‘less than two hours’.Footnote ¹²⁰ The numbers of slave exports made the case clear. Whereas between 1815 and 1820 around 2,900 Africans embarked in Galinhas, during the next quinquennium, 1821–6, the numbers almost tripled to 7,800. Between 1827 and 1856, when the last slave ship departed Galinhas to Cuba, an additional 21,600 Africans were shipped to the Americas. After excluding those liberated in Freetown, 76 per cent of them were sent to Cuba.Footnote ¹²¹

The economic growth boosted by political stability attracted more ships and merchants. A French visitor stated in 1822 that he had counted between 14 and 16 white settlers, mostly British and Americans, but also two Spaniards. After 1825, the influence of Spaniards from Havana in Galinhas expanded. According to Adam Jones, ‘the Spanish had a greater impact on Galinhas society than any other non-African nation. Nearly all the Spanish traders were agents of firms based in Havana.’Footnote ¹²² This massive influx of Spaniards to Galinhas could never happened without the American connection created by Mason, Faber, and others. Among the nearly thirty Spaniards who settled in Galinhas between 1825 and 1850, one was particularly infamous. Pedro Blanco Fernández de Traba (1794–1854) sent thousands of enslaved Africans to Havana in alliance with his father-in-law and landlord Siaka.Footnote ¹²³ Among the captives they sent to Cuba were those who rebelled in the schooner Amistad in 1839.

In the 1830s, Siaka, supported by his loyal mercenary Mende warriors, expanded his territory thirty miles inland by waging new wars, which, in turn, fed the growing slave market.Footnote ¹²⁴ In what used to be a fairly deserted coastline, many factories, barracoons, and other adjacent trading compounds were erected with lookout posts a hundred feet high. Men continually watched the horizon with telescopes and used signaling systems to communicate the arrival of slave ships or cruisers.Footnote ¹²⁵ The system was perfected, the population expanded, and the commercial routes with the interior multiplied, reaching as far as Futa Jallon.

In the mid-1830s, war broke out again in Galinhas against Amara Lalu, which resulted in his decapitation in 1842.Footnote ¹²⁶ After Siaka died in 1843, his son Mana took his place as the ruler of the kingdom. Well respected, with a stable network of subordinate alliances and supported by other chiefs, Mana expanded his influence as far as the Mano River. Galinhas's ‘grandeur’ under the first years of Prince Mana could be illustrated in the wealth of its capital, Gendema, as described by Reverend James Beale in 1850:

Mana, nevertheless, presided over the decline of the kingdom induced by major British attacks, abolitionist pressures, the Zawo slave revolt, and British and Liberian colonization efforts, but most importantly, the end of the Atlantic slave trade.Footnote ¹²⁸ After Mana died in 1872, the decay of the kingdom was sealed. Without having environmental or demographic conditions to adapt to the so-called ‘legitimate commerce’, people left the region, trading outposts closed, and few villages survived under conditions that little resembled the old days. In 1896, the British declared Galinhas a protectorate and part of Sierra Leone.

Almost a century later, in 1978, historian Adam Jones visited Gendema where he saw only the shadows of the past: