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no sense economically and is an artifact of cultural chauvinism. A more appropriate approach would be to consider instead why people desired and chose certain trade goods over human labor and access to land. In this case, why was it that so many people in Africa valued beads so highly?

      Beads were a form of money. The long history and prominent role of beads in ancient and Islamic trade made strong cultural imprints throughout the world, including in Africa. Whether made of stone, organic material, or glass, beads were acquired, circulated, hoarded as a store of wealth, worn as jewelry, buried as treasure, then perhaps unearthed by scavengers and polished to be exchanged anew. As was noted in chapter 1, imported beads were prominent among trade and burial goods found in some of the earliest archaeological sites in West Africa, which show evidence of the Islamic caravan trade across the Sahara. With the rise of the Atlantic era, Europeans built on and adapted to this long-standing commercial and cultural foundation.

      In their dealings on the Guinea Coast, the RAC noted the well-established markets there for particular kinds of beads. On the Upper Guinea Coast, people used coral (a red organic material), crystal, and glass beads as well as cowry shells as cash to purchase food or drink or to pay a person for labor or services. People also hoarded these small currency units for making larger purchases or for major family investments. Crystal beads were desired up the Gambia River, where they were necessary in the trade assortments for captives and export goods. Coral and amber also served as jewelry on the Upper Guinea Coast, worn by prominent titled women and valued by them as highly as gold and silver. Beads of coral were also in great demand farther down the coast in the Benin Kingdom, where they were displayed ceremonially as part of the royal regalia. And cowries were an essential item in Euro-African trade all along the Bight of Benin.

      The Dutch East India Company brought cowries—a shell currency originally from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean that circulated in and around Islamic trading zones—in quantity as ballast for its ships on their voyages homeward. In the early years of the RAC monopoly, they purchased their cowries in Amsterdam, but it did not take long for London dealers who specialized in other Indian Ocean goods to become the company’s main suppliers. For their early supplies of clear crystal and colored glass beads, the company relied on Holland until London dealers developed reliable contacts to get them direct from producers in Venice. The RAC managed to acquire a direct supplier of German amber, a fossilized yellowish resin that is hard as stone, when one of their dealers in Baltic goods put them in contact with an associate in Danzig (see map 2.1). Beads made of coral also came from various sources via London dealers.²⁰ Together, these efforts demonstrate that the RAC had clearly learned the high value and importance of beads in their trading even though they were far from easy to store and transport. There was always a potential for losses when loose beads were packed in barrels for shipment, an expense which had to be considered alongside the labor costs of having them strung.²¹

      RAC: Shipping and Coasting in Northern Guinea

      Atlantic trade along the Upper Guinea Coast in the second half of the seventeenth century followed a complex and shifting set of overland, riverine, and coastal traffic patterns. In the interior of western Africa, the thriving trans-Saharan systems continued to move captives and goods such as salt, gold, and kola interregionally, primarily on routes running along north–south axes. Meanwhile, the newly developing Atlantic system intensified a regional east–west commerce that previously had been relatively small in scale. Formerly the riverways attracted inland merchants to the coast, eager to exchange their locally made cotton textiles with producers of sea salt. Now the maritime traffic from Europe was turning these networks into major corridors of overseas global trade.²² Employees of the RAC stationed on the Upper Guinea Coast thus encountered and worked within an increasingly complicated network of multilateral trade in western Africa and, no matter what their employers in London might have wished, had no choice but to adapt.

      Company employees conducted their operations from three island trading forts: James Island at the mouth of the Gambia River; Bence Island in the Sierra Leone estuary to the south; and York Island a bit beyond at Sherbro.²³ The RAC presence, however, was not simply confined to these forts. Staff at each main station established additional satellite out-factories in various locales and also developed contacts at regular ports of call. When combined, these extended their influence all along the coast from Cape Verde in the north to Cape Mount in the south, a stretch of over seven hundred miles (map 2.2). This vast trading network made waterborne traffic in, out of, and around the forts and factories an ongoing logistical challenge. It involved not only the heavily fitted and armed ocean-going sailing vessels coming in from London and departing for London or the Americas but also all sorts of smaller sloops and smacks engaged in shorter voyages to and from offshore islands or along coastal waters. Still smaller work boats and canoes propelled manually by oarsmen were essential for transporting people and small cargoes along rivers and between ship and shore. Thus, the trading forts served as hubs for a much broader sphere of commercial traffic and activity.

      MAP 2.2 Royal African Company forts, outstations, and coasting destinations, Upper Guinea Coast, seventeenth c. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.

      The forts operated both independently and in cooperation with one another at various times. Ocean vessels from London would periodically arrive on the Guinea Coast loaded with provisions, supplies, and trade goods along with company instructions on where to put in and unload, what return cargoes to seek, and where to take them. Agents at the forts had their own plans and pressing needs, oftentimes in their own interests, which could delay a vessel in port or divert it into local affairs or business. As the northernmost fort, James Island was usually the first stop for supply ships arriving from London on the Upper Guinea Coast. This priority caused resentments at times among the agents downwind at Bence and York Islands to the point where they sent letters of complaint when they felt they were not getting their fair share of goods or when vessels were being delayed in continuing southward. In one instance in 1679, the agent at Bence Island reported that he had received letters and invoices from the company for the last three ships they had sent down but that most of the trade goods they covered had been unloaded at James Island. He claimed that as a result he had not been able to take an active part in that year’s trade in captives and ivory.²⁴

      Ship captains followed their instructions when it was possible or when it best suited them, but unpredictable events and changing conditions had a way of intervening and altering their courses. One voyage of the Benjamin serves to illustrate these kinds of complications. This particular vessel was recorded arriving from London at James Island, Gambia, in early November 1685. Its incoming cargo was relatively small, having been selected and organized specifically for the Cape Verde Island market where the overseas goods were to be exchanged for “high cloths,” the elaborately patterned cotton textiles produced at Santiago. They presumably were to be sent to Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast. However, for unknown reasons the captain decided to go instead to Gambia. Captain, crew, and vessel apparently remained there for the next nine months. A company scribe at James Island recorded in late January that a funeral had taken place for John Samuel, a crew member of the Benjamin, and his unsold personal effects (including one boy captive) were entered into the James Island stores.²⁵ In June the Benjamin joined with one of the company yachts in a coasting voyage north to Joal on the Petite Côte, returning with forty-eight captives, ivory, several thousand hides, and a cake of wax. While there they lost a “company slave” on salary by drowning—whether by accident or in attempting to escape is not known. Then in August 1686 the Benjamin was loaded up with a cargo of captives and provisions for the middle passage to the West Indies. Half of the captives were branded to identify them as coming from the fort at Sierra Leone, having been brought to James Island in July on the Charles, with the other half branded to identify them as “Gambia negroes.” The Benjamin then set sail for Antigua, even though the company had consigned the Charles’s captives to Barbados.²⁶ RAC officials

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