In May of 1746, slaving captain Christiaan Hagerop illegally captured ten Gold Coast canoe paddlers, seven of whom were free Africans from Elmina and Fante. Hagerop subsequently sailed to Suriname, where he sold the paddlers into slavery. To appease the relatives of the captured men and to safeguard its reputation among local Africans, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) launched a search for the kidnapped paddlers. Six of the men were eventually located in Suriname in 1749, the seventh having died in slavery. While the Africans were transported back to the Gold Coast via Amsterdam, the WIC tried to have Hagerop extradited to its Gold Coast possessions to receive punishment for his crime. A legal battle over jurisdictional competence ensued in the Dutch Republic, the outcome of which was that the captain was made to stand trial in Amsterdam, but in the end he received very little punishment.
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Harvey M. Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1989), 141–143.
K. Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters van het Kasteel Sao Jorge da Mina aan de Goudkust, 1645–1647 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1953), xx, xxii.
See David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 145–149.
Ibid, 115–118. See also Natalie Everts, “Social Outcomes of Trade Relations: Encounters between Africans and Europeans in the Hubs of the Slave Trade on the Guinea Coast,” in Wim Klooster, ed., Migration, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World: Essays in Honor of Pieter Emmer (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 141–164, 159–160.
For comparison, see Robert Law, ed., The English in West Africa, 1681–1683 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), x, wherein Law notes “this [English] correspondence reveals, perhaps more clearly than any other body of material, the dependence of European enterprise in West Africa, for coastwise communication as well as for trade, on canoes and canoemen.”
Jean Barbot, Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea (London: n.p., 1732), 266, cited in Peter Gutkind, “The Canoemen of the Gold Coast (Ghana): A Survey and Exploration in Precolonial African Labour History,” Cahier d’ Études Africaines 29, nos. 115–116 (1989): 339–376, 350.
See K.Y. Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), chs. 3–4; and Feinberg, Africans and Europeans, ch. 7, esp. 136, 145–151, where Feinberg illustrates the limits of Dutch power, but also discusses the Dutch influence and role in the Elmina community, emphasizing the complex relationship that existed.
Jelmer Vos, “The Slave Trade from the Windward Coast: The Case of the Dutch, 1740–1805,” African Economic History 38 (2010): 29–51, 37.
See ibid, AvSS 1862, 1 September 1750. See also NA, Archive of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) 6217, Slot van Kapelle: Grootboek en journaal, f. 4. In the margin of this pay book of the VOC is written that Hagerop was not to receive his wages without prior consent from the WIC.
In 1743, director-general de Petersen wrote that “it remains a constant truth that no subject of a chief castle can be panyarred [kidnapped] … without the [director-general’s] consent.” This policy included a prohibition against taking Elminans as slaves for export. NBKG 107, Commany, De Petersen to Verschueren, 14 Aug. 1743.
See Gert Oostindie, ed., Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
Seymour Drescher, “The Long Goodbye: Dutch Capitalism and Antislavery in Comparative Pespective,” The American Historical Review 99, 1 (Jan. 1994): 44–69, 62–65.
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In May of 1746, slaving captain Christiaan Hagerop illegally captured ten Gold Coast canoe paddlers, seven of whom were free Africans from Elmina and Fante. Hagerop subsequently sailed to Suriname, where he sold the paddlers into slavery. To appease the relatives of the captured men and to safeguard its reputation among local Africans, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) launched a search for the kidnapped paddlers. Six of the men were eventually located in Suriname in 1749, the seventh having died in slavery. While the Africans were transported back to the Gold Coast via Amsterdam, the WIC tried to have Hagerop extradited to its Gold Coast possessions to receive punishment for his crime. A legal battle over jurisdictional competence ensued in the Dutch Republic, the outcome of which was that the captain was made to stand trial in Amsterdam, but in the end he received very little punishment.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 808 | 583 | 4 |
Full Text Views | 265 | 25 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 105 | 63 | 0 |