The Other Slavery (56 page)

11. At least three Englishmen left accounts of their experiences: Miles Phillips, “A discourse written by one Miles Phillips, Englishman, one of the company put on shore northward of Pánuco by M. John Hawkins 1568” (hereafter cited as Phillips’s account), and Job Hortop, “The travails of Job Hortop which Sir John Hawkins set on land within the Bay of Mexico on the 8 of October 1568,” both in Richard Hakluyt,
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation,
12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904), 9:398–465; and “Testimonio de Antonio Godard,” Seville, November 2, 1569, AGI, Indiferente, 902, N. 1, R. 3, 5–10. The quotes are from Phillips’s account
,
410.

12. Phillips’s account, 398–405. Hawkins’s exploits, including this third slaving voyage, are well documented in Antonio Rumeu de Armas,
Viajes de John Hawkins
(Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1947); Raynor Unwin,
The Defeat of John Hawkins: A Biography of His Third Slaving Voyage
(London: Readers Union, 1921); Harry Kelsey,
Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Robert S. Weddle,
Spanish Sea: The Gulf of Mexico in North American Discovery, 1500–1685
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), 297–307.

13. Phillips’s account, 410–411.

14. Ibid., 414–415. The eyewitness accounts differ in a few details but not in substance. See the discussion in Temkin,
Luis de Carvajal,
42–52.

15. Phillips’s account, 416; Temkin,
Luis de Carvajal,
50–52.

16. Phillips’s account, 417. Although different types of leagues were used at the time and it is not always easy to determine which one is referred to, my general assumption is that 1 Spanish league equals a little over 3 miles or 4.8 kilometers.

17. Phillips’s account, 417–420. For an excellent analysis of African coffles, see Joseph C. Miller,
Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 190–199. Some Indians transformed themselves into what some scholars have termed “militaristic slaving societies.” The term was coined by Robbie Ethridge, “Creating the Shatter Zone: The Indian Slave Traders and the Collapse of the Southwestern Chiefdoms,” in Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge, eds.,
Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 207–218. See also, more generally, Ethridge and Shuck-Hall,
Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone;
and Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead,
War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare
(Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1992).

18. Phillips’s account, 420–421.

19. Ibid., 421.

20. Ibid., 421–422.

21. Ibid., 423. As the Englishmen’s accounts make clear, they received favorable treatment when compared with Indian slaves. Yet as suspected Lutherans, they were also investigated and sentenced by the Spanish Inquisition, which was formally established in New Spain in 1571. A number of the men, including John Gray, John
Browne, John Rider, James Collier, Thomas Browne, John Keyes, and several others, received lashes or served in monasteries while wearing the
sanbenito,
the garment worn by those convicted by the Inquisition. Miles Phillips was sentenced to serve in a monastery for five years but did not get lashes. The inquisitorial proceedings of some of these men provide some information about Hawkins’s expedition and reveal that several of the Englishmen worked in the mines of Guanajuato and Taxco. See the proceedings of David Alejandro and Guillermo Calens, in Julio Jiménez Rueda, ed.,
Corsarios Franceses e Ingleses en la Inquisición de la Nueva España
(Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1945), 231–304 and 307–506, respectively.

22. For an interesting survey of the frequency and location of colonial rebellions, see Friedrich Katz, “Rural Uprisings in Preconquest and Colonial Mexico,” in Friedrich Katz, ed.,
Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 65–94. On the patterns of rebellion in central Mexico, see William B. Taylor,
Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979). The classic work on the Chichimec Wars is Philip Wayne Powell’s
Soldiers, Indians and Silver: North America’s First Frontier War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952). Powell argues that the war lasted from the 1550s to the 1590s. More recently, José Francisco Román Gutiérrez has revised this chronology, showing that the wars started in the 1530s with the arrival of Nuño de Guzmán in northwestern Mexico. Gutiérrez,
Sociedad y Evangelización en la Nueva Galicia durante el siglo XVI
(Guadalajara: El Colegio de Jalisco, 1993), 360–366. See also Carrillo Cázares,
El Debate sobre la Guerra Chichimeca,
1:40. For Carvajal’s journey to New Spain, see Temkin,
Luis de Carvajal,
26–30. The Englishman John Chilton visited Tampico in 1572. Although some aspects of his account are vague or erroneous, this part jibes with other evidence about the unsettled conditions in town. See Luis Velasco y Mendoza,
Repoblación de Tampico
(Mexico City: Imprenta Manuel León Sánchez, 1942), 13; and Temkin,
Luis de Carvajal,
212–213 n. 8. For glimpses of Tampico in the sixteenth century, see Velasco y Mendoza,
Repoblación de Tampico,
10–18. The
Suma de Visitas,
based on an inspection tour of 1548; the
relaciones geográficas,
or questionnaires and maps elaborated in 1579–1585; and the Ortelius atlas, containing a map of the Huasteca region, all help clarify the human geography of this area. See Guilhem Olivier,
Viaje a la Huasteca con Guy Stresser-Péan
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008), 247–256; and the
Suma de Visitas de Pueblos por Orden Alfabético,
in Francisco del Paso y Troncoso,
Papeles de Nueva España
(Madrid: Impresores de la Real Casa, 1905), 230.

23. The quote about the Chichimecs is from Fray Guillermo de Santa María, quoted in Alberto Carrillo Cázares, ed.,
Guerra de los Chichimecas
(Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2003), 117. See also Powell,
Soldiers, Indians and Silver,
50–51.

24. Kelsey,
Sir John Hawkins,
71–93; Philip Wayne Powell,
Mexico’s Miguel Caldera: The Taming of America’s First Frontier, 1548–1597
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 40–45.

25. On the council of 1569 and at least three others that followed, see Carrillo Cázares,
El Debate sobre la Guerra Chichimeca,
56–57, 223–245; Powell,
Soldiers, Indians and Silver,
106–107; and Powell,
Mexico’s Miguel Caldera,
68–69.

26. On Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras’s position, see his letter to chief councilor of the Indies Juan de Ovando, Mexico City, August 31, 1574, in Paso y Troncoso,
Epistolario de Nueva España,
11, 179.

27. The quotes are from “Comisión título de capitán para Luis de Carvajal,” Mexico, April 11, 1572; Viceroy Enríquez to Carvajal, Mexico, April 17, 1572; and testimony by Juan de Urribarri, Mexico City, February 15, 1578, all cited in Temkin,
Luis de Carvajal,
54, 54, and 61, respectively.

28. Fiscal Arteaga Mendiola to King Philip II, Mexico City, March 30, 1576, and November 2, 1576, both in Temkin,
Luis de Carvajal,
69.

29. Francisco de Belver, quoted in Primo Feliciano Velázquez,
Historia de San Luis Potosí,
4 vols. (Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, 1946), 1:330. Carvajal’s pronouncement reportedly occurred at the church of Xilitla (or Xelitla), not far from Jalpan. Soldiers Cristóbal Rangel and Martín Robles, who were not present at Xilitla at the time, heard the same version and provided testimony to that effect. Velázquez,
Historia de San Luis Potosí,
329. Temkin discounts Belver’s testimony, claiming that he was one of the soldiers disrupting the peace that Carvajal had achieved in the region in 1576. In fact, to clear Carvajal of all wrongdoing, Temkin goes on to question the motivations not only of Belver but also of the
fiscal
of the Audiencia of Mexico, Eugenio de Salazar, and of the viceroy, Álvaro Manrique de Zúñiga, Marquis de Villamanrique. Temkin,
Luis de Carvajal,
70–72, 129–171.

30. Philip Wayne Powell,
War and Peace on the North Mexican Frontier: A Documentary Record,
vol. 1 (Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1971), 163–182; Powell,
Mexico’s Miguel Caldera,
54–55, 60.

31. Provinces or regions in the Spanish empire were often referred to as “kingdoms,” such as the “kingdom of New Mexico” or the “kingdom of Guatemala.” “New Spain” and “Mexico” are used interchangeably in this book to refer to the region that now includes the country of Mexico and the American Southwest.

32. Eugenio del Hoyo,
Esclavitud y encomiendas de indios en el Nuevo Reino de León, siglos XVI y XVII
(Monterrey: Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León, 1985), passim. In northern Mexico, encomiendas had traditionally amounted to spoils of conquest. In theory Spanish governors gave these grants of Indians to “worthy” or “meritorious” colonists. But in practice the system often operated the other way around: Spanish colonists subdued Indian bands that they subsequently requested be granted to them as encomiendas. In places such as Nuevo León, Durango, and Chihuahua, these roundups of Indians were indistinguishable from slave raids. Over the years, however, the Spanish crown whittled away at the encomenderos’ stranglehold on such Indians by reducing the time they could hold their encomiendas—initially from perpetuity to “three lives” (i.e., three generations) and then, by the middle of the seventeenth century, to “two lives.” Finally, in the heat of the Spanish campaign of 1673, the crown forbade the granting of new encomiendas altogether. For the constraining role played by colonial officials, see Chantal Cramaussel, “Encomiendas, repartimientos y conquista en Nueva Vizcaya,”
Historias
25 (October–March 1991), 1–18. Bans on encomiendas did not always succeed. In Nuevo León, for example, the abolition of encomiendas led to the rise of
congregas,
forced resettlements of Indians
close to mines and other Spanish businesses, which in many ways retained the same coercive elements. Thus the early eighteenth century witnessed a struggle in Nuevo León between a reformist visitor named Francisco Barbadillo and the local landed elite over how to incorporate the nomadic Indians into the Spanish enterprises and body politic. Sean F. McEnroe,
From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 2. See also Susan Deeds,
Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 74–75.

33. Governor Carvajal’s affidavit appears in a lawsuit by a miner from Zacualpan named Alonso de Nava against Luis de Carvajal the younger over a thirteen-year-old Chichimec Indian named Francisco. Affidavit by Governor Luis de Carvajal, León, March 21, 1586, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter cited as AGN), Real Fisco de la Inquisición, 1593, vol. 8, exp. 3, fols. 49–68.

34. Viceroy to the king, Mexico City, August 10, 1586, “Cartas del virrey Marqués de Villamanrique,” AGI, Mexico, 20, N. 135. The quote is from Affidavit by Governor Luis de Carvajal, León, March 21, 1586.

35. On el Mozo’s involvement in the slave trade, see the lawsuit by the Zacualpan miner Alonso de Nava against Luis de Carvajal el Mozo over the thirteen-year-old Chichimec Indian Francisco. AGN, Real Fisco de la Inquisición, 1593, vol. 8, exp. 3, fols. 49–68. In his inquisitorial deposition, el Mozo describes his occupation as “merchant of the mines and other parts.” In another part of his deposition, he clearly states that he “went to the town of Pánuco, and from there took provisions to the war of Tamapache, and then in the company of his father came to Mexico City with some slaves that his father was taking to sell.” Deposition of el Mozo in the proceedings against Governor Carvajal, in Toro,
Los judíos en la Nueva España,
237, 242. For the Indians sold by el Mozo, see Affidavit by Governor Luis de Carvajal, León, March 21, 1586. The quote is from Carvajal,
The Enlightened,
58–60.

36. Currently, the most detailed biography of Carvajal is Samuel Temkin’s
Luis de Carvajal.
Temkin has gone beyond previous scholars in unearthing relevant information about this fascinating figure. As stated in his introduction, Temkin believes that a number of present-day scholars who have written critically about Carvajal—highlighting in particular his slaving activities—are biased. As a result, his biography leans heavily on Carvajal’s own self-defense. Temkin found corroborating evidence for “every one of the claims Carvajal made” and regards some of the accusations against him as mere “fabrications” and part of a “scheme” by his enemies to bring about his downfall. In his drive to clear Carvajal of
all
charges, Temkin intentionally avoids in his book what he calls “hearsay testimony” and “sworn affidavits by witnesses who stood to benefit from their testimony.” As is clear from this chapter, while I embrace the new information presented in Temkin’s biography, I fundamentally disagree with his broad acquittal of Carvajal of any involvement in the slave trade. I offer additional information about Carvajal’s slaving activities and discuss his life in the context of a frontier environment in which not only he but many other Spanish conquerors, settlers, and officials, as well as many Natives, profited from the sale of Indians. For more critical appraisals of Carvajal’s life, see, for example, Vito Alessio
Robles,
Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial
(Mexico City: Porrúa, 1978); Eugenio del Hoyo,
Historia del Nuevo Reino de León,
1577–1723
(Mexico City: Libros de México, 1979); and Velázquez,
Historia de San Luis Potosí
. For Carvajal’s activities, see his inquisitorial testimony in Toro,
Los judíos en la Nueva España,
339; and Temkin,
Luis de Carvajal,
63–72. The quotes are from viceroy to the king, Mexico City, August 10, 1586; king of Spain to his viceroy and audiencia members, San Lorenzo, August 8, 1587, in Konetzke,
Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica,
1:583–584; and Velázquez,
Historia de San Luis Potosí,
330–337.