The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Grandin, Greg

  Born into fading prestige, wedded into money, Alejandro lived on the margins of advantage. Having acquired a vineyard outside of Mendoza, his father had left the family land rich but worse than cash poor, passing on his debts to his widow, who couldn’t pay them off until she married Alejandro’s stepfather, José Clemente Benegas. After Alejandro and his older brother, Nicólas, moved into Benegas’s well-accommodated home, a compound really, they were attended to in all the genteel comfort that their times allowed.

  Then Rosa Ventura and José Clemente began to have boys of their own. Alejandro and Nicólas were by no means pushed out. When they grew up and went into business together as merchants, the Aranda brothers were able to count on their stepfather, along with his extensive network of relatives, for financial and political support. But their standing in the family was more like wards, or visiting cousins, than true sons of the father.

  Mendoza is just east of the Andes, encircled by haciendas and wineries, its arid soil turned fertile by melting mountain snow. Beyond this agricultural belt was a great desert plain, the western fringe of the Argentine pampas. Mendoza’s merchants had done well as middlemen for goods shipped from Buenos Aires, more than a month’s wagon ride away, over the mountains to Santiago, Chile. They also exported their own products east and west, including wheat, barley, alfalfa, and wine.

  A well-kept town of midday naps and simple adobe homes, Mendoza struck a precarious balance between isolation and prosperity and worked to maintain an equally difficult equipoise between commerce and custom. The town’s women were courteous and elegantly composed, wrote one Frenchman traveling through in the early nineteenth century. Its men wore ponchos as a matter of pride, even as formal wear, covering short pants cinched by gold or silver buckles. The style was “bizarre” and “extravagant,” whereby the city’s elite mixed and matched the ostentation of medieval Spain with clothing associated with the pampas gaucho. Residents of Mendoza, the Frenchmen said, were “hostage to their traditions.”3

  As young men in their twenties, the Aranda brothers led separate private lives. Nicolás stayed in town, while Alejandro moved back and forth between Buenos Aires and Santiago, selling wine fermented on the vineyard they had inherited from their father and buying wholesale goods to bring back to Mendoza. Military rosters from the time record that Nicolás, a five-foot, five-inch cavalry lieutenant, was always present, and Alejandro, an inch shorter and a sergeant, was always “traveling.”4

  By 1804, Alejandro, the half-orphaned son of a migrant who had come to America hoping to get rich but died without succeeding, had burrowed deep into the incestuous heart of aristocratic power in Mendoza. In January, he married his first cousin María del Carmen Sainz de la Maza.5 She was the daughter of his mother’s sister, who, like his mother, had married into a wealthy family. Alejandro, therefore, wasn’t so much rising in as sidestepping through Mendoza society. A month later, his mistress, Francisca de Paula Puebla, gave birth to his daughter, whom they named María Carmen, after Alejandro’s new bride. Francisca was the daughter of one of Mendoza’s largest vintners, Juan Martín Puebla, but his wealth was self-made and over time his vineyards had run down. By the turn of the century, his two hundred wine barrels were considered “old but serviceable.”6 And later that year, Alejandro, at the advanced yet unaccomplished age of thirty-six, learned he would be starting a proper family. His wife was pregnant.7

  * * *

  Alejandro was comfortable with black slaves; they were part of his world. His stepfather’s house had more slave servants than family members. He and his brother were raised by enslaved women and played with enslaved children. Since women from well-off families generally had servants do their breast feeding, Alejandro might even have been a hijo de leche—a “milk child” whose nursing by a black slave often established a lasting relationship of affection. The houses of the Aranda brothers’ next-door cousins had even more slaves than theirs, the majority of them children their own age. When Alejandro was nine, the home of his cousin María Carmen, his future wife, had over sixteen blacks and mulattos living in it, ten of them under the age of twelve.8

  Every year during his childhood, a few hundred captive Africans regularly traveled through Mendoza on their way over the Andes to Chile. When the Crown began to liberalize the slave trade in the late 1770s, the numbers steadily increased. By the mid-1780s, nearly one mule train in three leaving Mendoza for Santiago carried slaves. Most of these shipments were small; through the 1790s, only a handful of very wealthy importers could afford to freight large numbers of slaves overland.9

  Things changed with the new century, as more ships arrived in the Río de la Plata with more slaves. It began to seem that every shipment of shoes from Spain or candy from France making its way to Santiago was accompanied by a considerable number of Africans. Supply still couldn’t keep up with demand and the value of slaves kept rising. By 1804, Africans were considered a much better investment than land.10

  When historians talk about the “slavers’ fever” that overcame Spanish America, most virulently in the early 1800s, they are generally referring to expectations of profit to be made from the commerce. The delirium, though, was about more than economics. Slavery shaped the most intimate realms of life: men like Aranda drank human bondage in at the breast (black women were held in higher esteem than mulattas as wet nurses); familial networks of fathers, sons, cousins, and friends carried out the maritime and continental trade, and slavery worked its way into prized bloodlines through concubinage and rape, weaving together relatives in a shadow tapestry of unrecognized heraldries, the most famous examples being those of America’s founding republican fathers: Thomas Jefferson’s slave children and Simón Bolívar’s reputed slave ancestor. In a world where fashion vied with religion and law in maintaining rank, slaves served as signifying adornments. Well-dressed slaves tended to the women of well-off families everywhere they went in public, to the market, to church, or after mass on their Sunday stroll, and these women treated their enslaved servants as if they were jewelry. The best families kept troupes of African musicians, including violinists and harpists, who entertained the lavish dinner parties that filled society’s calendars, and the choruses of the finest churches and convents were comprised of slaves. One Buenos Aires priest, in Montserrat, a neighborhood where many of Buenos Aires’ black servants lived, said that slaves sang Mozart’s Laudate Dominum “to perfection.”11

  For the Aranda brothers, whose business venture so far yielded more debt than profit, further undermining their supposedly noble standing, free trade, of slaves and other goods, was a threat and an opportunity. It was a threat because it enriched even the city’s mule drivers, decreasing the distance between commoners and lords and pushing the mannerly world of their childhood farther into the past. But the profits that could be made on slavery also offered a chance to stem the erosion of their own position, to secure the noble name their ancestors had long claimed. As the solidity of Spanish mercantalism gave way to a fast-churning economy, slaves, along with livestock and land, often seemed to be the last substantial things. Men like the Aranda brothers latched themselves onto black bodies and held tight.

  11

  THE CROSSING

  There were two ways to get slaves to Lima from Buenos Aires. One was how the Santa Eulalia went, down the coast of Argentina, through the Strait of Magellan, then up the Pacific to Lima. That route was dangerous and expensive, costing between sixty and one hundred pesos per slave for food and freight, nearly a quarter of the slaves’ retail value. Alejandro de Aranda could save money and take the slaves he purchased from Nonell overland for a third that amount.

  They set out in early July, two hours before the sun rose, part of a long teamster train carrying not just Aranda’s cargo but the goods of many merchants hoping to make it across the pampas before the start of the rainy season, which could come as early as September. The caravan had the feel of a traveling village, moving forward not just merchandise but also the bustle and hierarchy o
f Argentine society. There were hundreds of mules and scores of ox teams and wagons carrying the freight, followed by a few coaches for well-off passengers, including merchants like Aranda who were accompanying their merchandise. Not quite mansions on wheels, these carriages still were nicely accommodated. Behind these came the rickety, overflowing wagon homes of the muleteers, many traveling with wife, children, and other relatives in tow. Then the cooks and the carpenters, blacksmiths, and other specialists needed to repair the damage caused by the rough road on the carts.

  Conveying privilege, wealth, and labor, the procession also had law and order—the hired armed men who rode front and rear. The caravan was traveling west, parallel to a line not too far south that was the frontier of Spanish authority, beyond which lived what some called the “pirates of the pampas,” yet-to-be-subdued Native Americans and lawless gauchos.1

  The trip was easiest in the dry winter, between May and August, when the bridgeless rivers were at their lowest. But this was the season when wind blew from the west, wiping away trails as if they were surface currents on the ocean. Called buques, or boats, the wagons that made up the train had their beds high off the ground, on big wheels set wide apart, designed to glide over shifting sands and muddy grasslands. They were practically rolling carcasses, covered with hides, “hair outward,” stretched over ribs made of sugarcane, to protect from the blown dust. Cow skins were also used to strengthen the cart’s woodwork. Cut into narrow strips, the hides would be soaked in water and then wrapped around the wagon’s shafts, wooden springs, and wheels. As they dried, they’d contract, adding a layer of tensile strength to protect the vehicle as it moved over furrowed roads.

  The stretch leaving Buenos Aires was covered in clover and dark-purple thistle. It was boggy, even during the dry season, yet made passable by the bones of cows and other animals thrown into the marshy ground as landfill. After a week, the caravan would have entered the pampas proper, a wide-open “misty expanse” that often reminded travelers of the desolate ocean. Charles Samuel Stewart, a navy chaplain who crossed in the middle of the nineteenth century, described “a vast sea of grass and thistles, without roads or enclosures, and without a habitation, except at long intervals. Nothing breaks the unvarying outline, unless it be now and then an ombu [an immense, solitary shade tree] rising on the distant horizon, like a ship at sea.” It took a bit over a month for a large caravan to travel from Buenos Aires to Mendoza, about the length of the Atlantic crossing.2

  The Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo said that the pampas destroy perspective. They offer “no middle ground”: everything is either urgently close or impossibly far away. Only someone in love with emptiness could be comfortable in them, Ocampo observed, invoking T. E. Lawrence’s fascination with the Arabian Desert. Lawrence himself quoted Shelley, who, referring to the ocean, wrote, “I love all waste. And solitary places: where we taste the pleasure of believing all we see is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”3

  For Babo, Mori, and the other slaves, the boundlessness must have been unnerving. Not because the landscape was alien but rather because it was almost similar to what they had left behind. Along the way, their carts crossed reedy marshes like the swales and swamps of Senegambia, Guinea, and the Niger delta. Though now mostly gone, Argentina’s famed never-ending blanket of grass that so enthralled travelers was then still unbroken, resembling, in a way, West Africa’s inland steppe. Its absolute flatness made it seem even more enormous than the African expanse. Observers looking out at the pampas often commented that they could see the curve of the earth, the horizon bending as it yielded to the sky.

  The pampas were full of strange animals, wrote one traveler, herds of deer, solitary ostriches, small owls, and four-inch-long locusts that flew up from the feet of the horses and oxen like small birds. The West Africans passed cows, some of them of the same stock found in their homeland, and goats grazing in open grassland, licking saline soil, and drinking from muddy lagoons. The cattle were tended to by dark-skinned mestizos and Amerindians, calling to mind the wandering Fulbe pastoralists who roamed the African savanna. Gauchos were skilled horsemen, like the Mandinkas (though if any of Aranda’s captives were from the forested areas of West Africa, where the tsetse fly was prevalent, they might never have seen a horse, since the sleeping sickness spread by the fly was fatal to most domesticated animals). Babo, Mori, and the others traveled during the blue-sky season, when the pampero constantly blew dust and caused occasional whirlwinds (“like a thick column of smoke issuing from a large chimney”) similar to the dry Harmattan that comes down from the Sahara.4

  The hide-covered, cane-ribbed, constantly rocking wagons were less fetid and crowded than the hold of a slave ship. The West Africans had more opportunities to relieve themselves by the side of the road. They could bathe in the rivers, in fresh cold water. Even during the dry season, these rivers were hard to cross, and the effort to do so broke the tedium of the journey. Horsemen plumbed them to make sure they were passable, their steeds braying if they weren’t, advancing reluctantly if they could, followed by the mules and oxen, water rushing to their chests.

  Most often, time passed with nothing to do but sit and suffer the jolts from the rough road, rutted by the burrows of vizcachas, fat, rabbitlike rodents, and listen to the almost deafening squeak of the wagon’s ungreased wheels. The vast plain went on and on, covered in grass, green clover, alfalfa, and occasional patches of giant sunflowers, with “scarcely an undulation to break the dead and boundless monotony.” It was an “ocean of grass,” a “sea of verdure.”5

  In his inquiry into the beautiful and the sublime, Edmund Burke wrote that a large tract of land, like an open level plain, provokes nothing like the fear “as the ocean itself.” The voyage across the Atlantic was undoubtedly more terrifying to the West Africans than the trip across South America. Burke, though, also recognized boredom as its own terror. “Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder,” he wrote, “is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body.” The coerced kind of boredom that Babo, Mori, and the others suffered must have been especially so. It stole, along with their freedom, another thing that made them human: the experience of time as the ordering of purposeful activity. Hour after hour they looked out from their carts and watched something that seemed like their world pass by, with slightly different smells and subtly different colors.6

  Two-thirds through their journey, after the caravan crossed a major river, the Quinto, they came upon an even more desolate stretch of land called la travesía, the crossing, a phrase also used by Spanish slave traders to refer to the Middle Passage. The stony road gave way to sand, and they went long periods seeing not a tree or a drop of water, not a variation in the topography, only the occasional ox or mule skeleton lying on the side of the road. One English-speaking traveler said this part of the journey looked like nothing so much as “similar tracts in Africa.” The day would have been searing, hotter than their homes during the dry season. The austral nights were cold.

  Then, even before ending la travesía, about the time they reached yet another river—“as broad as the Thames at Windsor,” thought an English traveler—they’d have caught their first glimpse of the Andes.

  The Andes are the longest mountain chain in the world. What makes them stunning, however, is that they are the thinnest. The Himalayas are wide and sprawling, with long, slow ascents of hundreds of miles that gradually raise the traveler up and dilute the view, so much so that some of their highest peaks give the impressions of hillocks. In contrast, only a short distance separates Andean crown from foot, making them appear like a great wall running the length of South America. The effect is especially striking if the Andes are approached from the pampas. The haze that occasionally hangs over the far horizon blocks the view but also heightens the impact, drawing one’s eye to snow-covered summits that seem to float in the sky like “stationary white pillars of clouds.” As Babo, Mori, and their companions moved closer, the full �
�view of this stupendous barrier” would become clearer. They were still days away, yet they would have had to lift their “necks back to look up” at the mountains.

  Just beyond la travesía was Mendoza, Aranda’s hometown, with its poplar-lined roads, fenced farms, vineyards, and orchids. Having crossed the pampas before the summer rains came, the West Africans now had to wait until the winter’s mountain snows melted before moving on. By early December they were on the move again, on a straight road west heading toward the Andes.

  12

  DIAMONDS ON THE SOLES OF THEIR FEET

  Enslaved peoples had been traveling along, and dying on, this road for centuries, ever since the Spaniards arrived in the area in the 1540s. When Pedro de Valdivia led an expedition down from Peru to claim the territory today known as Chile, he named the city he founded Santiago de la Nueva Extremadura. Santiago was the patron saint of Spain, also known as Santiago Matamoros, or the Moor Killer, for having intervened in an early battle to drive Islam off the Iberian Peninsula. And Extremadura was the name of the Spanish province where Valdivia was born. Sometimes, though, the Spaniards simply called this far edge of empire, wedged between the Andes and the Pacific, La Nueva Extrema, the New Extreme.

  Africans died on one of the first Spanish attempts to find a way over the Andes, in 1551, during Francisco de Villagrán’s disastrous trek. Villagrán only made it across with the help of Native Americans, wrote a Spanish chronicler, and along the way he lost “two slaves and two horses” to the ice and cold. In 1561, Mendoza was established as an outpost of Santiago, and soon Spaniards were passing back and forth regularly over the mountains. The going was still treacherous. Even during the summer months, when the passes were open, travelers moved slowly along narrow paths, tethered together by guide ropes for support. Native Americans would fly by them. They “traveled liberally, without these ropes,” wrote one Spaniard, “as if they had diamonds on the soles of their feet.”1