About the house was a large yard, in which were two or three China trees, and two fine
Cherokee roses; half a dozen hounds; several negro babies; turkeys and chickens, and a
pet sow, teaching a fine litter of pigs how to root and wallow. Three hundred yards from
The plantation landscape 103
the house was a gin-house and stable, and in the interval between were two rows of
comfortable negro cabins. Between the house and the cabins was a large post, on which
was a bell to cal.I the negroes. A rack for fastening horses stood near it. On the bell-post
and on each of the rack-posts were nailed the antlers of a buck, as well as on a large oak-
tree near by. On the logs of the kitchen a fresh deer skin was drying. On the railing of the
iazza lay a saddle. The house had but one door and no window, nor was there a pane of
p . 26 glass on the plantat10n.
Plantation life, particularly in the western portion of the cotton belt, was essentially
a S artan pioneer experience on the edge of a constantly advancing frontier. 27 Settlements
lik: the one visited by Olmsted were carved out of the wilderness in the optimistic hope
that a substantial upgrading would follow after a few harvests. More often, however,
these temporary homes were abandoned altogether as the cycle of planting was started
a ain on a new, more promising tract of land. The common planter might follow the
:ode! of a large plantation estate and create an ensemble of buildings including a separate
kitchen, a string of slave houses, and several barns and storage cribs, but these were, as
Forsyth had complained, only “rude ungainly structures,” and no one would ever have
mistaken such a house for a “rural palace.”
That plantations existed along a spectrum ranging from superbly appointed
mansions set amidst well-tilled fields to expedient shelters thrown together in slash-and-
burn clearings is certainly borne out by the testimony of former slaves. Martha Colquitt
from Lexington, Georgia, recalled: “Our Big House sure was one grand fine place. Why,
it must have been as big as de Mill Stone Baptist Church. It was all painted white
with green blinds and had a big old high porch dat went nigh all ’round de house.” This
dwelling presents a marked contrast to the house of Mary Ella Grandberry’s master in
Barton, Alabama, which she described in the 1930s as “a li’l old frame building like a
ordinary house is now. He was a single man and didn’t have so terrible much, it seem
… just to look at him you’d think he was a poor white man.” 28
The appearance of a plantation certainly varied with the crop that its owner
attempted to grow. The cultivation of tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar, the primary staples
of the plantation economy, each followed different schedules and work routines and used
different equipment and storage structures. One type of plantation could be distinguished
from another by its barns, mills, and other gear. The identity of a tobacco plantation
was marked by the distinctive tobacco barns used to cure the leaves before they were
packed into huge barrels. Standing in the yards of most cotton plantations were both a
gin house and a press for compacting processed lint into bales. By the second quarter
of the nineteenth century, rice plantations had large steam-powered mills to comple-
ment the older threshing platforms and wi7 nowing houses where slaves had previously
refined the rice by hand. The mills located on Louisiana’s sugar plantations were
large sheds, sometimes as much as three hundred feet long, containing boilers, engines,
conveyor belts, rollers, and evaporators. Because these mills spewed clouds of smoke
and steam as the cane juice was transformed first into syrup and then into raw sugar,
it is not surprising that sugar plantations were said to resemble New England factory
towns .29
104 John Michael Vlach
The appearances of plantation fields also varied with the crop that was grown. The
rice fields of South Carolina and Georgia, for example, stood out prominently because the
were developed on reclaimed wetlands. Rice paddies were diked off from the surroundiny
marshes, leveled, and then irrigated ingeniously by means of a system of sluice gates
canals. The landscape resulting from these efforts was, according to Olmsted, “Holland-
like. “30 The sugar fields of Louisiana, laid out in rectangular units marked off by ditches
and cross-drains, also had an engineered appearance. British observer William H. Russel
thought John Burnside’s sugar plantation was impressive in part because his fields were
judged to be “as level as a billiard-table. “31 Because the crop did not require any special-
ized techniques of cultivation, a cotton planter’s acres did not look very different from any
other farm. And because cotton planters tended to specialize only in their single cash crop,
their fields showed the viewer little more than continuous furrows pushing up the same
plant, often right up to the door of the planter’s house. Contemporary visitors, hoping for
more diversity, denounced the monotonous rows of cotton as drab.32
Other variables affecting the visual appearance of a plantation included the size and
organization of the available work force, the condition of the soil, and the willingness of
its owner to embrace up-to-date methods of cultivation, harvest, and processing. There
were also inevitable subregional differences within an area as large as the South, a
geographic zone reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to the prairies of central Texas and
from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River Valley.
Any plantation reflected not only the local ecology and climate, but the conse-
quences of a particular settlement history as well. Finding it difficult, if not impractical,
to ignore the customs of the cultural region in which their estates were located, planters
frequently used the same designs for houses, barns, and outbuildings as yeoman neigh-
bors. In the Tidewater South, where single-pen barns were favored, for example, planters
also used single-crib barns. Similarly, the planters in the Piedmont and upland South
showed their regional allegiances by selecting double-crib barns over other possible barn
types. Maryland plantation estates closely resembled mid-Atlantic farmsteads both in
their layout and in their selection of buildings. It is apparent that so-called plantation
architecture was often nothing more than a particular expression of whatever vernacular
tradition happened to be dominant in a given region. It is difficult, then, to refer with
confidence to a single “plantation style” of architecture, for these regional variations in
building customs affected the design of houses as well as service structures.
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN PLANTATION LANDSCAPE
The experiences of plantation slaves were quite different from those of plantation owners,
not only because of their status as captive laborers, but because so many of them were
held on the larger and therefore less typical plantations. Historian John B. Boles demon-
strates how so many slaves came to live on large-scale manorial holding(
Imagine a universe of ten slaveholders, eight owning two slaves apiece, one owning rwenty-
four, and the tenth possessing sixty. Obviously most slaveholders (80 percent) would own
The plantation landscape 105
(
….-:(j \_
“‘
.. } –
5.4 Slave houses, Hermitage Plantation, Savannah, Georgia, nineteenth century
fewer than five slaves, but most slaves (84 out of 100) would reside in units of more than
twenty. Such an imaginary model suggests what the nwnbers reveal. In 1850 … over half
[of the slaves], 51.6 percent, resided on plantations of more than twenty bondsmen. The
figures were more pronounced in the Deep South, and still more so in 1860, when fully 62
percent of the slaves in the Deep South lived in plantation units.33
Plantations, albeit unintentionally, served as the primary sites at which a distinctive
black American culture matured. By 1860 over 800,000 slaves were living mostly in the
company of other slaves, in groups of fifty or more. On almost 11,000 plantations, conse-
quently, slave settlements were big enough to resemble, in the words of former slave
occupants, “little towns. “34 No doubt their quarters did resemble villages (Figure 5 .4 ). A
group of fifty slaves probably contained about ten families housed in as many as ten but
110 fewer than five cabins, depending on the type of buildings used as quarters. Slave settle-
ments containing larger populations obviously required more houses and thus were even
more townlike. Bill Homer, a former slave from Shreveport, Louisiana, described a large
grid pattern of slave houses when he recalled that the quarters on his plantation “was fifty
one-room cabins and dey was ten in a row and dere was five rows.” 35 A map of the
Stapleton plantation on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, drawn up in 1789, shows that
the slave quarter, containing eighteen cabins, was set out in a block pattern three rows
deep and six rows wide. 36
Although slaves had no legal power, they were often able nonetheless to use their
marginal status to their advantage. Kept for the most part in small frame or log houses,
slaves knew that they were being humbled by their master, who owned a big mansion-
or at least a bigger house- that often was located on the highest ground available.
106 John Michael Vlach
However, because their more modestly constructed slave quarters frequently were located
some considerable distance from the planter’s residence, slaves also had ample oppor-
tunity to take control of many domestic concerns. Beyond their master’s immediate
scrutiny, beyond its boundary lines, slaves created their own landscape. This was a domain
that generally escaped much notice, mainly because it was marked in ways that planters
either considered insignificant or could not recognize.
Rhys Isaac has suggested that paths and trails into the countryside were the central
elements of the slave landscape in Virginia. Some of these secret tracks led to clandestine
meeting places in the woods, used sometimes for ritual purposes and at other times for
festive parties at which fiddles were played and stolen pigs barbecued. Paths also led from
the slave quarters across the fields to a particular corn house or to some other food store
that was known to have a conveniently loose board in its gable. A shortcut through the
woods or marshlands that surrounded the fields may have allowed slaves from different
plantations to rendezvous more conveniently and to return to their assigned tasks with
less chance of detection. On those plantations located near navigable streams and rivers,
the waterways were yet another domain over which slaves exercised particular control by
means of their boating skills.37 The whole ensemble of sites and pathways constituted, in
Isaac’s terms, “an alternative territorial system. ” 38
This system, used wherever large groups of African Americans were gathered
together, encouraged racial solidarity and provided slaves with a means to escape, at least
temporarily, from their masters’ control. Moreover, the informal qualities of this type of
landscape, specific material indications, may also have reflected an ethnic choice. The
loose, ad hoc scheme of preferred paths and gathering places was created incrementally
by a series of improvisational responses to the given landscape rules of white masters.
Because similar improvisational responses by black people to Anglo-American culture are
known to have resulted in the creation of distinctive African American forms of speech,
music, and dance, it is not too farfetched to suggest a parallel development in their
responses to their assigned environments. 39
Some slaves are known to have countered the geometrically circumscribed order
imposed by their masters’ logic with what seemed like chaos. For example, the forty-one
slaves at Mount Vernon who were assigned to the so-called Muddy Hole Farm, where
they worked under the supervision of a black overseer, located their cabins randomly
among the trees at the edge of the cleared fields. Those slaves living on the plantation’s
other “farms,” where they were supervised by white overseers, had their cabins set in
straight lines at regular intervals along the edge of a road.40 One observer of Georgia rice
plantations similarly noted that when slaves were given the chance to build their own
houses, “they wanted their cabins in some secluded place, down in the hollow, or amid
the trees, with only a path to their abode. “41 In one of the slave villages at J. J. Smith’s
cotton plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina- apparently located far away from his
central processing area- although the cabins consisted of a row of boxy frame buildings,
all were set at odd, irregular angles to one another.42
If the black system of place definition positively embraced the random and mean-
dering givens of the natural world, their spaces would naturally strike white observers as
sloppy and poorly maintained. British visitor Edward Kimber, in fact, went so far as to
The plantation landscape 107
·t that slave settlements located on the backlands of plantations (those fields beyond
cert! yawners’ immediate scrutiny) produced “Indolence and Nastiness.”43 What white
theII . . . I ( ” ,, ) h I f
0
le were prone to cnt1c1ze as soppy or worse, as nasty was t e save pre erence
pe p landscape marked by few overt boundaries and fixed sites, an environment open to fora . · .
d characterized by movement. Planters who wanted theu places clearly and certainly
::fined could only be annoyed at the way slaves acted. In an 1833 issue of the Southern
Agriculturist, a South Carolina planter wrote: plantation might be .considered as a
iece of machinery; to operate successfully all of its parts should be umform and exact
the impelling force regular and steady. “44 Clearly slave actions went against this
d ·ce countering its suggestions with behavior that seemed deliberately careless. In the a VI ,
li ht of what is known about life within various slave communities, the inhabitants’
were indeed deliberate, for they hoped thereby to carve out a domain of their own
and thus improve, however slightly, the conditions of their captivity.
Within their settlements, slaves established strong family identities, created distinc-
tive art forms, and developed meaningful religious rituals. 45 To the furthest degree
ossible, they took charge of their lives. Among the many tangible signs of black initia-
and autonomy, the foremost spatial statements were the extensive vegetable gardens,
sometimes as big as half an acre per person, in which slaves raised much of their own
food . Such self-sufficiency was undergirded by other demonstrations of slave skill. Frances
Anne Kemble, who in the late 1830s lived on a plantation in coastal Georgia with a
slave population approaching five hundred, observed that slaves who had woodworking
abilities built furniture and boats, which they sold for considerable sums in the nearby
rown of Darien.46 On other plantations, slaves developed similar entrepreneurial enter-
prises, selling chickens, ducks, and pigs that they raised, and even a horse or two. Others
were able to improve their material conditions by offering their blacksmithing, tailoring,
or coopering skills for hire.47 Frederick Law Olmsted noted that in one particularly large
slave village, again in Georgia, the slaves daily secured their homes and possessions under
lock and key, asserting their right to personal space and property.48 By acting as if they
owned the quarters, these slaves had overturned the declared order of the plantation.
Although everything they had could be taken away in a moment if the master so desired,
few planters wanted to disturb the inner workings of large slave villages. As long as the
slaves performed their assigned tasks with reasonable efficiency, planters concerned them-
selves neither with the routines of the slave quarters nor the domestic claims being
exercised there.
Once they were able to establish a level of proprietorship in the quarters, some slaves
felt emboldened enough to exert a claim over their work spaces as well. Philip Fithian, a
tutor in Westmoreland County, Virginia, during the late eighteenth century, found that
the slaves at Nomini Hall regularly took over the stables as a place in which to hold their
private entertainments. From his frequent complaints that his pupil, Henry Carter, spent
much time in the kitchen or in the various craft shops, we can infer that these build-
ings, too, were regarded as black spaces and therefore off limits to white boys who hoped
to become well schooled in the refined ways of gentlemen.49 The cook at the Merrick plan-
tation in Louisiana not only ran the kitchen but determined who could have access to it.
Caroline Merrick, at one time the plantation’s Young Miss, remembered being driven out
108 John Michael Vlach
of the room by the cook’s stern rebuke: “Go inter de house, Miss Carrie! Yer ain’t no
manner er use heah only ter git yer face red wid de heat. “50
After years of toil in the fields, slaves sometimes began to feel that the harvest was
their achievement rather than their master’s. He may have owned the crop, but they had
created it. There is no more eloquent expression of a slave’s identification with the soil he
worked than the claim made by a former South Carolina slave named Morris. Early in the
twentieth century, when he was about to be thrown off the plantation where he had lived
all his life, he went to the landlord to state his case.
I was born on dis place before Freedom. My Mammy and Daddy worked de rice fields.
Dey’s buried here. De fust ting I remember are dose rice banks. I growed up in dem from
dat high … . De strength of dese arms and dese legs and of dis old back . . . is in your rice
banks. It won’t be long before de good Lord take de rest of pore old Morris away too. An’
de rest of dis body want to be with de strength of de arms and de legs and de back dat is
already buried in your rice banks. No .. . you ain’t agoin’ to run old Morris off dis place.
51
The ironies of plantation slavery were many and profound, for although the plan-
tation system was the very reason people of African descent were enslaved, it also provided
them with an arena in which they could begin to piece back together their shattered
lives. While ownership of a plantation clearly divided whites into distinct have and
have-not classes, blacks generally found themselves drawn together in sufficient numbers
to constitute coherent social groups. Comforted by the fellowship of the quarters, they
were able to confront the injustice of their captivity in ways both subtle and obvious;
among their various strategies of accommodation and resistance was the creation of their
own version of the plantation. Recognizing that they could define a space for themselves,
they took back the quarters, fields, gardens, barns, and outbuildings, claiming them as
parts of a black landscape. Empowered by this territorial gesture, they were able to forge
an even stronger sense of community, which few planters would ever recognize or
acknowledge.
Even when slaves were most persistent in establishing their own landscapes, they
attempted few bold gestures. Instead, they prudently relied on subtle adjustments to
their dwellings, or they sought out spaces where their masters were unlikely to intrude.
Their domains, consisting mainly of rough and ungainly dwellings together with their
cluttered yards, reflected not a lack of ability but their material poverty. Denied the time
and resources needed to design and build as they might have wanted, they simply appro-
priated, as marginalized peoples often do, the environments to which they were assigned.
The slaves’ agenda is the hidden dimension of a southern plantation. Looking over
these places, one sees most clearly the pattern of well-known, European-derived fashions.
The ordered surfaces of building facades and well-tended grounds, however, were under-
pinned by a slave community whose labor provided the wealth with which planters
created their impressive estates. The more than two-and-a-half-million slaves held on
plantations in 1860 clearly dominated the southern countryside. It was, finally, their
formidable demographic presence that transformed plantations into undeniably black
places. This circumstance fostered such a self-reliant attitude among slaves that they were
The plantation landscape 109
. . ed to think about their captivity and its various physical contexts in ways that they
most reassuring. Just as slaves usually did not consider it a crime to take extra
ns from the master’s storehouse in order to satisfy their hunger, neither did they
ranoider the buildings and in which they were forced to work to be solely his
cons ty s2 Thus the kitchen might be claimed by the slave cook, the dining room by the
proper ·
ervant the loom house by the weaver, the barn by the field hand. houses ‘
Acts of appropriation leave few physical marks, and therefore they must be
·ously recalled in order to be factored into our interpretation of surviving slave build-consc1
.
5
and spaces. Consequently, southern plantations can only be described accurately ::d analyzed fully if we remember the territorial prerogatives claimed and exercised
repeatedly by slaves.
Notes
1 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), p. 94.
2 Quoted in Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 33.
3 Quoted in Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, p. 220.
4 John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1982), pp. 75-76.
5 Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial
Ruling Class (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1940), pp. 158, 190, 286, 346.
6 Thomas Tileston Waterman, The Mansions of Virginia, 1706- 1776 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1946), pp. 22- 25; Nicholas Luccketti, “Archaeological Excavations at
Bacon’s Castle, Surry County, Virginia,” in William M. Kelso and Rachel Most, eds., Earth
Patterns: Essays in Landscape Archaeology (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990),
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
pp. 24, 27, 32, 35.
W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Pelican, 1970), pp. 167, 170.
Gregory A. Stiverson and Patrick H. Butler III, eds., “Virginia in 1732: The Travel .Journal of
William Hugh Grove,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85 (1977): 26.
Louis Morton, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth
Century (Williamsburg, Va .: Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., 1941), p. 207, n. 4.
Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia, p. 330.
Waterman, Mansions of Virginia, pp. 108- 9.
Quoted in Anne Leighton, “For Use or for Delight”: American Gardens in the Eighteenth
Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 269; see also Clement Eaton, The Growth of
Southern Civilization, 1790- 1860 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 3-4.
Samuel Gaillard Stoney, Plantations of the Carolina Low Country (Charleston: South Carolina
An Association, 1955), pp. 59, 61-62, 119, 170- 75.
Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Places 2, no. 2
(1985): 66.
Fraser D. Neiman, “Domestic Architecture at the Clifts Plantation: The Social Context of Early
Virginia Building,” in Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in
American Vernacular Architecture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 311.
Roger G. Kennedy, Greek Revival America (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1989),
p. 286.
Eugene L. Schwaab, ed., Travels in the Old South Selected from Periodicals of the Times
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 2: 292, 295.
Quoted in Eaton, Growth of South Civilization, pp. 122- 23.
110 John Michael Vlach
19 John Burkhardt Rehder, “Sugar Plantation Settlements of Southern Louisiana: A Cultural
Geography, ” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1971, pp. 84-86, 100-3, 109; Schwaab
Travels in the Old South, 2: 495. ‘
20 Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), p. 339.
John B. Boles, Southerners, 1619- 1869 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983):
p. 75.
21 Harold D. Woodman, ed., Slavery and the Southern Economy: Sources and Readings (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 15.
22 See Isaac, Trans formation of Virginia, p. 21 , for a discussion of figures on mid-eighteenth-century
plantation ownership.
23 Upton, “White and Black Landscapes,” p. 66 .
24 Quoted in James C. Bonner, “Plantation Architecture of the Lower South on the Eve of the Civil
War,” Journal of Southern History 11 (1945): 372.
25 Ibid., p. 374.
26 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations an Cotton and Slavery
in the American Slave States, ed. by Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953),
p. 280.
27 The small plantation in northern Louisiana described by Olmsted can profitably be compared to
the profile of a slaveowning farm in Yell County, Arkansas, detailed by John Solomon Otto
in “Slaveholding General Farmers in a Cotton County,” Agricultural History 55 (1981): 167- 78.
28 Norman R. Yetman, ed. , Life Under the “Peculiar Institution”: Selections from the Slave
Narrative Collection (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), pp. 61, 144.
29 Olmsted , Cotton Kingdom, p. 249. See also John Michael Vlach, “Plantation Landscapes of the
AntebeUum South,” in Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr. , and Kyrn S. Rice, eds. , Before Freedom
Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1991), p. 41, Figure 43.
30 Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, p. 181.
31 Quoted in J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1953), p. 47.
32 Bonner, “Plantation Architecture of the Lower South,” p. 375.
33 Bales, Black Southerners, p. 107.
34 George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1972), 3 (pt. 4): 177, 15 (pt. 2): 364.
35 Yetman, Life Under the “Peculiar Institution, ” p. 168.
36 See Vlach, “Plantation Landscapes of the Antebellum South,” p. 28, Figure 30.
37 Dell Upton, “Imagining the Early Virginia Landscape,” in Kelso and Most, Earth Patterns, p. 74.
38 Issac, Transformation of Virginia, pp. 52-53.
39 ]. L. Dillard, Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (New York: Vintage,
1972); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971); Lynne
Fauley Emery, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, Calif.: National
Press Books, 1972).
40 See Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-
Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 105, 109.
41 Quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York:
Random House, 1972), p. 534.
42 Charles Joyner, “The World of the Plantation Slaves,” in Campbell and Rice, Before Freedom
Came, p. 79, Figure 70.
43 Edward Kimber, “Observations in Several Voyages and Travels in America,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 1st ser., vol. 15 (1906-7): 148.
44 James 0. Breeden, ed., Advice among Masters: The Ideal of Slave Management in the Old South
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 31.
45
46
47
48
49
so
51
52
The plantation landscape 111
See Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750- 1925 (New York:
Vintage, 1976); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts
(Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and
Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York:
oxford University Press, 1977).
Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39 [1863] , ed .
by John A. Scott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), p. 63.
Philip D. Morgan, “The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Low
Country,” Journal of Southern History 49 (1983) : 399-420.
Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, p. 185.
Upton, “White and Black Landscapes,” p . 70.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 142 (emphasis in original).
Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 42-43.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 602- 3.
Louis P. Nelson
Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum,
Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 88-125 (Article)
Published by University of Minnesota Press
DOI: 10.1353/bdl.2014.0006
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louis p. nelson
Architectures of West African
Enslavement
The gleaming white castle rises dramatically
from the promontory overlooking the coastal
town of Dixcove, Ghana, much as it has for more
than three centuries (Figure 1). Visitors arrive in
town and park at the base of the hill, climbing to
the castle on foot. The path wends up the side of
the hill and diverts to the west toward the small
parade ground that stands between the front of
the castle and the sea. Two massive diamond-
shaped bastions stand to either side of a heavily
rusticated door, which opens through the solid,
unbroken masonry of the outer wall into the
front courtyard of the castle. In the back corner
of an interior courtyard is an arched opening
into the northeast bastion, accessed by a range of
three steps. The small chamber behind is closed
by a heavy iron gate (Figure 2). No more than
two hundred square feet, this was the slave hole.
Merely 2 percent of the total square footage of
the whole compound, this small cell was a criti-
cal component of the sequences of such spaces in
English castles along the west coast of Africa. It
played a vital role in the highly lucrative system
of transatlantic slavery that defined the coastline
of West Africa and that sustained the sugar pro-
duction of the British West Indies from the late
seventeenth century to the abolition of the slave
trade in 1807.1
The slave holes of the English castles lining
the west coast of Africa were and are horrifying.2
“There was nothing to be heard but the rattling
of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans
and cries of our fellow men,” reported Ottobah
Cugoano.3 But these chambers were not the only
spaces experienced by enslaved Africans in the
long journey from Africa to the Caribbean. While
historians have dealt extensively with many di-
mensions of the slave trade—and this article de-
pends on the published scholarship of a number
of excellent historians—architectural historians
have left the spaces of enslavement largely un-
touched. This article situates the historical nar-
ratives of the slave trade not in buildings but in
spaces, some permanent, some temporary, some
floating, and some created by implements of
bondage. This understanding of space depends
on that formulated by Henri Lefebvre in which
space is at once physical, socially produced, and
imagined.4 When possible, physical spaces have
been documented, recorded in their surviving
conditions as artifacts of slavery.5 But these spaces
were very much the product of those social and
economic relationships governing the capture
(and resistance to capture), containment, trans-
fer, and sale of people. They are also products of
the British imagination, changing as their in-
tended function changed and changing relative
to other institutional architecture. Understood as
agents in the economic and social relationships
of exchange, these spaces—in buildings and in
canoes—are components of a machine of pro-
duction dedicated to the generation of “the slave”
as a social, historically contingent and situated
subject.
In tracking sequences of spaces, I do not pre-
tend to suggest that this article reports a typical
experience; variations over space and time and
among personal dispositions mean such an at-
tempt would be folly.6 But the telling that follows
was in its component parts the reality for many
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 89
who were transported against their will from Af-
rica to the Caribbean by British slavers, a term
used historically to identify both the men who
enslaved and the boats that carried their victims.
Based on fieldwork in Ghana and on a careful
examination of documentary and visual records
in England, Ghana, and the United States, this
article reconstructs the spatial experience of the
enslaved, examining when possible not just the
physical spaces but also the spatial experience of
the senses, so powerfully captured by Cugoano.
By engaging sequences of spaces, this article
embraces four methodological convictions. The
first is that the meanings of spaces are not always
determined by their physical production. Some-
times the experience of a space, if such an experi-
ence can be reconstructed, is far more important
than its material making. Another conviction is
that the writing of history benefits from the rigor-
ous examination of the spaces where events took
place; too frequently, historians generate disem-
bodied narratives that divorce events from place.
And this article also presumes that the most im-
portant meaning of architecture is often found in
the various human networks—social, economic,
political—that tied those spaces one to the next.
Derived from these three convictions, this article
is a history of architectural experience.
The fourth and last methodological convic-
tion is potentially the most important. West Af-
rica’s coastal castles and their associated spaces
are rightly understood as spaces engaged in the
economic processes of slave making—of trans-
forming a person into a commodity. It is no ac-
cident that the definitive study of the Royal Af-
rican Company—the organization that oversaw
England’s African trade until 1750—was written
not by a social or a political historian but by a
historian of business in a series on emergent
international capitalism.7 The decisions made
by Europeans along the west coast of Africa and
by their African partners were motivated by
Figure 1. View of the
castle at Dixcove, Ghana.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, July 2012.
90 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
economic self-interest, and over time it became
increasingly clear that the highest profits lay in
the production of slaves. This economic machine
matured through the eighteenth century, gen-
erating finely tuned processes of exchange and
function-specific architecture to support that
machine.
Understood as an economic process, slave
making had a number of important factors that
drove the decisions of enslavers. One was valua-
tion; central to this process was the recognition
that individuals became more valuable as they
traveled further in the process from capture to
final sale in the New World. Allied with this was
the recognition that some goods had higher value
potential over other goods; in slave making these
criteria were typically gender, age, and health.
A younger healthy male had far greater value
potential than an older sickly female. Another
reality was that damaged goods were less valu-
able, creating an incentive to protect investment
from damage. While deeply inhumane, these
were the factors that drove many decisions in the
early modern West African trade; to ignore this
reality is to write poor history. But it is also poor
history to write about these spaces under the
presumption of isolation. In some ways, the trad-
ing castles transformed in the later eighteenth
century to support the slave trade corresponded
with European prisons, schools, and institutions
of reform, which also transformed and matured
in these same decades.8 The fundamental differ-
ence was, of course, that prisons and schools ap-
pealed to the humanity of their subject to enact
reform (however insufficiently), whereas the cas-
tles in West Africa and their allied spaces were
more concerned with the economic processes
of commodification.9 These differences will be-
come clear as the narrative unfolds.
Capture and Coffles
The first act of enslavement was capture. En-
slaved Africans were sometimes the result of
wars. In 1682 Barbot reported that one English
trader recently purchased three hundred Afri-
cans “almost for nothing, besides the trouble of
receiving them at the beach in his boats.” This
was a huge number, the result of a recent war:
“The Commenda men brought them from the
field of battle, having obtained a victory over a
neighboring nation, and taken a great number
of prisoners.”10 Nonetheless, as recent histori-
cal scholarship has made clear, most Africans
sold into slavery in the eighteenth century were
not legitimate prisoners of war but the result of
internal legal processes, debt, famine, or, most
commonly, kidnapping.11 One English observer
wrote, “We often saw several thousand men in
full war paint march inland where they stormed
the villages, set the houses ablaze and caught
Figure 2. View of the
slave hole gate at
Dixcove Castle, Ghana.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, March 2011.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 91
the inhabitants.” Francis Owen, another English
trader, described how an African trader “went
out with his troops, set three sides of a village
ablaze, placed his soldiers at the forth side to grab
those inhabitants who ran out of the flames.”12
Especially as the eighteenth century unfolded,
kidnapping became the primary mode of slave
production across West Africa as African trad-
ers worked to meet the escalating demand for
enslaved Africans from their European trading
partners.
Surviving African accounts of capture are
rare. That written by Ottobah Cugoano, pub-
lished in 1787 as part of the emerging critique
of the slave trade, offers a rare glimpse into the
experience of an African boy.13 Playing with
friends, Cugoano was assaulted by “ruffians”
who claimed the boys had “committed a fault
against their lord” and must travel with them to
answer for this fault. Threatened with weapons,
the boys submitted and walked for two days to
what was likely a market town, where they were
divided among the houses of locals, colluders
in the plot. After spending six days in a house,
Cugoano was eventually conveyed under the
direction of another trader to a town populated
with white men near the coast. The next morn-
ing, the trader took him into the castle under the
presumption of obtaining some trade goods, but
it was in the castle that young Ottobah came to
fully understand his kidnapping.14 Asa-Asa, an-
other African boy, relayed how his hometown was
attacked and burned by invaders. They pillaged
for two days and then carried off all the survivors
Figure 3. Map of
the West Coast of
Africa identifying the
locations of various
sites mentioned in the
text. Drawn by Jason
Truesdale.
1 2 3
4
5
Gambia Rive
r
Cross R
iver
Benu
e Rive
r
Lake Volta
Black Volta
White Volta
Red Volta
Senegam
bia
Sierra Leone
Windward Coast
Gold Coast
Bight Of Benin
Bight Of Biafra
Nig
er R
iver
Kumasi
Salaga
Sankana
Gwolu
Idah
Timbuktu
Old Calabar
Ouidah
1 Nzulezu
2 Dixcove
3 Cape Coast
4 Anomabo
5 Accra
Bauchi
Atlantic Ocean
92 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
in a coffle of about twenty.15 It is not surprising
that these accounts came from children. The
increasing numbers of older children sold into
slavery over the course of the eighteenth cen-
tury has led some historians to see kidnapping
of youth supplanting war as the primary means
of introducing persons into the slave trade mar-
ket, especially as the value of adolescent males—
unwounded by war—surpassed the value of all
other categories of potential slaves.16 The result
was the delivery of millions of Africans to the
coast, some as the result of war or crimes in their
village but, as the century unfolded, most deliv-
ered to coastal factories by armed raiding parties
through a method called “grand pillage,” which
simply meant people stolen from their homes as
they slept, worked, and played.17
Many African communities fiercely resisted
raiders.18 Oral histories from the Kasena, Bulsa,
and Chiana peoples have preserved stories of at-
tack and resistance against African slave traders.19
The Mfantses still use a greeting that echoes re-
sistance to slaving: “If there is someone chasing
you, let us know so as to hide you.”20 Victim com-
munities also enacted architectural strategies of
resistance. The Daagare people of Sankana have
an oral tradition that reports cow horn alarms
were used to warn nearby villages of a slaver
attack. That same community also points to a
series of three caves that were used as places of
refuge.21 With appropriate provisions these caves
provided sanctuary for weeks at a time. One of
their songs begins, “When the raiders came, the
people of Sankana stood firm” (Figure 3).22
The people of Gwollu offered a different strat-
egy for defense: they built a wall encircling their
village. The village elders reported that the wall
“was constructed at the time of the notorious
raiders,” in response to “the disappearance of
people.” They found that their people were being
trapped in nets in the forest. But then the raid-
ers began attacking the village, coming at night,
usually burning houses to drive out the inhabi-
tants. The village elders offered a number of
solutions, including (1) building roofs of baked
bricks that could not burn as easily; (2) installing
impediments to block or trap an intruder; and
(3) installing narrow doors, often low enough to
require bending over to gain entry, that would
allow only a single person access to the interior.
Yet even after these were put in place, the raids
continued. So the final solution was to erect a vil-
lage wall with small holes for surveillance. After
two years the wall was complete and brought to
the village “limited peace.”23
Sometimes, resistance resulted in even more
drastic measures. Research in Dahomey (now
Benin) has determined that the region’s many
lacustrine (waterborne) villages were part of a
defensive strategy of relocating whole villages to
the edges of lakes that were both visually shel-
tered and largely inaccessible by land, thereby
more easily defensible.24 The appearance of such
lacustrine villages across West Africa, from
Benin through at least western Ghana, suggests
the possibility that this practice was widespread
(Figure 4). Such strategies required, of course,
learning new architectures and embracing dif-
ferent foodways. Isolation meant safety. From
building walls to building water villages, Afri-
cans responded to the raids of the slavers. Ac-
tively attending to these architectural strategies
reminds us that capture was itself a stage in the
process and that victim communities were ac-
tively engaged in acts of resistance. There was an
architectural history to African-on-African and,
eventually, European-on-African violence.
Once captured, the enslaved African was
bound to a coffle in the forced march from the
point of capture to trading posts along the coast.
A remarkable early representation of such a gang
appears in a watercolor sketch drawn by Captain
Samuel Gable into the logbook of the Sandown,
an English slaver ship that slaved in Sierra Leone
in 1793. Entitled, in part, “Representation of a
Lott of Fullanis bringing their slaves for sale to
the Europeans,” the image shows a collection of
drivers armed with bows and arrows marching
seven enslaved in a gang along the horizon of
the picture plane (Figure 5). The implements of
restraint are the diagonal yokes that reach from
the waist of one captive to the neck of another.
Other slaves are carrying large baskets on their
heads, likely filled with food and essential sup-
plies or sometimes other trade items like ivory
tusks, which had to be carried with the coffle dur-
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 93
ing the days, weeks, and sometimes months of a
march.25
Such yokes were the target of much criti-
cism among abolitionists by the late eighteenth
century. Thomas Clarkson’s Letters on the Slave
Trade, published in 1791, includes two plates
illustrating three variations on the yokes (Fig-
ure 6).26 In the simplest version, Clarkson re-
ports, Africans were bound around the neck by
two pieces of wood fastened to each other at the
ends. Such individual devices prevented escape
by creating an impediment to the escapee, who
could not quickly run through the dense for-
est. A second version shows a single yoke with
crutches, one at each end to secure two people.
The third has a crutch at one end and a twisted
rope at the other, by which it was hung around
the neck. “It is reported to be so heavy,” Clarkson
writes, “that it is extremely difficult for the per-
son who wears it to walk, much less to escape or
run away.” The only way to manage the weight
of the log was to rest the crutched end of the
yoke on the shoulders of the person before. In
Clarkson’s account the straight end of the yoke
was tied around the person’s neck, and in the
captain’s sketch it appears to be secured around
the waist. One such yoke, probably from the early
nineteenth century, survives in the collections of
the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.
The base of the yoke has an indentation a few
inches from the end that would have been used
to secure a cord between the yoke and the neck or
waist of the captive. The crutched end of the yoke
does not have any evidence of such mechanisms
for fastening, suggesting that it simply rested
on the shoulders of the person before. Some ac-
counts indicate that Africans were bound neck to
neck in chains with their hands fastened behind
their waists or to their sides.27 Bound in one of
these ways, most coffles walked from their point
of capture to the coast. Evidence of the torture of
this march was clear to Carl Wadstrom when he
Figure 4. The isolated
lacustrine village of
Nzulezu, Ghana.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, March 2011.
94 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
Figure 5. “Representation of a Lott of Fullonis . . . ,” Samuel Gable Logbook, 1793. Image courtesy National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 95
noted the “mangled bodies of several [Africans
who had just arrived], whose wounds were still
bleeding . . . a most shocking spectacle.”28 The
march to the sea was gruesome. The estimates
of mortality vary widely, but it is absolutely clear
that not all who began the journey lived to see
the ocean.29
Although evidence is scant and uncertain, his-
torians generally agree that while most Africans
came from within a few hundred miles of the
coast, some traveled great distances. They could
hail from as far as Timbuktu, approximately one
thousand miles from the closest castles or facto-
ries on the Gold Coast.30 The complexity of Af-
rican trading meant that the majority of those
Africans sold into slavery experienced complex
African trading networks that brought captives
from across the interior.31 Ghanaian historian
Akosua Perbi has determined that early mod-
ern Ghana had at least nine major trade routes
by which captives were channeled to the coast.32
Most of the interior routes passed through Ku-
masi; one of the major spurs from Kumasi led di-
rectly to Cape Coast. Those traveling substantial
distances likely passed through one of the inte-
rior’s many market towns. Perbi has identified as
many as sixty-six market towns in Ghana, most
of which probably engaged in the trade of slaves.33
As a result, captives became commodities in the
complex trading network that spread broadly
across west and central Africa. Asa-Asa, for ex-
ample, reported that he had been sold six times
over the course of about six months, “sometimes
for money, sometimes for cloth, and sometimes
for guns,” before he arrived at the coast, where he
was sold again for exportation.34
The largest and most important market town
in what would become modern Ghana was Sal-
aga, located approximately three hundred miles
inland from Cape Coast. This critical town en-
joyed a very important position. Situated between
the two branches of the Volta River, Salaga was
easily accessible to the coast. The town was the
terminus for two branches of the trans-Saharan
trade routes and was the market town with the
greatest access to North Africa.35 Salaga was also
politically important as the major market town
under the rule of the Asante, after their capture
of the town in 1744. The Asante were one of the
major African tribes that provided Africans for
the transatlantic market, and as a result the Sal-
aga market became a major point of exchange.36
Recent archaeological investigations have uncov-
ered evidence for the courtyard of a large slave
warehouse, as well as water dams and cisterns
used to bathe slaves before sale.37 As described
by Perbi, the Salaga market was divided into two
sections, foodstuffs and slaves. The majority of
the foodstuffs were sold in the morning, while
the sales of people usually took place in the af-
ternoons, a lag that gave traders time to organize
their “stock” by gender and age and to assess
their value. Some period accounts suggest that
a town crier announced the daily opening of
the slave market, having been paid by traders to
launch sales.38 This was an experience often re-
peated; many if not most people would be housed
in slave camps at some point along the journey.39
Research on the internal trade in the Bights of
Biafra and Benin, the regions that would become
southeastern Nigeria, suggests that traders in
these places also depended on a vast network that
penetrated deep into the African interior. The
diary of Antera Duke, one of the leading African
traders in Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra, in-
dicates that he depended on a trading network
Figure 6. Representation
of a yoke as printed
in Thomas Clarkson,
Letters on the Slave Trade
(London, 1791).
96 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
that ranged over 30,000 square miles and that
most of his slaves came from market towns near
the fringes of that region; many came from the
Cameroon grasslands, most having already trav-
eled great distances.40 David Northrup’s work on
this region suggests that many captives, if not a
majority, were marched in coffles from at least
as far as Bauchi, a major market town more than
500 miles from the coast, although the last 150
miles was surely by canoe on the Niger or Cross
Rivers.41 Many of these enslaved Africans also
passed through the market town of Idah, near
the critical junction of the Niger and Benue Riv-
ers. The market in Idah occurred every ten days,
was attended by as many as six thousand people,
and witnessed the sale of approximately three
hundred enslaved Africans at each market (see
Figure 3).42
If travel by land in a coffle was the experience
of most enslaved Africans, some were also trans-
ported from market to market via canoe. This
was certainly the case for those in Gambia and
the Bight of Biafra, both regions dominated by
major river systems. Fashioned from the trunk
of a single enormous tree, canoes, up to eighty
feet in length, could hold scores of paddlers, raid-
ers, and captives.43 When preparing for a raiding
expedition, canoes were fitted out with a range
of weaponry, including “two guns, which were
three pounders, fixed upon a block of wood; one
in the canoe’s stern and one in the bow.”44 Fleets
of up to twelve canoes would depart on expedi-
tions that could last as long as three weeks, re-
turning with as many as thirty enslaved Africans
per canoe. These canoes were such a critical
component of slaving on Old Calabar that Olau-
dah Equiano noticed that some people seemed
to live out of their canoes, which were fitted out
with “household utensils and provisions of all
kinds. . . . [Some] staid and cooked in theirs, and
laid in them all night.”45 In such canoes the initial
captives of a raid traveled for weeks, as described
by one sailor, with “their Arms generally pin-
ioned behind their backs with Grass Ropes. They
are made to lie down in the Bottom frequently
of a wet canoe.”46 In Gambia and the Bights of
Benin and Biafra, most of the enslaved arrived at
their final African destination via canoe; along
the Gold Coast that arrival was on foot as part of
a coffle.
Before arriving at a coastal castle, most coffles
would pass through the castle town: “Their
streets and roads . . . are only poorly kept clean
so there is a right good smell,” wrote Johannes
Rask in the early eighteenth century. But he then
asserted that their courtyards were “usually very
neat and clean” and that trees planted along the
streets “provide a comfortable shade and a lovely
appearance so that every negeri looks like a small
green grove.”47 Occupants of the town included
the majority of the castle slaves, or those slaves
owned by the castle—not intended for resale—
purchased to undertake work in the castle. One
report from 1749 lists 379 castle slaves for Cape
Coast Castle, all identified by name and occupa-
tion, which ranged from washerwoman to brick
mason.48 But living in the town was also an as-
sortment of both African and European traders,
many of whom had houses and offices in town;
they frequently paid a regular fee to house in the
secured slave holes of the castle those slaves they
intended to sell to ship captains. Centuries-old
multistory masonry buildings are likely the rem-
nants of such traders’ houses (Figure 7). Often
predating the erection of the castle, the town was
a socially and economically complex entity that
was thoroughly integrated into the workings of
the castle.49
At some point the coffle came in sight of the
castle itself. As described by one European ob-
server, the castles appeared to be “chalk moun-
tains, especially when the sun shines directly on
them.”50 The first sight of the castle was often a
terrifying prospect, for at that moment enslaved
Africans came to understand their fate. As one
firsthand European observer wrote, “To be ex-
ported is, for them, synonymous with being
murdered.”51 He continued, “Sometimes a gag is
placed in the slave’s mouth, which is forced wide
open, in order to keep him from shouting. . . .
This intractability among the slaves as they ap-
proach the coast also has its origin partly from
their conviction that they are going to be shipped
out to places where they will be eaten.”52 Oth-
ers, like young Cugoano, had been tricked into
approaching the castle: “Those [slaves] who are
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 97
brought [to the castles] without knowing the fate
that awaits them there . . . are violently fallen upon
in the forts and dragged into the slave holes. . . .
They, especially the women, throw themselves to
the ground, shriek, stretch their hands over their
heads and turn their eyes to heaven.”53
The Royal African Company
The early history of the British castles along the
west coast of Africa falls into two major eras:
their formation under the Royal African Com-
pany and their restructuring and expansion
under the Company of Merchants Trading to Af-
rica, which took over control of the fortifications
in May 1751. Under the direction of the Royal Af-
rican Company, the amount of space dedicated to
the containment of enslaved Africans at Dixcove
and most other castles was never very large. In
part, this is because, at the point of their con-
struction in the later seventeenth century, the
trade in slaves was only one growing dimension
of the broader African trade undertaken from
these castles.
While the English had been involved in trade
along the west coast of Africa since a 1618 expe-
dition up the Gambia River, the establishment
of a permanent well-organized presence on the
coast did not materialize until the construction
of the castle at Cormantin in the 1630s.54 But in
these early years the trade was driven almost en-
tirely by the search for gold; the trade in slaves
was dominated by the Portuguese, who enjoyed
an exclusive position of selling slaves to Spanish
plantations in the Americas. The revolt of the
Portuguese against the Spanish in 1640 opened
the door, however, to alternative European sup-
pliers of enslaved labor. Paired with the rapid ex-
pansion of sugar production in the newly settled
English colonies in the eastern Caribbean, the
middle decades of the seventeenth century set
the stage for English involvement in the African
trade in slaves. While English slaving had taken
place for decades under various structures, this
country’s involvement in the African slave trade
took on an organized structure in 1672 with the
foundation of the Royal African Company, which
received the English monopoly on the African
trade for a stretch of five thousand miles of the
African coast.55 By that time human trafficking
was assumed to be an integral part of the African
trade.
The Royal African Company took over man-
agement of the various settlements and fortified
castles already present on the West African coast.
The oldest settlement, the castle at Cormantin,
had been begun by the English in the 1630s but
was lost to the Dutch in 1665. The most impor-
tant settlement was Cape Coast Castle, which
was begun by the Swedes in 1652 but taken by
the English in 1664. The castle at Cape Coast
stood “on a round head jutting out into the sea . . .
and its being encompassed on that side . . . by
several rocks and the sea itself, render it inacces-
sible on that side. The only landing is just under
the fortress.”56 The Royal African Company dra-
matically expanded the Swedish castle at Cape
Coast from 1674 to 1682.57 After that expansion
the castle included a number of large warehouse
spaces, apartments for the governor, barracks for
soldiers, and a chapel, in addition to the various
towers and bastions defining its perimeter. But
much of its power derived from its appearance,
not from its actual constructed fabric; as with
most early European construction in Africa, the
walls were largely rubble contained in two ve-
neers of whitewashed stone. Since castles were
often poorly maintained, castle governors regu-
larly complained that the heavy rains would liter-
ally wash the building away.58
Given its remarkably advantageous site, the
Figure 7. European
slaver’s house, Elmina,
Ghana. Photograph by
Louis P. Nelson, March
2011.
98 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
castle at Cape Coast was from the 1670s onward
the center of English trading interests along the
West African coast. Through the seventeenth
century, the castle housed a garrison never
smaller than fifty men and often over one hun-
dred. The castle also boasted an officer corps of
ten to fifteen and as many as thirty castle slaves.59
The Royal African Company lost its monopoly
on the Africa trade at the end of the seventeenth
century, but it continued to oversee the mainte-
nance and construction of castles along the West
African coast, including the one at Cape Coast,
until the middle of the eighteenth century (see
Figure 3).60
From Cape Coast the company established
along the coast a number of factories—small,
intentionally experimental, and often imperma-
nent settlements where traders could engage in
business. These were unfortified outposts of a
few men intended to establish a successful trade
treaty with a local chief.61 If they succeeded, the
location might become a castle; if they failed, the
company had lost little capital investment. The
letterbooks of the Royal African Company offer
brief glimpses into the material realities of these
factories. In 1681 James Nightingale wrote from
a remote location to the castle at Cape Coast. He
notified the castle authorities that he had made
arrangements with the local chief to build the
factory. “They demand ten Anchors of brandy for
ye whole charge of building ½ in hand ye other
halfe when it is built,” a small charge for the con-
struction of a building, he thought. He wanted
immediate approval to move forward “to have it
finished before Ye Raines.”62 The factory was to
be built out of posts, mud, and thatch, the stan-
dard West African building materials, excepting
“doors, doorcases and windows,” which were to
be imported to the site.63
Letters from other factories make it clear that
the most important building was the warehouse.
Ralph Hassell requested “a new good large lock
for the warehouse door.” But he also requested
“some irons for slaves for we have none here: I
bought three men and three women yesterday:
I am afraid of their running away for want of
irons to put them in.” Those enslaved Africans,
it seems, were stored in the warehouse, together
with other trade goods.64 These impermanent
factories were a reflection of the reality that trade
in any one location fluctuated enormously and
that the management of some established forti-
fied sites and some portable sites simply made
more economic sense than the construction of
many immovable, capital-intensive castles in
locations that might prove unprofitable.65 Espe-
cially in the seventeenth century, the supply of
enslaved Africans to the trade was closely linked
to African wartime activity, and if a region was
relatively peaceful, the supply of prisoners of war
to an established castle could dwindle quickly. As
a result, smaller factories could be moved up and
down the coast as the market required, channel-
ing victims to Cape Coast by canoe or sloop.
Even so, castles were essential. Physically dom-
inating the landscape, castles created the sense
of a secure site for the high-stakes buying and
trading in slaves and other goods. A substantial
percentage of indoor space in most remote castles
was given over to warehouses for storage of the
various European and East Indian goods used in
the African trade.66 One account by Dane Hans
Christian Monrad, penned between 1805 and
1809, reported that the castle warehouses stored
those things considered most valuable by African
traders, especially “guns . . . gunpowder, shot,
flint stones, iron, lead, swords, knives of various
kinds, all manner of cotton, calico, salem puris [a
cotton cloth from India], silk cloth, wollen caps,
quantities of beads, mirrors, and . . . tobacco,
rum, brandy and cowries.”67 While the particu-
lars vary from account to account, it is quite clear
that the most valuable trade item across Africa
was guns.68 It was critical that castle warehouses
remain filled with ready trade items to quickly
satisfy the demands of African traders.69 But
some early factories and castles also offered a
dedicated containment space for small lots of
captives during the negotiations between castle
governors and African traders. Through the sev-
enteenth and into the early eighteenth century,
this was most commonly accomplished through
the construction of a purpose-built “slave house,”
sometimes called a “slave booth,” often erected
outside the walls of the castle or factory.70
Because the grim setting offered safety and
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 99
easy access to provisions, purchasing slaves from
the castle meant prices higher than those when
purchasing slaves from coastal impermanent
factories.71 If they were up to the challenge, sla-
ver ship captains could negotiate and purchase
Africans directly from independent African or
European traders along the coast, who often sig-
naled passing ships that they had Africans for
sale.72 But such purchases from the coast were
more dangerous in wartime; mooring offshore
and out of site of a friendly castle for long periods
of time left a slaver ship much more vulnerable
to attack.73
Some of those factories at geographically or
politically advantageous positions eventually
became fortified outposts; the castles at Kom-
menda, Anomabo, Secondi, and Dixcove were all
built later in the seventeenth century to replace
earlier factories. Early plans from Dixcove, begun
in the 1690s, offer an example of the castles
built by the Royal African Company. The shel-
tered cove at a place called “Dick’s” had been a
favored landing place for canoes and small boats
for centuries.74 The English had established a fac-
tory there by 1684, but in 1692 they began the
construction of a castle, which took four years
to complete. In 1711 it was described as a large
square castle of stone and lime with two round
flankers and two square bastions.75 A 1727 sur-
vey of Dixcove completed by William Smith for
the Royal African Company documents the early
rectilinear core of the castle, with three diamond-
shaped bastions and one round tower, suggest-
ing that one of the round towers had by that point
been replaced (Figure 8). The open courtyard in
the interior was ringed by buildings providing
some warehouse storage, apartments for officers,
and barracks for soldiers.
Careful examination of early plans and the
surviving fabric of Dixcove and many other
castles makes it clear that the builders of Dix-
cove never dedicated a large space for the hous-
ing of enslaved Africans, a view contrary to the
standard interpretation of these coastal forts. In
fact, Dixcove’s placement insured its importance
not so much as a slave castle—although it was
a slave castle—but as a guard over a supply of
essential natural resources. A heavily forested
site provided lumber; a natural bed of lime-
stone sourced masonry building materials; and
a natural spring made it an excellent location
for ship refreshment and repair.76 As a result,
its role in the slave trade was largely as a point
of temporary holding and transfer.77 Of course,
captives passed through this and other fortifica-
tions and factories along the coast, but they only
passed through. Records of the Royal African
Company from 1678 suggest that between April
and December of that year, Cape Coast housed
1,854 Africans for sale, quite obviously not all at
the same time. Three hundred sixty-six arrived
from Anamabu; 330, from Egya; 166, from the
castle at Accra; and the same number, from Win-
nebah. The rest are unaccounted for but presum-
ably came from small factories along the coast or
from traders delivering directly to Cape Coast.78
Unlike the smaller fortifications, Cape Coast
had underground containment chambers with
substantial capacity.79 These chambers were cre-
ated by the English expansion of the castle in the
1680s; they utilized the remains of the quarry
from which the stone for the massive exterior
walls and new bastions had been extracted. The
massive hole, it seems, was vaulted and paved
above to create a central parade ground.80 One ac-
count from 1682 describes the vast chamber as a
“mansion . . . cut out of the rocky ground, arched
and divided into several rooms; so that it will con-
veniently contain a thousand Blacks, let down at
an opening for the purpose.” The advantage of
keeping the enslaved underground was “good
security to the garrison against any insurrec-
tion.”81 Inspection of the surviving fabric of the
castle suggests that some portion of the series
of chambers under the courtyard (spaces now
used as cisterns) were first used for containment.
These chambers had no natural light except that
leaking in through the single openings near the
roof vaults, through which slaves were raised and
lowered (see Figure 9). A later 1756 plan of the
castle shows a number of ventilators in the floor
of the courtyard, extending all the way across the
parade grounds, presumably inserted to deliver
more light and fresh air into the spaces below.
The ventilators suggest that these spaces were
vast indeed, spanning across the width of the
100 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
parade ground. While period descriptions report
that these cells were intended to hold up to one
thousand captives, records reveal that they actu-
ally held far fewer. One account from the turn
of the eighteenth century records four hundred
Africans being held in the containment cham-
bers of Cape Coast.82 With or without the venti-
lators, the conditions must have been unthink-
able. Even above, in the best apartments for the
captain and his guard, one factor wrote in 1708,
“there is never a dry room to lye in.”83
The Company of Merchants
Founded in 1750, the Company of Merchants
Trading to Africa took over management of the
forts and instituted a major restructuring of the
West African slave trade. This change was driven
largely by the press to undermine the monopoly
on the slave trade held by the Royal African
Company at its founding.84 As early as the late
seventeenth century, merchants—many from
Bristol—began to launch voyages independent of
the Royal African Company, a process that slowly
weakened the company’s monopoly and caused
its slow demise.85 The newly founded Company
of Merchants was open to anyone who wanted to
enter the slave trade. Parliament agreed to pay a
yearly grant to the company for the maintenance
of the British castles along the coast of West
Africa. The London-based African Committee,
consisting of three men, one each from London,
Liverpool, and Bristol, received the monies, gath-
ered the necessary materials, men, and other
resources, and sent them to Cape Coast to then
be distributed to the various castles as necessary.
Through the 1750s and 1760s, the company
Figure 8. Plan of Dixcove
Fort as it appeared in
1727. Drawing by Jason
Truesdale based on
William Smith, “Survey
of Dixcove Fort, 1727,”
appearing in Arnold
Walker Lawrence,
Fortif ied Trade-Posts: The
English in West Africa,
1645–1822 (London: Cape
Publishers, 1969), 188.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 101
spent a great deal of time and resources assess-
ing and improving the physical condition of the
existing fortifications and building new forts.
In 1756 the company informed the governor of
Cape Coast Castle that “the ruinous condition of
the Forts in general, is a matter of great concern
to us.”86 That same year, the company sent John
Appleby, an “engineer,” to Africa to oversee the
reconstruction of the castles, with the instruc-
tion that he was to be in charge of all designs, “ex-
cept you shall find it necessary from the opinion
of the governor and council at Cape Coast Castle
to make any Alterations in the Lodgements for
Slaves or any of the inner Apartment.”87 The com-
pany wished the fortifications to be made sub-
stantial, “making good use of lime, and not clay
as formerly,” objecting to the mud-walled con-
struction of so much of the castle construction
under the Royal African Company.88 A few years
later, in 1758, the company required reports from
the chiefs of each castle assessing the material
conditions of the outposts along the coast. Let-
ters sent in the 1760s suggest that those chiefs
had not repaired or upgraded the conditions of
the castles to the expectations of the company.89
Under the Royal African Company the forti-
fications had been understood as trading posts
where Europeans could engage in business trans-
actions with African traders. One of the increas-
ingly lucrative markets was the trade in slaves.
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centu-
ries, many castles housed slaves not in dedicated
rooms in the castle but in stockades called “slave
yards” outside the castle walls.90 Under the Com-
pany of Merchants, the fortifications became
installations dedicated almost exclusively to the
trade in slaves. For the first time castle plans care-
fully illustrated slave containment chambers,
called “slave holes” on most mid-eighteenth-
century plans. Most commonly, these slave
holes were built within the thick walls of a newly
erected bastion, as in the case of Dixcove’s slave
hole. The use of the term hole might draw from
the square ventilators that often opened through
the pavement of the bastion down into the cham-
ber (Figure 9). It might also draw from the an-
cient use of the term hole as a verb meaning “to
oppress.”91 The appearance on the 1750s plan of
Cape Coast Castle of a “Black Hole,” a deep, nar-
row chamber clearly used for punishment, sug-
gests that hole certainly retained its association
with explicit oppression in the middle decades of
the century. Plans also demarcate slave yards—
transformed into a place for daily exercise—and
identify ventilators for the holes within bastion
walls. Records from the second half of the cen-
tury demonstrate that the sick from among the
enslaved were sent out of the castle into town to
recover, so as not to contaminate the rest of the
African captives. One 1753 letter from the cas-
tle governor to a ship’s captain reports that the
eighteen Africans being held in the castle were
all in good health but that three had been sent
to town. A 1770s listing of castle rules reports
that no sick slave was to remain in the castle.92
Such attention to conditions was quite obviously
driven not by general concerns for welfare but
the economic incentive to preserve the value of
an investment in human capital. Remote castles
were refitted with secure slave holes for more ef-
fective temporary containment; new castles were
built at points central to the slave trade; and a
new set of holding chambers was added at Cape
Coast, which remained the flagship fort. Under
the Company of Merchants, the castles became
slaving machines.
Changes to the existing fortifications are well
represented by the new work at Dixcove Fort. The
expansion of the new spur had, in fact, begun
prior to the economic restructuring and so cannot
be claimed as improvements by the Company of
Merchants. A plan of the castle produced in 1750
represents the new-built spur and barracks—
constructed of locally fired bricks—but notes
three old bastions out of repair.93 Significantly,
a 1750 plan drawn under the directorship of the
Royal African Society does not differentiate any
one of the three ruined bastions as any differ-
ent from the others. This is significant because
a 1756 plan of the same fort—now produced
under the aegis of the Company of Merchants—
reveals that the small slave hole, the same space
that survives to the present, had been installed
in the northeast bastion—and was called the
“slave room” on the plan (Figure 10). Bastions, of
course, lent themselves well to such a function.
102 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
They were segregated from the rest of the spaces
of the castle interior. They were usually very sol-
idly built. And they usually had only a single en-
trance that was easily surveilled from many loca-
tions within the fort. H. C. Monrad, writing from
personal experience, reported that in such spaces
slaves “spend the night on wooden planks, one
over the other, [suggesting wall-mounted shelves
for sleeping] in dark vaults where only a little air
can seep in through a square hole that has been
made in the door.” He continued by remarking
his surprise that the enslaved didn’t suffocate,
“since the heat, augmented by the evaporation
from many people, caused by that of which one
must at times, rid one’s self, and which are col-
lected in large tubs, produce an extremely abhor-
rent, mephitic stench.” The odor, he continued,
was at times so strong that “in the morning when
the rattling doors are opened, (especially if there
are many slaves), [it] spreads over the entire fort
and corrupts the air.”94 By the second half of the
eighteenth century, all English castles were out-
fitted with similar slave holes.
Soon after taking control in 1750, the Com-
pany of Merchants began a campaign to construct
a new castle at Anomabo, a lucrative factory since
the sixteenth century.95 Surviving records sug-
gest that Anomabo had become a favored slaving
locale for many English slave captains.96 The pri-
mary motivation was to secure the site for Eng-
lish trade and to provide defense against a feared
French invasion.97 The agreement with the local
chief allowed the English to build “a fort or ware-
house of whatever kind they choose,” as well as
to cultivate ten acres for a garden.98 By 1753, Par-
liament, which was charged with paying for the
castle at Anomabo, finally consented, and the
foundations of the castle were laid in August of
that year. Built right on the edge of a beachside
shelf of rock, the building is a large square hulk
with massive diamond-shaped bastions at all
four corners (Figure 11). Intent on building a cas-
tle that did not require constant repair, all of the
building materials were shipped from England.
More than two million English bricks traveled to
Africa as ballast, approximately twenty thousand
Figure 9. Courtyard
at Cape Coast Castle,
Cape Coast, Ghana. The
square opening to the
left of the stairs is an
entrance into the early
containment chambers.
The ventilators—two
small openings, framed
in stone and cut into the
pavement—can be seen
to the far right on the
edge of the courtyard.
This castle is a World
Heritage Site and as such
has been restored, unlike
most others along the
coast. Photograph by
Louis P. Nelson, August
2012.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 103
sent in each of some one hundred ships. Since
the ships were unable to dock, all of these materi-
als had to be brought ashore by canoe. As in the
retrofitted forts, the company built a dedicated
slave hole into one of the bastions, although here
the chamber was much larger than allowed by
smaller preexisting bastions (Figure 12). The cas-
tle was operational but still not complete by 1760.
The efficiency of castles like Anomabo is made
evident by the fact that while Cape Coast contin-
ued to be populated by an ex-patriot community
of up to one hundred, these smaller castles were
often manned by as few as six.99
A final act of reconstruction undertaken by
the Company of Merchants was the extensive
expansion of the castle at Cape Coast, especially
the construction of a new set of slave prisons; no
longer warehouses, these spaces were purpose-
built, more closely aligned with the prisons of
England and Europe than with the warehouses
and quarry spaces of the earlier castles. Designs
for the new set of prisons in a defensive spur were
prepared in 1768, and construction was com-
pleted soon thereafter. Five vaulted chambers
were built into the large new double bastion that
overlooked the sea (Figure 13).100 As evident in the
section through the bastion, the five chambers
were stepped to accommodate a central brick
gutter that encouraged human waste to flow
down and out through the exterior wall of the
lowest chambers. Presumably, the gutter would
also drain washing water, although there is no
evidence that the spaces were regularly cleaned.
A parade ground door opened into a tunnel that
Figure 10. Plan of Dixcove
Fort as it appeared in
1756. Notice the “slave
room,” labeled 1, in the
upper bastion. Drawing
by Jason Truesdale
based on original plan
published in Arnold
Walker Lawrence,
Fortif ied Trade-Posts: The
English in West Africa,
1645–1822 (London: Cape
Publishers, 1969), 198.
104 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
led down into the chambers, connecting with
the second chamber in the sequence of five (Fig-
ure 14). A 1972 archaeological excavation of the
prison chambers unearthed food debris, body or-
naments, and other evidence that demonstrated
that all five chambers were used for human con-
tainment.101 The first chamber was structurally
isolated from the rest by a small opening that
originally had a lockable door. Unlike all the
others, that chamber had a brick-laid floor and
a much more sophisticated drainage system
for more effective cleaning out of waste (Figure
15).102 The last of the chambers has evidence of a
lockable iron gate and evidence for shelving; the
three middle chambers were all open, one to the
next. Through the sequence of the final four, the
packed earthen floor sloped from either side to-
ward a single gutter that ran down the spine of
the rooms.
These five chambers were designed to intro-
duce more daylight and air to the Africans con-
tained therein than were the earlier quarry cells.
The last three chambers had large openings near
the crest of the roof vault—presumably with iron
bars limiting human passage—that would have
once allowed for ventilation and light from above.
These openings are now blocked up, creating an
even darker experience of the interior. The first
chamber has a curious shaft leading from the
entrance passage into the chamber, presumably
intended to filter some natural light from the en-
trance tunnel into this space. In all five, small
ventilators on the walls opposite the windows
were intended to allow some airflow through the
chambers. Much larger than the previous cham-
bers, far better lighted and with far greater ca-
pacity for airflow, more easily accessed and more
easily cleaned than the former site, the new pris-
ons were—according to contemporary descrip-
tions—capable of holding upwards of two thou-
sand people, doubling the capacity of the earlier
chambers.103
Yet the claimed capacity of the prison was far
higher than the reality of persons held in these
spaces at any moment in time. The launch of the
massive NEH-funded Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade Database by David Eltis and Martin
Halbert has made available an extraordinary
body of numeric information about the slave
trade. A recent query of the database uncovered
data about every slaver voyage that departed from
Cape Coast Castle from 1685 to 1807.104 Data
from the Voyages records make clear that the re-
construction of the prisons by the Company of
Merchants was in clear response to the increased
demand on the castle. Under the Royal African
Figure 11. The Castle
at Anomabo, Ghana.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, July 2012.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 105
Company, from 1685 to 1749, Cape Coast Castle
provided an average of 517 enslaved Africans per
year. Those shipments increased rapidly under
the Company of Merchants, who supplied from
Cape Coast an average of 842 slaves per year
in the 1750s and then a sharp increase to 1,514
slaves per year in the 1760s, an almost threefold
increase over the average annual rate under the
Royal African Company. Clearly in the face of
that sharp increase in the 1760s, the Company
of Merchants felt the need to outfit the castle by
building enlarged prisons in the late 1760s in
response to the heavier demand and to better in-
sure the health (i.e., value) of their investments.
And they were right. The average number of en-
slaved Africans departing from Cape Coast each
year jumped to 1,847 in the 1780s and peaked in
the 1790s at 1,998 per year, a fourfold increase
over the rates of exportation under the Royal Af-
rican Company. It is important to note, however,
that these rates are averages over the decade, and
as such they mask the remarkable variation by
year; trade in one individual year could be as
much as double the average rate.
Even so, thousands of people were never held
in these prisons at any one point in time. The
castle’s busiest year for export was 1785, in which
Cape Coast provided an astonishing 4,118 Afri-
cans to twelve slaver ships—nine of which were
scheduled for Jamaica. But these 4,118 individu-
als were loaded onto ships that left in seasonal
clusters, with 790, 580, and 1,095 in March,
April, and May, respectively, and 650, 400, and
470 in August, September, and October, respec-
tively. May 1785 was the heaviest month of supply,
possibly the heaviest month in the fort’s entire
250 years of slave trading, and only in that month
did the total number of enslaved crest 1,000. But
that does not mean that on any given day there
were actually 1,000 Africans in captivity in the
prison. These 1,095 departed in two waves over
the course of the month: 320 departed on a ship
Figure 12. Interior
of the slave hole,
Anomabo Castle, Ghana.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, July 2012.
106 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
on May 2, and the other 775 were on two ships
that both departed on May 9. And enslaved Af-
ricans arrived in the castle in small lots of ten
and twenty. Ship captains were usually eager to
purchase slaves as quickly as possible, especially
if there were competitors. Ship logs make clear
that captains moved recently purchased slaves
onto their ships soon after purchase to avoid hav-
ing to pay the castle to house and feed slaves now
owned by the captain. As a result, in the heavi-
est month of supply, the prison of Cape Coast
Castle contained a few hundred individuals at
any one point in time—more than could fit in
a single chamber, but far fewer than would fill
all five—never coming close to the proclaimed
2,000-person capacity.
Even so, these roomier chambers, with better
light and air, were still miserable. Accounts sug-
gest that upon arrival at the fort Africans were
“struck into chains,” meaning bound by chains
into gangs of ten to twenty. Individuals so struck
remained in their gang until sold to a ship.105
Cugoano’s account of his own capture in 1770 is
the sole known account of the experience of con-
tainment in Cape Coast’s prison. He was kept in
the hole “for three days, where I heard the groans
and cries of many, and saw some of my fellow
captives.” The separation from and then reunion
with his friends betrays the reality of multiple
African traders and multiple routes to this single
prison space. Describing a still, dark, and likely
very damp cavernous space, his account reports
more on what he heard than what he saw: “When
a vessel arrived to conduct us away to the ship,
it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing
to be heard but the rattling of chains, smacking
of whips, and the groans and cries of our fel-
low men. Some would not stir from the ground,
when they were lashed and beat in the most hor-
rible manner.”106 The sharp sounds of whips and
the low groans or loud cries certainly echoed
through the cavernous chambers of Cape Coast’s
slave prison.
Contrary to Cugoano’s account, which reports
that his coterie of slaves remained in the prisons
for the three days of his containment, other re-
cords suggest that by the second half of the eigh-
teenth century enslaved Africans were spending
the majority of their days not in the chambers
but in the courtyard or parade ground of Cape
Coast and other castles.107 Like the drive to build
Figure 13. Still image
from a three-dimensional
model of the 1768
dungeons at Cape Coast
Castle, Cape Coast,
Ghana. See the online
version of this article at
JSTOR (www.jstor.org)
for the three-dimensional
model from which this
is taken. Model by Jason
Truesdale, 2013.
Figure 14. Entrance
tunnel leading down
into the 1768 dungeons
of Cape Coast Castle.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, July 2012.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 107
healthier slave prisons, this decision was likely
motivated by the drive to preserve the health of
the enslaved as a means of sustaining their re-
sale value. A 1756 plan of Cape Coast demarcates
the newly established yard for enslaved women,
just above the large bastion called Greenhill’s
Point. Records show that the large parade ground
dominating the rest of the castle’s open interior
was used as a yard for male slaves, although they
remained bound in lots of ten or twenty. These
yards created an outdoor space for slaves to take
in some fresh air and exercise. Accounts also
suggest that the enslaved were driven down to
the ocean once or twice daily for washing.108
The sights and sounds of everyday life occa-
sionally interrupted long days in the courtyard.
The records of Cape Coast Castle report an as-
sortment of tropical animals kept in the castle
as pets, from chimpanzees to parrots and, once,
even a leopard called Sai.109 This menagerie
only added variety to the sounds of violence that
marked the soundscape. Vultures, circling to col-
lect scraps from butchering, frequented the cas-
tle, as did voracious biting red ants.110 The regular
ringing of the castle bell marked the hours.111 In
the evenings, after the return of the enslaved to
the subterranean chambers, the rattle of chains
was a constant sound that echoed enough to be
heard consistently throughout the apartments
above.112 The hourly bells were occasionally bro-
ken by the fife-and-drum corps, who played for
newly arrived visitors, at special events in the
governor’s hall, and at the many funerals for sail-
ors and officers alike.113 Screams also punctuated
the day—from newly arrived coffles, from castle
slaves, regularly flogged, and from the slaves of
merchants in town, frequently sent to the castle
for whippings.114
The announcement of the arrival of a ship’s
captain by the fife-and-drum corps meant the
likelihood of a sale. In preparation the castle
slaves would wash and oil the bodies of Africans
Figure 15. Interior of
chamber 4, Cape Coast
Castle. The end wall
window to the courtyard
has been closed in. The
sewage gutter runs left
to right from chamber
to chamber down the
spine of the prisons.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, July 2012.
108 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
to be sold. This event took place in the courtyard,
with slaves “either chained or loose, so that they
form a circle.” The buyers then undertook a thor-
ough examination of the bodies of those offered
for sale: “The slave must open his mouth wide,
show his teeth; they smell in his mouth, and look
very carefully into his eyes; he must perform all
manner of movements with his arms and legs;
the secret parts are examined, during which
I have seen many, especially young, Negresses
crying.” Not all submitted to inspections. A 1767
account from the Dutch castle of Elmina reports
that when the slaves were ordered from the pris-
ons into the yards, they “cut their own throats:
one Negroe even cut the throat of his wife and
then his own; the yard of the noble company’s
chief castle was thus turned into a bloodbath.”115
Barring such violent resistance, slaves se-
lected for sale were physically marked as human
property. After the inspection the buyer initially
“marks those slaves he has chosen with a piece
of white chalk right across the head.”116 After
the sale victims were frequently branded “as the
seller often sees a chance to exchange the sold
slave for one of inferior quality.”117 Those so se-
lected and then branded were then sent out of the
castle to canoes waiting on the shores.
The process of moving those recently sold to
the canoes was entirely restructured by a second
major construction in the later eighteenth cen-
tury, a new set of warehouses completed in 1777
(Figure 16).118 Letters from the governor to the
Company of Merchants in London make it clear
that the company prepared designs for the new
construction but that the governor rejected them,
preferring to build them to his own design. “I am
now erecting a fortification in the form of a horn
work,” he wrote to the company, describing a type
of fortification with two adjacent bastions extend-
ing from the body of a castle. He hoped that they
would “not blame me for deviating from Mr. Hip-
perley’s design, and be enabled at the same time
Figure 16. Plan of Cape
Coast Castle. The
hatching indicates the
extent of late eighteenth-
century additions.
1 indicates the air vents
into the seventeenth-
century dungeon;
2 points to the 1768
dungeons; 3 indicates
the 1777 hornwork and
warehouses. Drawn by
Jason Truesdale based on
1944 drawings produced
by the University of
Ghana and fieldwork
undertaken by the author
in July 2012.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 109
to see the impropriety of Mr. Oxbridge’s plan.”
He was quite pleased with the new construction,
given that the “old warehouses are likely to fall
soon.” He continued that the new warehouses
within the hornwork bastions could “contain all
that used to be put in the old warehouse,” includ-
ing “all the liquors, provisions, and store that will
ever be in the castle at one time.”119 These new
warehouses, in the form of a hornwork, were in
fact also a new channel by which the recently
sold could be safely marched out of the castle
and toward the canoes waiting outside the castle
walls. The new construction included a taper-
ing (and thereby increasingly constrained) pas-
sage that gently sloped down from the height of
the parade ground to an exterior platform only
a few steps above the beach. In addition to its
gradual constriction—limiting the damage pos-
sible from the press of panicked Africans—there
was a sentry box immediately above with a clear
view over the passageway (Figure 17). From this
position a guard had easy surveillance over the
stream of enslaved and could shoot if necessary.
The investment of so much attention to a pas-
sage out to the sea clearly suggests that these few
minutes were fraught with anxiety for both cap-
tor and captive.
The prisons added to Cape Coast Castle in the
late eighteenth century were part of the broader
discourse on contemporary European institu-
tions of containment and reform so eloquently
discussed by Michel Foucault. In Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault contrasts
these institutions as distinct from sites of slav-
ery.120 I disagree. The commodification process
of slave making diminished acts of punishment
in an attempt to preserve the value of the slave—
flogging in the castle was usually reserved for
laboring slaves not intended for resale—but
many dimensions of the discipline that shaped
prisons, military installations, and schools were
readily apparent in these slave forts. Emergent
mechanisms of time discipline and the mak-
ing of docile bodies were central to the work-
ings of both African prisons and European in-
stitutions of reform. Surveillance and organized/
specialized containment, if not simultaneously
universal and individual as in the Panopticon,
were both in evidence in the castle in nascent
form. Furthermore, the processes of inspection
by potential purchasers certainly engaged in the
classification and objectification processes so
clearly articulated by Foucault.121 Those spaces
called “slave holes” in the middle decades of the
eighteenth century were by the 1790s commonly
called slave “prisons,” mapping directly onto the
institutional use of this term in Britain in these
same years.122
As imagined by their builders, late eighteenth-
century British slave castles in West Africa were
Figure 17. View from
the sentry box over the
passage to the ocean
gate, Cape Coast Castle.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, July 2012.
110 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
prisons, commercial machines dedicated to the
production of slaves, just as their counterparts in
Britain were dedicated to the social (re)making of
the inmate. One space within the late eighteenth-
century castle, a single cell labeled the “Black
Hole” on early plans, more than any other dem-
onstrates the discipline uniting the two. Its stone
floor is still today inscribed with deep circular
scars cut by shackles, anger, and long days of iso-
lation (Figure 18).123 Whether for soldiers or slaves,
or both, this space manifests most acutely the
emerging mechanism for correction: isolation.124
Through time discipline, compartmentali zation,
isolation, and the systematic production of doc-
ile bodies, African castles were not distinct from
prisons and schools in Europe. In fact, African
prisons were loci of experimentation, at the very
least contingent with the development of English
and European institutions of reform and correc-
tion. In this way, the castles of Africa’s coast stand
at the front edge of modernity.
Ship Trade
The slave castles along the coast loom large in the
historical imagination of the transatlantic slave
trade. Yet the vast majority of Africans traded by
English and American slavers never saw a fort.
Modern histories of the transatlantic African
slave trade break the west coast of Africa into six
regions running from northwest to southeast:
Senegambia; Sierra Leone, also called the Wind-
ward Coast; the Gold Coast; the Bight of Benin;
the Bight of Biafra; and West-Central Africa. In
the broadest terms, the European trade slowly
moved down the coast from Senegambia through
the Gold Coast in the seventeenth century to
West-Central Africa by the early nineteenth cen-
tury. The English and American slave trade fol-
lowed suit, strongly centered in the Windward
and Gold Coasts in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries and in the Bight of Benin
and West-Central Africa from the middle of the
eighteenth century into the nineteenth century.
Although the English built substantial slaving
castles all along the Gold Coast, only one in five
Africans sold into slavery—approximately 22
percent—passed through the castles of the Gold
Coast, most now in modern Ghana. The records
of the Royal African Company make clear that
even in the earliest decades a substantial percent-
age of Africans taken into the slave trade were
driven by African traders along the coast and
sold to English slavers, bypassing the European
castles altogether.125 The greatest concentration,
approximately 860,000, or 29 percent, came
from the Bight of Biafra, most of those during
the second half of the eighteenth century. At the
heart of the Bight of Biafra was Old Calabar, the
greatest supplier of enslaved labor to the British
Caribbean and the primary source of Africans
for Jamaica in the 1790s, its decade of greatest
consumption.126 The remaining came from the
coastal factories of African and European trad-
ers scattered all along the west coast. This dis-
tribution meant that the majority of purchases
by slaver captains were not from “fort-trade”—
conducted in the massive slaving castles along
the Gold Coast—but from “ship-trade.” This is
where slaver captains negotiated with traders
right from the decks of their own ships, leading
one sailor to describe his ship as “a floating fac-
tory.” Slaver ships were simply an extension of
the coastal castles, spaces framed around con-
tainment, correction, and discipline.127
Nicholas Owen was an Irish sailor working in
Sierra Leone in 1754 as a small-scale slave trader,
first in the employ of an Englishman and even-
tually on his own. His surviving journal cap-
tures a wealth of information about his day-to-
day life. Near the end of his record, he describes
his house, similar to the houses of many other
smaller European slave traders in the region: “As
our houses are not built for durance or strength,
we can soon erect one on long sticks muded over
and whitewash’d, having the inside lined with
mats and well thatched aloft.” He appended to
this description his rough sketch of the house,
which shows an oblong house with rounded ends
supported by earthfast posts and sheltered by a
thatch roof. Behind the building extends an en-
closed pen, a space surely designed to keep ani-
mals out but also able to keep people in (Figure
19). Built almost entirely of found natural ma-
terials, Owen’s house differed little from those
of the Africans with whom he frequently social-
ized and traded, which were “built of mud and
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 111
Figure 18. Floor of the
“Black Hole” isolation
chamber, Cape Coast
Castle. The curved
gouges in the stone floor
are the evidence of hours
of isolation as captives
scraped their shackles
back and forth around a
central fixed point. The
bouquet is a tribute left
behind by one of the
thousands of visitors to
these spaces every year.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, March 2011.
112 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
stakes drove into the ground and covered with
long grass.” Like most traders, his settlement
comprised his own house and that of his African
laborers, both free and enslaved: “About twenty
yards from my house stands that of my people,
likewise my cookroom.” Other entries also men-
tion a storeroom, which was surely well secured,
as it housed all the necessaries for his trade, the
bulk of which was iron and lead bars.128
Owen never mentioned a dedicated space for
the containment of his slaves, but it is likely that
one existed. Late in his journal, he described
being both sickly and low staffed, and in these
instances he mentioned three or four enslaved
Africans “I have now by me in the house,” sug-
gesting that as something worthy of note because
it was not his usual practice.129 The presumption
is that his purchased Africans—never more than
about five in number—were usually housed in
the rear building occupied by those Africans who
worked for him or in a small-scaled barracoon, a
temporary pen used to house captives while trad-
ers waited to negotiate with passing ships.130
Sometimes, African communities on the coast
became slaving centers. Robin Law’s excellent
study of slaving in Benin suggests that the coastal
town of Ouidah boasted a number of secure com-
munal buildings, called “trunks,” where Africans
owned by many local merchants could be stored.131
One Dutch trader reported in 1705 that all traders
bringing slaves to the coastal market had to pay a
local chief for the use of the trunk, or barracoon,
“with which they guarantee that the slaves will
not escape.”132 Whether individual or communal,
these barracoons differed only in scale. A Brit-
ish naval captain described them in the 1840s
as “sheds made of heavy piles, driven deep into
the earth, and lashed together with bamboos,
thatched with palm leaves.” The walls usually rose
four to six feet, with an open space of four feet be-
tween the wall and the roof “for the circulation of
air.” A central range of piles that carried the ridge
of the thatched roof supported larger barracoons.
Along each line of piles hung a chain with “neck
links” for securing slaves at two-foot intervals,
and the floor was often boarded to protect slaves
from skin-boring insects.133 An image of one such
barracoon was published in the Illustrated London
News in the late 1840s (Figure 20). Constructed
of vertical posts close enough to prevent human
passage but wide enough to allow air circulation,
this barracoon appears to hold between twenty
and thirty people. Barracoons could be found all
along the African coast but were most commonly
concentrated in Senegambia and the Windward
Coast.
Unlike their counterparts elsewhere along the
African coast, chiefs in the Bight of Biafra never
granted Europeans the right to build trading
castles or settlements on their soil. This policy
resulted in the development of African-operated
trading centers along various rivers, centers that
were connected to vast trading networks into the
African interior. These trading centers were the
seats of African merchants who engaged in regu-
lar correspondence with merchants in England,
especially in London through the seventeenth
century, Bristol in the early eighteenth century,
and Liverpool at the height of the trade in the
late eighteenth century.134 The lack of a castle
and its infrastructure as a land-based interme-
diary space meant that much more negotiation
took place on board the deck of the ship. Even
so, by the end of the eighteenth century this
mode of purchase came to dominate the traffick-
Figure 19. Drawing of
Owen’s house. Reprinted
from Nicholas Owen,
Journal of a Slave-Dealer
(1759; repr., London:
Routledge and Sons,
1930).
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 113
ing in slaves. These ships, waiting sometimes
for months in the safe haven of the Niger and
Cross River Deltas, collected almost one-third of
all those slaves taken from Africa in British and
American slaver ships, a higher percentage than
any other region.
One of the most intensive slaving centers
was Old Calabar, a series of Efik trading towns
in the estuaries of the Cross River Delta, now
in modern Nigeria.135 The Efik had been trad-
ing with English slaver ships since the first sus-
tained contact in Old Calabar in the 1660s, but
this economy grew rapidly over the course of the
eighteenth century.136 The leading town of Old
Calabar was Duke Town, a community of about
two thousand residents by the early nineteenth
century.137 Over the course of the eighteenth cen-
tury, this region was transformed by the transat-
lantic slave trade. By the later eighteenth century,
Efik traders were selling between three thousand
and five thousand Africans annually, 85 percent
to English and American slavers. The region had
become the nexus of the British slave trade.138 A
large trading network in this region was respon-
sible for the capture of Olaudah Equiano and his
sister in 1765 (see Figure 3).139
The vast majority of slaves made the final leg
of their journey to Duke Town in the bottom of
one of Calabar’s famous war canoes. Probably the
most remarkable description was of Efik chief
Eyamba’s war canoe:
His great canoe was gaily decked out with several
ensigns streaming in the wind, British ensigns,
with his name thereon in large letters. The little
house amidships was brilliantly painted red and
yellow. Astride the roof thereof sat two men beat-
ing drums with might and main. Before it stood
Eyamba, shaded by his grand umbrella, dressed
as usual, except in having a gold laved cocked hat
under his arm, and a splendid sword, a present
from the Dutch Government, at his side. In the
bows a large gun pointed forward, and before it
stood a man with a bundle of reeds, which he kept
shaking at arms length to warn every obstacle and
danger out of the way. On each side sat fifteen men
with paddles, and between them down the center
stood a row of men armed with cutlasses and guns.
The king’s body-guard were immediately around
him. A train of inferior canoes, ornamented and
arranged in the same style, belonging to the lesser
gentry, were in his wake.140
As this description suggests, these great canoes
were usually among the best of a much larger
collection that all belonged to a canoe house,
Figure 20. “Slave
Barracoon,” Illustrated
London News 14 (April 14,
1849): 237.
114 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
the major organizational framework for trading
among the Efik. Usually headed by a man of great
charisma and talent in trade, these canoe houses
functioned like trading companies connecting
numerous households, often related by kinship,
in different locations along a river system.141
After journeys that sometimes lasted weeks or
even months, the Calabar war canoes returned to
Duke Town, where their captives were then dis-
tributed among the houses of a town.142 Most of
the Efik and other Africans in this region lived in
wattle-and-daub houses covered in thatch. These
buildings were usually built in clusters around a
yard; typically, an Efik man had his own house
and separate houses for his wives, his freemen,
and his slaves.143 Duke Town was described in
1805 as “composed of a number of low houses,
supported by mangrove sticks, and covered over
with bamboo, laid across and afterwards thatched
with bamboo leaves.”144 A few decades later, the
town was similarly described as filled with
houses, “low, mud-plastered, and palm-thatched,
without windows, but each with a capacious door,
leading into a small court-yard. There was hardly
anything like a street, and the passages between
the houses were narrow, crooked, rugged.”145
An early twentieth-century photograph of Duke
Town, surviving on a postcard, suggests that the
townscape had changed little over the past cen-
tury (Figure 21). Densely constructed of one-story
mud-walled houses, Duke Town and other Old
Calabar villages would have seemed generally fa-
miliar to most captive Africans.
Like all towns in Calabar, the center of Duke
Town was dominated by the palaver house,
which functioned simultaneously as a religious
and a governmental center. The palaver house in
nearby Creek Town was described in the 1840s as
a large, low shed, with its end to the street, and
quite open in front. Several immense posts of solid
mangrove supported the ridge-pole. A broad seat
of hard-beaten clay ran down the two sides; the
further end was closed by a recess for Egbo mys-
teries; in front was the great Egbo drum, fixed on
a frame, to be beaten only on occasions of public
importance; and before it were two upright pen-
tagonal stones, “pillars of remembrance” of basal-
tic appearance, which had been brought originally
from the Camaroon country. On both these and
the drum was the blood of sacrifices. In the center
of the street, before the Palaver House, stood the
figure of a man, rudely carved out of a great post,
which also formed its pedestal. Up the front of the
base a serpent seemed crawling, and up the back
an alligator.
Upon inquiry, the figure was identified as the
devil.146 The palaver house in Duke Town, not
visible in the postcard image, was fairly similar
in form except that it stood on a rise in town, as-
cended to from the road by a set of steps.147
The palaver house functioned as the site for
entertaining by the local chief, both on the oc-
casion of visitors and for regular feasting and
celebration.148 But as the site for all executions,
the palaver house was for many a place of hor-
ror. One early nineteenth-century visitor to the
town noted that a man condemned to death was
“chained to the palaver-house, with a large timber
chain round his neck.”149 Efik practice insisted on
executions by beheading as judgment for those
found guilty of murder, but also as ritual: the
decease of an important man occasioned the be-
heading of many of his slaves so that they might
accompany him in death.150 The diary of Antera
Duke is replete with accounts of executions of
enslaved Africans on such occasions. On the
death of Duke, a local leader, in 1786, the family
decapitated fifty enslaved Africans in one day in
the palaver house.151 As a result, the interior of
the palaver house was regularly stained with the
blood of sacrifices.
If the palaver house was a place of sociabil-
ity but also judgment and fear, the houses of the
major traders were surely objects of wonder. Be-
ginning at least in the later decades of the eigh-
teenth century, leading Efik traders began to
import whole house frames from their English
trading partners, most commonly those from
Liverpool.152 A visitor to Old Calabar, one Mr.
Nicholls, described a typical trader’s house dur-
ing his visit in 1805:
The principal traders’ houses are built of wood,
brought out by the different captains from Liver-
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 115
pool, oblong, and thatched with bamboo leaves,
which last very well two years. The house I reside
in was brought out by Mr. Patrick Fairweather; was
built in the year 1785, and still remains very good.
A description of mine will suffice for all the rest,
as they are all built upon the same principle; the
house is about twenty yards long and thirty feet
high, with a ground floor, a first floor, and a kind
of cock-loft: the first floor contains two rooms, one
I occupy, and the other my attendants, and two
small rooms in each wing for bedrooms. My room
is about forty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and
fifteen feet high, and has been very handsomely
finished. A covered gallery surrounds the house.
As mentioned by Nicholls, these houses took the
common form of a raised two-story house, with
a gallery enclosing the whole on all sides. Below
the main living floor were the ground-floor ser-
vice spaces, sometimes walled, sometimes de-
fined only by pillars carrying the upper floor.
Such a building in Duke Town survived into
the 1880s to be represented in a view from that
decade (Figure 22). By the late eighteenth cen-
tury, of course, the Efik had been trading with
the English for generations and had managed
to accumulate a stockpile of English material
goods and social practices—so much so, in fact,
that Nicholls noted that the interior of his guest-
house put him “in mind of a drawing room in
England.” He continued:
I have two large pier-glasses, seven feet by four,
elegantly gilt and ornamented; twenty five ditto,
from two and a half to four feet; three large sophas,
twelve chairs, two handsome escrutoire desks, six
tables, two large garde vines, one handsome marble
side-board, and an immense quantity of glasses,
china, and earthen ware; six paintings, and twenty
large engravings, five clocks, and two musical ditto;
and a pretty jumble of furniture it is.153
Duke and other Efik traders typically dressed in
English clothing when entertained on a slaver
ship by its captain.154
Adopting select Anglo material practices was
not unique to the Efik. As early as the 1750s, Nicho-
las Owen reported a mulatto African trader on
the Windward Coast who “lives after the manner
of the English, having his house well furnish’d
with English goods and his table tolerably well
furnish’d with the country produce. He dresses
gayley and commonly makes use of silver at his
table, having a good side board of plate.”155 In
1773 Robin John, African merchant in the Bight
of Biafra, ordered from Ambrose Lace, merchant
in Liverpool, a large mirror, one table, six chairs,
two armchairs, two small writing desks, twelve
pewter plates, four dishes, twelve knives, twelve
forks, two large table spoons, one pair of balances,
one case of razors for shaving, one hundred yards
of chintz, and two coats with gold lace, one red
and one blue all “for my Salf.”156 For newly ar-
rived Africans, these traders’ houses, their fur-
nishings, and certainly their dress would have
seemed very far from familiar.
The structure of the slave trade in Old Calabar
eliminated the need for large barracoons. The
greatest reason for this was the simple fact that
slaving expeditions were usually launched once a
ship had safely anchored in the river and an agree-
ment had been reached between the ship’s cap-
tain and the African merchant.157 As expeditions
arrived, captives were stored in various houses
in town for only a few days at most while they
were washed and fed in preparation for sale to
the captain. For these few days those captive Afri-
cans were certainly in chains while they awaited
purchase; English trading records provide ample
evidence for the purchase by Efik traders of iron
Figure 21. Postcard,
“Government Hill from
Duketown, Old Calabar,”
Bob to J. B. Scott, Old
Calabar, February 2,
1903. Image courtesy
Museum Victoria,
Victoria, Australia.
116 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
manillas (shackles), often inscribed with the Af-
rican merchant’s name.158 In 1773, for example,
Efik trader Robin John ordered from Liverpool
merchant Ambrose Lace “large leg manillas with
locks, and large iron manillas” for his “Room of
irons,” suggesting that John had a small prison
in his courtyard house compound.159 Once sold,
most Africans would be housed on board the
ship—usually below deck—until the vessel was
prepared to depart for the Caribbean.
Shore to Ship
The view of the ocean and the slave ship surely
incited a range of emotions. Writing about his
experience in the 1760s, Equiano reported: “The
first object which saluted my eyes was the sea,
and a slave ship, which was then riding at an-
chor. . . . These filled me with astonishment,
which was soon converted to terror, when I was
carried on board.”160 As the majority of people
sold into slavery came from Africa’s interior, few
had ever seen the ocean, a European, a sailing
ship, or the ever-present sharks that favored fac-
tory sites and followed slave ships.
The first leg of the middle passage was the
voyage from shore to ship.161 In many cases this
passage was undertaken via canoe provided by
African merchants and manned by free African
“canoemen,” but sometimes slaves were trans-
ported in the yawl or longboat carried on the
ship.162 For the enslaved headed to those ships an-
chored in the calmer waters of a river delta, this
voyage was brief and generally uneventful. For
the majority, however, the passage was harrow-
ing and occasionally fatal. Without the protection
of a harbor or river, ships along the Gold Coast
Figure 22. “Old Calabar
Factories, Near Duke
Town.” The large
galleried house is likely
a manufactured house
imported from Liverpool.
From H. M. Stanley, The
Congo and the Founding
of Its Free State: A Story
of Work and Exploration
(New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1885).
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 117
and the Windward Coast typically anchored well
past the surf in a band of the coastal waters com-
monly called “the roads,” which at times could
be as much as a mile off shore.163 Like the canoes
used on Old Calabar, those used to pass through
the surf were usually fashioned from a single
large tree and could shuttle as many as twenty
captives, who usually remained chained in pairs
for the short voyage to the ship (Figure 23).164
For the majority the ocean was both unfamiliar
and terrifying, and reports of resistance, small-
scale insurrection, and suicide of those boarded
on canoes are numerous. For some their fear of
the ocean’s mighty waves was justified, espe-
cially in the rainy season from April to July.165
The overloading of canoes or the violence of the
surf sometimes resulted in an overturned canoe.
Chained in pairs and often unable to swim, Af-
ricans thrown from a canoe perished by drown-
ing or were attacked by the sharks.166 Sometimes,
they threw themselves overboard willingly. One
English captain reported: “The Negroes are so
willful and loth to leave their own country, that
they have often leap’d out of canoes . . . into the
sea, and kept underwater till they are drowned.”167
Once on board the deck of the ship, the ar-
riving Africans were stripped naked, if they had
not been already, and then were inspected by
the captain and the ship’s surgeon if the ship re-
tained one.168 This inspection took place under a
Figure 23. Image of canoe
under construction,
Elmina, Ghana. Ruins of
a pier rise from the sand
of the beach behind.
Photograph by Louis P.
Nelson, March 2011.
118 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
thatched roof that was built over a majority of the
deck to provide shade during the stay along the
African coast.169 The inspection was humiliating
and terrifying. Equiano’s description of the expe-
rience is a rare report:
I was immediately handled and tossed up, to see
if I were sound, by some of the crew, and I was
not persuaded that I had got into a world of bad
spirits and they were going to kill me. Their com-
plexions, too, differing so much from ours, their
long hair, and the language they spoke united to
confirm in me this belief. Indeed, such were the
horrors of views and fears at that moment that if
ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would
freely have parted with them all to have exchanged
my condition with that of the meanest slave in my
own country.170
Those remaining on board were then usually
shaved and sent into the secure chambers below
deck; those rejected by the captain or the surgeon
boarded the canoe once again for the return jour-
ney to the shore.171
Since Africans were usually loaded on ships
soon after their purchase by the captain, those
Africans purchased early in a ship’s season along
the coast of Africa often had a long and miser-
able waiting period before the ship departed.
Surviving accounts suggest that ships often re-
mained along the coast for at least three months,
sometimes as long as a year, waiting to collect a
full cargo of captives.172 Ship’s captains or Brit-
ish merchants trading in Africans often wrote
to the governor of Cape Coast Castle in advance
of their departure for Africa requesting the gov-
ernor begin collecting and reserving prime Af-
ricans for their voyage in an attempt to reduce
the wait along the coast.173 Because captains
widely believed the newly enslaved more likely
to engage in insurrection or suicide while the
coastline was still in sight, captives were often
kept below deck from the time of purchase to the
time of departure from the coast. Most historians
estimate that as a result of this long wait, often
entirely below deck, just as many if not more
Africans died while waiting to depart as dur-
ing the middle passage itself.174 After months of
harboring in river deltas or cruising “the roads,”
the ship would eventually fill to capacity, and the
captain would depart the coast. Under horrific
conditions approximately three million enslaved
Africans disembarked from the coast of Africa
on English and American slavers and began the
months-long voyage of the middle passage to the
New World.175
Real Spaces
What can we learn from such a history of archi-
tectural experiences? Understanding the archi-
tecture of the slave trade helps to ground the
horror and the tragedy of these events. We need
reminders that this history did not happen in
the abstract, that it took place in real spaces and
times. We must also come to recognize that these
spaces—monumental or missing—were compo-
nents of a massive international trading scheme
that generated enormous wealth for a few, mur-
dered millions, and laid the foundations for early
modern and modern international trade and
capitalism. This is especially important because
so many of the spaces associated with “the most
magnificent drama in the last thousand years of
human history,” to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, are
now gone. The castles remain, but they are not
the whole story.
The transatlantic slave trade was an extra-
ordinary machine that displaced approximately
nine million people, incidentally killing an addi-
tional five million. Approximately one in three of
those enslaved in Africa perished in the process
of capture, containment, and passage or in the
first year of life in the Americas. Yet there are no
marked battlefields and few sites of memory. The
strategies of resistance survive most clearly in the
songs and dances of village elders. Coffles con-
structed temporary spaces—between the yoke
and bodies that it conjoined by force. Thankfully,
all of these spaces are now entirely gone, with the
sole reminder being the one known surviving
yoke in Liverpool, likely brought back as part of
the abolitionist cause. The castles along the coast
of Ghana have become increasingly important
sites of heritage tourism, and that is to be cele-
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 119
brated. But their actual functions and interrela-
tionships remain poorly understood. Most castles
were not major holding stations for thousands or
even hundreds of enslaved Africans at a time but
subsidiary providers sending small lots of five or
eight, often by canoe, to the headquarters at Cape
Coast. The majority of enslaved Africans never
even saw a castle; they were held in the small
African-built mud-walled cells of a factory or in
open-air barracoons near the coast, waiting for
the arrival of the next slaver ship. If some came
from castles and others from factories, the one
experience shared by all was the middle passage.
Marcus Rediker’s extraordinary book on the sub-
ject, The Slave Ship, is an excellent corrective to
the unfeeling distance offered by too many histo-
rians of the subject.176 In his history people have
names, feelings. In many ways, his wonderful
and horrible book inspired this article. Lastly, for
architectural historians this essay reminds us of
the importance of understanding spaces through
the processes that generated them. Historians of
architecture can no longer be contented solely
with histories of making: the grand drama of real
life, of everyday life, is just too important.
au thor biogr aphy
Louis P. Nelson is associate professor of archi-
tectural history and associate dean of Research
and International Programs in the School of Ar-
chitecture at the University of Virginia. He is a
former editor of Buildings & Landscapes.
notes
The research and writing of this article has depended
on the support of many people. The Dean’s Office of
the School of Architecture provided a travel grant to
support one of the two field research trips that under-
gird this article. Nicholas Ivor, director of the Cape
Coast Castle, gave me permission to spend days at a
time studying the fabric of the article’s central build-
ing. He was also enormously helpful in providing sug-
gestions for further research. An early version of this
article was presented at the Shadows of Empire confer-
ence hosted at the University of Ghana, Legon, by Kofi
Baku and John Kwadwo Osei-Tutu. I am immensely
grateful to them and the many other participants at
the conference; this article incorporates many of their
comments and suggestions. Max Edelson and Maurie
McInnis both read early drafts of this article and pro-
vided essential critique. I received very helpful com-
mentary from the two blind reviewers; whoever you
are, thank you. I am indebted to Jason Truesdale, who
produced the plans that illustrate this printed version
of the article and the three-dimensional model avail-
able in the digital supplement. And last, I owe a debt
of gratitude to Marta Gutman and Cindy Falk, B&L’s
spectacular editors, who pushed me toward a far bet-
ter product through two rounds of revisions.
1. Scholarship on the internal African slave trade
includes David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-
colonial Economic Development in South Eastern Nige-
ria (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1978); B. G. Der,
The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana (Accra, Ghana:
Woeli Publishing, 1998); A. M. Howell, The Slave
Trade and Reconciliation: A Northern Ghanaian Per-
spective (Accra, Ghana: Bible Church of Africa, 1998);
Ann Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2006); A. B. Stahl, “Historical Process and the
Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Banda, Ghana
c. 1800–1920,” in West Africa during the Atlantic
Slave Trade: Archaeological Perspectives, ed. C. R. De
Corse, 38–58 (London: Leicester University Press,
2001); J. Boachie-Ansah, “Archaeological Research at
Kasana: A Search for Evidence on the Historic Slave
Trade in the Upper West Region of Ghana,” Journal
of Environment and Culture 2, no. 1 (2005): 35–57; Joe
Miller, “The Slave Trade in Congo and Angola,” in The
African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, ed. Martin Kilson
and Robert Rotberg, 75–113 (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1976). The best sources on the
slave castles of West Africa include William St. Clair,
The Door of No Return: The History of the Cape Coast
Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Blue-
bridge, 2006); Arnold Walker Lawrence, Trade Castles
and Forts of West Africa (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1964); Arnold Walker Lawrence, Forti-
fied Trade-Posts: The English in West Africa, 1645–1822
(London: Cape, 1969); Albert Van Danzig, Forts and
Castles of Ghana (Accra, Ghana: Sedco Publishing,
1980). See also Ray Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Poli-
ties in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore,
120 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). The con-
nections between slaving in Africa and plantations in
the Caribbean are hard to ignore. The English settled
St. Kitts in 1623 and Barbados two years later. In 1630
the English acquired their first permanent castle site
in Africa at Cormantin. Similarly, the Danes built Fort
Fredensborg only three years after their purchase of
the island of St. Croix.
2. The term slave hole was used in the middle of
the eighteenth century to refer specifically to a cham-
ber within the strong walls of a bastion used to con-
tain slaves. These were often ventilated by holes in
the paved surface of the bastion. By the 1790s these
spaces were commonly referred to as prisons. See Law-
rence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 181, 223 (for slave hole);
69, 70, 148, 168 (for slave prison).
3. Cugoano tells his story in Thoughts and Senti-
ments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and
Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1791), 7–9.
4. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,
1991).
5. I undertook fieldwork in Ghana in the spring
of 2011 and again in the summer of 2012. Over the
course of those trips, I examined eight different cas-
tles and completed measured drawings of one, Cape
Coast Castle.
6. Many historical issues do not concern me here.
The economic implications of changes in markets or
the preferences of planters for Africans from different
regions, for example, are both important components
of the historiography, but as they do not directly im-
plicate the experience of the enslaved in space, they
play no role in this telling. For discussion, see David
Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behav-
ior in Early English America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1986); and Daniel Littlefield, Rice
and Slaves: Ethnicity and Slave Trade in Colonial South
Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1981), chap. 2.
7. K. G. Davies, The Emergence of International
Business, 1200–1800: The Royal African Company, vol.
5 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1957).
8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Pantheon Books/Random House, 1977).
9. On the recognition of humanity in criminals,
see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 74, 125.
10. Barbot quoted in Akosua Perbi, A History of In-
digenous Slavery in Ghana (Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan
Publishers, 2004), 29. See J. Barbot, Description of the
Coasts of North and South Guinea, 5 vols. (London, 1732).
11. Northrup, Trade without Rulers, 68–80.
12. Both Bowman and Owen quotes cited in
Thorkild Hansen, Coast of Slaves, trans. Kari Dako
(Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2002), 48.
13. Another account was written by Louis Asa-Asa,
quoted in Mark Rediker, The Slave Ship (London: John
Murray, 2007), 102.
14. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 7–9.
15. Transcribed from Asa-Asa’s telling and printed
in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 51.
16. Northrup, Trade without Rulers, 66, 78.
17. For recent work on the internal slave trade and
the impact of European involvement, see “African
Paths to the Middle Passage,” chap. 3 in Rediker, The
Slave Ship.
18. S. A. Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade: West Af-
rican Strategies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).
See Hilary Beckles, “African Resistance to the Trans-
atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Transatlantic Slave Trade:
Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations, ed. James Kwesi An-
quandah, 81–91 (Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publish-
ers, 2007); Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, “Living the
Experience of the Slave Trade in Sankana and Gwollu:
Implications for Tourism,” in Transatlantic Slave Trade,
210–24.
19. A. M. Howell, “Showers of Arrows: The Reac-
tions and Resistance of the Kasana to Slave Raids in
the 18th and 19th Centuries,” in Transatlantic Slave
Trade, 189–209.
20. Opoku-Agyemang, “The Living Experience of
the Slave Trade,” 214.
21. The use of caves as refuge appears elsewhere in
West Africa. See Thiero Mouctar Bah, “Slave-Raiding
and Defensive Systems South of Lake Chad from the
Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” in Fighting
the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, ed. Sylviane A.
Diouf, 15–30 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).
22. Opoku-Agyemang, “The Living Experience of
the Slave Trade,” 216–17.
23. Opoku-Agyemang, “The Living Experience of
the Slave Trade,” 218–20. Very similar strategies were
implemented farther east. See Bah, “Slave-Raiding and
Defensive Systems South of Lake Chad,” 15–30; Martin
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 121
Klein, “Defensive Strategies: Wasulu, Masina, and the
Slave Trade,” in Fighting the Slave Trade, 62–78.
24. Elisee Soumonni, “Lacustrine Villages in South
Benin as Refuges from the Slave Trade,” in Diouf,
Fighting the Slave Trade, 3–14.
25. See Bruce L. Mouser, A Slaving Voyage to Africa
and Jamaica: the Log of the Sandown, 1793–94 (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
26. Thomas Clarkson, Letters on the Slave Trade
(London, 1791), 34–37.
27. H. C. Monrad, Description of the Guinea Coast
and Its Inhabitants (Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Pub-
lishers, 2010), 219.
28. Cited in Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The
Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1999), 381.
29. Estimates of mortality before even boarding the
slave ship range from highs of 25 percent to lows of 5
percent. For more, see Joseph Miller, Way of Death, Mer-
chant Capitalism, and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Pat-
rick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History through
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
30. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 381.
31. For a useful discussion of the internal trade in
those areas, see Miller, “The Slave Trade in Congo and
Angola,” in Kilson and Rotberg, The African Diaspora.
32. Perbi, History of Indigenous Slavery, 40.
33. Perbi, History of Indigenous Slavery, 37–38; See
also S. N. Nkumbaan, “Historical Archaeology of
Slave Route Case Study of Kasana and Sankana” (mas-
ter’s thesis, University of Ghana, Legon, 2003).
34. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831;
repr., New York: Pandora Press, 1987), 52.
35. On Salaga, see Perbi, History of Indigenous Slav-
ery, 44–47.
36. On the importance of the Asante to the inter-
nal slave trade, see Perbi, History of Indigenous Slavery,
20–23.
37. J. A. Okoro, “Indigenous Water Management,
Slavery and Slave Trade in Salaga” (unpublished
paper, Department of Archaeology, Legon, 2003).
38. See the 1705 account reprinted in James An-
quandah, “Researching the Historic Slave Trade in
Ghana: An Overview,” in Transatlantic Slave Trade,
23–56; quote on 28–29.
39. On slave camps, see Akosua Perbi and Yaw
Bredwa-Mensah, “Slave Camps in Pre-colonial Ghana:
The Case of Jenini in the Brong Ahafo Region,” in
Transatlantic Slave Trade, 138–47.
40. Stephen Behrendt, A. J. H. Latham, and David
Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-
Century African Slave Trader (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, with the assistance of the International
African Institute, 2010), 110–13.
41. Northrup, Trade without Rulers, 64.
42. Northrup, Trade without Rulers, 101.
43. Randy Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar:
An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 49. For a
broad study of the African canoe, see Robert Smith,
“The Canoe in West African History,” Journal of Afri-
can History 11, no. 4 (1970): 515–33.
44. Account of Isaac Parker appears in Sheila
Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers of
the Eighteenth Century, vol. 73 (London: Scholarly Re-
sources Incorporated, 1975), 126.
45. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of
Olaudah Equiano, ed. Vincent Carretta (1789; repr.
Penguin, 2003), 32.
46. The account of David Henderson appears in
Sheila Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Pa-
pers of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 69 (London: Schol-
arly Resources Incorporated, 1975), 13.
47. Johannes Rask, A Brief and Truthful Descrip-
tion of a Journey to and from Guinea (1754; repr., Accra,
Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2008), 156–57.
48. St. Clair, The Door of No Return, chap. 5.
49. This complexity is made clear in “Soldiers and
Workers,” chap. 5 in St. Clair, Door of No Return.
50. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast, 258.
51. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast, 216.
52. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast, 220.
53. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast, 221.
54. Davies, Emergence of International Business, 5:9.
55. A great summary of this history appears in
Davies, Emergence of International Business, 5:12–15,
41–44, 213.
56. Barbot quoted in Lawrence, Fortified Trade-
Posts, 184.
57. The best assessment of the physical develop-
ment of Cape Coast and other West African castles is
in Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa.
58. St. Clair, The Door of No Return, 45–46.
59. Davies, Emergence of International Business,
5:241–43.
122 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
60. Eveline Martin, British West African Settle-
ments, 1750–1820 (New York: Longmans, 1927), 7. For
a full account of the financial management of the Brit-
ish West African castles, see also Davies, Emergence of
International Business.
61. For an excellent summary of the development
of these early castles, see Davies, Emergence of Interna-
tional Business, 5:243–49.
62. “James Nightingale to Cape Coast Castle, Feb
15 1681,” MS Rawl C. 745, “Copies of Letters sent by the
Out Factors Of the Royal African Company of England
to the Chief Agents at Cape Coast Castle, Jan 27, 1680
to June 8, 1681,” Letterbooks of the Royal African Com-
pany, Bodelian, Special Collections Library, Oxford.
63. “James Nightingale, Feb 20 1681,” MS Rawl
C. 745, “Copies of Letters sent by the Out Factors Of
the Royal African Company of England to the Chief
Agents at Cape Coast Castle, Jan 27, 1680 to June 8,
1681,” Letterbooks of the Royal African Company,
Bodelian, Special Collections Library, Oxford.
64. “1682: from Ralph Hassell,” MS Rawl C. 745,
“Copies of Letters sent by the Out Factors Of the Royal
African Company of England to the Chief Agents at
Cape Coast Castle, Jan 27, 1680 to June 8, 1681,” Let-
terbooks of the Royal African Company, Bodelian,
Special Collections Library, Oxford.
65. For more on this, see Davies, Emergence of In-
ternational Business.
66. St. Clair, Door of No Return, esp. chap. 8.
67. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast, 212.
The records of the Company of Merchants offer a very
similar list. See Martin, British West African Settle-
ments, 45.
68. As scholars of early West African history and of
the slave trade have come to argue, the internal African
slave trade was much exacerbated by European involve-
ment, especially through the introduction of guns—
the most highly desired trade good. On this, see Jo-
seph Inikori, “Changing Commodity Composition of
Imports into West Africa, 1650–1850: A Window into
the Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on African
Societies,” in Transatlantic Slave Trade, 57–80.
69. Martin, British West African Settlements, 50.
70. See Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 157. See
also Rask, A Brief and Truthful Description, 58.
71. Davies, Emergence of International Business,
5:226.
72. Davies, Emergence of International Business,
5:188; see also Door of No Return, chap. 8. For numer-
ous examples of this, see John Newton, The Journal
of a Slave Trader, 1750–1754, ed. Bernard Martin and
Mark Spurrell (London: Epworth Press, 1962).
73. Davies, Emergence of International Business,
5:222, 262.
74. Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 292.
75. Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 187.
76. Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 298.
77. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa,
190.
78. Davies, Emergence of International Business,
5:226.
79. Cape Coast is described in 1710 as having “re-
positories for one thousand slaves.” Davies, Emergence
of International Business, 5:241.
80. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 77.
81. Barbot quoted in Lawrence, Trade Castles and
Forts of West Africa, 166.
82. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 223.
83. Davies, Emergence of International Business,
5:241.
84. Davies, Emergence of International Business,
5:242.
85. For a full account, see David Richardson, Bristol,
Africa, and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to Amer-
ica, 3 vols. (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1986–90).
86. “London, May 28, 1756,” “Letterbook of the
Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, 1751–1769,”
GB 0402 SSC/22, 2 vols., vol. 1, “Letters from the Com-
pany to the Governor and Council of Cape Coast Castle,
1751–68,” The Royal Geographical Society, London.
87. “Letterbook of the Company of Merchants Trad-
ing to Africa, 1751–1769,” GB 0402 SSC/22, 2 vols.,
vol. 1, “Letters from the Company to the Governor and
Council of Cape Coast Castle, 1751–68,” p. 24, n.d., The
Royal Geographical Society, London.
88. “London, June 24, 1761,” “Letterbook of the
Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, 1751–1769,”
GB 0402 SSC/22, 2 vols., vol. 1, “Letters from the
Company to the Governor and Council of Cape Coast
Castle, 1751–68,” p. 141, The Royal Geographical So-
ciety, London.
89. “Sept 5, 1760,” “Letterbook of the Company of
Merchants Trading to Africa, 1751–1769,” GB 0402
SSC/22, 2 vols., vol. 1, “Letters from the Company to the
Governor and Council of Cape Coast Castle, 1751–68,”
p. 135, The Royal Geographical Society, London.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 123
90. See Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 123. See
also Thorkild Hansen, Coast of Slaves, trans. Kari Dako
(Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2002), 50.
91. See the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v.
“hole.”
92. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 220.
93. Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 302–4.
94. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast,
221–22.
95. An excellent history of the castle at Anomabo
appears in St. Clair, Door of No Return, chap. 2. See
also Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa,
349–55.
96. Stephen Behrendt, “‘Journal of an African
Slaver,’ 1789–1792, and the Gold Coast Slave Trade of
William Callow,” History in Africa 22 (1995): 61–71.
97. Martin, British West African Settlements, 17–18.
98. Martin, British West African Settlements, 49.
99. On the shipment of materials from England,
see “Letterbook of the Company of Merchants Trad-
ing to Africa, 1751–1769,” GB 0402 SSC/22, 2 vols.,
vol. 1, “Letters from the Company to the Governor and
Council of Cape Coast Castle, 1751–68,” The Royal
Geographical Society, London.
100. Readers are encouraged to view the full three-
dimensional model posted on Buildings & Landscape’s
digital edition hosted by JSTOR (www.jstor.org).
101. D. Simmonds, “A Note on the Excavations in
Cape Coast Castle,” Transactions of the Historical Soci-
ety of Ghana 14, no. 2 (1973): 267–69.
102. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 212–13.
103. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 80.
104. This data was collected by the author from the
Voyages project for the specific purpose of interrogat-
ing the volume of slaves departing from various cas-
tles over the course of the period in question. These
queries were undertaken in the spring of 2013.
105. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast, 221.
106. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 9.
107. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast,
222. See also Hansen, Coast of Slaves, 82, 171.
108. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 81. Monrad sug-
gests only once a day; see Monrad, A Description of the
Guinea Coast, 222.
109. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 72–73.
110. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 75.
111. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 63.
112. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast, 266.
113. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 129.
114. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast,
228.
115. Quoted in Beckles, “African Resistance to the
Transatlantic Slave Trade,” 81–91.
116. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast,
222. A very similar description from the 1690s sug-
gests that this was common practice throughout the
period of the slave trade; see Hansen, Coast of Slaves,
29–30.
117. John Barbot in 1746, as cited in Hansen, Coast
of Slaves, 31.
118. St. Clair, Door of No Return, 78; Lawrence,
Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa, 190.
119. “Letterbook of the Company of Merchants
Trading to Africa, 1751–1769,” GB 0402 SSC/22, 2
vols., vol. 2, “Letters from the Agent at Cape Coast
Castle to the Royal African Company, 1767–69,” pp.
96–97, November 6, 1767, The Royal Geographical
Society, London.
120. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 137. In mak-
ing this argument, I am aware of the objections by
many to Stanley Elkin’s comparison in the late 1950s
of plantation slavery and Nazi concentration camps.
My argument is that West African slave castles and
European prisons emerged contemporaneously and
participate in a shared discourse on architectures of
correction and (re)formation. See Stanley M. Elkins,
Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and In-
tellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1959). For objections and debate, see Ann Lane, The
Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); and John
Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in
the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972).
121. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184–87.
122. Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 69, 70, 148,
168.
123. Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts, 168.
124. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 122.
125. See Davies, Emergence of International Busi-
ness, 5:242.
126. There are a number of excellent works on
the history, economics, and social structures of Old
Calabar; for example, see Behrendt, Latham, and
Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke; and Sparks, The
Two Princes of Calabar. On the importance of Calabar
124 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014
to Jamaica, see Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan,
“The Dynamics of the Slave Market,” 208.
127. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 44.
128. Nicholas Owen, Journal of a Slave-Dealer (1759;
repr., London: Routledge and Sons, 1930), 33, 85, 105.
129. Owen, Journal of a Slave-Dealer, 100–101.
130. These barracoons may have been similar to
the places for the containment of slaves on Gorée Is-
land called captiverie in the eighteenth century. See
Lambert, House of Commons Sessional Papers, 73:25.
131. Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West
African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 (Athens: Ohio Univer-
sity Press, 2004), 137.
132. Account reprinted in James Anquandah,
“Researching the Historic Slave Trade in Ghana: An
Overview,” in Transatlantic Slave Trade, 23–56, quote
on 28–29.
133. Frederick Forbes, Six Months’ Service in the Af-
rican Blockade (London: R. Bentley, 1849), 113.
134. The complexity of these centers is discussed in
detail in the introductory essays in Behrendt, Latham,
and Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke. On the im-
portance of Liverpool, see 76–77.
135. On the Efik and Old Calabar, see Behrendt,
Latham, and Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke; Jo
Anne Chandler, Efik Traders of Old Calabar (London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963). See also Two Princes of
Calabar; for an earlier eighteenth-century history, see
Stephen Behrendt and Eric Graham, “African Mer-
chants, Notables, and the Slave Trade at Old Calabar,
1720: Evidence from the National Archives in Scot-
land,” History in Africa 30 (2003): 37–61. For a com-
prehensive discussion of the structure of the slave
trade in Angola, see Joseph Miller, “Some Aspects of
the Commercial Organization of Slaving at Luanda,
Angola, 1730–1830,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays
in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed.
Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn (New York: Aca-
demic Press, 1979). For a careful study of a slave port
in the Bight of Benin, see Law, Ouidah.
136. Behrendt, Latham, and Northrup, The Diary
of Antera Duke, 49.
137. Behrendt and Graham, “African Merchants,
Notables, and the Slave Trade,” 50; Robin Hallett, ed.,
Records of the African Association, 1788–1831 (London:
Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964), 206.
138. Behrendt and Graham, “African Merchants,
Notables and the Slave Trade,” 52.
139. I am aware of the critique of Equiano’s nar-
rative as a partial fabrication. Nonetheless, I take the
position that even if he was American-born, he would
have known plenty of African-born slaves and their
own stories of capture and shipment. Equiano, Inter-
esting Narrative, 22.
140. Rev. Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-Nine
Years in the West Indies and Central Africa, 1829–58
(London: Frank Cass, 1970), 247–48.
141. Northrup, Trade without Rulers, 89, 100.
142. Lambert, House of Commons Sessional Papers,
73:26.
143. Behrendt, Latham, and Northrup, The Diary
of Antera Duke, 16.
144. Hallett, Records of the African Association,
200.
145. Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, 243.
146. Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, 250.
147. Donald Simmons, “An Ethnographic Sketch
of the Efik People,” in Efik Traders of Old Calabar, ed.
Daryll Forde (London: Oxford University Press, 1968),
16–17.
148. Hallett, Records of the African Association,
200, 203.
149. Hallett, Records of the African Association, 203.
150. Hallett, Records of the African Association, 203.
151. Reported by Antera Duke in his diary. See
Forde, Efik Traders of Old Calabar, 50. For a more re-
cent discussion, see Behrent, Latham, and Northrup,
The Diary of Antera Duke, 36–39. Human sacrifice
was found among a number of West African com-
munities; see Rask, A Brief and Truthful Description,
141–44.
152. The earliest example thus far is Egbo Young’s
Liverpool Hall, so named by Antera Duke, in 1785.
Forde, Efik Traders of Old Calabar, 28. See also Wad-
dell, Twenty-Nine Years, 244; and Simmons, “An Eth-
nographic Sketch of the Efik People,” in Forde, Efik
Traders of Old Calabar, 9. Such exportation of house
frames was also presumed among the English. In his
discourse advocating for the English colonization of
West Africa, Wadstrom recommends that all colonists
bring a house frame with them. See Wadstrom, Essay
on Colonization, vol. 1 (1794), 49.
153. Hallett, Records of the African Association,
207–8.
154. Behrendt, Latham, and Northrup, The Diary
of Antera Duke, 57.
LOUIS P. NELSON, ARCHITECTURES OF WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT | 125
155. Owen, Journal of a Slave-Dealer, 76.
156. Behrendt, Latham, and Northrup, The Diary of
Antera Duke, 56–57.
157. Herbert Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 116–21.
158. Behrendt, Latham, and Northrup, The Diary
of Antera Duke, 57; Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior
Districts of Africa (London, 1799; repr., Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2000), 18.
159. Behrendt, Latham, and Northrup, The Diary of
Antera Duke, 56–57.
160. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 33.
161. The most important source for accurate in-
formation on the middle passage and shipboard ex-
perience of the slave is Rediker, The Slave Ship. An
interesting comparison to the transportation of slaves
is the transportation of convicts. See Kenneth Mor-
gan, “The Organization of the Convict Trade to Mary-
land: Stevenson, Randolph, and Cheston, 1768–1775,”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 42, no. 2 (April
1985): 201–27.
162. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 70.
163. St. Clair, The Door of No Return, 14.
164. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast,
223; St. Clair, The Door of No Return, 25.
165. Law, Ouidah, 135.
166. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast,
223; Rediker, The Slave Ship, 38.
167. Cited in Thomas, The Slave Trade, 404–05.
168. Law, Ouidah, 143.
169. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 143, 233–34.
170. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 33.
171. St. Clair, The Door of No Return, 223; see also
Mouser, A Slaving Voyage, 104.
172. St. Clair, The Door of No Return, 11; Rediker,
The Slave Ship, 234; Davies, The Royal African Com-
pany, 186.
173. St. Clair, The Door of No Return, 220.
174. Davies, The Royal African Company, 293.
175. For statistical information on the slave trade,
see Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). For
a detailed discussion of the conditions on slave ships,
see Rediker, The Slave Ship; and Charles Gland and
Herbert S. Klein, “The Allotment of Space for Slaves
aboard Eighteenth-Century British Slave Ships,” Wil-
liam and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 42, no. 2 (April
1985): 238–48.
176. Rediker, The Slave Ship.
Review (Fernand Braudel Center)
Research Foundation of State University of New York
Keeping a Tight Lid: The Architecture and Landscape Design of Coffee Plantations in
Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Authors(s): Tania Andrade Lima
Source: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 34, No. 1/2, RETHINKING THE PLANTATION:
HISTORIES, ANTHROPOLOGIES, AND ARCHAEOLOGIES (2011), pp. 193-215
Published by: Research Foundation of State University of New York for and on behalf of
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