The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  As for Maryland, that colony for many years constituted too small a market to bid for an entire cargo of slaves: she procured her slaves in ones and twos from Virginia or the West Indies. The territory did not have slavery by law for many years, even if an act of 1664, “concerning negroes and other slaves,” recognized their existence, in the indirect English way. Governor Charles Calvert wrote in 1664 to his father, Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of the colony, that, although he had tried to find someone to sell him one or two hundred slaves from the Royal Company of Adventurers in London, “I find we are not men of estates good enough to undertake such a business.” But, he added, he “could wish [that] we were, for we are naturally inclined to love negroes, if our purses would endure it.”18 In the 1670s, there was a hardening of the position: the Maryland assembly passed an act stipulating that, just because slaves became Christian, they should not presume themselves free; and even the children of Christian captives might be considered slaves. No doubt this declaration reflected a shortage of labor: even in 1670, there still was no regular direct trading from Africa to North America. Only in 1685 did a serious slave trade to Maryland tentatively begin: in that year, instructions from the RAC’s Committee on Shipping (the ever-active Lord Berkeley was on it) asked a sea captain, Marmaduke Goodhand, to deliver two hundred slaves to be shared among Edward Porteus (a merchant of Gloucester County, Virginia), Richard Gardiner, and Christopher Robinson (a future secretary of the colony), on the Potomac River. Next year, there was a reference to a consignment of “slaves and sugar” in Maryland from Barbados. The intention had been to load tobacco, as if the transaction were normal; and there are some other isolated references to slaves arriving at Annapolis or smaller ports on Chesapeake Bay.

  Meantime, in 1670, just after the foundation of Carolina, and the proclamation of its somewhat feudal constitution, influenced if not written by the prudent shareholder of the RAC, John Locke, with a modest paragraph about slavery as an institution to be accepted, there is the first mention of slaves there: an early colonist, Henry Brayne, wrote to Lord Ashley, the Cabinet minister and director of the RAC who was also one of the fathers of the state: “I have put on . . . enough for my people which is one lusty man, three Christian servants and an overseer I brought out of Virginia. . . .”19

  For some time, there were few African slaves in this new colony but, by 1699 at least, direct trade between it and Africa had begun. In that year, Governor Blake and others in Carolina gave to Captain William Rhett “all such sums of money, goods, wares, merchandise, negro slaves, gold, elephants teeth, wax effects, and things whatsoever which the said captain William Rhett had in his hands in account of their being part owners of the ship Providence . . . whereof the said William Rhett is commander”; and Captain Daniel Johnson was arrested and thrown into Marshalsea Prison in London for failing to pay the appropriate dues for landing slaves in Carolina in 1703.20 But in those days one in four slaves in the colony was an Indian. The year after that, a report to the Board of Trade from Governor Sir Nathaniel Johnson (a promoter of silk cultivation) estimated that, with a total population in Carolina of 9,580 “souls,” there were 1,800 African male slaves, 1,100 African female slaves, and 1,200 African child slaves, alongside 500 Indian male slaves, 600 Indian female slaves, and 300 Indian children—of whom many of the latter had been captured by Johnson himself in an expedition in 1703.

  Still, no country was then free from the threat of being embroiled in the trade. Just when the British were beginning to take slaving in Africa seriously, a British resident in Constantinople, Thomas Bendish, reported in 1657 to the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, that some Venetians there had a stock of English slaves (perhaps initially captives of the Barbary pirates) whom they brought every year to that city to be sold for eighty to a hundred dollars apiece. Bendish redeemed some but lacked the money to free them all.21 Doubtless they were eventually bought by a Turkish nobleman who liked their pink complexions.

  * * *

  IDowning, a villainous individual, later served Cromwell in London as scoutmaster-general and then as minister to Holland, where, remaining after 1660, he betrayed several regicides to Charles II. Downing Street in London is inappropriately called after this double-faced traitor, whose name for a time was a synonym for infamy.

  IIThe dowry also included Tangier, and privileges for English merchants in the Portuguese empire.

  IIIAccording to Aubrey, William Davenant was the son of Shakespeare by the wife of an innkeeper in Oxford.

  IVThe other two-fifths being gold from Senegambia and the Gold Coast; camwood and beeswax from Sierra Leone; and gum, used for textiles, from the Sénégal Valley.

  12

  He Who Knows How to Supply the Slaves Will Share This Wealth

  “Everyone knows that the slave trade is the source of the wealth which the Spaniards draw from their Indies, and that he who knows how to supply the slaves will share this wealth with them.”

  Benjamin Raule of Zeeland to the elector of Brandenburg, 1680

  SPAIN LIMPED ALONG for some years, after the defection of Portugal from the combined realm in 1640, without a policy for the supply of slaves to her imperial possessions. King Philip IV approved a return to the policy of separate licenses, with no asiento, such as had prevailed before 1580. But this arrangement worked even worse in the seventeenth century than it had in the sixteenth, because the presence now of the Dutch, the French, and the English in the Caribbean led to smuggling on a large scale. Despite that, there were continuous shortages. Thus, in 1648, Pedro Zapata de Mendoza, the governor of what was now the biggest entry port for slaves, Cartagena de Indias, in present-day Colombia, wrote home to Madrid that no Africans had been brought in for seven years. He recalled that, in addition to the disastrous consequences for the economy, the losses of taxes were considerable: “A ship full of blacks brings more to the Treasury than galleons and fleets put together.”1 Most of the few slaves who entered those territories in these years were imported illegally from Dutch captains: the letters of Beck, vice-director of the Dutch West India Company, were in the 1650s full of the possibilities of landing slaves on the north coast of Cuba, where there were no coast guards and few fortresses, or at Portobelo, with due arrangements. In Africa, a few Spanish ships traded illegally in Portuguese territories such as the Cape Verde Islands or in the rivers Cacheu and Bissau, causing a good deal of irritation, even scandal, there, but not sensibly affecting the problems of the Indies.

  Yet there were all the same in 1640 probably about 330,000 African slaves in Spanish America, of whom half, or 150,000, were in Peru and the Andean region, 80,000 in New Spain, about 45,000 in what is now Colombia, over 25,000 in Central America, perhaps 16,000 in the Spanish Antilles, and about 12,000 in the modern Venezuela. These were the estimates of Fernando de Silva Solís, a captain who wrote to the king that, having spent twenty-five years in the Indies, he knew that the annual demand in the Empire was nearly 9,000.2 Slaves from Africa had come to seem essential in the silver mines of Potosí in Bolivia and Zacatecas in New Spain, in pearl-fishing, in building fortresses, and on sugar plantations which, if none were at that stage anything like so efficient as the Anglo-Saxon and French ones, were all the same well established.

  The increasing reliance of Spanish planters on Dutch, French, or En-glish interlopers meant above all that the Crown was losing what it had always considered to be essential taxes. So, in 1651, for the first time since 1580, Spanish merchants were given the opportunity of supplying the empire with Africans. The trade was to be handled, from 1651 till 1662, by the Consulado, or Universidad de Mercaderes, of Seville, a guild of great merchants. This body had been set up a century before, in 1543, when Spain had seemed to constitute a lively economy, to arrange with the Casa de Contratación the dispatch and outfitting of fleets to the Americas.I

  Four years later, in 1655, Spain suffered the loss to the English of Jamaica, which had been for some years, with its long and unfrequented coastline, a center of the illicit sl
ave trade in the Caribbean. The event was a bad defeat for the Crown but, for the merchants of Seville, who had not yet organized a slave trade from Africa, it was a blessing in disguise. Jamaica, English though it in theory now was, became a prosperous slave mart, stocked now by the new masters without any apology, as by the Dutch—a mart to which the Spanish ex-masters of the place could return and buy fruitfully. The reliance on English heretic suppliers was, it was true, a bitter thing for good Catholic Spanish colonists. But they had for years accepted the humiliation of buying from the Dutch; and, a harbinger of what was to come, two English merchants, Burchett and Phillips of Barbados, had already in 1642 offered to supply the Spaniards with two thousand slaves a year—acting, as it turned out, as intermediaries for the Dutch.

  In 1662, Spanish merchants from Cartagena de Indias proposed to Humphrey Walrond, president of the Barbados council, that they buy slaves from him for Peru. Although such sales were quite illegal by both Spanish and English law, Walrond allowed the Spaniards to take four hundred slaves at between 125 and 140 pieces-of-eight per head. The explanation was that Walrond, one of the most curious individuals in the bizarre history of the West Indies, was almost a Spanish agent since, a cavalier, he had passed the years of the Commonwealth in the Spanish service, for which he had been named a marquis, and even a grandee of Spain, by Philip IV.II

  Weary of these unsatisfactory arrangements, disgusted with the inactivity of the sevillanos, and anxious to return to those rules which had seemed to work so well before 1640, the Spanish Council of the Indies in 1663 established a new asiento, in favor of Domingo Grillo and Ambrosio and Agustín Lomelin—all three Hispanicized Genoese merchants whose families had had many years of contact with Spain and Portugal. Ancestors of Lomelin had been rich and influential in Madeira in the fifteenth century, and another member of the family, Leonardo, had contracted to supply slaves to Cortés in 1542. Once a Lomelin had been Portuguese consul in Genoa at the same time as a cousin was selling sugar in Madeira. The Grillos, too, had had a remarkable mercantile history in the fifteenth century, in Spain as well as in Genoa. Their ships had already been on the coast of Angola as interlopers.

  The idea of employing these Genoese came from yet one more influential Dominican at the Spanish Court, Fray Juan de Castro, whose innocent title of “Regent of the Order of Preachers” gave him access to everyone on both the Council of the Indies and the Junta de Negros. Castro had known the new asentistas when they had been treasurers of the Santa Cruzada, a lucrative fiscal responsibility. Grillo and the brothers Lomelin pledged themselves to deliver in Veracruz, Cartagena, and Portobelo 24,500 piezas de indias in the next seven years, on which they would pay duty of three hundred thousand pesos.III But they were not to take their slaves from merchants whose countries were at war with Spain. So their schemes, adequate though they were for illegal interlopers, were confused. In practice, the Spanish colonists continued to obtain what they needed from the Dutch island of Curaçao, so conveniently close to Cartagena and, to a lesser extent, from Jamaica and other English islands. They established a network of agents in London and Amsterdam to assist them to find the slaves whom they had promised. Meantime, as a price for the contract, Grillo and the Lomelins agreed to build two galleons for the Spanish government at their own cost.3

  The Spanish ambassador to the Hague, Esteban de Gamarra, warned his king that these Genoese were going to seek slaves everywhere under the sun—the “trade is now being introduced by way of Curaçao . . . [where], as I understand it, they have now established large stores with every kind of merchandise there which they deliver during the night, using long boats, taking back silver bars and other products . . .”4

  Dutch Sephardic Jews played a certain part in this slave traffic from Curaçao. They had excellent contacts with Portuguese New Christians, in both the Caribbean and Brazil. Firms directed by conversos in Amsterdam were also concerned. By 1702, the Dutch Sephardic community on Curaçao of perhaps six hundred accounted for over a third of the wealth of the island. Curaçao flourished, and perhaps four thousand slaves were exported from there every year between 1668 and 1674. Yet in 1668, because of difficulties over sales, more than three thousand slaves had to be held in the island’s “storage facilities.”

  All the same, the English were evidently, in the long run, more satisfactory to the Spanish buyers than the Dutch. Grillo recognized that reality by arranging a subcontract with the Royal Adventurers of London for an annual delivery of 3,500 slaves, to be obtained chiefly from Old and New Calabar, in the Niger Delta. An effort was made to keep the contract secret, for Grillo knew that the Spaniards would not like it. But that contract was not fulfilled, and the truth came out. Grillo for a time turned back to Portugal and to Holland for what he needed.

  Grillo had been helped by a decision in 1666 by the Portuguese Overseas Council that the Genoese could trade, among other places, in Angola for slaves to be sold in Spanish America, on condition that they paid to the Crown in Lisbon dues of one or two million reals, as had been previously demanded by Spain. But, as so often, the asiento made for unhappiness, even among those to whom the privilege was granted. Thus Agustín Lomelin died on the way from Veracruz to Mexico, a victim of a revolt of slaves whom he was leading to the capital, the only example of a great slave merchant being killed by his cargo; and, thereafter, his brother, Ambrosio, lost interest as well as money. In 1667, Grillo, now alone, took the radical decision to appoint as the administrator of the asiento an important Dutch banker, Baltasar Coymans, then established in Cádiz as representative of his brother, Jan Coymans, one of the biggest bankers in Amsterdam. Of course, he realized that most of the slaves would come from Curaçao, many of them directly through the Dutch West India Company. Thus it was that Amsterdam became the unofficial headquarters of the Spanish traffic in slaves.

  In 1670, Grillo’s asiento was canceled. By that time he had earned the hatred of the very Dominican who had promoted his and the Lomelins’ cause in the first place, Fray Juan de Castro, whose hopes of profiting from shipbuilding in Havana had not been fulfilled. For the next five years, the supply of slaves to the empire was vested in a joint concession to Antonio García and Sebastián de Siliceo, both Portuguese businessmen living in Madrid; to the Consulado of Seville; and to Juan Barroso del Pozo, an independent merchant, also of Seville. All employed the Dutch in Curaçao to supply their ships, and also used Dutch banks in Amsterdam for the financing. When, a year or two later, García took over the contract alone, he bought all his slaves in Curaçao, borrowing the money he needed from Coymans’s bank in the Dutch capital, which thus continued their dominance of the commerce behind the scenes, as if they were supercapitalists in a play by Shaw—or in a pamphlet by Marx.

  The Spanish government did what it could to oppose this reliance on the heretic enemy and, in 1676, awarded an asiento to last for five years to another consortium of merchants of Seville, organized by the Consulado of that city, with the explicit instruction that no slaves were to be bought in Curaçao. Many merchants in Seville, Cádiz, and Sanlúcar de Barrameda—some of them women, such as Jerónima Vabas or Juana Balcano—invested money for the purpose. But the Consulado had difficulty in finding the right number of slaves, and in 1679 confessed its failure and shamefacedly handed back its contract.

  Despite these failures, over sixty thousand slaves were carried between 1650 and 1675 to Spanish America. The Dutch West India Company was no doubt the largest single supplier to its old enemy; certainly by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, slaving had become the mainstay of that company which, it will be remembered, had, in the first place, entertained doubts about entering into that business at all.

  The constant changes of asiento in the late seventeenth century are curious. It is surprising that the Spanish Court did not seek to approach the pope to revise his concessions in the fifteenth century to the Portuguese to control trade in Africa; they must have realized that there was no effective alternative to seeking their own slaves in Afri
ca. Yet they seem to have made no effort to change the status quo. After the failure of the sevillanos, for example, the contract went, in 1679, to Juan Barroso del Pozo (the independent merchant of 1670) and his son-in-law, Nicolás Porcío, yet one more hispanicized Italian. The scheme, like everything related to the asiento, was complex; in ten years, they had to import black slaves from Africa in such quantity as would fill 11,000 tons of shipping and, in return for that privilege, they would have to pay over a million pesos in taxes and be responsible for two hundred thousand escudos of government expenditure in Flanders. It was recognized that they would buy their slaves in Curaçao.

  This arrangement lasted only till 1685. Barroso and Porcío operated on a small scale, though Porcío moved to Cartagena. They seem to have imported only 883 slaves in all, nearly all from Curaçao, though their eight ships could easily have brought in four times that number, and though Porcío seems to have had an interest in the now more promising Jamaica.

  Spanish settlers were privately every year more busy in Jamaica buying slaves illegally, including many from the RAC. In 1684, Sir Thomas Lynch, the governor there (he had been on the island in various capacities since its capture in 1655), wrote home to London about the difficulty of preventing the Spaniards from buying slaves from English interlopers. He thought it difficult to keep any contract with Spain, for, he wrote, “their ill conduct will ruin any that trust them.” He admitted that “particular Spaniards may be in their senses, but the Government is out of it. . . . Altogether, if we can get negroes, it is very likely that, let who will have the asiento, they will come to us. . . .”5 Next year, an Order in Council in London, though forbidding foreign vessels in general to go to English colonial ports, made an exception for Spanish ones, which “shall come to buy Negroes at Jamaica or Barbados. . . .”6