The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Much the same geographical origin can be read in notarial registers, a little later, of slaves in Lima and Arequipa. These suggest that 80 percent (1,207) were African-born and the rest came from Spain of, of course, enslaved African parents. Like those on Cortés’s property, three-quarters of those from Africa came from the “Guinea of Cape Verde”—Senegambia and Guinea-Bissau. But there were also some from the Congo, and five from Mozambique.2

  The most important merchant of Portugal concerned in the slave trade in the mid-sixteenth century was Fernando Jiménez who, though based in Lisbon, had close relations living in Italy, and others in Antwerp. Despite his Jewish ancestry, the powerful reforming Pope Sixtus V was so appreciative of his services that he gave him the right to use his own surname, Peretti. Jiménez’s descendants were among the largest contractors in Africa—above all, eventually, in Angola. The Jiménezes were run close in wealth and influence by another New Christian, Emanuel Rodrigues, and his family—including Simón, a dominant figure in the trade from Cape Verde. Other conversos in the slave trade included Manuel Caldeira, whose commercial great days were in the early 1560s, and who then became chief treasurer of the realm. In Lisbon in the mid-century there were altogether about sixty to seventy merchants in slaves, though only three large-scale ones—Darnião Fernandes, Luis Mendes, and Pallos Dias—seem to have survived into the 1570s. In the mid-century, Clenard not only noticed that the birth of a slave child in Portugal was greeted enthusiastically, but that some masters did business by encouraging female slaves to breed, “as they do pigeons, for purposes of sale, without being in the least offended by the ribaldries of the slave girls.”3 The same judgment was made by Giambattista Veturino when he visited the palace of the duke of Braganza at Vila Viçosa: the slaves were treated, he said, “as herds of horses are in Italy,” the aim being to create as many slaves as possible for sale at thirty or forty scudi each.4

  The mid-sixteenth century also saw for the first time the emergence of a number of Spanish slave merchants of significance. In those days, the market was an open one, there were no monopolists, and the Spanish empire took in more slaves than the Portuguese one. Of course, the Spaniards still had, as a rule, to buy from the Portuguese, though sometimes they carried the slaves which they had obtained across the Atlantic in their own ships. About thirty Spanish ships were licensed for Africa in the 1550s, but they usually went to buy in the Cape Verde Islands—no farther. Those who broke the law and tried to buy in Guinea were few and far between. One such trader who did finance an expedition to the African mainland met with disaster, for the seamen who had expected to buy slaves from Muslim traders found themselves enslaved by them.

  The slave merchants of Seville also included New Christians, as was the case in Lisbon. For example, prominent in the 1540s was Diego Caballero, a converso from Sanlúcar, who began to make his fortune in Hispaniola in 1510 or so and much increased it when he went to Seville. Portraits by the fashionable painter Pedro de Campaña (Pieter de Kempeneer) of him and of his brother Alonso (probably the same Alonso Caballero who acted as “admiral” to Hernán Cortés at Veracruz) can be seen in the Chapel of the Mariscal in the Cathedral of Seville, which Diego presented to that great church.

  In the 1550s, the outstanding mercantile family in Seville were the Jorges, also conversos. This dynasty was founded by Alvaro, in the 1530s, and his sons Gaspar and Gonzalo, and then his grandsons, Gonzalo and Jorge, carried on the business. They had five ships which regularly made the Seville-Cape Verde-America voyage. The Jorges seemed the most powerful consortium in Spanish-American commerce for a time, their interests embracing wax, clothes, mercury (for use in the silver mines), wine, and olive oil as well as slaves. Some of these things came from their haciendas at Cazalla de la Sierra (wine) and Alamedilla (olives), in the sierra to the north of Seville and near Granada, respectively. Ironically, these “New Christians” were in the habit of referring to their old Christian rivals, solid old Castilian families without a drop of Jewish blood, as “negros.” The Jorges never seem to have recovered from one of the periodic forced loans levied by the Crown on merchants in Seville returning from America: seizing from them the then vast sum of 1.8 million ducats of gold in return for an annuity of a mere 3 percent.

  Old Christians were also engaged in the slave traffic in Seville: there was, for example, not only Juan de la Barrera, mentioned in the last chapter, but Rodrigo de Gibraleón of Seville, who was concerned with pearls as well as slaves. His son Antonio acted as his agent in Nombre de Dios, where he stayed till 1550, when his father died. In the 1560s, the first merchant of the city was probably Juan Antonio Corzo, who was of Italian origin (though he did not derive from the old Genoese sevillano oligarchy). He first accumulated a fortune in Peru, selling linen, oil, saffron, and above all slaves. He returned to establish himself in Seville in 1558, when he had a network of trading posts, all run by members of his family. By 1566, his fortune was worth 31 million maravedís.5

  By 1568 Corzo had been overtaken by Pero López Martínez, whose principal activity was certainly the sale of slaves, though, like most of the other entrepreneurs mentioned, he was also interested in other goods: mercury, cochineal, linen, and wine. With Gaspar Jorge and Francisco de Escovar, López Martínez is found agreeing to supply a hundred slaves for the building of the fortress at Havana in the 1570s—the famous La Cabaña, subsequently scene of so many miseries, and not only for black prisoners.

  Evidently, many people dabbled in the slave trade in Seville in the mid-sixteenth century. It was the new fashion. For example, the famous doctor of Genoese origin Nicolás de Monardes bought shares in slave ships. As usual, there were Italian merchants involved, in addition to Corzo: Juan Fernando de Vivaldo and Germino Cataño of Genoa and Seville, Tomás de Marín (Marini) of Sanlúcar, and Leonardo Lomellino, and there were also Jerome and Giovanni Battista Botti (of Florence), the latter a creditor of Hernán Cortés. These merchants were more or less law-abiding in that they paid the regulation fee per slave on shipment. But extra slaves beyond those provided by the rules were often hidden on board the ship by the captain or the owner, and many more slaves were carried than are indicated by the official figures. Many captains carried cargoes of slaves across the Atlantic without registration and sold them profitably. Nor was the law of 1526 banning the import of Spanish-born slaves maintained. Heavy fines did not prevent these and other illegalities; and, after a while, even admirals stocked their ships with slaves, so much so that the first line of cannon was sometimes submerged when naval vessels entered the harbors of the New World.

  There were, naturally, more African slaves in Portugal than in any other European country. In 1539, twelve thousand black slaves were sold in Lisbon alone—many of them, admittedly, to be exported later to Spain. In 1550, Lisbon boasted ten thousand resident slaves, in a population of a hundred thousand, and Portugal as a whole probably had over forty thousand. In 1535, Clenard wrote, “In Evora, it was as if I had been carried off to a city in hell; everywhere I only meet blacks.” He added that, when a gentleman of Evora went out on his horse, two slaves might go in front, a third would hold the bridle, a fourth would be available to rub down the horse; and other slaves would carry the master’s hat, cloak, slippers, clothes brush, and comb.6

  Such slaves were often bought almost as decorations as continued to be the case throughout Europe till the eighteenth century. African slaves, however, still performed many services in sixteenth-century Portugal. King João III, father of the Brazilian empire, had a black slave as a jester; the naval foundry employed slaves; and so did the palace kitchens and gardens.

  Portugal seemed indeed to be a veritable Babylon. Portuguese viceroys in the East sent back slaves from wherever they could, some from Malacca, some from China. When, in 1546, Baltasar Jorge d’Evora of Lisbon made his will, he left two captives from Gujarat in India, and two Chinese slaves, of whom one was a tailor and one from the old Genoese art of Kaffa in the Crimea. In 1562, Maria de Vilhena, in Evora, Portuga
l, in her will, freed ten slaves, of whom one was Chinese, three were New World Indians, two were Moorish, one was white from Eastern Europe, one was black, one brown, and one mulatto.

  Spaniards also still employed slaves on a large scale. In the early sixteenth century, every family of means in Andalusia had at least two slaves, black or white, African or Moorish, preferably the first. When the record states that the conquistador Juan Ruiz de Arce lived, during his retirement in Seville, a life of luxury on his Peruvian fortune, “surrounded by horses and slaves,” we can be sure that those last were mostly African slaves, not American ones.7 In 1565, Seville was the home of over six thousand slaves out of a population of about eighty-five thousand, blacks by then outnumbering Berbers or “white slaves” (7 percent of the population, compared with Lisbon’s 9 percent). The authorities in that city tried conscientiously to mitigate the harshness of the life of slaves by allowing them to gather on feast days to dance and sing, and to have their own steward (mayoral) to protect them, and defend them if necessary in the courts. The Church of Our Lady of the Angels established a hospital for blacks, and it received many donations—for example, from the duke of Medina Sidonia, one of the two leading aristocrats in the city. Free blacks retained their own religious confraternity.

  Slaves were sold in Seville by being advertised publicly in the streets. They were used as kitchen maids and as doorkeepers, as nursemaids and as porters, as valets, waiters, and cooks, as escorts when riding, and as entertainers, in singing and dancing. Sometimes, slaves were better treated than regular servants were. The religious life of the slaves sometimes did concern their masters in Seville, and children of domestic slaves were usually baptized. Female slaves were often close to their mistresses: thus, in the plays of Lope de Vega, such as Amar, servir y esperar, they appear often as confidantes and go-betweens in love affairs (as in those of Plautus of Rome). They might even be buried in family vaults.

  In the mid-sixteenth century, African slaves were to be found in the silver mines of Guadalcanal, to the north of the Jorges’ property at Cazalla de la Sierra. The Franciscan friary of Las Cuevas in Seville, where Columbus’s body remained for thirty years after his death, used Africans to look after their beautiful gardens.

  Some slaveowners leased out their slaves and lived on the proceeds. Many of these worked as stevedores in the Seville docks, in the soap factories for which the city was famous, or in public granaries, while others earned a living as porters, or street vendors, or bearers of sedan chairs, in print shops and in swordmakers’ shops, even as agents for traders. Some served as constables for the municipality.

  Blacks might often be mocked in the street, but they mixed easily, marriage between black and white was not forbidden, sexual relations were frequent, and slaves in Seville were received as full members of the Church. Prominent free blacks, of whom Juan Latino (who claimed to be a real Ethiopian by birth) was outstanding, played a full part in the intellectual life of Andalusia, such as it then was. Several mulattoes also distinguished themselves (Juan de Pareja the painter, for example, and Leonardo Ortiz, a well-known lawyer), even if a few crafts prohibited blacks from entry.

  In the middle and late sixteenth century in southern Spain, there were also one or two signs of what might be called a slave trade in reverse: the criollo slave—that is, a slave born in the empire but brought back to Spain—began to be popular in Andalusia. One such was Elvira in Lope de Vega’s Servir a un señor discreto, the witty maid of Doña Leonor, daughter of a merchant with interests in the New World. Rich merchants of the Americas, such as Leonor’s father, often brought back their slaves from the colonies: Don Alvaro, in Castillo Solórzano’s novel La niña de los embustes, was caused to return from Lima to Seville with four black slaves.8

  Sometimes, such criollo slaves could gain their freedom in Castile, in which case they might even return to America (as, for example, occurred in the case of Ana, a freed slave of the Pineda family in 1538). The archives of the Casa de Contratación in the sixteenth century give evidence of several black freedmen and women who were determined to return across the ocean to seek employment in the New World, where they had been born as slaves.

  Given the survival of the Canary Islands as a producer of sugar—there were seven mills at work—it was understandable that the modest trade in Berber slaves between Africa and the Canary Islands should have continued throughout the sixteenth century, the ships averaging 150 slaves each voyage, with the Canary Islanders mostly keeping to the geographical limits between the designated capes prescribed by the Spanish-Portuguese treaties; though, in 1556, the Portuguese navy carried back to Lisbon as prisoners a group of Canary Islanders who had tried to trade slaves at Arguin. Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria, remained a significant slave market, and slaves, both black and Berber, were sold from there to Seville or Cádiz at profits of almost 100 percent. African slaves were also shipped from the Canaries to the Indies on a small scale.

  The institution of slavery survived elsewhere in Europe. In 1538, a Greek, bought as a slave by an Italian and carried to France, was declared free, “selon le droit comun de France.” That phrase expressed, actually, a pious hope, not a reality: for, when, in 1543, Khaïr-ed-din Barberousse, admiral of the Caliph Selim I, arrived in Marseilles as an ally of Francis I, he brought with him slaves kidnapped in a raid on Reggio di Calabria, and put them forward for sale. He found a market with no difficulty.

  In Italy, Genoa, moved by a desire to avoid too many Africans in the city, in 1556 established rules against the sale of slaves but, all the same, in a statute of 1588, when making arrangements for the division of goods lost at sea, the rules spoke of slaves as among the frequent merchandise. In 1606, a Florentine traveler said that he did not need to go abroad to buy slaves because he could obtain a diversity of them at a modest price in his own city.

  In the New World, conditions were always harsher than those in Europe, since the slaveowners were often more nervous, and perhaps less experienced, than those at home: further, the king in Spain explicitly provided for a change in the laws of Alfonso the Wise, the “Siete Partidas,” whereby slaves were proclaimed free to marry whom they liked; that generosity was not to be afforded to Africans in the New World. Already the complexities of black slaves’ marrying free Indians had begun to weary state lawyers. In the Americas, however, Africans were also beginning to be seen everywhere: as pearl-divers off New Granada, as dock-workers at Veracruz in New Spain, in the new silver mines at Zacatecas, as cowboys in the region of the river Plate; in gold diggings in Honduras, Venezuela, and Peru; and as blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, and domestic servants almost everywhere. African slaves worked for viceroys and for bishops, for private entrepreneurs in urban sweatshops making textiles, and on farms, while female slaves were often established as planters’ maids, mistresses, wet nurses, or prostitutes. The pattern was established of assigning to black Africans any difficult or demanding task.

  We catch a glimpse of what these first North American Africans were doing in the first years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico: for example, in the new textile workshops which sprang up in the late 1530s, at first in the city of Mexico, then in the new city of Los Ángeles (Puebla), and finally in Antequera (Oaxaca) and Valladolid (Yucatán), founded to make up for the shortage of clothes brought over from the mother country. Some of these little factories employed Indians, but black slaves were sought after from the earliest days. Africans also helped to open up agriculture: for example, in the Valle de Mezquital, to the north of the Valley of Mexico, the largest group of immigrants as early as the 1530s were African slaves. They came first to work on the local sheep stations, and then in the mines at Ixmiquilpan and Pachuca.

  The first work of these early American Africans was usually as herdsmen, in which capacity they were so active that they infuriated the Indians, who knew nothing of domesticated animals. Brutality was normal, and Indian villagers were often bullied or even killed by Africans: one Indian who went to the help of his wife who
had been attacked by an African was tied to the tail of a horse and dragged to his death.

  Other recollections of the first Africans in the New World sometimes placed them in an unattractive light in relation to the indigenous peoples. The well-intentioned Judge Alonso de Zorita, for example, recalled, in his Lords of New Spain, that, about 1560, he saw “a great number of Indians hauling a long heavy beam to a construction site. . . . When they stopped to rest, a black overseer went down the line with a leather strap in his hand whipping them all from first to last to hurry them on and keep them from resting. He did this not to gain time for some other work, but simply to keep up the universal evil habit of mistreating the Indians. . . . The black struck with force and they were naked.”9

  The Indians all the same made clear that they supported the introduction of African slaves. For example, in the 1580s, a group of indigenous people in Mexico told the viceroy, Alvaro Manrique de Zúñiga (a cousin of Cortés’s second wife), that they were themselves quite unable to work in sugar plantations, and that that “difficult and arduous work” was “only for the blacks and not for the thin and weak Indians.”10

  A fillip to the African slave trade was naturally given by the trend towards the outlawing of Indian slavery in the Americas, as a result of the agitation of Bartolomé de Las Casas and other Dominicans. An indication of the mood in 1544 is shown by a letter of Cristóbal de Benavente, public prosecutor of the Supreme Court in Mexico, to the king: “Every day the gold mines are giving less profit, because of the lack of Indian slaves. In the end, if Your Majesty abolishes local slavery . . . ,” wrote Benavente, “there will be no alternative to allowing blacks into the land, at least in the mines.”11