Some time before 200 BC, Eratosthenes measured the globe’s size using noonday sightings of the sun at Aswan and Alexandria to estimate the circumference of the Earth. We know that he was within about 4 per cent of the true size, though scholars made a botch of it for many years. But Eratosthenes had more to say, and he said it plainly: ‘If the extent of the Atlantic Ocean were not an obstacle, we might easily pass by sea from Iberia to India, keeping in the same parallel.’ People had always travelled east by land to the Indies and China. On foot it was a long way, and their estimates always set the Indies a greater distance to the east than they were. The other problem was that Eratosthenes had measured the world in a unit called a stadion, and nobody knew quite how big a stadion was, so they had to guess as well as they could. Sadly, their ‘modern’ stadion was too small by one part in four, and that made the Earth smaller than it is. That led them to think the Indies even closer to Europe, barely over the horizon from the Atlantic islands.
It was only logical that somebody would try sailing to the Indies, just across the Atlantic to the west. All Columbus did was to try what Eratosthenes had suggested. Of course Columbus made a small mistake, that scholars’ botch I mentioned before. Knowing roughly how big the planet was thought to be, and that all the best spices and gold and sugar came from the Indies, Columbus worked out how far it would be if he went west instead of east.
Perhaps we should recall Columbus for the deed that would change the West Indies forever—taking sugar cane from La Gomera in the Canary Islands to Hispaniola on his second trip in 1493. By that simple act, he probably did more than anybody else to shape the Americas of today. Many of the events that moulded the New World had their roots in the cane fields, one way or another.
The conquistadors who came after Columbus thought the cane was a native of the West Indies, since it could be seen growing in Indian villages visited by Europeans for the first time. Then Spanish priests reported that sugar cane grew also in the Philippines, and made up complicated stories of traders carrying it across the Pacific. The simpler explanation was that when people saw and tasted the marvellous cane, it didn’t take them long to grow their own. Nor did it take others long to trade bits of the cane to villages further afield, and in this way sugar cane swept through the West Indies faster than the conquistadors could expand. Sadly for the Indians, though, the conquistadors were spreading fast.
GOD’S FIRST PRIEST IN THE INDIES
Bartolomé de Las Casas was a Dominican missionary on Cuba in 1514, the first priest ordained in the Indies. He had a grant of land to help him do God’s work, with a hundred local Caribs attached to the land as serfs. Within three years, this gentle and decent man was horrified to see how the Caribs sickened and died when they were forced to work, and how they were slaughtered by the Spanish colonists when they revolted. It would be better, he told the Court in Spain, to bring in Africans who were inured to such labour. He believed the choice to be the lesser of two evils, but he thought the lesser evil to be hardly an evil at all, for the African slaves in Spain seemed happy enough, and they were clearly better able to carry out hard work in the mines. In any case, the mines would soon be worked out, and the slaves could then be freed to a life of agriculture.
Instead, the trade grew ever larger, and African slaves soon began to outnumber their white masters. In 1530 there were 3000 slaves on San Domingo, and just 327 Spaniards. By 1547, de Las Casas was Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, but he resigned his bishopric to return to Spain to campaign against the slave trade—the lesser evil he himself had suggested for the benefit of the Caribs and their peaceful neighbours, the Arawaks. It took three and a half centuries, five normal full spans of three-score years and ten, to abolish what he thought he could end as quickly as he had started. That same five life spans would be some 35 working lives of the African slaves, who never lived as long as free men, because slavery was cruel and brutal in the extreme.
At one stage, de Las Casas had great hopes that the King would listen to what he had to say, but early in 1555 that chance slipped away as Charles V began to fear for his own soul. He abdicated the throne and devoted the rest of his life to prayer in a little house next to the monastery of Yste, seeking salvation through prayer rather than by doing good deeds. If the king had struck against slavery then, perhaps half of all those who would eventually be hauled across the seas and worked to death might have been spared. Bartolomé de Las Casas gave the rest of his days to the fight, but he never again got close to winning.
His countrymen were not necessarily cruel to slaves per se. Like the English and most other nationalities at the time, they were just cruel to other humans in their power, making no particular discrimination between free men and slaves. It was normal to treat other human beings badly. People were still being burnt at the stake, and public executions, hangings, drawings and quarterings were a common enough ending for many a free man, and even a few women. Horrible things were done to the slaves, but mostly because they outnumbered the whites, and needed to be terrorised to remind them they had no rights. After all, no rational man would beat, murder or maim a slave, any more than he would beat a cart horse beyond what was needed to make it work, for slaves and horses were property, and both cost money to replace.
And slaves were not all that profitable at the best of times— Adam Smith knew that when he wrote The Wealth of Nations and, according to him, so did the ancients:
The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own. In ancient Italy, how much the cultivation of corn degenerated, how unprofitable it became to the master when it fell under the management of slaves, is remarked by both Pliny and Columella.
Sadly, not all slave owners in the Americas were entirely rational. Drunkenness from the abundant cheap rum, irritability caused by the tropical heat, even madness, led to actions that took a great toll of slaves’ lives.
But far more numerous than the deaths from cruelty were the deaths from epidemic disease, always a problem when populations come together from distant places. Each group tends to carry a range of diseases to which they have developed a degree of immunity, and yet they have absolutely no immunity to the diseases carried by other groups.
The Arawaks, Caribs and other locals had the worst of it, because they were susceptible to both African and European diseases. The Spaniards arrived with influenza, pleurisy, measles, tuberculosis and whooping cough, which immediately began a savage attack on the locals. Then in 1516, smallpox arrived to ravage the local populations even further—a major reason for introducing slaves from elsewhere. The Indios, said the Spaniards, were a feeble bunch who died all too easily; clearly, they were not up to the work.
Long before the germ theory of disease, it made a sort of sense to blame the work. The Indians were sick; it could not always have been like this, so the different factor must be that the Indians were now being made to work. The solution was just as obvious: bring in Africans who were from an agricultural culture and known to be able to work in the heat, and set them to work. The slaves and the ships that brought them across the Atlantic carried diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, hookworm and schistosomiasis. In no time at all these diseases attacked the Indians—but found equally good targets in the white populations, among both the plantation owners and the indentured workers brought by the English when they moved in.
And then there was syphilis. Nobody seems to know whether syphilis came to the New World from the Old with Columbus’s sailors, or if they took it back to Europe, but there was a lot of it about in those times, and in the end it made men mad, and cruel. Most of the cruelty, though, was seen in its time as for the
good of the slaves, because it made better servants of them, and achieving that was their owners’ first duty.
Sugar was lurking in the background, the threat that would last long after the mines were found and worked out. It was sugar that shaped the slaves’ world, just as it reached forward into our time, shaping the world we know. Without sugar, there might only have been a minor slave trade; with sugar, the slave trade drove European commerce and development.
THE FIRST SUGAR SLAVES
Sugar and slavery seemed to go hand in hand. Without slaves, there might not have been a sugar industry—but without sugar, there would not have been as many slaves. On the other hand, slavery was around long before sugar came on the scene. Slavery is often thought of today as a distinctly American and Caribbean phenomenon, but slaves were being brought into fourteenth-century Crete and Cyprus to work in the Mediterranean cane fields even before the Black Death cut the local labour force. These were Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish prisoners of war, and Tartars. And going on old place names that survive today, historians believe that Morocco probably used slaves in the sugar industry around 1400.
In ancient times slavery was commonly the fate of those defeated in war, as the Hebrews found when Nebuchadnezzar came to call. There may have been slaves in what is now Libya, about 6000 BC, and there were certainly slaves in ancient Egypt. When Hammurabi of Babylon made the first code of laws, between 1800 and 1750 BC, there was a special provision that any who helped a slave escape, or who harboured a fugitive, should be put to death.
That high point in our western civilisation, Athens at the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, around 450 BC, could only function through having enough slaves to free up citizens for study and thought. In the Athens of Pericles, perhaps two-thirds of the city’s population were slaves of one sort or another. In the first book of his Politics, Aristotle explains that: ‘It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.’ At another point, Aristotle explains to his readers that the ox is the poor man’s slave, and in general treats slavery as a natural phenomenon.
The Romans also relied on slaves, brought to Rome in huge numbers by their victorious armies, or brought from further afield in smaller numbers. During Rome’s greatest period, from 50 BC to AD 150, there were probably half a million slaves brought into Rome and its empire each year— and why not? The Romans admired Greek learning and followed its teachings, and later Europeans followed the Romans in a manner that can only be called slavish. When Romans criticised slavery, it was the cruel treatment of some slaves that worried them, not the institution of slavery itself. If the great Aristotle said slavery was acceptable, that was an end to the matter.
While the slaves of the last thousand years have mainly been African in origin, black slaves were a minority in Roman times, though one is shown in a mosaic at Pompeii. Black slaves are also depicted on Greek vases.
Islam recognises the prophets of the Old Testament. Muslims, like Jews and Christians, were aware that Ham had seen Noah both drunk and naked, and that Ham was accursed for this. In Christian and Muslim tradition, Ham’s descendants turned black, and the Hamitic peoples were destined for slavery, or so the slavers claimed. Something that had been decreed to be the will of both God and Allah, and was also profitable, would almost inevitably become almost unstoppable.
The rise of Christianity made little difference to slavery, even though the church mildly encouraged manumission, the act of freeing slaves from servitude. Pope Leo the Great declared in 443 that no slave could be a priest, and about the only time slaves did well was under a law of 417, which allowed that if a Jew bought a male slave and made him undergo circumcision, the slave was, by that act, made free. It seems there was a greater prejudice against Jews than there was against slaves.
Slavery remained the norm in Europe in the Dark Ages, but towards the end of the first millennium, the rent-paying serf slowly replaced the slave in much of northern Europe. The Domesday Book of 1086 reveals some 25 000 slaves in England, but by 1200 they had disappeared, perhaps because improved agricultural tools and methods meant there was more profit to be had from a serf.
Without the development of a large market for sugar, slavery may well have died out, but around the Mediterranean in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries slavery remained common. Muslims, Christians, Jews and pagans all preyed on each other and took slaves where they could. It must have seemed as though a benevolent deity had placed others there so that people might avoid the embarrassment of having to enslave their own kind. Africans, of course, were fair game to all.
Soon, rather than slaves being a by-product of war, raids were being mounted just to catch them. The Muslims, in particular, took slaves from among the pagan Slavs in such large numbers that this gave rise to the word ‘slave’. These Slavic slaves were widely traded around the Mediterranean until the Muslim capture of Constantinople in 1453 meant this source was largely lost to Europe. Still, it hardly mattered, because at the far end of the Mediterranean the Portuguese were already beginning to venture into the Atlantic, and along the African coast, returning with black slaves.
Slaves from Guinea had been sold in Europe from about 1250, brought overland to the Mediterranean coast by Moorish traders. At the same time the Portuguese were reaching out westwards. In 1320 the Canary Islands, known to the ancients as the Hesperides or the Fortunate Isles, were rediscovered by the Genoese navigator Lanzarotto Malocello. The inhabitants of these rediscovered isles were less fortunate, as many of them were promptly enslaved.
In the early 1400s African slaves became more common all around the Mediterranean, although most were house servants rather than field hands or industrial workers. That was soon to change. European expansion continued, and after the fall of the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415, the Portuguese were able to gather better information about Africa through first-hand information from overland traders who had travelled far to the south.
The first slaving incident of that era was the Portuguese seizure of a Moroccan ship in 1425 with 53 black men and three black women aboard, all from Guinea. They were liberated from the torments of Moorish enslavement and sold into benevolent Christian slavery—at a great profit to the liberators. How overjoyed the Portuguese must have been, to both fill their pockets and do a Christian duty at the same time! Unfortunately, such joint religious and economic opportunities were rare.
The odd thing is not so much that slaves were brought from Africa in Portuguese ships, but that it took so long for Europeans to work their way around the African coast. The first circumnavigation of Africa happened some time before the death of Herodotus in 425 BC, because he tells us about it in Book 4 of his Histories, even as he discounts the tale:
These men made a statement which I myself do not believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right—to the northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered to be surrounded by sea . . .
The Libya of Herodotus was the whole of the African continent. Anywhere south of Aswan on the Nile River, at the height of summer, the sun will be seen to the north at noon. So if later readers followed Herodotus and rejected the circumnavigation tale, it could only be because they were rejecting the evidence. All the same, Cape Bojador, just south of the Canaries and almost on the Tropic of Cancer, was regarded as the safe limit for Portuguese travel. Further south, it was asserted, white sailors would turn black (as the locals had clearly done), and monsters, liquid flame and serpents would prevail. Perhaps those who had already ventured there spread the tale to frighten off others.
Antão Gonçalves was one of two captains who sailed to Cabo Branco (Cap Blanc or Râs Nouâdhibou), five degrees south of Cape Bojador and well into the tropics, in 1441. In bringing twelve black Africans before Prince Henry of Portugal, he was following an ancient tradition that stretched back at least to the Romans, who paraded capti
ves before their emperor. It was a tradition that would be honoured by Columbus when he took Arawak ‘Indians’ back to Spain, and by the English when they took Pocahontas to meet King James I and again when they took two Australian Aboriginals, Bennelong and Yammerawannie, to London to meet King George III, and later still, Jemmy Button to meet yet another king.
One of Gonçalves’s captives spoke Arabic, and negotiated his release in exchange for assistance in acquiring further slaves. In 1442 Gonçalves brought back another ten captives, while in 1443 Nuno Tristão captured fourteen men from canoes. He later increased this to 29, and the stage was set for the new slave trade. On 8 August 1444 a revenue officer named Lançarote de Freitas and his men landed near Lagos with 235 African slaves, all captured during a visit to what is now Mauritania.
The Azores were certainly known by 1351, when they first appeared on a map. The Portuguese claimed the islands in about 1431 and colonised them in 1445, just in time to start taking advantage of the new trade in African slaves. Within a few years, about a thousand slaves had been carried to the Azores and Madeira to cultivate sugar cane. The pattern of sugar and slavery was thus set not in the Indies but in the Atlantic Ocean.
The importation of slaves into the New World began slowly. A decree of 1501 forbade any slaves born in Spain being taken to the Indies, and the ban applied also to Jews, Moors and ‘New Christians’ (Jews who had been converted to Christianity). All the same, by 1502 the first black slave had arrived and in 1504 five white slaves (that is, Muslims) were brought in. They came not to work in the fields but to dig for gold in Spanish mines.
The Governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando, opposed bringing in slaves from overseas. His grounds for this had nothing to do with a concern for fellow humans; rather, that these ingrates repaid their masters’ efforts in importing them by taking every chance to run away. Worse, they encouraged the local slaves to do the same! They were a disturbing influence and needed to be kept out, declared the governor.
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