The Other Slavery (5 page)

This fifth-century Roman mappamundi divides the earth into five zones: two frozen bands at the poles, a torrid region by the equator (believed to be occupied by an ocean), and two temperate zones. According to subsequent Christian writers, in the aftermath of the great Flood humans adapted to these climatic regions and thus came to acquire widely different physical and mental traits.

All along the Admiral had been extremely observant of the Native islanders—men, women, and children who went about completely naked, or nearly so, and who often painted themselves from head to toe in red and black. In Columbus’s journal and letters, we can find many passages about how plentiful, well proportioned, docile, and alert the Caribbean Indians were. His comments seem innocuous. However, we need to understand his observations in the context of what he expected to find, as historian Nicolás Wey Gómez has recently reminded us. The explorer and his contemporaries subscribed to very old and deeply held notions that linked latitude with character. In this view, belts of latitude wrapped around the earth and corresponded with specific human traits. The inhabitants of the “cold zone” in northern Europe, for instance, tended to be audacious but “of lesser prudence,” while those of the “hot zone,” such as sub-Saharan Africans, were intelligent but “weaker and less spirited.” Such ideas about latitude and character, which harked back to Aristotle and Ptolemy and ran through biblical and medieval authors all the way to Columbus, justified a clear human hierarchy. As luck would have it, the inhabitants of the temperate zone—roughly extending across the Mediterranean—possessed a perfect balance of strength and prudence, which gave them dominion over the peoples who inhabited other latitudes. The Greeks and Romans had shown as much with their conquests, and Portugal’s more recent exploits in western Africa had confirmed this natural hierarchy.
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Had Columbus’s pilots pointed their compasses due west from the coast of Spain, they would have landed somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay just south of modern-day Washington, D.C. Instead, the Admiral went to the Caribbean because, as he put it, “under that parallel of the world [close to the equator] more gold and things of value are found.” A prominent cosmographer of the Spanish court elaborated on the same idea. “All good things come from very hot regions whose inhabitants are black or dark brown,” Jaume Ferrer de Blanes wrote in a letter to Columbus, “and therefore in my judgment, until Your Lordship meets such peoples, You shall fail to find an abundance of such things.”
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By journeying to a part of the world where the sun’s rays were strong, Columbus anticipated finding dark-skinned peoples. On his first voyage, he wrote in his journal that the Indians were “the color of the Canary Islanders, neither black nor white,” and that their hair was not curly but “straight and as coarse as horsehair”—thus they occupied an intermediate position between whites and blacks, an observation that was in line with Columbus’s expectations, because the newly discovered lands lay roughly on the same parallel as the Canary Islands. During the second and third voyages, the Admiral traveled farther and farther south, approaching the equator, but the Natives’ pigmentation did not darken. Columbus and other early explorers were at a loss to explain why the Indians were not “black as in Guinea,” though the sun was strong and the heat was sometimes unbearable in those parts. Regardless of their skin color, Columbus knew these peoples were intelligent but “weaker and less spirited” than Europeans, making them especially suitable as slaves. It is in the context of these assumptions, widely shared by Europeans of the Age of Discovery, that we must understand Columbus’s entries about the “docility” and “ingenuity” of the Indians, as well as his earliest slaving proposals.
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Columbus captured perhaps two dozen Indians during his first voyage. Strictly speaking, these were not slaves but “showpieces” intended as proof of his discovery. The Admiral also hoped that these Indians would learn Spanish and serve as translators on subsequent expeditions. Some of them came from Cuba’s north coast, close to a natural port that Columbus named Puerto Mares. On November 12, 1492, while his ships surveyed the port and river, six Indians in a canoe paddled to the side of one of the caravels to trade. Five Native men climbed up and were easily imprisoned on the Admiral’s orders (the Indian who remained in the canoe narrowly escaped). As they were not enough to suit his needs, Columbus sent some of his men ashore to catch more Natives, “and they brought me seven head of women between young old, and three children. I did this because the men would behave themselves better in Spain having women from their homeland than they would without them.” Later that night, another canoe approached the
Santa María,
this time containing a man of about forty-five years of age, whose wife
and three children had been captured earlier in the day. He begged the Europeans to take him as well, and the Admiral obliged.
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On the way home, Columbus had occasion to observe his captives in close quarters and to reaffirm his preconceptions about their “tameness” and “ingenuity,” so characteristic of peoples in the hot regions. “They began to understand us, and we them, whether by words or by signs,” Columbus would later write of these first captives, “and these have been of great service to us.” The return ocean passage also afforded him time to develop his economic plans, which included the wholesale export of Native slaves. In his very first letter after his return, addressed to the royal comptroller, Luis de Santángel, he promised gold, spices, cotton, and “as many slaves as Their Majesties order to make, from among those who are idolaters.” The Admiral’s plan to ship Natives to Europe was quite understandable given his ideas about the nature of the Indians, his anxieties about making his discovery economically viable, and the one-tenth of the proceeds of the sale of these captives that he would pocket according to the terms of the capitulations
.
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Columbus had a model in mind. Ten years before his great voyage of discovery, he had sailed along the coast of Guinea and visited São Jorge da Mina, the first European fortress and trading post in sub-Saharan Africa. The Portuguese had built the fort one or two years before Columbus’s visit in order to protect their claim to the trade on what is now the coast of Ghana. Unannounced, a fleet of very large ships known as
urcas,
or hulks, had appeared on that coast loaded with bricks, roof tiles, building tools, and scores of masons and carpenters. While Portuguese diplomats overcame the reluctance of the local ruler and the soldiers made room for the fort by bribing African families to move out of their houses and off their plots, the masons worked around the clock. They completed a tower and the outer wall of São Jorge da Mina in a record twenty days, amid rising tensions. At the time of Columbus’s visit, the fort was new, and the resident merchants conducted a diversified trade, mostly in gold dust but also in copper, ivory, salt, and slaves. São Jorge da Mina was still far from becoming one of the most important slaving depots of West Africa—the infamous Elmina, as it was known in later centuries, a corruption of the original Portuguese name, where the slaves bound
for the New World were kept before crossing the Atlantic. But even in its early days, Columbus could observe how a European stronghold on another continent could thrive by trading a variety of products, including humans.
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There is little doubt that the Admiral of the Ocean Sea intended to turn the Caribbean into another Guinea. Early in his second voyage to America, Columbus sent dozens of Carib Indians back to Spain with the first returning ships. Accompanying them was a candid letter to Ferdinand and Isabella: “May Your Highnesses judge whether they ought to be captured, for I believe we could take many of the males every year and an infinite number of women.” The Admiral treaded lightly before touting the quality of the merchandise. “May you also believe that one of them would be worth more than three black slaves from Guinea in strength and ingenuity, as you will gather from those I am shipping out now.” Columbus’s optimistic appraisal of the Indian slaves had a clear intention. Ten days later, he wrote again to the Catholic monarchs, explaining that his stores of wine and wheat were running low. Requesting more caravels loaded with provisions, he proposed, “We could pay for all of that with slaves from among these cannibals, a people very savage and suitable for the purpose, and well made, and of very good intelligence.”
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Columbus’s shipments would continue. A year later, in February 1495, he sent 550 Indians from Española crammed into four caravels bound for the slave market of southern Spain, his largest shipment thus far. Michele da Cuneo, a childhood friend who returned to Europe at this time, wrote an unusually explicit letter about his experiences in the New World. Among other things he reported that his old friend had given him as a present “a beautiful Carib girl [
bellisima Camballa
] who was brought to my cabin . . . and seeing her completely naked as is their custom, the desire to have her came over me.” About the slaves with whom he traveled, Cuneo wrote that about 1,600 captives had been brought to the docks but only 550 of them—“the best males and females”—could be loaded. The rest were distributed among the Europeans who stayed behind or were turned loose. The caravels were filled to capacity. The conditions were extreme. During the passage, approximately 200 Natives perished “because they were not used to the cold weather,” Cuneo
wrote, “and we cast their bodies into the sea.” Of the remaining Indians, half were ill and very weak when they finally arrived in Spain. With this voyage, Columbus inaugurated the Middle Passage, complete with the overcrowding and high mortality rates commonly associated with African slavery.
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The Admiral’s enslavement plans reached their zenith in 1495–1496. “Under the protection of the Holy Trinity, from here [the Caribbean] we can send all the slaves needed,” Columbus insisted yet again to Ferdinand and Isabella, “and if the information that I possess is correct, we could sell four thousand slaves who will be worth at the very least twenty
cuentos
[20 million
maravedís,
or ten times the total cost of Columbus’s first voyage].” It was a remarkable proposal considering that so many Natives would have to be transported to Spain in thirty or forty shiploads. But the payoff would be enormous even if the Admiral’s calculations were only half-correct.
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Left to his own devices, the great discoverer would have turned the Caribbean into another Guinea. Yet two factors steered the Columbian experiment in a different direction. First, the Spanish monarchs opposed the enslavement of the Natives of America. When the first load of slaves arrived, in the spring of 1495, Ferdinand and Isabella initially approved their sale. “About the Indians who came on the caravels,” they wrote to the man in Seville who oversaw the affairs of the New World, Bishop Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, “it seems to us that they would be more easily sold in Andalusia than in other parts.” But only four days later, the Spanish sovereigns wrote again countermanding their previous order and urging Bishop Fonseca to stop immediately the sale of Indians “until we know whether we can sell them or not.” Ferdinand and Isabella needed time to wrestle with the legal, theological, and moral implications of the transactions.
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Slavery was a venerable institution in Spain (and throughout the Mediterranean world). Anyone visiting Seville, Valencia, Barcelona, or any other Iberian city in the fifteenth century would have come in contact with a variety of slaves. Many of these people were Muslims who had lived in Spain for centuries and who had been seized as prisoners during the Reconquista, the Christian campaigns to retake the peninsula.
Other captives came from the eastern edges of Christendom—Greeks, Bulgarians, Russians, Tartars, Circassians, and others traded by Mediterranean merchants. More recently, Spaniards had introduced the Native inhabitants of the Canary Islands, known as
guanches,
and the Portuguese had sold Africans from the west coast of Africa. But regardless of the provenance and circumstances of these captives, they had to go through the same procedure before they could be sold legally. First, they appeared before a Spanish official, who took the depositions of the captors and—crucially—the captives to determine whether they were in fact “enemies of the Catholic church and of the crown” who had been taken in a “good” or “just” war. As a practical matter, this was merely a formality, as officials seldom blocked the sale of captives. But clearly this bureaucratic practice reflected a deeply ingrained Iberian and, more generally, western European belief that proper slaves had to be non-Christian enemies taken not in slaving raids but in wars formally declared by popes and kings. Muslim jihadists clearly fit the bill. But not so—or at least less clearly so—others who regularly appeared shackled in the Spanish slave markets. For example, some masters were troubled or uneasy about acquiring Orthodox Christian Greeks as slaves.
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Therefore the question before the Catholic monarchs was whether the Natives of the New World met this legal standard of “enemy” and thus constituted an enslaveable people. Ferdinand and Isabella appointed a committee of lawyers and theologians to help them reach a final determination. This body deliberated for an astonishing five years. The case must have been difficult in the extreme: the Indians of the New World were not Muslims, and they were not waging an offensive war against Spain; instead it was the other way around. Unfortunately, the committee’s final report is now lost, so we do not know what arguments were advanced for and against the enslavement of the Indians or why the committee deliberated for so long.
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