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Antera Duke of Old Calabar—A Little More About an African Entrepreneur

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

P.E.H. Hair
P.E.H. Hair*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

The reference to Antera Duke of Old Calabar in HA 16 (1989) encourages me to contribute a note on this historical notable.1 A gross imbalance exists in the scholarly study of black slavery. The shelves of academic libraries groan under the weight of books on black slavery in the Americas. Yet for every hundred books on trans-Atlantic black slavery and the Middle Passage, there is at best a single volume on black slavery in Africa. Moreover, the curt preliminary chapter dealing with slavery in Africa mandatory in books on black slavery in the Americas, not uncommonly limits itself to repeating anachronistic moralizing cliches that show little awareness of up-to-date Africanist knowledge of slavery in Africa—and exhibit little empathy with past African enterprise. There is some excuse. Any historical social process shared between preliterate and literate societies will inevitably have fuller and clearer source material in respect of the latter than in respect of the former. Information on black slavery in the Americas, on the Middle Passage, and on the non-African aspects of the procurement of slaves, is relatively abundant; information on the transmission of an individual African from an earlier non-slave situation, through the hands of Africans, to the point where he or she was handed over to non-Africans, is almost nonexistent. This being so, the publication in 1956 of the diary of an African slave trader, Antera Duke of Old Calabar, a diary covering the years from 1785 to 1788, was an outstanding historiographical event.

Type
Notes
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 359 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. Hargreaves, Susan M., “Indigenous Written Sources of the History of Bonny,” HA 16 (1989), 185.Google Scholar

2. Forde, D., Simmons, D. C., and Jones, G. I., eds., Efik traders of Old Calabar…the Diary of Antera Duke, an Efik Slave-Trading Chief of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1956).Google Scholar Written in pidgin English, the diary is reproduced in the extracts that were transcribed before the original was destroyed in the early 1940s, and the extracts are also given in normal English, this latter text being annotated. The extracts may oversensationalize the diary, if the missionary transcriber selected ungodly episodes to copy out, a point not considered by the editors. The scholarly editing sets the diary within the context of Efik society and cites the few other sources on Calabar commerce in this period. A more extended treatment of the relevant Calabar history is provided in the early chapters of Latham, A. J. H., Old Calabar, 1600–1891 (Oxford, 1973).Google Scholar Information available in these works will not be repeated in the present article.

3. Dalemain house and estate were purchased by Sir Edward Hasell in 1679 and have been in the hands of his descendants since. In the eighteenth century members of the family were involved in the Liverpool shipping trade, hence the family papers include slave trade records. I am much indebted to Maurice and Eunice Schofield for introducing me to the Hasell papers, which they are cataloging; to Mr. Robert Hasell-McCosh for kindly arranging for me to examine the papers; and to Mr. and Mrs. Bryce McCosh, the owners of the papers, for giving me permission to see them and to cite the Dobson account book in this note. The relevant section of the family papers is cataloged as “The Letters and Account Books of Christopher Hasell of Liverpool, Merchant, 1760-1773, and of his Father-in-Law, John Goad of Liverpool, Merchant, 1750-1772.” The account book of the Dobson is item 16, “Trade Book for Slaves etc etc 1769.” It does not appear that the other African voyages recorded in the Hasell papers have their African transactions documented in as much detail as does this particular Dobson voyage.

4. The only other documents containing names are letters from 1763 to 1783 from African traders at Calabar to Ambrose Lace, a Liverpool merchant, printed in full or in extracts, in Williams, Gomer, History of the Liverpool Privateers and…the Liverpool Slave Trade (London, 1897), 533–53.Google Scholar These letters may have formed part of those recorded as having been regularly received in Liverpool from Calabar notables (Crow, Hugh, Memoirs of the late Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool [London, 1830], 285–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Unfortunately, after coming down to Gomer Williams, the originals of the letters he published disappeared; and today no eighteenth-century letters from Calabar can be traced in archives in Liverpool or apparently elsewhere.

5. Latham, , Old Calabar, 98, 161.Google Scholar

6. These details of trading correspond fairly closely to those noted in the relevant essays in R. Anstey and Hair, P. E. H., eds., Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition (Liverpool, 1976, enlarged reprint 1989).Google Scholar

7. For an overall view of the Atlantic trading of Black Africa as seen from the African end, see my The Atlantic Slave Trade and Black Africa (London, 1978, 2d ed.: Liverpool, 1989).Google Scholar

8. The various cloths, mainly Indian in origin or at least in name, were mentioned in the letters from Calabar and are explained in Williams, Privateers, 539, 545: many of the commodities are also mentioned in the diary.

9. Gomer Williams (Privateers, 539) suggested at one point that the abbreviation “Cos” meant “cowries” but in the account book it certainly means “coppers.”

10. The Dobson, a ship of 200 registered tons, had a bad record of exceptionally high slave mortality. A prize of 1763, formerly the French Active, under that name it traded in 1763-64 at Bonny and arrived at St. Kitts with 230 slaves, having lost 106, and in 1765-66 in Angola and arrived at Barbados with 336 slaves, having lost 89; and under the new name Dobson (the name of one of the group of Liverpool owners) it traded in 1767-68 at Old Calabar and arrived at Antigua with 219 slaves—the number lost is not known but, judging by the numbers carried on the previous voyage and the next voyage (and supposing Antigua to have been its first port of call), it may well have been between 100 and 200. On the return of the Dobson to Liverpool in 1770, or shortly thereafter, it ran aground at the dock entrance, and appears then to have been broken up. The information in the text, and in this and the following note, has been kindly supplied by Maurice M. Schofield from his index of eighteenth-century Liverpool shipping data, part of a project to provide an edition of the Liverpool Plantation Registers 1744-1784, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Department of Economic History, University of Liverpool. Maurice Schofield, a distinguished local historian, died while this paper was in press.

11. When Christopher Hasell, probably the managing owner for the Dobs on voyages, died in 1773, in his early thirties and hence after only a fairly short trading career, he left little to his children, who had to be educated by an uncle, and none of the profits of slave trading returned to the Dalemain estate. This may indicate that the dozen or so African ventures in which Christopher Hasell had a share were not outstanding financial successes, and if so, the high slave mortality of at least some of the voyages provides a plausible explanation.