A Lucrative Voyage in the Black Ivory Trade
A Voyage Promised, A Tomb Delivered: The Sloop Hope and the Providence Gazette
The Advertisement
NOTICE TO ABLE SEAMEN — A PROSPEROUS & TIMELY VOYAGE
Captain JAMES BRIGGS (of Dighton, Mass.), seeks stout and able-bodied Seamen for a swift and lucrative trading voyage aboard the sloop HOPE.
· ROUTE: Providence → WINDWARD COAST of AFRICA → DANISH WEST INDIES → home.
· TERMS: Full share of profits, advance pay upon signing articles.
· PROVISIONS: Salted beef, biscuit, rum in good measure.
The advertisement reads like a promise. It offers profit, adventure, and steady provisions. It is concise, persuasive, and deliberately neutral about the voyage’s true purpose: the transatlantic slave trade.
Signing On
Men met at the Sign of the Golden Anchor and signed articles. For many, the language of the Gazette meant steady wages and a chance to travel. Yet the wording hid the transaction at the voyage’s heart: rum and manufactures exchanged for human lives on the Windward Coast.
The Windward Coast
At the Windward Coast, the ship took on its true cargo. Men, women, and children were crowded below deck. They were cataloged in ledgers as profit. The crew’s daily routine changed into brutal maintenance: feeding, cleaning, and counting bodies. The smell from below deck, sweat, sickness, and refuse became a constant; it clung to sailors long after the ocean breeze.
The Middle Passage
Once underway, the Atlantic became a corridor of suffering. Disease spread in the confined hold. Death was logged as cargo loss. Bodies were thrown overboard, and sharks tracked that grim trail. The Gazette’s promise of a prosperous and timely voyage met the ruthless arithmetic of profit and loss.
“It’s been forty days out from the Windward Coast... The hold is quiet again. But the chains rattle with every roll of the ship. We are sailing a tomb.”
Revolt in the Night
Oppression produced resistance. A revolt erupted on a moonless watch; chains became weapons; the enslaved surged onto the deck. For a terrifying, terrible moment, the ship itself was contested. The crew’s armament and position prevailed; pistols and cutlasses crushed the uprising. Some captives chose the ocean and the sharks over recapture.
The Danish West Indies
In St. Croix, the surviving captives were sold. The hold was scrubbed; accounts balanced. Merchants in Providence declared profit. The ship returned lighter in weight but burdened with conscience and ghosts. The Gazette’s advertisement had delivered its result: lucrative trade for the merchants, trauma and displacement for the survivors.
Epilogue
That small advertisement in the Providence Gazette masked a violent industry. When we read such notices today, we must read between the lines: understand the language of opportunity as part of a system that turned people into commodities and normalized cruelty. The Sloop Hope is not an isolated story; it is a clear example of how public print grounded the machinery of the transatlantic slave trade.
Did You Know?
The term A Lucrative Voyage in the Black Ivory Trade was a common euphemism in 18th-century New England seaports like Providence and Bristol. This grim phrase, found in newspaper advertisements, was code for the transatlantic slave trade. Black Ivory referred to enslaved Africans, commodifying human lives as mere cargo to be traded for profit. These ads promised sailors a full share of profits for a journey to the West African coast, but they concealed the brutal reality: the horrific Middle Passage, the constant threat of revolt, and the moral catastrophe that financed the prosperity of many northern merchants and ports.
