The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  In 1621, with war beginning again with Spain (and Portugal, still united to Spain as a dual monarchy) after a twelve-year truce, the Dutch West India Company (the “Oude” Company, to historians) was reestablished, and given a monopoly for twenty-four years of Dutch trade to Africa and the West Indies. Influenced by Calvinist zealots from Zeeland and Holland, this body was run by a Council of Nineteen, of whom the chairman was appointed by the States General. Part of the capital came from public funds and, though its soldiers were paid by the company, the government supplied both them and the war matériel. The company was divided into five chambers deriving from different parts of the Netherlands, each being responsible for a different proportion of the capital and enjoying a corresponding control over the enterprise. The Amsterdam chamber was the dominant one, for it owned most of the capital. The successes of this body would be enormous, as much in war as in trade.

  The man behind the new foundation was a visionary, originally from Antwerp, Willem Usselinx. Before the Dutch rebellion against Spain, he had been an apprentice to merchants in most of the great ports of Europe. He had seen the return of the Spanish treasure fleet to the Arenal at Seville, the Portuguese casting anchor in the Azores, and Brazilian sugar being unloaded at Oporto. He fled from Antwerp to Amsterdam in the 1570s, and joined the brilliant circle of the geographer Petrus Plancius. To this group, Usselinx often expanded on the need for the Dutch consciously to seek to take over the imperial mission of Portugal, as well as to succeed to Spanish greatness. In numerous letters and speeches, he demanded that the States General persuade or, if need be, force the Spaniards to allow Dutch commerce and settlement, particularly in areas where there were no colonies already established. He was among the first Europeans to see that the Americas could contribute much to the home continent, as the example of Brazil, already penetrated by Dutch capital, seemed to prove. He also thought (with no personal knowledge of the people concerned) that the indigenous Indians could be persuaded to accept the Dutch as their leaders more easily than they could Latins, for he was a Calvinist and an enemy of the pope. Of course, he opposed the idea of encouraging colonial industry, as did everyone else in his day. But he did suggest the emigration of agricultural laborers, including Germans and Balts, who already were contributing much to Dutch maritime power as seamen. He was critical of slave labor, thinking, as Adam Smith would do a century and a half later, that it was both uneconomical and—most unusually for his time—inhuman. Indeed, he believed that free white workers would work better than slaves, even if they might have to be in sugar mills at night.

  To begin with, as a result of Usselinx’s insistence, the new West India Company continued to eschew trading in slaves. Some enterprising shareholders proposed the traffic. But the directors decided, after discussion with theologians, that a trade in human beings was not morally justified. That might seem odd for, at that time, Calvinists usually accepted slavery as unthinkingly as Catholics did, agreeing that it derived from the curse of Ham.II But the first work of literature to criticize slavery outright had already been written in 1615 in Amsterdam by the brilliant young poet Gerbrand Bredero who, in his Moortje, The Little Moor (based on a free French translation of Terence’s Eunuch), talked of the traffic in slaves as “Inhumane custom! Godless rascality! That people are being sold to horse-like slavery. In this city there are also those who indulge in that trade.”5 So those directors of the West India Company who were not influenced by their pastors were affected by their visits to the theater.

  Despite the playwright and the pastors, however, a few independent merchants of Amsterdam were by 1620 engaged in slaving. The most prominent of these was Diogo Dias Querido, originally a citizen of Oporto in Portugal who had lived for a time in Brazil. He had black servants—or were they slaves?—in his house in Amsterdam, and he trained them there to serve as interpreters on the African journeys which he promoted. Dias Querido, a Sephardic Jew, was important in Dutch foreign trade for many years: as well as carrying slaves on a small scale to Brazil, he imported sugar from both the latter and São Tomé, and sold it in Leghorn and in Venice. Still, only twenty to forty ships sailed annually to Guinea from the Netherlands during the “twelve years truce” between 1610 and 1622, and only two or three of them did so on behalf of Dias or other merchants interested in slaving.

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  At first, these doom-laden Dutch initiatives had little effect on Spanish-Portuguese imperial ways. The Portuguese in Luanda were certainly perplexed as to what to do about Dutch activities in Loango, to the north of their own city, but they thought that force was the only answer to such incursions, and the Crown in Madrid was reluctant to act. The Court in those days, if it thought about black Africans at all, was probably more concerned about Yanga’s revolt of 1607-11 in New Spain, a rebellion of slaves born in the Americas, who were less submissive than African-born bozales. The upheaval lasted many years, until a conciliatory viceroy allowed the escaped slaves to survive in their own community, San Lorenzo de los Negros, near Córdoba, in the Sierra de Orizaba, on the assumption that they would not attack white communities and travelers. Another black revolt, supposed to threaten the capital of New Spain in 1612, was only arrested by the execution of thirty-six blacks. In Brazil, the governor-general was preoccupied with the lesser planters’ continuing insistence on using Indian slaves, thousands of whom were captured in the interior, on the ground that they could not afford Africans: a poverty which led to the extraordinary expeditions of the bandeiras, freely organized bands of adventurers, in search of Indian slaves which, between 1600 and 1750, did so much to discover the heartland of central South America, and ruin the Indians at the same time.

  Perhaps the Dutch appearance on the international commercial scene seemed in New Spain less remarkable than the fact that there were by now mulatto slaves in Spanish America. The disastrous final expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1610 did not disturb the domestic slave trade, since Moorish slaves were excepted from the rules, though obliged after 1626 to accept Christianity. In Cádiz, there were, in 1616, three hundred Moors, as well as five hundred black slaves, most of them employed in building fortifications against new attacks by the English. Lisbon in 1620 still numbered over 10,000 slaves—almost all black: Moorish slaves would indeed be prohibited in 1641, while in 1606, and again in 1618, limitations were placed on sending slaves back from the Americas (one could only send males over sixteen years old). Neither religious corporations nor individuals had yet abandoned slaves in Europe.

  Further, the Portuguese dominance of the slave trade was causing much bad blood with their nominal friends the Spaniards. Spanish merchants accused the Portuguese of being thieves who stole Spanish silver; of being Jewish heretics, who continued to practice Judaism behind a mask of Christianity, and who were even filling the Americas with Africans educated to follow those heretical beliefs. As a result, the Council of the Indies of Madrid introduced a law in 1608 which made it difficult for foreigners to trade in Spanish America; but it was never applied to slave traders.

  Because of all these difficulties, negotiations in the Junta de Negros in Madrid for a new contract (asiento) to carry slaves into the Spanish empire continued very slowly, as if the Dutch fleets and merchants did not exist. Thus, in 1611, the Casa de Contratación in Seville proposed the division of this legendarily valuable private treaty into two: one to apply to ships whose captains would buy slaves in the Cape Verde Islands, with an obligation to register all cargoes in Seville; the other concerning the carriage of slaves from Angola direct to Brazil and the Indies. The scheme was not accepted, since the first obligation would have added a long extra stage to an already formidable journey. The merchants of Seville, however, argued that to allow slave ships to leave direct for the Americas from Lisbon or the Canary Islands, as well as from Seville, would enable many captains to escape paying taxes. Anyway, the sevillanos insisted, officials in Lisbon and the Canaries were less punctilious than those of Seville. They wanted the ships to come to Sevil
le, where the slaves would be listed for purposes of taxes, sold, and placed on Spanish vessels for the transatlantic crossing. The Portuguese argued that the adoption of these new ideas would ruin Portugal.

  But, seeing the slave trade primarily as an item in tax revenue, the supreme authority, the Council of the Indies, eventually conceded victory to the sevillanos. All slaving ships destined for the Spanish overseas empire were henceforth to be inspected at Seville. Africans destined for the New World would be taken first to Seville, and then transferred to one or another of the caravels in the annual convoys. Only if there were no Spanish ships available would Portuguese traders be able to carry slaves to the Spanish New World.

  But there were no candidates for a new contract on these conditions. The old asentista, Vaz Coutinho, continued, therefore, provisionally to sell licenses for his own profit. Then, finally, in 1616 (after discussion of other candidates, and again against the complaints of sevillano merchants), a new contract was granted to another Portuguese millionaire, and converso, Antônio Fernandes Elvas. He agreed to pay 120,000 ducats a year for the privilege of arranging the annual import—through licenses, of course—of between 3,500 and 5,000 slaves into the Spanish colonies. He already had a similar contract to supply Brazil with slaves from Angola, for which he had paid 24 million reals; while a cousin, Duarte Pinto D’Elvas, had had the same right to trade slaves from the Cape Verde Islands—an assignment which Antônio now took over, too, at a cost of over 15 million reals.

  Elvas had been born rich, he was a member of the prosperous Portuguese converso community in Madrid, and he had married a rich woman, Elena Rodrigues de Solís (also of Jewish origin, whose brother was at that time rotting in the Inquisition’s prison in Cartagena de Indias). He had been treasurer to King Philip II’s daughter, the Infanta María, and had numerous properties in Lisbon, where he preferred to live, as well as a luxurious quinta, Mil Fontes, just outside that capital. Elvas agreed, in order to satisfy the Spanish complaints, that in theory he would take his Caribbean-bound ships to Seville for inspection before they set off for the colonies. Further, his blacks would be delivered only in Cartagena and Veracruz, a limitation which made taxes easier to collect.

  So Elvas now became responsible for nearly all the legal slave trading from Africa to America. There were spectacular consequences, for, after some bad years (between 1611 and 1615, only nine slave ships had been licensed by Vaz Coutinho, carrying only 1,300 slaves), 139 ships were licensed between 1616 and 1620, most (104) going to Angola—Luanda—carrying nearly 20,000 slaves. Between 1621 and 1625, 125 ships were licensed for America, the West Indies, and West Africa, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope, again mostly (82) to start from Angola (carrying more than 17,000 slaves).6

  Thus more slaves went annually to the Indies under Elvas’s aegis than ever before: an official named Benito Banha Cardozo wrote, in 1622, “Most people being employed [in Luanda] in the slave trade, they neglect everything else.” In the New World, the colonists found themselves receiving blacks from all parts of Africa. In her will about this time, for example, in Cartagena de Indias, María de Barros left four American-born Africans (one born in São Tomé), three Angolans, three “Ararás” (Dahomeyans), two “Lucumís” (Yorubas), one Congolese, and one from Biafra.

  As usually happened with these contracts, Elvas’s asiento led to difficulties. That entrepreneur was probably the first merchant to make a financial success of the contract. But that in itself excited extraordinary jealousy for him, and not only among the sevillanos. Accused of cheating the king, he defended himself inadequately, and went to prison where he died. After war began again with Holland, in 1621 (largely as a result of the Spanish Crown’s determination to reimpose their embargo on Dutch trade, to be sure), the asiento passed to Manuel Rodrigues Lamego, who gained a new contract for eight years in 1623, against the claims of Elena Rodrigues de Solís, Elvas’s widow. Slave ships were henceforth to be permitted to register at Lisbon, not just at Seville, and thereafter most did so: the biggest shippers of slaves were, after all, still the Portuguese.

  Rodrigues Lamego was another converso merchant, already enriched by the slave trade in Angola, both a friend and a relation of bankers in Brazil and the North of Europe, including many in Holland. Like his predecessor Elvas, Lamego was the proprietor of several rich farms in Portugal. But, like other New Christian merchants at that time, he lived in constant fear of the Inquisition, whose activities were often venomously promoted by less fortunate, jealous merchants in Seville. Lamego’s brother, Antônio, suffered an auto-da-fé in 1633. His son, Bartolomé Febos, was in constant danger of a similar tragedy, for he was intimately linked with the powerful converso commercial network of Madrid. Like Elvas, Lamego made money from the asiento even though, between 1626 and 1630, only fifty-nine ships were licensed for Africa, mostly for Luanda (they carried a total of about eight thousand slaves). Much of the demand for slaves was in these years beginning to be met by interlopers—many of them Spanish and Portuguese—minor traders who had been kept out of the national arrangements with the powerful Portuguese merchants. But even the official figures picked up in the next quinquennium: between 1631 and 1635, eighty ships were licensed—mostly (sixty-four) for Angola (carrying over 11,000 slaves). There were, again, a few more between 1635 and 1640: eighty-three ships were then licensed, as ever the majority (seventy-six) bound for Angola (carrying in theory over 11,000 slaves).

  These increases, both official and illegal, were the consequence of the permission granted by Philip IV in 1627 to Portuguese businessmen to trade wherever they liked in the “Iberian” empire. The fact that so many of them were conversos did not disturb the king, nor his prime minister, the great Olivares for, perhaps because of the little drop of Jewish blood which he himself enjoyed—through his great-grandfather, Ferdinand the Catholic’s secretary, Lope Conchillos—the prime minister had always been well disposed towards that minority.

  Of course, illegalities, smuggling, and corruption continued, undisturbed. There were innumerable cases of ships arriving in Cartagena de Indias whose captains, for fiscal purposes, declared that they carried fewer slaves than they really did—say, two hundred slaves instead of five hundred. The chief dealer in Cartagena was in those days a Portuguese, Jorge Fernández Gramaxo, who had begun to trade slaves in 1594 for his uncle, Antônio Gramaxo. By 1610, Jorge was defrauding the Spanish Treasury on so large a scale that he seemed “enough in himself to destroy the Indies.” Once a representative of Gomes Reinel, and later of Vaz Coutinho, he had several properties outside Cartagena, where he stored illicitly introduced slaves on a large scale (much as, in the same country, in much the same region, in the twentieth century, his spiritual successors would keep cocaine), and he maintained an extensive correspondence with Amsterdam, Seville, and Lisbon. He began to be accused by the authorities of illegal, treasonable contact with foreign states (the Netherlands, in particular); but he escaped all charges since, again like some modern drug dealers, he was a local benefactor. He eventually obtained the position of “commander of the fortifications” in Cartagena and, from then on, he could not be challenged. He died in 1626 a very rich man, leaving his fortune to his nephew, Antonio Núñez Gramaxo, who dissipated it.7

  Perhaps the most flagrant example of smuggling, though, was that of João Correia de Souza, governor of Angola, who, after a singularly disastrous administration of that province, himself set off on May 3, 1623, to Cartagena, in a vessel with three hundred slaves, as well as a good deal of silver. He sold everything without registering the fact, thanks to the useful connivance of the governor of Cartagena, a friend for many years.

  Despite these irregularities, the Crown in Madrid—still for a few more years the united Crown of Portugal and Spain—remained concerned to promote the traffic in slaves. The tone had been set for the new century when, in 1607, the king of Spain told a new governor of Angola, Manuel Pereira Forjaz that, during his proconsulate, the buying of slaves was actually to be en
couraged, so as to swell the tax returns to the Royal Treasury. The king coupled this instruction with a reminder that no white man should ever be allowed to go inland to slave markets, for African middlemen could usually buy cheaper than Europeans could. By that time, indeed, most slaves bought in Angola were bought from the half-African, half-Portuguese lançados, traders who could live in two worlds—one pagan, the other Christian—with no difficulty.

  Typical of those active in slaving, in those last years of the Portuguese-Spanish control of the Atlantic slave trade, as of the Americas as a whole, was Diego de la Vega, of Madeira (he originated in the Castilian market town of Medina del Campo), who made a fortune by selling contraband slaves for use in the Peruvian silver mines. After working for years with the Angolan slave merchants, he, like Elvas, ended in prison in Lisbon, as a smuggler, and also on a grand scale. (His ruin was caused by the government’s prohibition in 1622 of the overland route from the new colony of Buenos Aires to Chile and Bolivia, insisting that slaves for Peru and Pacific colonies should henceforth be sent by a long roundabout route which they could easily control—and tax—via Panama.)

  More disconcerting at first sight to the Portuguese than the growing Dutch challenge to them was new warfare in the kingdom of Ndongo in the hinterland behind Luanda, after 1608. This fighting was caused by a series of brutal attacks on the Mbundu people of Ndongo by the nomadic, palm-wine-drinking, and often cannibalistic Lunda. To enable themselves to retain their mobility, the Lunda never raised children. Even the monarch, with his long hair embroidered with shells, and his daily anointment with the boiled fat of his enemies, would slaughter his own offspring, by all his twenty or thirty highly perfumed wives. To maintain their numbers, the Lunda adopted adolescents from the peoples whom they conquered. These novices were slaves, and wore iron collars as a sign of that status, until they were able to present the severed head of an enemy to the king. An English sailor, Andrew Battel (of Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex)—who was imprisoned for many years by the Portuguese, first in Brazil, then in Luanda—observed the Lunda at this time, precisely when they fell on Benguela, a new coastal settlement 250 miles to the south of Luanda, on the northern bank of the sluggish river Kuvu.III After their victory, the Lunda lived off the cattle and pigs which they had captured—and off the profits of selling the population to Portuguese traders.