by Hugh Thomas
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Africa was not, in these years, just a silent participant in the supply of slaves to two distant European empires. The overthrow, at the battle of Tondibi, of the great Songhai empire by a Moorish army sent down the main western caravan route by the sultan from Marrakesh had immeasurable consequences for the international market in slaves. Despite their victory, Berber control was far from certain, even of the main Songhai cities of Gao and Timbuktu, and internecine disputes disturbed the completeness of the pashas’ triumph. The consequence was that, quite independent of the growing European demand, every day there were more slaves available in the interior of Africa. The victors after Tondibi may themselves have limited their loot to twelve hundred prisoners, as well as forty camel loads of gold dust. But the Sahara slave trade thereafter much increased.
On the coast of West Africa, these were the years when, in consequence of the Atlantic trade, several fishing villages at the estuary of the Niger began to turn into city-states, their economies based on trading slaves to the Europeans. A famous hunter, Alagbariye, on an expedition for game to the coast, is said to have come upon the site in Nigeria on which Bonny now stands and, aware of the potentialities for trade, brought his people there, much as Huitzilopochtli the Mexican warrior god was held to have seen in Tenochtitlán the ideal site for a city. Such developments led to the villages on the delta of the Niger becoming important slave markets in the seventeenth century, though they were never as important as Angola or Congo. Once Bonny and the city-states had been established, there was little room for free men there; slaves abounded, and not just for the benefit of the Europeans.
Some of these cities eventually became strong monarchies: Bonny, to begin with, but also New Calabar and Warri as well as Bell Town and Aqua Town, in the Cameroons; and there were some strong commercial republics, such as old Calabar and Brass. But the powers of the Bonny kings were always limited: “Although in many respects they appear to exercise absolute power, unrestrained by fixed principles,” wrote one English slave captain, “they may be properly termed heads of an aristocratic government. This is evinced by having a grand palaver [consultation] house, in which they themselves preside, but the members of which, composed of the great chiefs and great men, . . . [are] convened and consulted upon all matters of state urgency.”20
Imports of African slaves to Europe and the Canaries were coming to an end. The explanation was that the high birthrate of the sixteenth century satisfied the demands for labor in Spain, Italy, and southern France; and, when the population declined in the seventeenth century, the economies in those countries were in poor condition. Brazilian sugar farmers could afford black slaves; Lisbon noblemen could do so less and less. Yet indigenous Indian slaves were still to be found in Portugal in the early seventeenth century, and the slaves of Lisbon in 1620 may still have been over ten thousand, about 6 percent of a total population of 165,000. Perhaps, too, a tenth of the population of the Algarve were slaves at this time. In 1600, Catalonia and the Mediterranean coast of Spain were still importing slaves as a result of maritime raids against Arab towns, and the authorities there were often occupied by the flight of slaves to France. (But this dimension diminished during the seventeenth century, when naval engagements were won by Moors more often than by Spaniards.) In Seville, there was actually an increase in the population of the black quarter of San Bernardo. The parish had even to be divided into two (the new section was San Roque, whose church was finished in 1585). Perhaps there was here, as there had been in Portugal, a deliberate encouragement of black births for a time; in Palos, at least, masters apparently sought to persuade slave women to have a child every two years.
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Meantime, another firm declaration against the slave trade then so vigorously under way had been made in Seville by Tomás de Mercado, a Dominican friar who had been, when young, to Mexico. He wrote an account of the commerce between Spain and the New World. He knew from personal observation in what vile conditions slaves were carried on ships. So he could be more direct on the matter than de Soto and others had been. In his Suma de tratos y contratos, published in Salamanca in 1569, he admittedly accepted the institution of slavery. He recognized too that prisoners captured in war had, throughout history, been enslaved, and even considered that slaves were, usually, better off in America than they were in Africa. But he also described vividly how so many slaves were obtained through kidnapping or trickery, even if the kidnappers and tricksters were usually Africans. The high prices offered for slaves by Europeans, he pointed out, also encouraged the African monarchs to raid each other’s land, and even persuaded fathers to sell their children, sometimes out of spite. Overcrowding on slave ships while crossing the Atlantic was so atrocious that the smell alone was enough to kill many: 129 slaves on a recent ship, he said, had died the first night of the voyage. No official regulations about loading slaves, such as the Portuguese had tried to introduce, could be expected to work. So, he argued, indulgence in the slave trade to the Americas automatically caused men to incur deadly sin. Those who engaged in the trade in Seville, such as the Jorges and other distinguished merchants, should discuss the matter with their confessors.21
These stern words had no effect. The Arenal in Seville remained full of ships clearing for the Cape Verde Islands, if not for Africa.
A few years later, Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz, a lawyer born in Talavera in Spain who had emigrated to Mexico and lived there, went further than Mercado had done, in his Arte de los contratos, published in Valencia, in 1573. Frías de Albornoz was the first professor of civil law in New Spain and is now considered “the father of Mexican juriconsultants”: a paternity which has certainly had an extended progeny. In his book, he doubted whether prisoners of war could ever be legally enslaved. Unlike Mercado, he thought that no African could benefit from living as a slave in the Americas, and that Christianity could not justify the violence of the trade and the act of kidnapping. Obviously, he thought, clergy were too lazy to go to Africa and act as real missionaries.22
Clearly these expressions of doubt needed a reply; and they came, in the form of a revelation. A Dominican friar, Fray Francisco de la Cruz, told the Inquisition in Lima, that an angel had told him that “the blacks are justly captives by reason of the sins of their forefathers, and that because of that sin God gave them that color.” The Dominican explained that the black people were descended from the tribe of Aser—he must have meant Isacchar—and they were so warlike and indomitable that they would upset everyone if they were allowed to live free.23
Similar views to those of Frías de Albornoz were nevertheless expressed by a Jesuit, Fray Miguel García who, arriving in Brazil about 1580, and being among the earliest members of the order to reach that dominion, was horrified to find that his society owned Africans who, as he thought, had been illegally enslaved. He decided to refuse to hear confession from anyone who owned African slaves. He and a colleague, Frei Gonçalo Leite, returned to Europe in protest. But nothing more was heard of them. A comparable protest was expressed in 1580 by the historian Juan Suárez de Peralta, a nephew by marriage of Hernán Cortés, who wondered why no voices were raised on behalf of the black Africans when so many were so raised in favor of the Indians: “There is no difference between them other than that one is darker in color,” he sensibly pointed out.24 But his book, like Las Casas’s History of the Indies, in which that author spoke similarly, was not published till the nineteenth century.
A ferocious attack on the slave trade was also made at the end of the sixteenth century by the Portuguese bishop of the Cape Verde Islands, Frei Pedro Brandão. He tried to end the traffic and proposed that all blacks should be baptized and then declared free.
These disparate challenges to the ancient institution, like all others, fell on deaf ears. Spain, and Portugal with her, was entering an intellectually dead period. The assumption was that the status quo had to be maintained. The age of adventure was over, and that of considerate philanthropy had
not arrived. Printing had come, but there was no method of general communication. Albornoz’s book was condemned by the Inquisition as being unduly disturbing. Anyway, what was written in a Dominican monastery, however important, could not be expected to be read by merchants on the waterfronts.
All the same, these isolated denunciations enable the Catholic Church to present herself as a prefigurement of the abolitionist movement more plausibly than is often allowed. Throughout the seventeenth century, letters of protest on the matter of the slave trade continued to arrive at the sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome from Capuchins, Jesuits, and bishops.
Mercado and Albornoz might have no effect, but they had successors. Thus, in the early seventeenth century, a Jesuit named João Álvaras wrote—privately, of course—“I personally feel that the troubles which afflict Portugal are on account of the slaves we secure unjustly from our conquests and the lands where we trade.”25 Fray Alonso de Sandoval, a great Spanish Jesuit traveler who was born in Seville but educated in Lima, asked some embarrassing questions in his book Naturaleza . . . de todos los etíopes, which was published in his birthplace in 1627. He concluded that slavery was a combination of all evils. In 1610, he had written to Frei Luis Brandão, the rector of the newly established College of Jesuits in Luanda, to ask if the slaves whom he had himself seen in Brazil had been legally procured or not. Brandão replied delphically: “ . . . there have been fathers in our order eminent in letters, [and] never did they consider this trade as illicit. . . . We and the fathers of Brazil buy these slaves without any scruple. . . . If anyone could be excused from having scruples, it is the inhabitants of those regions for, since the traders who bring those blacks do so in good faith, those inhabitants can very well buy them from such traders without any scruple, and the latter . . . can sell them.” He then warned Sandoval, “I find that no black will ever say that he has been captured legally . . . in the hope that they will be given their liberty.” He added: “In the fairs where these blacks are bought, there are always a few who have been captured illegally, because they were stolen, or because the rulers of the land order them to be sold for offenses so slight that they do not deserve captivity; but these are few in number and to seek, among the ten or twelve thousand who leave this port every year, for a few who have been illegally captured is an impossibility. . . .”26 Sandoval published this letter, but the exchange seemed surprisingly to have convinced the Jesuits of the legality, grosso modo, of the trade in slaves.
The only tangible consequence of all these discussions was a decision by Philip III, king of Spain as of Portugal, to insist that all slave ships carry priests.
Despite this official neglect of criticism of the new trade in black slaves, it is hard not to feel that there were, by 1600 or so, enough hostile voices to have brought the trade to an end within the next generation or so had it not been for the entry into the business of the Northern European Protestants, as will be discussed in the next chapter.
There were also in these years just a few indications that the institution of slavery itself was not accepted as a permanent state of affairs. In 1571, for example, the parliament of Bordeaux declared that “all blacks and Moors which a Norman merchant [probably from Honfleur] has brought to this town to sell should be placed at liberty: France, mother of liberty, does not permit any slaves.”27 A little later, a slave traveling between Genoa and Spain with his master was set free in Toulouse on the ground that any slave who entered that city was automatically free. Jean Bodin, the philosopher of sovereignty, was personally present on the last occasion, and he used what he saw to support his argument, in his Six Livres de la République, that an all-powerful sovereign could abolish slavery altogether.28 But the decisions at Bordeaux and at Toulouse were isolated events of little significance. Whatever was said by Bodin, slavery persisted sporadically in France; and Frenchmen were quite ready to participate in the international slave trade, if they could only find a way.
There was, in the early seventeenth century, just one expression of uncertainty about the slave trade emanating from West Africa itself. Thus an ex-slave captured by the Moroccans at the great battle of Tondibi, Ahmed Baba, established himself as a lawyer in Tuat, a large market town of North Africa. Some of his admirers approached him, shocked by the increasing quantities of “ebony” passing through their oases in the Sahara trade. To be sure, they were worried not about the slave trade as such but, rather, that there just might be some “brothers,” Muslims, included by mistake in some of these caravanserais. Ahmed Baba then wrote a study concluding that slavery was certainly permissible if the slaves were captured in a just war, but all captives had to be asked before being enslaved whether they would accept Islam.29 If they did they should be freed. A free man, therefore, might have supposed in 1620 that Islam was a more tolerant faith than Christianity.
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IIn the same inquiry in London, the question was put, “Can any cause be assigned which impedes the natural increase of Negroes?” The answer was: “the lascivious abuse of authority in white servants over the immature and unprotected females. . . . The women . . . have in general a sense of decency and decorum in their fidelity. . . . The men have none; they follow the examples of the white servants. . . . To their loose amours, many of them are sacrificed. Both sexes are frequently traveling all night going to or returning from a distant connection. . . .”
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Book Two
THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE TRADE
9
A Good Correspondence with the Blacks
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL assumed in the sixteenth century that they could together retain the Atlantic as a private lake. But from the beginning those imperial nations were troubled by pirates or interlopers in their trade in both Africa and the Americas.
The first seizure of a shipment of gold from Elmina by a French “pirate” was as early as 1492. In 1525, a French ship anchored off Mpinda, just to the north of the river Congo, and King Afonso welcomed what he thought were two new friendly Europeans in his capital; the Portuguese complained bitterly, and did all they could to prevent any repetition of the unwelcome incursion. But by the 1530s, French captains, mostly from Dieppe, that grand arsenal, both of shipping and of robbery on the high seas, had become intolerable to the Portuguese. The most feared figure—shipbuilder to the king of France, but pirate to the Spaniards as well as to the Portuguese, Jean Ango, of Dieppe, later viscount of that city (one of his captains seized Cortés’s treasure fleet in 1522)—secured royal approval to plunder Portuguese shipping as early as 1530. In 1533, two French ships attacked two Portuguese vessels off the river Mahin, near Benin and by 1539, French merchants were already buying the pepper though not, so far as is known, the slaves, of that city.
The Portuguese sought to provide naval escorts for their trading ships. By then, however, it was almost too late: France had begun to displace the Portuguese on the rivers Sénégal and Gambia. A Portuguese renegade, João Affonso, sailing under a French flag as Jean Alphonse, was among the first to carry out what is now spoken of as a triangular trade, sailing to the Grain Coast for pepper, and across to “France Antarctique,” then a promising French settlement at Rio de Janeiro, for wood. As well as attacking Portuguese ships, he probably carried slaves on a small scale. Another French adventurer, Balthazar de Moucheron, appreciating the possibilities of African trade, tried to make a permanent settlement on the coast of Guinea. He attacked the Portuguese at Elmina with a small force, but failed to dislodge the paramount power. Other French attempts, to gain possession of Principe and São Tomé, were equally unsuccessful. All the same, France was plainly determined to play a part in the destiny of Africa—as well as in that of Brazil. The records of Le Havre, Dieppe, and Honfleur suggest that nearly two hundred ships from those pretty Norman ports set sail for Sierra Leone between about 1540 and 1578; and at least fourteen vessels left La Rochelle, then France’s main Atlantic-facing port, for Africa between 1534 and 1565. In 1544, Estevan D
arrisague, of Bordeaux, hired his ship, the Baptiste de Saint Jean de Luz, to a well-known captain, André Morrison, to make another triangular voyage: Guinea, Brazil, Bordeaux. Morrison made what trade he could: such were the rules in those days. No document survives to show that he carried slaves; but nothing proves that, in the easiest stage of the journey, later so well known, from the Congo to Brazil, he did not.
During the disastrous Huguenot wars of the last half of the century, French commerce was quiescent; but, no sooner had peace returned than trade to Africa revived; and, in 1594, a ship of fifty tons, L’Espérance, from La Rochelle, certainly took slaves from Cape Lopez, near Gabon, to Brazil.1
Long before that, the English, too, had become engaged in the tempting African waters: the first adventurer there was William Hawkins, of Tavistock in Devonshire, who sailed to the Guinea coast in the 1530s. In 1532, he even brought an indigenous chief back to England from a voyage to Brazil. This individual was intended for show; Hawkins left behind one of his seamen in the new continent as a hostage, who returned later, though the chief died on his way home. That was not a slaving journey.
There was a similar voyage to Guinea, precisely to the Gold Coast and to Benin, in 1553, led by two quarrelsome captains—Thomas Wyndham, originally of Norfolk, and Antonio Anes Pintado, a renegade Portuguese, perhaps a converso (he was denounced as a “whoreson Jew” by his English colleague, but that may have been a typical East Anglian insult)—with the intention of breaking into the trade in gold: an aim which they fulfilled, for their ships brought back 150 pounds of it, though both captains died on the journey. This expedition sailed some way up the Nun River entrance to the Niger and later visited Benin where, following in the footsteps of the French, they bought pepper direct from the oba. The captains resisted the temptations of the slave trade. Wyndham, who had previously sailed and swashbuckled with William Hawkins, was not the last member of his family to be associated with the African trade; but he was the first Englishman to sail into the perilous waters of the Bight of Benin.