The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  27

  Guinea Gold and Guinea Slaves

  I

  The different groups of Atlantic islands participated in the slave trade in different ways: the Canaries as exporters of native slaves, and eventually as importers of black slaves to replace the depleted population; Madeira and the Azores as consumers, especially in the growing sugar industry; Cape Verde as a base for the despatch of slaves first to Portugal and later to the Caribbean and Brazil; São Tomé as another consumer of slaves, another point of despatch, and as the last home of captive Jewish children of Spanish descent. It is difficult to read the bare documents listing slave exports out of Cape Verde without a feeling of deep sadness and disgust. Children as young as two or three years old were transported through Santiago to Portugal (assuming they survived the journey); families were split up, as the slaves were divided into equally numbered groups and as one fifth of these animate trade goods were assigned to the Crown, with another share for the crusading Order of Christ. Prince Henry’s biographer, Zurara, described the misery of slaves arriving at Lagos in the Algarve in 1444:

  It is not their religion but their humanity that makes me weep in pity for their sufferings. If the brute animals, with their bestial feelings, understand the sufferings of their own kind through natural instinct, what would You have my human nature do when I see before my eyes that miserable company and remember that they too are of the generation of the sons of Adam? … To increase their sufferings still more, there now arrived those who had charge of the division of the captives, and they began to separate one from another in order to make the shares equal. It now became necessary to separate fathers from sons, wives from husbands, and brothers from brothers … You others, who are so busy in making that division of the captives, look with pity upon so much misery and note how they cling to one another so that you can hardly separate them!1

  In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas had insisted that slave-traders must not break up families, which would be contrary to natural law; but Prince Henry and his successors let this happen without a second thought. Zurara was not, however, alone in reasoning that enslavement also brought an inestimable advantage to these miserable people; they were given the opportunity to become good Christians, so captivity was in fact their road to salvation – a notion that was still in the air in the southern United States in the nineteenth century. Zurara had his prejudices too. He believed that black races were condemned to slavery because of sin – specifically the sin of their supposed ancestor, Ham, who mocked his naked and drunken father, Noah.2 Zurara complained that the black slaves he saw were very ugly, like monsters from Hell. Physical difference had not been an issue while the slaves traded in Iberia and the Mediterranean were white or light brown, and similar in colour and facial characteristics to southern Europeans – descriptions of Canary islanders stressed that their physique was similar to that of Europeans, that they were intelligent, and that, if anything, they were taller, though sometimes a little darker.3 No one was very interested in the intelligence of the black slaves, even though, as will be seen, many of them came from sophisticated, partly urbanized societies whose technology far surpassed that of the Neolithic Canary islanders.

  The slaves delivered to Portugal were callously seen as commodities, for all the talk of Christian salvation. Portuguese trading documents from around 1500 never name the slaves, any more than they would have attached names to the pieces of ivory that they also sent towards Portugal. No questions were asked about how these people were obtained. In one bare list from 1513 four ‘lots’ of African slaves are mentioned, consisting of two men in their early thirties, a teenage boy, two mature women and five children, one of whom, a girl of between ten and twelve years of age, was retained as a tax payment to the king’s officials; and this composition of a slave cargo was fairly typical of the time.4 The bare facts do not explain how the slave trade came into existence, what needs it was thought to satisfy, or where the slaves originated. But it is important to understand the origins of the transatlantic traffic in human beings that lasted for another 400 years and that, amid massive misery, reshaped the ethnic map of large areas of North America, South America and the Caribbean. This takes one back to the early history of Portuguese exploration in the Atlantic – exploration this time of coastlines rather than islands.

  II

  The challenge of Africa was of a very different order to the challenge posed by the occupation of uninhabited islands. Broadly, there was a difference between the lightly islamized peoples of the savannah, who controlled the great rivers, notably the Niger, and the peoples of the forests, who were animists, and who often became the target of the Muslim jihad against pagans. The pagan Serers, for instance, lived in present-day Sierra Leone and were flanked entirely by Muslim principalities or by the sea; not surprisingly, they would find common cause with the Portuguese. West Africa was known to be inhabited by people of high culture, many of them Muslim, many also living in large towns. These towns were the home of leather, cloth and other industries; payments were often made in cowrie shells, individually worth very little, so that a piece of cloth might cost tens of thousands of units. Many west African kings relied on cavalry; even when they were pagan, their courts welcomed Muslim merchants from the north, who lived in reserved areas not far from the court itself. Although war captives were enslaved, slavery in much of west Africa had many similarities to the serfdom of medieval Europe: slaves were occasionally sold, for instance to buy war horses; but the main task of slaves was to cultivate the land on behalf of their masters. Many features of these societies were therefore familiar to western Europeans.5

  Reports reached Europe of wealthy courts, such as that of Mansa Musa, king of Mali, whose fabulous wealth in gold was no fable; he continued to be shown on Catalan world maps well into the fifteenth century, and memories of his visit to Egypt, where he had scattered gold in the streets of Cairo and had set off rampant inflation, increased the certainty that the gold of Africa was within reach if only it were possible to bypass the caravan routes of the Sahara, dominated by Muslim Tuareg Berbers. Europeans were unaware that the power of the Mali empire had peaked by 1400; in 1431 the Tuaregs even managed to take control of Timbuktu, holding it for thirty-eight years.6 It has been seen that adventurers such as the Majorcan Jaume Ferrer, who vanished off the coast of Africa, were already heading out in search of the ‘River of Gold’ in the mid-fourteenth century. Around 1400 demand for gold was very high in Europe, and western Europe was experiencing a bullion famine, as gold and silver leaked out in payment for spices and eastern luxuries, targeted by an increasingly prosperous urban middle class as well as by princely courts that often spent beyond their means.7 Availability of sugar in southern Spain and the Atlantic islands helped ease the outflow of bullion to the Islamic world; the jury is still out on the question of whether this bullion famine was as severe and universal as some have argued. Economic warfare against Islam was an integral part of the grand strategy of late medieval crusaders; if the gold that north Africa and the Middle East received from sub-Saharan Africa, by way of Timbuktu and its neighbours, could be diverted to Christian Europe, a double blow would be struck: Christendom would be enriched and Islam would be impoverished.8

  In 1444 a Genoese spy, Antonio Malfante, penetrated deep into the Sahara in search of the sources of gold; but, if his trek proved anything, it was that an overland route managed by European traders was out of the question. Then the occupation of the Canary Islands opened up the prospect of European bases being created along the flank of Africa, but as it turned out the islands lay a long distance north of the sources of gold; moreover, the islands, being already inhabited, proved difficult to tame (Tenerife was only conquered in 1496, and Gran Canaria in 1483). It made more sense to see what could be found on the coast of Africa itself. The traditional date for the breakthrough into west Africa is 1434, when, under the patronage of the Order of Christ (and therefore of Prince Henry), Gil Eanes worked his way past the reefs of Cape Boj
ador into what were thought to be unknown waters, though it is quite possible pioneers such as the Genoese Vivaldi brothers in 1291 and Jaume Ferrer in 1346 had already gone beyond. However, Eanes not merely went beyond – he returned home. And he returned home a year later from a second expedition with reports of footprints left in the sand by human beings and their camels, as well as of rich fishing grounds, for, as ever, the Portuguese were on the lookout for good fish.9 Gradually the Portuguese gathered information about who lived along the outer shores of north-west Africa; these were lands inhabited by Sanhaja Berbers, or Aznaghi, some of whose ancestors had formed the mainstay of the terrifying Almoravid armies that invaded Iberia in the late eleventh century.

  The Portuguese did not involve themselves in any depth with the complicated politics of western Africa. Their aim was to find allies with whom they could trade, preferably in gold or ivory. Henry’s resources were far from limitless, although he made a handsome profit out of Madeiran sugar; and the Ceuta garrison was a constant drain on the resources of a kingdom that was only now lifting itself out of relative poverty. Alternative sources of revenue had to be found by Henry’s explorers. This led to the foundation of an offshore trading base at Arguim, on an island off the coast of modern Mauretania. The choice of a small island made excellent practical sense. No one lived there apart from a few Sanhaja fisherfolk. No ruler’s sovereignty was being challenged. The island was easily defensible. Offshore islands and defensible promontories had again and again been chosen by merchants in the Mediterranean, at least since the time of the Phoenicians, as safe places from which to penetrate the hinterland opposite.10 The Portuguese also briefly occupied the islands off Mogador, which had themselves been Phoenician bases in the days of the trade in purple dye.11

  It was all very well to create a base; but there were no big profits to be made out of sealskins, orchil dye or even fish. Ten years after the rounding of Cape Bojador one of Henry’s Genoese captains brought back to Lagos caravels crammed with 235 Berber (or ‘Moorish’) slaves he had captured along the coast of west Africa. They were put on show in Lagos, where Prince Henry and Zurara saw them, one taking pity and the other not.12 The first slaves to arrive en masse from Africa were therefore white or brown, not black; the trickle of Canary islanders towards Spain and Portugal had continued for a century already. But what Henry wanted to prove was that he could obtain more and better slaves with greater ease. In the years that followed, raids penetrated further south, and the expeditions returned with black slaves as well as brown ones; and eventually they came only with black slaves. Arguim and later the Cape Verde Islands served as way stations from which the captives were sent on to Portugal.13 Raiding was not the most satisfactory way to achieve this; trading was more effective. This required the Portuguese to make treaties with local rulers who might see some advantage in an alliance – whether the provision of trade goods, armaments or even mercenaries willing to fight on their behalf and to train local warriors in skilled horsemanship. This happened when the Portuguese made contact with the Serer people, animists who made no use of horses, but who realized how useful they would be in fending off the cavalry of the Muslim Mandinga and Wolofs on their borders. As a result the Cape Verde Islands became an important centre of horse-breeding within easy sailing distance, able to supply Serer needs. Even so, the islanders had to import a great amount of basic equipment such as bridles, bits and spurs from Portugal, before passing them on to their African allies.14

  The Portuguese were not dealing with maritime peoples. The boats they encountered as they crept down the coast of Africa were either rivercraft or vessels that kept close to shore, like the boats used by the fishermen of Arguim. There were no ports along the coast, although it was not too difficult to find safe harbours in river mouths. All this meant that it was much easier to make contact with local rulers inland than along the coast. However, by making full use of the virtues of the caravel, the Portuguese could navigate a long way upriver, whether in search of African towns and villages, or in the hunt for the ‘River of Gold’. In 1455 the Venetian nobleman in Prince Henry’s service, Alvise da Cà da Mosto, took his caravel up the Senegal River and reached the court of Budomel, an African king who extended a hearty welcome to the insatiably curious traveller, although one of his motives for doing so was his wish to increase his sexual potency still further – he already, as da Mosto discreetly wrote, ‘has a different dinner each night’.15 These river journeys continued: the Portuguese would travel as much as sixty miles up the river from their base at Cacheu-São Domingos, which was their largest base on the African coast by the end of the fifteenth century, trading in honey and fine-quality beeswax with the Mandinga in the interior.16 By 1500 too the Portuguese were not simply living in the Cape Verde Islands, Arguim and Cacheu. Some, the so-called lançados, or ‘thrown ones’, by and large people who had good reasons for not wishing to return to Portugal, were living among the Africans and had taken African women to their bed, with the result that a mulatto generation came into being.17 These good reasons included being under suspicion as New Christians who had not abandoned their Jewish religion. The lançados played an important role as cultural intermediaries, inspiring African ivory craftsmen to produce the extraordinary carvings of Portuguese soldiers and merchants that started to appear towards the end of the fifteenth century.

  This still leaves in the air the controversial question of how the Portuguese obtained the thousands of slaves they were exporting. Modern politics dominate discussion, and admitting that black rulers sold slaves to white merchants has not come easily to historians of the slave trade. The idea that these rulers sold their own people is certainly an oversimplification. The Serers did not enslave fellow Serers. War captives were another matter, and the intense struggles for power on the frontier between the savannah and the forest made sure that there were plenty of such captives. Further south, in Kongo and Angola, the situation was more complicated, and at the start of the sixteenth century the Portuguese leaned on local rulers to ensure that they delivered large numbers of slaves, even from their own population. The truth is that the slave trade could only come into being because plenty of different people collaborated: back in Portugal, Prince Henry and then the Crown; merchants of various origins, including Spaniards and Genoese as well as Portuguese; settlers living in the Cape Verde Islands; lançados living in west Africa; local African rulers; and even parents who imagined that selling their sons and daughters to the Portuguese would offer them new opportunities in rich lands far away. Payment often came in the form of manilhas, brass bracelets that could be worn or melted down to satisfy the craving of the African elite for copper and brass goods, for which they generally depended on imported raw materials. One slave might be worth forty to fifty bracelets. A ship called the Santiago that set out for Sierra Leone in 1526 carried 2,345 manilhas, which might be enough to purchase fifty or sixty slaves; and slaving in Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau before returning to Portugal by way of the Cape Verde Islands and Terceira in the Azores was the main aim of the voyage.18 Not every ship was carrying slaves; one Flemish ship captained by a well-born Portuguese sailor was only interested in ivory and raw cotton. The peoples who lived upriver were keen to receive raw cotton, which grew quite well in the Cape Verde Islands; and these peoples then sold cloth made out of this cotton.19

  III

  So long as the sources of gold lay out of range, the Portuguese continued to trade in slaves and ivory along what became known as the Guinea Coast, and the king of Portugal adopted the grandiose and not totally empty title ‘lord of the navigation of Guinea’. The discovery of a hot spice, named Malagueta pepper after the stretch of coast where it was first found, increased the attraction of the Guinea trade, even though this pepper did not compare in quality with the true pepper that continued to arrive in the eastern Mediterranean along the Indian Ocean sea routes; Malagueta pepper is not actually a botanical pepper, but a member of the ginger family. However, the Crown waited a while before it too
k direct control of traffic along the Guinea coast; a wealthy merchant and shipowner, Fernão Gomes, was granted licences that permitted him to trade beyond Sierra Leone. Gomes not merely had to pay a handsome sum each year for his special privilege; he had to sell all his ivory to the king at a knock-down price (before resale at a grand profit by the king) and promise to explore 100 miles of coast each year. Even without the gold, the profits were attractive enough for King Afonso to keep increasing his share of the Guinea trade, claiming a monopoly, for instance, on the import of civet cats, whose anal gland produced a foul-smelling excretion that perfumiers knew how to turn into one of the most prized scents in the world.20

  The more attractive Guinea became, the greater became the danger of interlopers, especially since the Canary Islands were occupied (as yet only partly) by Castilian forces, and provided a good base for pirates looking for business on the Guinea Coast. This problem became more serious still when the Portuguese king set out his claim to the crown of Castile following the death of King Henry ‘the Impotent’ in 1474 – he was not really impotent, but his half-sister, Isabella, who had married the heir to the throne of Aragon five years earlier, took the view that anyone accused of homosexuality must ipso facto be unable to father a child. So she pushed aside the claims of Henry’s daughter Juana and seized the throne; thereupon Afonso, already Juana’s uncle, married her and invaded Castile. The contest was settled on Iberian soil, with the victory of Ferdinand and Isabella; but events in the Atlantic, even if they were a small sideshow, had lasting effects too.21 These were the circumstances in which the Castilians gained control of the Cape Verde Islands for a while, in the hope that they could establish a Spanish stake in the Guinea trade.22 Ferdinand and Isabella hoped to intercept Portuguese fleets bringing Malagueta pepper, ivory and maybe even gold, while claims to Castilian dominion over the Guinea Coast were also put about, though it is hard to see what they might have been based upon, since by now the Portuguese could wave several papal bulls that confirmed their possession of the Guinea Coast. Meanwhile, Spanish traders arrived aboard three caravels at the mouth of the River Gambia, and started trading with the local ruler, buying slaves in return for brass bracelets and other goods. The king had no reason to suppose these Europeans were anything other than Portuguese. Tricked into visiting one of the ships, he and 140 of his best men were seized and carried off to Spain; King Ferdinand thought the capture of a king was a disgrace, and in solidarity with his fellow prince he sent him back to Africa, but several of his companions were less fortunate, and were sold as slaves in Andalusia.23