Maritime Passages in the Indian Ocean Slave Trade

Abstract

Enslavement as a process was complex and multilayered, often encompassing experiences of dislocation and displacement, as individuals were taken from their homes to destinations that could be thousands of miles away. This chapter considers the range of experiences that both African and Asian slaves endured in the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries during periods of intensified exchange of captives between the interiors, coasts and islands scattered across the ocean. While the moment of capture or bondage signaled the beginning of a new unfree state and social position, the experience of enslavement did not necessarily end at that moment; rather, it initiated a process whose trajectories could be expansive and involve multiple stages (and geographies) that shaped the contours of an unfree existence in the ocean.

Introduction

Enslavement, in all its manifestations, was an experience that slaves and unfree peoples endured as part of the process of entering an altered social condition. Whether through kidnap, capture in war, debt or the transactional mechanisms of commercial sale, individuals often underwent protracted experiences as they began their lives as unfree peoples or entered a period of further enslavement. While the moment of capture or bondage signaled the beginning of a new unfree state and social position, the experience of enslavement did not necessarily end at that moment; rather, it initiated a process whose trajectories could be expansive and involve multiple stages (and geographies) that shaped the contours of an unfree existence. In the Indian Ocean, slave and unfree experiences were defined by several factors, from the process of enslavement, gender and age, to how social structures operated and the particularities of the social and labor conditions under which individuals toiled. These experiences could also be shaped by the ways in which slaves were used as forms of conspicuous consumption in contexts in which wealth in people and not land was paramount, and where individuals could be incorporated as members into the lowest levels of their masters’ houses over a period of time.

An indelible part of the slave experience, enslavement was oftentimes violently disorienting and began the moment an individual was separated from their home environment. This could be many hundreds if not thousands of miles from the destinations to which they were transported, whether overland or as was commonly the case, by sea. Maritime crossings in particular have assumed a paradigmatic place in understandings of the slave experience and as an extension of the narrative of how a slave and unfree person was acquired and adjusted (or was made to adjust) to bondage—the process of enslavement. Associated almost exclusively with the “Middle Passage” of Atlantic slave histories whose iconographic significance for African diasporic communities across the ocean has been central to highlighting the brutalizing trauma of violent displacement, a slave’s journey is seen to begin at the coast as they forcibly boarded the ships that would take them from Africa west to the Americas. A rich body of scholarship, drawing on the numerous autobiographical and “slave narrative” accounts portraying the perspective of the enslaved—and that highlight the wrenching horror of the Middle Passage—has thus been able to provide many details about transportation and the lives of movement that the voyage across the Atlantic represented for millions.¹

Yet, the Middle Passage was only one among many “passages” and journeys that slaves forcibly undertook from the moment they were snatched from their homes located far in the African interior.² Rather than see the experience of displacement and dislocation as beginning at the coast, it is important to recognize that it may have begun many days and months, and countless miles, before the ocean ever came into sight for a slave or they arrived at the coast. Indeed, as occurred in East and Southeast Africa, it could take years from the time of capture until a slave was embarked onto a ship (if they were embarked at all), a length of time during which they might acquire a new language or in the case of young slaves forget their natal language, and an overdetermined focus on the Middle Passage as an exclusively maritime experience occludes the complexity of the forced movements of the enslaved and unfree.

This was as true in the slaving worlds of the Atlantic as it was in the Indian Ocean. In this chapter, while recognizing the influence of the Middle Passage as a conceptual, analytical and narrative framework in shaping understandings of the brutalities of Atlantic slaving, I will explore the range of enslavement experiences of African and Asian slaves in the unfree worlds of the Indian Ocean, as they were removed from the familiar surroundings of “home” and trafficked, exchanged, transported along land and sea to faraway destinations. I note at the outset, however, that slavery in the Indian Ocean was not necessarily defined by long-distance trafficking, nor did it always involve capture, kidnap or the economic logic of commercialized exchange. Unfreedom and its associational contours shaped belonging, dependency and the social hierarchies of many communities around the rim and interiors of the Indian Ocean where slavery—even when it involved debt as a mechanism for enslavement—was characterized by highly localized relationships articulated between and among community members who were known to one another.³

Nonetheless, it was the case that many thousands of slaves and unfree peoples were made to journey over great distances and into new lands in response to the encroachments of economic and political forces over which they exercised little if any control, and that were inflected often by political and commercial contexts that were changing rapidly in response to heightened labor demands to meet expanding consumer tastes for a range of goods. Local systems of bondage, where individuals might only journey short distances by land or sea (or a combination of the two) as part of their routes into slavery, could overlap with long-distance circuits of highly commercialized trafficking organized and run by both European and local interests.

If not always in as much detail as scholars would like, the slaveries of the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nonetheless offer several glimpses into the processes of enslavement and forced movement that marked the existences of slave and unfree individuals as they were taken from interiors to coasts, placed on ships and transported across the water to destinations that were not necessarily their final points of arrival.⁴ Onward journeys awaited many, while slaves were also subjected to being exchanged multiple times in serving many masters across different locales. These were centuries of profound change to the sources, routes and numbers of people who became enslaved for work in an array of capacities throughout the Indian Ocean. The focus in this chapter, for reasons of length but also because of the availability of sources, will be East and Southeast Africa, as well as South Asia and insular Southeast Asia, areas where local and Euro-American slaving interests both competed with one another and intersected in ways that reflected the complementarity in the expropriation of these region’s peoples to serve a range of productive capacities.

Routes into Slavery

Enslavement did not necessarily begin with an act of violence, such as capture in warfare or kidnapping. Countless examples exist from around the rim and islands of the Indian Ocean of individuals entering into slavery or unfree status voluntarily, in response to crises created for instance by droughts and famine (the so-called “famine-slave cycle”) where, as a survival strategy, families sold members into debt servitude ostensibly for short periods until the debt could be paid and the person redeemed.⁵ However, as is well documented, in many—and perhaps most instances—families who were unable to repay the debt would “lose” the individual to a perpetual state of unfreedom as they were transformed into enslaved laborers. At other times, a person could be sold permanently, which was what happened to a 10-year-old girl (“China”) who was sold by her mother to a VOC (Dutch East India Company) employee at the company’s trading post at Nagapattinam on India’s Coromandel coast as a survival strategy in circumstances of extreme poverty.⁶ Together with pawnship, debt could also result in enslavement in East Africa in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries in the context of a globally inflected commercial efflorescence and heightened labor demands for such products as ivory, pearls and cloves. Debts among elites, as occurred in the mid-eighteenth century with transactions involving local rulers and Europeans in Southeast Asia, could also be the cause of re-enslavement. In the 1750s, a Dutch burgher in Kupang in Timor (eastern Indonesia) was owed slaves by the raja of Amabi and, after deeming that the latter had been slow with their delivery, traveled to the village of the raja’s brother-in-law where he seized twelve villagers as liquidation of the debt. They were subsequently shipped to Batavia for sale.⁷ The functioning of debt as a powerful mechanism for the production of unfreedom among individuals endured even through attempts by the British to reconstitute dependent labor ties in Bihar in northeastern India into “free” labor where, after the abolition of slavery in 1843, enslaved agricultural laborers (Kamias) were transformed into bonded laborers.⁸

Yet, overwhelmingly, the process through which most individuals entered into slavery in the Indian Ocean involved some degree of violence amid forcible removal from a home environment. This could result from raids that were part of warring strategies among states, as happened throughout the history of South and Southeast Asia, and was present too in much of eastern and southeastern Africa. In Islam, the capture of infidels in jihad (holy struggle or war) was a recognized form of slave acquisition in the service also of extending the faith. A slave raid orchestrated by the Pangeran Dipati of Jambi on the east coast of Sumatra against Ujang Salangh on the Malaysian Peninsula in 1669, for instance, was justified on the grounds that they were “heathens” and thus susceptible to capture. Warfare and its associated raiding expeditions were endemic in Southeast Asia, particularly after the collapse of the powerful sultanate of Makassar in South Sulawesi between 1667 and 1669.⁹ Peoples of the region’s stateless societies and microstates, unable to defend themselves effectively against the stronger societies of the cities and rice-growing lowlands, were vulnerable to attacks and enslavement, with the slave trade network revolving around the dual axes of Makassar and Bali. Apart from operating as independent slave exporters, the kingdoms of Bali also reexported slaves from eastern Indonesia and as far as New Guinea. Several thousands of those captured in warfare were shipped for sale at Batavia, the center of VOC interests in the region, where they fulfilled a wide variety of labor needs in the Dutch colony that sustained high levels of demand for slaves among private merchants and Company officials alike. Indigenous warfare operated as a conduit indirectly supplying Dutch imperial labor needs in Southeast Asia in building the infrastructure of empire and providing the human capital for its trade and commerce.¹⁰

Local and regional warfare was, however, not only practiced by indigenous forces, with Europeans engaged in widespread armed conflicts with numerous societies and states. These violent encounters could result in the enslavement of individuals or groups of people, at times through the establishment under duress of particular arrangements with the vanquished. The Dutch case is illustrative once more. Following the defeat of “rebellious” peoples in the decades between the 1650s and mid-1670s, Dutch officials often forced leaders at gunpoint to conclude slave-cause agreements or treaties whereby fixed numbers of slaves (along with other commodities) had to be supplied to them as boete ofte amende (fine or tribute). These constituted an important source of captive labor for the VOC and its burghers, with the Company and its officials justifying warfare as a strategy of imperial imposition.¹¹

Elsewhere, frequent warfare could produce large supplies of captives. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for instance, the major confederations and kingdoms of the Sakalava, Merina and Tsitambala in Madagascar, the large island that lay across the Mozambique Channel with wide-ranging historic connections both to the Swahili coast, the Cape, the western Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia as well as the Atlantic, waged regular campaigns against one another that resulted in the enslavement of significant numbers of individuals across many parts of the island.¹² Captive individuals were sold to European slavers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and well into the nineteenth, by Dutch, English and French slavers, among others. Fueled by the sale of firearms and gunpowder, and strategic demands, European trading Companies successfully acquired sizeable cargoes of captives in Madagascar. Whether in the 1660s or 1670s, when internecine warfare along the western coast of Madagascar between the kings of St Augustin’s Bay and Boina in 1671 resulted in high numbers of captives being available for sale or in the decades between the 1740s and 1760s when intensive warring between the Sakalava and Betsimaraka led to the enslavement of many, the scale of conflagrations on the island created a robust war market of the captured who were shipped to such places as the Cape and Mauritius.¹³

In later periods, amid a cycle of violence and widespread warfare related to an expansion of slave trading, communities in eastern and southeastern Africa suffered similar fates. From the third quarter of the nineteenth century, in particular, these areas witnessed high levels of violence as thousands of individuals were displaced by and caught up in wars and attacks between groups of neighboring peoples. While older notions of slaves as clients and dependents had characterized slavery in earlier periods, and whereas the possibility existed for captives to be ransomed back or even incorporated into the conquering society, increasingly new demands for slaves as laborers grew from this time to dominate the nature of social and political relations.¹⁴

Labor demands of plantation economies along the Swahili coast for clove, coconut and other labor-intensive production, connected to the expansion of the Omani state under the Busaidi dynasty that had come to power in the 1740s and extended its rule over the Swahili coast by the late 1820s, spurred high demands for slave labor. By the time the court transferred its capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840 under the direction of Sayyid Said ibn Sultan, many elements of a burgeoning plantation economy were in place and would develop rapidly over the following decades on oceanic islands and the African mainland. Coupled with the labor demands of Omani date production that would effectively establish a global market for dates in the nineteenth century (American consumption was a critical factor in this regard and already by the 1850s ships from Salem and elsewhere along the east coast were trading in large volumes of dates); and the efflorescence of Gulf pearling connected to regional and especially Euro-American consumer tastes that forcibly drew in high numbers of captive Africans to labor predominantly as divers at pearl banks in Bahrain and elsewhere, slave trading became a dominant feature of social and economic life.¹⁵ Consequently, hundreds of thousands of Africans became enslaved in areas that today comprise southern Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique.

Young children in particular were at risk of enslavement from warfare and attacks, as happened to a Nyasa boy from the southern region around today’s Lake Malawi. He was seized with his mother and sisters by Ngoni raiders of the paramount chief Mpezeni and taken back to his country. From there, the boy was sold to a Yao slave trader—among the most notorious nineteenth-century African slave traders of the area in what is today northern Mozambique—in the first of several transactions that would see him eventually sold onto an “Arab from Muscat” with the intent of shipping him to Oman.¹⁶ Children, some as young as 6 years of age, were easy targets in warfare and became enslaved in significant numbers in response to the labor needs of the date plantation and pearling economies of the nineteenth century mentioned earlier.

Relatedly, raiding as either a focus or byproduct of warfare or as a strategy for acquiring captives for sale, was commonly practiced to enslave individuals throughout the lands and waterways of the Indian Ocean. In the estuaries of the Arakan-Bengal coasts, slave raids in the decades between the 1620s and early 1660s involved Magh pirates working in concert with Portuguese traders operating beyond the jurisdiction of the Estado da India, and supported by the Taung-ngu rulers of Arakan.¹⁷ Rulers from western Madagascar launched a number of raids in the early nineteenth century in the waters off northeast Mozambique that enslaved many thousands of people to meet labor demands. Raiders were drawn from within the Sakalava empire whose leaders, by using violence or the threat of violence and a politics of incorporation and allegiance among various groups, had expanded their control over the west coast and northwest of Madagascar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁸ Having become closely connected to the growing slave trade in the Mozambique Channel from the mid-eighteenth century, with ports under their control serving as shipment centers of slave exports carried by European, Arab and other regional merchants to markets throughout the western Indian Ocean, Sakalava sought slaves for their own labor needs as Madagascar emerged as another market for servile labor where previously it had been only a source of slaves for export.

In the Sulu sultanate of the southern Philippines, extensive slave raiding by Balangingi pirates associated with its prolific slave-trading rulers, led to the large-scale enslavement of thousands of regional sea peoples such as the Bajau who were found throughout the waters of Southeast Asia. Along with others such as the Bugis, Taosug datus (princes) organized regional slaving expeditions that generated 200,000–300,000 imports into the sultanate between the final quarter of the eighteenth century and the 1870s. With the development and growing importance of Chinese trade in the South China Sea over the course of the eighteenth century, connected particularly to the intensified extraction of marine resources that ranged from pearls and mother-of-pearl to trepang (sea cucumber) and turtle-shell, slave raiding saw an upsurge in the “Sulu zone” as the Bajau and others became subject to sustained maritime raids in the waters and along the coasts of northwestern Southeast Asia. The slave market of Jolo emerged as a key site to which thousands of captives were transported in these years, with the Taosug organizing large slaving voyages that enslaved up to 20,000 sea people per year to labor in the procurement of marine products.¹⁹

In other areas, for instance, those to the east of Bali, slave-raiding itineraries were incorporated into trading routes as the two were pursued simultaneously. Poorly monitored by the Dutch at Kupang and the Portuguese in Lifau and Dili, the Timor area represented an attractive arena for pirates and raiders. As occurred elsewhere, victims of raids were often fishermen, and the fate that befell one group who sailed out from the island of Leti to the east of Timor in 1787–1788 demonstrates the ruthlessness of and the swiftness with which raiders could enslave vulnerable individuals aboard unarmed vessels. Although the fishermen had spotted a pirate vessel closing in on their boat after they had been out at sea for several hours fishing, they were quickly caught and the vessel sunk by the raiders who had come from east of Seram. The Letinese fishermen were taken on board the pirate vessel after which it proceeded in its raiding activity to the island of Moa and other nearby places in its people-collecting ventures.²⁰

As these examples suggest, raiding was a common way in which individuals could become enslaved, and its corollary—kidnapping—removed thousands from their homes and places of residence. Indeed, the two activities were mutually reinforcing and practically indistinguishable from one another. In the highly commercialized world of slave trading that had developed throughout the Indonesian archipelago in the nineteenth century, where slave labor was a central component in the production of commodities as the region became deeply enmeshed in and oriented toward a rapidly expanding global economy shaped in part by the demands of the Chinese market—for a range of marine products among other goods—and the interests of European trading companies, the kidnapping of individuals assumed remarkable proportions by mid-century.²¹ Between 1820 and 1850, it may have resulted in the annual enslavement of between 8000 and 9000 individuals, some of whom were taken from kampongs (villages) while the majority appear to have been fishermen kidnapped at sea.

In some cases, as happened to a sailor born in North Sulawesi named Kalunea, an individual could be abducted as soon as they landed at an island, so widespread were abductions. In this particular instance, Kalunea appears to have been taken expressly for the slave market of Sulu, likely Jolo. Excluding Java and Madura, as many as 806,000 slaves may have been present in the archipelago in the 1850s, with slave exports and imports from places such as Bali, Kalimantan, Lombok, Sulawesi and Sumatra maintaining a robust commerce in captives.²² In certain areas like Central Sulawesi, slave trading was widespread and extensively carried out by the end of the century. Kidnapping slaves became not only integral to slave acquisition but was also firmly entrenched in broader commercial circuits and networks, particularly in the eastern reaches of Indonesia where British and Dutch naval attempts at its suppression were not as successful as in the western part of the archipelago.

Kidnapping could occur, however, in the absence of piratical or other raiding, and often involved unsuspecting young children. Ari, a slave prisoner at the Cape castle in 1706, for instance, related how “during his childhood years [in the area] between Surat and Persia, when he was playing on the beach, he was carried off by the Dutch and eventually sold as a slave.”²³ The particular vulnerability of children is further evidenced in Zanzibar, where by the late 1830s and early 1840s young boys were being snatched from around the island. According to British officials, ships from Trucial Oman that would sail regularly to the East African island for trade would “steal” slaves while at the same time also acquiring captives through purchase. A few decades later, slavers from Sur—located at the entrance of the Gulf of Oman—were brazen enough to carry kidnapped and gagged children in large baskets through the streets of Zanzibar in daylight to awaiting vessels.²⁴ Children were also taken in India around this time; a young girl relating her story to a British agent in Muscat in 1841 about how when she was playing with two friends in the street in Yādgīr in present-day Karnātaka, two “Arabs” approached the girls with promises of food and money. After agreeing to go with them, the “eight or nine years [sic] old” girls were separated before being thrown into a world of slavery that involved journeys of great distances and multiple sales, a not uncommon occurrence for the enslaved. Within the space of approximately 18 months, the young girl was sold 6 times as she was trafficked from Hyderabad to Bombay, then Mukalla in Yemen, Sur and Masirah in Oman and finally to Muscat where she recounted her story of enslavement and sale.²⁵

By the same token, adults could also be subject to kidnapping in the absence of raiding. While they may not have been as persuadable as the girls from Yādgīr, they could nonetheless be enticed with “sweetmeats” or delicacies. This seems to have occurred with some frequency in Zanzibar where in the mid-1840s even already enslaved individuals could be seized after they had been hired to transport goods from the market by the very individuals who had engaged their services, or be kidnapped after they had gone to merchants’ homes under false pretenses where they were detained before being shipped away from the East African coast.²⁶

Long Days’ Journey into the Night

If an individual could become enslaved in a variety of ways across the Indian Ocean—as the result for instance of debt, or as a function of hereditary slavery, legal verdicts or pawnage—a great number became captives through the kinds of violent acts described above. The moment of seizure or abduction was often followed by further violence as a person faced the beginnings of a process of displacement that could transport them far away from their home or the place where they had been seized.

I should note, however, that this was not necessarily always the case, as is clear in the slave-raiding histories of Southeast Asia where individuals could end up being sold relatively close to where they had been kidnapped. This is evident from the experiences of the Letinese fishermen mentioned earlier who, after their vessel was sunk and they were seized, sailed the relatively short distance on their captors’ vessel as it continued to chart a raiding itinerary that took in a nearby island and the negeri (settlement) Batumattang among others before making its way across the Savu Sea to Alor where the raiders attempted to sell and barter the captives for goods.²⁷ The Bajau and other sea peoples raided and abducted by pirates working under the auspices of the Sulu Sultanate from the late eighteenth century, equally, were in most cases not transported far away from where they had been taken. Their point or place of capture was coastal or on the water itself, with their journey into enslavement being at the same time a sojourn on the water where individuals experienced both removal from home or residence and the sea passage to their destination which in many cases was the slave market of Jolo.²⁸ This traversing of the water, even when distances were not great, could take months and entail much hardship compounded by the dangers from inclement weather that could either steer a ship way off course and thus prolong its journey or, in the event of a severe storm, cause its loss and the death of those aboard.

Even if distances between capture and onward transportation were relatively short, this is not to suggest that the enslaved in Southeast Asian waters did not enter very different social, linguistic or cultural environments to which they had to adapt, given the  number of heterogeneous groups present in Southeast Asian waters. Rather, it is to recognize that displacement as a product of enslavement need not be a function of distance. This was true also in African settings, where in early nineteenth-century northern Mozambique, Makua slaves were captured and traded a short distance from Mozambique Island, a slaving entrepôt to which enslaved individuals from throughout the Portuguese colony were taken to be sold to slave ships.²⁹ Further north, in the late 1880s, after being employed by a Swahili trader to deliver a letter to a house at Pangani, an individual named Muhandu was forcibly detained there before being transported by boat with other slaves over the short distance to Pemba (a three-day passage) to labor on its plantations.³⁰

Yet distance could and often did matter as a defining feature of displacement. This is perhaps most evident in eastern Africa in the nineteenth century, where enslavement often involved protracted overland journeys across vast distances from the place of capture or kidnap to the coast from where slaves often faced further onward journeys across the ocean to destinations in Oman and elsewhere in southern Arabia, as well as to Gulf ports. As discussed earlier, widespread slaving had developed through the eighteenth century to meet French demand for the plantation economy of the Mascarene islands, and more broadly intensified in the nineteenth as a result of heightened labor needs to support the dramatic expansion of the ivory, clove, date and pearl trades that was reflective of East Africa’s enmeshment in a burgeoning global economy, pushing slave trading in the region to new heights.³¹ Patterns of enslavement and slave ownership for the enhancement of social standing or to meet reproductive purposes, among other functions, had been established for centuries in eastern Africa but underwent a great surge in the nineteenth that both elaborated local slaving networks and brought new ones into existence.

Although variously mediated by translation, and collected in different ways through a variety of anti-slaving and abolitionist efforts of British and other European officials, the availability of personal accounts by African captives offer a rich window into the experiences of displacement caused by enslavement.³² Many of the accounts, while brief, contain invaluable information and relate to the slave trade that shipped between 250,000 and 500,000 Africans to Arabia. They were collected by vice-admiralty courts established at Zanzibar and elsewhere to adjudicate cases of vessels that British antislavery patrols had captured in their efforts to end slave trading in the western Indian Ocean, as well as from accounts from runaway slaves seeking protection from the British navy, and consular records from both East Africa and Arabia. The testimonies and narratives that enslaved individuals provided give us a vivid picture of how the next phase in the enslavement process—transportation or journeying from point of capture or sale—unfolded during a high point in the trafficking of East Africans to the western Indian Ocean.³³ They are worth exploring in some detail, though I provide only a partial exploration of these sources because of space constraints.

Following capture far inland in southeastern Africa—in areas that included Lake Nyasa—a slave faced a journey of many weeks or months to a coastal export center (such as Kilwa) from which they would often endure further journeys on land before making the passage to Zanzibar or Pemba where they were sold and either remained or in many instances were taken by sea to destinations in the western Indian Ocean.³⁴ The majority, it must be stressed, were not transported away from the East African coast but remained there to labor in local clove, coconut and other plantations or to work in various capacities in the burgeoning globally oriented economy.³⁵ Captives were often sold in sizeable groups after falling victim to large-scale raids or otherwise acquired (e.g., as the result of debt or criminal activity), with transactions arranged for slave cargoes between leaders of commercial centers and slave dealers. Once an agreed-upon number had been secured, slaves embarked for the coast in large caravans—some with over 300 slaves—that included porters carrying other trade cargoes from the interior, such as ivory. In one early nineteenth-century description of the Mozambique slave trade, in which all captives—like exports more generally—were required under Portuguese law to pass through the customs house at the colonial capital of Mozambique Island before they were exported (thereby extending the journeys of slaves who had to be brought to the capital from all points along the coast),³⁶ caravans with as many as 500 slaves traveled by night to the coast from deep in the interior, burdened further by the weight of carrying numerous elephant tusks for merchants at the coast. As a result of the physical strenuousness of this labor, and the lack of adequate food and harsh treatment, up to 50 percent of the captives could die on the journey.³⁷

Slaves were bound together and made to endure passages to the coast that at times traversed perilous and physically treacherous terrain. Food supplies were not always sufficiently available or offered, and slaves were provided with only a single meal and water once a day, with the dangers of starvation an ever-present reality. Where and when they could, they scavenged for roots and plants in an attempt to survive. Testimonies speak of violence inflicted upon slaves, such as beatings and assaults that were commonplace, and the killing of individuals appeared also to take place not infrequently. Compounding these dangers was the possibility that a caravan could be attacked by raiders and its captives stolen to endure yet further arduous and life-threatening experiences that characterized the enslavement process in southeastern and eastern Africa.³⁸

Once slaves arrived at the coast from the African interior, the next phase in the enslavement process often involved being held in barracoons or storehouses, as happened at Mozambique Island and elsewhere on the East African coast. By the time they reached these confinement structures, though, several will have died en route with several more perishing while awaiting sale on the coast and in the barracoons. In 1819, of the almost 10,000 slaves who had arrived on the beaches opposite Mozambique Island, 12 percent died before they could be sold; and due to the effects of exhaustion and disease, an equal number died in the holding pens.³⁹

For those who survived, if the possibility existed that they could be sold relatively soon after arriving at the coast, they could though also spend considerable time awaiting shipment to their next destination(s). Sometimes, this waiting period was a product of how active a particular port was in the export trade, with slaving vessels queuing up behind one another as they took on sizeable consignments of captives. The large French vessel, Licorne, had to drop anchor behind two Portuguese and three French ships off Mozambique Island in 1787 before it could begin embarking its own cargo of African captives, a process that took several days.⁴⁰

Not all captives were held in barracoons, however, for merchants sometimes acquired small numbers (e.g. 15 or 20 slaves) at different locations along the coast and shipped them from such places as Kilwa to Pangani and onto Pemba where they would either remain or be sold again to other buyers and transported to Zanzibar. It is a feature of the region’s nineteenth-century slaving activity that enslavement involved captives being exchanged multiple times before they reached their final destination on the coast or mainland, or were embarked on a vessel for the long-distance crossing of the waters of the western Indian Ocean as they experienced yet another passage as part of the lengthy enslavement process.

On the Water

Once slaves either arrived at the coast or were taken at the water’s edge, or had been captured at sea, in many instances they faced onward sea passages to other—but not necessarily—final destinations. Conditions at sea could and often were horrific, as slaves experienced physical brutalities and trauma associated with crossings into the unknown. Testimonies gathered by the Dutch in the 1850s from individuals who had been captured by pirates in the Indonesian archipelago and later “liberated” by them attest to the hardships endured by the enslaved.⁴¹ As noted earlier, while raids for captives targeted villages with some frequency at least until this period, most were taken at sea. They were held in chains, provided with little food and given nothing else but seawater to drink. Compounding the misery of these conditions was the uncertainty of where or when they would be sold—as the rations of pirate crews themselves became limited, they exchanged captives for food whenever and wherever they could to avoid starvation. This survival strategy for captors of exchanging bodies for food was prevalent too in the Timor region. If the sea passage experience of the enslavement process could be brief for some who were sold soon after capture, for many their time at sea could extend into months before they arrived at their next or final destination, with cramped onboard conditions and poor treatment being responsible for death rates of up to 25 percent on voyages.

To a similar degree but at the other end of the Indian Ocean, nineteenth-century evidence of African slave experience at sea highlights the equally, and in many instances perhaps worse, treatment of captives. Personal accounts collected under the auspices of British anti-slavery efforts, as mentioned previously, speak to the terrifying effects of transportation and reflect the vulnerabilities of slaves once they were on the water. These sources offer among the richest testimonies of this stage of the enslavement process, and are therefore invaluable in underscoring shared dimensions of the slave experience in the Indian Ocean.

It was not uncommon for slaves to change hands multiple times on the East African coast before arriving at Zanzibar, for instance, where some might remain or be sold or kidnapped and taken to other destinations. While the slave trade that was carried out in dhows in most cases involved only small numbers of enslaved Africans on any one vessel (there were often other slaves on board, for example, domestic slaves of the owner or captain of the vessel), there was great fear of the seaborne passage, whether it involved the relatively short distances to this island-entrepôt or longer ones across the Arabian Sea. As expressed in one account from the mid-1860s, slaves “began to tremble all over and to cry out in a strange manner. ‘Oh! They said, we are lost. We are going to Zanzibar where there are white men who eat the Blacks.’”⁴² Arab slavers, as related by another captive, reinforced this notion as a self-serving tactic to instill dread of capture by British anti-slavery naval forces: “Europeans are coming! They have sighted us. Their boat is a long way off. They do not want us Arabs, certainly not! But they are after you slaves and they will eat you and they will grind your bones and make sweetmeats of them.”⁴³

The widespread fear that “whites intend to eat them” had deep-seated roots and had emerged from the heavy European involvement in slave trading that had grown to a significant degree from the mid-to-late eighteenth century (earlier in the century VOC members at the Cape had sent expeditions to Madagascar for slaves and even established a short-lived factory at Delagoa Bay on the Mozambique coast for this purpose but their lack of success saw the Company turn to South and Southeast Asian slaves for their labor needs),⁴⁴ prominently involving French and Portuguese slavers, as well as Brazilian merchants from the early decades of the following century. Their vessels were specifically outfitted to transport slaves, even when they took on other cargoes such as cloth or ivory.⁴⁵ A description from around 1809, describing life in the hold of a slave ship transporting captives from Mozambique to Île de France (Mauritius), spoke to  their desperate onboard conditions: individuals endured “sea sickness, the little air that circulates in the place where they spend the night, the stinking odors emanating from the hold; the buckets in which they leave their excrement and that they only change every four days…all of this adds to the horror of their situation.”⁴⁶

Similar experiences characterized the sea passages for slaves transported on dhows, especially in (the relatively few) instances when these carried a large consignment of captives. This is confirmed not only by accounts and reports written by British officials and naval officers—inflected as they were by abolitionist sentiment—but also in the words of the slaves themselves. The Times of India, for instance, published an account in 1872 that detailed the capture of a slave dhow near Ras al-Had at the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula: it noted that slaves were so “crowded on deck, and in the hold below” that “it seemed, but for the aspect of misery, a very nest of ants.” There were a number of children on board along with other “wretched beings in the most loathsome stage of small-pox and scrofula of every description. A more disgusting and degrading spectacle of humanity could hardly be seen, whilst the foulness of the dhow, was such that the sailors could hardly endure it.”⁴⁷ For female slaves, there was the added danger and brutality of rape, as experienced on the vessel Patriote that in 1790 left 14 slaves at the Cape on its voyage from Mozambique to the Caribbean.

The individual voices of liberated Africans, though recorded also in the same abolitionist context as those of the British, offer further perspective and insight into the atrocious conditions of ocean crossings. A young girl, describing the seaborne passage from Kilwa on the East African coast to Zanzibar in 1865, highlighted how “closely packed” slaves were, to the extent that “I could not turn, not even breathe.” The days at sea were marked by heat and thirst “that became insufferable, and a great sickness made my suffering even worse.” Lengthy days and nights resulted in “[H]unger, thirst, seasickness,” while the “sudden transition from great heat to insupportable cold, the impossibility of laying down one’s head for a moment because of lack of space” underscored the atrocious conditions that she and others endured in their transit at sea.⁴⁸

Lack of food leading to starvation was common, as described by a freed slave who had come from near Mozambique Island and been caught up in the Mozambique Channel traffic to the Comoros and northwest Madagascar: “We were ten days on board before we were captured [by a British naval patrol]…We were packed closely in tiers one above the other. Those of us who died, died of starvation: they gave us hardly any food and but little water.”⁴⁹ Even when supplies may have been adequate during the first few days of a voyage, its length could cause these to dwindle to such a degree that there was almost nothing left to eat. A Bisa who had been enslaved in what is today northwest Zambia in the 1870s when he was a young boy and taken overland to Mikindani to the south of Kilwa before being embarked for Muscat, recounted how “[A]t first we had food twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. The men had two platefuls and the women two and for our relish we very often had fish…But because the journey was so long the food began to run short and so were hungry, and also water was short and they began to mix it with salt water.”⁵⁰ Although various factors could prolong a voyage, British anti-slaving activity had the effect of adding to time at sea because vessels sought to evade patrols—as inadequate in number as these were—by sailing on open water away from the coast (the same Bisa slave mentions that, after traveling all night, he “found that we were in the midst of the sea and out of sight of land.”) or disembarking slaves at ports that were not necessarily under British surveillance.

This is confirmed, for example, in the late 1880s by the testimony of a male slave named Yusuf and a woman slave called Rasiki who, as runaways from the Omani port town of Sur that at this time was the principal importation site of slaves into the southern Arabian Peninsula, had walked twelve miles to Ral Al-Hadd to seek the protection of the HMS Osprey anchored off the coast of Oman. In testimony recorded by the ship captain, “Jusef” talked about how “we…kept right out to sea, and did not sight any land till we arrived at Ras al Hadd, we were landed at Shehr [Ras Sherh] close to Khor Joramah [Jarama] in the dhow’s boats, walked to Sur and were sold there…” For her part, Rasiki spoke about how she had sailed on a dhow from Malindi carrying 20 slaves which “first anchored at Msena, where I was kept there 2 days then put on a camel and brought to Sur” to be sold.⁵¹

These kinds of evasive tactics extended the misery for enslaved individuals, yet even when they were “liberated” by the British, their experience of unfreedom did not necessarily come to an end as many were forced into extended periods of apprenticeship whose terms in many cases amounted to forms of bonded labor. A growing literature is detailing the further voyages endured by slaves that British vessels captured at sea in the Indian Ocean as individuals were shipped onto ports of the empire such as Cape Town or Bombay where the racialized hierarchies of rule saw them labor under conditions that were never truly “free.”⁵² But even before liberated Africans reached these ports, they could continue to suffer horribly on board captured ships. The case of the Progresso, a slaver that had left Angoche on the Mozambique coast in 1843 with just under 450 slaves, is illuminating in this regard. After the prize crew of the HMS Cleopatra took control of the vessel and found its slaves in a starved state, transferring fifty to its decks, the Progresso remained heavily overloaded as it was escorted to Simonstown (Cape colony) where the British maintained a naval base. Progress along the coast was slow, partly the result of the Progresso’s canvas being in tatters and due to inclement weather, with the voyage taking over a month and a half. Having already been embarked at Angoche weakened by malnutrition and dysentery (along with other ailments), the slaves began to die in high numbers as the ship made its way to Simonstown. By the time the ship dropped anchor, 177 slaves had died, while a further 63 perished after landing, resulting in an overall mortality rate of 54 percent on a vessel that had been manned by a prize crew of the Royal Navy.⁵³ The sea passage, then, a central element of the process of enslavement in the Indian Ocean (as it was elsewhere), never ceased to be or have  the potential of being a brutalizing and fatal experience.

Conclusion

No singular experience can capture the dynamics of enslavement in the Indian Ocean. Whether in East Africa, on the waters of the Arabian Sea, or in Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, slaves underwent a wide array of experiences from capture, to transport and sale. Certainly, there were some commonalities across the ocean between African and Asian slaves, something that I have sought to highlight in this essay. However, there is a need to remain attentive to the disparate experiences of the enslaved  as well as the contingencies of particular spatial and temporal contexts that could shape these in particular ways. Enslavement was complex, multi-sited, fraught with dangers of various kinds, and endured for varying periods of time. Becoming a slave and unfree person in the Indian Ocean involved many stages and this essay has highlighted some of their dynamics as individuals entered slavery and endured its most egregious abuses.

Notes

• 1. These are discussed and located in a broader framework by Pier Larson, “Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora,” Journal of World History 19, no. 4 (2008): 431–64.

• 2. We are reminded of this by Edward A. Alpers, “The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, eds. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus and Markus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 20–38.

• 3. I provide an overview of these dynamics in Machado, “Slavery and Histories of Unfreedom in the Indian Ocean,” in Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives, ed. Prasannan Parthasarathi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 29–38.

• 4. There has been growing interest recently in recovering slave’s lived experiences in the Indian Ocean, as seen for example in Mathias van Rossum, et al., Testimonies of Enslavement: Sources on Slavery from the Indian Ocean World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

• 5. Markus Vink, “The World’s Oldest Trade: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 131–77.

• 6. Nigel Worden, “Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 1695–1807,” Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 3 (2016): 398.

• 7. Hans Hägerdal, “Slaves and Slave Trade in the Timor Area: Between Indigenous Structures and External Impact,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 20.

• 8. Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

• 9. Vink, “‘World’s Oldest Trade’,” 143; 150.

• 10. Idem.

• 11. Idem.

• 12. Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Pier Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770–1822 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000); idem, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

• 13. Idem, 157; Michael Charles Reidy, “VOC Slave Trading Strategies on the Madagascar to Cape Slave Route, 1676–1781,” HumaNetten 44 (2021): 14–55.

• 14. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spice and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (Oxford: James Currey, 1987); Jonathon Glassman, “The Bondsman’s New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Rebellions on the Swahili Coasts,” Journal of African History 32 (1991): 277–312.

• 15. Matthew S. Hopper, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

• 16. Idem.

• 17. Vink, “World’s Oldest Trade’”; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Slaves and Tyrants: Dutch Tribulations in Seventeenth-Century Mrauk-U,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 3 (1997): 735–62.

• 18. Edward A. Alpers, “Madagascar and Mozambique in the Nineteenth Century: The Era of the Sakalava Raids (1800–1820),” Omaly sy Anio 5–6 (1977): 37–53; Machado, Ocean of Trade.

• 19. James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898, 2nd edition (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007).

• 20. Hägerdal, “Slaves and Slave Trade in the Timor Area.”

• 21. On the ecological and other effects of Chinese demand for sea products, see inter alia, Eric Tagliacozzo, “A Sino-Southeast Asian Circuit: Ethnohistories of the Marine Goods Trade,” in Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); idem, “A Necklace of Fins: Marine Goods Trading in Maritime Southeast Asia, 1780–1860,” International Journal of Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 23–48; Pedro Machado, “Shell Routes: Exploring Burma’s Pearling Histories,” in Pearls, People and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds, ed. Pedro Machado, Steve Mullins and Joseph Christensen (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2020).

• 22. Ulbe Bosma, “Commodification and Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Indonesian Archipelago,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 109–24.

• 23. Nigel Worden and Gerald Groenewald, Trials of Slavery: Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794, second series, Vol. 36 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2005), 8.

• 24. Hopper, Slaves of One Master.

• 25. British Parliamentary Papers, Slave Trade, XXV, Class A, 401, quoted in Hideaki Suzuki, “Tracing Their ‘Middle’ Passages: Slave Accounts from the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean,” in African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, eds. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene and Martin A. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 314–15.

• 26. Hopper, Slaves of One Master; Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018).

• 27. Hägerdal, “Slaves and Slave Trade in the Timor Area.”

• 28. Warren, The Sulu Zone.

• 29. Machado, Ocean of Trade.

• 30. Edward A. Alpers and Matthew S. Hopper, “Speaking for Themselves? Understanding African Freed Slave Testimonies from the Western Indian Ocean, 1850s-1930s,” Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 1 (2017): 60–88.

• 31. For an overview of European slave trading in the Indian Ocean, see Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014).

• 32. These exist in different forms, from the testimonies collected by the Universities Mission to Central Africa (including an autobiographical account written by a former slave) and British Admiralty Records, to Consular records from East Africa and Arabia. British offices who had served aboard vessels of the Anti-Slave Trade Patrol also published accounts describing the slave trade and the conditions of captives but written often in language serving abolitionist efforts and without first-hand accounts by Africans themselves. For discussion of these sources, see Alpers and Hopper, “Speaking for Themselves?”.

• 33. Alpers, “The Other Middle Passage;” Alpers and Hopper, “Speaking for Themselves?” See also Alpers, “The Story of Swema: Female Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century Zanzibar,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, eds. Claire C. Robertson and Martin Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 185–201.

• 34. McDow, Buying Time.

• 35. Larson, “Horrid Journeying;” Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory; Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

• 36. Machado, Ocean of Trade.

• 37. Harries, “Middle Passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean.”

• 38. Hopper, Slaves of One Master.

• 39. Harries, “Middle Passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean.”

• 40. Idem.

• 41. These were published in the journal, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, “Berigten omtrent den Zeeroof in den Nederlandsch—Indischen Archipel, 1858,” as recently discussed by Bosma, “Commodification and Slavery.”

• 42. Alpers, “The Story of Swema,” 212.

• 43. Petro Kilekwa, Slave Boy to Priest: The Autobiography of Padre Petro Kilekwa, trans. from Chinyanja by K.H. Nixon Smith (London: Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, 1937), 10, quoted in Alpers, “Indian Ocean Middle Passages.”

• 44. Trade journals of the VOC detailing this trade have been published, offering several insights into its dynamics, for which see, for example, James C. Armstrong and Piet Westra, Slave Trade with Madagascar: The Journals of the Cape Slaver Leijdsman, 1715 (Cape Town: Africana Publishers, 2006); and for a slightly later period, Robert Ross, “The Dutch on the Swahili Coast, 1776–1778: Two Slaving Journals, Part 1,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (1986): 306–60; Idem, “The Dutch on the Swahili Coast, 1776–1778: Two Slaving Journals, Part 2,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 3 (1986): 479–506.

• 45. Machado, Ocean of Trade.

• 46. E. Colin, “Notice sur Mozambique,” in Annales des voyages, de la géographie et de l’histoire, 9 (1809), ed. Malte-Brun, 324, quoted in Harries, “Middle Passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean.”

• 47. Captain G.L. Sullivan, Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters and on the Eastern Coast of Africa: Narrative of Five Years’ Experience in the Suppression of the Slave Trade (London: Dawns of Pall Mall, 1967 [1873]), Appendix, “The Slave Trade on the East Coast of Africa,” 429–30, quoted in Edward A. Alpers, “Indian Ocean Middle Passages: The Dhow Slave Trade,” ZIFF Journal 2 (2005): 15–21.

• 48. Alpers, “The Story of Swema,” 212.

• 49. J.F. Elton, the British Consul at Mozambique in the 1870s, was able to record a number of slave depositions at Durban that captured slave experience of the oceanic crossings. See Elton, Travels and Researches among the Lakes and Mountains of Eastern and Central Africa (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1968 [1879], as cited in Alpers, “Indian Ocean Middle Passages.”

• 50. Kilekwa, Slave Boy to Priest, 15, cited in Alpers, “Indian Ocean Middle Passages.”

• 51. Both of these are discussed in Alpers and Hopper, “Speaking for Themselves?”

• 52. Much of this work is Atlantic focused but for exceptions see, for instance, Stephan Karghoo and Satyendra Peerthum, “‘An Unfortunate but Proud People’: The Experience of the Liberated Africans in British Mauritius, c. 1811–1839,” Truth and Justice Commission, International Conference (Slave Trade, Slavery and Transition to Indenture in Mauritius and the Mascarenes, 1715–1848, April 2011); Christopher Saunders, “Liberated Africans in Cape Colony in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18 (1985): 223–39; Matthew S. Hopper, “Liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean World,” in Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896, eds. Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2020), 271–94. This volume of essays represents the newest scholarship on ‘liberated’ Africans and aims in part to bring research and scholarship on these individuals that has tended to be produced in discrete fields—for instance by Caribbean specialists or scholars of the Indian Ocean—into dialogue with one another. See also the website, liberatedafricans.org.

• 53. Details of this case appear in F.L. Barnard, A Three Years’ Cruise in the Mozambique Channel (New York, 1971 [1848]), 40, 43–44; 222; P.G. Hill, Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique Channel, in April and May, 1843 (London: John Murray, 1844), as cited in Harries, “Middle Passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean.”