The Other Slavery (52 page)

17. The quote is from the very famous letter of Columbus to Luis de Santángel, Canary Islands, February 15, 1493, in Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso, ed.,
Colección Documental del Descubrimiento,
3 vols. (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1994), 1:256. See also Wey Gómez,
The Tropics of Empire,
316–317. The distinction made by Columbus seems curious because from the standpoint of most Europeans, all Indians were idolaters. Yet the Admiral initially believed that many Indians possessed no religion.

18. Rui de Pina, “Chronica Del Rei Dom João II,” in Antonio Brásio, ed.,
Monumenta Missionária Africana,
vol. 1 (Lisbon: Agência Geral Do Ultramar, 1952), 8–14; Morison,
Admiral of the Ocean Sea,
42; Paolo Emilio Taviani,
Christopher Columbus: The Grand Design
(London: Orbis, 1985), 110–126; P.E.H. Hair,
The Founding of the Castelo de São Jorge da Mina: An Analysis of Sources
(Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, 1994), 1–41; Christopher R. DeCorse,
An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 26–28, 138–144.

19. The quotes are from Columbus to the Catholic monarchs, La Isabela, January 20, 1494, and January 30, 1494, in Pérez de Tudela y Bueso,
Colección Documental del Descubrimiento,
1:535–536 and 545, respectively. For a general treatment of Indian slavery during these years, including what different Spanish chroniclers have said about this institution, see Deive,
La Española y la esclavitud del indio,
and the more expansive José Antonio Saco,
Historia de la esclavitud de los indios en el Nuevo Mundo,
2 vols. (Havana: Talleres de Cultural, 1932).

20. The most complete account of the slaves dispatched on February 17, 1495, can be found in Michele da Cuneo to Gerolamo Annari, Savona, October 15, 1495, in
L’isola regalata
(Milan: Viennepierre edizioni, 2002), 30–31. The same episode appears in other sources, including Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
1:405.

21. Columbus’s grand proposal is quoted in Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
2:71. See also Rumeu de Armas,
La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica,
133; and Deive,
La Española y la esclavitud del indio,
62–63.

22. The quotes from Ferdinand and Isabella are from Rumeu de Armas,
La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica,
134–138.

23. For an excellent discussion of the practices of enslavement in Spain during the century before the discovery of America, see Debra Blumenthal,
Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

24. Rumeu de Armas,
La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica,
134–138. Brief accounts of the same events appear in Lesley Byrd Simpson,
The Encomienda in New Spain
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), chap. 1; and Deive,
La Española y la esclavitud del indio,
68–70.

25. Rumeu de Armas,
La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica,
134–138. The queen’s outburst is reported in Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas,
Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar oceano,
book 4, chap. 6.

26. Columbus’s memorial is quoted in Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
2:237. The italics are mine. Some of the key texts about Indian slavery in the early Caribbean appear in English translation in Eric Williams,
Documents of West Indian History
(New York: A & B, 1994). For an early work on Indian slavery in the Caribbean, see Edwin A. Levine, “The Seed of Slavery in the New World: An Examination of the Factors Leading to the Impressment of Indian Labor in Hispaniola,”
Revista de Historia de América
60 (1965), 1–68.

27. Las Casas, Oviedo, and Pietro Martire d’Anghiera provide brief accounts of the discovery of gold in Española. Especially detailed is Pietro Martire,
De Orbe Novo,
1:81–82.

28. Pietro Martire,
De Orbe Novo,
1:88, 109.

29. The first and third quotes are from Las Casas, cited in Samuel M. Wilson,
Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 79, 76. The second quote is from Pietro Martire,
De Orbe Novo,
1:88.

30. For gold production figures and estimates of Indians working in the mines, see Oviedo,
Historia general y natural de las Indias,
book 4, chap. 8; and Las Casas,
The Devastation of the Indies,
24–25. For the effects of the pearl rush, see Aldemaro Romero, Susanna Chilbert, and M. G. Eisenhart, “Cubagua’s Pearl-Oyster Beds: The First Depletion of a Natural Resource Caused by Europeans in the American Continent,”
Journal of Political Ecology
6 (1999), 57–78. See also Enrique Otte,
Las perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua
(Caracas: Fundación John Boulton, 1977); and Molly A. Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean,”
Slavery and Abolition
31:3 (September 2010), 345–362. As Carl Sauer notes, the meaning and location of Cibao has changed over the centuries. The lowlands that today are known as Cibao were called the Vega Real at the time of Columbus. Cibao proper encompassed the mountains that today constitute the Cordillera Central. Sauer,
The Early Spanish Main,
80. For the Indian slave trade more broadly, see Erin Woodruff Stone, “Indian Harvest: The Rise of the Indigenous Slave Trade and Diaspora from Española to the Circum-Caribbean, 1492–1542” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2014).

31. Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
1:417; Livi Bacci, “Return to Hispaniola,” 14; Arranz Márquez,
Repartimientos y encomiendas,
60–64.

32. Oviedo,
Historia general y natural de las Indias,
book 6, chap. 8; Las Casas,
The Devastation of the Indies,
24–25. The weight calculation assumes a volume of sixty-four cubic feet and a weight of one hundred pounds for each cubic foot of sand.

33. Oviedo,
Historia general y natural de las Indias,
book 6, chap. 8.

34. The quote is from ibid. The host of those parties was a royal accountant named Santa Clara. Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
2:344. Contemporaries offered different figures for gold production in addition to the gold bullion imports recorded in the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) in Seville. Livi Bacci provides tables with various figures for gold production in Española in the early sixteenth century and gold productivity culled from different gold mines around the world. For the gold mines of Española, he arrived at an upper limit of ten thousand workers, assuming a maximum yearly production of 1,000 kilograms (about 2,000 pounds) of gold and a productivity of about 100 grams (3.5 ounces) per worker. Livi Bacci, “Return to Hispaniola,” 11–20.

35. The phrase is often attributed to Francisco de Bobadilla, cited in Arranz Márquez,
Repartimientos y encomiendas,
82.

36. Ursula Lamb,
Frey Nicolás de Ovando: Governador de las Indias
(Santo Domingo: Sociedad Dominicana de Bibliófilos, 1977), passim.

37. The first quote is from Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, and the second is from King Ferdinand to Diego Columbus, Burgos, February 23, 1512, both cited in Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
96 and 100, respectively.

38. On Ovando’s background, see Lamb,
Frey Nicolás de Ovando,
chaps. 1 and 2. See also Rumeu de Armas,
La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica,
143–145. Ovando had very clear instructions about how to deal with the Indians. See “Instrucción al comendador Frey Nicolás de Ovando,” Granada, September 16, 1501, in Richard Konetzke,
Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispano-américa, 1493–1810,
3 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), 1:4–6.

39. The early encomiendas have been the subject of numerous studies, the best of which are Arranz Márquez,
Repartimientos y encomiendas,
and Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano.
For the European roots of the institution, see Robert S. Chamberlain,
Castilian Backgrounds of the Repartimiento-Encomienda
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute, 1939). For the survival of pre-contact labor arrangements, see Francisco Moscoso,
Tribu y clases en el Caribe antiguo
(San Pedro de Macoris: Universidad Central del Este, 1986).

40. The information about the free caciques and villages is from Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
109–111.

41. The quotes are from the Dominican Friars of La Española to Señor de Chiebvres, Santo Domingo, June 4, 1516, cited in Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
37; Oviedo,
Historia general y natural de las Indias,
book 1, chap. 3; Las Casas,
The Devastation of the Indies,
24–25; and King Ferdinand to Diego Colón, July 21, 1511.

42. The witness is quoted in Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
111.

43. The quotes appear in Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
2:346; and Pietro Martire,
De Orbe Novo,
4th decade, book 10. Governor Ovando proposed the idea of bringing additional slaves to the island as early as 1507. He dispatched two representatives to Spain, who secured the necessary support from the Spanish crown, as is clear in the instructions to Ovando, Burgos, April 30, 1508, quoted in Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
267.

44. For an excellent archaeological report of the town of Isabela, see Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent,
Columbus’s Outpost Among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). For glimpses of the two ports on the northern shore, see Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
1:429; 2:241, 269, 338, 340, 348, 435.

45. The quote is from Oviedo,
Historia general y natural de las Indias,
book 1, chap. 5. Carlos Esteban Deive has gathered the most relevant passages concerning the first contacts with the Carib Indians and the opinions of Europeans about cannibalism. Deive,
La Española y la esclavitud del indio,
27–34. On the conflation of “Caribe,” “Caniba,” “cannibal,” and other words and the early reports of cannibals, see William F. Keegan, “Columbus Was a Cannibal: Myth and the First Encounters,” and Louis Allaire, “Visions of Cannibals: Distant Islands and Distant Lands in Taino World Image,” both in Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, eds.,
The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 17–32 and 18–49, respectively. See also Irving Rouse,
The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); and Neil L. Whitehead, “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: The Caribbean, 1492–1580,” in Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, eds.,
The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas,
vol. 3, part 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 864–903. Scholarly debates still rage about the ethnic and cultural affiliations of certain islanders. See, for example, Jalil Sued Badillo, “Guadalupe: ¿Caribe o taína? La isla de Guadalupe y su cuestionable identidad caribe en la época pre-colombina; Una revisión etnohistórica y arqueológica,”
Caribbean Studies
35:1 (January–June 2007), 37–85.

46. Following scholarly convention, I use the name Lucayos for the inhabitants of the Bahamas. See Sauer,
The Early Spanish Main,
159; and William F. Keegan,
The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Bahamas
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 11. On pearl-related slavery, see Otte,
Las perlas del Caribe;
Julian Granberry, “Spanish Slave Trade in the Bahamas, 1509–1530: An Aspect of the Caribbean Pearl Industry,”
Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society
1 (1979), 14–15; and, more recently, Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean.” The term
islas inútiles
often also encompassed the Lesser Antilles.

47. On the early slaving raids in Central America, see the excellent essay by Carmen Mena García and Carmen María Panera Rico, “Los inicios de la esclavitud indígena en el Darién y la desaparición de los ‘Cuevas’” (paper presented at the Congreso de la Asociación Española de Americanistas, Barcelona, September 2011); and, more generally, Carmen Mena García,
El oro del Darién: Entradas y cabalgadas en la conquista de Tierra Firme, 1509–1526
(Seville: Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2011). See also William L. Sherman,
Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Linda A. Newson,
Indian Survival in Colonial Nicaragua
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); and Mario Góngora,
Los grupos de conquistadores en Tierra Firme, 1509–1530
(Santiago: Universidad de Chile Centro de Historia Colonial, 1962). For early Indian enslavement on the coast of Venezuela, see Morella A. Jiménez G.,
La esclavitud indígena en Venezuela, siglo XVI
(Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1986).

48. The royal prohibition against taking Indian slaves and the subsequent exceptions to the prohibition are discussed in numerous works, including Rumeu de Armas,
La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica,
140–141; Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
266–267; Deive,
La Española y la esclavitud del indio,
72–83; and, most recently, Nancy E. van Deusen,
Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 3–5. The quote is from Judge Rodrigo de Figueroa, cited in Sauer,
The Early Spanish Main,
195. The literature discussing Indian cannibalism is vast. For a brief and convincing review, see Neil L. Whitehead,
Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guyana, 1498–1820
(Dordrecht: Foris, 1988), 172–180.