The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  All the same, the black slaves of Portugal continued to take part in religious ceremonies, fitting in with the customs of the country—dancing in churches being one of them. There was a brotherhood of the Virgin of the Rosary, a specifically black community, in Lisbon by 1460.

  The most interesting economic development was the growing prosperity of Madeira. Sugar cane had been planted successfully there in 1452, by Diogo de Teive, on the initiative of Prince Henry, to whom de Teive was an equerry. The cane was brought from Valencia, which had grown sugar while it was still under Muslim rule. Several merchants belonging to the best commercial families of Genoa—Luis Doria, Antonio Spinola, Urbano and Bautista Lomellino, Luis Centurione—came from Seville to establish plantations. The Islamic advance in the eastern Mediterranean, after all, was threatening the Venetian sugar plantations in Crete and Cyprus; the Crusaders’ plantations in Palestine had long been lost to Islam; and Sicily, a producer of sugar from cane for several generations, was also menaced. Portuguese sugar plantations had never fulfilled their promise. Now Madeira seemed the best alternative. Well-watered terraces were, therefore, built, some by guanche slaves, from Tenerife; and African slaves were introduced there at much the same time as cane—the famous marriage between sugar and slaves, which has played such a tragic part in history, being celebrated for the first time in this Atlantic island. As would happen in Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean two hundred years later, the earlier-established farmers of other crops were driven into bankruptcy.

  The sugar mills in Madeira used a modern system of two rollers, powered by water, men, oxen, or horses, cogged to one another so that the cane could be squeezed between them. That method had been devised in Sicily.

  By 1460, sugar was already being exported from Madeira to Flanders and to England; by 1500, the island would have about eighty sugar mills (and over two hundred growers of cane) and be the biggest exporter of sugar in the world, producing annually a hundred thousand arrobas of white sugar.I Most planters by then were Portuguese, but there remained a few Florentines, Flemings, and Genoese, while the Lomellino family of Genoa were responsible for the marketing of the crop.

  Another crop carried by the Genoese to Madeira was the Cretan Malvoisie grape, which led to the production of the great wine of that name—Malmsey wine, to the English—which has never lost its charm, and was sometimes carried to Africa as another export for exchange with slaves.

  Yet one more economically promising island under Portuguese rule was now Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands whose settlers had gained for themselves the right to collect slaves from the coast of Africa facing the archipelago. They soon extended their range to include the Wolofs on the river Sénégal. Because of its good security, Santiago would become the biggest slave depot (“factory”) of the sixteenth century, and the various tiny Portuguese bases on the coast—on, for example, the river Cacheu—became in effect colonies of that island. But efforts to turn one or another of the Cape Verde Islands into centers of sugar cultivation, on the model of Madeira, were unsuccessful. Rainfall was unreliable, and even the well-protected Santiago seemed at risk to Spanish attack. The little sugar grown there came to be used exclusively for making rum, which thus began its great history as a commercial product traded on the African coast.

  A modest consideration of the philosophy of capturing and holding these new African slaves began too. There was, for example, A Garden of Noble Maidens, a guide for young ladies, written about 1460 by Fray Martin Alfonso de Córdoba, an Augustinian friar (who, judging from his name, was probably a converted Jew, a converso). This collection of pious precepts was commissioned by Isabella, the Portuguese queen of Spain, niece of Prince Henry, and mother of Queen Isabella the Catholic of Spain, who read it as a girl. On the subject of slavery, Córdoba argued that “the barbarians are those who live without the law; the Latins, those who have law; for it is the law of nations that men who live and are ruled by law shall be lords of those who have none. Wherefore they may seize and enslave them, because they are by nature the slaves of the wise.”2 The argument would later be rejected by Queen Isabella when considering her American indigenous subjects. But it governed her attitude to black and Moorish slaves.

  There was one somewhat ambiguous condemnation of the new trade in slaves in these years, this time from papal authority. The intelligent, farsighted, and cultivated Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, wrote on October 7, 1462, to a titular bishop of Ruvo in Italy (who had assumed responsibility for Portuguese Christians in West Africa) in which he criticized the slave trade in terms which obviously applied to the Portuguese in Guinea. Taking a position somewhat different from that of his predecessors, Nicholas V and Calixtus III, Pius threatened severe punishments to all who should take new converts into slavery.II But the pope did not condemn the slave trade as such; he only criticized the enslaving of those who had been converted who, of course, were a tiny minority of those brought back to Portugal;III and other evidence about Pius’s acceptance of slavery in Italy shows that the pontiff was not censorious about slavery in general. He was, after all, a great Renaissance prince; the Renaissance implied the recovery of the practices and traditions of “the Golden Age,” of antiquity; and antiquity, as has been amply shown, never questioned slavery, nor the slave trade, on humanitarian grounds. Indeed, it relied on it. Thus painters of the Renaissance would depict slavery as a normal part of modern, as of classical, life. Carpaccio in 1496 seems to have painted a black slave rowing a gondola in his Healing of a Possessed Man. The revival of the slave trade was to be an integral part of the recovery of the ideas of antiquity.

  On the death of Prince Henry, responsibility for Africa and the Cape Verde Islands was given to the Infante Fernão, his nephew; but he was uninterested, as was his brother King Afonso V. The latter eventually handed over the opportunity, and the responsibility, for Africa to a well-known entrepreneur of Lisbon, Fernão Gomes, for an annual payment of two hundred thousand réis, on the interesting condition that every year he explore another three hundred miles (one hundred leagues) of new coastline. This unusual scheme was remarkably successful. Starting from Sierra Leone, captains sailing under Gomes’s direction swiftly found the Grain Coast (southern Sierra Leone and what is now Liberia) and then, sailing directly east, the Ivory Coast (Cape Palmas to Cape Three Points, the modern Côte d’Ivoire); and the coast that the Portuguese at first called El Mina,IV where they were at last close to gold mines, those of the Akan forest, which had been developed by the Dyula (Mandingo) traders in the fourteenth century; most of their product had hitherto been carried north to Europe by those same Dyulas across the Sahara. The territory eventually became known as the Gold Coast (running about two hundred miles east from Cape Three Points to Cape Saint Paul).

  Fernão Gomes, father of a new generation of explorers—and slave traders—was already a rich merchant of Lisbon when he was offered this great opening. He had served in the Ceuta campaign as a boy, as later in that of Tangier, had traveled to Africa, and even came to dance well the sad African dance, the mangana. When he was later granted a coat of arms, he took the device of three heads of Africans on a silver background, each with golden rings in the ears and nose, and a collar of gold round the neck; his descendants were known as Gomes da Mina.

  Farther east, beyond the Gold Coast lay the so-called Slave Coast (Dahomey and Togoland, between Cape Saint Paul and Lagos), though no slaves were taken from there till the sixteenth century. The people had no tradition of maritime activity, because of the heavy surf and the long sandbar that there runs parallel to the coast for some two hundred miles. Farther still to the east, where the land begins to turn southward, lay the dangerous Bight of Benin, into which five rivers ran: the so-called Rio Primeiro (the First River), the Rio Fermoso (the Beautiful, or the Benin, River), the Rio dos Escravos (the Slave River), the Rio dos Forcados (the Swallowtail River), and the Rio dos Ramos (the Creek River).

  By 1475, the Portuguese were to be found not only buying slaves in the e
stuaries of these waterways, for transport back to Portugal or Madeira, but also taking them to be sold to Africans at Elmina, where they were traded for gold—usually gold ornaments—for “the gold merchants gave twice the value for them obtained” in Portugal,3 and the African merchants preferred, or insisted on, receiving part of the price for the gold in slaves.

  This trading in the Gulf of Benin was managed on the African side by two peoples of the coastal region, the Ijo and the Itsekiri, who bought their slaves at inland auctions or sold criminals of their own community. For a time, the leaders of the powerful state of Benin itself stayed apart from, and may even have been unaware of, this Portuguese coastal activity, for their merchants mostly traded with the interior, not with their poorer cousins on the sea.

  In 1471, one of Gomes’s lieutenants, Fernão do Po, discovered, in addition to the delta of the Niger, and a little beyond it eastwards, an island which he called Formosa, the Beautiful, though it was subsequently called after him (Fernando Po, as it has become known in Spanish), inhabited by a people called the Bubis. Other captains, João de Santarém and Pero de Escobar, discovered uninhabited islands which they christened O Principe (January 17, 1472), Ano Bom (January 1, 1472), and Sao Tomé (December 21, 1471, first called San Antonio), to the south. They then crossed the equator. Either in 1475 or 1476, the year when Gomes’s contract ran out, one of his captains, Rui de Sequeira, reached a cape which he named for Saint Catherine, well south of the river Gabon. By now the verb “to discover,” descobrir, was coming to be used for the first time in connection with these remarkable explorations.

  All these journeys were difficult, with currents which assisted the captain during the outward, south and eastward passage, but made the return dangerous; the polestar disappeared near the equator and, near the shores, there were mists and many dangerous shallows. The achievements of the Portuguese in these years were, therefore, all the more remarkable. Still, Gomes, however far his men had gone, would not have been able to fight off Spanish and other interlopers; so it was no doubt as well, for Portugal at least, that the heir to the throne, Prince João, in 1474 asked for, and gained, the African proprietorship. This revived a much-needed royal interest in Africa.

  The Spaniards were, indeed, still exploring Africa. Despite the papal reservation of the entire coast to Portugal in the 1450s, Diego de Herrera from Seville, successor to the Medina Sidonias as controller of the three eastward-facing islands of the Canaries, with his son Sancho, had begun to make systematic raids on the neighboring coast of Africa. From there, they seem to have repeatedly kidnapped Berbers. Perhaps this adventurer made forty-six African landings in all, sometimes, as in 1476, carrying back in a single ship 158 “Moors.”

  The demand for African slaves was growing in Spain. In 1462, for instance, a Portuguese merchant, Diogo Valarinho, was given permission to sell slaves from Lisbon in Seville. (Most were originally from the coast between the river Sénégal and Sierra Leone, probably Wolofs.) By 1475, there were enough black slaves in Spain to demand a special judge for blacks and mulattos (loros). This magistrate, Juan de Valladolid, himself a black, had previously been attached to the Court.

  But this trading with Spain was not popular in Portugal: the parliament of the country, fearful of losing control over the new labor force, complained to the king of the practice of selling black slaves abroad. They were speaking in what they conceived to be the interests of Portuguese agriculture. A special use, for example, had been found for Africans in draining marshes. A few black slaves were still working on Portuguese sugar plantations established in the Algarve by Genoese merchants, such as Giovanni di Palma, to whom a property had been given as long ago as 1401, on condition that he plant sugar. But the Portuguese king benefited from the trade to Spain, and sales of slaves continued. A Czech traveler, Václav Sasek, noticed in 1466 that the king of Portugal was making more money selling slaves to foreigners “than from all the taxes levied on the entire kingdom.”V,4

  The commercial interest in slaves made it understandable that, when the monarchs of Castile and Portugal went to war with one another, in the 1470s, the former was even more free with licenses to Spanish captains to break into Guinea. Numerous journeys were made there from Seville and the ports of the Rio Tinto, bringing back slaves as well as gold and ivory. “Everybody was scheming to go to that country,” wrote the Castilian chronicler Hernando del Pulgar, a friend of the Court.5 On one such occasion, a Spanish captain from Palos, the port whence eventually Columbus would sail to the Caribbean, set off to Senegambia and traded some slaves for a cargo of brass rings, small daggers, and colored cloths. The Spanish captain invited the African ruler concerned in these negotiations to dine aboard his ship; the African accepted, with his chief advisers and some of his brothers. As happened on several other occasions in the long history of the traffic in slaves from West Africa by Europeans, the guests were captured and carried off to Spain. There the African ruler insisted on his eminent position and talked so persuasively to Gonzalo de Stúñiga, the commander of the fort of Palos, that he was sent home to Africa, and some of his relations were also later exchanged. (But the remainder of these slaves were marched to Seville, a long enough journey, and sold there.) Another Castilian, Carlos de Valera, set out with a fleet of twenty to thirty caravels and brought back four hundred slaves in 1476; he also captured Antonio di Noli, the Genoese governor of Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands—for whom his friends paid a ransom. Both the duke of Alba and the count of Benavente sent forty-five-ton ships to Elmina the same year; how many slaves they brought back is unknown, but Benavente’s captain brought back an elephant, much admired in Medina del Río Seco for many years. A Catalan, Berenguer Granell, and a Florentine, Francesco Buonaguisi, were also conceded licenses by the queen of Castile to trade in Guinea in 1477, while the Catholic kings themselves sent an armada of twenty caravels in early 1479, under Pedro de Covides. To show the seriousness of the interest, Fray Alfonso de Bolaños was named as special nuncio to convert the infidels “in the Canaries and in Africa and in all the Ocean Sea.”6

  These Spanish adventures did not all prosper. Thus, in 1475, one Castilian vessel, crewed by Flemings, set off for Guinea to look for slaves, but the whole ship’s company was captured by Africans and, apparently, eaten. The royal fleet, with all its stores provided by the merchants Granell and Buonaguisi, was seized by the Portuguese. In 1479, Eustache de la Fosse, of Tournai, set off for Guinea, on the Mondanina, a Castilian ship. He recalled from Mina: “They led us many women and children which we bought, and then we resold them there” (an early testimony of slaves’ being sold, as well as bought, in Africa). The exchange was that two slaves—a mother and her son—were bought in Sierra Leone for a barber’s basin and three or four large bronze bracelets; and they were sold for twelve or fourteen weights of gold at Shama, at the mouth of the modern Ghanaian river Pra.7

  But, in January 1480, four Portuguese ships commanded by Diogo Cão, subsequently one of the greatest Portuguese explorers, surrounded the Mondanina, and captured de la Fosse and his merchandise. The Fleming was condemned to death in Portugal for going to Guinea without permission, but he escaped and made his way home to Bruges.

  All the same, three or four Spanish expeditions a year were successful in the late 1470s and brought back black Africans for the Spanish domestic market.

  Nor were Spaniards the only interlopers: English merchants wanted to enter the African trade in 1481, and were only excluded, after a special Portuguese embassy to King Edward IV in London which thereby must be seen as having delayed the beginning of the English slave trade several generations.

  The difficult relations between Spain and Portugal were regularized in 1480 when, at a treaty of peace signed at Alcáçovas, near Évora, in the Alentejo, in return for Portugal’s surrender of all claims to the throne of Spain, the queen of Castile recognized the Portuguese monopoly in Africa: indeed, the Spaniards also accepted Portuguese control of commerce in Fez, Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape V
erde Islands. Spanish ships would thenceforth not venture without permission into “the islands or lands of Guinea.” In return, Portugal would leave the Canary Islands, as well as a stretch of African coast facing it, between Cape de Aguer and Cape Bojador, to be exploited by Castile.

  This was more of a Portuguese triumph than it seemed at the time, and it permanently affected the history of Africa and the slave trade.

  Spain saw the treaty both as a license to fish for her much-desired hake off the coast of Africa, and as an approval to continue Herrera’s slaving expeditions in the same territory. There, opposite Fuerteventura, the Spaniards built a small fortress, Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña, which acted as a center for much small-scale slave-trading in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Las Palmas became an important slave market. When Diego García de Herrera died in 1485, his sons and his son-in-law continued his work. They did generally keep, though, to the zones where Castile was legally entitled to trade. Only a few ventured to the south to Sénégal. Sometimes, too, thenceforward, Portuguese captains would stop at the Canary Islands on the way home, despite their Spanish administration; and a few black slaves previously taken to those islands entered the Portuguese dominions in that way. After the establishment of the Cape Verde Islands as a major center for Portuguese trade, both Canary Islanders and Spanish traders from Seville would often go there to buy black slaves (the brothers Fernando and Juan de Covarrubias, from Burgos, for example, would soon have their own factor there). Another source of slaves for Andalusia was the raids which the Christian knights of Castile, especially from Jerez, made on the coast of the Maghreb. Similar raids were made by the Portuguese, operating from Ceuta.