The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  It was not surprising, meantime, that, by 1618, the phrase “a new Guinea” was once more used, this time to speak of the northeast of Brazil.16

  These plantations represented substantial investments. All the same, one must keep a sense of proportion here also: in the late sixteenth century, the value of the slave trade to the Portuguese Crown was, through taxes per slave and so on, 280,000 cruzados, but the Eastern trade of Portugal yielded two million.

  • • •

  Spain’s slave trading, in the last era when that country and Portugal were alone in the New World, had many upheavals. Thus the 1560s saw an economic collapse in Spain. Both Crown and private merchants, slavers and silver kings alike, were ruined. One disaster followed another. A regular merchant ship belonging to the Jorges burned; in it they had loaded clothes for the New World, and there were other losses at sea. The Jorges were especially damaged. Then the Crown repudiated its debts. Since Philip II had borrowed so much from so many, and had paid so little interest, several great men lost all they had. The slave trade to the empire lurched to a temporary stop. Between 1566 and 1570, only nine ships were licensed for Africa (they carried a mere thirteen hundred slaves). A few continued to take slaves on the short journey to the Canaries from Africa, but these too were few. The price of slaves in Cartagena reached the record height of sixty thousand maravedís a head.

  In order to try and save something from the wreck for which he himself was partly responsible, King Philip II sought in 1568 to reach an agreement with his cousin and ally, Sebastian, king of Portugal, whereby that monarch, or his agents, would supply annually two thousand slaves to be handed over to Spanish merchants in the Cape Verde Islands. The idea had been proposed by Alonso de Parada forty years before. The aim was both to supply labor to planters in the West Indies, who needed it, and to gain a secure royal income from the issue of licenses. But the Portuguese seemed little interested. The only merchants to put themselves forward, Jimeno de Bertendona and Jerónimo Ferrer, offered inadequate terms. So, throughout the 1570s, the slave trade to Spanish America continued in the doldrums: between 1571 and 1575, a mere sixteen Spanish ships were licensed for slaves from Africa, of which four went direct to Guinea, most of the rest, as heretofore, to Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands, carrying a little over 2,000 slaves in all. The king made matters worse in 1574 by establishing a capitation tax on all slaves held in America. In the late 1570s, only two ships were licensed by the Spanish Crown for Africa or the Cape Verde Islands (responsible for only about three hundred slaves).

  In 1576, another bank failed: that directed by Pedro de Morga. That failure dragged down several more sevillano shippers, such as Alonso and Rodrigo de Illescas and the brothers Sánchez Dalvo, who were all linked to American commerce, above all in gold and silver, but had some interests in mercury, linen goods, cochineal, and slaves.

  Demand for African slaves continued all the same. Planters in Peru, for example, wanted to make use of blacks on a regular basis. A few Genoese bankers continued to make money from trading slaves. Yet the Crown was deaf to suggestions by viceroys and others that Africans should be bought specially to work building bridges in tropical territory, where Indians from the highlands were ineffective. The viceroy of Peru, the determined and ruthless Francisco de Toledo, tried to compensate for the shortage of labor by impressing all free blacks, mulattoes, and ungainfully employed Spaniards into work in the silver mines which opened in 1545 in Potosí, or in the mercury mines establishd a little later at Huacavelica. But this compromise failed, for black Africans could scarcely survive at the high altitude of Potosí.

  By 1580, Spanish officials in both Peru and Mexico came to decide that a constant supply of black African labor was the only way of satisfying the motherland’s appetite for precious metals.

  • • •

  The goddess Fortune turned a kindly eye on King Philip II after 1580. The royal line of Portugal died out, and King Philip “bought, inherited and conquered” the country (as he put it himself). Easily disposing of a patriotic protest in Lisbon, the two realms were united. Though they remained separate entities, Philip, or the Council of the Indies, merged their policies towards commerce, especially towards the matter of trading slaves. Spain also took over the fort of Arguin, the oldest Portuguese trading post in Africa.

  The benefit of this association to Spain cannot be overemphasized. By the 1580s, Spain had already, through bureaucracy and perseverance, ensured the security of her colossal empire. Castile controlled most of the world’s silver, as well as a large proportion of tropical America’s indigo, tobacco, cochineal, and dye woods. After 1580, with Portugal subservient, the Spanish Crown dominated international trade, the world’s gold supply, the production of marine salt and of pepper, spices from the East Indies and, with Brazil, most of sugar, too. One of the main aims of Spanish policy became to impose an embargo on foreign trade, especially Dutch and English trade, and much of the history of the next sixty years was concerned with that ultimately vain endeavor.

  King Philip II decided to use the experienced Portuguese merchants to provide the Indies with slaves, including the Spanish Indies, and he therefore signed contracts with two of them, Juan Bautista de Rovelasco, a great capitalist of a Flemish family, and Francisco Núñez de Vera, to take slaves from São Tomé to certain designated ports in the New World. Afterwards, he turned to Pedro de Sevilla, and Antonio Mendez de Lamego, both conversos, residents of Lisbon, who had been already concerned with slave trading for the Portuguese Crown. These two merchants obliged themselves, by a contract of 1587, to pass a specified number of slaves every year to the Spanish Indies, usually five hundred but sometimes more, from their three main points of assembly: Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands, though it was sacked by Francis Drake in 1585 and by Antony Shirley (fellow of All Souls, Oxford; spy; and traitor) in 1596; second, São Tomé, still prosperous (despite a destructive slave revolt in 1574); and, third, Luanda, which, being more remote, was more secure, and which would provide more Africans for the Americas than anywhere else in the coming century (84 percent, according to one estimate, of those sent between 1597 and 1637).

  Though Sevilla and Mendez de Lamego could conduct trade themselves, they also had to sell licenses to anyone who asked for one. Their position was immensely powerful, since they had already a similar contract to carry slaves to Brazil. The two also agreed to provide the monarch, free of all charges every year, with two choice black slaves, whom the king could pass on to whomsoever he liked. A subcommittee of the Council of the Indies, a Junta de Negros, a mixed commission of eight men from the Council of the Indies and the Treasury, was set up to resolve all the problems relating to the slave trade. It was usually composed of powerful noblemen or bureaucrats known in other parts of the administration, for whom the activity provided a useful extra income.

  The consequence was a reinvigoration of the slave trade to the Spanish as well as to the Portuguese empire. It was much needed, or so it seemed: as early as 1570, Fray Diego de Salamanca, the bishop of Puerto Rico (where there were about eleven sugar mills), had sent a familiar-sounding report in the form of a letter to the king saying that “the most important cause of the decay and decline of this island is the lack of slaves.”17 But New Spain’s production of sugar, though never so important as that of Brazil, was thriving, the Jesuits’ plantation at Xochimalcas near Guanajuato having two hundred slaves in 1600. The equipment invested in such mills was considerable: one plantation, La Santísima Trinidad, also in New Spain, owned by a certain Hernández de la Higuera, had, about 1610, not only a casa grande on two floors, a chapel, and a mill, but a boiling house with seven boilers and two refineries, tended by two hundred slaves, the whole being valued at seven hundred thousand pesos, a colossal sum for that time. Almost all the sugar equipment came from heretical Holland. At Tlaltenango, about half the black slaves were born on the property in the early seventeenth century, incidentally a level of reproduction rarely repeated in the history of European sugar gro
wing in the New World.

  The contractors Sevilla and Mendez de Lamego took their task seriously. They obliged themselves to carry to the empire three thousand slaves in six years, or five hundred slaves a year. Their investors seem to have included the Medicis and the Strozzis of Florence. But they failed to fulfill their commitments.

  In the 1590s, after several years of further generous agreements with other Portuguese merchants to carry slaves to his empire, the king revived the monopoly system which had been tried so unsuccessfully by his father, Charles V, in his youth. As with Charles, the Crown’s desire to make money played an important part in the decision. Several schemes had already been devised to secure new monopoly arrangements. Thus, in 1552, as has been mentioned, the Crown contemplated contracting with Hernando Ochoa for twenty-three thousand slaves to go to the Indies over seven years, with the payment of eight ducats’ tax a head to the Crown. But Ochoa did not carry the plan through, partly because of the opposition of the merchants of Seville to the idea: they believed that they as individuals could perform the task better. Then, in 1556, the famous Manuel Caldeira of Portugal secured a contract to dispatch two thousand blacks to whatever part of the Indies that he desired, to be carried in Portuguese or Spanish ships. Perhaps the high royal share of this scheme prevented it from working (each license was to cost taxes equivalent to two-fifths the value of each slave).

  In 1595, a new monopoly contract was at last concluded between the Spanish Crown and Pedro Gomes Reinel, a Portuguese merchant who was already the king of the slave trade in Angola. Gomes Reinel bought this favor for a hundred thousand ducats a year for nine years. He agreed to arrange for the carriage of 4,250 blacks a year to the Spanish Indies, of whom, it was coldly stated, 3,500 had to be landed live. The slaves were to be fresh from Africa, and none could be mulatto, mestizo, Turkish, Moorish, or of any blood other than black African. The king reserved the right to grant licenses for another nine hundred to one thousand slaves to other people. So Gomes Reinel’s was not exactly that of a full monopolist: and he, too, could sell licenses at thirty ducats to merchants—in practice, nearly all Portuguese slave traders—who desired to enter the trade. He could not reasonably refuse anyone. He himself kept, however, what he hoped would be a monopoly right to carry slaves to the new port of Buenos Aires. All the ships which he licensed had to be registered in either Seville, Cádiz, the Canaries, or Lisbon. (Buenos Aires, incidentally, had presented herself as a new city needing slaves more than anything: a sad letter forwarded by the superior of the Franciscans there told the king in 1590 that the inhabitants believed: “We are so poor and needy that we could not be more in want, in proof of which we do our plowing and digging with our own hands. . . . Such is the need from which the settlers suffer that their own women and children bring their drinking water from the river. . . . Spanish women, noble and of high quality, because of their great poverty, carry their drinking water on their shoulders . . . as if it were the tiniest village in Spain.”18)

  What, of course, they thought they needed were—African slaves.

  Though Gomes Reinel was to be the contractor, some slaves would still be brought by other Portuguese, from São Tomé and the Cape Verde Islands. Gomes Reinel had also to pay a fine of ten ducats a slave for every license not used. All the same, he expected to make a fortune, for there was a large difference between what he had paid for his contract and the sum for which he could, separately, sell licenses. Yet his costs were great, too: he had to pay agents in Spain, Africa, and the Indies; he had to make appropriate presents or bribes to officials throughout the empire; the costs of the slave journeys were greater than he supposed that they would be; and he had to pay taxes. Then there was much bureaucracy: for example, during the time that this contract lasted, all the licensing, of all ships and cargoes, had in theory to be performed in Seville, and the final checking of all ships had to be done in Bonanza, the little port on the Guadalquivir, just next to Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

  This first important state slaver of the new era, Gomes Reinel, was probably a converso. He seems to have been more a typical courtier than a merchant, one of the few Portuguese who spoke and wrote Castilian to perfection. On the other hand, he was audacious. Thus he had coolly ruined the famous banker Cosme Ruiz Embite by recalling a loan actually contracted in the slave trade.

  At all events, Gomes Reinel at first seemed to have solved the problems of providing slaves for the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. The years of his monopoly saw a new peak of licensed trade to Africa: 188 boats were approved. About half (90) went to Guinea, and thence carried over 25,000 slaves, or 5,500 a year. In Gomes Reinel’s day, the Spanish Crown, no doubt impressed by the Portuguese experience, made a famous concession to the sugar planters of the empire, by granting that sugar mills could not be attached for debt or for unpaid mortgages. This “privilegio de ingenios” lasted several hundred years—almost as long, indeed, as the Spanish empire itself.

  Of course, there was a substantial contraband trade in slaves, particularly between the Caribbean ports. Many ships sailed directly from Africa to the Caribbean without having registered in Seville, though sometimes sailing northwest to take on water in the Canaries. Those vessels traveled outside the protection of the Spanish Crown. There were also many small smuggled imports to secondary ports—for example, Havana, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Jamaica—by the captains of slave ships and of naval vessels (including admirals). Captains would continue to stock more slaves than they registered (and were taxed) for, and sell the surplus where they could. For example, in 1574, the caravel San Sebastián, master Diego Rodríguez, carried from the Cape Verde Islands as many as four hundred slaves, but with only 145 licenses. Both naval vessels and cargo ships would often enlist Africans in Guinea as “cabin boys” and sell them in America. Sometimes masters would register small boats and exchange them for big ones capable of carrying larger numbers of slaves. Port officials and even viceroys would often turn a blind eye to such infractions, provided they themselves profited: Luis de Velasco, viceroy in Mexico in 1591, thought that, instead of seizing slaves carried illegally, the authorities should merely collect the extra tax owed.

  In 1600, Gomes Reinel died, and the contract for trading slaves was transferred to João Rodrigues Coutinho, who was then governor of Angola, and extended to 1609. The contract was the same as that afforded to his predecessor, except that anyone who broke any of the rules would be fined a hundred thousand maravedís, of which penalty two-thirds would go to the contractor. No foreigner was to be allowed into the trade, and Rodrigues Coutinho had to sell licenses openly in both Lisbon and Seville. He was also required, in order to hold the slave contract for Angola, to build forts at such places as the Kisama salt mines, at Cambambe (both far inland), and at the Bay of Cows, in Benguela, to the far south.

  This new monopolist was an aristocrat, born at Santarém, a knight of Henry the Navigator’s Order of Christ, and he lived in Madrid, where he was a member of the King’s Council of Portugal. He was one of the few major Portuguese slave dealers of this era who were not conversos, and several of his brothers and sisters were monks or nuns. When appointed governor of Angola, he had undertaken to take 2,500 horses there, and to equip the troops which were helping to pacify the place after the death of Dias. He had also lived in both Elmina and Panama, a colony that, as he knew, needed its black slaves for the backbreaking carriage of goods across the isthmus. Rodrigues Coutinho invested all the money which he made from the slave trade in seeking to complete the conquest of Angola, a task which obsessed him.

  When he died, in 1603, a long way up the river Coanza, in pursuit of the ever-elusive final victory over the kingdom of Ndongo, his brother Gonzalo Vaz Coutinho succeeded him with the slave contract. He had been responsible for much of the detailed work in his brother’s time; he, too, was a caballero of Henry the Navigator’s Order of Christ; and he had been governor of the island of São Miguel in the Azores. He was a man with many interests. Thus he offered himself to deve
lop the copper mines near Santiago de Cuba, taking with him 250 Castilian colonists and nine hundred slaves. To do this, he asked to be named adelantado (military commander) of Cuba, and governor of Santiago, Bayamo, and Baracoa, and for the titles to pass to his descendants for three lives. This extravagant suggestion by a Portuguese adventurer was not approved.

  In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the total number of slaves exported from Africa probably approached 200,000, of which about 100,000 went to Brazil, over 75,000 to Spanish America, 12,500 to São Tomé, and only about a few hundred to Europe. The average per year must thus have been about 8,000.19

  The African element in the population of New Spain was beginning to seem the dominant one in most big towns where Europeans lived—even outnumbering the mestizos. The blacks were also important in all mines, and dominant in all sugar properties, particularly in supervisory roles: indeed, in 1600, King Philip III finally forbade the use of any Indians in plantations. Since there were never enough African slaves to keep the sugar estates in being, that was tantamount to a royal discouragement of business in New Spain.

  The Casa de Contratación in Seville, with a bureaucratic insistence worthy of the twentieth century, was still determined to guarantee that all imports, including human ones, should enter the Spanish empire via Cartagena or Portobelo where their own representatives were. This rule was, however, an inspiration for a considerable smuggling trade in which most royal officials participated with enthusiasm, as Francisco de Salcedo, archbishop of Santiago de Chile, complained to the king. The episcopal démarche seems to have been the explanation why, in 1622, the Crown established an internal customhouse four hundred miles inland from Buenos Aires, at Córdoba.