The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  These slaves were treated with at least as much brutality as the African slaves were by Europeans: Atkins described how a Frenchman, “catched in the creeks of the river, with hopes to have escaped over in the night time,” was “found by his patron, [who] first cut off his ears, then slit his nose, after that beat him with ropes till all his body which was not covered with gore was black with stripes, and lastly drove him naked, thus disfigured, through the streets, for an example and a warning to other slaves not to try and escape. In the end, they threw him into a dungeon with a little straw under him, loaden with irons.” A Breton sailor caught trying to escape not only had his ears cut off, but was forced to eat them. Eight hundred English captives were held as slaves at Salé in 1625, over fifteen hundred in 1626.23 It will be recalled that Defoe caused Robinson Crusoe to be a slave here for two years in the 1650s. He escaped to become, however, a would-be slave trader in Brazil.

  * * *

  IPhilip II became king of Portugal in 1580, since the main line of monarchs in Lisbon had died out. Philip had a good claim to the throne through his mother. The crowns, though not the laws, of the two countries remained united till 1640.

  IISee page 23.

  IIIA new colony had been founded by the Portuguese at Benguela, with an ex-governor of the first city, Manuel Cerveira Pereira, in command. The venture was not solely concerned with the possibility of trading slaves, but it was probably uppermost in the mind of the new conquistador.

  IVSee page 148.

  VRich had been one of the performers in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Beauty, and went on to write one of the most sycophantic letters ever penned, to Oliver Cromwell: “Others’ goodness is their own; yours is a whole country’s.”

  VIIn Luanda, another converso, Gaspar de Robles, for a long time dominated the trade in the early seventeenth century. He went to New Spain, where the Inquisition seized him, as they had done Manuel Álvarez Prieto in Cartagena.

  VIIThey were held in a dungeon, known by the term matamoros, a Hispanicization of the local word matamoura, grain silo (which served as a prison), but also, ironically, the Spanish for “killer of Moors.” They narrowly escaped being made eunuchs to “wait upon the king’s concubines in their chamber.”

  10

  The Black Slave Is the Basis of the Hacienda

  THE REVERSES in Brazil and Angola were not the only ones suffered by the joint Spanish-Portuguese Crown in these years. In 1640, both Catalonia and Portugal rebelled. After many battles, the Catalans were reabsorbed by Spain, leaving behind a train of resentment which has never disappeared. The Portuguese, on the other hand, escaped into self-assertive independence under the rule of the Braganza kings. These events brought an end to the imperial Spanish Crown’s collaboration with the Portuguese merchants in the slave trade to their empire. Had it not been for the revolution, the old asentista Cristóbal Méndez de Sosa would probably have gained anew the rights which had expired. Instead, he and others like him removed to Lisbon. There was for the time being no new asiento. The Spanish slave trade remained suppressed for ten years.

  These events seemed to promise catastrophe. José de los Ríos, procurator-general of Lima, wrote in 1646: “The shortage of blacks threatens the total ruin of the entire kingdom, for the black slave is the basis of the hacienda and the source of all wealth which this realm produces.”1 Without African labor, he went on mournfully, all economic activity would collapse: market gardens, cornfields, vineyards, sugar mills, mines. For the agriculture of the region of Lima was then heavily dependent on African workers; the vineyards of the valleys of Pizco and Ica employed thirty thousand slaves, and the owners constantly needed them replenished. Similar complaints were made by owners of silver mines in New Granada and in New Spain. Everyone in the Americas remembered how the great protective fortresses of the Spanish empire had been largely the work of black African labor: San Juan de Ulloa, Havana, Cartagena—a hundred or two hundred slaves had made all the difference to the defense of the empire.

  An illegal trade in slaves did flourish, so much so that some less important parts of the Spanish empire, such as Buenos Aires, remembered that “it was when the metropolis ceased to send them that the colonies were best supplied with slaves.”2 But old hands, in rose-colored haciendas, in Lima or Mexico, in Cartagena de Indias or in Jamaica (still Spanish for a few more years), or pearl merchants in Margarita, looked back with nostalgia to the old days, when the empire was regularly served by the great Portuguese converso merchants.I The last few years had been unsatisfactory in many ways. There had never been enough slaves, but what was to come would surely be worse. For, in these years, the interlopers were mostly heretic Dutch.

  The Dutch presence was the paramount one in both Africa and the Caribbean in the 1640s. They were in these heady years the dominant world power, Portugal’s successor on both sides of the Atlantic, with innumerable possessions in the East too. Their painters at home, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, were at the summit of their powers; and distinguished artists also traveled to Brazil to depict the Dutch triumph there.

  In Africa, Elmina, once the magnet of Portuguese power in the Gulf of Guinea, remained with the Dutch at the temporary peace of 1640. They reinforced the place, building nearby Fort Conradsburg, and they soon had a chain of such castles on the Gold Coast. Their sale of slaves increased by leaps and bounds. Whereas, between 1636 and 1640, the average number of slaves sold in Pernambuco varied between 1,000 and 1,800, the five years 1641 to 1645 saw the figures change thus: 1,188, 14,337, 2,312, 3,948, 5,565, and then back to 2,589. “Without Negroes and oxen nothing can be expected from Pernambuco,” the Heeren XIX, the supreme authority of the West India Company, were told in 1640;3 and, in 1648, Frei Antônio Vieira, himself grandson of a black woman, and the greatest defender and friend of the indigenous Indians, would write: “Without blacks there is no Pernambuco and, without Angola, there are no blacks.” Vieira also pointed to the uncomfortable fact that the Portuguese had been fighting a people whiter than they, the Dutch, and embarrassingly asked whether “we are not as dark compared with them, as the Indians to us”4

  The Dutch, having established themselves in Luanda, took care to maintain their older relations with the Vili, on the Loango coast. The trade from there was now put to better use than ever, in that the fine cloths of the place, the redwood, and the nzimbu shells could be exchanged in Luanda for slaves almost as easily as Dutch cloth and Swedish iron bars. The local kings all rejoiced at the thought of a new European master. The king of Congo even sent an ambassador to Maurits of Nassau, in Brazil, in order to ensure that the slave trade to that country would be just as the Portuguese had had it. He sent presents, including two other slaves for the governor, and a few more for his council. Other African ambassadors went to Amsterdam to seek Dutch help against Portugal. The king of Congo placed images deriving from the Dutch Reformed Church on the altar of his Catholic cathedral. The invincible Queen Nzinga (in retreat, her kingdom was known as Matamba) also became a Dutch ally, and undertook several small wars locally in order to provide the Dutch with more slaves than she could otherwise supply.

  Yet the Portuguese were resilient. After the Dutch capture of Luanda, the governor, Pedro Cesar de Menzes, led the old colonists a few miles north to the Bengo River, where the Jesuits had established plantations, and where they sought to prevent their old African friends (and enemies) from collaborating with the conquerors. Failing to do this, the governor and his friends moved much farther into the interior, to the fort of Massangano, on the river Cuanza. There, Cesar de Menzes was able to count on the backing of the puppet ngola, Ari, of Ndongo.

  Given the interruption of the Portuguese slave trade to Brazil, certain noblemen of Lisbon (Gaspar Pacheco, Francisco Fernandes de Furna, Antonio Lopes Figueroa, and Ruy da Silva Pereira) had, in the meantime, presented a new plan to their king. It was adopted in 1643. The idea was to arm Flemish boats, crew them with Portuguese, and send them round the Cape of Good Hope to Mozambique, to fetch both slaves an
d valuable woods: the same dues would be payable in Rio on the slaves as if they had come from Angola. So four to six thousand slaves were soon being exported every year in this way to the Americas, mostly to Rio, but also to other markets. Mozambique, so remote, so exotic, became the last resort of the European slave traders, and the tiny island of that name soon became much used, and not just by the Portuguese.

  After a while, the Dutch and Portuguese in Angola came to a working agreement: the former, in Luanda, would tolerate the settlement at Massangano and sell it food, provided that the Portuguese supplied them with slaves. The Dutch conquerors were, in fact, disappointed: they had expected to find in Portuguese Africa a self-sustaining export trade of sixteen thousand slaves a year, and their failure to achieve that without much greater efforts than they had expected forced them into all kinds of bargaining. They demanded high prices (in slaves) for their food, while the Portuguese colonists waged war to gain slaves, for all the world as if they were local Africans.

  Portugal, newly independent again, was a more formidable power than a nation tied to the coattails of the king of Spain. The Portuguese-Brazilian settlers still living in New Holland—the moradores, those who had stayed on under Dutch rule—staged a rebellion. In a short and effective campaign, they expelled the Dutch from all their old territory, except for Recife-Pernambuco. Then, in 1648, they sent fifteen ships, under a brilliant general, Salvador Correa de Sá, across the South Atlantic to reconquer Luanda and São Tomé. This expedition was immediately successful, for the Dutch were as ill-prepared in 1648 as the Portuguese had been in 1641. So the latter’s enclave at Massangano (which had been besieged by Holland’s African allies) was relieved. Correa de Sá, now the new governor of Angola, destroyed the Dutch outposts (to the north of the Congo, at Pinda, and even at Loango), while García, king of Congo, as a punishment for his welcome to the Dutch, was obliged, among other things, to accept Portuguese sovereignty south of the river Dande (fifty miles north of Luanda), to deliver annually nine hundred basketfuls of palm cloth, worth a thousand slaves, and to give up all those Angolan slaves who had recently taken refuge in his kingdom.

  Given these wars and other reversals of fortune, some of them explicitly inspired by disputes over the source of labor for the Americas, it is scarcely surprising that much the same number of slaves were exported from Africa in the second quarter of the seventeenth century as in the first: about 200,000, of whom 100,000 probably went to Brazil, 50,000 to Spanish America. For the first time (in the 1620s and 1630s), the English and French Caribbean appeared as major consumers: nearly 20,000 and 2,000 respectively to the English in Barbados and the Leeward Islands, and 2,500 to the French in Martinique and Guadeloupe. The average number of slaves exported per year from all parts of West Africa might have been about 8,000, many of whom, in the last part of this era, were brought in Dutch boats, including those taken to the Spanish empire. Probably Angola was the most frequent source, if by that word one understands the whole region south of Saint Catherine’s Bay.5

  Despite their military failures, Dutch merchants in the 1650s, however, still dominated the market of slaves for the West Indies. Their superior position there reflected their global standing. Holland remained the world’s dominant economic power, in Central Europe as in the Baltic. The Dutch East India Company was still prospering, and much of world trade was in its hands; like Antwerp a century earlier, and London a century later, Amsterdam was a market for everything under the sun. She held her position by keeping her costs low. It was cheaper, for example, for French merchants to buy Baltic goods in Amsterdam for exchange with Africans than to obtain them direct from where they were made.

  As for slaves, the Dutch were soon back in the region of the Congo, if not at Luanda. They had, after all, an old association with Loango, principally concerned with ivory and copper, and that was now revived, though, in the 1650s and 1660s, transformed to concentrate on slaving. By 1670, the Overseas Council at Lisbon was talking of the Dutch activity at Loango as if it were still a real threat to the Portuguese slave traffic, since many slaves exchanged at Loango Bay were taken from what had previously been Angolan sources of supply. Other captives were taken from Allada (Ardra), in the commercially promising territory of the so-called Slave Coast.

  Though the Dutch had lost all their possessions in Brazil, they retained settlements in the north of South America, in the Guyanas, on the rivers Demerara, Essequibo, Berbice and, after 1667, Surinam, as well as islands in the Caribbean: Curaçao, off Venezuela, to which had been added nearby Aruba and Bonaire. They also held islands in the more northerly Leeward group: Saint Eustatius, Saint Thomas (taken by the English in 1667), and also Saba and half of San Martin.

  Of these Caribbean colonies, Curaçao was every year richer and more important. It had no gold, and now no native population. It was too dry to be a plantation colony. It was tiny. But there was a fine harbor, at Willemstad. The Spaniards had used the place primarily to obtain dye-wood. They took some cattle there, too. The Dutch first used Curaçao as a naval station. They planted oranges, from whose juice they distilled the famous liqueur. Then, in 1641, their West India Company began to use the island as a collecting point for slaves captured from foreign ships. A large prison warehouse was built, capable of housing over three thousand captives. In the 1650s, the bleak spot was an important slaving center, with five or six hundred slaves being taken there every year direct from Africa, ready for illicit sale to the Spaniards above all but, also illegally, to the English and French. In 1659, the governor of Curaçao, Matthias Beck, wrote to his superior in New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, that the trade with “our nearest neighbors,” the Spaniards, was looking promising, despite differences of religion.6 During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the Dutch West India Company, reconstituted in 1674 primarily as a slave-trading organization, was sending three or four ships a year to the Caribbean from West Africa, without counting its shipments to the Guyanas.

  There were also Dutch settlements in North America until 1664. These seemed to require at least some African slaves as a labor force. On July 26, 1646, for instance, instructions to the director-general and Council of New Netherlands (that is, the Dutch colony in North America) provided that “for the promotion of agriculture . . . it is deemed proper to permit . . . the conveyance thither of as many blacks as they are willing to purchase at a fair price. . . .”7 Two years later, the colonists of North America were authorized to send food to their fellow Dutch colonists in the Guyanas, and carry away slaves in return. New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island, was to be allowed to trade with Angola; and there was talk of converting that city into a slave mart to serve the English mainland colonies, just as Curaçao and Saint Eustatius were beginning to serve the Caribbean islands. Still, only two substantial shipments of slaves from the Guyanas to Dutch North America seem to have been made: one was of an unspecified number of slaves in 1654, in the West India Company’s Witte Paert; the other, of 290 in the Gideon, in 1664. For the rest, the Dutch in North America bought slaves in small numbers from Curaçao, of whom some were probably sold down the coast to the English in Maryland or Virginia.

  Among the Dutch merchants concerned in this new trade, the de Wolffs were outstanding. The most prominent of these men was Abel de Wolff, born in Amsterdam in 1636, whose interests embraced Baltic grain, wine from Bordeaux, whaling, gold and ivory, and salt in New York, as well as slaves. His father, Dirck de Wolff, had been a baker in Haarlem before rising to the board of the Brokers’ Guild in Amsterdam. Most Dutch merchants in North America were ruined when New Amsterdam fell to England in 1664, but Abel de Wolff survived—partly because of his interest in whaling in Greenland, but partly thanks to his investment in the slave trade. In 1670, de Wolff’s profits from the Africa trade exceeded fifty thousand florins. Some of his partners and friends (for example, Gerrit Zuyuck and Tobias van Hoornbeeck) also survived, moving into the trade in slaves to Surinam, to the east of the main Guyana settlements, a colony founded by the En
glish in 1651 but captured in 1667 by the Dutch, who retained it. The British had made the place prosper; the Dutch failed to do so to begin with until, however, a Society of Surinam was founded in 1682, and a more substantial slave trade began; some twenty-two thousand African captives had been taken there by 1700.

  When, in 1654, the quarter-century of Holland’s control of northeastern Brazil came to an end with the expulsion of the last Dutch troops from Recife-Pernambuco, certain Dutch colonists, including some members of the Jewish community, moved to Barbados. A paper entitled “Touching Barbados,” written in England in the 1660s, stated: “The Dutch losing Brazil, many Dutch and Jews repairing to Barbados began then planting and making of sugar. . . . Likewise, the Dutch, being engaged on the coast of Guinea . . . for negro slaves, having lost Brasille, not knowing where to vent them, they trusted them to Barbados.”8 To a lesser extent, the same was true of the larger (French) island of Guadeloupe. Brazil had been the major zone of large-scale cultivation of sugar cane in the Americas. Now the Caribbean began to perform that function, and did so in a way which seemed, from an economic point of view, more efficient than Brazil.

  There had been sugar in Barbados before the coming of the Dutch; and sugar survived in Brazil. Jean Aubert, of Rouen, originally a surgeon, introduced the cultivation of sugar cane into the French Antilles in 1640, at Saint-Christophe. All the same, the small number of Dutch colonists in Barbados did have an effect out of all proportion to their number. For the result was the transformation of most of the only recently colonized Caribbean islands. The best indication of what occurred can be seen in Barbados itself. There, in 1645, rather more than 11,000 impoverished white farmers of English stock were established, owning about 6,000 slaves, and mostly growing third-rate tobacco. By 1667, there were 745 owners of plantations growing sugar, and over 80,000 slaves. The island was held to be nearly twenty times richer in 1667 than it had been before the coming of sugar. The changes in the price of land were even more remarkable, for 500 acres which had been sold at £400 in 1640 fetched £7,000 for only a half-share as early as 1648. The white small farmers, who either did not wish to, or could not, turn over to sugar, lost almost everything. They emigrated where they could—many to the North American mainland, particularly Carolina, which retained its air of being a kind of Barbados-over-the-sea for a long time. Some whites survived on the island to become the ancestors of the twentieth century’s “red-legs.” Meantime, the planters who carried out this sugar revolution, such as James Drax, eventually went home to England as rich men, and their families began to think of their Caribbean sugar properties as if they were gold mines. Most of the smaller British islands in the Caribbean went through the same kind of experience as Barbados, though a little later.