by Hugh Thomas
The plantations now established in Brazil and in the Spanish Caribbean were beginning to show all the signs of the familiar commercial enterprise of later days: a greater number of men than women; other obstacles offered to the male slaves to prevent them from founding families; excessive work, especially during harvest; harsh punishments for minor offenses; and deaths because of machinery working badly. Similar judgments could be made of conditions in the many mines opened in the sixteenth century from Mexico to Venezuela to Peru.
There seemed always to be a shortage of workers. In 1542, the town council of Mexico requested of the Crown in Madrid that, because slaves were needed in “the mines and other services,” the king “might be moved to give anyone license and general permission in order that they may bring slaves over to this New Spain, paying in its ports the almojarifazgo [port duty], without having the need to get any other license, because the existing arrangements are the source of much vexation.”12 Permission was not granted: “general permissions” without payment of taxes were not in the tradition of the Spanish Crown.
By the mid-sixteenth century, Brazil had already begun its long life as a producer of sugar for the European market. A pioneer was the first Portuguese expeditionary, Martim Afonso de Sousa, to whom King João III had allocated the captaincy of São Vicente, to the south of Rio de Janeiro. His largest interest was the Engenho (Sugar Mill) São Jorge dos Erasmos, of which he was a shareholder along with a German, Erasmo Schecter, and which was administered from the beginning by German and Flemish overseers. More important still was the northern captaincy of Pernambuco, where Duarte Coelho, the king’s captain there, reported five sugar mills in operation by 1550. One of them, Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, was the property of Coelho’s brother-in-law, Jerónimo de Albuquerque, “the Pernambucan Adam,” who had greatly helped good relations with the local Brazilians by marrying a Tobjara princess and setting up several of her relations as his mistresses.
The main labor force on these mid-sixteenth-century Brazilian plantations were still, admittedly, indigenous Brazilians: slaves certainly, but at least not as yet Africans, or at least not yet Africans on a large scale. Indian slaves were then seen by the new conquerors as essential: “If a person comes to this land and contrives to get hold of a couple of them (even if he has nothing else he can call his own) he then has an honorable [!] means of supporting his family; for one of them will fish for him, another will hunt for him, and the others will cultivate and harvest his plantings; and in this way he is at no expense for food, either for them or for his family.” Yet, by 1570, disenchantment about Indian labor had set in. The Portuguese captains sought slaves outside their captaincies. But still there were shortages; and Duarte Coelho wrote to the king in 1546 that, whereas in the past, “when the Indians were needy,” they used to come and work for practically nothing, now they wanted “beads and feather caps and colored clothing that a man could not afford to buy himself.” In the good old days, a Jesuit remembered, some tribes would sell “an [Indian] slave for a chisel.”13 But that was no longer the case in 1570.
So, little by little, in the new cities of the new empire, African slaves began to work much as they had done for a hundred years in Portugal—as servants, gardeners, cooks, seamen, and as symbols of wealth, and finally on plantations, with some of the attitudes of the Portuguese at home being emulated by colonists in dealing with the Africans.
• • •
There was still little criticism of slavery and the slave trade in these days of the High Renaissance. After all, antiquity continued to be the fashion. Michelangelo designed a monumental Dying Slave—a Slav, it would seem—now in the Louvre, but it is obvious that he worried less about the slavery than the mortality. Sir Thomas More had provided for slavery in 1516 in his Utopia. He thought it “a suitable station in life for any prisoner of war, for criminals and also for the hard-working and poverty-stricken drudge from another country.”14 More’s friend Erasmus said nothing of the matter. Machiavelli was also silent. How should it be otherwise? The cultivated and wise Pope Leo X, the greatest Renaissance head of the Church, did, it is true, remark that, with regard to the enslavement of Indians, “not only the Christian religion but nature herself cried out against a state of slavery.”15
But Leo was not talking of Africans, and there would certainly have been one or two slaves from the coast of Guinea in the Vatican in his day.
Even more explicitly concerned with the Indians was Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese). Influenced by yet another Dominican friar engaged in humanitarian matters, Fray Bernardino de Minaya, Paul, in a letter to Cardinal Juan de Tavera, archbishop of Toledo, forbade conquistadors in the New World to reduce Indians to slavery; and then, in a bull, Veritas Ipsa, he proclaimed the complete abolition of slavery, stating firmly that all slaves had the right to free themselves. Indians were to be deprived neither of their liberty nor of their property, even if they were still pagans. The penalty for disregarding these injunctions was excommunication.
The declaration disturbed the Emperor Charles, for it seemed that the pope was moving into the temporal sphere. But it is obvious that Paul’s mind was still centered on Indians in the New World, not blacks. Indeed, his subsequent bull, Sublimis Deus, of 1537 shows that he was merely trying to insist that “the Indians are true men,” even if he did make the (to the slaveowners, dangerous) concession that “all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith.”16
No serious study of slavery in antiquity was written in the sixteenth century. The first consideration of the matter seems to have been in 1613, when Lorenzo Pignoria of Padua published De Servis et Eorum Apud Veteres Ministeriis, about the urban lives of Roman slaves, a work “unsurpassed in its scope till the late nineteenth century.” But he sought to draw no modern moral.17 Pignoria would no doubt have agreed with his contemporary Giles of Rome, when he recalled, in 1607, that Aristotle had “proved” that some people are “slaves by nature and that it is appropriate for such people to be placed in subjection to others,” a view that found general support.18
Neglect of the African dimension was not reserved to the Church of Rome: when certain serfs in Swabia appealed for emancipation in 1525 on the argument that Christ had died to set men free, Luther was alarmed. He believed that the earthly kingdom could not survive unless some men were free and some were slaves.19
All the same, some concerns were expressed by Portuguese and Spanish writers in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Portuguese, the major traders in slaves, even sought to lay down conditions in which slaves were to be transported. Thus, in 1513, a decree limited the number of slaves who could be carried in a single ship (an echo of an old Genoese law). In 1519, another decree sought to govern conditions on the short journey from Africa to São Tomé. It also insisted that captains should maintain gardens on the latter island to feed slaves properly before they were embarked for the Americas. The best slaves were henceforth to be retained to work the plantations and grow the provisions of the future.
Even the Spanish Crown intervened in favor of humane treatment of slaves who, Charles V remarkably required in 1541, should be subjected to an hour every day of instruction in Christian precepts, and should work on neither Sundays nor feast days—regulations which were surprising even if they were very rarely observed.
The famous public contest at Valladolid in 1550 between Bartolomé de Las Casas, the apostle of the Indies, and the classicist Ginés de Sepúlveda, on the subject of how the Catholic faith could be preached and promulgated in the New World, was judged by a board of notables. Among these fifteen wise men was a Dominican theologian, Fray Domingo de Soto, of Segovia. De Soto was the most distinguished of the pupils of the recently deceased jurist Francisco de Vitoria, with whom he had lived for many years in the same Dominican monastery in Salamanca. A professor at Segovia as well as at Salamanca, de Soto served the Crown at the Council of Trent and is generally held, with Vitoria, to be the creator of international law. He was also a confessor of the Emp
eror Charles V.
De Soto was asked to make a résumé of the proceedings at the debate at Valladolid. That document supported Las Casas. But there was, as usual in such congresses, no discussion at all of black Africans.
A few years later, however, in 1557, de Soto published his Ten Books on Justice and Law (De Iustitia et de Iure), in which he argued that it was wrong to keep in slavery a man who had been born free, or who had been captured by fraud or violence—even if he had been fairly bought at a properly constituted market. In speaking thus, de Soto must have been thinking in terms of black or Moorish slaves, of whom there were then certainly some in Salamanca. De Soto could not have been more influential. His work was dedicated to the heir to the Spanish throne, Don Carlos. Yet his words on slavery, written clearly in the greatest Spanish university, struck few chords at the time.20
One who did listen to him, though, was Alonso de Montúfar, archbishop of Mexico, another Dominican, who wrote to King Philip II in 1560: “We do not know of any just cause why the negroes should be captives any more than the Indians, because we are told that they receive the gospel in goodwill and do not make war on Christians.” Philip does not seem to have replied.21 He had a little earlier, when still prince not king, asked a committee which included a Dominican, a Cistercian, and two Franciscans about the benefits of granting a certain banker, Hernando Ochoa, the right to carry 23,000 slaves to the Americas at 8 ducats each. The discussion did not touch on whether it was legal or illegal to treat Africans in such a way but whether such a large contract would damage other businessmen.22
At much the same time, a Portuguese captain and military writer, Fernão de Oliveira, also criticized the slave trade, in his Art of War at Sea (Arte da Guerra da Mar). His criticism is a real anticipation of the abolitionist movement, and the captain should receive due credit for such a pioneering work. He pointed out that the African monarchs who sold slaves to the Europeans usually obtained them by robbery or waging unjust wars. But no war waged specifically to make captives for the use of the slave trade could possibly be just. Oliveira denounced his countrymen for being the inventors of “such an evil trade” as the “buying and selling of peaceable freemen as one buys and sells animals,” with the spirit of a “slaughterhouse butcher.”23
Oliveira’s work was published in 1554 at Coimbra, a city where, a few years later, in 1560, yet one more Spanish Dominican, Martín de Ledesma, wrote, in his Commentaria, that all who owned slaves gained through the trickery of Portuguese traders (the lançados, for example) should free them immediately, on pain of eternal damnation. He also pointed out that Aristotle’s comments about wild men living without any order could not be held to apply to Africans, many of whom lived under regular monarchies.24
These arguments in Portugal were not quite without consequences. The Crown did try to persuade traders not to buy slaves who had been kidnapped but, on most occasions, the distinction between kidnapping and war was an indistinct one; and the traders themselves continued to maintain that, in buying slaves, they were serving the best interests of humanity.
8
The White Men Arrived in Ships with Wings
“One day the white men arrived in ships with wings, which shone in the sun like knives. They fought hard battles with the Ngola and spat fire at him. They conquered his salt-pans and the Ngola fled inland to the Lukala river. . . .”
Pende oral tradition
IT HAD BEEN AGREED between the new Christian king of Congo, Diogo I, and Portugal that the settlers on São Tomé should only trade in the former’s realm; and, as a result, ten leading Portuguese merchants (such as Fernando Jiménez, Emanuel Rodrigues, and above all Manuel Caldeira) took up the slave trade there, twelve to fifteen ships arriving every year to carry off four to seven hundred slaves each. These ships were still too few to carry the slaves available; captains overloaded, often causing revolts. The Portuguese being unable to fulfill all the details of this treaty, King Diogo of the Congo broke off relations in 1555 and expelled the seventy or so Portuguese living in his realm, even though many had by then been established there, mostly with African women, for many years. His position had been adversely affected since, in recent years, the Tio slave traders at that cosmopolitan, overcrowded spot known as Malembo Pool had been coveting European goods more than the nzimbu shells which he offered them. Thus the king’s income in European goods had declined. But, in 1567, the old relationship was restored with a new king of Congo, Álvare.
Next year, in 1568, a savage, cannibalistic, and nomadic people, the Jaggas, who originated on the southern banks of the river Kwango (which now forms part of the boundary between the states of Angola and Congo), invaded Congo, and drove Don Álvare to take refuge on Hippopotamus Island, in the Congo estuary. The Jaggas had been disrupted by the intensive slave raids of the Tio in their territory in the mid-century. In his refuge, Don Álvare’s shortage of food became so severe that he and his counselors sold slaves for bread. Some of his advisers were also constrained to sell their children as slaves to secure a day’s subsistence. The king sent some emissaries as slaves to Lisbon, and asked King Sebastian to dispatch an army to restore him, which he did; and four hundred Portuguese from São Tomé, led by Francisco de Gouveia e Sotomayor, a member of one of the most distinguished families in Portugal, re-established King Álvare in São Salvador. The use, and perhaps even more the sound, of gunfire was especially effective in this campaign.
The grateful Álvare thereupon sent to Lisbon to buy back his nobles, though a few of these, disappointingly, preferred to remain in Portugal “for the love of God.” The actions of the Jaggas long remained, meantime, a terrible warning in the minds of the Portuguese, for it had been a shock to find a monarchy which they had supported, and which they thought had become Christian, overthrown so easily by ruthless nomads. Gouveia, on the other hand, was ordered by his master in Lisbon, to build at the expense of Álvare, a fort where the king, and the Portuguese residents of Congo, could find shelter, if there were to be future attacks by the Jaggas.
The Congo as a result fell more and more under Portuguese tutelage. Álvare avoided direct vassalage but, once he had used Portuguese troops to restore his authority, they remained. For Portugal, Congo was a dependency worth having: Pacheco Pereira wrote that in that realm “they make some cloths of palms, with a surface like velvet, and some with fancy work like velvetized satin, so beautiful that there is no better work in Italy.”
There was, however, every year a greater emphasis on slavery within Congo, the only Christian monarchy of any importance in Africa, and the only one where literacy made any headway. King Álvare now used slaves as soldiers and servants, messengers and mistresses, builders and bearers, as well as workers on the land. In the short term, this strengthened the monarchy, reducing its previous reliance on chiefs and noblemen. King Álvare even felt so powerful that he could designate a son by a slave wife as his heir (but that son was in the event set aside when Álvare died in 1614, being supplanted by a half-brother, Bernardo II, who was also the son of a slave mother).
Mulatto traders were now to be found in all the most important Congo ports. Though trade between villages and between neighboring peoples had existed for generations, the coming of the Portuguese had the consequence of creating, for the first time, a long-distance commerce, in which European goods (and some American ones) were carried along new routes.
The Portuguese in São Tomé were also making friends with Angola—that is, with the ngola, the king of another Bantu state named Ndongo, composed of Mbundu people, whose small monarchy stretched from the river Dande (which runs into the sea north of what is now Luanda) to the river Coanza (the river on which Luanda would soon be built), and which had been loosely under the dominion of the kings of Congo. Ndongo had been, from the early sixteenth century, a minor source for slaves for the Congo in raiding expeditions. By the terms of the Congolese-Portuguese treaty, these slaves could only be traded through the Congo port of Mpinda but, more and more, Portuguese inter
lopers would obtain these slaves directly, at the mouth of the Coanza, just to the north of the Luanda islands; for the traders of São Tomé found the arrangements at Mpinda unsatisfactory, for they could never obtain enough slaves there.
As early as the 1550s, there had been some rivalry between the kings of Congo and Ndongo as to who should be the main suppliers of slaves to the Portuguese; and, though Portugal was obliged formally to support Congo, her interests were becoming more and more concerned with Ndongo.
In 1559, Paulo Dias de Novães, a grandson of Bartolomeu Dias, the explorer of the Cape of Good Hope, left Lisbon with three ships, accompanied by two Jesuits and two lay brothers. He made for the island of Luanda in the estuary of the Coanza and dispatched a cousin, Luis Dias, with the Jesuits up the river itself to Pungo-Andungo, the then capital of Ndongo. There the Portuguese explained that their king wanted the new monarch, Ndambi, to convert to Christianity, as had occurred in Congo. Ndambi was cautious, and the negotiations on the matter were long-drawn-out. One of the Jesuits died, along with others among the explorers. So Paulo Dias, on the coast, lost patience and set out himself, with a small expedition. Having traveled 120 miles by river, and then perhaps 50 miles on land, he reached the capital. Ndambi thereupon imprisoned Dias and several colleagues, including Frei Gouveia, seized such European goods as he could find, and dispersed or killed other Europeans.
Frei Gouveia, a kinsman of the first proconsul of Angola, died in captivity, though not without sending an important letter to his superior, in which he insisted that the only way seriously to convert heathen people was to conquer them.1 Paulo Dias was released after six years. In 1575, he returned to Angola—with a permit from the king of Portugal at least, if not from the ngola—to colonize. The terms of his contract gave him vast powers. He seems to have been convinced that, with so many slaves available, the Portuguese in Angola would be able to build a civilization comparable to that of Rome in the Mediterranean. As a first step on this notable enterprise, Dias set about building what became São Paulo de Loanda, the first Portuguese fortified town in West Africa south of Elmina, at the mouth of the Coanza, first on the island of Luanda, then on the mainland, near what is now the fortress of São Miguel.
