The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  That same year, an efficient and farsighted, if ruthless and hardhearted, governor-general, Nicolás de Ovando, was sent to the Caribbean. He was ordered to compel the natives of the islands to work: “Because of excessive liberty,” his instructions curiously said, “the Indians flee from the Christians and do not work. They are, therefore, to be compelled to work . . . to be paid a daily wage, and well treated, as the free persons such as they are, rather than as slaves.”6 Ovando was also allowed to carry with him black slaves born in the power of Christians—that is, those born in Spain or Portugal; and we must presume that some of them arrived because, a few months later, the new governor, already in Santo Domingo, changed his mind about them. He asked that their import be suspended, since they not only seemed to be taking every opportunity to run away but were encouraging the Indians to rebellion; and when, in 1504, the Spanish Crown allowed ten years’ free commerce with Hispaniola, the trade in slaves was excepted, along with gold, silver, arms, and horses—all presumably because they were needed in Europe.

  The issue of whether or not to allow African slaves to the Indies dogged the governorship-general of Ovando, and there were several more changes of policy. In 1504, for example, Alonso de Hojeda was permitted to take across five white slaves (that is, Muslims). In 1505, seventeen black slaves were permitted to be sent to Hispaniola, with a promise of more; yet, the next year, Ovando was ordered to expel “Berber and pagan slaves.”7 In 1509, the example of Juan de Córdoba was followed by Dr. Diego Alvarez Chanca, an erudite royal physician from Seville who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage: he, too, commissioned a black slave, Juan de Zafra, to sell goods in the New World on his behalf. Ponce de León, meantime, took some Africans with him in the conquest of Puerto Rico in 1508; and, two years later, Gerónimo de Bruselas, presumably a Fleming, who worked as a founder of precious metals on that island, was given authority to import two black slaves there to assist his labors.

  Sugar cane seems to have been already brought, incidentally, in a very modest way, to the Caribbean: perhaps even by Columbus, on his second voyage, in 1493. A colonist named Aguilón was apparently growing cane in Concepción de la Vega, Santo Domingo, as early as 1505; he is said by Las Casas to have ground the cane with “certain wooden instruments which obtained juice.”8 No doubt these were brought from Madeira or the Canary Islands.

  A decisive change of strategy occurred in respect of slaves in the New World soon after Ovando left his governorship in 1509. Diego Colón, Columbus’s son, amiable and intelligent but weak and improvident, succeeded him in command of the “empire,” an enterprise which still consisted only of Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico, even if it already had pretensions to control the north coast of South America. The native Indians were by then in rapid decline, less from the diseases brought by the Europeans (the first epidemic was that of smallpox in 1518) than from loss of faith in the future and from the overwork to which they were submitted in the mines and fields. Whatever the original population of Hispaniola in 1492, there were in 1510 only about twenty-five thousand people able to work. These Indians had already shown themselves to be nothing like such workers as black Africans, many of whom were accustomed to domestic animals and who also resisted diseases well. Africans, too, were better able to work with horses than were indigenous Indians, for the Mandingo, the Fula, and the Wolof peoples, at least, had an equestrian tradition. A 1511 report to the king would declare that the work of one black slave was equal to that of four Indians. The gold mines, especially those in the Sierra Cibao and San Cristóbal, both in the center of the island, also preoccupied the Spanish Crown. Diego Colón wrote to King Ferdinand about the shortage of labor at the end of 1509, explaining that the Indians found it very hard work “to break the rocks in which the gold was found.”9 The king was annoyed. Only in May, he had given carte blanche to Colón to import all the natives from the neighboring islands that he wanted: they could be kidnapped in, say, the Bahamas, “in the manner [in] which they have been brought on other occasions, so that those needed will be placed in our enterprises, and the others be given in allotment, in Hispaniola, in the manner that has been used until now.”10 A commercial partnership in Concepción fitted out ships for the kidnappings. But Indian slaves did not constitute the answer to the problem of labor in Santo Domingo, even if their price went up from 5 to 150 gold pesos. Many Lucayans, as the natives of the Bahamas were then called, died on the journey to Hispaniola. Other Spanish kidnappings in the still-unconquered island of Cuba were no more profitable. The only part of the newly discovered territories where the Spaniards restrained themselves from stealing slaves was the island of Margarita, where they wanted the indigenous people to continue diving for pearls.

  So it was not surprising that, in Valladolid, on January 22, 1510, King Ferdinand should have given authority for, first, fifty slaves to go to Hispaniola for the benefit of the mines—they had “to be the best and strongest available.”11 Then, three weeks later, on February 14, in Madrid, the king asked the Casa de Contratación—the new bureaucracy in Seville which managed Spanish maritime activities—to send another two hundred slaves as soon as possible, to be sold in Santo Domingo “little by little” to whosoever desired to buy them. The documents signed by the king do not specify that these slaves should be Africans, so in theory they could have been Moorish or even Canary Islanders, but there is no doubt that Africans, and Africans already in Europe, were intended. Henceforth, the sale of all such captives would be regulated, as would the payment of taxes (two ducats per head to the Crown) for a license. Regulation, as always, led to contraband. But the requirement to buy this permit would become an important source of income for the Crown.

  This was the beginning of slave traffic to the Americas. Gold in Hispaniola was the lure.

  King Ferdinand was not a man to hesitate over the fate of slaves or the slave trade. Despite his grand titles of “athlete of Christ” and “Catholic king,” awarded him by Pope Alexander VI, he was a practical politician, not an idealist. As such, he was as much admired by Machiavelli, his contemporary, who saw him as having risen to “being for fame and glory the first king of Christendom,” as he would be by Spanish Carlists in the twentieth century, one of whose polemicists, Victor Pradera, would end a description of what he hoped for from a “new state” with the hollow expectation that it would resemble the Spain of the Catholic kings.12 In regard to human beings, Ferdinand had already deported substantial sections of the Jewish and Moorish populations of his realm, and enslaved many of the latter. He had approved slaving expeditions in the Caribbean for “Carib” or “cannibal” Indians. His treatment of his unfortunate daughter, Juana, who was too sensitive to be a princess of that era, was coldhearted. He would have remembered the participation of Castilians in the trade to Guinea during the war with Portugal in the 1470s and, probably, he had employed some of the slaves then made.

  In 1510, Ferdinand was in truth concerned less with the New World than with the conquest of Tripoli, on which he had embarked in order to remove the threat of piracy from the western Mediterranean. He mentioned that engagement in his first letter to Diego Colón about the slaves. He was also disturbed that his unpopular if attractive second wife, Germaine de Foix, had not produced a male heir for him. Ferdinand would have spent little time considering the fate of a few hundred black slaves being moved, as he probably thought would be the case, from one part of his dominions to another. Being surrounded by slaves in Spain, he would have seen no reason why such captives should not be sent to the Americas. Three hundred and eighty-two Muslim slaves had been sold in Valencia the previous year, most of them deriving from Cardinal Cisneros’s conquest of Oran; indeed, the capture of that city had even produced for Spanish masters a number of Jewish slaves. “Indian” ones were also still to be found in Spain, including in these days some from Brazil.

  The chief influence with the king, virtually the minister for the Indies, was that perplexing bishop and bureaucrat, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca. Fonseca
, then bishop of Palencia, was empowered to act almost independently in matters concerning the new empire. A protégé of Queen Isabella, but an enemy of Columbus as of Cortés, he was a man who put every obstacle in the way of imaginative ventures in the New World, yet who sought to get as much money for the crown from it as he could. He was cultivated and intelligent, for he had been a student of the great humanist Lebrija at Salamanca, and he encouraged many Flemish artists to go to Spain. A master of detail, with a remarkable memory, Fonseca would have recalled how, in 1496, Queen Isabella had asked him to arrange for some of the Tainos brought back from the Caribbean by Columbus after his second voyage to row in the royal galleys; and how few had survived. He must have known from personal experience in Seville—he had been archdeacon there at the beginning of his swift rise to preferment—that black slaves were different.

  It would be foolish to make this dedicated public servant into a villain, to blame for all that went wrong in the Spanish Indies during the first years after Columbus’s voyage; all the same, while he was a power in Spain, the instruction of the late queen, his patroness, that only cannibal Indians should be enslaved was interpreted very broadly: one had only to declare such-and-such an island as “Carib” to ensure that the slave trade there was approved.

  There were others concerned in these fateful decisions. For example, an Aragonese secretary of Ferdinand’s, Lope Conchillos (his signature is on both the documents approving the dispatch of slaves, along with that of the king), a converso, worked closely with Fonseca, and he probably saw that the slave trade might be a method of increasing royal revenue; perhaps his own, too. After all, the king of Portugal had made two million réis in 1506 from the slave trade, from taxes and duties; and that news must have been known at the Spanish Court.

  Both Fonseca and Conchillos, as well as the king, incidentally had a direct interest in the dispatch of these slaves, since all would, two years later, have groups of Indians personally allocated to them in a new division carried out in Hispaniola which meant—in effect if not in law—land and mines, since the properties concerned were in the main districts where gold had been found.

  The senior official of the Casa de Contratación, the chief pilot, was now the imaginative and much-traveled Florentine Amerigo Vespucci. He would also have given his advice on all these matters, for he knew the shortcomings of the indigenous Indians of the Caribbean at first hand. Just a year before, Vespucci had advised Archbishop Ximénez de Cisneros on the question of taxation of commerce with the New World: should goods shipped to the Indies be managed exclusively by a single individual? Or should there be unrestricted trade, in which case how would the taxes be collected? The argument would later affect slaves as much as cloth.

  One man who would have been pleased at the king’s decision, and was concerned in the execution of the policy, was the present representative in Seville of Bartolommeo Marchionni, Piero Rondinelli, another Florentine, who had succeeded Juanotto Berardi as the most influential merchant in Seville. Rondinelli by now had interests in sugar in the Canary Islands, in silk, in velvet and English cloth, as well as in supplying the Indies with dried beef, clothing, and slaves. He probably obtained most of the slaves made possible by Ferdinand’s license from Marchionni in Lisbon: a document in the Archivo de Indias shows that, to carry out the king’s plans, a hundred black slaves were bought in Lisbon and sent to Diego Colón in Santo Domingo, for he was to organize the sale there. Another hundred were sent direct from Seville on the Trinidad, as part of an expedition led by Diego Nicuesa, a conquistador who was lost at sea off Panama—though not before he had delivered his slaves.

  After this decision by Ferdinand, a few black Africans were sent every year to the Americas—perhaps fifty annually, and usually in ones and twos. For example, a permit was given to a certain Gaspar de Villadiego for ten slaves, to a colonist named Alonso de Rueda for three, to Ponce de León for another six. There were obviously some remaining doubts about the desirability of this innovation: in July 1510, the king asked Luis de Lizarazo, a conquistador who already held a property with fifty Indians, to explain “what point there was in carrying more slaves to the New World.”13 Surely those first four hundred granted in 1510 were enough. The king also wondered why the blacks whom he had had sent had died so fast: “Look after them well,” he added.14 One or two more white (Muslim) slaves were also sent, as requested by a conquistador, Hernando de Peralta, in 1512 and by Ponce de León in 1515.

  The advent of black slaves did not mean an end to the local Indian slave trade. Thus King Ferdinand gave approval, in a new ordinance of June 1510, to more seizures from other islands of Indians, who were to be brought to work in Santo Domingo; and indeed a steady flow of these unfortunates continued to Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, sent an expedition to the Bay Islands off Central America in 1516 and, after some setbacks onshore, brought back four hundred slaves. One such enterprise went badly wrong, however: while their boat was lying offshore of what is now Havana, the Indians rebelled, killed the Spanish crew, and sailed themselves home—an early example of a successful slave rebellion though the rebels seem to have been killed later. The island of Barbados probably got its name from these activities, since the slaves found there, and sometimes sent to Madeira, were, unlike the other Tainos, bearded.

  A few of the first generation of black slaves in the Americas played a part in the next wave of conquests. Diego Velázquez had had a few African slaves with him in 1511-12, in his occupation of Cuba, an island which would eventually develop a black culture more profound than anywhere else in the Spanish empire. Vasco Núñez de Balboa had a black slave, Nuflo de Olano, with him (as well as a dog) when he first saw the Pacific, and he soon had thirty building boats on that ocean. Pedrarias probably had Africans with him when he established the first European colony on the American mainland, in Panama. Cortés was accompanied by two or three slaves in his conquest of Mexico, as a picture of him in Fray Diego Durán’s book suggests. Survivors of ancient Mexico living in the 1550s later assured Fray Bernardino de Sahagún that there were indeed a number of “curly-haired” black men among the first five hundred conquistadors who came with “Don Hernando.”15 African slaves also went to “New Spain” with Pánfilo de Narváez, the conquistador who sought unsuccessfully to supplant Cortés, and one of them, Francisco de Eguía, seems to have been the first to carry smallpox to that country, in 1519. The most famous black African in Cortés’s expedition was, however, a free man, Juan Garrido, who was later known as the first “European” to plant wheat in Mexico, on his farm at Coyoacán. Later a “black Moor” from Morocco, Estebán, accompanied Cabeza de Vaca on his heroic walk from Florida to Mexico between 1528 and 1536—the first serious exploration of North America. Pedro de Heredia also had a substantial body of slaves from Africa when he founded Cartagena de Indias in the early 1530s. So did Diego García, Sebastian Cabot, and Domingo Martínez de Urala in the first Spanish approaches to Buenos Aires. In 1521 El Cano stopped at Santiago, the biggest of the Cape Verde islands, to buy slaves to help his ship, the Victoria, reach home.

  During these years, following a denunciation of the colonists of Hispaniola from the pulpit by the Dominican Fray Antonio de Montesinos in 1511, a complicated controversy was beginning about the treatment of the indigenous peoples of America. The arguments lasted forty years, and it is much to the credit of Spain that there was such a debate. What other empire can boast such a discussion, and at so high a level? During the years 1511–13, the most searching questions that any imperial nation can ask of itself were at least posed. But the discussion as to whether the Indians were men, and whether it was permissible to enslave them, completely ignored the status of black African slaves, with their greater experience of agriculture, their greater endurance, and their longer connection with Europe.

  In Spain, meantime, the licenses to carry African slaves to the Americas continued to be granted. One was given in 1517 to Jorge de Portugal, son of Alvaro de
Portugal, the Portuguese ambassador to Spain (an illegitimate son of the Portuguese royal duke of Braganza), and a close friend of the late Queen Isabella, to import four hundred black slaves to the Indies. No taxes were to be paid. But it does not seem that this nobleman did much about the matter: Jorge de Portugal was at the time the commander of the castle of Triana in Seville, and was preoccupied with local politics there. His father, incidentally, had been a business associate of Marchionni, so perhaps the idea of his son’s entering the slave trade derived from him.

  Soon the complete collapse of the population of the Caribbean changed the African slave trade to the Americas into a major enterprise. The great efforts made to substitute the labor of the population of the islands by enslaving people on the mainland, in the Bahamas, and elsewhere was proving unsuccessful, though some slaving expeditions of the conquistadors in these years continued: Juan Bono, a Basque shipmaster, one of the hardest men in the Spanish Indies, who afterwards took part in Pánfilo de Narváez’s expedition against Cortés, mounted a particularly scandalous raid in Trinidad in 1517; and the first Spanish expedition to Mexico, that of Hernández de Córdoba the same year, was sent at least partly to find slaves, perhaps from the Bay Islands. A substantial trade in Indian slaves from the mainland, from what is now Nicaragua, would do something to make up for the shortages of labor in the Spanish Caribbean in the 1530s; but that terrible chapter in the history of America was only just beginning. Some Indians were also shipped to the Caribbean in Spanish vessels from Brazil.