THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE-PORTUGUESE AND SPANISH EXPLOITATIONS 1500CE Name: Dharna Patel Course: HIS 101 – Western Civilization Date: December 4th 1 As Aldous Huxley once proclaimed, facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Most studies on the early periods of Western Civilization mostly focus on the Spanish conquest of America in the interchanges between Europe and the New World. They mostly omit how Africans-especially West Africa-was a channel of influence as the epicenter of the first transAtlantic slave trade from circa 1520 to the 1580s. The words slave trade and slavery conjure up visceral feelings of shame and revulsion. However, slavery was an ancient institution that existed even more than 11,000 years ago during the Neolithic Revolution. Therefore, it is essential to analyze how the trans-Atlantic trade came to being and how it led to a slavery cycle in Europe and the United States that lasted well to the 19th century. The central question that faces anyone writing a biography of the Atlantic Slave Trade is why Africans were enslaved and transported to the New World. This article attempts to answer these questions through the biography of the Atlantic Slave Trade during the beginning of the trade in the 1500s. Since Portugal and Spain had risen to great colonial powers in the fifteenth century, they used the Age of Exploration in searching new lands with their principle aim being sailing around Africa to establish a sea route for the Spice Islands with their primary interest being gold1. The pepper, slaves, ivory, and other products were initially secondary concerns. The first shipping of slaves to Europe began in 1444 and was only sent to Europe as domestic servants. However, when they started sugar production in the Atlantic Islands as well as the European Conquest in the Western Hemisphere, a new and essential use was discovered for slaves at the end of the fifteenth century 2. They became the main factor in agricultural 1 Keller, S. (Ed.). (2015). The Age of Exploration. Encyclopedia Britannica. Johnston, Mark. "The Sugar Trade in the West Indies and Brazil between 1492 and 1700." James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, https://www. lib. umn. edu/bell/tradeproducts/sugar (accessed Jan. 20. 2016) (2016). 2 2 production and the Portuguese interest in African Trade in gold and ivory slowly faded and focused on buying and selling slaves. The Portuguese initially concentrated their slave trade efforts on three main regions: the Gold Coast, Senegambia, and Mauritania. They even established interior routes with the help of the navigable Gambia and Senegal Rivers, creating offshore trading posts. They further developed Sao Jorge da Mina (Elmina) on the Gold Coast in 1481 which further served their interest on slaves. Slave trade among the Portuguese slowly started with about 800 slaves taken per year between the 1450s and 1460s. However, over the next two decades, it grew to almost 1,500 and over 2,000 per year in the next two decades of the 1480s to 1490s. There occurred a significant structural change after 1500. At the same time, João Jorge, the procurator of Santiago, Cabo Verde, wrote to the king of Portugal in May 1510, underlining the importance of Santiago. The letter noted that it was important that the island should not be abandoned, because it was “one of the main help of India and Guinea … and the islanders serve Your Highness with great love and diligence, because if they had not given 70 blacks to the fleet of Afonso d’Albuquerque to help him man his pumps with the strength of their arms and take him back to Lisbon the fleet would have been lost (Albuquerque arrived in Lisbon from Calicut in January 1504)… moreover, in the same way, they aid all the sailing ships of Your Majesty which arrive there”3. The economic situation from West Africa was a necessary condition for the rise of the trans-Atlantic trade due to direct shipment of slaves from West Africa. Slaves from Kongo and Angola populated the plantations of São Tomé and were prominent in the direct trade to Portugal. 3 Fradera, Josep M., and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Slavery and antislavery in Spain's Atlantic empire. Vol. 9. Berghahn Books, 2013. 3 As the work of Las Casas attests, slavery was vital to early Spanish conquests in the New World. As Columbus described the situation to Ferdinand and Isabela, a shortage of Native American slaves there was not. Thus in order for Upper Guinea and Senegambia to develop a pan-Atlantic slave trade, one other condition made it happen: the genocide of the Taíno people who lived in the Caribbean. The Taíno population of Hispaniola in 1492 is generally reckoned not to have been less than 300,000. According to Las Casas, who had original documents which no longer exist, the Dominican friar Bernardo de Santo Domingo wrote in 1515 that when the Spanish first set foot in the Caribbean, they had found over one million Taínos on Hispaniola, but during the period of his writing, there were only 10,000 Taínos left4. Even though these estimates are unreliable, a 1508 census suggested an original population of around 400,0005. There was a direct connection between the trans-Atlantic slave trade from Western Africa and the genocide in the Caribbean. It was Las Casas himself who, having traveled to Spain in 1517, managed to persuade Charles V to grant a license in 1518 for purposes of directly taking slaves from Africa to the Caribbean6. The license was granted to Laurent de Gouvenot, the governor of Bresse, who sub-contracted it to Genoese merchants. To relieve the labor shortage in Hispaniola, four thousand slaves were to be transported directly from Africa7. The contract had a direct effect. In December 1517, Alonso Suazo, the judge of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, Pons, Frank Moya. "The Taínos of Hispaniola: The Island’s First Inhabitants." In The Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 211-219. Routledge, 2017. 5 Frank Moya, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 215 6 Harmer, Harry. Longman Companion to Slavery, Emancipation and Civil Rights. Routledge, 2014. 7 See also Harry (2014: 20) on the contract with Ehringer and Seiler. The earliest such case of direct traffic from Cabo Verde I have found is from 1526, detailed in AGI, Justicia 9 No. 7; but cf. also above on the request from the Jeronymite monks governing Hispaniola in 1518 for a direct traffic, and the evidence of illegal contraband trade in 1514, which suggests it may have taken place much earlier. 4 4 was asking for ships to travel from Hispaniola to Seville to buy trade goods with which to purchase slaves in Cabo Verde8. Then, in 1518, the three Jeronymite monks governing Hispaniola requested that ships from Hispaniola be allowed to go straight to Cabo Verde and bring slaves9. Las Casas later wrote that what moved him to make this petition was the desire to relieve the Native Americans of their appalling suffering. Thus had there been no genocide, Las Casas would never have made such a request. A system of licenses to import Black slaves to the Caribbean via Iberia began in 151310. It was another case of the state catching up with reality: African slaves had been imported to work on Hispaniola as early as 150211. King Fernando of Spain had even sent one hundred African slaves directly to Hispaniola in 1505 to work for him in the mines12. In 1510, he had ordered fifty more slaves to be used in the royal mines13. The route from Cabo Verde to the Indies was fully established by the mid-1520s, with licenses initially given to various residents of Hispaniola to bring slaves under the general license granted to Gouvenot in 151814. Several documents have been discovered by María Manuel Ferraz Torrão which confirm merchants in Seville sending ships to Santo Domingo via Cabo Verde from 1525 at the latest15. Due to the rampant and notorious illegal trade, during this 8 Harry, 203. See note 5 above. 10 Hall, Trevor P. Before Middle Passage: Translated Portuguese Manuscripts of Atlantic Slave Trading from West Africa to Iberian Territories, 1513-26. Routledge, 2016. 11 Brewer, Stewart. "The African Atlantic Slave Trade in Latin America." In Latin American History Goes to the Movies, pp. 78-89. Routledge, 2015. 12 Stewart, Latin American History Goes to the Movies, 79 13 Stewart, Latin American History Goes to the Movies, 81 14 T. Hall (2016, 439-40) suggests that only in the 1530s did more ships go directly from West Africa to the Americas; however, this may underestimate both the 1518 decree permitting a direct trade from Africa to America and this evidence of trade by 1514, illustrating the need which the 1518 decree sought to meet. 15 Torrão (2015: 9) concurs that direct slaving between Cabo Verde and the New World had begun by the end of the 1510s. 9 5 period, the number of slaves transported to the Americas was more substantial compared to the real number of licenses granted. An official wrote to Charles V from Hispaniola in 1526 suggesting that six hundred contraband slaves had been introduced to that island in that year alone16. Indeed, contraband had been recognized as a problem in the slave trade in Western Africa since 1514 at least, when one of the royal decrees issued by Manoel noted a problem with the traders and ship crew at Cantor/Kantora on the River Gambia, who did not “tell the truth about the trade for the merchandise. It was clear that the importation of Africans to the new colonies was a process which would not be reversed. The proportion of American slaves derived from Western Africa was undoubtedly significant. Curtin suggests that between 1526 and 1550 they constituted 80 percent of the slaves making for the New World, and Hugh Thomas claims that in the period to 1550 three-fourths of the slaves in Lima and Arequipa came from the “Guinea of Cape Verde.” By the middle of the sixteenth century, before being transported to other parts of the Americas, over two thousand African slaves per annum were entering Hispaniola. Each sugar plantation, or ingenio, on that island alone often employed between 150 and 200 slaves17. A judge from the Audiencia of the island who resided there between 1557 and 1564 wrote that there was one ingenio with 900 slaves and that there were 20,000 Black slaves on the island in total18 After rigorous research from letters, court documents and other related materials, there are estimates of the total number of African slaves annually transported to the Americas was over 16 Harry, 114 Sublette, Ned, and Constance Sublette. American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. Chicago Review Press, 2015. 18 For a new perspective on the volume of the slave trade between 1570 and 1640, see Wheat (2009: 77–120). 17 6 one million during the seventeenth century and over five million during the eighteenth century. The slave trade gradually spread from West Africa and spread through Central Africa and East Africa. Altogether, from the 1500s to the nineteenth century, over twenty-five million African slaves were transported to the New World. As depicted above, the main reason Portuguese and Spanish sourced for slaves was working in sugarcane plantations during the 1500s after the Taíno genocide. As they got overthrown by the British, German and French, more slave exploitations happened. 7 Bibliography Brewer, Stewart. "The African Atlantic Slave Trade in Latin America." In Latin American History Goes to the Movies, pp. 78-89. Routledge, 2015. Fradera, Josep M., and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Slavery and antislavery in Spain's Atlantic empire. Vol. 9. Berghahn Books, 2013. Fradera, Josep Maria. "The Peculiarity of the Spanish Empire: A Comparative Interpretation." From Al-Andalus to the Americas (13th-17th Centuries): Destruction and Construction of Societies (2018): 429. Hall, Trevor P. Before Middle Passage: Translated Portuguese Manuscripts of Atlantic Slave Trading from West Africa to Iberian Territories, 1513-26. Routledge, 2016. Harmer, Harry. Longman Companion to Slavery, Emancipation and Civil Rights. Routledge, 2014. Johnston, Mark. "The Sugar Trade in the West Indies and Brazil between 1492 and 1700." James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, https://www.lib.umn.edu/bell/tradeproducts/sugar (accessed Dec. 4. 2018) (2016). Keller, S. (Ed.). (2015). The Age of Exploration. Encyclopedia Britannica. Pons, Frank Moya. "The Taínos of Hispaniola: The Island’s First Inhabitants." In The Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 211-219. Routledge, 2017. Sublette, Ned, and Constance Sublette. American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. Chicago Review Press, 2015.