A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger

By Johann Peter Oettinger, Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg

As he traveled across Germany and the Netherlands and sailed on Dutch and Brandenburg slave ships to the Caribbean and Africa from 1682 to 1696, the young German barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger (1666–1746) recorded his experiences in a detailed journal, discovered by Roberto Zaugg and Craig Koslofsky in a Berlin archive. Oettinger’s journal describes shipboard life, trade in Africa, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the sale of enslaved captives in the Caribbean.

Translated here for the first time, A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade documents Oettinger’s journeys across the Atlantic, his work as a surgeon, his role in the purchase and branding of enslaved Africans, and his experiences in France and the Netherlands. His descriptions of Amsterdam, Curaçao, St. Thomas, and Suriname, as well as his account of societies along the coast of West Africa, from Mauritania to Gabon, contain rare insights into all aspects of Europeans’ burgeoning trade in African captives in the late seventeenth century. This journeyman’s eyewitness account of all three routes of the triangle trade will be invaluable to scholars of the early modern world on both sides of the Atlantic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813944463

Book preview

A GERMAN BARBER-SURGEON IN THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN GERMAN HISTORY

H. C. Erik Midelfort, Editor

A GERMAN BARBER-SURGEON IN THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger

Edited and translated by Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2020 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8139-4445-6 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-0-8139-4446-3 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: Keelhauling of a ship’s surgeon, Lieve Verschuier, 1660–1686 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam); Johann Peter Oettinger, anonymous painter, ca. 1700 (© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin; photo by Michael Setzpfandt); enslaved man in Senegal, from the Letters on the Slave Trade by Thomas Clarkson, 1791 (Library Company of Philadelphia)

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Notes on Usage

THE JOURNAL OF JOHANN PETER OETTINGER

Appendix: Documents for Comparison

An Annotated Guide to Sources

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Unlike Portugal, Spain, England, and France, none of the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire ever possessed a colonial empire. The colored textbook maps depicting the overseas dominions of European powers during the first global age (c. 1450–1815) do not show any Bavarian, Saxon, Hanseatic, or German territories in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Pie charts representing national shares of the transatlantic slave trade barely display a slice devoted to the German lands.

For generations, the absence of German colonies during the first global age has led historians to draw a sharp line between the history of the Holy Roman Empire (the political unit that largely contained the German-speaking population of Europe) and what we call—in a slightly triumphant way—the history of European expansion. The emergence of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French empires, and the rivalry and violence that accompanied their development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, seemed very distant from German history as it moved from an age of Reformations to the disaster and destruction of the Thirty Years’ War. Certainly, some astute historians crossed the line between German history and European colonial history to make visible the connections between the German lands and new colonial sources of wealth and power, such as New World silver. But until very recently an awareness of such connections did not really affect the grand narrative of early modern German history: it continued to be conceived and narrated as a fundamentally intra-European scenario. Connections between the German lands and the wider world were not ignored, but, overall, they remained outside the focus of both academic scholarship and public memory.

This landlocked view of early modern German history has begun to change. As recent scholarship has made unmistakably clear, the men and women of the Holy Roman Empire were by no means disconnected from the early modern phase of globalization. Hamburg merchants invested in ventures to the Indies; German sailors served on East- and West-Indiamen; soldiers from Saxony and Hesse provided troops for colonial wars. Aristocrats and princes showed off their African servants (acquired through the Atlantic slave trade), and city-dwellers and peasants learned to love tobacco. German armchair travelers devoured accounts about foreign lands and peoples, nourishing the business of printers and engravers who responded to—and fueled—a growing interest in the distant wonders of the world.

Atlantic slavery played an important—although often overlooked—role in connecting early modern Germany to global trade. Not only did individual German merchants invest in slave-ship voyages or even acquire Caribbean plantations, but the trade also created economic and cultural ties at the regional level. German-speaking Europe was a huge market for the colonial goods produced by enslaved labor: re-export to the territories of the Holy Roman Empire constituted a major business for those European nations who did control overseas dominions—and for those German entrepreneurs who succeeded in establishing themselves as commercial brokers. The vast sugar-refining industry of Hamburg is one example of this. On the production side, specific manufactures such as knives, brass work, stoneware vessels, and linen textiles, produced in German towns or protoindustrial regions far from the shores of the North Sea, were key exports to both coastal West Africa and colonial America. Historians of early modern Africa have long debated how deeply, and in what ways, the economic force of the Atlantic slave trade affected the interior of the continent. Historians of early modern Central Europe have begun to ask similar questions, reconceptualizing the German-language region as a globalized periphery or even as a true slavery hinterland.¹ One can no longer write the history of this region without considering its place in Atlantic and global economic, migratory, and cultural exchanges.

Johann Peter Oettinger’s biography is just one small thread in the vast, interwoven fabric that connected early modern Germany with the wider world. This book shares his story—the story of a teenager, a journeyman barber-surgeon, who left home to earn a living. He did so by walking from town to town, covering thousands of miles. He shaved beards, let blood, and set broken bones. For some years he worked for chartered slave-trading companies, which made huge profits by buying and transporting enslaved men, women, and children from one side of the Atlantic to the other. After fourteen years as a journeyman, Oettinger came home to his small town in southwestern Germany, where he settled down and became a respected citizen, husband, and father.

During his travels in Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean, he kept a diary, writing down his day-to-day experiences: an extraordinary document from a rather ordinary man. Through chance, family pride, and a great deal of luck, Oettinger’s Travel Account and Biography has survived the three centuries since he wrote it. Today it can serve many purposes. One might be tempted to read it as a callous tale of adventure, but it also contains significant anthropological evidence and offers valuable details about the economic ties between Germany and the Atlantic world. Oettinger’s diary provides us with precious insights into the precarious youth of a poor migrant, and it is among the very few writings that allow us to reconstruct in detail the travels of a seventeenth-century artisan. And it is, first and foremost, the only known German-language eyewitness account of an entire slave-ship voyage in the triangle trade. By reading Oettinger’s description of the voyage from Europe to Africa, on to the Americas, and then back to Europe, we can reflect on daily life in the slave trade, its quotidian brutality, and the willingness of ordinary men to enact it. It bears straightforward witness to the commodification of human life and to the banality of evil.

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Editing and publishing a work like this adds a new chapter to the manuscript’s history. As editors and translators of Oettinger’s diary, our chapter began in April 2012 when we met in Liverpool. Working independently, in 2010 and 2011 we had both discovered the manuscript in a neglected corner of a Berlin archive. Neither of us knew that the other had found the diary. In 2012 we learned of one another, each startled to discover that on the other side of the planet, another scholar was doing research on the very same document. After an initial moment of unsettling surprise, what could have become a disagreeable competition rapidly developed into a fruitful cooperation and, over time, into a true friendship. The conference where we met and co-presented the diary to the public, The Slave Business and Its Material and Moral Hinterlands in Continental Europe, held at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, was the starting point for our shared project. We have continued to work on the diary ever since, more or less intensely, meeting in Paris, Basel, and Urbana, and at conferences in Dakar and Bremen.²

We worked to decipher the text and identify the persons and places Oettinger mentioned, to understand his jokes, and to see what he left out. But we sought, above all, to make sense of the life and words of this migrant laborer in broader contexts: the connected but deeply different worlds of continental Europe, coastal West Africa, and the colonies of the Caribbean. In Oettinger’s time all three regions were undergoing profound changes that historians are still working to understand. By translating Oettinger’s journal into English, we intend to make this source accessible to a broader readership, for whom the (early modern) German text would have been a significant obstacle.³ We hope that—together with the introduction and the additional documentary sources—this translation will be able to speak both to scholars pursuing their own research and to students engaging with the history of the Atlantic world. (We have kept the footnotes to a minimum: interested readers who wish to learn more will find a thematically ordered guide to sources in the back matter.)

Over these years we have had the opportunity to present our work on several occasions and to discuss it with a wide range of colleagues. For the stimulating debates we had and the critical feedback we received at different stages of the project, we are deeply grateful to Adam Jones, Kofi E. Baku, Felix Brahm, Gérard Chouin, Martin Dinges, David Diop, Renate Dürr, Philip Hahn, Wolfgang Kaiser, Martin Klein, Josef Köstlbauer, Stefan Kraut, Sarah Lentz, Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, Pap Ndiaye, Akosua A. Perbi, Matthieu Péry, Eve Rosenhaft, Ousmane Seydi, Jakob Vogel, Klaus Weber, as well as the late Patrick Harries. All the participants at the 2012 Liverpool conference on The Slave Business and Its Material and Moral Hinterlands in Continental Europe deserve a special word of thanks for their engagement with this project at its earliest stage. Much more recently Christina Brauner, Karwan Fatah-Black, Erika Gasser, and Hannah Murphy each read the book manuscript and offered vital advice and suggestions, which we greatly appreciated.

During the transcription and editing process, we have benefitted from the skills and support of Laurent Burrus, Cristian Consuegra, Anja Eichelberg, Amanda Eisemann, Lance Lubelski, Leslie Tingle, and Iris van Meer. Erik Midelfort was enthusiastic from the start and hugely encouraging, and we are proud that the book appears in Studies in Early Modern German History. The advice of Richard Holway and Nadine Zimmerli was crucial as we transformed our project into a book for the University of Virginia Press. A true Atlantic German, Nadine went above and beyond her editorial duties by comparing our translation with the original German text, which improved the finished product greatly. Many thanks to Patrice Mitrano and Anouk Pettes of the Atelier de Cartographie de Sciences Po for mapping Oettinger’s voyages. Our research and editorial project would not have been possible without the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Additional funding has been provided by the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft Basel, the Institut Français d’Histoire en Allemagne (now Institut Franco-Allemand de Sciences Historiques et Sociales), and by the universities at which we have worked during these years.

Craig would like to thank in particular his colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Illinois, especially participants in the Premodern World Reading Group. For their help with the funding of this project, thanks go out to Tom Bedwell, Maria Gillombardo, Tim Tufte, and Stefanie Walker. For advice, assistance, and inspiration thanks to Erika Gasser, Erik Gøbel, Andrew Kettler, Hannah Murphy, Jenny Shaw, and John Thornton; Regulus Allen and Richard Frohock of the Early Caribbean Society; and Sean Hanretta and the Program of African Studies, Northwestern University. My deepest thanks go, as always, to Dana Rabin.

This project has accompanied Roberto on his postdoctoral peregrinations, leading from the University of Basel to Sciences Po (Paris), then back in Switzerland, to the universities of Lausanne, Bern, and finally Zurich. Kaspar von Greyerz introduced me to the study of early modern autobiographical sources, encouraged me to explore new scholarly horizons, and has been, with his advice and friendship, a constant point of reference. Questions about the ways to engage with European travelogues have been a persistent challenge—discussions with Susanna Burghartz provided a precious resource for fine-tuning my analytical tools. On the shores of the Lac Léman I was warmly welcomed by Danièle Tosato-Rigo and her research group working on first-person writings from early modern Switzerland. Christian Windler and I only overlapped for a couple of months at the Historisches Institut in Bern, but his support began well before that, and his scholarly inspiration continues to the present. Francisca and Davide have been with me all along through the years of work on this book: I owe them much.

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Together we dedicate this book to our families in Europe, Africa, and America.

Urbana and Basel, January 2020

NOTES

1. See Brahm and Rosenhaft, Slavery Hinterland, as well as Wimmler and Weber, Globalized Peripheries.

2. L’Afrique des savants européens (XVIIe–XXe siècle), Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, 5–7 February 2018; Traces of the Slave Trade in the Holy Roman Empire and Its Successor States: Discourses, Practices, and Objects, 1500–1850, Universität Bremen, 29 November–1 December 2018.

3. A German critical edition will be published separately.

Abbreviations

ANOM Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence)

BAC Brandenburg African Company (1682–92)

BAAC Brandenburg African-American Company (1692–1717)

BArch (B.-L.) Bundesarchiv (Berlin-Lichterfelde)

BNF Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris)

BS Brandenburg Sources for West African History, 1680–1700 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985)

GS German Sources for West African History, 1599–1669 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1983)

GStA PK Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin)

JPOe Ms 1779 copy, Travel Account and Biography (1682–96) of Johann Peter Oettinger, GStA PK, VI. Hauptarchiv, Familienarchiv Oettinger, 12

NA Nationaal Archief (The Hague)

RA Rigsarkivet (Copenhagen)

RAC (English) Royal African Company

StadtA Stadtarchiv (municipal archive)

TNA The National Archives (Kew/London)

UkF Unter kurbrandenburgischer Flagge (Berlin: R. Eisenschmidt, 1886)

VOC (Dutch) East India Company

WIC (Dutch) West India Company

WIGC (Danish) West India and Guinea Company

Introduction

JOHANN PETER OETTINGER: BARBER-SURGEON, JOURNEYMAN, AUTHOR

On March 15, 1693, a twenty-seven-year-old German man named Johann Peter Oettinger arrived at the royal court of King Agbangla of Hueda, in the town of Savi in present-day Benin.¹ He had just been carried there from shore on a hammock—it took the local porters several hours to make the seven-mile journey inland across lagoons and grassland. Safely offshore, out beyond the enormous waves and surf of the coast, the ship on which he served, the Friedrich Wilhelm, rode at anchor. As Oettinger looked around at the royal palace, the king’s many wives, the cannons protecting the English and French lodges, and the powerful local leaders (caboceers) with their servant boys walking behind them, it must have struck him: he had never been so far from home.

In terms of sheer miles, he had in fact already traveled a greater distance: in 1688 he sailed with the Dutch West India Company (WIC) to the Caribbean, landing first at Curaçao, about 5,200 miles from his tiny hometown of Künzelsau in southwestern Germany. The court of King Agbangla in Savi was only about 3,200 miles from Künzelsau as the crow flies. But in the Caribbean, Oettinger had seen only European colonial sites: Dutch Curaçao, the Danish island of St. Thomas, and Dutch Suriname. The Kingdom of Hueda was not ruled by Europeans. Like most of sub-Saharan Africa, it was (from the European perspective) an alien place. In the region just to the west (modern-day Ghana) local rulers permitted Europeans to build trade forts, but in the Kingdom of Hueda no European settlements were allowed. Oettinger and the other Europeans at Savi depended entirely on the king for their security. They had come to a place where the Negroes are the masters (as one English official put it).

There was only one force powerful enough to bring ordinary European men like Oettinger into the West African royal court of Savi: the slave trade. This ship that brought Oettinger to Africa, the Friedrich Wilhelm, was a slaver. It left Europe with a crew of 140 men, but in West Africa it had been refitted to carry human cargo, and two great cooking cauldrons were built into the main deck, so that (as Oettinger explained) food could be cooked therein for 7[00] to 800 people. All of these people would be slaves, and almost all these slaves would be purchased, branded, and loaded in Hueda.

What was Johann Peter Oettinger’s role in all this? As a young barber-surgeon on a slave ship, Oettinger was what we might call a subaltern perpetrator: a low-ranking but willing participant in the enslavement of Africans. He described the trade in humans without condemnation or criticism; indeed, he did not even question it. Atlantic slavery was simply a part of the world Johann Peter found when he left his native region, rural Hohenlohe, in 1682 and began to trudge as a journeyman across Germany and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam he discovered the demand for surgeons on ships bound for Africa or the Indies, and he sailed for the Caribbean; in 1692 he signed on with the Friedrich Wilhelm for a second Atlantic journey. This slave ship would sail first to Africa to trade European and Asian goods for enslaved Africans, and then take these slaves on the dreaded Middle Passage to America (in this case the Caribbean), where those who survived would be sold. The profits would buy New World sugar, cotton, and tobacco, which the Friedrich Wilhelm would then carry back to Europe and sell for yet more profit. On both of his Atlantic voyages, Oettinger himself purchased a few crates of sugar, cotton, and tobacco in the Caribbean to sell at a profit in Europe. He was—literally—personally invested in the slave trade through the products of slave labor.

As he took part in the triangle trade, Oettinger noted in a journal what he saw and felt. Oettinger started the journal when he became a journeyman in 1682. Like a college transcript, it would document his learning and experience as a barber-surgeon so that he could one day become a master of his trade. And Oettinger continued the journal until he returned home to Hohenlohe, settled down, and became a master barber-surgeon in 1696. His journal is the only known German-language eyewitness account of a slave ship sailing all three sides of the triangle trade from Europe to Africa and the Americas.

In this journal Oettinger tried to bridge the enormous distance between Künzelsau and the Caribbean or West Africa. He wrote for his family and for some future group of master barber-surgeons who would one day examine him and question him about his travels. None of these people would know firsthand what the Atlantic world of slavery and trade looked like, so Oettinger had to situate himself—geographically, socially, professionally, and morally—in this unfamiliar world. Consider one part of his description of the Kingdom of Hueda: Moreover, stealing and cheating are very much in vogue, so that the king himself is completely given over to theft. . . . The king had his hand right in the barrel [of cowrie shells, i.e., currency] as soon as one was opened; and as soon as one did not pay close attention, he took some sneakily. . . . Even though we could see what he was doing, neither the chief factor nor I could say anything about it. This sounds like a familiar contrast between honest Europeans and thieving Africans or between good Christians and immoral pagans, as Oettinger continues: "If the biggest thieves here were to be hanged, one would have to start by hanging the king and his Herren [lords] caboceers. But then Oettinger immediately follows this conclusion with another point, one not found in the journals of any of the slave ship captains or merchants who wrote about West Africa at this time: —But enough of that. Among us Christians as well, the big thieves usually get away and the little ones are put to death."² Oettinger shifts from a Christian-pagan contrast to the social hierarchy of big vs. little. For him it is all too clear that the powerful go unpunished while the lesser folk pay with their lives—whether in Germany or in Hueda. Keenly aware of social hierarchy, he rejects the easy moral superiority of Christian over pagan African. In his journal Oettinger reveals himself to be a subaltern perpetrator engaged in the European stereotyping of Africans, but he is also looking up at the greed of kings (European or African) and noting wryly that the privileges of the powerful cross the line between pagan and Christian. It is this perspective, developed throughout his journal, that makes it such an engaging source for European, African, and Caribbean history.

To understand Oettinger’s unique journal, we must understand the author. Johann Peter Oettinger was born in 1666 in the tiny village of Orendelsall; the rural town of Künzelsau in the region of Franconia, where Oettinger died in 1746, lies only about ten miles from Orendelsall. Both localities are in the Kocher valley, where Oettinger’s ancestors had been living since at least the 1560s. In Oettinger’s day the region was ruled by different branches of the Hohenlohe family; the nearest cities were Heilbronn and Schwäbisch Hall. It might seem that Johann Peter was firmly rooted in his region—and for the major part of his life this impression is correct. Both during his childhood and during his adult life as master craftsman he did not travel—as far as we know—beyond his native region in the southwest of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation (which today lies within the German state of Baden-Württemberg). But as a young man he travelled extraordinary distances. During fourteen years as a journeyman he crisscrossed the territories of modern-day Germany and the Netherlands and embarked on ships that took him as far west as Curaçao in the Caribbean and south to the equator in the Gulf of Guinea. From the ages of sixteen to thirty, this small-town artisan lived a life punctuated by a period of exceptional mobility.

Johann Peter Oettinger, unknown artist, watercolor. (© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin; photo by Michael Setzpfandt)

In 1669, when Johann Peter was three years old, his family moved to Künzelsau, where his father, Johann Adam Oettinger, was appointed pastor of the town’s Lutheran church. The family planned for Johann Adam’s first-born son, Johann Christoph, to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a pastor, so he was sent to study theology at the university in Jena (where Johann Peter visited him in 1685). As the second son, Johann Peter was directed to a skilled trade: he would become a barber-surgeon.

In early modern Europe, barber-surgeons were craftsmen, just like tailors, butchers, smiths, and the like. Since the Middle Ages, a sharp line separated them from physicians, both legally and socially. Physicians were educated at universities on the basis of scholarly texts that were still largely written in Latin; barber-surgeons practiced one of many lower-ranking mechanical arts (artes mechanicae). Like shoemakers or tailors, they were organized in guilds and learned their trade by working for masters of their craft, first as apprentices, then as journeymen. Their field was hands-on care of the human body: barber-surgeons dressed wounds, stitched up cuts, and treated fractures, ulcers, and burns. They often practiced bloodletting, teeth pulling, and shaving and cutting hair—hence the term barber-surgeon.

And so in 1679, at the age of thirteen, Johann Peter was sent to Schwäbisch Hall and apprenticed to the master surgeon Joachim Matthias Sander. Family connections played a decisive role here: Sander’s wife, Rosina Beeg (1626–84), was the daughter of Caspar Benignus Beeg, Johann Adam’s mentor and predecessor as pastor of Künzelsau. After the death of her first husband in 1671, she had inherited the latter’s workshop and then married Sander, a much younger journeyman who—by virtue of this marriage—was promoted to the rank of master and owner of the Beeg family barber’s surgery. Johann Peter’s apprenticeship with Joachim Matthias Sander was cut short, however: in 1681 Master Sander ran away with his stepdaughter, who had become his mistress.³

Oettinger’s house