by Hugh Thomas
Another Peruvian conquistador, Hernando de Soto, received a license to take fifty slaves on his doomed journey to Florida in 1537. (Menéndez de Aviles would take five hundred in 1565, on his successful one.) Coronado also had African slaves with him on his journey to the “seven cities of Cibola” in 1540.
The provision of slaves for the New World was now becoming what it was to be, in ever-increasing dimensions, for the next 350 years: a source of profit for the merchant as well as for the Crown. One could buy slaves in Europe or Africa for forty-five or fifty pesos, and sell them in America for at least double that. Prices were increased in the New World because of the taxes; but, despite denunciations of frauds by the Court in Spain, merchants and local officials turned a blind eye to the regulations, making the numbers of slaves imported as difficult to establish for the Crown as, later, for the historian. In consequence, Hispaniola seemed “a new Guinea” to Fernández de Oviedo in the 1530s: there were more people of African blood there than Spanish.25
Friendships of a kind were sometimes formed, in these early days of the history of European America, between the Spaniards and their African slaves. For in Peru, as in Mexico, the blacks sometimes identified themselves with their Spanish masters, who came to rely on them in many battles against the Indians. The slave of Almagro, Margarita, was wonderfully loyal to her master who freed her on his death. When Francisco Hernández Girón rebelled against the viceroy in Peru in 1553, his first recruits were also African slaves. In the Caribbean, an understanding of a sort was created between black and white in consequence of the fierce attacks made, particularly in Puerto Rico, by Caribs from the Lesser Antilles. Raids by French “pirates,” on towns and farms near the coasts, in Cuba as in Santo Domingo, also inspired good relations between masters and slaves.
There were, however, several dangerous signs. The first major slave rebellion of black Africans in the New World took place in Hispaniola in 1522. The slaves were then seeking to escape rather than to overthrow the Spanish community. More radical motives were to be found among the black slaves who sought to inspire the Zapotecs in Mexico to fight the Spaniards in 1523. These rebels were justly celebrated by romantically minded Spaniards, such as the poet Juan de Castellanos, as excellent fighters:
Clever are these Wolofs and brave,
With the vain hope of becoming knights
There was another rebellion in Santo Domingo in 1533, when the few surviving local Indians rose against the Spaniards under a chief known as Henríquez, and many Africans joined them. The subsequent guerrilla war lasted ten years. There was a similar revolt in Puerto Rico in 1527. In 1529, the new city of Santa Marta, founded by Rodrigo de Bastidas, on what is now the coast of Colombia, was destroyed in a revolt of African slaves. A conspiracy of blacks in New Spain in 1537 led the Viceroy Mendoza to demand a suspension of the dispatch of the new slaves whom he had earlier requested. Smaller revolts were reported at Cartagena in 1545, Santo Domingo again in 1548, and Panama in 1552. All these rebellions were in the end crushed, brutally, but in all these instances a few Africans escaped into the forests of America, eventually to mix, or fight, with the indigenous people. By 1550, in Mexico, a well-known group of escaped slaves lived as robbers in forests near the mines of Tornacustla, thus beginning a long history of banditry in Mexico.
The indigenous people of the New World did not find the concept of slavery an innovation: slaves, with something close to the European definition of the term, were well known in Mexico, Peru, and most of the other major societies. It was one of the many, to the conquistadors, comforting similarities between the two systems of living. Slaves in old Mexico, for example, may have constituted a tenth of the population, almost all obtained by capture in war. These captives were primarily required for human sacrifice. They also played a part in agriculture in the coastal regions, rather than in the valley of Mexico. True, there were no slaves on the large islands of the Caribbean. But the Caribs, in the Lesser Antilles, employed their captives as slaves; and, when some of them began, after 1530, to attack the Spanish settlements in, for example, Puerto Rico, they often carried off black slaves and used them in their own communities. Perhaps there were in consequence as many as two thousand African slaves in Carib hands in 1612.
Some of the peoples in Brazil and Central America, such as the Tupi or the Cueva Indians, had slaves, too, always secured as captives in war.
Still, and despite the use of slaves for human sacrifices, the conquistadors knew perfectly well that there was a difference between the way the Indians and they themselves thought of slaves: the first judges in the Audencia of New Spain in 1530 pointed this out in a letter to Charles V when they wrote that servitude in ancient America was very different from what it was in Europe: for “they treat slaves as relations, while the Christians treat them as dogs.”26
The shortage of available slaves in the Americas meant that, despite the regulations, and the preference for Africans, a few “white slaves,” Moors, were also shipped. Licenses to import females of this people were indeed granted in the 1530s: to Rodrigo Contreras, governor of Nicaragua in 1534; to a certain Rodrigo Zimbrón in Mexico; to the widowed sister-in-law of Bartolomé de Las Casas; and to Hernando, brother of the conquistador Pizarro.
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As for Portugal in America, Pedro Alvares Cabral had in 1500 discovered Brazil on the second Portuguese voyage to India; Marchionni, who owned one of the ships in the fleet, wrote that Cabral had “discovered a new world.”27
Brazil was at first not much appreciated, for it was considered unimportant in Portugal, offering nothing but slaves and redwood. Still, the first were perfectly acceptable: thus the ship Bretoa, returning to Portugal from Brazil in 1511, listed thirty-five indigenous slaves along with the parrots, jaguar skins, and brazilwood. Naturally, Marchionni was a partner, with a New Christian, Fernão de Noronha, in the ship’s oufitting. Eighty-five Brazilian slaves were sold in Valencia in 1515-16 by a specialist in such men, Juan Miguel Dabues, as well as a few slaves from the real India, not the Indies, brought back from round the Cape of Good Hope by Portuguese shippers. Sebastian Cabot, then sailing on behalf of the king of Spain, also kidnapped the four sons of a chief of the Carijó Indians in the region of the river Plate and maintained them as slaves in his house in Seville in the late 1520s.
Still, the pattern of the future of the great dominion was being established, for a little sugar was grown in Brazil before 1520, the first sugar technician had been ordered for Brazil by 1516, and there may even have been two or three small mills there by then.
Only after 1530, however, did the Portuguese begin to contemplate conquering Brazil. King João III might well have taken no initiative to promote settlements there, based on captaincies allocated to individual leaders, had he not been afraid of French involvement, much as the British established Nigeria in the late nineteenth century, in order to avoid French colonization. In Brazil, France did tenuously establish herself at Rio de Janeiro, during the 1540s, in a colony which she curiously named “La France Antarctique.” French traders in redwood, such as captains serving the viscount of Dieppe, the remarkable shipbuilder Jean Ango, were as common a sight on those coasts for a time as their Portuguese colleagues, for the red dye obtained from brazilwood was fashionable at the cultivated Court of François I. But, in 1530, King João, by one of those extraordinarily impudent actions of which Europeans were capable in the sixteenth century, divided the three thousand miles of coast in Brazil, to which he thought he was entitled under the Treaty of Tordesillas, between fourteen grantees, who would establish there their captaincies; as indeed they did.
The import of Africans into the “Land of the True Cross,” as Brazil was first known, was in the early days tiny: the Portuguese had at their disposal during this period native Indians, who cut the logs for the small-scale commerce in redwood with great energy, entranced by the contact with metal tools. There was a flourishing “factory,” where Indian slaves were sold; these were mostly reserved for
use in Brazil, however, and, after 1530, a decree forbade any of the new grantees to send back to Europe more than twenty-four slaves a year—an indication that higher numbers had probably been sent.
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The continuing “Old World trade” in slaves from Africa remained more important than the Atlantic one in Africans or Indians during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. It seems possible that over twelve thousand slaves may have been exported by the Portuguese in these years to Europe, and five thousand to the North Atlantic islands, such as Madeira, the Azores, and the Canaries. Portuguese coastal trading in Africa also continued: slaves taken from, say, Arguin or Benin to Elmina were exchanged for gold. The advantage was considerable: the African gold merchants still paid higher prices for slaves than they fetched in Lisbon. The stealing of captives direct from the coast of Africa by Spaniards based on the Canary Islands also went on: every year in the early sixteenth century, two or three journeys seem to have been made. In 1499, Alonso Fernández de Lugo, the Spanish captain-general of the Canary Islands, even went so far as to speak of Las Palmas as “the most important market for human beings.”28 The new Treaty of Sintra of 1509 gave over the stretch of the African coast between Cape de Aguer and Cape Bojador to Portugal which had for the previous thirty years been reserved to Spain but allowed Spaniards to continue trading there. Canary Islanders and sevillanos alike went to buy slaves from the Portuguese in the Cape Verde Islands and a few others, more intrepid, went farther south, illegally, and bought slaves in Guinea, or from the settlers of São Tomé. Alongside this, the Portuguese maintained a small export of Moorish slaves from Agadir, an Atlantic Moroccan port which they held for much of the early sixteenth century.
The Portuguese tried to meet the Spanish demands for slaves for their empire. But there were difficulties. Thus the trading post at Benin, or its port Ughoton, on the Benin River, failed to work well, for the death rate was high among the Portuguese, and the conventional trade there (in pepper, ivory beads, and muslin) did not prosper. The people of Benin had not become Christians, and the magical King Prester John remained elusive. Still, all kinds of Portuguese slave buyers, and some Genoese or Florentines—with licenses, of course—were still regularly putting into one or another of the “five rivers,” and carrying off slaves, though the three annual galleons bound for Elmina were now surpassed in importance by those of São Tomé, whose governor in the early 1500s, Fernão de Melo, arranged with Lisbon that, in return for a monopoly of buying slaves in the “slave rivers,” his island should also supply Elmina with all the slaves whom they needed. Perhaps a hundred a year would be a reasonable estimate. Usually these slaves of Benin would be paid for in copper or brass manillas: twelve to twenty-five a slave in the 1490s, fifty-seven by 1517. The metal would often be melted down and turned into something more beautiful.
The oba of Benin responded slowly to these requests, and arranged that male and female slaves should be bought in different parts of the market and, exceptionally in the history of the African slave trade, he sought to restrict the sale of males, eventually banning their export.
The island next door to São Tomé, Principe, was settled by Portugal soon after 1500. The governor there in 1515 was Antonio Carneiro, who had been secretary to the king, and who eventually won for himself Governor Melo’s monopoly of slave exports from the “five rivers” to Elmina. He probably traded a thousand slaves a year between 1515 and 1520, of whom half went to Elmina, though his rivals in São Tomé, Melo’s heirs, sought to outmaneuver him.
Carneiro abandoned his contract in 1518, and the settlers of São Tomé recovered it. By then the place had become a plantation island of its own: there were probably about five or six thousand slaves concentrated there, working on sixty or so sugar mills. But the settlers consistently failed to deliver the necessary number of slaves to Elmina, and there was a consequent falling off in deliveries of gold to Portugal—which had reached a peak of nearly six hundred kilos a year in the 1490s. So, though São Tomé was still the base for its arrangements, the Portuguese Crown began to engage directly in the trade in slaves. A royal official in São Tomé henceforward gathered slaves from all over West and Central Africa, including some from the Congo. Though he was also charged to buy camwood (a hard red wood, ideal for making the cabinets which the nouveau riche in Lisbon needed to house their new possessions), ivory, Benin cloth, muslin, and beads, his instructions show that his main concern was to find slaves (for each of whom he was not to pay more than forty manillas): the document was indeed entitled “Our Slave Trade in the Isle of São Tomé.”
Yet the king was to be as much outmaneuvered as Carneiro had been, in this case by interlopers from São Tomé.
Elmina did not, however, depend uniquely on the region of Benin for its slaves, for shipments from there were often too slow and too few. Thus, in 1518, a Portuguese wrote from that castle to Arguin asking for the delivery of forty or fifty slaves, preferably all men, and the best young ones available, for use as porters in the mines of the forests of Akan. Yet by 1535, such demands were beginning to be unnecessary, since “great caravans of blacks” would usually arrive at any port frequented by the Portuguese, “bringing gold and slaves for sale. Some of the slaves have been captured in battle, others are sent by their parents, who think they are doing their children the best service in the world by sending them to be sold in this way to other lands where there is an abundance of provisions.”29
By then, the always uneasy friendship between the king of Portugal and the oba of Benin was waning. In 1514, the oba sent two courtiers to Lisbon in order, on the one hand, to request cannon; and, at the same time, to offer to become a Christian. To finance this journey, he gave the emissaries twelve slaves to live on by selling them as and when they needed money.
After many disagreeable adventures, these men reached Lisbon. There King Manuel I of Portugal (the Fortunate) undertook to send missionaries and other clergy to Benin; “and, when we see that you have embraced the teachings of Christianity,” he said, “there will be nothing in our realm with which we will not be glad to favor you, whether it be arms, or cannon, and all other weapons of war for use against your enemies. . . . These things we are not sending you now . . . because the law of God forbids it.” Manuel also asked the oba to open his markets in order to allow trade to be carried on freely.30
Though some priests and monks did go to Benin, the negotiations came to nothing, for the oba died, being killed by his own soldiers during a war with neighbors. By then, though the slave trade from São Tomé was expanding, that from Benin was in decline: slaves reaching the former colony were coming from other parts of the African coast. High prices in Benin made those other sources more attractive; and the rigid determination of the next oba to refuse to export male slaves, except in unusual circumstances, was having an effect, since the Portuguese, their Spanish clients, and the gold miners in Elmina all wanted “prime male slaves,” not women.
The beneficiaries of the change (if the matter can be so stated) were the Congolese. In 1512, King Manuel of Portugal sent an embassy under Simão da Silva to his “brother,” the Christian King Afonso of Congo, who had succeeded to the throne after a battle with his brother in 1506—in which, it was said, Santiago miraculously appeared on his side: the first appearance of that legendary inspiration on African soil. Da Silva’s embassy was charged to bring back information, copper, ivory, and slaves—the last item being the most important.
King Afonso was a convinced but eccentric Christian and, in his capital, now rechristened São Salvador, 150 miles up the Congo, he was busy reading volumes of theology as well as Portuguese law. Afonso had given his councilors the titles of dukes, marquises, and counts; and many of them had also taken Portuguese surnames (Vasconcelos, Castro, Meneses, even Cortes). Schools were open for the teaching of both Portuguese and the Christian religion. A son of Afonso, Enrique, had also become bishop of Utica (that is, Carthage), but was permitted to live in Funchal, Madeira; the diocese i
ncluded Congo.
That appointment led Pope Leo X, in his declaration Exponi Nobis, to enable other Christian “Ethiopians” (by the word he intended to include West Africans) to become priests or monks, assuming that they exercised their functions in their own homelands. During the middle of the sixteenth century, several blacks and mulattoes availed themselves of these opportunities. All were, of course, freemen; and some were ex-slaves.
Under King Afonso’s direction, the Congolese were inspired to adopt a Western style of life, and the Portuguese set up a trading post at Mpindi, at the mouth of the river Congo, which became their main port in the region, and where they also expected to draw on the Congo’s copper. At first, Afonso was delighted by the new openings for trade. The copper under his control was of a high quality, and Afonso exported about five thousand manillas between 1506 and 1511, comparable in quality to those made by the Bavarians; many of these were used in the slave trade in the Gulf of Guinea.
This monarch also saw that he, too, could make money from the slave trade, provided that he controlled it himself; and he therefore appointed a special factor charged to supply the Portuguese, and gave him nzimbu shells with which to buy the slaves. But the Portuguese demand for these captives, after the decline of their source in Benin, soon began to seem excessive. Afonso had only a few slaves available, those being obtained in wars with the neighboring Tio state of Makoko, higher up the river Congo, near Malembo Pool. So the Congolese began to raid their neighbors, the Mbundu. Yet Portuguese demand, because of the insatiable desires of the settlers of São Tomé, and because some local Portuguese insisted on being paid their wages in slaves, still outran supply. After a while, Afonso was persuaded to abandon his royal monopoly and henceforth, as if he had been a European monarch, sought merely to tax the exports of slaves, not to control them. Other African peoples apart from the Congolese began to adapt to the new conditions of trade. Thus the Pangu a Lungu, a people who had seized a stretch of the north coast of the river Congo, were beginning to raid its south bank specifically to obtain slaves. By 1526, King Afonso was complaining that the slave dealers, whom, of course, he initially had encouraged, were leaving his realm depopulated: “There are many traders in all parts of the country. They bring ruin. . . . Every day people are kidnapped and enslaved, even members of the king’s family”31—the kidnapping being done by Congolese, not Portuguese, who only constituted the market.
