by Henry Kamen
In time the discovery of the mines of Mexico and Peru would give yet more boost to the attractions of coming over. Certain professions were evidently in short supply and offered quick gains to newcomers. A baker in Mexico commented that ‘you earn more here than in Spain’; another resident of the same province confirmed that ‘for poor people this country is much better than Spain’.92 Even for priests, whose numbers were reputed to be excessive in Spain, there were advantages: ‘for the clergy’, a settler reported from New Granada, ‘America is a very good place’.93 The most disliked of all the professions were the lawyers, whom the early conquerors tried to keep out of America. Their services, however, were soon seen to be essential, since they helped to protect disputed property rights. ‘Over here even the donkeys earn their living’, a priest wrote ironically from Quito, ‘and the lawyers much more so.’94
Many immigrants hoped to profit from opportunity and return home with their wealth: ‘in three or four years we'll earn, God willing, more than thirty thousand pesos, then we'll come back to Castile’.95 ‘Those of us who live far out here’, an old and infirm settler wrote from Trujillo to his family in Spain, ‘live with no other wish than to end our days at home, in our country.’96 Many did go home, but only to live off what they had gained: a resident of New Spain commented in 1574 on a friend who ‘now that he is rich wants to see the back of the Indies; he told me when he left to catch his ship that he never wanted to return to America, he was fed up with it’.97 The poor, however, could not return: ‘those who come out to this country cannot return to Castile without money, for everyone would laugh at them’.98 In practice for a variety of reasons only a small proportion did so. The majority were too settled, too successful, or too old (‘now that I am old, I shall stay here’99) to return. Though they yearned to live again among their families and show off their newly acquired riches, they feared the old world that they remembered only too well. ‘We did think of going back shortly to Spain’, two brothers wrote home from Potosí, which by that date (1576) was awash with silver, ‘but looking at the misery there and at what we have over here, we have no wish to go but will stay here in this country, which is rich and good.’100
From the beginning, non-Spaniards played a significant role in the creation of the empire not only in Europe but also in the New World and Asia. Official chroniclers, however, tended to gloss over the fact. They often passed over in silence the detail that Columbus was Italian and Magellan Portuguese. A decree of 1499, repeated in another of 1501, prohibited the entry of any foreigner into the Americas, but the bans were never observed, and in any case it was easy for immigrants to claim that they came from some other part of the Habsburg territories. It was common for Germans and French to pass themselves off as citizens of the Netherlands. Foreigners were numerous in towns that had strong trading links. Seven of the group of men that founded the town of Panama in 1519 were foreigners; in the same half-century one tenth of the households in the town was foreign.101 The irregular situation of many ‘foreigners’ was set right by an order of Charles V on 17 November 1526 allowing any of the subjects in his realms to go to America. From that date immigration was virtually uncontrolled.
Non-Spaniards, of course, owned a good part of the New World, if the concessions made by Charles V to his Flemish courtiers were to be taken seriously. In the 1530s many Netherlanders received official permission to settle in the Caribbean, New Granada and the Río de la Plata. Castilians in the peninsula continued to harbour resentment against the privileges granted in America to foreigners. The concession in 1528 of the territory of Venezuela to the German banking firm of the Welsers caused the greatest indignation, for it opened the door wide to foreign infiltration. When Welser's agent Hieronymus Kohler went to Venezuela in 1534, it was reported that those in his ship represented ‘many tongues, many from Scotland, England and the Netherlands, but mostly Basques, Spaniards and Italians, around thirty persons who even if pushed to it could not understand each other’.102
Despite attempts to control their presence, non-Spaniards, especially Portuguese and Italians, could be found everywhere. The situation elicited a comment from the historian Oviedo on ‘so many different peoples and nations, of varied and diverse condition, who have come to America and pass through it’. In particular, he said, in the city of Santo Domingo ‘every language can be heard, from every part of Christendom, from Italy, Germany, Scotland, and England, with Frenchmen, Hungarians, Poles, Greeks, Portuguese and all the other nations of Asia and Africa and Europe’.103 America was too vast a continent to be closed off, and the non-Spanish element continued to be important throughout the colonial period. In the generation after Columbus it proved – as we have commented – very difficult to attract Spaniards to the Caribbean, and the government made intense efforts to bring in Spanish settlers from the Canary Islands.104 In the end, the authorities had to be content with allowing Portuguese settlers into Hispaniola, where they flourished, contributed greatly to sugar production, and converted parts of the island into a ‘little Portugal’.105 In 1535 on the island there were ‘over two hundred Portuguese who run the sugar mills, and others who are farmers, as well as many carpenters and masons and smiths and all the trades; there is a great number of them in all the settlements and they are very productive’.106 In 1588 the city council of Santo Domingo complained to the government that the Portuguese ‘in this town are more numerous than the Spanish, they trade publicly and thereby appropriate the wealth of the country’. In many areas of America the Portuguese continued to play a significant role. Five per cent of the population of Buenos Aires in the early seventeenth century, for example, was Portuguese; and by mid-century there was one Portuguese family for every three Castilian.107 Since Portuguese controlled the slave trade in the same period, they used it as the channel for entry. An official of Cartagena de Indias reported in 1618 that ‘the biggest problem is that most of these slaving ships are Portuguese; each one transacts his business in blacks and then stays on to live in Cartagena’. Not surprisingly the officials at Seville complained that ‘the Portuguese do so much business in the Indies that it appears the Indies belong to the Crown of Portugal rather than to Castile’.108
The Italian presence was also pervasive. Italians participated in the early explorations, as we have seen, both in person and through agents. But they were also to be found everywhere in the New World in the first century of settlement, especially in Mexico.109 Italians, mainly from Genoa, took part in all the expeditions of conquest: they could be found with Cortés in Mexico, with those who seized the Inca at Cajamarca, and among the companions of Valdivia in Chile. A native of Lombardy introduced printing into Mexico, a Sicilian was with Balboa when he sighted the Pacific. Italians were, in the 1530s, among the first to colonize the mouth of the Plata. The expedition to this area, led by Pedro de Mendoza in 1530s also brought from Nuremberg a shipload of German merchants and adventurers, some of whom helped in the colonization of Paraguay. The foreigners in early Spanish America were by no means an élite, apart from the few commercial agents of Genoese and Germans. In Hispaniola and Cuba the majority were, like the Spaniards, ordinary people seeking their fortune: they included sailors, farmers, traders and artisans.110
Meanwhile an equally significant, but wholly involuntary, immigration was taking place. Almost from the beginning of trade relations between Europeans and the African kingdoms, the former had purchased, in addition to the prime commodity of gold, quantities of slaves. Slavery had existed in medieval Western Europe, and warfare between Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean continued to give life to the practice. Slaves also existed as part of the economic life of all African states, which made use of them at all levels and were only too willing to trade them for European commodities.111
The taking of black slaves to the New World had always been permitted by the government, and Las Casas had suggested in addition that import of black labour might ease the lot of Indian labourers. The first import of blacks is normally date
d to 1510, when King Ferdinand licensed the House of Trade in Seville to send to Hispaniola two hundred and fifty Christian blacks acquired in Lisbon. More and more blacks were imported, commented Las Casas later, but ‘it never led to any help or freedom for the Indians’. Blacks from the Iberian peninsula had the legal status of slaves, that is, they had originally been captured in aggressive raids on the African coast. But the need arose for many more than the peninsula could supply.112 Since Spain had no access to them in her African territories, recourse was had to the Portuguese, who held outposts in tropical Africa.
Spain's direct participation in the trade of Africans to America, which dates from the first import of Africans to Hispaniola, established a model that became the standard one for all the enterprises, both civil and military, that contributed to the evolution of the colonies. The state did not have direct access to the resources or expertise necessary to carry out the trade. It advanced the money and made the rules, but left all other matters in the hands of the entrepreneurs. This had already happened in the case of the Portuguese. In the late fifteenth century the money for their slave trade to Africa was put up principally by the Florentine financier Bartolomeo Marchione and by Genoese colleagues.113 Throughout its long history, therefore, the African slave trade to the Spanish empire was dominated by international finance. The early permissions took the form of limited ‘licences’, later on a system of long-term contracts or ‘asientos’ was adopted. The first licence for importing slaves in quantity from Africa was granted in 1518 to the Franche-Comtois noble Laurent de Gorrevod, who in turn subcontracted the licence to others. In 1528 the first asiento went to Heinrich Ehinger, agent of the German financiers the Welser.114 Slaves were transported mainly from the area known as Upper Guinea, stretching from the Senegal southwards to Sierra Leone, and from the Congo; the trade was managed by Portuguese merchants in the Cape Verde Islands and in Sao Thomé off Biafra.
The new Portuguese trade very soon aroused a storm of protest among Spanish officials and churchmen, because of its brutality. The outcry was such that Philip II for a while suspended it. Among the most outspoken critics was the Dominican friar Tomás de Mercado, who had lived in Mexico in the 1550s and seen it in action. He termed it ‘barbarism’ and ‘injustice’, describing the blacks as ‘cheated, violated, assaulted and despoiled’; the death rate on the Atlantic crossing could be, he testified, four-fifths of the blacks transported.115 A few later Spanish writers, such as the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, whose On the salvation of Africans (De instaurando Aethiopum salute) was published at Seville in 1627, also bitterly criticized the barbarity of the Middle Passage, as the long trip from Africa to the Caribbean came to be known. Sandoval concluded that ‘slavery is the beginning of all offences and travails, it is a perpetual death, a living death in which people die even while they are alive’.
It is impossible to estimate satisfactorily the number of Africans who were transported across the Atlantic, and the problem has consequently always aroused controversy among scholars. A recent calculation116 suggests that around the year 1500 the number of slaves transported annually from the West African coast was 5,000, rising to 8,000 a year around 1550, then 13,800 a year around 1650 and 36,100 a year around 1700. Only a proportion of these went to the Spanish plantations (after 1650 the demands of other Europeans in the Americas boosted the trade). But imports from Africa to Spanish America were high: the main port of entry, Cartagena, received a possible annual average of four thousand a year in the early seventeenth century.117
There is no wholly satisfactory way to arrive at figures for the involuntary immigration of Africans into the New World before the eighteenth century. The documentation is inexact, fraud was extensive, and the high death rate on the Atlantic crossing cut deeply into the presumed number of persons on each voyage. On balance, a general perspective is perhaps more illuminating than any attempt to count the uncountable. Reputable scholars have suggested that between 1450 and 1600 the Americas may have received around 290,000 Africans and between 1600 and 1700, when the slave trade was at its peak, around 1,490,000.118 The proportion that went to the Spanish colonies remains highly problematic. A recent opinion is that up to the year 1600 Spanish America received around 75,000 and between 1600 and 1700 around 455,000,119 but the figures serve largely to help us view the question in global terms and cannot be accepted as reliable.
The very large number of blacks imported very soon had the consequence that blacks came to outnumber whites in the New World. ‘Because of the sugar mills’, the historian Oviedo reported from Hispaniola, ‘there are so many of them on this island that it seems to be a veritable Ethiopia.’ This is astonishing, when we consider the unremitting mortality rates imposed on African immigrants. It was estimated, even in the sixteenth century, that on the Atlantic crossing around one quarter on average of the captives died of disease or because of the harsh conditions. There must have been many cases like that of the ship which (in 1717) reached Buenos Aires with only 98 survivors from its original shipment of 594 slaves.120 That was, of course, after an already high death rate caused by the conditions of the slave trade on the African continent itself. Once in the New World the slaves had to journey yet again to their destination, which involved further suffering and mortality. When they finally arrived they were put to work in conditions that quickly cut their lives short. Despite all this, they endured and survived. Their ability to survive in the intolerable conditions to which they were subjected, earned them a reputation as a labour force. But the reality was that they died in their thousands, and generally failed to reproduce themselves,121 so that the need to import more slaves became a permanent one.
Though black slaves had initially been imported to meet the demands of labour in the Caribbean, they were quickly seen to be essential in all aspects of production, and the numbers in Spanish-occupied parts of the mainland rapidly rose. In Hispaniola they were the only labour in the sugar mills and in agriculture; ‘only blacks till the soil’, the city council of Santo Domingo stated in 1556.122 In 1553 the viceroy of New Spain informed the government that ‘this land is so full of blacks and mestizos that they outnumber the Spaniards greatly. You Majesty should order that they do not send blacks, because there are in New Spain more than twenty thousand and they are increasing.’123 In central New Spain in the 1590s they were the largest ethnic group after the native Indians, and outnumbered white Spaniards by two to one. In Peru the situation was the same. From the last decade of the sixteenth century, Lima was a city whose population was half African, a situation that prevailed until the middle of the seventeenth century.124 In Chile in 1590 the European population of nine thousand was greatly outnumbered by the black population of twenty thousand.125 In the isthmus of Panama the nonnative population was overwhelmingly black. In 1575 the town of Panama had 500 Spanish households, but the area had 5,600 black slaves. By 1607 nearly seventy per cent of the town's population was black.126
Africans played an appreciable role in the creation and defence of the empire, and took part in the campaigns of the early conquistadors. Blacks were with Balboa when he claimed the Pacific, with Pedrarias Dávila when he colonized Panama, with Cortés when he marched to Tenochtitlan, with Alvarado when he entered Guatemala.127 Almagro apparenlty had twice had as many blacks as Spaniards serving with him, and Gonzalo Pizarro at the time of his rebellion had up to four hundred blacks in his forces.128 The most famous black of the early frontier was Juan Valiente, a hero of the conquest of Chile, who served with Alvarado, Almagro and Valdivia, became an encomendero in 1550 and died in battle against the Araucanians in 1553. The prowess of blacks as soldiers became legendary, and blacks were in the front line of the defence of the American territories.
Throughout its first two centuries as an imperial power Spain was completely unable to send enough men to its colonies to serve in the armed forces. Blacks became the main component of the militias that fought the Indians, patrolled the frontiers, put down rebellions and fought foreign pirates.12
9 Time and again the efficient black defences repulsed European invaders in the Caribbean. In Havana in 1600 the governor had at his disposal a coloured militia of free mulattos (the ‘Compañía de Pardos Libres’). By the end of the seventeenth century blacks could be found as junior officers in the colonial militia. The alternative face of the picture was that runaway (cimmaron) and rebel blacks also acted as a powerful aid to European military expeditions in their efforts to take over territories in the Caribbean. The first and most menacing sign was in the daring expedition of Francis Drake across the isthmus of Panama in 1572, a feat made possible only by the help given him by a group of thirty cimarrons.
The principal role of black Africans in the Spanish empire was as mainstay of the economy.130 Production in the islands and mainland of the New World would, quite simply, have collapsed without their contribution. From the time that Spanish missionaries and authorities decided that the indigenous population could not put up with the intensive labour required in certain activities, African slaves became the substitute. They came to be the main workforce in the sugar mills, in mining, in agriculture. From the beginning of its introduction into the New World, sugar cane came to be identified with the mass importation of black slaves. Blacks produced the sugar of the Caribbean. They became crucial contributors to the mining industry, in the silver mines of Mexico and the gold deposits of Colombia and Peru. Their role supplanting the Indians in the gold mines of Colombia is cogently echoed in the myth prevalent among the black miners of Güelmambi, at Barbacoas in Colombia:
