Ivory: the West African trade in elephant tusks

Where did ivory come from in 1715?

Almost all the ivory in the Atlantic trade came from African elephants. Historians group the places that sold it into three broad stretches of coast:

• Senegambia and the Guinea coast, including the rivers of Sierra Leone.
• The Gulf of Guinea, above all the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, today’s Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.
• The coast of Central Africa, from Gabon down through Loango and Kongo to Angola.

On the Gold Coast, Dutch records simply say the ivory came from “the coast”. Modern scientists have tested chemical traces in ivory objects dug up in Amsterdam, and the results suggest the elephants lived in many different parts of West Africa, both near the sea and far inland.

Further south, the Portuguese shipped ivory from Luanda and Benguela in Angola. There the trade was a crown monopoly, sold to contractors, and it stayed smaller than the Dutch and British trades.

Why was part of Africa called the Ivory Coast?

European traders named stretches of the West African shore after the goods they went there to buy, and one stretch, roughly today’s Côte d’Ivoire, became known for its tusks. It is usually said that Portuguese sailors called it the “ivory coast” and French writers the “coast of teeth”, though the old names and the exact limits of each coast varied from one writer to another.

The name was ordinary trade talk in the game’s era. In 1704 the Dutch merchant Willem Bosman, who had worked for years on the Gold Coast, published a famous book describing what he called the Gold, Tooth and Slave Coasts of Guinea. Today the country’s official name is Côte d’Ivoire.

Who hunted the elephants and controlled the trade?

Africans did. Archaeologists working in Ghana have found that people there were getting ivory, carving it and trading it with neighbours across the Sahara from at least the 1300s, before Portuguese ships reached the coast. In Sierra Leone in the 1500s, carvers made fine ivory salt cellars and horns for Portuguese buyers.

By 1715 the tusks that reached a European fort had passed through many hands. Hunters, who often worked in organised groups with their own customs and beliefs, brought them out of the forest and savanna. Porters and merchants carried them to the coast, and African rulers often claimed a share or a monopoly of the trade. European traders waited at their forts or anchored offshore and bargained for the tusks. They did not control the hunt.

Which companies traded ivory, and how much?

The biggest buyer on the Gold Coast was the Dutch West India Company, whose headquarters was the castle of Elmina. Between 1675 and 1731 it shipped almost 3 million pounds of ivory from the Gold Coast to the Netherlands, about 50,000 pounds a year on average. That was roughly a tenth of the value of everything it brought home from there. Some of the ivory was sold on to Asia; much of the rest was carved in Amsterdam.

The English Royal African Company, based at Cape Coast Castle, traded ivory too. Other English merchants were allowed into the trade from 1698, the company lost its last special rights in 1712, and after that it struggled against cheaper independent traders. Its letters and account books, now at The National Archives in Britain, are one of the main records of this trade.

Shipwrecks show how tusks travelled. A British ship wrecked off the Azores in the early 1700s carried 101 of them, some cut with traders’ marks.

How was ivory linked to gold and the slave trade?

Ivory was valuable, but it was never the main reason Europeans came. Gold drew them to the Gold Coast first. By the early 1700s the trade in captive people had overtaken both gold and ivory as the coast’s main export, and one historian estimates that even in the 1600s captives were worth two to three times all of western Africa’s other exports put together.

The trades were tangled together. The same forts, the same ships and often the same merchants dealt in tusks, gold and people. A ship could buy a few tusks at one stop and captives at the next. In Angola, ivory left Luanda alongside the Portuguese slave trade.

It was not the same everywhere. On the Ivory Coast itself, the slave trade was smaller than on the neighbouring coasts, and later in the 1700s Dutch ships there bought mainly ivory and few captives.

What did Europeans make from ivory?

Ivory is hard, creamy-white and can be carved in very fine detail, so it was used for small, useful things that looked expensive. Archaeologists digging in Amsterdam found that most of the combs from the 1600s and 1700s were made of elephant ivory, and so were more knife handles than any other material. They also found ivory dice, gaming pieces, toys, fans, brushes, buttons and boxes, along with workshop scraps showing how tusks were sawn into blocks.

In France, the port of Dieppe was famous for its ivory carvers, who made small carvings and fine everyday objects. Furniture makers set ivory into wood as inlay. A carved ivory comb or fan was something a well-off family showed off.

Piano keys and billiard balls, the uses many people think of first, came later. Ivory piano keys became a huge business in the 1800s, when much of the ivory came from East Africa instead.

What happened to Africa’s elephants?

Centuries of buying tusks had a lasting effect. In parts of Ghana, local ivory carving faded after about 1600 as more and more ivory was sold to the coast for export. Scientists who studied the DNA of tusks from a 1500s shipwreck found family lines of elephants that no longer exist in West Africa today.

Hunting grew much heavier in the 1800s, when demand for piano keys and billiard balls soared, and poaching struck again in recent times: forest elephant numbers fell by about 62% between 2002 and 2011. Today the African forest elephant, which lives in the rainforests from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana to Cameroon and Gabon, is listed as Critically Endangered, the most serious level before extinction in the wild. Countries agreed in 1989 to stop the international trade in ivory, and the ban came into force in 1990, though poaching continues.