by Hugh Thomas
Eventually, this problem was resolved by the establishment of regular slave markets near Malembo Pool. The Tio people who were there, having, to begin with, constituted the slaves for Afonso, soon controlled this commerce, drawing captives from the far interior and selling them to Portuguese or, in the next generation, to their mulatto agents, the so-called pombeiros, men who went deep into the interior and constructed a quite new pattern of commerce.
These arrangements suited all parties concerned. The Tio received payment for their services in nzimbu shells, which the Portuguese bought from Afonso. That king imposed his tax on the trade at Mbanza Kongo (São Salvador), through which all caravans of slaves had to pass. The increasing abundance of slaves in the market also reduced the inclination of Portuguese traders to kidnap Congolese subjects. By 1540, Afonso was boasting to the king of Portugal: “Put all the Guinea countries on one side and only Congo on the other, and you will find that Congo renders more than all the others put together. . . . No king in all these parts esteems Portuguese goods as much as we do. We favor the trade, sustain it, open markets, roads, and markets where the pieces are traded.” (The word “pieces” signified “pieces of Indies”: “prime” male slaves, with no faults.)
There had been a slave trade to Congo, and slaves in the kingdom, before the Portuguese arrived. But the Portuguese market transformed matters and caused an upheaval in the interior of Africa.
Perhaps twenty-five thousand slaves were carried to São Tomé between 1500 and 1525: say seventeen hundred a year.32 Many were thereafter sent on to Portugal, and some on to the Spanish Caribbean and this traffic probably exceeded that from the Senegambia and Cape Verde region by 1525. In 1530, about four to five thousand slaves were being exported every year from Congo and, if there were no more, that was because there were too few ships to carry them. In 1520, a Portuguese pilot visited São Tomé and found there planters owning as many as three hundred slaves each. These were obliged to work the whole week, he reported, save for Sundays and holy days, “when they work on their own plots—growing millet, yams, or sweet potatoes, also many vegetables. They drink either water or palm wine or sometimes goats’ milk. They just have a small piece of cotton cloth which they wrap round themselves.” It seems that, on those days of “rest,” the slaves were obliged to grow what they needed to maintain themselves (including clothing) for the rest of the week. Carmelite monks protested at these conditions in the 1580s, but to little avail. There was one way in which life at São Tomé seemed benign, however: these slaves were not required to live in barracks, as would so often be the case in the New World; they could live with their wives in houses which they had built themselves.
Everything conspired to ensure prosperity in São Tomé. Slave captains from Portugal were, in the mid-sixteenth century, obliged to leave a proportion of their cargo on the island as a tax—unless they were going to Brazil, in which case they merely paid a tax in cash. But few as yet did: the first Brazil-bound African slaves were taken from the Cape Verde Islands, an easy stop on the way to South America, as well as to India.
The Portuguese converso merchant who had brought slaves back from Brazil with Marchionni, Fernão de Loronha, now had obtained the monopoly of supplying slaves and wine to Elmina, as well of the trade from the same rivers in the Bight of Benin which Marchionni had once owned, and he also controlled the pepper trade from both Brazil and Guinea.
Loronha was able to extend his monopoly for several years, but there were soon others associated with him, such as José Rodrigues Mascarenhas, also a converso, who held a monopoly of slaves from the river Gambia from 1500 onwards, and was succeeded by his son António. King Manuel I approved of converted Jews and afforded them benefits wherever he could.
Despite the developments in the Congo, Elmina remained the keystone of Portuguese activities in Africa. There was now a town beneath its walls: inhabited by half-Europeanized Africans, “the Mina blacks,” it became a self-governing republic at the disposal of the Portuguese governors. Those officials included three remarkable men in the 1520s: Duarte Pacheco Pereira, later author of a famous chronicle about the Portuguese empire, Principio do Esmeraldo “de situ orbis”; Braz Albuquerque, illegitimate son of the architect of Portuguese dominion in the East, who used his ample leisure in Elmina to edit his father’s commentaries; and also João de Barros, who wrote his histories there, gaining for himself the designation “the Portuguese Livy.” All of them traded slaves as well as gold, and grew rich on them. Daily they heard a mass for the soul of Henry the Navigator, and sought to use Saint Francis as the motor of conversion of Africa: a picture of him, painted with white lead, was said to have mysteriously turned black when it reached Elmina.
East Africa should not be forgotten. As a part of the remarkable Portuguese thalassocracy stretching to the Far East, Sofala (Beira), a hundred miles south of the mouth of the Zambezi, was already an important Portuguese trading post in the early sixteenth century. The Zambezi in those days seemed to the Portuguese to be an artery of wealth, perhaps running up to Ophir (the Faro Mountain), believed to be governed by a legendary monarch, held to live at what is now Harare. In 1507, the Portuguese established themselves even more substantially on Mozambique Island, a malaria-ridden spot which served, all the same, as the main stopping place between Lisbon and Goa. Later, Lourenço Marques and Antonio Caldeira, after having made their fortunes in São Tomé, founded an ivory trade in the region of the Bay of Delagoa, a preparation for a substantial slave commerce to Brazil and elsewhere in America.
The continuing popularity of slaves of all colors was one of the obvious characteristics of those days in both Portugal and Spain, above all in Lisbon and in Seville. In Lisbon, King Manuel I, for example, had incorporated many slave provisions in his Ordenaçoes Afonsinas, a revision of the Portuguese code, in contrast with his uncle King Afonso V’s code of 1446, which had little to say of the matter. Black slaves were still plainly preferred by the Portuguese to Muslim ones, on the ground that they were less likely to rebel or run away. In Seville, Vespucci when he died had five slaves in his household, of whom two were African, one Canary Island, and two mixed Spanish and Canary (the two last may have been Amerigo’s bastards). One indication of the popularity of slaves is that the painter of The Virgin of the Sailors (La Virgen de los Navegantes), Alejo Fernández, thanks to his good husbandry, was able to endow his sons grandly—he had his own house, with black and Indian slaves as well as servants.33 Nor were all the slaves black: a “white slave,” Juana de Málaga, evidently a Moor, was sold to Diego Velázquez, the first governor of Cuba, in 1516, though it is unclear whether she was packed off to Santiago, the capital at that time of Cuba, or whether she remained waiting for her master in Seville. In 1514–22, the baptismal books in Sanlúcar de Barrameda show that 420 slaves were baptized at the parochial church, Our Lady of the O.IV Two hundred and twenty of these were Africans, six (Caribbean) Indians, three Canary Islanders, and the rest “blancos”: that is, Moors. Possession of slaves in Sanlúcar, as in Seville, was not a privilege: blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors, and most town councilors enjoyed the use of slaves and, only a few years before (in 1496), the lord of the place, the duke of Medina Sidonia, had had as many as fifty-two Canary slaves: the Medina Sidonias had for a time owned three of the Canary Islands. Many of these were domestic slaves; but some of them were employed to carry wheat and other supplies to the ships bound for the Americas.34
Nor were Portugal and Spain alone as slave countries: the institution was still flourishing in Italy and in Provence, where Marseilles held a large slave market.
• • •
So it was that the old institution of slavery was revived in the New World. The Renaissance in Europe had no humanitarian pretensions. Its “hard, gemlike flame” reburnished the ideas and practices of antiquity, the institution of slavery among them. It was entirely logical that the discovery of the New World should be attended by a rebirth of the idea of forced labor. A Flemish diplomat, Ogier-Ghislaine de
Busbecq, en route for Constantinople, in the mid-sixteenth century, even regretted the shortage of slaves in his day: “We can never achieve the magnificence of the works of antiquity,” he sighed, “and the reason is that we lack the necessary hands, that is, slaves.” He also went on to deplore the absence of “the means of acquiring knowledge of every kind which was supplied to the ancients by learned and educated slaves.”35 The Spanish historian and statesman of the nineteenth century Cánovas, however, wrote: “The idea of servitude, so opposed to Christianity, was thus fortified amongst us and, with it as its sister and comrade, the justification of tyranny entered into all spirits. . . . From philosophy, the nation, far from receiving doctrines of progress and sentiments of humanity, gathered nothing more than the resignation of stoics . . . and a greater sum of intolerance.”36 Almost the only adverse comment to be found in the first years of the sixteenth century about the lavish renewal of slavery then under way was that of another Fleming, Clenard, who went to Portugal as tutor to a sixteenth-century Prince Henry, that slavery made the masters idle; a fact which, in his opinion, explained “the pompous radish-eaters” who “paraded indolently in the streets of Lisbon, accompanied by an army of slaves whom they could not afford.”37
* * *
ITorres was a brother of Pedro de Torres, cupbearer to Prince Juan, and son of Juan Velázquez, cupbearer to the king: one of the many prominent members of the Velázquez family active at the Court of Spain. Another was Diego Velázquez, first governor of Cuba.
IIIn addition to the signatures indicated in the text, there is in the note following the Yo el Rey; “Señaladas [signed by] de Obispo y de Don García de Padilla . . .” The obispo (bishop) must be Fonseca, and in similar documents that is made explicit.
IIIIt seems probable that this three-roller mill was invented by Pietro Speciale in Sicily.
IVThe designation apparently derives from the exclamation of surprise of the Virgin when the angel announced to her that she was to bear the baby Jesus.
7
For the Love of God, Give Us a Pair of Slave Women
“For the love of the Lord God, give us a pair of slave women as alms, because we are spending the pittance we have entirely on hired girls.”
An abbess to the queen of Portugal, sixteenth century
THE TRANSACTIONS of the Portuguese on the periphery of West Africa in the early sixteenth century must be considered in continental perspective. As yet, the traffic in African slaves to Europe, or the Indies, was small in comparison with the ever-flourishing trade across the Sahara. In 1519, while Charles V was granting his slaving license to 4,000 slaves to his friend Gorrevod, the great emperor of the Songhai on the Middle Niger was offering a gift of 1,700 slaves to Cherif Ahmed Es-Segli, when he established himself at Gao, on a higher bend of that river. Most of the black slaves bought in Sicily in the sixteenth century were Bornus, from what is now Nigeria, who had been carried to North Africa across the Sahara. Only at the end of the sixteenth century did the trans-Saharan traffic decline, as merchants and monarchs alike began to succumb to Atlantic temptations.
All the same, in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, about 40,000 slaves were probably shipped from Africa to the Americas or to Europe and to the Atlantic islands, perhaps 1,800 a year; between 1550 and 1575, the figure may have reached 60,000, or nearly 2,500 a year.
The Old World was still the largest importer of these African slaves until about 1550—that is, if the island of São Tomé, which received about 18,000 slaves between 1525 and 1550, is included. Five thousand went to the North Atlantic islands and 7,500 to Europe. Probably a mere 12,500 went to Spanish America and a trickle only to Brazil. But many of the São Tomé slaves were eventually taken to the New World; and, after 1550, the first market in the Atlantic slave trade was undoubtedly Spanish America—an empire which, between 1550 and 1575, probably received twice what it took in the previous quarter-century, or 25,000. São Tomé, then still enjoying a sugar boom, perhaps once more took 18,000, but again many of those were shipped onwards; for it was then that Brazil began to be seriously interested. That last territory perhaps received as many as 10,000 slaves in the third quarter of the century: sugar cane had begun to be planted there on a large scale.
Europe, with a purchase of probably no more than 2,500 over the twenty-five years after 1550, and the Atlantic islands, also with 2,500 or so, were then falling back. A few Moorish slaves continued to be taken to the New World in the mid-sixteenth century, but the Crown did what it could to prevent it, on the ground as usual that as Muslims they would be intractable.1
Every encouragement, meantime, was given by the Spanish Crown to those who wanted to carry slaves to the New World. In 1531, a decree in Castile permitted loans on easy terms to settlers there who wanted to buy slaves in order to found sugar mills.
The Portuguese were responsible for most of these shipments from Africa, the work being carried out by a series of enterprising merchants, in the tradition of Marchionni or Foronha, who regularly obtained licenses for trading.
During this era of the High Renaissance in Europe, the pattern for the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade was set. First, the initial bartering—or still, in a few cases, kidnapping—of slaves was the work of Portuguese captains, in the estuaries of one or another of the rivers of the West African coast. These men, in ships of about one hundred tons, would carry their slave cargoes, along with gold and other goods, to some important entrepôt of the Portuguese African enterprise: São Tomé; Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands; or, now less and less important, Elmina. All those colonies were well established, their nursery gardens had expanded to include shrubs and fruit trees from the East as well as the West: yams, oranges, tamarinds, coconuts, and bananas from the first; pineapples, sweet potatoes, groundnuts, papayas, and above all maize (which took some time to become popular) from the second; the modern staple food of Africa, cassava or manioc, came later, from Brazil. Despite the regulations against them, the half-Portuguese, half-African lançados, who remained on the upper Guinea and Senegambian coasts, increased in wealth and numbers and, in the end, received a grudging if informal acceptance from the Crown. The Church approved, since their existence seemed to make possible the conversion of Africa. The lançados (some were of Spanish, Greek, or even Indian origin) were still the only foreigners to be settled permanently in Africa.
Many slaves in those days had a roundabout journey to the Americas. Thus some who were first quartered at São Tomé or Elmina might eventually be transferred to Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands. There they might be sold to other merchants, including Spanish ones, especially from the Canary Islands. They might then go to Lisbon or to Seville, to Madeira or the Azores; or they might be carried directly across the Atlantic on Portuguese or, possibly, Spanish ships to the important ports of the empire; either to Cartagena, in what is now Colombia, or Portobelo in Panama, for shipment south to Peru, or to Santo Domingo, Havana in Cuba, or Veracruz in Mexico. By the end of the sixteenth centujry, the direct route from across the Atlantic from São Tomé to Brazil or, even more adventurously, to Buenos Aires, a small new Spanish settlement on the river Plate was the rule. The sugar kings of late-sixteenth-century Brazil were beginning to send directly across the South Atlantic to obtain what they wanted from the region of the Congo. Some of those last planters would club together to send a little fleet of, say, six ships across the South Atlantic. Such ventures enabled the people concerned to procure slaves at a lower price than if they bought them direct from merchants in Brazil.
Some slaves were also carried to the Americas in these years from East Africa, where the fatally romantic King Sebastian of Portugal was dreaming of founding an African empire comparable to the Spanish dominions of New Spain and Peru.
The monarchy of Benin had ceased to be the main provider of slaves. After 1553, the royal factor in São Tomé prohibited all Portuguese trade with the place. A few Portuguese captains did continue to slip up the river Benin for illegal trade
but, more important, on the next-door river Forcados, the merchants in still-prosperous São Tomé had made friends with a new polity, the monarchy of Ode Itsekiri, whose leaders became at the same time enthusiastic Christians and ardent slave traders.
Captains from Portugal not only carried most of the slaves from Africa north to the Cape Verde Islands, to São Tomé, or to Europe, but they took most Spanish slaves across the Atlantic, and often sold them in Cartagena or Veracruz. Portuguese traders were, too, to be found in viceregal Peru. Most sales involved one or two slaves, with a maximum of ten to twenty, yet, all the same, the overall numbers rose steadily.
An indication of the geographical origin of slaves in Spanish America is to be seen in an inventory of the possessions of Hernán Cortés in 1547. Cortés owned 169 indigenous Mexican slaves; he also left sixty-eight black slaves from a wide variety of places: Gelofe (Wolof, in Senegambia), Mandingo (Malinke, in the Gambia Valley), Bran (Bram, in Guinea-Bissau), Biafra, and even Mozambique. Many of these were negros ladinos: that is, they were Spanish-speaking and had either been born in Spain or had spent some time there. Fifty-six of these slaves worked at Cortés’s experimental sugar mill at Oaxaca in southern Mexico. It is in some ways surprising that there were not more black slaves on that estate, for, in 1542, Cortés had contracted in Valladolid with the Genoese, Leonardo Lomellino, to import five hundred black slaves, a third women, from the Cape Verde Islands at seventy-six ducats each. Perhaps, though, one of Cortés’s agents sold the surplus in the Mexico market.
