by Hugh Thomas
Often in these days there were piracies involving slave ships en route to Spanish harbors: for example, in 1677, a Scottish pirate, James Browne, with a mixed Dutch, French, and English crew, seized a Dutch slave ship off Cartagena, killed the captain and several of his men, and took the 150 slaves back to Jamaica. Browne was hanged for piracy, but his crew was pardoned; the slaves, however, remained at the disposition of the governor of Jamaica.
In 1685, Barroso died and Porcío, his son-in-law, was forced to abandon the asiento from which he had profited so little, partly because of illness and partly because the governor of Cartagena, Juan de Pando, had himself reached a close understanding with the Dutch in Curaçao. Pando gave it out that Porcío was insane, seized his ships, and had him consigned to a prison. Porcío appealed to the Supreme Court, the Audiencia, at Panama, and carried his case to the Council of the Indies in Spain. He was prospering there when Baltasar Coymans—the banker from Amsterdam, the power behind recent asentistas—entered the lists. He was supported by several members of the Council of the Indies, including its president, the duke of Medinaceli, as by the friends of the governor of Cartagena. No doubt money changed hands. The Dutch ambassador in Madrid had lobbied extensively for Coymans. At all events, Coymans won the contract.
The éminence grise had thus come into the limelight. The great privilege was at last formally in the hands of a heretic—as the dean of the cathedral at Cádiz, Pedro Francisco de Barroso, Porcío’s brother-in-law, took a great deal of trouble to point out. This might have seemed the triumph of Holland; but in truth that once aggressive state was now in decline, the Dutch West India Company (with which Jan Coymans had worked in respect of his sales of slaves in the Spanish Indies) was near bankruptcy and, though the Dutch had sustained themselves successfully in war and trade when their rivals were Catholics, whether Spaniards or Portuguese, they were now being outdistanced by their Protestant neighbors, the English.
Baltasar Coymans received the asiento with qualifications: his firm had to make a large payment, in cash, to the Spanish Ministry of Finance, and he also, like Grillo and Lomelin, had to promise to build ships for the Spanish navy, four of them this time. To cover his expenses, which were in the nature of a loan, the Crown exempted certain of the slaves whom Coymans would bring in from the regulation duty. Even so, by this time, the Inquisition, apparently alerted by Dean Barroso, as well as by the papal nuncio in Madrid, had begun to interest itself in the matter. The nuncio had a paper prepared on the subject for him by Miguel de Villalobos concerning the dangers implicit in giving power to a heretic. Villalobos pointed out that, in the East, the Dutch, making much of a far smaller opportunity than would be open to Coymans in the West, had been able to put an end to the propagation of the true faith. The nuncio intrigued with the king’s confessor, the bishop of Sigüenza, and both of them let the king know that, in their opinion, the pope would be bitterly opposed to the new asiento if he only knew of it.
The nuncio had gone too far. What business was it of his? Anyway, in Rome itself, business with heretics went on all the time. Why should the nuncio find intolerable in the Spanish Indies what the Holy Father himself countenanced in the shadow of Saint Peter’s? A committee of the Council of the Indies approved the confirmation of the asiento but, at the same time, King Charles II of Spain, in a rare act of self-assertion, insisted on mounting an inquiry into the implications of the affair. This report, after a good deal of argument, declared: “First, the introduction of blacks is not only desirable, but absolutely necessary. . . . The fatal consequences of not having them are easily deduced, for . . . they are the ones who cultivate the haciendas, and there is no one else who could do it, because of a lack of Indians. [If there were no slave trade] the landed properties, the main wealth of which consists chiefly of black slaves, would be lost, and America would face absolute ruin. . . .”
There followed a more curious passage: “As to . . . whether this slavery is permitted [by God, or the Church], there are many authors who discuss it. . . . The Council is . . . of the opinion that there cannot be any doubt as to the necessity of those slaves for the support of the kingdom of the Indies nor as to the importance to the public welfare of continuing and maintaining this procedure without any change; and, with regard to the question of conscience, its [desirability is proved] . . . because of the reasons expressed, the authorities cited, and its long-lived and general custom in the kingdoms of Castile, America and Portugal, without any objection on the part of His Holiness or ecclesiastical state, but rather with the tolerance of all of them. . . .”7
This document suggests that the moral dimension was at least recognized in Spain, even if not faced. The effect of the declaration was, however, weakened by a statement by the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, which took the view that the contract with Coymans would not guarantee the purity of the faith, and would enable the introduction into the Indies of Africans who could be subversive of order. The Vatican’s important Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith took the same view, by talking of “the spiritual ruin” to be expected if the asiento went to a heretic. The next stage was that a special committee of the Council of the Indies recommended that the asiento to Coymans should indeed be annulled.
But Coymans was already at work, using Jamaica, the English depository, as well as Curaçao, the Dutch, to obtain his captives. Yet even Jamaica could not fully meet the demands. The recent establishment of tobacco in Cuba increased those requirements, even if sugar was still managed in an elementary way. Instructions in 1685 to a new governor of Jamaica (Sir Philip Howard) included permission to allow a Spanish agent, Diego Maget of Cartagena, to settle “in Jamaica, in order to continue the Negro trade” on behalf of Coymans. In 1689, the Council and Assembly of Jamaica—it must be remembered that these English islands always had parliaments, whose decisions could often be unpredictable—were found protesting that the Spaniards received the “choicest negroes,” and the Jamaicans only the “refuse”; and, when Jamaican planters had gone aboard the ships to buy slaves, “their ready money has been refused because it was not pieces of eight.”8
It does not seem as if Baltasar Coymans had the definite intention of using any of his twelve or so ships (such as the immodestly named Rey Baltasar, specially built for the trade, in Amsterdam, or the Profeta Daniel) for the purpose of introducing Dutch or other Northern European goods into Spanish ports as well as slaves, but obviously some smuggling did occur, giving support to the fears of Dutch imperial expansion expressed by the civil servants in Madrid. Coymans had no doubt committed this pardonable offense in the past, since he specifically had introduced into his contract a clause forgiving him for all previous illicit business. As a result of the intervention of the Council of the Indies, Coymans also agreed to carry Capuchin friars on his boats, and he seems to have tried to do so.IV
But then this imaginative Dutchman inconveniently died, and his longtime assistant and heir, Jan Carçau, a Dutch-born Spanish resident (and a Catholic) was soon in a jail, chained, in Cádiz for fraud. Coymans’s contribution to the slave trade had been much less than the Spanish government had hoped, for the legal import was less than five hundred slaves in the two years 1685-86, even if the smuggled number must have exceeded that. Coymans had encountered difficulties in securing permission for his ships to leave Cádiz, one excuse after another being used by the port authorities—the need to carry post, passengers, even troops—in order to delay departures of which they heartily disapproved. Then Coymans had been obliged to maintain a large bureaucracy in the main ports of the empire. With numerous quarrels preventing the free supply of slaves to the Spanish empire, the “storage” in Curaçao in 1687 was again overcrowded—so much so that a special ship had to be sent to Africa to bring food for the 5,000-odd slaves.
Despite the interest of Jan Coymans, Baltasar’s brother, and, behind him, the Dutch West India Company, Coymans’s company now lost the asiento: first, it was returned to Nicolás Porcío, who claimed that he had bee
n unfairly outmaneuvered by Coymans; and then to Bernardo Marín de Guzmán, a merchant of Caracas who had many connections with old Spain. The former used Curaçao much as Coymans had done; the latter struck out on his own for supplies, for he employed the new Portuguese joint-stock Cacheu Company (founded in 1676, on the initiative of Duarte Nunes, a Portuguese merchant established in Hamburg) of which, he, Marín de Guzmán, had previously been the agent and which backed him strongly.V The Crown was also in favor of this, for it seemed to mean that Spain would thus escape from the embarrassing reliance on heretics. But Marín de Guzmán died mysteriously in 1696—murdered by a Dutch agent, it was rumored.
In 1690, an Order in Council in London, meantime, had given freedom to both Barbados and Jamaica to trade in blacks with Spain. The governors of the two islands were even asked to give protection to all Spanish merchants who came to them; the year before, a Spanish agent, Santiago Castillo, representing Jan Coymans, arrived in London to negotiate with the RAC a regular arrangement for the sale of slaves. The aim was, as it were, to make regular an accepted illicit practice.
This was a remarkable concession to free trade. But it lasted a very short time. A reconstituted Cacheu Company asked for the asiento and, after the usual complicated negotiations in Madrid, obtained it, by offering a loan of two hundred thousand pesos to the Spanish Crown, as well as undertaking to deliver to Spanish America thirty thousand slaves in the following six and a half years. The agreement showed that the old Spanish resentment of Portugal after 1640 had died away; and converso connections between merchants in Portugal and Holland probably still enabled the former to obtain their goods for the African trade in Amsterdam both more easily and more cheaply than would otherwise have been the case. (The Huguenot French merchant and captain Jean Barbot wrote in the late 1670s that “the Portuguese . . . have most of their cargoes from Holland, under the names of Jews residing there. . . .”9)
Still, the Portuguese company failed to supply what it had promised. In these circumstances, Simon and Louis de Souza, agents for this company, approached, as so many of their predecessors as asentistas had done, the Dutch West India Company to help them find the necessary slaves. This request certainly maintained the fortunes of Curaçao but, as ever, demand there exceeded supply. In the end, the Cacheu Company did manage to carry ten thousand slaves to Spanish imperial ports legally, of whom just over half came direct from Africa. But hundreds of slaves were illegally imported: some were landed without payment of duties at Cartagena, on the plea that they were dead or dying—an early version, it might be said, of Gorki’s novel Dead Souls; and over two thousand went into the small port of Río de la Hacha, one of John Hawkins’s old markets. This was too much for the new governor of Cartagena, Juan Díaz Pimenta, who arrested the Portuguese company’s agent, Gaspar de Andrade, and closed his offices. Litigation followed, the governor being amply justified by evidence of the purchase of slaves in Jamaica and Curaçao. It even seemed, after a while, that the defrauding of the Spaniards had been the main purpose of the Portuguese company, though King Pedro II is said to have been the main investor in it. As King Louis XIV would say, in the early 1700s, “The English and the Dutch are the only ones to have profited. . . .”10
• • •
In Portuguese America—that is, Brazil—the usual estimates of African slaves imported for the first half of the seventeenth century seem exaggerated: one historian thought in terms of 200,000, or 4,000 a year, but his evidence is questionable. There were, after all, still thousands of Indian slaves available then from the raids of innumerable bandeirantes in the interior for all but the hardest work in the sugar plantations. Still, 350,000 African captives were almost certainly taken to Brazil in the second half of the century.11
The end of the sixty-year association with Spain incidentally seems to have had little effect on Portuguese trading to Brazil; thus a single contractor held the right to trade slaves from Angola from 1636 to 1644 (Pero Avoiz de Abreu), and he retained his place during the Dutch occupation there; he was followed by a succession of well-established Lisbon merchants.VI The same continuity was to be seen in the less valuable trading of slaves from the Cape Verde Islands, where Gaspar da Costa was the contractor, from 1637 to 1643. Private merchants maintained the trade from Lisbon or Porto till the end of the century, when a national company was established, in much the same way as had happened in other European countries. This was indeed the Cacheu Company, from the river of that name, between the Gambia and the Sierra Leone, whose activities in respect of Spain have already been touched upon.
The governors of Angola after the expulsion of the Dutch, João Fernandes Vieira and André Vidal de Negreiros, revived the old relations with the kings of Congo (ever more dependent, in a disintegrating realm), re-established the ngola of Ndongo as a useful puppet, made peace with the still-resilient Queen Nzinga (she did not die till 1663), sought a way of connecting Angola with the Portuguese colony in Mozambique by land, and above all began a process whereby Angola became more and more a commercial dependency of Brazil, rather than a colony of Portugal. Frei Antônio Vieira would, in his famous Sermões, at the end of the century, pronounce that, though Brazil certainly had its body in America, its soul was in Africa (he encouraged the black slave to resignation).
Congo was for a generation at the end of the century the best source of slaves for Brazil. The Portuguese had gone to war against the kingdom in 1665, King Antonio I had been executed after a victory (his head had been taken in un-Christian triumph to Luanda), and though the place remained nominally independent, it had in effect accepted the suzerainty of Portugal. That meant that the latter could extract from the territory such slaves as they wanted. Congo then began to break up; different members of the old Christian dynasty (the so-called infantes, each with his incongruous Christian name, a Pedro Constantino and even a Pedro del Valle de Lagrimas) fought each other, while the nominal monarch survived only as a ghost of his former eminence and, despite the emergence of a prophetess who claimed to be in touch with Saint Anthony of Padua (in order to bring the wars to an end), several small, autonomous principalities traded slaves without interruption.
Within a few years, the puppet kingdom of Ndongo also declined and, after a rebellion, was extinguished as an independent entity; the breakaway monarchy of Matamba, founded by Queen Nzinga, was in much the same condition after 1681, and that monarchy agreed to protect Portuguese pombeiros entering the realm in search of slaves. Beyond, the once equally ferocious Lunda kingdom had also allowed itself to be tamed and, by 1700, was the biggest slave producer for the Portuguese, with whom its people happily exchanged wine and clothes in return for souls.
Meantime, the Sonyo confirmed their independence from the Christian kings of Congo, though the astounding role there of the Capuchin order seemed to limit this freedom. The sons of the Sonyo king, for example, were named the “ten masters of the Church,” acting as interpreters, chanting mass, and assisting with confessions. This spiritual presence did not, however, interfere with a steadily rising export of slaves.
At the very end of the seventeenth century, the Brazilian market was transformed by the discovery of large deposits of gold. Just as Brazil had been the first in the Americas, in the late sixteenth century, to develop sugar-plantation agriculture, so she was the first to experience a “gold rush,” in Minas Gerais, in 1698: nothing like it had been seen before and “nothing like it was seen again, until the California gold rush of 1849.”12 To begin with, Indian slaves were used to open up the mines but they, as usual, proved themselves (or contrived to prove themselves) inferior to blacks, in endurance, commitment, and docility; and so the demand for Africans increased accordingly, as more and more gold was discovered, often in more and more remote places: the Mato Grosso, for instance, as well as Goiás and Cuiabá. The demand for labor so far exceeded supply that the mine owners even absorbed the extra taxes on slaves imposed by officials always looking for ways of replenishing the treasury, as of enriching themselves. Mos
t of the work in this adventure was soon being performed by Africans, under the supervision, of course, of Brazilian masters. The mine owners made their petty distinctions among different slaves; thus the captives from Guinea were found to be stronger and better for this new back-breaking work than those from Angola. Slaves imported from Whydah, on the Slave Coast, were also thought for some years to have a magic gift for discovering new deposits of gold.
Slaves for Brazil were now easily, and directly, carried across the South Atlantic from Angola, Congo, or possibly Mozambique. But many, perhaps most, still came from the Gulf of Guinea—or “Mina,” as the Portuguese came to call that territory (a fond diminutive of lost Elmina). One estimate gives an overall figure of over 150,000 carried to Brazil in the first ten years alone of the eighteenth century, of whom fewer than half, about 70,000, were said to have come from Angola, and 80,000 from Mina.13 Most of the few settlers in Luanda in these years were engaged in one aspect or another of slave trading and, in the 1680s, there were seldom fewer than twenty slave ships in the harbor. (The Portuguese had been permitted by the Dutch to return to Axim in Guinea, though not to Elmina—on condition of a 10-percent duty on all trade goods brought to the coast. Thereafter, Portuguese traders also set themselves up at four ports on the Slave Coast: Grand Popo, Ouidah, Jaquin, and Apa.)
Though the journeys of most of these ships were still organized in Lisbon, increasing numbers were now often sent across the Atlantic directly by merchants from Rio. That was, in some ways, the most important long-term consequence of the gold rush in Minas Gerais. Daniel Defoe caused his character Robinson Crusoe to participate in one of these early direct journeys from Brazil to Africa, and it was on the outward journey that Crusoe was shipwrecked.14 Later on, some of these Rio-based traders would also smuggle slaves to Spanish settlers at Buenos Aires, on the river Plate. Though these merchants made money, and sometimes a great deal of it, their long-term position was weaker than it seemed, because they naturally could not offer the elaborate range of European goods which the Lisbon captains, with their connections in England and Holland, could guarantee. Brazil, however, had two successful direct exports, which accounted for a majority of the slaves taken to the place in these years: first, there was the sweet, molasses-dipped, third-rate tobacco which was especially favored in Benin; second, they produced a strong, rough cane brandy, gerebita, which was extraordinarily popular in Angola.
