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THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE-PORTUGUESE AND SPANISH EXPLOITATIONS
1500CE
Name: Dharna Patel
Course: HIS 101 – Western Civilization
Date: December 4th
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.