by Hugh Thomas
I have a personal reason for hoping that the sins of no collateral ancestors can be visited on the present generation: in the Archivo de Indias in Seville (that best and greatest of imperial archives, to which the American scholar Irene Wright dedicated a sonnet), where I have, in researching the conquest of Mexico, spent some of the most fruitful days of my life, I discovered that a ship bringing twenty slaves to Havana Bay in 1792 was captained by someone from Liverpool by the name of Hugo Tomás.
I have tried in this book to say what happened. In seeking the truth, I have not thought it necessary to speak of outrage on every page. But all the same the question is, How was the business tolerated for so long? In my chapters on abolition I have touched on that; but, at the end of some years spent writing this book, I now cannot think of the traders in slaves, or the captains of the slave ships, as “worse” than the slaveowners, who after all constituted the market. There were brutal owners of slaves, such as Frederick Douglass’s putative father, and reasonably kind slave captains, such as John Newton. A few African rulers tried to escape from participation in the transatlantic trade. Mostly they failed. All were caught up in a vast scheme of things which seemed normal at least till 1780.
For only a few parts of this book have I done archival research (for example, Ferdinand the Catholic’s decision to send black slaves to the New World in 1510; the career of Bartolommeo Marchionni; the license to carry slaves granted by the Emperor Charles V; various moments of the Spanish slave trade; and some aspects of the end of the trade to both Cuba and Brazil). But I have tried to look at original sources, where available. In this respect, I wish to pay special thanks to: the late Elizabeth Donnan, whose Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America was a great assistance; and also to Philip Curtin, whose The Slave Trade: A Census was a wonderful guide and whose figures I have only modestly revised. Enriqueta Vila Vilar’s remarkable studies on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish trade, especially Hispanoamerica y el comercio de esclavos, were the best introduction to that theme. Thomas Clarkson’s The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, 2 vols. (London, 1808), remains the best introduction to the abolition movement. Charles Verlinden’s L’Esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale opened my eyes to the persistence of the institution of slavery during the ages of faith.
I am most grateful to the directors of the libraries and archives where I have been able to study: in particular, those of the Archivo de Indias in Seville; the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid; the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid; the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid; the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the New York Public Library; Widener Library, Harvard; the Murger Memorial Library of Boston University; the London Library; the library of the House of Lords (the librarian, David Jones, and his assistants); the Cambridge University library; the Public Record Office; Kew; and the British Library. This will be the last time that I shall express my gratitude to those who work as assistants in the last named’s inspiring Round Reading Room, the most beautiful library in Europe, about to be destroyed by the ignorant philistines who have recently directed British cultural life. I am also grateful to a number of people who read chapters of the book at an early stage—for example, Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Dr. Felipe Fernández-Armesto—as to Oliver Knox and my wife, Vanessa, who kindly read the proofs and made many invaluable suggestions. My gratitude to Michael Korda, at Simon & Schuster, is profound; he was a constant encouragement. I am also grateful to Tanya Stobbs, of Macmillan’s, for her care and assiduity. Gillon Aitken and Andrew Wylie, my agents, were admirable. An immense amount of hard work on this book was done by Gypsy da Silva, also at Simon & Schuster; I must thank her and copyeditor Terry Zaroff-Evans for their patience and meticulous attention to the details of the production.
HUGH THOMAS
London, March 1997
* * *
Book One
GREEN SEA OF DARKNESS
“Green Sea of Darkness” was the Medieval Arab description for the Atlantic Ocean, used to indicate the terrors of the waters beyond Cape Bojador, which the Portuguese rounded in 1434
1
What Heart Could Be So Hard?
“What heart could be so hard as not to be pierced by piteous feeling to see that company?”
Zurara, Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea
“VERY EARLY in the morning, because of the heat,” a few Portuguese seamen on the decks of half a dozen hundred-ton caravels, the new sailing ships, were preparing, on August 8, 1444, to land their African cargo near Lagos, on the southwest point of the Algarve, in Portugal.
This cargo consisted of 235 slaves. On arriving on the mainland, these people were placed in a field. They seemed, as a contemporary put it, “a marvellous sight, for, amongst them, were some white enough, fair enough, and well-proportioned; others were less white, like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear . . . the images of a lower hemisphere.
“What heart could be so hard,” this contemporary chronicler, Gomes Eannes de Zurara, a courtier attached to the brother of the king of Portugal, the inventive Prince Henry, asked himself, “as not to be pierced with piteous feeling to see that company? For some kept their heads low, and their faces bathed in tears, looking one upon another. Others stood groaning very dolorously, looking up to the height of heaven, fixing their eyes upon it, crying out loudly, as if asking help from the Father of nature; others struck their faces with the palms of their hands, throwing themselves at full length upon the ground; while others made lamentations in the manner of a dirge, after the custom of their country. . . .
“But to increase their sufferings still more,” the writer continued, “there now arrived those who had charge of the division of the captives, and . . . then was it needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers. No respect was shown to either friends or relations, but each fell where his lot took him.”
Zurara then permitted himself a prayer to the fashionable goddess Fortune: “O mighty Fortune, who, with thy wheel doest and undoest, compassing the matters of the world as it pleaseth thee, do thou at least put before the eyes of that miserable race some understanding of matters to come, that the captives may receive some consolation in the midst of their great sorrow . . . .”1
The arrival of this collection of Africans was a novelty which many came to observe, among them Prince Henry, the chronicler Zurara’s hero. He watched, impassive, from his horse, and himself received forty-six of those slaves present, the “royal fifth.” He gave thanks that he was saving so many new souls for God.
Most of the captives who were on this day the cynosure of all eyes were Azanaghi (now usually known by their Berber name of Sanhajah or Idzagen), from what is today the southern part of the modern state of Sahara, or the northern part of Mauritania. These people later seemed to a Venetian adventurer, Alvise Ca’da Mosto, who would visit them in their own land, “tawny, squat and miserable”: in comparison with the blacks from farther south, who for him were “well-built, noble-looking men.”2 Yet the Azanaghi were one of the most important families of the veiled Tuaregs, a tribe who had, for generations, been traditional raiders of cities such as Timbuktu and other settled places on the Middle Niger. Arab geographers placed them as living near “the Gleaming Mountain” and “the City of Brass,” separated from the unknown land of the blacks to the south by a “Sea of Sand . . . very soft to tread, in which man and camel may sink.”3 They had adopted Islam in the eleventh century, but had known remarkably little about that faith till an inflammatory teacher, Ibn Yasin, a Muslim Berber from the University of Qayrawan (Tunisia), preached to them and captured their imaginations with an austere “fundamentalist” message, which promised, through barbarity and sectarianism, an eventual end to all fighting and disunion. So began the ruthless Almoravid movement—which, in the beginning, caused widespread destruction.
For, in the service of unimpeachable ideals, the ancestor
s, or at least collateral ancestors, of the humble captives in Portugal in 1444 had—zealots all, dressed in skins and riding camels—swept through first Morocco and then the Iberian peninsula and, for a time, ruled an empire which stretched from the rivers Niger and Sénégal in Africa to the Ebro in Spain. Ibn Yasin’s hermitage, or ribat (the Almoravids were “people of the ribat”), in his years of struggle, was not far from that same Arguin whence the slaves of 1444 were stolen. It is thus possible that some of the Portuguese concerned to guard the new arrivals were, as a result of rape or seduction three hundred years before, their distant relations.
Zurara described how, even in the fifteenth century, the Azanaghi often made “war on the blacks, using more ruse than force, because they are not as vigorous as their captives.” The remark shows why the slaves brought to the Algarve were of so many colors: those captured by the Portuguese raiders even included men and women who had already been enslaved by the Azanaghi. If the chronicler’s comment about white and black slaves is accurate, the captives would have also included some who were bought in markets from the ubiquitous Muslim salesmen.
Most of the captives of 1444 had been taken by the Portuguese in a village: where “ . . . they [the Portuguese], shouting out ‘St James, St George, and Portugal,’ at once attacked them, killing and taking all they could. Then might you see mothers forsaking their children, and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best they could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts, others stowed their children among the sea-weed, where our men found them afterwards. . . .”4
The leader of the Portuguese in this expedition was Lançarote de Freitas, a successful young official previously engaged in collecting taxes, but now captain of a newly formed company for trade to Africa, established at Lagos (the town where de Freitas had been an official), for “the service of God and the Infante Henry.”5 De Freitas was known as a “man of great good sense,” who had been brought up in the large and interesting household of Prince Henry.
The seizure of slaves, rather than their purchase, was then a frequent practice in both Europe and Africa. These “razzias,” as the odious practice of man-stealing was known, were carried out throughout the Middle Ages in Spain and Africa by Muslim merchants, and their Christian equivalents had done the same. Muslims were justified by the Koran in seizing Christians and enslaving them; the Christians, in their long-drawn-out reconquest of Muslim Spain, had conducted themselves similarly.
This voyage of de Freitas’s was the first serious commercial venture to West Africa by the Portuguese whose business leaders, as a result, became as convinced of the benefits of such expeditions as they had previously been skeptical. The merchants of Lisbon had been hoping for gold from West Africa. They had found some, but slaves were in more ample supply. Prince Henry was not displeased: the money which he obtained by selling his share of the slaves could be used to finance further endeavors, including journeys of pure discovery.
The chronicler Zurara probably thought that the captives owed their fate to the sins of their supposed ancestor Ham, cursed by his father, Noah, after seeing him naked and drunk. It was both a Christian and a Muslim tradition to suppose that the descendants of Ham had been turned black. Zurara may also have been influenced by the work two centuries before of Egidio Colonna, who had written that if people did not have laws, and if they did not live peacefully under a government, they were more beasts than human, and therefore could legally be enslaved.6 No doubt Zurara would have considered that the Africans brought back to Portugal in 1444, whatever their origins, were just such people.
2
Humanity Is Divided into Two
“Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves.”
Aristotle, Politics
IN HIS DESCRIPTION of the sale of slaves at Lagos in 1444, Zurara, the Court chronicler, was writing of what has since seemed a turning point in history. Yet few occurrences thus named remain so after scrutiny; and the Portuguese, along with all Southern Europeans of that time, were accustomed both to slaves and to slavery.
Most settled societies at one time or another have employed forced labor; and most peoples, even the proud French, the effective Germans, the noble English, the dauntless Spaniards and, perhaps above all, the poetical Russians, have experienced years of servitude.
Slavery was a major institution in antiquity. Prehistoric graves in Lower Egypt suggest that a Libyan people of about 8000 B.C. enslaved a Bushman or Negrito tribe. The Egyptians later made frequent raids on principalities to their south and, during the Eighteenth Dynasty, also launched attacks by sea, to steal slaves from what is now Somaliland. Slaves helped to build the innovations of the world’s first agricultural revolution: the hydraulic system of China and the pyramids of Egypt. The first Code of Laws, that of Hammurabi, silent on many matters now considered interesting, included clear provisions about slavery. For example, death was prescribed for anyone who helped a slave to escape, as well as for anyone who sheltered a fugitive—a foretaste of two thousand years during which slaves figured in most such compilations.
In the golden years of both Greece and Rome, slaves worked as domestic servants, in mines and in public works, in gangs, and individually, on farms, as well as in commerce and in cottage industries. They both managed and served in brothels, trading organizations, and workshops. There were slaves in Mycenae, and Ulysses had fifty female slaves in his palace. The Greeks were appreciative employers of them: Athens had in her heyday about sixty thousand slaves. Her police force was a body of three hundred Scythian archer slaves; her famous silver mines at Laurium employed over ten thousand slaves until a rebellion in 103 B.C.; and twenty slaves—perhaps a quarter of those so employed—helped to build the Parthenon. The Athenians used slaves to fight for them at Marathon, even though they freed them first.
The Romans made use of slaves in all the categories employed by the Greeks, though they had many more domestic ones: a prefect in the days of the Emperor Nero might have four hundred in his house alone. There may have been two million slaves in Italy at the end of the republic. From the first century B.C. to the early third century A.D., the use of these captives was the customary way in which prosperity was created. That did not mean all these were equal: rural and urban domestic slaves lived different lives; a man working in a gang in the fields had a different life from one in a workshop in the city; some slaves practiced as doctors or lawyers, and others acted as majordomos to noblemen, or as shepherds in the hills. Cicero’s slave Tiro was a confidential secretary and was well educated: he even invented a shorthand called after himself.
Half a million captives seem to have been required every year in Rome during its most self-confident age—say, 50 B.C. to 150 A.D. The Roman state itself possessed innumerable: seven hundred, for example, were responsible for maintaining the imperial city’s aqueducts. Perhaps one out of three members of the population was a slave during the early empire. One rich lady, Melania, is said to have liberated eight thousand slaves in the early fifth century A.D., when she decided to become a Christian ascetic.1
In both Greece and Rome, slaves were in origin captives taken in war, or obtained by a razzia on an unsuspecting island or city. Fifty-five thousand captives are said to have been taken after the Third Carthaginian War, and Caesar, it will be recalled, brought “many captives home to Rome” from the Gallic Wars. Many Germans were enslaved in later centuries. Then Septimius Severus brought a hundred thousand captives home after defeating the Parthians at Ctesiphon. Fifteen thousand Gallic slaves a year were exchanged for Italian wine in the first century B.C. Piracy and brigandage also played their parts in providing Rome with the labor which she desired.
Markets specifically for slaves, such as those at Chios, Rhodes, and Delos, were developed early during the golden age of Greece. Ephesus was the largest market of the classical world for hundreds of years, though the evidence as to the numbers sold there is unsatisfactory. These markets were popula
r places of resort for all patricians. The majority of captives sold there would have come from the East. The sale of slaves born within the Roman empire was also a thriving enterprise. Some were probably bred deliberately for markets.
Many slaves of old Rome were fair Germans, including Saxons: “The beautiful faces of the young slaves,” wrote Gibbon, “were covered with a medicated crust or ointment which secured them against the effects of the sun and frost.”2 They must have been from Northern Europe, perhaps from the historian’s own land.
Black slaves also existed in antiquity. Egypt had always sought to secure their southern frontier militarily with Nubia, but commerce crossed it in both directions. Herodotus spoke of an Egyptian trade in black slaves; during the most fortunate times of the pharaohs, the Nubians regularly dispatched down the Nile tributes including Ethiopian captives as well as gold and cattle. Blacks, surely slaves from Ethiopia, fought in Xerxes’ army, as they did in that of Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse. Ethiopians are recorded in many parts of the Mediterranean in those days: as having been dancers and boxers, acrobats and charioteers, gladiators and cooks, prostitutes and personal servants. Black heads are to be observed on Greek vases, as on Alexandrian terra-cottas, and a first-century mosaic at Pompeii shows a black slave serving at a banquet. Seneca spoke of “one of our dandies with outriders and Numidians.”3 The Roman playwright Terence had been a slave in Carthage and, according to Suetonius, may have been a mulatto. A useful guide to navigation in the second century A.D., the Periplus Maris Erythraei, of the Red Sea, talks of a maritime slave trade from the East African coast to Egypt. Black Africans seemed attractive. Seneca is supposed to have remarked that Roman men believed that black women were more sensual than white, and Roman women had a similar voluptuous admiration for black men: the poet Martial praised a lady “blacker than night, than an ant, pitch, a jackdaw, a cicada.”4 In the Bible, the queen of Sheba was always described as beautiful as well as black; and the Song of Solomon included the firm declaration: “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.”5 Herodotus, who traveled as far down the Nile as Elephantine, the frontier city with Nubia, called the Ethiopians “the most handsome of peoples.”6
