The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Some of these colonies needed slaves, or so it seemed, especially in the islands. The indigenous inhabitants, the Caribs, had almost all been stolen for that purpose a hundred years before by the first Spanish conquistadors on the bigger places of the Caribbean. The descendants of the cattle and pigs which the Spaniards had inadvertently brought, and which roamed the empty islands and provided food for the new settlers, were not an adequate substitute. Or could workers from England and France be induced to settle in the lands over which their country’s flag now flew?

  Actually before the new European settlers entered the African slave market, the business was initiated on the mainland. In 1619, John Rolfe, the Norfolk-born first recorder of Virginia, already a grower of tobacco, who had been recently left a widower by Princess Pocahontas, noted, “About the last of August came a Dutch man of war that sold us twenty negroes.”13 This comment is usually held to be the first reference to the import of black slaves into what became the United States, though Pánfilo de Narváez, Menéndez de Avilés, and Coronado had all taken slaves with them in their expeditions of conquest in Florida and New Mexico the previous century and it is unclear what transpired in 1619. The early history of Anglo-Saxon America lacks the ample written records which distinguish the arrival of the Castilians in Mexico and Peru. Probably, the ship concerned was not a man-of-war but a privateer, whose captain had captured the slaves from a Portuguese ship in the West Indies.

  Even before that, King James I in London had granted to an active entrepreneur and favorite of the Court, Robert Rich (shortly to be earl of Warwick), and to thirty-six others, control over British African trade, through the formation of a Company of Adventurers to “Gynny and Bynny” (Guinea and Benin). This was the first incorporated English company to concern itself with Africa. Rich already owned a tobacco plantation in Virginia, and was probably hoping to secure black slaves to work it.V A “list of the living in Virginia” of 1624 included twenty-two blacks, several of them presumably coming to the New World as personal slaves of certain passengers on ships, such as Rich’s own Treasurer (1619), but also the James (1621), the Margaret and John (1622), not to speak of the Swan (1623).

  The English attitude to slaving was at that time not quite clear. For example, a merchant named George Thomson went out, on behalf of Rich’s Guinea Company, to explore the river Gambia. He was primarily interested in gold. Thomson lost his vessel to the Portuguese, and a certain Richard Jobson (of whom nothing is recorded except that he despised the Irish) went to relieve him, to find that Thomson had been murdered by one of his own men. Jobson reported that the natives on the Gambia were afraid of him, because their compatriots had “been many times by several nations surprized, taken and carried away.” Jobson was offered slaves by an African merchant, Buckor Sano but, speaking for himself and not for the Guinea Company, he declared proudly that “we were a people who did not deal in such commodities, neither did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes.” The African merchant seemed to marvel at this, and “told us it was the only merchandise they carried down into the country, where they fetched all their salt, and that they were sold there to white men, who earnestly desired them. . . . We answered, ‘They were another kind of people different from us.’ ”14

  Jobson made various explorations in the Gambia region, looking for gold, but this journey and two subsequent voyages of his were financial failures and, after a loss of five thousand pounds, the Guinea Company gave up.

  Jobson’s protests were exceptional. The Anglo-Saxons turned out to be as ready to trade slaves as their French neighbors were. John Hawkins had in no way lost his reputation after his slaving expedition, for he had become treasurer of the navy and remained a national hero. Some private slaving had also already been carried out by English ships on the Guinea coast: English ships carried sugar from São Tomé to Lisbon, and there is a record of an English vessel carrying slaves from São Tomé to Elmina under contract in 1607.

  The consequence of this commercial failure of Thomson and Jobson was that, in 1624, several independent London traders complained that they had lost business because of the monopoly grant of 1618. Had they not already built European-style houses and factories in the estuary of the river Sierra Leone? This was the first mention of such a thing, but the Crown must have been interested. So some English trading revived on the Guinea coast. Did the ships carry slaves? Surely: in May 1628, there was a new report of black slaves’ arriving in Virginia: John Ellzey, collector of the Admiralty Tenths for Hampshire, wrote to Edward Nicholas, secretary of the Admiralty to the duke of Buckingham, “The Fortune has taken an Angolan man [a vessel] with many negroes, which the captain bartered in Virginia for tobacco. . . .”15 The next year, one of the independent traders, Nicholas Crisp, a Gloucestershire man whose father had been sheriff of London, was found complaining about the French seizure of his ship Benediction, which had been carrying on its “accustomed trade” with 180 slaves on board. In 1630, King Charles I granted a license to transport slaves from Guinea to a syndicate of separate traders (that is, a group which had nothing to do with the company of 1618). This was headed by that same Nicholas Crisp, the other directors being all prominent men about the Court: Sir Richard Young, Sir Kenelm Digby, George Kirke, Humphrey Slaney, and William Clobery.

  Of these men, Crisp was original in many ways other than maritime enterprise (“The art of brick-making, as since practised, was his own, conducted through incredible patience by many trials”); Digby, son of a conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, was a genius; and Slaney was a Bohemian by birth. They received an exclusive right (among English traders) to trade in Guinea, Benin, and Angola for thirty-one years. Crisp had already built a British factory at a place which came to be known as Cormantine (Kormantin), on the Gold Coast: and it would remain the English headquarters, indeed the only English fort, though not the only English settlement, till 1661. He was the foremost member of the company.

  This enterprise certainly traded slaves. Thus, in 1637, the ship Talbot was found equipped to “take nigers and to carry them to foreign parts”; and, the same year, Crisp, interloper turned gamekeeper, was himself complaining that new interlopers—English ones, that is—were threatening his monopoly. In 1644, he lost control of his company. As a monarchist (he “gave thousands” to the king during the Civil War) he could scarcely be surprised at being accused by his opponents of owing the state £16,000, to settle which debt his share of the Guinea Company was seized. Other English merchants were now beginning to be interested: for example, Samuel Vassall (a trader of French extraction, much concerned with Massachusetts, of which he, with his brother, John, was one of the first promoters). Crisp’s Guinea Company was denounced by Vassall and other rivals before the Council of State in 1649, for having gained their monopoly by the “procurement of courtiers.”16

  The next year, Crisp himself went to Guinea, to Cabo Corso (Cape Coast), with what he understood from the king of Fetu was a permission to build there. He bought the land for £64 worth of goods; “whereupon the people gave several great shouts, throwing the dust in the air and proclaimed that this was Crisp’s land.” Fourteen days later, though, Henrick Carloff, an adventurer in the service of the queen of Sweden, appeared offshore, and the king of Fetu allowed him, too, to build. The English were soon turned out, and so it was the Swedes who built the first castle at Cabo Corso.

  When denounced as monarchists in 1649, Crisp and his friends defended themselves by saying that they had brought £10,000 from the Africa trade into England, that they had founded a trading post in 1632, had purchased Winneba in 1633, and had even taught English to the son of the king of Aguna.

  • • •

  By the late 1630s, a few African slaves were to be seen in most of the European North American colonies. In 1638, for example, there were some recorded in the territory which would become Pennsylvania. Equally, that was when slaves are known to have been first in Maryland: an official, Richard Kemp, wrote to the governor that he had bou
ght, among other things, “ten negroes . . . for your lordship’s use.”17

  The Desire, 120 tons, built at Marblehead (Massachusetts) but registered at Salem, was probably the first ship constructed in North America to trade for slaves, though she merely went to the West Indies, not to Africa; she was also the first ship to carry black slaves to Connecticut, in 1637. According to John Winthrop the younger, the Suffolk-born first governor of that colony, William Pierce, its master, “brought some cotton and tobacco and negroes etc., from thence and salt from Tortugas [off Hispaniola]. . . . Dry fish and strong liquors are the only commodities for [exchange in] those parts.”18 Pierce also kidnapped, but then apparently left behind, some Indian captives at Providence Island (the Islas Providenciales, in the Caicos Islands, in the Bahamas).

  In these years, it seemed possible that the demand for agricultural labor in both French and English North America and the Caribbean could be satisfied by white indentured servants: men and, to a lesser extent, women who, in return for a free passage and an opportunity for possession of land in future, bound themselves to work for a specific number of years with employers. The English government approved: Francis Bacon, when lord chancellor, had coldly told King James I that, through this kind of emigration, England would doubly gain: “the avoidance of people here, and in making use of them there.”19 These chances of a successful escape from half-feudal Europe, with its wars and obligations, seemed a great chance, not only to the English poor but to the French: the so-called engagés, from France, went to the French Caribbean on similar lines. For a generation, too, “Newlanders” traveled along the Rhine Valley trying to persuade discontented German peasants to seek their fortunes across the ocean, as did similar agents in Bristol and London. Kidnapping for this purpose also became frequent; men and women were given drink, or children sweets, by planters’ “spirits,” to persuade them to agree to work in America. Conditions on these emigrant ships were almost as bad as those on slavers. Long before Australia was discovered, convicts, too, were sent.

  But the era of the engagé or indentured servant was short. Within a generation, it came to be realized that the treatment of such men and women was harsh, and that the feudal conditions which many had sought to avoid in Europe were being copied in the New World. Wages in both France and England were also increasing. Indentured servants found it hard to find good land after their ten years of service were over; and slaves began to look cheaper to the planter: a slave could be had at the end of the seventeenth century for twenty pounds, whereas an indentured laborer might cost ten to fifteen pounds as well as the cost of the journey. Africans were anyway tougher than white yokels. They stood up to tropical diseases better than farmers’ boys from Normandy or East Anglia.

  • • •

  In the new circumstances, meantime, in which all Northern Europe seemed to be seeking entry into a formerly closed Iberian world, the Spanish Crown tried to manage affairs by maintaining all its old techniques (it was still responsible for the affairs of Portugal): thus, in 1631, a new asiento was let to Melchor Gómez Angel, another merchant of Lisbon with converso origins. The contract reduced the number of slaves to two thousand five hundred a year; but, as usual, no one kept to the rules. Asentista boats went to non-asiento ports; the king’s uncle, the Cardinal Infante Enrique, was allowed to send an extra fifteen hundred slaves a year to Buenos Aires, through a license to Nicolás Salvago of Seville. The entry of Spain into the Thirty Years’ War meant that the Caribbean became—for the first time—a war zone: Portuguese slave merchants lost twenty ships, mostly to the Dutch, who were ever more active against all Portuguese possessions, especially in Africa. Nevertheless, the slave traffic could still be described by the “visitor to New Spain,” Medina Rosales, a kind of official inspector-general, as “the most considerable and important [cuantioso] commerce that there is in the Indies”; and, in 1638, the viceroy of that dominion, the marquis of Cadereyta, wrote that the slave traffic “is the biggest income and most secure of all which His Majesty has in his realms.”20

  The asiento continued in the hands of Portuguese conversos: passing in 1637 from Gómez Angel (he seems to have lived in Andalusia, on the Guadalquivir, perhaps at Lebrija) to a relation, Cristóbal Méndez de Sosa.

  But the Inquisition was still concerning itself with the alleged Judaizing activities of all Portuguese merchants, whether or not they were involved in the slave traffic. The traders of Seville were thereby enabled to have their revenge on the traders in Lisbon, whose economic dominance they had so long resented. Thus 1636 saw the trial of Francisco Rodrigues de Solis of Lisbon, brother-in-law of the monopolist of the 1620s, Antônio Fernandes Elvas. Sent to Cartagena de Indias to liquidate his affairs there, he fell into the hands of the Inquisition and was, accordingly, submitted to an auto-da-fé. There was in 1638 a big auto-da-fé in Cartagena, of João Rodrigues Mesa of Extremós, Portugal, who had sold a great number of Angolans since he arrived in the city in 1630. A large crowd of slaves, free blacks, mulattoes, and some Spaniards threw oranges at him and other condemned men before they were burned.

  Subsequent autos-da-fé would ruin the Portuguese slave-selling network in the New World. For example, in 1646, Antonio Váez de Acevedo, buyer and provider of slaves at Veracruz, and, in 1649, his brothers, Simón and Sebastián Váez Sevilla, were humiliated (though not burned), in the terrible auto-general of that year. Sons of a butcher from Castellobranco, in northeast Portugal, who had acted as executioner and then become a stevedore in the port of Lisbon, Antonio had provided most of the African slaves who were sold in Mexico; Sebastián had been purveyor-general to the recently founded Spanish Caribbean naval squadron, the Armada de Barlovento; and Simón had become one of the richest men in Mexico thanks to his slave dealings. Friend and protégé of the viceroy, the marquis of Villena, as well as holder of several governmental positions, on excellent terms at one time with bureaucrats of the very Inquisition which condemned him, Simón Váez had also prospered from the trade with China, via Acapulco. He had married Lorena de Esquivel, an old Christian—but philo-Semitic, according to the Holy Office, for had she not, years before, broken a pot in anger when a ham was cooked in it? In consequence of such minor matters were great fortunes lost. No doubt, Simón Váez and his brother Sebastián were secret Jews: as early as 1625, one of Simón’s accountants, Hernando Polanco, had denounced him for never permitting cooking with lard, and for arranging that his wife always arrived too late for mass. On the other hand, hostility towards the Portuguese merchants, Jewish or non-Jewish, was evidently a strong motive in the persecution in Mexico which was pressed ferociously by the temporary viceroy, the brilliant and unbending bishop of Puebla, Juan Palafox.

  Simón Váez, betrayed by people who had worked for him, communicated, during his seven years in prison, with his friends and relations through some of the slaves whom he had sold so well; but to little avail. The auto-da-fé of 1649 was watched by, it was said, thirty thousand people, of every rank of society: how agreeable it must have been for the Indians and the African slaves to observe the parading of the great merchant, with his wife, his brother, and other relations, men and women, half naked and shaved, who, a few years before, had “driven through the city in coaches, receiving judges and their wives at their parties, respected as if they had been the grandest nobles of the kingdom.”21

  Similar trials of converso slave merchants were also held in Lima, above all that which, beginning in 1635, ended by incriminating the most important slave merchant there, Manuel Bautista Peres. Peres had been active in slaving since 1612, having been at first a captain of slave ships from Africa. He had been in Lima since 1620. In later years, he obtained slaves through his brother-in-law, Sebastián Duarte, who regularly bought Africans in Portobelo or Cartagena for shipment to Peru. Peres was looked upon as the leader of the Portuguese in Lima, and known there as “el capitán grande.” His fortune was estimated at half a million pesos, a large sum for that time. He owned silver mines in Huarochiri, fifty miles i
nland from Lima, where his house was so luxurious as to be nicknamed Casa de Pilatos. He conducted himself as a serious Christian, and priests educated his children; yet it was said that he held secret theological meetings which showed him to be Jewish. Peres never confessed to Judaism, and he tried unsuccessfully to kill himself with a dagger, but he and Duarte were both burned alive all the same.

  The Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias had a similar bout of accusations. Thus Luis Gómez Barreto, also a converso, also a slave trader, who played an important part in the city between 1607 and 1652, was in the end seized and tried. His ceaseless traveling, in pursuit of the best slaves, between São Tomé and Luanda or between Guinea-Bissau and Benin, sometimes returning to Spain, and making four journeys at least to Lima, availed him nothing in the end. Then Manuel Álvarez Prieto, taught to be a practicing Jew in Angola, was also tried for it in Cartagena de Indias.VI

  • • •

  The slave trade to the Americas in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—until the 1640s, when sugar took over from tobacco in the Caribbean plantations—was still on a fairly small, and therefore a relatively human, if not humane, scale. It was probably still smaller than the Arab trans-Sahara trade in black slaves in these years. The commerce in slaves still flourished with respect to captured Christians, from all over Europe. William Atkins in 1622 described how he, and some other English Catholic schoolboys bound for Seville, were, despite being encouraged to fight by a draft of aquavit mixed with gunpowder, captured by a Morisco captain, in the service of the king of Morocco (of Marrakesh). Atkins was imprisoned with eight hundred Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Irish, and Flemish slaves in Salé, on the Atlantic coast, near what is now Rabat, where slaves were sold in the streets, with the seller calling out, “Who buys a slave?” and the captives being beaten to walk faster by a peezel, a bull’s penis.VII,22