Transatlantic tragedy

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[ABOVE: Bartolome’ de Las Casas, 16th century. Biblioteca Colombina, Seville, Spain—Public domain, Wikimedia Commons]

In 1516, to preserve the rapidly dwindling Taíno population of the island of Española (Hispaniola in English-language histories), Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), a Dominican friar and activist, suggested importing some Black and White slaves from Castile. Though Las Casas became well known for his insistent appeals and attempts to end exploitation of vulnerable peoples, he has been pilloried ever since for hypocritically advocating the initiation of the African slave trade in the Western Hemisphere to do so.

But what did Las Casas really advocate? Was he the first to do so as so many have claimed? Did he sustain and defend his advocacy of the slave trade over the years? Perhaps most important, how does he fit into the origins and nature of the African slave trade?

AN ESTABLISHED SYSTEM

Las Casas had, in fact, nothing to do with initiation of the slave trade. In the decades before Columbus’s first voyage of discovery in 1492–93, the nascent Portuguese maritime empire had been pushing down the coast of Africa. Portuguese mariners—as they explored for trading and commercial opportunities further south along the African coast—arrived around Senegal and captured some Africans to take back to Portugal and sell into slavery. Soon thereafter they discovered that it was more efficient, less confrontational, and quite a bit safer to deal directly with African kings and chiefs and their representatives along the coast and up the rivers of West Africa, buying instead slaves offered for sale by Africans themselves. Thus began the trade of enslaved Africans to Europeans via seafaring.

Interesting questions frame this story. How was the African slave system organized so that the Portuguese could apparently tap so easily into it? How strongly was slavery embedded into African culture and history? What was it about the initial Portuguese voyage that eventually transformed this somewhat less harsh but widespread form of slavery in Africa into the nightmarish slave voyages of Africans to the New World? 

We know that the Portuguese slave trade simply took advantage of a slave system already well developed in West Africa. Recent research has shown clearly that African slavery flourished in precolonial African empires such as Dahomey and Ashanti (modern Benin and Ghana). Furthermore, the growth and development of this widespread slavery in Africa occurred outside of the Atlantic trade. As historian John Thornton writes: 

The slave trade (and the Atlantic trade in general) should not be seen as an “impact” brought in from outside and functioning as some sort of autonomous factor in African history. Instead, it grew out of and was rationalized by the African societies who participated in it and had complete control over it until the slaves were loaded onto European ships for transfer to Atlantic societies.

Additionally, new research has disproven the preconception of Europeans controlling the slave trade and imposing themselves with unequivocal power and authority over a passive African society.

Indeed early Portuguese attempts to seize scores of slaves either on offshore islands or from the mainland and river estuaries backfired. While one of the first expeditions to the Senegal River region led by Lanzarote de Lagos in 1444 was successful in capturing some people by force, within a few years Africans organized their naval forces with enough prowess to repel subsequent Portuguese expeditions. Thornton notes, 

In 1446 a ship under Nuno Tristâo attempting to land an armed force in the Senegambian region was attacked by African vessels, and the Africans succeeded in killing nearly all the invaders.

In 1456 the Portuguese Crown sent Diogo Gomes “to negotiate treaties of peace and commerce with the African rulers of the coast” to establish some peaceful ground rules for the slave trade since the Portuguese realized early on they could not impose their will on the region. Having done so successfully, Portuguese and Africans settled into a routine of sorts for the rest of the fifteenth century.

COLONIZING AND THE CROSS

While this in no way mitigates the terrifying dimensions of the slave voyages—which included the grossly inhumane practice of shackling hundreds of people side by side for the weeks-long journey with no dignity for the sick and dying, as well as cruel punishment for objection to the conditions— it does give some credence to the Portuguese position that they were simply trafficking in people already in bondage, thus making the slave trade both legal and socially acceptable. (Las Casas would criticize slave voyages and such notions 100 years later in his massive History of the Indies.)

By the time the young Las Casas reached the Indies for the first time in 1502 in the same fleet that carried the new governor, Comendador Nícolas de Ovando, to Santo Domingo, the Portuguese had been importing African slaves into Iberia for half a century. 

Las Casas had followed his father overseas as a colonist himself, part of an arrangement to grow the Spanish settlements on the islands that Columbus had newly discovered and claimed. But as the young man grew in his Christian faith, his experience in the settlements shocked him.

Between 1502 and 1510, Las Casas witnessed the ruthless subjugation of the Taínos on the island of Española by Spanish conquistadors and settlers. Driven by unbridled greed, they exploited the Taínos through outright slavery or by applying the encomienda (a Spanish royal decree that gave colonists the right to force labor and tribute). After witnessing one particularly senseless and brutal massacre in 1514 near the River Caonao in central Cuba, Las Casas broke rank with his fellow settlers.

Unable to convince the conquistadors to reform their behavior consistent with Christian values, Las Casas returned to Spain in 1515 to lay out his appeal directly before King Ferdinand (1452–1516). Although Ferdinand died before he could do much, the regent Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517) did authorize a reform of administration on Hispaniola. Las Casas accompanied some Hieronymite friars sent by Cisneros in 1516 to make things right on the island. But they failed. Openly frustrated with the Hieronymites as well as with the settlers, Las Casas turned to another solution that eventually haunted him the rest of his life—giving the colonists licenses to import African slaves to the islands. The colonists agreed.

Las Casas would do anything to lift the burden of oppression and death off the Taínos. Typically tunnel-visioned, he picked up on the idea, and, back in Spain in 1517 through 1519, he suggested to young King Charles’s (1500–1558) counselors that a license be issued to import slaves directly from Spain or Africa to the islands. Later he reflected on this:

This suggestion to issue a license to bring Negro slaves to the Indies was made first by the cleric Casas [he frequently wrote of himself in the third person], not seeing how unjust the Portuguese were in taking slaves [on the coast of Africa]. Later on he realized how unjustly and tyrannically Africans were taken slaves, in the same fashion as Indians. 

Two sides of Las Casas’s character emerge from this episode. One, Las Casas was quite honest in his admission of shortsightedness; and two, he was totally devoted to the Indians, so much so that he failed initially to see the implications of advocating licenses to import African slaves. 

BLOOD AND GREED

So, the call went down to Seville. They thought that 4,000 slaves would do for the four islands of Española, San Juan [Puerto Rico], Cuba, and Jamaica. 

There was money to be made in this transaction, and a Flemish gentleman in Charles’s court, the governor of Bressa, Lorenzo de Gorrevod (or Gouvenot, c. 1470–1529), quickly petitioned the king to award him the license to import slaves to the Indies. Then he sold (or subcontracted) the licenses to some Genoese in Seville, the brothers Centurione (Melchor, Gaspar, Martín, Esteban, and Luis), and their associates in banking and slave trading—Nicolás Grimaldi and Agustín Vibaldi—for 25,000 ducats (about 4 million US dollars today). The Genoese negotiated a monopoly for the next eight years. They eventually earned over 300,000 ducats on the business, selling their licenses and the Africans for a huge profit. The sea voyages from Africa to the New World colonies were well underway.

Las Casas came to rue the African slave suggestion—while it was meant to lift the terrible burden of exploitation from the native people, in the end the Taínos remained “in captivity until there were none left to kill,” and Black slavery spread like a stain across the New World. In 1522 Las Casas joined the Dominican order and began a 50-year-long ministry of missions, abolitionism, and advocacy for vulnerable peoples. 

Even so, what had started out as a small effort to reduce the suffering of the Native Americans turned into a growing sea trade in human beings from Africa directly to the plantations of the Americas. CH 

By Lawrence A. Clayton

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