The Boundless Sea
Page 98
Portugal was able to face up to its Spanish enemy thanks in part to the support of the English and the Dutch. Angra became the base for merchants from all over Europe; the Dutch consul acted on behalf of other nations as well, including Denmark, Sweden and Hamburg. Seventeenth-century Angra has been described as ‘one of the nodal points of Atlantic maritime commerce’.18 With its spacious harbour, overlooked by a massive promontory that had already been heavily fortified by the Spanish Habsburgs, it was a safe retreat in times of tension and a much valued port in times of peace.
III
There is a stark contrast between the lush Azores and the barren Cape Verde Islands. Yet the existence of both archipelagoes made long-distance oceanic navigation possible in an age when supplies of food were liable to be exhausted in mid-voyage – no one could predict the time it would take to battle against the winds and the waves until the coming of the steamship. The Cape Verde Islands provided goat meat, the flesh of the very animals that had done most to strip the islands’ vegetation bare; there were cheese and butter made out of goat’s milk; they offered salt in great quantities, at virtually no cost; there were citrus fruits, even though European sailors were slow to make the connection between limes or lemons and a cure for scurvy. These islands also played a significant role in the transmission of African and European plants to the New World, including yams and rice; the links between the Cape Verde Islands and Brazil had been forged as early as the first half of the sixteenth century. The movement of plants went both ways: arriving by way of the Cape Verde Islands, American maize became a favoured crop in west Africa, along with manioc. It has been pointed out that this transmission took place within the space of just a few years; but ‘once a certain amount of diffusion had taken place, it was self-perpetuating’.19 It was also irreversible, part of a wider process that transformed the domestic economy of each continent bordering the Atlantic – the example of the potato and its importance in the nineteenth-century Irish economy hardly needs to be stressed.20
By the 1680s enterprising English merchants were selling Azorean wheat and Caboverdean salt to settlers in Newfoundland, who then used this salt to process the cod in which that part of the Atlantic was so rich, before the salted cod was passed back across the Atlantic to Spain and Portugal, where bacalao remains a national dish to this day. The Cape Verde Islands were also visited by East Indiamen, whose crews would stock up with supplies before making the long haul around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indies. From the sixteenth century onwards, this gave the islands a certain strategic interest; Francis Drake arrived in Santiago, the main island, in 1585, and ravaged its tiny capital, Ribeira Grande.21 The Habsburg rulers of Portugal reacted by building the Fort of São Felipe, an imposing structure that still hangs high above the remains of the old town, looking far out to sea.22 This did not protect the bays further east along the coast of Santiago, and other predators arrived, notably the Dutch, who briefly occupied Praia. However, there was not much to occupy. The islanders relied on imported knick-knacks from Europe, cheap ceramics and textiles, simple metal goods, as well as African pottery, some produced locally and some carried across from the Portuguese trading posts on the west coast of Africa.
The real source of prosperity for the Europeans living in or trading through Santiago remained African slaves.23 As the sugar industry of Brazil took off in the late sixteenth century, the importance of the route past Santiago was magnified. In 1609–10 thirteen ships took something like 5,900 African slaves out of Ribeira Grande to a variety of destinations, Cartagena, in modern Colombia, being the favourite. However, this was just the official trade, and we can be sure that many more Africans were loaded on ships and sent across the Atlantic; the islands remained a useful entrepôt where slaves could be held for a while until slave-merchants came to collect them. Proof of this comes both from the fact that recorded numbers of slaves arriving in Santiago are lower than the numbers of those leaving, and from the fact that the slave cemetery excavated by archaeologists from Cambridge in Ribeira Grande contains the skeletons of so very many slaves who died on the island before being re-exported.24 By the end of the seventeenth century some attempts had been made to protect slaves from abuse. They were to be baptized within six months of arrival, or else they would be forfeited, and they were to have time off on Sundays. Slaves bound for the Americas were to have a certain minimum space on board, and time for exercise on deck, as well as for instruction in their new faith. The Portuguese view was that their souls had a chance of salvation, so that being a Christian slave had clear advantages over being a free pagan.25
There were distinct advantages in picking up slaves in the islands rather than on the African coast. The Portuguese trading bases in west Africa such as Cacheu, inhabited by the so-called lançados, Portuguese often suspected of crime or heresy, built close ties to the courts of African rulers. Many were well assimilated into African society, with African mothers or wives and a good knowledge of both European and African culture. Some were of New Christian descent; local Muslim rulers and their economic usefulness to Portugal protected them from the long arm of the Inquisition. Since many of the Portuguese settlers in the Cape Verde Islands were also New Christians, there existed a natural kinship between the colonists on the islands and on the coast, a network of trust that helped to foster trade.26 The lançados obtained trading privileges and knew what sort of gifts the African kings expected to receive in return for favours, for the kings could be very specific in their demands for weapons or brass goods. This was an art that the slave-merchants and sea captains, who were only transient visitors to these waters, could not be expected to develop.
Dealing with the lançados brought another benefit: they supplied the islands with the basic goods that the islands found it hard to produce, such as palm wine and millet. These were required at least to feed the slave population. And the lançados were happy to send these goods in payment for the worldwide manufactures that were popular among the west African elites: Europe sent red cloth of Portugal, metal bracelets, buttons, Venetian glass beads; the New World sent silver coins; the Indies sent coral, cloves and cotton, though these were often re-exported through Lisbon.27 All these goods passed through the Cape Verde Islands, reinforcing their role as a key entrepôt between Africa and the rest of the world. Islanders of African descent began to weave cotton cloths in the African fashion, often coloured blue and white and copying traditional African designs. These cloths, or barafulas, were similar to but often better in quality than west African ones; they were produced for the African market, making it possible to exchange Caboverdean products for the captive humans of west Africa. The whole process was helped further by the planting of indigo in the islands, where it flourished. The barafulas were used as standard currency (the American silver coins were melted down and turned into jewellery in west Africa). The use of cloths as currency defeated the bureaucrats of Lisbon, who expected customs dues to be paid in coin, with the result that many merchants simply failed to pay their taxes.28
The Portuguese rebellion against Habsburg rule in 1640 posed the usual problem that political freedom was one thing, but the risks to prosperity were quite another. The solution was simple: that year, the Portuguese government decreed that Spanish ships could continue to visit both the Cape Verde Islands and Guinea, so long as they arrived from the New World, so long as they deposited a financial guarantee in Lisbon and so long as they paid for the slaves with American silver. This led to a lucrative trade with places such as Havana. Either side of 1640 the slave trade continued to bring profit (and to inflict massive misery): taking the seventeenth century as a whole, 28,000 slaves are known to have passed through the Cape Verde Islands, which is definitely not the full total.29
These archipelagoes were not simply part of a Portuguese network but part of a global one. Without the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands it is hard to see how not just the Portuguese but the Spanish and English commercial networks would have functioned reasonably efficiently duri
ng the seventeenth century. At the same time, one cannot close one’s eyes to the horrors that this trade inflicted on the innocent human cargoes that passed through the Cape Verde Islands towards the Americas.
IV
Far beyond the Cape Verde Islands lay other isolated peaks sticking up out of the southern Atlantic Ocean, uninhabited by humans or by mammals until the arrival of the Europeans: St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha. Historians of St Helena in particular have noticed that this island, mainly known to history as the last abode of Napoleon, had an importance out of all proportion to its size, for what really mattered was its location on the sea routes to and from India; the takeover of the island by the English East India Company reflected a carefully constructed policy of creating stepping stones across the oceans, in the awareness that without resupply the routes across the high seas were quite simply unmanageable. Oddly, the island had been known to European navigators since the Feast of St Helen in May 1502, and it was visited again the next year by Vasco da Gama on his return from his second Indian voyage. St Helena may be tiny; but it was impossible to miss: heading out across the Atlantic from the Cape of Good Hope ‘the wind is very constant and carries you in sixteen days into St Helen’s road’.30
The Portuguese realized that this island could serve its India fleets well, without the need to create a colony there on the model of Madeira or the Azores; they actually discouraged long-term settlement, for they knew that such a remote place would be impossible to control from Lisbon. They wanted to keep St Helena out of the public eye, all the more so as the English and the Dutch began to navigate to and from the Indies. They had not learned from their experiences in the Cape Verde Islands, for they populated the island with goats. At least one Portuguese resident settled there voluntarily in 1516. Fernando Lopez was well born, but was arrested in Goa for desertion and was brutally punished by having his ears, nose, left thumb and entire right hand cut off. Understandably he avoided human company, preferring his pet chicken, but he did some business with visiting ships, selling the skins of the goats he had captured for his dinner with his four remaining fingers.31
Aware of the value of this island as a source of fresh food, the Dutch began to prey on Portuguese shipping off St Helena at the end of the sixteenth century. The Witte Leeuw, or White Lion, a Dutch East Indiaman, attacked Portuguese ships off St Helena in 1613. This proved to be an act of hubris: a cannon exploded on board, and the powder room then blew up, leading to the loss of a hundred tons of pepper and a large cargo of fine Chinese porcelain, some of which has been recovered from the sea and is preserved in the island’s museum.32 This was the prelude to Dutch attempts to push the Portuguese out of the island, without, however, taking direct control. The idea that it could continue to function as a resupply centre, to all intents a neutral territory, still found favour. This was not the view of the English. In 1656 Oliver Cromwell was persuaded by the English East India Company that the Company’s trade with the Indies would take off once England took charge of St Helena – ‘a halfway house in the midst of a great ocean’, as a French traveller described it in 1610. St Helena had already been visited by Cavendish as he headed back into the Atlantic on his round-the-world cruise. He was greatly impressed, for by now he was glad to see melons, lemons, oranges, pomegranates and figs, streams of fresh water, big fat pheasants and partridges, and goats and pigs brought there by the Portuguese.33 Oliver Cromwell’s son and momentary successor, Richard Cromwell, granted the EIC a charter giving it authority to ‘settle, fortifie and plant’ the island. The EIC thought of St Helena as a base from which to launch expeditions towards the far-distant Moluccan island of Run, which they still dreamed of recovering from the Dutch right up to the exchange agreement of 1667 that sacrificed Run for Manhattan.34
Defeated in the Moluccas, the EIC was nonetheless disinclined to let go of St Helena, for the island was thought to have real potential. The quality of its fresh water attracted wonder, making the island ‘an earthly paradise’.35 It was assumed that ‘plants, rootes and grains and all other things necessarie for plantation’ would transform its lush but wild environment, while fish swarmed in the waters round about, and even the wild grasses provided wondrous cures for ‘sailors just dead with scurvy’, who would ‘recover to a miracle’ and bounce back into life. Using plants brought from the Cape Verde Islands, St Helena became a garden island where fruits and roots from across the world were cultivated: from the Americas cassava and potatoes, from Europe oranges and lemons, from Africa plantains, from India rice, all intended to make the island self-sufficient, since a settled population would require rather more than the limited list of items needed for the resupply of passing ships. The animal population was boosted by sending cattle and sheep as well as chickens. Even so, at the start of English colonization, it was difficult to obtain agricultural knowhow. Four free planters could be found on the island in the 1660s; inevitably, the hard work planting and harvesting the new crops was carried out by black African slaves, who were permitted to cultivate their own plots of land, and produced promising yields. This was an island that suffered from underpopulation, not overpopulation: in 1666 there were fifty male inhabitants, twenty women, and six slaves. Male and female slaves were regularly brought from the Cape Verde Islands; Madagascar slaves were specially prized by the English and were taken as far as Barbados, where they trained as highly skilled artisans. It was hoped they could be equally useful on St Helena.36 In 1673, 119 colonists set out from England, following an abortive Dutch invasion of the island. Some of them were reasonably well-off, with servants of their own, or black slaves. By 1722 the population had reached 924, more than half of whom were free; and of those the majority were women and girls.37
The settlers were not a passive body of people, willing to take orders from the EIC. St Helena was a turbulent place in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as its governors, its garrison, its free planters and its slaves clashed with each other. The colonists held a majority on the island council for a few years, but from the moment the English took control of the island its governors were not inclined to pay the council much attention, and back in London the directors of the EIC were well aware that this high-handed treatment of the settlers was counterproductive. In 1684 the governor responded to an uprising by the settlers by ordering his soldiers to shoot at the rebels, killing some of them; and then others were taken prisoner and executed. Another governor was assassinated. The slaves rose up in rebellion. The leading historian of this island has pointed out that it was only ever a Utopia on paper; theory and reality stood far apart.38
The East India Company wanted to keep St Helena for its own exclusive use, and that did not simply mean defending the island against the Dutch or other foreign rivals. Even other English companies were discouraged from making use of the island. This was the EIC’s link to India, not England’s link, even if it had been established by a charter of the Lord Protector himself. Not for nothing was St Helena known as ‘The Company’s Island’. In 1681 the EIC resolved that slave ships coming from Madagascar or the adjacent coasts of Africa would be made welcome, if they touched at the island for supplies or were in distress. However, the governors discouraged non-Company ships from attempting to trade. The Roebuck, an English slaver, reached St Helena in spring 1681, having lost forty of its 346 slaves to disease; sickness had also taken hold of the crew. Medical help was offered, but the governor forbade the sailors to carry on any trade, to the intense annoyance of the planters.39 Yet this policy was consistent with the monopolistic outlook of the Company.
The EIC hoped to extend its monopoly even further by taking control of another remote south Atlantic island, Tristan da Cunha, although the weather there was worse even than on St Helena and the island was even more barren.40 The motive was control of the sea routes into the Indian Ocean, and also looking westwards towards Brazil, though Tristan da Cunha stands a little south of the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope, a long way down from St Helena, which l
ies roughly on the latitude of the border between modern Angola and Namibia. Tristan was not occupied by the British until 1816, although the first attempt to colonize the island took place in 1684, when the English ship Society was despatched there with orders to conduct a survey; the East India Company was keen to learn how good its harbours might be. There, or on other promising but empty islands, the ship’s captain was to leave a boar and two sows and a letter in a bottle, which was deemed sufficient evidence to establish an English claim to the territory. By the early nineteenth century British enthusiasm for this utterly remote volcanic island had reached the point where it was compared favourably to Funchal, the main town of Madeira, ‘from the circumstance of its being a straight shore’; there was sufficient land for cultivation and there were good supplies of fresh water.41