The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Limited resources on the islands themselves were not an overwhelming problem; if anything, these sparse resources stimulated close interest in trade with west Africa as a much more viable source of profit, and the king permitted islanders to trade freely on the Guinea coast opposite, with the result that slave-trading and slave-raiding became their speciality (the arrival of the Portuguese in west Africa will be explained in the next chapter).22 It cannot, therefore, have been easy for the islanders when, during the 1460s, the Crown insisted that only Caboverdean goods, including foodstuffs, could be used in payment if the settlers visited the Guinea coast for trade, but one effect of this regulation was that it stimulated the cultivation of cotton and the weaving of cotton cloth in the islands.23 Horse-breeding became another speciality – mounted troops were a familiar sight in African armies, but obtaining good horses was a headache everywhere.

  The main article of trade through these islands was quite simply, and quite horribly, human beings young and old, male and female.24 As the coast of west Africa became a major source of black slaves, the Cape Verde Islands began to be used as a way station for slaves exported from Africa to Europe (and, in the sixteenth century, to Brazil and the Caribbean).25 Although Portuguese merchants penetrated into west Africa, and even set up home there, there were great advantages in using the islands as a base. In Africa, there was always the delicate problem of dealing with the local rulers, and convincing them that the presence of these outlandish Europeans, with their bizarre clothes, was worthy of attention. Living on Portuguese territory and visiting the Guinea coast solely for business was a much more practical option; one might have to pay taxes to Portuguese officials, about whom the merchants naturally grumbled a good deal, but the protection of the Portuguese king, even so far from Lisbon, was preferable to that of African rulers who were often at war with one another – indeed, these wars were the major source of slaves for European buyers. In the three years 1491, 1492 and 1493 around 700 slaves were brought to the island of Santiago, or, at least, that number was recorded; in reality there must have been many more who were sneaked past the royal tax officials, and it is likely that as many as 25,000 African slaves passed through the island between 1500 and 1530, as demand for labour grew not just in Europe but in the newly discovered lands across the Atlantic.

  Most of the population lived on the main island, Santiago, and a town called Ribeira Grande, later sacked by Francis Drake, was founded in about 1462; after it was abandoned for the present capital, Praia, it became known by its present-day name of Cidade Velha, ‘the old city’. Taking advantage of the ‘Great River’ that gave the town its original Portuguese name, and that ensured an unusually lush setting in an otherwise arid island, the Portuguese were quick to develop their trading base. They built stone houses, which have now vanished, and churches, beginning with Nossa Senhora de Conceição, whose construction probably began only a few years after the islands were discovered. The foundations of this church have been unearthed by a team of archaeologists from Cambridge University, marking the site of the earliest European building in the Tropics.26 Only one of the churches in the old capital survives intact, Nossa Senhora do Rosário, built in the 1490s close to the earlier church. It was reputedly visited by both Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus, who passed through the Cape Verde Islands in 1498 on his third voyage. Today much of the church has been remodelled, but there are still clear traces of the original building: a side chapel has retained its ribbed Gothic ceiling, manufactured in Portugal for reassembly in Ribeira Grande; for it was common Portuguese practice to send dressed stones to overseas settlements, and the vaulting of James of Bruges’s church in the Azores, also brought from Portugal, is quite similar.

  Half a century later Ribeira Grande was still tiny: in 1513 it contained 58 Portuguese citizens, or vezinhos, 56 visitors or foreign settlers, 16 free African males, 10 free African women and 15 churchmen, who were all outnumbered by the uncounted slaves; and the foreigners included Genoese, Catalans, Flemings and even a Russian. (By 1600 it may have risen as high as 2,000, though never higher.)27 The Town Council of Ribeira Grande saw slaves as the foundation of the islands’ prosperity, and stated in 1512 that ‘merchants from Castile, Portugal and the Canary islands would not come to the Cape Verde islands if they were not able to purchase enslaved Africans’; by this time the slavers were already sending captives across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, to replace the native population of Hispaniola and other islands, which was heading towards rapid extinction.28 In 1518 the Spanish king arranged the purchase of 4,000 slaves from Portuguese merchants, to be sent to the Caribbean.29

  Ships put in at Ribeira Grande and at a rival town called Alcatrázes, whose location remained unknown until the archaeologists from Cambridge identified the site at the start of the twenty-first century. Archaeology has also come to the rescue of historians of the Atlantic by showing that large numbers of slaves lived in Ribeira Grande just after 1500, many of them apparently converted to Christianity. To judge from the graves found by the same team from Cambridge, there may be as many as 1,000 burials under and close to the church of the Conceição, and the simplicity of many of the burials, along with preliminary DNA analysis, suggests that half or more were slaves. There were also some free black inhabitants, and they eventually merged with the European settlers to create the Creole, or Krioulu, society that persists. For long, though, a white elite dominated the islands, including New Christians of Jewish descent who hoped to keep the Inquisition at arm’s length; their blood also runs through the veins of many modern Caboverdeans.30

  Millet and rice were imported from Guinea, mainly, it seems, to feed the African slaves.31 The islands depended on the income from the sale of slaves and other goods, which provided the cash to buy in the most basic supplies. The manifest of a single ship that carried 139 slaves and a quantity of hides back to Europe in 1513 is very revealing. The Madanela Cansina was a Castilian caravel under the command of Diego Alonso Cansino. It carried a vast variety of products to Santiago in 1512: linen cloth, dark-green Castilian cloth, Flemish cloth, figs, flour, wine, biscuit, raisins, almonds, cheeses, saffron, wheat, olive oil, beans, soap, shoes, tablecloths, bowls, brooms, just to cite selected items.32 In addition, the new excavations at Cidade Velha on Santiago have brought to light pottery from Portugal and Africa (and, rather later, from China), building materials, especially marble, tiles, coins, nails and buckles, once again indicating how dependent Santiago was on finished goods, particularly those from Europe. African ceramics arrived from Senegal and from Berber areas of north-west Africa; European ceramics included small drinking cups and other everyday wares from Portugal, ‘giving’, according to the archaeologist Marie Louise Sørensen, ‘a sense of the attempt to maintain a similarity in daily life routines’ among the settlers.33

  IV

  There is no reason to doubt the misery of the African slaves who either languished labouring in the Cape Verde Islands or were sent on to Portugal, and from there across Iberia to Valencia and other slave-trading centres in the western Mediterranean.34 As Portuguese expeditions reached further south and east, they made contact with local rulers who were happy to sell them slaves from the Gulf of Benin and from the areas they knew as Kongo and Angola, a little to the north of the present-day country of Angola. Once again the Portuguese made use of uninhabited islands off the coast of Africa as collection points for slaves, while at the same time they tried to work out how they could capitalize on the resources of these fresh territories. In 1472 Portuguese ships reached the island of São Tomé, tucked into the corner of Africa and lying right on the Equator. Within ten years it had become the collection point for the thousands of slaves who were brought (and bought) from Ghana, while the nearby island of Príncipe was the major Portuguese base for trade with the Benin coast.35 When they discovered that the third island in the Gulf of Guinea, Fernando Pô (modern Bioko), was already inhabited, the Portuguese held back from settling the island. For what they wanted was territor
ies they could mould exactly to their own uses.

  It took some years for the Portuguese Crown and Portuguese merchants to express much interest in São Tomé, whose thick tropical forests left them wondering what they could hope to extract from the island. Its usefulness only became obvious as the slave trade out of Ghana took off in the 1480s.36 Unlike the Cape Verde Islands, this island played an insignificant part in the trade towards the Indies that developed after 1500, lying as it did well away from the great parabolas that carried ships around the southern tip of Africa or up to Portugal from Brazil. Gradually, though, the Portuguese attempted to cash in on the island’s own resources. At the end of the fifteenth century they tried to make São Tomé into a centre of sugar production.37 Labour was cheap, consisting of Kongo slaves and, as will be seen, Jewish children from Portugal, although São Tomé offered its first inhabitants little apart from palm oil and yams, leaving them hungry, so that, at the start, staple goods such as flour, olive oil and cheese had to be imported from Portugal and the nearby, better-endowed, island of Príncipe. That said, the Portuguese made a great effort here, as in other Atlantic islands, to transform their colony into a place suitable for settlement. They brought in all sorts of domestic animals, figs, citrus trees, plantains, and, in due course, American varieties of coconut and sweet potato. By 1510 there was a surplus and they were now feeding, rather than being fed by, the colonists at Elmina, the main Portuguese base in Ghana.38

  Sugar came to dominate the economy of the island, along with the handling of slaves brought from the mainland. One item, essential for sugar manufacture, was plentiful: water. São Tomé has high rainfall as well as plenty of wood for burning; and there are steep slopes off which the water runs. Water was also a problem. It was needed while sugar was being manufactured; but the finished product had to be allowed to dry out, and the humid climate made this much more difficult. What the São Toméans put on sale was far inferior to the highly prized sugar of Madeira. Sugar from São Tomé was described as ‘the worst in the world’; it often contained live insects that survived transport to Portugal. Moreover, mortality from malaria, overwork and generally unhealthy conditions was extremely high, particularly among Portuguese settlers unused to the tropics; it is hardly surprising that Portuguese churchmen appointed to serve on this island made every effort to avoid setting out. At a rough estimate half of those who came to São Tomé died from disease and other factors within a few months of their arrival.

  The population remained small at the start of the sixteenth century, when about 1,000 heads were counted by a German geographer and printer based in Portugal named Valentim Fernandes. But these were just the settlers; 2,000 slaves resident on the island and 6,000 slaves destined for export have to be included as well. The free settlers included liberated slaves, among whom there were women who bore children to Portuguese men, so that a free mulatto population emerged quite early.39 Like other Atlantic islands, São Tomé was considered a suitable place of exile for the so-called degredados, people convicted of crimes in Portugal.40 São Tomé, as a place of exile, had one very special feature to its early population. In 1493 King João II decided to settle the island with Jewish children, forcibly taken from their parents in order to ensure that they were baptized and brought up as Catholics. These were Jews who had fled from Spain to Portugal in 1492, at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and who had overstayed the eight-month period the king had reluctantly allowed them to remain. This was one stage in a process that culminated in the mass conversion of all Portuguese Jews in 1497.41

  The Jewish settlement of São Tomé is described in several Jewish and Christian sources. The court chronicler Rui Pina wrote soon afterwards of João II:

  The king gave to Alvaro de Caminha the Captaincy of the island of São Tomé by right and inheritance; and as for the Castilian Jews who had not left his kingdom within the assigned date, he ordered that, according to the condition upon their entry, all the boys, and young men and girls of the Jews be taken into captivity. After having them all turned into Christians, he sent them to the said island with Alvaro de Caminha, so that by being secluded, they would have reasons for being better Christians, and the king would have a way for the island to be better populated, which, as a result, grew rapidly.42

  The Christian writer Valentim Fernandes thought there were 2,000 children, while the estimates of numbers among Jewish authors varied between 800 and 5,000. It appears that they were mostly very young, from two to ten years old, so that they were placed with foster parents, mostly convicted degradados.43 According to the Portuguese Jew Samuel Usque ‘almost all were swallowed up by the huge lizards on the island and the remainder, who escaped these reptiles, wasted away from hunger and abandonment’. Fernandes said only 600 were still alive in 1510.44 The harsh conditions – the searing heat, the uncleared jungle, the heavy manual work involved in sugar production, along with diseases such as malaria – killed many of the settlers, whatever their origin; and it was for that reason that black slaves began to be imported to work the sugar estates. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese New Christians, descended from Jews, did settle in the island, but the Jewish children were by then long dead, or had merged with the other Portuguese settlers and with the African slaves. Memories of the Jewish connection survived: one bishop reported, as late as the seventeenth century, that he had been awoken by a ‘Jewish’ procession, in which a Golden Calf was being carried along the street underneath the windows of what passed for his palace. His knowledge of Judaism, or indeed of the biblical story of the Golden Calf, was evidently very limited.45

  Valentim Fernandes noted that there were about 250 wooden houses in the main town, and that there were stone churches, constructed out of materials sent in 1493 with those early Jewish and Christian settlers. Despite the miserable conditions, the island proved a lucrative source of income, from which the Crown could hope to draw as much as 10,000 cruzados a year at the start of the sixteenth century.46 A privilege to Fernão de Mello and the inhabitants of São Tomé, dated 20 March 1500, explains the Crown’s thinking:

  Since the said island is so remote from these our kingdoms, people are unwilling to go there unless they have great privileges and franchises; and we, observing the expenditure we have ordered for the peopling of the said island and likewise the great profits which would come from it to our kingdoms, if the island were peopled in perfection, as we hope with the help of the Lord it will be, have resolved to grant him certain privileges and franchises, whereby the people who go there, may do this more willingly.47

  The basis of this success was initially trade towards the African mainland, using home-made ships, which were quite small (thirty tons) and simple, and which were supplied with cowrie shells rather than metal currency for payments in Angola and Kongo.48 The regular traffic in slaves between São Tomé and Elmina reached its peak in the thirty years after 1510, when up to half a dozen vessels moved back and forth almost continuously between the two points, laden with African slaves when bound for Elmina. The journey normally took up to a month and departures from São Tomé occurred about every fifty days; some ships were large enough to carry one hundred slaves, others only about thirty.49

  V

  The Portuguese began to see the Atlantic as an island-studded ocean. In 1469 and 1474 the king of Portugal had already made generous grants of islands in the far west to two of his knights. One was granted two islands, which suggests some vague reports had arrived of specific places; the other was simply granted the isles ‘in the parts of the Ocean Sea’, which implies little more than a general assumption that there were more places like the Azores to be found. If there were islands, these might well be the islands that were known to lie off the coast of Asia, notably Cipangu, Marco Polo’s Japan, or bits and pieces of the Spice Islands whose costly products were on sale in Alexandria and Beirut.50 The best authorities, such as Admiral Morison, have rejected modern Portuguese claims that there was real knowledge of land to the west, kept secret in Li
sbon for fear of Spanish or other competition.51 A good reason for this doubt is the fact that the Crown was not willing to pay the costs of an expedition to find new land. If individual entrepreneurs wanted to apply for a licence to look for land, that was another matter, so long as they reached into their own pockets.

  King João II therefore had no objection when the Flemish sea captain Ferdinand van Olmen approached him in summer 1486 requesting permission ‘to find for him a large island, or islands, on the coast of a continent, situated where it was thought the Island of the Seven Cities was to be found, and that he would undertake this at his own expense’, winning in return hereditary rights of jurisdiction. He would travel in the company of a Madeiran named Estreito, who would provide two caravels; if the land was found and the natives resisted, the king airily promised that he would despatch an armada to keep them in check. Van Olmen thought that the journey could be accomplished in less than forty days. He set out from the Azores full of hope, probably in spring 1487, heading north-west, only to disappear from history. For, even if he had heard rumours of distant lands, vague reports of Greenland or of Bristol fishermen off Labrador, he knew little of the winds and currents out in the open ocean, and he almost certainly sailed into storms he could not manage.52 If anything, van Olmen’s disappearance proved that this route led nowhere. It might indeed be possible to reach the Indies, but the obvious routes were down the ‘River of Gold’ that in some accounts crossed the waist of Africa, or even around the southern tip of Africa – assuming, that is, that it had a southern tip and that the Indian Ocean was not a closed-off Mediterranean completely surrounded by land, as Ptolemy had maintained, and who could quarrel with such a great authority?