Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (25 page)

Condemned by the `curse of Ham' and set apart from the beginning by the colour of their skin, blacks stood little chance in societies which had as yet no developed code of law relating to slavery, and which, with little or no Indian labour available, were otherwise overwhelmingly white. As Virginia's House of Burgesses realized in the wake of Bacon's rebellion in 1676, it was in the interests of masters to prevent the development of an alliance between aggrieved indentured servants and slaves by drawing a sharper dividing line between them in terms of legal status, a process already under way before the rebellion began.103 Gradually the legal shackles were tightened round the Africans, and British America moved inexorably towards the establishment of chattel slavery.

This chattel slavery would make possible the development of plantation economies on the British American mainland whose nearest Iberian equivalent was to be found not in the territories settled by the Spaniards but in Portuguese Brazil.104 In principle, the Spanish Caribbean islands - Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica - might have seemed to offer the same potential in the sixteenth century for the development of monocultures based on slave labour as that which was to be realized in the British island of Barbados in the seventeenth century, or indeed in Spain's own possession of Cuba in the later eighteenth. But, after the early years of plunder and ruthless exploitation were over, the Spanish Caribbean became something of an economic backwater. The more ambitious settlers moved on in search of richer prizes on the mainland, and with their departure the white population of the islands stagnated or declined. The sugar estates of Hispaniola and Cuba, although enjoying some initial successes, found it increasingly hard to compete with the sugar produced in New Spain and Brazil. It was cheaper and easier to concentrate on the less labour-intensive activity of cattle herding and ranching to meet the steady demand in Spain for hides. Moreover, the consequences for Spanish American economic life of the primacy of silver mining in the mainland viceroyalties extended to the Caribbean. As Havana became the port of departure for the annual silver fleets, it was understandable that islanders should lose their enthusiasm for the development of local products for export. There were quicker profits, illicit as well licit, to be made out of Havana's growth as the emporium of a transatlantic trade that was now attracting the predatory interest of Spain's European rivals.'05

It was Brazil, not the Spanish Caribbean, that offered the first, and most spectacular, example of the enormous wealth to be made from large-scale plantations worked by black slave labour. Serious colonization had begun only in the 1540s after the Portuguese had become alarmed by reports of French designs on the vast region that had nominally come into their possession after its accidental discovery by Pedro Alvares Cabral on his expedition to India in 1500. Initially appreciated for their brazilwood trees, which produced a highly prized reddish-purple dye, the coastal regions of the Brazilian north-east, thinly settled by Portuguese colonists, turned out to be well suited to the growing of sugar cane. As the Portuguese crown moved in the years leading up to the union with Spain in 1580 to establish a tighter grasp over its promising new territory, it also began to take a close interest in the creation of a sugar industry. The Tupinamba Indians failed to live up to expectations as a work-force for the new plantations, whether as chattel slaves or as European-style wage-labourers, and large numbers were wiped out by European diseases. With the European demand for sugar expanding, the response to the labour shortage was the same as it was in the Spanish Indies. From the 1560s growing numbers of African slaves were imported to supplement or replace an unsatisfactory and diminishing Indian work-force, and by the end of the century Brazil, now dependent on African labour, had become the world's largest supplier of sugar.'°6

The production techniques responsible for Brazil's spectacular success in growing and exporting sugar could not be kept secret indefinitely. When the Dutch West India Company seized Pernambuco from the Portuguese in the 1630s, the information fell into the hands of their Protestant rivals; and when the settlers chased the Dutch out of Brazil in the course of the decade following Portugal's recovery of independence from Spain in 1640, Sephardic Jews anxious to escape the attention of the Portuguese Inquisition fled Pernambuco for the Antilles, where they instructed the islanders in Brazilian production and processing techniques.107 With Dutch merchants happy to provide the settlers of Barbados with African slaves, the necessary ingredients were at hand for the dramatic expansion of the slave-based sugar plantations of the British Caribbean.

As Virginian tobacco growers came to imitate the example of the Barbadian sugar producers, so the English word `plantation' became more narrowly and specifically defined.108 When the Reverend John Cotton preached a sermon in 1630 on the departure of Winthrop's fleet for New England, he chose as his text a passage from the book of Samuel: `Moreover, I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them."09 The Irish `plantations' of the sixteenth century were essentially plantations of people, which would flourish in the right soil, and offer scope for infinite possibilities. Sir Philip Sidney, as an Irish planter, could write that he had `contrived' a `plantation' that would be `an emporium for the confluence of all nations that love or profess any kind of virtue or com- merce'.110 But, a hundred years later, the developments of the intervening century had begun to accustom people to think of `plantation' as an overseas settlement producing a cash crop for export, and as an emporium for the confluence of nations that professed the least virtuous of all kinds of commerce - the commerce in slaves.

The conditions of that commerce, as it was developed by the Portuguese and then appropriated by the Dutch and the English, were uniformly barbaric, although the ministrations of members of the religious orders at the ports of entry in the Iberian world did something to mitigate the sufferings of the sick and dying as they sought the salvation of their souls. If the seventeenth-century Anglo-American world had its equivalent of the Jesuit Fray Pedro Claver, who embraced the slaves on their arrival in Cartagena and even went down into the stinking holds of the slave-ships," his deeds remain unsung. For those who survived the ordeal of the Atlantic crossing, and subsequently of exposure to the unfamiliar disease environment of the New World, prospects were bleak. Their fate was described in vivid and moving words by Claver's colleague and fellow Jesuit, Alonso de Sandoval, in a work first published in Seville in 1627. Denouncing the treatment to which the new arrivals were subjected, he described how they would be made to work in the mines `from sunrise to sunset, and also long stretches of the night', or, if they were bought as house-slaves, would be treated with such inhumanity that `they would be better off as beasts'."2

Yet, for all the horrors of their situation, African slaves in Spain's American possessions seem to have enjoyed more room for manoeuvre and more opportunities for advancement than their counterparts in British America. Uprooted and far from home, they were regarded as representing less of a potential security threat than the indigenous population. This meant that Spanish settlers tended to use them as overseers or auxiliaries in dealing with the Indian work-force, thus raising them a rung on the increasingly complicated ladder of social and ethnic hierarchy. 113 The settlers' confidence was frequently misplaced, and marauding bands of cimarrones, or fugitive slaves, sometimes operating in collusion with local Indians, became a danger to Spanish settlements, especially in the Caribbean and Panama. 114 Yet the ambiguous status of slaves placed among a population itself subjected to a form of servitude offered opportunities that the shrewd and the fortunate could turn to their advantage.

Paradoxically, slaves in Spanish America also benefited from the fact that peninsular Spain, unlike England, possessed a long experience of slavery. This had led to the development of a code of law and practice which, at least juridically, tended to mitigate the lot of the slave. On the grounds that `all the laws of the world have always favoured liberty',i"' the thirteenth-century code of the Siete Partidas laid down certain conditions governing the treatment of slaves. These included the right to marry, even against the wishes of their masters, and a limited right to hold property. The code also opened the way to possible manumission, either by the master or by the state.

The transfer of slavery to the Spanish Indies inevitably brought departures from peninsular practice.' 16 In the vast areas under Spanish rule it was not easy to enforce the more generous provisions of the Siete Partidas, even when there was a will to do so, and the lot of the slave inevitably varied from region to region and from master to master. Yet the rules relating to marriage, manumission and the holding of property allowed slaves some latitude, and urban slaves in particular quickly became adept at exploiting the rivalries between the different institutions of control, together with the openings offered by the law. In principle, as Christians, they enjoyed the protection of the church and the canon law, and as vassals of the crown could seek redress from royal justice. No doubt many were in no position to take advantage of these possibilities, but the numerous cases that came before the courts in New Spain suggest that, in common with members of the indigenous population, they soon learnt to play the game by Spanish rules. 117 As they battled to establish their rights to marriage or their entitlement to freedom, they managed, with the help of church and crown, to erode the claims of masters to hold them as mere chattels and dispose of their bodies as they wished.

Since children took their mother's and not their father's status, zambos - the offspring of African slave fathers and Indian mothers - were free-born, although in practice this might mean little more than exchanging one wretched lifeprospect for another, since they now became subject to the tribute and labour demands imposed on the Indian population. Legally, however, their status was superior to that of the slave, and although the colonial authorities frowned on the growing number of Afro-Indian unions, the crown refused to break with a custom which favoured a libertarian trend."' Slavery, after all, ran counter to natural law, and natural law exercised a powerful hold over the Hispanic imagination.

Not surprisingly, therefore, manumission was more easily obtained in Spanish than in British America, where various possible avenues to freedom would come to be blocked one by one. The British American colonies increasingly restricted the master's power to free his slaves, whereas in general the territories of the Spanish crown were free of such restraints.119 In Spanish America it was not uncommon for masters - particularly in their last wills and testaments - to grant freedom to their slaves, especially female slaves and the sick and elderly, although this can also be seen as a device that enabled them to avoid the expense of continuing maintenance.120 It was possible, too, for slaves who met the appropriate criteria to win their freedom in the courts, something which seems to have been more difficult to achieve in North America, at least outside New England, although there were always variations between colony and colony and between statute and practice. 121 The majority of manumitted slaves in the Spanish territories, however, appear to have gained their freedom by purchasing it with monies saved from earnings on the side.122

With a constant trickle of manumissions adding to the pool of free Africans already settled in the Indies, the free black population grew rapidly, especially in the cities, and already in early seventeenth-century New Spain the free African urban labour force was beginning to outnumber that of slaves.123 Jointly with artisan slaves owned by artisan masters, free Africans and mulattoes set up confraternities - nineteen in Lima alone in the early seventeenth century124 - and established an uneasy foothold for themselves in a Hispanic American colonial world reluctantly prepared to accept their presence within its stratified society. British America, too, had its free blacks, but as slavery tightened its grip on the southern mainland colonies, the environment in which they lived became progressively less congenial. The advent of the plantation was accompanied by a deepening social and racial degradation, which affected them all.121

The exploitation of the New World's resources by European settlers, drawing - as circumstances suggested and new opportunities presented themselves - on their own labour, that of the indigenous population, and imported African slaves, was based on the recognition of reciprocal needs. Europe needed, or believed that it needed, the products of America, with gold and silver at the top of the list. The colonists needed European commodities that, for one reason or another, they could not supply for themselves. Until sound growth rates were established, they also needed a constant replenishment of people. The interaction of these mutual necessities promoted the rapid development of transatlantic commercial networks, in conformity with patterns dictated in the first instance by the winds and currents of the Atlantic, but also by metropolitan practices and requirements, and by their adjustment to local American conditions.

Through a combination of intuition and seafaring skills Columbus discovered the transatlantic route that would become the norm for the first and most elaborate of the commercial networks linking Europe and America - that between Andalusia and the tropical America of the Caribbean. Taking maximum advantage of the prevailing winds, the route described an elliptical arc, with the outgoing ships from Andalusia making the crossing after stopping over at the Canaries, and returning by more northerly latitudes by way of the Florida Strait and the Azores. If all went well, the outward passage, from Seville's port of San Lucar de Barrameda to Portobelo on the isthmus of Panama, could be done in something like 91 days, while the return journey, always much slower, would take some 128.126 Sailing times were shorter for the London-Jamestown route, although not as short as might appear from Captain Seagull's understandably over-enthusiastic response to the question `How far is it thither?', put by one of his drinking companions in Chapman's Eastward Ho: `Some six weeks' sail, no more, with any indifferent good wind'. The average was in fact 55 days, although the return journey could be done in 40 (see map 2, p. 50).127