Africa: Gallinas
Gallinas lies just north of the modern border between Sierra Leone and Liberia. Two rivers actually empty into the Atlantic here: the Kerefe, and the Moa. Eventually this area would become part of Sierra Leone, but in 1839 that colony did not yet extend that far south.
In a sense this was where the Amistad story began -- even though most of the Amistad Africans were originally taken from farther inland. For it was here that European slave traders established the networks that reached into the interior and plucked out victims from among the Mende, the Kisi, the Kono, and the other inland peoples.
Over the 1820s and 1830s, slave ships stopped regularly at the mouth of the Gallinas River, taking out roughly 2,000 slaves a year. Every month or so a ship, usually a fast-sailing brig or schooner, pulled in and waited just off shore while slaves were hurriedly loaded into large canoes and ferried across the bar, through the pounding surf, to be packed on board.
All of the Amistad captives passed through this place as they were carried out of Africa and into the Middle Passage. For them it was a place of confinement and waiting, a shore on the edge of a terrifying ocean.
For their captors it was a marketplace, where European and African slavers intermingled
and transacted business. As one American visitor noted, Gallinas by 1839 had rapidly
become “not only the centre of
an extensive and lucrative traffic, but the theatre of a new order of society and
a novel form of government...."
To European and American eyes it was a dangerous
and dreary landscape. Sluggish rivers oozing over treacherous bars, a shoreline of
mangrove thickets and swamp, a delta pocked with spongy islands. “Nothing more than
a quantity of lagoons," one slave trader wrote "... shapeless and unproductive
islands ... a
nursery for alligators, sea cow, and the hippopotamus...”
Yet trading stations and satellite towns had sprung up here to supply the slave trade. Stockaded warehouses lined the river banks, barracoons on the islands teemed with slaves, on the river canoes darted here and there. British naval patrols occasionally passed through, bringing activity to a sudden halt. But the grim business of slave trading started up again as soon as the British left.
In the Exploring Amistad Library: A slave trader named Theopholis Conneau,
who ran a slave factory on the coast near Gallinas at the same time as the Amistad
Africans passed through, described the region and slave trading in his memoirs.
James Hall, an anti-slave trade activist, filed several reports on Gallinas and the
slave trade there, one in 1850,
and another in 1857.
(Both reports described the trade over the 1820s and 1830s).
Further Reading: The best source on Gallinas in the Nineteenth Century is Adam Jones, From Slaves to Kernels: A History of the Galinhas Country (West Africa), 1730-1890 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1983).
