Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807

6. A for Asiento: The Slave Trade from British to Foreign Colonies, ca. 1713–1739

219 6. A for Asiento THE SLAVE TRADE FROM BRITISH TO FOREIGN COLONIES, CA. 1713–1739 We have . . . determined That all the Factorys be made dependant on Jamaica where We Imagine it for the Comp’s Service that all their Affairs . . . should Center. —Directors of the South Sea Company, 1725 In 1724, the heads of the South Sea Company wrote to their agents in Jamaica to commend their new plan for keeping tabs on African people at the island. The company sought a means to discourage theft of the company’s captives awaiting transshipment and to differentiate those Africans the company delivered to Spanish America from the people introduced illegally. Keeping tabs on the company’s deliveries was proving difficult because the outfit resorted to myriad methods of reaching its quota for deliveries of people to Spanish settlements—from direct African ventures, to purchases in the Caribbean for transshipment, to licensing independent traders in the islands for deliveries on the company’s behalf. Since so much of this commerce centered in Jamaica, the company’s agents on that island proposed a solution, and the company’s Court of Directors wrote: “The Mark A with which you mark all the Negroes before they are sent out, we approve of, and hope it will Answer the ends proposed.” As Africans passed through Jamaica en route to Spanish territory, in other words, the South Sea Company seared a brand into their flesh.The letter A, presumably, stood for Asiento. Captives would face another branding in Spanish America—the “Indulto Mark”—when Spanish officials recorded their legal entry, but South Sea Company officials wanted to mark their ownership at an earlier stage (Plate 6).1 1. South Sea Company to Rigby and Pratter, Nov. 12, 1724, in South Sea Company Records, 1711–1846, microfilm, Additional Manuscripts, 25564, 149, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. (hereafter cited as SSC Records). The Spanish practice of branding of Africans with an “Indulto Mark” upon arrival was not new in 1724, and that practice likely continued. The agents at Jamaica introduced their own symbol to mark people as company property at an earlier stage in their journey to deter slave stealers and interlopers. For a prior reference to the company’s branding slaves, see the company’s 1718 instruction to Bar- 220 / A for Asiento This practice highlights several aspects of Britain’s intercolonial slave trade to foreign colonies in the era of the South Sea Company’s asiento. Most obviously , branding was part of dehumanizing people as commodities for trade. Searing a mark of ownership into flesh not only calls to mind the treatment of livestock but, in the context of eighteenth-century shipping, a more direct parallel might be the standard practice of marking barrels and other shipping containers with the initials of an owner or a company’s mark before goods jumbled in the holds of crowded ships. The A tagged African people not only as the property of the South Sea Company but also as property in the eyes of the company and all others engaged in such commerce. For captives, this introduced another painful indignity to a long line of them.2 The South Sea Company’s branding of Africans also highlights other key points about Britain’s slave trade to foreign colonies in the first half of the bados agent Dudley Woodbridge to “take Care Negros be Mark’d w’th the Comp’s Mark” (SSC Records, Add. MSS, 25563, 235). 2. One should bear in mind other contexts in which human branding occurred during the eighteenth century. In the European context, governments sometimes branded individuals as punishment, making their degraded status permanently visible to all. Habitual criminals might be branded with an “R” for “rogue,” for example. Conversely, many West African cultures incorporated scarification into religious ceremonies and rites of passage. Thus, branding in and of itself might not have held the same negative connotations for the African victims as it did for the European perpetrators. The indignity would more likely have come from the coercion and from the practice’s divergence from an accepted, celebrated, or sanctified community practice. PLATE 6. A South Sea Company letter, illustrating the brand the company used to mark African people as their property at Jamaica. © The British Library Board, Add. MSS, 25564, 149 A for Asiento / 221 eighteenth century. Interlopers (English, French, Dutch, and others) routinely sold Africans in...