The Other Slavery (8 page)

North of Española lay the Bahamas. The Spaniards called them
las islas
lucayas
but also knew them as
las islas inútiles
(the useless islands) because they did not possess gold, pearls, or any other marketable products. The only “goods” that could be derived from them were Indians. Opinions varied about the nature of the Lucayo Indians, their degree of civilization, and whether or not they were cannibals. But there was a broad consensus among the Spaniards of Española that the Lucayos had to be removed from a place where there was nothing of value and transported to other islands where their work was badly needed. Since the life of these Natives was oriented toward the sea, many of them ended their days in the pearl fisheries—“the most infernal and insane life of our time,” according to a knowledgeable sixteenth-century witness.
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Beyond the Lesser Antilles and the Bahamas, Spanish mariners caught glimpses of coastal Florida and the shores of Central America, Colombia, and Venezuela. This was the edge of their known world. Some of these lands were thought to be inhabited by giants. Indeed, the islands of Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela, were called
las islas de los gigantes.
The belief in these giants arose partly from the chivalric romances that were popular among the conquistadors, but also from the very real fact that Natives in some of these areas were considerably taller than sixteenth-century Spaniards. Whether they were real giants or merely tall, these Indians were highly prized by Europeans.
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The first step for anyone wishing to launch a slaving expedition was to obtain a license. Clandestine slaving was possible, but because captives needed to be certified by crown officials before their legal sale in the markets of Española or Puerto Rico, it was best to get a license. Although King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had prohibited the enslavement of Indians in 1500, their order was followed by what appeared to them to be three judicious exceptions. In 1503 the crown authorized the enslavement of Indians who were cannibals—cannibalism being an especially nefarious practice that marked those who engaged in this
practice as somehow less than human. In 1504 the monarchy also allowed the capture of Indians taken in “just wars,” extending to the New World the doctrine that had long justified the impressment and bondage of enemies in Europe. And in 1506 the monarchs permitted the colonists to “ransom” Indians who were enslaved by other Indians and whom the Spaniards could then keep as slaves—the logic being that ransomed Indians would at least become Christianized and their souls would be saved. Governor Ovando and his successors were able to issue licenses by taking advantage of these exceptions. Of the three, they most often used cannibalism to legitimize their raids. Scholars have argued that early Spaniards had perverse incentives to exaggerate, sensationalize, and even fabricate stories of man-eating Indians, given the legal context. Contemporaries also recognized as much. A Spanish judge concluded in 1518 that many
armadores
were “taking Indians from Barbados, the gigantes, and elsewhere who are not Caribs nor proper to be slaves.” But as with other canards, there was a kernel of truth in this one: cannibalism was real in some quarters of the Caribbean and elsewhere in the New World.
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Slave traffickers prowled the Caribbean in the 1510s and 1520s, greatly expanding Europeans’ geographic knowledge. Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida—often depicted as a deluded explorer bent on finding the Fountain of Youth—was in fact deeply involved in the early Caribbean slave trade, sponsoring slaving voyages to the Bahamas and opening Florida to the trade. In fact, the royal patent confirming Ponce de León’s discovery of the “island” of Florida allowed him to “wage war and seize disobedient Indians and carry them away for slaves.” Similarly, the Spaniard who first laid claim to the coast of South Carolina, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a man of “great learning and gravity” deferentially addressed as
el licenciado,
was a prime mover in the slave trade. (The term
licenciado
refers to someone who holds a university degree, usually a lawyer.) We often think of these men simply as “discoverers,” when in reality considerable overlap existed between discoverers and slavers.
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Somewhat counterintuitively, the dispersion of Natives across the Caribbean greatly facilitated the task of capturing and transporting them. Villagers living in small communities on self-contained and exposed
islands had little chance to hide from the intruders or to repel unexpected attacks. Slave raiders formed compact groups of around fifty or sixty men. They arrived quietly on their ships; waited until nighttime, “when the Indians were secure in their mats”; and descended on the Natives, setting their thatched huts on fire, killing anyone who resisted, and capturing all others irrespective of age or gender. Once the initial ambush was over, the slavers often had to pursue the Indians who had escaped, unleashing their mastiffs or running the Natives down with their horses. If there were many captives, the slavers took the trouble of building temporary holding pens by the beach, close to where their ships were moored, while horsemen combed the island. The attackers literally carried off entire populations, leaving empty islands in their wake.
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The Indians were then loaded on the ships, packed into the space belowdecks. The scene in the hold of a slaving ship was infernal. Lack of air, poor provisioning, and the relentless tropical heat magnified the slaves’ suffering to the highest degree. “The Indians could not move,” wrote a young man from Milan named Girolamo Benzoní, “and there they lay like animals amid their vomits and feces. When the sea was calm and the ship could not move, sometimes there was no water for these poor people. Broken down by the heat, the bad smell, and the discomforts, they died miserably down there.” Unlike the Middle Passage, which required a month of travel, slaving voyages in the Caribbean lasted only a few days. Yet the mortality rates of these short passages surpassed those of transatlantic voyages. Friar Las Casas reported that “it was never the case that a ship carrying three or four hundred people did not have to throw overboard one hundred or one hundred and fifty bodies out of lack of food and water”—making for a mortality rate of twenty-five to fifty percent. Although it is tempting to disregard this claim as another of Las Casas’s exaggerations, sources confirm his mortality estimates. Vázquez de Ayllón’s slaving expeditions were among the most notorious for their poor provisioning and very high mortality rates, which cut deeply into his profits and caused untold human suffering and senseless death.
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Spanish slavers did not win every time. In particular, the Natives of the Lesser Antilles were able to fend off raids and occasionally even
go on the offensive, surprising lonely ships and Spanish strongholds. In 1513 about one thousand Caribs attacked the Spanish settlements of Puerto Rico, killing many colonists. Ponce de León blundered when he led a retaliatory slaving raid on the island of Guadalupe in 1515, which ended in total disaster: twenty Spaniards were wounded, and five died. The Indians found themselves at a tremendous technological disadvantage. Indian arrowheads made of fish bones could not penetrate the chain mail armor of the Spaniards, and Indian canoes, though they could easily outmaneuver a caravel, had no chance in a long-distance chase. Nevertheless, the Natives were occasionally able to prevail against the Europeans.
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In general, however, small crews of European slavers operating from dilapidated ships proved tremendously effective in subduing and capturing Indians across the Caribbean. Slaving licenses issued by crown authorities reveal just how responsive these crews were to market opportunities. The number of licenses grew steadily from 1514 through 1517, the years when the Taínos of Española were no longer available in sufficient numbers to satisfy the Spaniards’ demand for gold. There was a sudden drop in licenses in 1518, followed by an extraordinary spike in 1519. It is not difficult to explain these changes. A smallpox epidemic ravaged the Caribbean archipelago in 1518, curtailing the traffickers’ activities. The following year, slavers worked harder than ever before to replenish the dead or dying Indian workforce of the large Caribbean islands, launching more slaving raids than in all the previous years combined and spreading desolation and death to the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles, and parts of the mainland (see
appendix 2
). We can only imagine the grim circumstances of the Caribbean islanders who had to endure the alarming epidemic that took the lives of family members and neighbors, causing widespread dislocation and famine and tremendous hardship. And just when the worst seemed to be subsiding, Indian slavers appeared on the horizon, ready to stuff them into the holds of their ships and take them to the goldfields of Española or the pearl banks off the coast of Venezuela. The Bahamas became almost entirely depopulated. Las Casas estimated the number of Lucayos captured at forty thousand, while a slave trafficker put the figure at “only” fifteen
thousand. Regardless of the actual number, no Lucayo communities remained in the Bahamas except as bands of refugees. By 1520
armadores
like Vázquez de Ayllón were forced to bypass the Bahamian archipelago altogether and venture on to Florida and beyond to find human prey.
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The shorthand version of the history of the Americas posits that virgin soil epidemics were at the root of the demographic devastation that ensued. However, an exclusively biological explanation is at odds with much of the documentation of that era and runs contrary to the observed adaptability of humans. In the long sweep of history, human populations have survived virgin soil epidemics. The most well-known case is the Black Death. Possibly originating in China and spreading along the Silk Road, this epidemic arrived in Europe during the second half of the fourteenth century, when devastating outbreaks wiped out perhaps one-third of the continent’s inhabitants. It is hard to overstate the fear, suffering, and dislocation caused by the Black Death. But its aftermath shows the resilience of human populations. Europe’s losses lingered until the early decades of the fifteenth century, but then the population made a stunning demographic comeback. Men and women kept marrying, enjoyed higher standards of living, and had more children, boosting birthrates all across the continent. The recovery was powerful and long lasting. By the middle of the sixteenth century, all major European regions had reached or surpassed their pre-plague populations. Indeed, we can think of Europe’s colonization of the New World as an extension of this remarkable demographic rebound.
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Left to their own devices, the Native peoples of the Caribbean would have limited their exposure to illness, coping like many other human populations before and after them. We will never know how many Indians actually died of disease alone. But even if one-third, or two-thirds, of the Caribbean islanders had died of influenza, typhus, malaria, and smallpox, they would have been able to stem the decline and, in the fullness of time, rebound demographically. In fact, some Indian populations of the New World did just that. But unlike fourteenth-century Europeans, the Natives of the Caribbean were not left to their own devices. In the wake of the epidemics, slavers appeared on the horizon.
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2

Good Intentions

T
HE SPANISH MONARCHY
may have been bureaucratic, tortuous, and frequently complicit in the enslavement of Indians, but it was also capable of embracing a good cause. In the wake of the demographic debacle of the Caribbean, a group of activists gathered around the Spanish court to stem the tide of further disaster in the early 1540s. The most visible figure among them was Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. One of his favorite tactics consisted of scandalizing court members by reading aloud from a manuscript that he would go on to publish a decade later under the title
Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias
(A short account of the devastation of the Indies). University students today still learn about the gory details of Spain’s conquest from this book.

With the king’s backing, these activists introduced a sweeping new legal code for the Americas, intended to improve the lives of Indians. Airily known as the New Laws, this legislation attempted to achieve nothing less than a new beginning, a new compact with the Natives of the New World. The New Laws of 1542 prohibited the granting of new encomiendas, forbade colonists to compel Natives to carry loads against their will, and prevented Spaniards from forcing Indians to dive for pearls. They were also quite explicit about Indian slavery. Indians were “free vassals,” the code affirmed, “so from here on, no Indian can be made into a slave
under any circumstance
including wars, rebellions, or when ransomed
from other Indians.” Spaniards who had long relied on Indian laborers were in shock, and even later commentators were somewhat confused about the extent of this legislation. Yet there was no ambiguity in the laws themselves, which absolutely prohibited any further enslavement of Indians, closing the few loopholes in previous legislation that had led to the Caribbean disaster.
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One might assume that, though well-meaning, the New Laws were utterly unenforceable. Historians have long noted that they did not stop the enslavement of Indians, and this is undoubtedly true. Centuries after 1542, Spaniards continued to hold Natives in bondage. But even though the laws failed in this regard, they did shape the contours of this institution to a remarkable extent. Owners found themselves perennially at risk of losing their indigenous slaves. Important colonial officials complicit in the traffic of Natives had to worry about royal investigations. And the Indians themselves learned that they were free vassals of the Spanish king. In fact, there is no better evidence for the enduring importance of the New Laws than the lawsuits initiated by Indians all over the empire in an attempt to claim their freedom. If the laws did not matter, why bother? Clearly, Natives cared enough to take their masters to court, even at tremendous personal costs.
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