by Hugh Thomas
One consequence of importing these slaves was to inspire the Canary Islands to grow sugar much as Madeira had done, especially in Tenerife, capital being contributed not only by Genoese and Portuguese but also by German bankers, such as the Welsers of Augsburg. The first sugar mill was set up in 1484, the islands began to produce as much sugar as Madeira in the early sixteenth century, and African slaves were soon used there on a large scale.
One or two Italians sought to enter this tempting Guinea trade by overland journeys. For example, Antonio Malfante, a determined merchant from Genoa, reached Tuat, a group of oases of which Tamentit is capital, acting for the Centurione bank; and a Florentine, Benedetto Dei, who worked for the rival bankers Portinari, set himself up for a time in the 1470s in Timbuktu, selling Tuscan and Lombard fabrics.
The Portuguese, meantime, were establishing themselves ever more firmly on the coast of Africa. Prince João became King João II in 1481, and, henceforth, Portuguese adventure was part of an interesting innovation: monarchical capitalism. João was called “the perfect prince,” and he almost deserves that title, being not only a modern ruler in the school of his contemporaries Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England, but he was also the great-nephew and spiritual heir of Henry the Navigator. In African developments, his policies were consistent and far-reaching, returning to the exploratory tradition of Prince Henry, without, however, having to think of the implications for his own properties.
This monarch’s first move in Africa was spectacular. In 1481, the first year of his reign, Diogo d’Azambuja, an experienced official who had long served the royal family, was dispatched to build a fortress at Elmina on the Gold Coast (São Jorge da Mina), the first substantial European building in the tropics. Azambuja appeared offshore with a hundred masons and carpenters, as well as quantities of timber, bricks, and lime, and, above all, stone. The purpose was primarily to check European interlopers, but the place was also close to the auriferous river Ankobra, and to a road leading to the gold supplies in the Akan forests. It was on the border of two small local principalities, those of Komenda and Fetu.
King João took the decision to go ahead with this investment against the advice of his chief advisory council, whose members thought the place too precarious. Azambuja had, however, investigated the coast before he chose the site, a promontory at the mouth of the bay. A beach to the east provided an excellent landing place for ships of up to three hundred tons; careenage could be carried out to the northwest, on the river. The castle much increased the safety of Portuguese fleets, for ships no longer had to lie offshore for weeks while the African traders bartered slowly; at least on this coast, henceforth, goods brought from Portugal could quickly be carried into the castle, and the cargo for the return journey—including slaves—could be held in storerooms. The stay of a merchant ship could be much shorter. That reduced both costs and the risk of disease. Being on the sea, Elmina had few mosquitoes and thus (though the interconnection was not understood) little malaria. Fresh water was maintained, in a brick-built reservoir, with pipes contrived to lead directly to ships’ barrels.
The corner towers were solid, built on Italian designs to resist bombardment from, say, heavy artillery. New salients in the form of Italian-style bastions were added in the next few years. Portugal soon maintained a governor, a factor, and a garrison of fifty troops.
A local prince, Caramança (King Ansa)—it is unclear if he was a king of Komenda or a nobleman—had been reluctant to allow this establishment, as might have been expected, but Azambuja secured his grudging agreement—a foretaste of many subsequent arrangements between Europeans and Africans over the centuries. Elmina was self-consciously a royal establishment: private merchants were not allowed near it.
A few other, smaller, Portuguese trading posts were soon established nearby, at Shama, Accra, and, seventy miles west of Elmina, Axim, of which the last named was built as a fort in 1503-8 (Shama was given a fort in 1560). Though the justification of these fortresses was the pursuit of gold and the defeat of Spanish pretensions, they were all soon being used as depots for captives, many of whom were held there for long periods. Some slaves continued to be bought from people in the delta of the Niger and sold to local African merchants. Others were held for work at the fortresses: in the blacksmitheries, in the carpenters’ shops, and in the kitchens.
At home, Lagos on the Algarve was abandoned as Portugal’s main African port, and matters were regularized in Lisbon for the reception of African goods, including slaves. In 1473, a law had been introduced providing that all slaves brought from Africa were to be taken first to Portugal, not sold elsewhere first. The requirement for such a law suggests that many Portuguese captains were selling elsewhere—perhaps in Seville, perhaps in Valencia. After 1481, all ships setting off for Africa were also asked to register in Lisbon, in the Casa da Mina, a converted warehouse on the ground floor of the royal palace, on the waterfront. A subsection of this, the House of Slaves (Casa dos Escravos), was founded in 1486, in the Praça da Tanoaria, also on the Tagus, with João do Porto as its first director. This royal official was named the “receiver of all Moors and Mooresses and whatever other things which, God willing, may come to us from our trade in Guinea.”VI,8
These institutions, influenced by Genoese precedents (and themselves influencing Spain after 1500), were responsible for ensuring that the slaves reached the markets, that duty was paid, and that permits to trade in the first place were issued. About a thousand slaves a year were probably still being shipped to Portugal, though, since the imports were irregular, the figures could have been higher; no records seem to have survived the famous and destructive earthquake of 1755.
The likelihood is that many of the slaves continued to be sold in Castile, even if they were first registered in Lisbon; and, in 1489, a Portuguese merchant, Pedro Dias, established himself in Barcelona, actively selling slaves from Guinea. (One buyer explained that he had bought from Dias a black woman and her daughter, who had been captured in a “just war.”9)
The explorations continued. Gomes’s captains had been dismayed to find that, after the delta of the Niger, the African coast ran south for as far as anyone could see, so that the route to India was still none too close.
In 1486, the Portuguese sent João Afonso Aveiro to explore further the five “slave rivers” of the Benin coast which seemed to the previous voyagers at once so full of menace as well as of commercial promise. By that time, the explorers had learned something of the kingdom of Benin itself, probably through buying slaves who had the information. The requirements of the slave trade at Elmina also dictated a greater need for knowledge of where the slaves which the Portuguese captains had been buying came from. Ozulua, the oba (king) of Benin, had also learned something of the pretensions of the remote Portuguese monarch who was claiming a monopoly of trade from Europe to West Africa, who seemed to be so indefatigably interested in finding the whereabouts of a certain Prester John (who was of the same Christian religion), and who had recently had the impudence to name himself “lord of Guinea”—though the title would have meant little to the ruler of Benin.
Aveiro found the “great city of Benin” a revelation, almost as Cortés, thirty-five years later, was astounded by Mexico-Tenochtitlán. He was also interested in the “tailed peppers” of Benin, which he rightly thought would be a better competitor for Indian pepper than malaguetta. Aveiro was glad too to hear of a king in the East, the oghene, who concealed himself behind silk curtains and apparently held the cross in veneration, to whom even the obas of Benin customarily paid reverence: surely that must at last be Prester John? Oba Ozulua, after a talk with the explorers, agreed to send “a man of good speech and wisdom,” the chief of Ughoton—the port of Benin, as it were—to Lisbon to become acquainted with the Christian way of life.
This chief of Ughoton did go to Lisbon and returned, bringing to his king an (alas, unknown) “rich present of such things as he would greatly prize,” having agreed, on behalf of the oba, that a
trading center should be established at Benin. Aveiro returned with him to set up this outpost.10
A contract to trade on the Benin river between 1486 and 1495 was leased by the Crown to a Florentine banker long resident in Lisbon, Bartolommeo Marchionni. Probably he carried slaves back from the Slave River directly to his plantations in Madeira as well as to Lisbon, or sold some in Seville, where he also had many commercial operations.
There was one other Portuguese political intervention on the African coast in these days, but far to the north, on the river Sénégal. There, in 1486, a dispute occurred in the succession to one of the Wolof monarchies. King Bemoin asked for help, and “the Perfect Prince” João agreed to give it, on the condition that Bemoin convert to Christianity. The Portuguese sent missionaries, but Bemoin vacillated. The emissaries were ordered home. Bemoin then panicked and, sending King João a hundred slaves, begged his European friends to continue their help. Before that could be forthcoming, Bemoin was forced to flee from his throne, and took refuge in Arguin, whence he was carried to Portugal. There he was baptized João II and awarded a coat of arms. He returned to Sénégal, accompanied by Pero Vaz da Cunha, an intemperate courtier, with the support needed to establish a fortress for himself. But no sooner had they reached the territory of the Wolofs than Cunha accused Benoim of treachery and had him executed. The former returned to Portugal without more ado. The affair had no immediate sequel.
In 1486 the Portuguese began the settlement of São Tomé, the “large and magnificent” island, always with “the benefit of a fine fresh breeze,” on the equator, in the Gulf of Guinea, facing the river Gabon. This island had been discovered fifteen years before, by Santarém and Escobar, but it now received a formal letter naming it a captaincy. There were no indigenous African inhabitants. The first settlers were apparently deported Portuguese criminals, but Alvaro de Caminha, the third governor, took with him two thousand “young Jews”—that is, children separated from their parents. These were the children of Jews expelled from Spain and enslaved by the king of Portugal since their parents had not paid enough to ensure their residence in his territory. Caminha was also given a license to import 1,080 slaves over five years to serve the plantations which the Court hoped would be established. Most of these came from Benin or one or another of the five “slave rivers” nearby. He also brought a few sugar specialists from Madeira.
From the earliest years, these plantations grew sugar cane, making use of the many streams to provide power for water mills. As had once occurred in Crete and Cyprus under Venetian direction, and on Madeira and the Canaries more recently, all used slave labor. São Tomé thus constituted one more stepping-stone between Mediterranean and American sugar development: a real harbinger of the Caribbean. In 1500, to encourage further Portuguese settlement, a monopoly of trading slaves and other goods with coastal Africans from the mainland opposite was granted to the colonists of São Tomé; and, in the early sixteenth century, slaves would also be assembled at the island, to be taken up the coast of West Africa on a journey of thirty days or so to be sold at Elmina (for a time, a slave ship with 100 to 120 captives on board would leave São Tomé for Elmina every fifty days).
Long before these developments—indeed, just after the building of Elmina, in 1482–83—Diogo Cão, an old associate of Prince Henry, from an old family of the northern province of Tras-os-Montes, the captain who had captured the Mondanina in the war with Spain in 1480, set off to continue the voyages of exploration. Sailing south from Santa Catarina, which had been reached by Rui de Sequiera seven years before, he anchored first off the beautiful Bay of Loango, then the trading port of the powerful kingdom run by the people known as the Vili; and next, to the south, he found the colossal river Congo, which he called first Rio Poderoso, then Rio do Padrão—for he left behind on the estuary at Mpinda a stone or wooden column, a padrão, which he had specially brought for the purpose.11
After a few months of local exploration, which included some journeys upriver, and some ineffective conversations with the Sonyo people, Cão set off again south for what is now known as Angola.
Leaving another column at Cabo de Santa María, south of Benguela, he returned to Portugal with slaves from there, along with other presents, not to speak of some Mwissikongo hostages, whom he had seized as a guarantee of the safety of his own expedition. He had failed, however, to carry out his purpose of circumnavigating Africa, though it was supposed, on his return to Lisbon, that he had been “close to the Arabian Gulf.”
In 1485, Cão went back to Angola and sailed still farther to the south, this time leaving other columns at a point which he named Montenegro, quite near Cabo de Santa María, and at Cabo Cruz, in Damaraland. He also returned the hostages whom he had taken on his earlier voyage, and ascended the mainstream of the Congo for nearly one hundred miles, navigating the whirlpool later known as Hell’s Cauldron. After some time, he entered into a complicated relationship with Nzinga, the king of Congo (Kongo), a more substantial ruler than any whom he or his countrymen had hitherto found in Africa. That monarch’s capital was Mbanza Kongo, fifty miles east of Hell’s Cauldron and about thirty miles south of it. Congo was a Bantu state which had been established in the fourteenth century. The king lived in a palace in the center of a maze and was attended by drummers and trumpeters using ivory instruments; if he ate with his fingers, he ate well, as did, separately, his queen, who was customarily surrounded by slaves; when she traveled, they clicked their fingers like castanets. The provincial subdivisions of Congo were sophisticated, and there was a currency consisting of nzimbu shells found on the island of Luanda, though sometimes raffia-palm cloth was used as well. The monarchy, a relatively recent establishment (in that way comparable to the empires of the Mexica and the Inca in America), subsisted on a complex system of tribute. The Congo used both copper and iron, and the women made salt by boiling water. Slaves were well established as one of several kinds of tribute, but the monarchy had not been tempted to trade them on the large scale which the trans-Sahara route made possible for the rulers of Guinea.
Cão (he may have made three journeys, not just two) returned to Portugal with more slaves, as well as an emissary of the Congolese named Caçuta who, baptized in Lisbon as João da Silva, soon learned Portuguese and returned with an ambassador of Portugal, Gonçalo de Sousa. The Portuguese formally recognized the Congolese monarch as a brother-in-arms and an ally. They tried to convert the people by sending missionaries and sought to educate some Congolese young men in the fundamentals of Christianity at the Monastery of São Eloi and elsewhere in Lisbon. Craftsmen, agricultural laborers, masons, and even housewives were sent from Portugal to Congo to give lessons in carpentry, building, and housekeeping while, in the 1490s, two printers from Nuremberg traveled to São Tomé, probably intending to work for the Congolese. Finally, King Nzinga was baptized as King João I on May 3, 1491, along with six chiefs who took the names of Portuguese noblemen.
This conversion represented a triumph of Portuguese endeavor, but did not fulfill its promise. Congolese Christianity was marked by a merger of African with European saints and images, not the conquest of the former by the latter. Another consequence, though, was the development of a new source of slaves for Portugal.
Cão died after his voyages to Congo and so, in the end, it was not he but Bartolomeu Dias who set off in 1487 on the famous journey from Lisbon to find India. Some of the royal counselors thought that the voyage would be too expensive and that Portugal would do better to continue to trade slaves and seek gold in the kingdoms bordering the Atlantic than to venture into the unknown of the Indian Ocean—if indeed that sea existed. But, benefiting from the achievements of his predecessors, especially those of Cão, Dias sailed straight to Congo, steering clear of the Gulf of Guinea, and left a column at Cabo da Volta (modern Lüderitz, in Namibia). His fleet was blown round the Cape of Good Hope, and he then sailed north along the coast of East Africa as far as Cabo Padrone (where he left another column) before his crew insisted on r
eturning. Only on his way back did they see that “for so many ages unknown promontory,” the southern cone of Africa.
The main sources for the African slave trade to the Americas for 350 years, from the Bay of Arguin to beyond the Cape of Good Hope, were thus discovered by Europeans five years before the Genoese Columbus set off on his famous voyage. The Portuguese also knew by 1492 how the rivers Gambia and Sénégal served as connections with a rich empire far inland, and that the Congo was a colossal waterway. Five years after Columbus’s first voyage, the often underestimated East African sources of slaves were also found, when Vasco da Gama, en route for India, stopped at such important future slaving ports as Quilimane, Kilwa, Malindi, and Mozambique Island—indeed, to observe that, in these “very large and beautiful” cities, a flourishing trade in black slaves was already carried on. Mombasa, for instance, employed five hundred archer slaves, much as Athens had once done—except that these were black.
All the same, the Portuguese knowledge of Africa was confined to the coast. The interior was still, and would continue to be for many generations, barred to them by malarial mangrove swamps and impenetrable rain forests.
As far as the home country was concerned, a routine had been established, which would be emulated in respect of journeys to America: the right to carry slaves was given to a succession of privileged merchants, who were obliged to pay an annual tax established by the Crown, which was thereby committed to the enterprise.
Part of the reason for the Portuguese success in these early dealings was that they were prepared to act as middlemen carrying all kinds of goods along the coast in their excellent caravels. The Portuguese could thus be seen in some ways as intruding effectively, if brusquely, into an already established commercial network. Leo the African would later describe, in his geography, written in Rome for the Renaissance Pope Leo X, how the kings in West Africa particularly liked rosaries made from a bright-blue stone which the Portuguese took them from the Congo.
