Nantes, France... Irish Slave Traders...

[5fish]

I found this interesting for Nantes, France was the center of the French slave trade. It was the Irish who ran the French slave trade to the New World. It seems when the Irish leaders lost revolts against their English overlords. they would flee to Nantes, France... @PatYoung may know something about these Irish fellows...

‘They Threw Themselves Into the Sea, 14 Black Women, All Together’ (Published 2018)

Nantes played a major role in the European slave trade. Its museum and memorial are a model for other French cities grappling with their histories.

www.nytimes.com

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The expression ''Irish of Nantes'' denotes a community formed in the 17th century and of great importance in the 18th century. It was originally composed of Jacobite political refugees fleeing the violence of Britain's revolutions, particularly the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

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France was the third largest of the European slave-trading nations after Portugal and England, transporting an estimated 1.3 million to 1.4 million captives from Africa to the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Louisiana and French Guiana, where they were sold into slavery. The traders then brought back sugar, coffee, chocolate, spices and rum to Nantes, the city with the largest share of the French trade, transporting some 450,000 to 550,000 slaves.

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Some streets in the old town are named for slave traders, who were some of Nantes’s biggest patrons — funding schools, universities and orphanages. A number of houses in the Isle Feydeau, one of the most beautiful quarters, were built by slave traders, and discreet signs of their business remain. Limestone facades are ornamented with occasional caricatures of African captives: thick-lipped, broad-nosed and with curly hair.

 

[5fish]

Here where the Irish come into the story...

100 Years A Slaver - How The Irish Ran The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Slaver Antoine Walsh & Bonnie Prince Charlie Lauded at the Oscars and before t...

josefoshea.blogspot.com

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The many Haitians and West Indians who trace their ancestry back to African slaves transported on Irish-owned slave ships are living proof that the Irish have not always been the victims of history. Vast profits would establish Irish slaving dynasties, with the Irish of Nantes in France, closely affiliated clans of sailors and slavers, making the kind of money which allowed some to eventually join the French nobility.

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By the early 1700s, the French port of Nantes, with a large, close-knit and hard-working Irish slave-trading community, became the chief slaving port for the kingdom of Louis XIV, the Sun King.

It was said that half of the ships that sailed out of Nantes at the time were owned or stocked by Irish merchant families, including the Joyces, Walshes, MacCarthys, O’Sheils, Sarsfields and O’Riordans. Manufactured goods, guns, textiles, liquor and knives, were brought from Nantes to the Slave Coast, exchanged for slaves who were transported to the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) where they were sold for sugar and tobacco, which then returned to Europe.

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The Walsh's re-located to St Malo in Brittany (where Philip’s son Anthony or Antoine Walsh was born on 22 January 1703) and got into the licensed piracy business, sailing as “privateers” for the French crown and given free rein to attack, seize and destroy enemy shipping.

Antoine Walsh was, until he was comfortable enough to retire to his own sugar plantation on St Domingue (Haiti), a slave ship captain. The voyage, from France to East Africa and then across the Atlantic to the Carribean, was long and perilous and those making it faced everything from disease and foul weather to the possibility of piracy and mutinous human cargoes

snip... from revolutionary , to privateer, to slaver trader , to noble... and getting wealthy along the way...

Antoine had been lucky enough to avoid the bloody below-decks uprisings that claimed the lives of many slavers, including some of his employees and relatives. In 1734, the slave ship L’Aventurier, outfitted by Walsh’s father-in-law Luc O’Shiell (a former Jacobite officer) and crewed by Walshes, O'Sheills and other Irishmen narrowly survived a bloody below-decks revolt by its human cargo.

Walsh died in 1763 on his planation, ten years earlier he had been enobled by King Louis XV of France. The Irish clans of Nantes, and others in Liverpool and Bristol, would continue to make vast fortunes from the slave trade.

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Almost immediately Walsh’s monopolistic ambitions were challenged in Nantes itself by the establishment of a rival joint stock company, the Société de Guinée, which proved more successful than its Angolan counterpart. In 1753, when Walsh’s company completed the period for which it had been designed, he did not seek to reconstruct it. After launching 40 voyages, his career as an armateur had come to an end. He left France a few years later to manage the family properties in St Domingue and died there in 1763, slave-trader turned planter/purchaser in a colony which was by then absorbing a shipload of Africans a week. In the eighteenth century Britain emerged as Europe’s greatest slave-trader, but the development of St Domingue meant that France became her greatest sugar-producer. This colony, which Walsh helped to build, was envied as the richest gem in the imperial New World, before the opportunity offered by the French Revolution caused it to implode into the Caribbean’s first black republic of Haiti.
Antoine Walsh’s greatest ambitions had not been achieved in Jacobite politics nor in establishing the dominance of his company over the French slave trade. Nor had he become France’s largest slaver: that position fell to an indigenous French family, the Mauntondons (60 voyages), who had begun life as shoemakers. Over the years Antoine Walsh had purchased over 12,000 Africans for export across the Atlantic, though not all of them had reached the Americas. No other family from the Irish community in Nantes could claim anything approaching such a score, although two others, the Rirdans and the Roches, emerged as significant armateurs. The Rirdan (O’Riordan) brothers, Etienne and Laurent, claiming roots in Derryvoe, Co. Cork, sent out eleven expeditions during the years 1734–49, purchasing just over 3,000 slaves. Between 1739 and 1755 the Roche family (their roots in Limerick, where they possessed marriage connections with Arthurs and Suttons) organised a similar number.

 

[5fish]

Here another look at the Irish and the slave trade... @PatYoung , It seem the early English Slave trade had the Irish involved in it to... They article goes in death how the Irish in Ireland made money suppling goods the the slave traders...

The Irish and the Atlantic slave trade - History Ireland

It was the Stuarts who introduced the Irish to the slave trade. Charles II returned to the throne in 1660 at a time when it was becoming clear that sugar […]

www.historyireland.com

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It was the Stuarts who introduced the Irish to the slave trade. Charles II returned to the throne in 1660 at a time when it was becoming clear that sugar plantations were as valuable as gold-mines. The Royal Africa Company (RAC) was established to supply slaves to the British West Indies in order to extend production. Irish names can be found among those working for the RAC. Among the most successful was William Ronan, who worked in West Africa for a decade (1687–97). A Catholic Irishman, he rose to become the chairman of the committee of merchants at Cape Castle in present-day Ghana, his career apparently unhindered by the ascent of William of Orange. In the seventeenth century Europeans saw slaving as respectable and desirable. It was conveniently accepted that Africans sold into slavery by their rulers were prisoners of war, who would otherwise have been slaughtered. Thus export to the Americas offered them prolonged life in a Christian society. It was a century later, when public sensitivities began to change, that such attitudes to the slave trade were called into question.

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In Europe the connection between the Stuarts and Irish slave-traders was not lost with the throne. The defeated James II was conveyed from Ireland to France by Philip Walsh, a Dublin-born merchant, settled in St Malo, who would die on an African voyage. In 1745 Philip Walsh’s son, Antoine, provided Prince Charles Edward Stuart with an armed frigate, on which they sailed together for Scotland in a bid to restore the Jacobite line. Antoine Walsh could afford this political gesture because of the wealth he had made from the slave trade. Nantes (with its close-knit Irish community) had emerged as the kingdom’s chief slaving port, a starting-point for the triangular trade—manufactures for Africa (textiles, brandy and firearms), slaves for the French West Indian colonies (Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Domingue), sugar and tobacco for Europe

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By the end of the seventeenth century the RAC had lost its monopoly. This opened up the slave trade to individual British merchants, while banning Irish ports from launching direct voyages to Africa.

snip... in Liverpool the Irish were there...

By the end of the seventeenth century the RAC had lost its monopoly. This opened up the slave trade to individual British merchants, while banning Irish ports from launching direct voyages to Africa. Thus the equivalents of the Rirdans and the Roches (though not Antoine Walsh) can be found in Bristol and Liverpool. Bristol was Britain’s premier slaving port from the demise of the RAC until 1740, when Liverpool came to dominate the trade. In this expansive period the Frekes, an offshoot of the County Cork landowning family, could be found among Bristol’s leading slave-merchants. Their success over several generations was marked by their move into Queen Square, where they lived in an elegant new building looking out on a handsome statue of William III. Other Irish slave-ship-owners from the same era were Michael Callaghan and John Teague. By the 1760s they had disappeared, to be replaced by John Coghlan and James Connor

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In 1780s Liverpool there were slave-merchants with Irish names: Felix Doran, Christopher Butler, Thomas Ryan, James McGauley and David Tuohy. But the first four had all been born in that area; only Tuohy had arrived as a young man from Tralee.

 

[5fish]

@PatYoung , I found the list of Irish families that were compensated by the British government when it end slavery...

http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2014/07/compensation-paid-to-irish-slave-owners-1833-sheet1.pdf

I found the article it was in...

Opinion: Following the money – Irish slave owners in the time of abolition

What happened to slave owners in Ireland after slavery was abolished? They were handsomely compensated.

www.thejournal.ie

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Records and have created a new online database which reveals that nearly 100 different individuals, either born or based in Ireland, benefited directly from this slave compensation; (compared to circa 36 from Wales, 394 from Scotland and 1,879 from England).

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We also find some Irish claimants holding a high level of office in the colonies, such as Howe Peter Browne, the 2nd Marquis of Sligo, of Westport House, Co Mayo. In 1809 he inherited slave plantations in Jamaica from his father and he continued to profit from them (a sum of £20,000 per annum) until his appointment as Governor of Jamaica in 1833. Then he submitted a claim for 286 slaves and was awarded £5,525. He was also responsible for overseeing the fraught transition on the island from slavery to apprenticeship.

Browne is commonly referred to as a “champion” “emancipator” and “protector” of slaves, but this hyperbole stretches the white saviour narrative to its absolute limit. Browne benefited from slavery from the cradle to the grave and did not free his slaves until the institution of slavery was abolished by an act of parliament.

 

[5fish]

Here a post of a French slave ship...

French Slave Trade | Slavery and Remembrance

Through sites and objects from across the globe, Slavery and Remembrance aims to broaden our understandings of a shared and painful past, the ways in which we collectively remember and forget, and the power of legacies to shape our present and future.

slaveryandremembrance.org

French Slave trade...
Though the Portuguese and British dominated the transatlantic slave trade, the French were the third largest slave traders, elevated to that rank by the staggering numbers of Africans delivered to Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in the late eighteenth century. Of the 1,381,000 Africans loaded onto French ships during the course of the transatlantic trade, 1,165,000 survived the Middle Passage to encounter harsh conditions mostly in French Caribbean colonies. Though substantial numbers sailed on French ships to Guadeloupe (73,000) and Martinique (217,200), the vast majority (773,000) went to Saint-Domingue—the New World’s most profitable eighteenth-century colony.

French possessions in the Caribbean were larger in population and more productive than British and Spanish holdings in the region, and voyages based in several key French port cities made it all possible. Le Havre was France’s first major slave-trading port and delivered captives to Martinique, French Guiana, and mostly Saint-Domingue. Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle outfitted large numbers of slave voyages that moved captives from vast regions of western Africa (from Senegambia to West-Central Africa) to the Dutch and French Guianas, Caribbean islands, and even the Spanish Caribbean mainland and Mississippi Delta, including Louisiana. Overwhelmingly, however, the sugar plantations of France’s crown jewel, Saint-Domingue, remained the destination for African survivors until the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791.

 

[Jim Klag]

In your zeal to post all things slavery, don't forget the Estonian slave trade or the Icelandic slave trade or the Tasmanian slave trade or the Sri Lanka slave trade or the Lichtenstein slave trade or the Vatican City slave trade.

 

[5fish]

In your zeal to post all things slavery, don't forget the Estonian slave trade or the Icelandic slave trade or the Tasmanian slave trade or the Sri Lanka slave trade or the Lichtenstein slave trade or the Vatican City slave trade

My zeal was only to show that most of Western Europe was involved in the African Slave trade to the Americas... The wealth it created was amazing...

 

[5fish]

The French passed a law in 1685...

In 1685, the ‘Code Noir’ was passed by Louis XIV concernant les esclaves nègres de l’Amérique. It consists of 60 articles defining slave conditions in French colonies and detailing some horrendous punishments.

Here are just a few:
Fugitive slaves absent for a month would be branded and their ears would be cut off.
The punishment for a two-month abscondment was the cutting of the hamstrings. A third absence meant death.
Owners could chain and beat slaves—but not torture or mutilate them
Any owner who falsely accused a slave of a crime and put the slave to death would receive a fine

The law also...

Code Noir - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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The decree restricted the activities of free people of color, mandated the conversion of all enslaved people throughout the empire to Roman Catholicism, defined the punishments meted out to slaves, and ordered the expulsion of all Jews from France's colonies

Free people of color were still placed under restrictions via the Code Noir, but were otherwise free to pursue their own careers. Compared to other European colonies in the Americas, a free person of color in the French colonial empire was highly likely to be literate, and had a high chance of owning businesses, properties and even their own slaves.[1][2][3] The code has been described by Tyler Stovall as "one of the most extensive official documents on race, slavery, and freedom ever drawn up in Europe"

Here is 60 articles... but in French...

Le Code noir de 1685

 

[5fish]

A thought...

France, major actor in enslavement of Africans

France played leading role in slave trade, buying millions of slaves in its African colonies - Anadolu Ajansı

www.aa.com.tr

Based on extensive research, French historian Jean Mettas found that France had carried out 3,317 slave shipments, from 17 of its seaports, including Nantes, Le Havre, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux.

"About 1,800 shipments are from Nantes. For the 18th century alone, Nantes ships transported between 450,000 and 600,000 Africans to the European colonies in new worlds," meaning the Americas, according to Jean-Francois Martin, a reporter from for Ouest-France daily.

"The French slave ships, from the ports of Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle or Le Havre, transported more than 2 million Africans from 1625 to 1848," CM98, an Antillean anti-slavery group, said on its website