Pedro Blanco
Slave Trader
Several dozen white slavers established themselves in Gallinas
in the early 1800s, building slave "factories" along the banks of the Kerefe,
or on islands in the lagoon, to feed Cuba's voracious appetite for slaves. The most
notorious was Pedro Blanco, who by 1839 operated a network of factories on the Gallinas
and along the region's coast. Blanco came to Gallinas by way of Cuba, where he worked
on a sugar mill near Matanzas before investing in the slave trade and sailing to
Africa on one of his vessels, the Conquistador. He set up his Gallinas operations
in 1822, struck up a profitable and efficient working relationship with King Siaka, a local
Vai chief, and rapidly expanded the scope of his operations, stationing agents at
Cape Mount, Shebar, Digby (near Monrovia), Young Sestos, and elsewhere. On the marketing
end, he entered a partnership, Blanco & Carballo, with headquarters in Havana
and correspondents in Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Texas. As a measure of his mercantile
standing, Blanco’s bills of credit were readily accepted in London (by the Baring
Brothers), New York, and other financial centers.
In Gallinas he built himself a private kingdom in miniature: with warehouses on an
island near the mouth of the Kerefe River, his personal quarters and private office
on another island nearby; houses for African wives on a third. Slaves awaiting shipment
were kept in baracoons in the islands of Taro and Kamasun.
Blanco left Africa in 1838 for Cuba (continuing to trade in slaves), and eventually
Barcelona. His firm failed in 1848, and Blanco himself died in 1854, in Genoa.
AMISTAD: The figure of Pedro Blanco lurks like a shadow in the background of this story. He left Gallinas just before most of the Amistad Africans reached the coast. But he left behind a network of agents to carry on his operations; very possibly some of them handled the Amistad Africans. Cinque, for example, knew of Pedro Blanco. At any rate, he had played a key role in the expansion of the slave trade in the region over the several preceding decades: in a sense, he had built the machinery that carried the Amistad Africans across the Atlantic.
Fred Dalzell
DOCUMENTS: James Hall, who as an anti-slave trade activist was a determined antagonist, judged Blanco "a man of education, having the bearing and address of a Spanish Grandee or Don, which was his usual appellation. He lived in a semi-barbarous manner, at once, as a private gentleman and an African prince..."
Theopholis Conneau, a slave trader who worked for several years in Pedro Blanco's
employ, describes his first meeting: "Don
Pedro received us with his usual urbanity, but declined purchasing from us, inasmuch
as we had not called on him on our first landing. We were aware that we had committed
a fault, as we had heard much of this man's pride ..."
SOURCES: Adam Jones, From Slaves to Palm Kernels: A History of the Galinhas Country (West Africa), 1730-1890 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983)
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997)
