III - Rotterdam and Transatlantic Slavery

Summary

At the end of 1676, a ship set sail from the coast of what is now Benin, probably setting off from the West India Company trading post in Offra. Painted on the stern in looping letters was the word ‘Rotterdam’, for that was the home port of this particular West India Company ship and its point of departure nearly a year earlier. Four hundred and fifty people were lying and standing in the hold. Most of them had been brought from the kingdom of Alada and its tribute payer Ouidah, both of which in turn paid tribute to the powerful kingdom of Oyo in what is now Nigeria. The people held below deck would have been unaware of these political relationships. However, they would probably have been impressed by the towns with populations of twenty to thirty thousand that they passed through along the coastal area known to the crew of the Rotterdam as the Slave Coast. The people themselves came from more northerly regions, a few perhaps even as far north as what are now Niger and Burkina Faso. They had to travel huge distances on foot to reach the ship. They came from different cultures and spoke a variety of languages. Some could understand one another a little or even quite well, others not at all. The cultural and language differences must have made it a confusing and lonely experience. They had almost nothing they could hold onto that was familiar to them, except perhaps other people from their own region.

In the course of the journey across the sea, they learned to communicate with one another and even to a small extent with the people who controlled the ship, with their weird clothes and strange skin colour. For example, the Africans adopted ‘sippi’ as their version of schip, the Dutch word for ship, an object for which they had no word in their own languages. Later, sippi became a term of address for everybody who had been through the communal experience of that traumatic journey and survived. It was a form of kinship. It should be noted that on average one in every seven people who were forced to make that voyage across the ocean never reached the final destination. The figure for this journey by the Rotterdam was actually as high as one in six.