Tumbeiro

File:NavioNegreiro.gif

Diagram of a Portuguese slave transport ship, showing how enslaved Africans were arranged in the hold to maximize cargo

Template:Prod llm/dated A tumbeiro was a Portuguese and Brazilian term for the slave ships that transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil during the Atlantic slave trade. The word derives from tumba (Portuguese for "tomb" or "coffin"), reflecting the appalling mortality rates aboard these vessels, which were widely regarded as floating coffins or mobile graveyards. The term was used interchangeably with navio negreiro (literally "black ship" or "slave ship"), though tumbeiro carried a more visceral connotation, evoking the death that pervaded these voyages.

Brazil was the largest single destination of the transatlantic slave trade, receiving an estimated 4.8 to 5.5 million enslaved Africans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, far more than any other country in the Americas. The historian Robert Edgar Conrad titled his landmark study of this trade Tumbeiros in its original 1985 Portuguese edition, underscoring how central the slave ship was to the Brazilian experience of slavery.

Etymology and usage

The word tumbeiro is formed from tumba (tomb, coffin, or grave) with the suffix -eiro, which in Portuguese denotes an agent or instrument. In its primary dictionary definition, a tumbeiro is a person who carries the dead to the tomb, a coffin-bearer. By extension, the term came to be applied to the slave ships that carried so many to their deaths during the Middle Passage. The death rate on these voyages was so high that contemporaries regarded the ships themselves as instruments of death, and the word entered common usage in Brazil as a synonym for navio negreiro.

Some Brazilian sources also use the term cemitérios ambulantes (mobile cemeteries) as a further descriptive synonym.

The Brazilian slave trade

Scale

The slave trade to Brazil was the largest branch of the transatlantic slave trade. From approximately 1530, when the first recorded shipment of enslaved Africans arrived with the expedition of Martim Afonso de Sousa, until the effective suppression of the trade around 1850, Brazil imported more enslaved Africans than all other destinations in the Americas combined. The port of Rio de Janeiro recorded the highest number of slave ship arrivals in the Americas, particularly after the transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil in 1808. Salvador da Bahia and Recife were also major ports of disembarkation.

The trade drew enslaved people from multiple regions of Africa. In the earliest centuries, Portuguese Guinea (Cacheu and Bissau) and the Gold Coast were significant sources. From the seventeenth century onward, Angola (especially the ports of Luanda and Benguela) and the Bight of Benin (the Costa da Mina, including Ouidah, Lagos, and Porto-Novo) became the dominant sources of supply. In the 1790s, Mozambique in East Africa was added as a new and distant source, extending the voyage considerably.

Reasons for the trade's persistence

The slave trade to Brazil persisted for over three centuries, far longer than in most other slaveholding societies in the Americas. Historian Robert Conrad argued that this was because of persistently low slave fertility rates (due to a heavily male-skewed population) and extraordinarily high slave mortality caused by overwork, malnutrition, and a general indifference among slaveholders to the longevity of their enslaved workers, so long as replacements could be cheaply obtained from Africa.

Characteristics of the vessels

Enslaved Africans being forced to "dance" on the deck of a slave ship, a practice imposed to maintain their physical condition during the voyage

The tumbeiros were not purpose-built vessels but rather ordinary merchant ships adapted for the transport of human cargo. They varied widely in size and type, ranging from small schooners and brigantines to larger barques and galleons. According to the historian Jaime Rodrigues, the ships used in the Brazilian trade were typically chosen for their manoeuvrability (necessary for the shallow anchorages of the African coast), their speed (essential for evading the Royal Navy after the trade became illegal in 1831), and their low cost (to minimize losses in case of shipwreck or capture).

The holds of the tumbeiros were typically divided into three levels: the lower hold, used for storing water and food supplies; a falsa coberta (false deck), where the enslaved were confined; and the upper deck. The vertical space allotted to each level was often less than half a metre, meaning that enslaved people could not sit upright. Each ship carried an average of 400 enslaved people, though vessels carrying 600 or more were not uncommon, and at least one documented case involved over 700 people on a single vessel.

Enslaved people were separated by sex: men were chained together in pairs and confined to one side of the hold, while women and children were placed in another section. All were kept naked. The holds were dark, poorly ventilated, and intensely hot. The stench was so overpowering that contemporary accounts reported slave ships could be smelled from a considerable distance before they reached port.

Conditions and mortality

The voyage

The duration of the crossing varied significantly depending on the route. A voyage from Angola to Pernambuco averaged approximately 35 days; from Angola to Rio de Janeiro, around 50 days. Voyages from the more distant coast of Mozambique could take four months or more. During this time, the enslaved received one meal per day, typically consisting of beans, corn flour (fubá), rice, and dried fish or meat, which was often spoiled.

In the early decades of the trade, slavers deliberately underfeeded their captives in order to weaken them and reduce the risk of rebellion. Water was rationed. The enslaved were occasionally brought to the upper deck and forced to move or "dance" as a form of forced exercise to keep them alive and marketable. Those who refused to eat were subjected to force-feeding. Those who attempted suicide by jumping overboard were deterred by nets strung along the sides of the ship.

Causes of death

The principal causes of death aboard tumbeiros were dysentery (known as the "bloody flux"), scurvy, smallpox, measles, and other infectious diseases, all of which spread rapidly in the cramped, unsanitary conditions of the hold. Dehydration and malnutrition were constant contributing factors. Many enslaved people also died of what contemporary sources called banzo, a state of deep melancholy, despair, and withdrawal that modern scholars have compared to severe depression or acute psychological trauma resulting from the violent uprooting from their homeland.

Mortality rates varied by period and route. Herbert S. Klein's study of the Rio de Janeiro slave trade between 1795 and 1811 found a mortality rate of 95 per thousand (approximately 9.5 percent) for voyages from West Africa. A later study covering 1825 to 1830 found the rate had declined to approximately 7.1 percent, possibly due to shorter sailing times and improved provisioning. However, voyages from the more distant Mozambique coast had significantly higher death rates. The Portuguese vessel Protector, for example, lost 339 of 807 enslaved people (a mortality rate of over 40 percent) on a single voyage from Mozambique to Brazil.

Conrad estimated that the enslaved people who reached Brazilian ports represented only about 40 percent of those originally captured in Africa, with the remaining 60 percent dying during capture, forced marches to the coast, confinement in coastal barracoons, or during the Middle Passage itself. By this reckoning, Brazil's slave system cost Africa an estimated 12.5 million lives over the entire period of the trade.

Disposal of the dead

The bodies of those who died during the voyage were thrown overboard. In some cases, enslaved people who were gravely ill but still alive were also thrown into the sea, sometimes weighted with stones, to prevent the spread of disease and to reduce the ship's burden. When British naval patrols began intercepting slave ships in the early nineteenth century, captains sometimes ordered their entire human cargo thrown overboard to destroy evidence of illegal trafficking.

Resistance

Enslaved people aboard tumbeiros resisted their captivity in various ways. Revolts and uprisings, though rarely successful, were a constant fear of the crews and a significant risk factor in the economics of the trade. The most famous such revolt aboard a ship bound for Brazil-related destinations was the Amistad revolt of 1839. On the Brazilian route, the brig Kentucky experienced a revolt in 1845 that ended with the killing of all the rebels, whose bodies were thrown into the sea.

Other forms of resistance included hunger strikes, self-harm, and suicide by jumping overboard. The phenomenon of banzo, the deep melancholy that killed many captives, has also been interpreted by some scholars as a form of passive resistance or psychological withdrawal from an unbearable reality.

Suppression

British pressure

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron began patrolling the Atlantic to intercept slave ships. After the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1810 and subsequent agreements, Britain exerted increasing diplomatic and military pressure on both Portugal and Brazil to end the trade. Captains of tumbeiros responded by using faster, smaller vessels, sailing under false flags, and developing elaborate evasion tactics, including sailing at night and using coded communications.

Brazilian legislation

The Lei Feijó of 1831 formally prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans into Brazil and declared all enslaved people entering the country after that date to be free. The law was, however, widely ignored, giving rise to the Brazilian expression lei para inglês ver ("a law for the English to see"), meaning a law enacted only for show. The trade continued on a massive and largely open basis throughout the 1830s and 1840s, with an estimated one million or more enslaved Africans entering Brazil illegally during this period.

It was only with the Eusébio de Queirós Law of 1850, enacted under renewed British pressure (including British naval incursions into Brazilian territorial waters under the Aberdeen Act of 1845), that the trade was effectively suppressed. Some clandestine voyages continued into the late 1850s and possibly the early 1860s.

Cultural legacy

Literature

The tumbeiro occupies a central place in Brazilian literature and collective memory. The most famous literary work on the subject is the epic poem O Navio Negreiro ("The Slave Ship"), written in 1868 by the Romantic poet Castro Alves, who became known as o poeta dos escravos (the poet of the slaves). First performed publicly on 7 September 1868 at a literary event in São Paulo, the poem is a vivid and harrowing depiction of conditions aboard a slave ship and became a powerful weapon in the Brazilian abolitionist campaign. It remains one of the most widely read and recited poems in the Portuguese-language literary canon.

Historiography

Nègres a fond de calle (Enslaved Africans in the hold), painting by Johann Moritz Rugendas, c. 1830

The term tumbeiro was adopted by the American historian Robert Edgar Conrad as the title of the Portuguese edition of his study World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil, published in São Paulo by Editora Brasiliense in 1985 as Tumbeiros: O Tráfico Escravista para o Brasil. The book documented the full scope of the Brazilian slave trade, arguing that the institution of slavery in Brazil was far more brutal than the myth of a "benign" master-slave relationship had long suggested. Other major works on the Brazilian slave trade include Manolo Florentino's Em Costas Negras (1997), which used shipping records and estate inventories to reconstruct the economics of the Rio de Janeiro slave trade, and Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), which examined the Anglo-American slave ship as a formative institution of Atlantic slavery.

Naming of the ships

A striking aspect of the Brazilian slave trade, noted by historians such as Daniel Domingues da Silva, is the cynical and often religiously inspired names given to tumbeiros by their owners. Ships that carried thousands of people to enslavement and death bore names such as Amável Donzela (Lovely Maiden), Boa Intenção (Good Intention), Brinquedo dos Meninos (Children's Toy), Caridade (Charity), Feliz Destino (Happy Destiny), and Graciosa Vingativa (Gracious Avenger). Wilson Prudente, a member of Brazil's Truth Commission on Black Slavery (OAB-Rio de Janeiro), has argued that these names were not accidental but reflected the slave traders' deliberate attempt to mask the nature of their enterprise.

See also

• Slave ship
• Middle Passage
• Atlantic slave trade to Brazil
• Slavery in Brazil
• Seasoning (slavery)
• Castro Alves
• Eusébio de Queirós Law
• West Africa Squadron
• Coffin ship

Further reading

• Conrad, Robert Edgar (1985). Tumbeiros: O Tráfico Escravista para o Brasil. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense. (Published in English as World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-8071-1245-8 Search this book on .)
• Florentino, Manolo (1997). Em Costas Negras: Uma História do Tráfico de Escravos entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro (Séculos XVIII e XIX). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. ISBN 978-85-393-0557-5 Search this book on .
• Klein, Herbert S. (1999). The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-46588-8 Search this book on .
• Rediker, Marcus (2007). The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-01823-9 Search this book on .
• Rodrigues, Jaime (2018). "Navio Negreiro". In: Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz; Gomes, Flávio dos Santos (eds.). Dicionário da Escravidão e Liberdade: 50 Textos Críticos. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

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