by Hugh Thomas
A new ngola, Quiloanage, understandably took exception to these encroachments, though his capital was the local capital of the slave trade for many Portuguese buyers, and though the island of Luanda was not actually his, since it had been looked on as belonging to the king of Congo. After years of diplomatic maneuvering, during which the slave trade to São Tomé and to Brazil flourished as never before, the ngola was convinced by several local Portuguese traders, who distrusted Dias, that that proconsul planned to overthrow him. The ngola thereupon killed his Christian slaves and thirty Portuguese. The result was war. After further setbacks, in a long campaign beginning in 1580, the Portuguese, with 350 Europeans “mostly rogues and cobblers,” according to one chronicler, and many African mercenaries (including slave bowmen and slave lancers), using terrorism as much as open war, eventually defeated the ngola, and established their colony on the coast firmly. But, by then, Dias was dead and many of his countrymen had also died, more of disease than in battle, as usually was the case in tropical wars. In the interior, the ngola glowered in temporary impotence, though relatively easy to restrain.
Luanda soon became the headquarters for all Portuguese operations south of Nigeria. By 1590, three hundred Portuguese were settled there. The colony attracted merchants from Portugal, especially those who, like some converted Jews, had been unable to secure opportunities in Portugal itself. The Crown sought to control such immigration but, in the long run, it was quite unable to do so.
With this good base at Luanda, a lovely port, and with relative peace established with both the king of Congo and the ngola, there was nothing to prevent the slave trade from prospering, and it soon became the economic mainstay of Angola as well as of Congo. The best historian of Portuguese-African race relations, C. L. R. Boxer, saw the slave trade as a reason, along with the high incidence of malaria, why a responsible Portuguese colony was not founded in Angola in the sixteenth century. Yet one of the main purposes of this entity was precisely to undertake a slave trade to Brazil.
Already in 1576, Frei Garcia Simões, S.J., had written: “Here one finds all the slaves which one might want and they cost practically nothing. With the exception of the leaders, almost all the natives here either are born in slavery or are reduced to that condition without the least pretext. . . . After his victories the king gives entire villages over to his subalterns, with the right either to kill or to sell all the inhabitants.”2 For the tail of an elephant, it was even said, one could buy three slaves. An English prisoner, Andrew Battel (in Angola from 1589 to 1603), described seeing thousands of slaves in Portuguese hands.3 Between 1575 and 1592, over fifty thousand may have been taken from Angola. In 1578, Duarte Lopes visited Luanda, and remarked that there was “a greater Trafficke and Market for slaves that are brought out of Angola than in any place else. For there are yearly brought by the Portuguese above five thousand head of Negroes, which they afterwards conveigh away with them, and so sell them to divers parts of the world.”4 Thomas Turner, an English captain, reported: “Out of Angola is said to be yearly shipped 28,000 slaves and there was a rebellion of slaves against their masters, 10,000 making a head and barricading themselves but by the Portugals and Indians chased and one or two thousand reduced. One thousand belonged to one man who is said to have ten thousand slaves, eighteen sugar mills etc. his name is John de Paüs . . . and here prospering to this incredibilitie of wealth. . . .”5 In 1591, one official assured the Crown that Luanda could expect to supply slaves to Brazil “until the end of the world.”6
The Portuguese Crown naturally maintained a financial interest in all these undertakings. The African coast had been divided into several zones of exploitation. In these, the collection of royal taxes or duties was farmed out to individuals, who in turn made arrangements with the traders and collected the dues concerned, in return for licenses.
The Portuguese influence on Africa had, of course, positive sides. By then, they had introduced into Congo and Angola not only—at a certain superficial level, to be sure—Christianity, but many European techniques, and several important European or West Indian crops—rice, oranges, coconuts, onions, and above all manioc (cassava). The last-named crop would inspire a veritable agricultural revolution in the seventeenth century, enabling the population to grow to previously unattainable levels, therefore indirectly no doubt making available more candidates for the Atlantic trade. Another American transplant was maize, which had similar consequences a little later.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt whatever that the main impact of the Portuguese in this part of Central Africa was the encouragement of the commerce in slaves. Though these things meant that São Tomé and Portugal itself (and the Spanish empire) could continue to be well supplied with the workers they coveted, the real beneficiary was Brazil.
• • •
In 1570, the Brazilian black population was only two or three thousand. Most slaves were still Indians. But these indigenous captives were becoming less easy to acquire because of the diseases brought by the Portuguese (the epidemic of dysentery, combined with influenza, of the 1560s was as destructive in Brazil as the smallpox had been in 1520 in Mexico and the Caribbean). It is true that Indians still accounted for two-thirds of Pernambuco’s labor force on sugar plantations in the 1580s. But these Indians were poor workers, for they were quite “unused to such continuous and back-breaking toil. In addition to the diseases which these inferior races always acquire upon contact with the whites, the ill treatment which they received was a cause of illness and death, notwithstanding the laws against it which were continuously promulgated.”7 The “expenditure in human life here in Bahia in these past twenty years,” wrote a Jesuit in 1583, “is a thing that is hard to believe; for no one could believe that so great a supply could ever be exhausted, much less in so short a time.”8 But, from this time, because of the Angolan connection, blacks, above all to work on the new sugar plantations, were every day more available.
Between forty and fifty thousand African slaves, nearly all from Congo or Angola, seem to have reached Brazil between 1576 and 1591. The population of black slaves in 1600 was probably about fifteen thousand, mostly in sugar mills, whose laborers were by then 70 percent black—though, ten years later, in 1610, a Frenchman named François Pyrard de Laval visited Bahia and estimated that, though the administrative region round that city boasted two thousand whites, and three or four thousand black slaves, there were another seven thousand black or Indian slaves on the sugar estates. But Indians were certainly playing less and less of a part in the plantations. In 1573, there had been an understanding among the Jesuits, the governor of Brazil and Maranhão, and the auditor-general. The enslavement of an Indian would only be possible if the person concerned were to be captured in a just war, or if he had fled from his village and had remained absent for over a year. Although the arrangement was not adhered to, its existence increased the need for black slaves. Later, it was laid down that a just war was one which was so declared by the king. In fact, the Crown and the settlers continued to quarrel over the issue of Indian slaves for many years more—the monarch taking a moral position, and insisting eloquently that enslavement damaged the chance of converting slaves to Christianity while the settlers argued that, in capturing Indians, they were saving them from becoming cannibals.
The discrepancy between the figures for the population of slaves and for their import shows the position in all its brutality: slaves were expected to die after ten years or so and, therefore, on any effective property, had to be replaced, from Angola or Congo. From the very beginning, it was thought essential on these sugar estates to replenish the slaves by making new purchases rather than by encouraging breeding: as a witness (the future admiral Sir George Young) in a British inquiry in 1790 put the matter, “All I ever understood was that purchasing slaves was much the cheapest method of keeping up their numbers; for . . . the mother of a bred slave was taken from the field labour for three years, which labour was of more value than the cost of a prime slave or new N
egro.”I,9
Angola or Congo and Brazil were thus more and more linked. Currents and winds intensified the relationship: ships leaving Portugal for Angola had virtually to pass by Brazil, and those leaving Angola had to sail close to Rio.
In these years, Brazil was showing herself to be São Tomé’s successor as Europe’s most important sugar supplier, just as São Tomé had succeeded Madeira, the Canaries, and the Mediterranean islands. Brazil—that is, a narrow coastal strip of it—had about 120 sugar mills by 1600 and was probably the richest European colony. She was also an international enterprise: Italian sugar equipment was to be seen, artisans from the Canary Islands and Madeira had been deliberately brought out and, as early as the 1540s, Cibaldo and Cristóvao Lins, Lisbon representatives of the Fuggers of Augsburg, were marketing as well as producing sugar. Dutch merchants often provided the ships to carry the sugar home to Europe, as well as the capital for many of the plantations. Then it was the great market of Amsterdam which sold much of the sugar—still principally considered as medically desirable, rather than as a sweetener, since tea, coffee, and chocolate, which seemed in their early days of fashionableness to need sugar for taste, had not appeared on the European scene.
However, sugar was already sometimes coveted for the pleasure it gave, especially among the rich. A German traveling in England thought that, though the queen was majestic, her teeth were unfortunately black: “a defect to which the English seem subject, from their too great use of sugar.”10
These developments in Brazil mark the beginning of the American sugar revolution. It is usually thought that that occurred in the Caribbean, in the mid-seventeenth century. But the typical sugar plantation, with its characteristically male population, its slaves who were expected to die so young and who remained more African than American in their ways, was developed in Brazil three generations earlier.
As has been mentioned, sugar had already been known in the Caribbean earlier in the century. But in the haciendas of Hispaniola and Cuba, as in Mexico, that crop was grown alongside others, with cattle and tobacco. The modern sugar estate, producing nothing but sugar, for export and on a large scale, was an invention of Brazil.
Sugar is not a complicated crop: all that is necessary is fertile and well-irrigated land, and the digging with hoes of shallow holes in which a few pieces of stalk from mature sugar canes can be placed. The holes are covered with earth and, within about fifteen months, the new cane is ready for harvest. In Brazil, the cane would then be cut by slaves with machetes (that was the heavy work) and carried by ox cart to mills driven either by water, oxen, mules, horses, or wind. These would grind the juice out of the cane. That juice would be boiled, skimmed, and cooled. The brown crystals of the rough sugar would be separated from the viscous parts, molasses, which could be used to make rum or second-rate sugar. The good sugar would be held for a time in countinghouses before being placed in hogsheads, carried down to the nearest port or river and put on ships. The crushed stalks of the cane could, meantime, be used as fuel. A little over a year later, a second harvest, from the stumps of the old canes, could be reaped; and, although the cane produced would be less good than it was at the first harvest, the process could be repeated three or four times.
Occasionally the raw sugar was refined in the tropics, but usually that was done in Europe. The division of function had nothing to do with climate nor with labor: the home countries were determined to prevent colonial manufacturing.
The ideal sugar plantation seemed to be about 750 acres, certainly not less than 300 acres. The enterprise was best carried out with, say, 120 slaves, 40 oxen, and a great house in the center, surrounded by the specialist buildings and slaves’ quarters. On such properties, slavery, black African slavery, appeared the best kind of labor. In the late eighteenth century, a British inquiry into the sugar industry would explain that “to cultivate annually 100 acres of cane requires 150 working negroes at least in the field.”11 White laborers were less amenable than Africans, less strong, and were considered less suitable for tropical conditions: “It is plain to demonstration that hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes,” George Whitfield, the Calvinistic Methodist, would stiffly write in the eighteenth century.12 In 1848, a British planter, M. J. Higgins, a sugar merchant, would tell another British inquiry, of the House of Commons, that “the labour which I have seen exacted from the slaves in Cuba [for which read “Brazil” anytime after 1570] would have been quite fatal to Europeans if that amount of labour had been exacted from them in that climate.”13
These were widely held views, but they were myths: many white men have worked hard in heat, even in cane fields, in the South of the United States and Queensland, as well as in Puerto Rico, Barbados, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. In the eighteenth century, the same British report already quoted about the working of the sugar industry asked, “Would it be possible to cultivate to advantage the West Indian islands by the labour of Europeans or free negroes?” The reply was: “It would be possible to cultivate cane by negroes gradually rendered free and when taught the experience of being paid in money . . . and Europeans, inured to the common labour of digging and carrying burdens, whose pride was not to be excited and inflated by a condition of men legally unprotected and too much below them, might also cultivate these lands very well, especially [but] for cotton, the labour of which bears no comparison with that required for canes. . . .”14
In late-sixteenth-century Brazil, neither white slaves nor white laborers were easily available, even if a few Slavs or Turkish slaves might have been still found in the Mediterranean. Slaves from China, India, or elsewhere in the East were in theory an alternative, for the Portuguese could have brought them from their Asian outposts, but they would have been expensive to ship, and neither the trade nor the men were fully tried out. For the silver mines at Potosí in Peru, the idea was once suggested of recruiting “Chinese, Japanese, and Javanese, who come from the isles of the Philippines,” and who, it was said, were “a people more domesticated than the blacks, and very suitable for any kind of work.” In New Spain (Mexico), the scarcity of slaves from Africa did for a time lead colonists to use the Philippines as a source for a few workers: the Manila galleons which made their regular journeys across the Pacific from Manila to Acapulco after 1565 rarely failed to bring one or two slaves. But planters in Brazil were not interested: they were finding black slaves both hardworking and resilient, in every way adequate. Their value was reflected in relative costs: twenty-five dollars per African slave in 1572, only nine dollars per Indian.
Blacks were also reliable in skilled positions of authority on the estates, for many Africans had experience of agriculture, even of dealing with cattle. There was another side to the matter. The harvesting of sugar cane was laborious and repetitive. The typical Indian of the Brazilian forest had been used to hunting and fishing, as well as fighting. A semi-nomad, he had left the modest cultivation carried out (of manioc, above all, but also of tobacco, maize, and yams) to women. He served the Portuguese well as a soldier, but the Africans, with their remarkable reserves of toughness and good humor, were far more effective in the cane fields; and so they would remain for the next three centuries; while African women made good cooks, nurses, mistresses, and wet nurses.
Anyone black in a strange country, obvious by his features as well as his color, often ignorant of the language of the Portuguese, could also be easily kept isolated.
The region of Brazil which acted as the host for these important changes was the northeast, the two northern captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia. The latter was the capital of the colony from 1549, the most important port, and a growing center for sugar: the Recôncavo, a beautiful strip of land about sixty miles long and thirty wide behind the Bay of All Saints, was the most sought-after district for the mills. There the most energetic of sixteenth-century governors, Tomé de Sousa, built a sugar mill for the Crown. The most successful undertaking, however, was probably the Engenho Sergipe, set up by the most effective of
Sousa’s successors, Mem de Sá, on the north shore of the bay. In 1601, the Jesuits built their first sugar mill nearby, and other religious orders followed.
Here began that curious society summed up in Brazil by the word bagaceira, or “a life built round cane waste,” so brilliantly described in Gilberto Freyre’s Great House and Slave Quarters, with “the Great House” built of mud and lime, covered by straw or tiles, with verandas on the sides, sloping roofs to give protection against tropical rains and sun, at once “a fortress, a bank, a cemetery, a hospital, a school and a house of charity,” all protected, at least in the sixteenth century, by a palisade against savage Indians.15
The men and women who created this first great sugar boom in the world lived well. Many stories are told of the opulence of the planters in old Brazil, their tables laden with silver and fine china bought from captains on their way back from the East, doors with gold locks, women wearing huge precious stones, musicians enlivening the banquets, beds covered with damask; and an army of slaves of many colors always hovering. These fortunes rested on sugar, and sugar on African slavery, but it was no less real for all that.
A few of these first sugar mills of Brazil were owned by converted Jews. Let us not exaggerate: of about forty mills in the region of Bahia whose owners can be identified in 1590, twelve were apparently New Christians. Yet the Inquisition thought that, in 1618, twenty out of thirty-four mills were so owned. Some of these individuals were probably still practicing Jews: the Holy Office discovered a synagogue on a plantation on the river Matoim, no distance from Bahia, in the 1590s. But they were adept at finding what they wanted to find: much more important, these conversos stayed in touch with their equivalents elsewhere, in Amsterdam, especially, and in Brazil itself; the most famous of them all, Diogo Lopes, the so-called count-duke of Brazil, remained most influential despite countless denunciations by the Inquisition.
