The Other Slavery (13 page)

In one decade, Melgarejo freed 3,150 Indian slaves, a small fraction of the 100,000 or more of them in Mexico at the time. The trial transcripts are missing (or at least have not been found), so all we know about the trials comes from the reports written by the procurador himself. Still, it is possible to glean some sense of how they progressed. First, since Melgarejo believed that some slaves were justly made and others were not, he insisted on lengthy proceedings to get to the bottom of each case. Whereas on the island of Española, the procurador had granted
freedom automatically to all petitioners, in Mexico Indian slaves faced long and arduous legal fights and therefore had strong incentives to settle their cases. Especially in the early years, trials could last a year or longer, during which time many of the slaves either died, fled, or found an accommodation with their masters or some other individuals. Slaves often dropped their lawsuits after agreeing to serve their masters for a few more years, while receiving token salaries. In this sense, they remained “in deposit” with their former masters under conditions that could not have been much different from slavery.
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It is also evident that Melgarejo bowed to political pressure in some of his decisions. For example, many lawsuits were initiated by Indians from western Mexico who had been captured during the Mixtón War. Because that uprising had been so serious, the Audiencia of Mexico had declared legal the enslavement of the former rebels, who numbered in the thousands. Melgarejo had the authority to overrule the audiencia, but in the end he went along with its decision and refused to liberate any petitioners involved in that war.
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Perhaps the greatest challenge to Mexican authorities was what to do with the Indians working in the mines. They had been reluctant to liberate these Indians out of fear of disrupting the colonial economy. According to an account provided by a member of the Audiencia of Mexico in 1550, when Indians toiling in the nearby mines of Taxco, Zultepec, and Zumpango arrived in Mexico City to request their freedom, they were ordinarily returned to their owners if they had brands on their faces. The brands were considered sufficient proof of their servile status. “And the most common outcome, is that the owner gets his slave back and the case ends there and the Indian continues as before if not worse because he infuriated his master.”
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Indians who worked in distant mines on the frontier were even more disadvantaged because they had to travel great distances to Mexico City to appeal for their freedom. Occasionally the crown sent
visitadores,
or inspectors, to the mines, in which case the Indians could present their petitions to the inspectors. In 1550 Hernando Martínez de la Marcha made the rounds of several mines. A man of great energy and strong opinions, Martínez de la Marcha traveled through western
Mexico almost continuously for a year, sometimes on horseback and other times on a litter carried by Indians—a mode of transportation that raised some eyebrows. Undaunted, the
visitador
wrote reports about the unsettled conditions of the frontier and the convenience of making Indian slaves. When mine workers approached him to request their freedom, far from liberating them, he admonished them to obey their masters.
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In spite of the crown’s insistence, New World liberations were few and extremely difficult to accomplish. The specific application of the New Laws in the various colonies differed, but the results were much the same. In Venezuela, for example, the laws, and specifically the prohibition against Indian slavery, were made public but not enforced. Slave raids continued in Cubagua and Margarita even though royal officials were well aware that such activities were strictly forbidden. Colonists in Venezuela generally refused to give up their Indian slaves and insisted that the brand on a slave’s face was sufficient title and reason to keep him or her in bondage. They also retained the service of a class of Indians known as
naborías,
who were indigenous servants attached to them for life. The only difference between naborías and outright slaves was that naborías could not be legally bought and sold.
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In contrast, in Central America an uncompromising and vigorous royal official named Alonso López de Cerrato embarked on blanket liberations of Indian slaves. Next to Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cerrato ranks as the most ardent champion of Indian liberty of the sixteenth century. As president of the Audiencia of Central America, Judge Cerrato prosecuted slave takers, criticized officials who “preferred to make friends with the colonists rather than applying the New Laws,” and refused to make invidious distinctions among Indians to justify the enslavement of some of them, as happened in Mexico. Cerrato’s vigorous reforms ended formal Indian slavery in Central America, restricted the use of naborías
,
and regulated the use of Indians as
tamemes,
or load bearers. But even these victories proved temporary. Cerrato acquired a reputation of being an overzealous crown official and died in 1555 largely repudiated by his fellow colonists. After his passing, subsequent officials
reversed some of his policies. The naborías returned, Indian load bearers proliferated, and many Indians, though technically free, were compelled to render “personal services” to the Spanish colonists under various guises.
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All over Spanish America, Indian slave owners and colonial authorities devised subtle changes in terminology and newfangled labor institutions to comply with the law in form but not in substance. Frontier captains no longer took “Indian slaves,” but only “rebels” or “criminals” who were formally tried and convicted; forced to serve out sentences of five, ten, or twenty years; and sold to the highest bidder. Colonists in Venezuela and the Caribbean resorted to naborías, while those in Central America continued to receive “personal services” throughout the sixteenth century. Ranchers in northern Mexico relied on encomiendas that, unlike those of central Mexico, often amounted to cyclical enslavement as they gathered their “entrusted” Indians at gunpoint and forced them to work during planting and harvesting time. Miners in many parts of the New World relied on the repartimiento system, in which Indians received token salaries but were otherwise compelled to work. In short, Spaniards adapted Indian slavery to fit the new legal environment, and thus it became the other slavery.
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3

The Trafficker and His Network

T
HROUGHOUT THE HEMISPHERE
, Spaniards chanced upon Indian villages or nomadic bands and snatched a woman or a couple of children to make a tidy profit. While constant, these spur-of-the-moment kidnappings were narrow in scope. The real slavers, the individuals who truly benefited from trafficking humans, operated on a much larger scale. They planned their expeditions carefully, procured investors and funds for weapons and provisions, hired agents to sell the slaves in mines and other enterprises, and—because Indian slavery was illegal—made sure to exploit loopholes and elicit plenty of official protection. Frontier captains were ideally suited for this line of work, as the empire expanded prodigiously during the sixteenth century. For them, slavery was no sideline to warfare or marginal activity born out of the chaos of conquest. It was first and foremost a business involving investors, soldiers, agents, and powerful officials.

Perhaps no one understood this better than Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, a frontier captain who had occasion to operate in Africa and America and to deal in both black and Indian slaves. His activities give us a rare opportunity to compare the slave trade on two continents. Carvajal was more colorful and baffling than many fictional characters. Born to a Jewish family in 1537, he spent his early years dodging the long arm of the Inquisition. Many years earlier, in 1492, the Spanish
monarchy had expelled all Jews from the empire, forcing them either to convert to Christianity or to leave. At least one hundred thousand Jews left Spain. The majority went to neighboring Portugal, but this solution proved only temporary, as the Portuguese crown issued its own decree of expulsion in 1496. Already uprooted once, many Jewish families stayed in Portugal in spite of the risks. They remained close to the border between Spain and Portugal, a liminal area known as
la raya de Portugal
(the line of Portugal), in case they needed to cross into Spain if pursued by the Portuguese, then cross back into Portugal if run out by the Spanish. Straddling the border became a common survival strategy for many practicing Jews.
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Luis de Carvajal spent his earliest years negotiating these turbulent waters in the town of Mogadouro, on the Portuguese side. But when the Portuguese Inquisition began investigating neighbors and friends of the Carvajals, Luis was promptly shipped back to Spain—ostensibly to further his education, but more likely to steer him away from trouble, as Samuel Temkin’s recent biography shows. Just seven or eight at the time, Luis would go on to spend six years in the household of the Count of Benavente, where he perfected his Spanish and surely acquired a solid Catholic education. After the danger had passed, one of his uncles, a larger-than-life figure named Duarte de León, personally journeyed to Benavente to bring Carvajal back to Portugal—this time to Lisbon—and to a new start in life. At fourteen Luis had reached what in the sixteenth century was considered a working age.
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Duarte de León was a very prominent merchant. Even though he was a “New Christian”—that is, a Jew who had recently converted to Christianity—or possibly a crypto-Jew, still practicing his faith secretly, his business contacts reached up to the highest levels of the Portuguese court. Duarte de León served the king as a slave broker. In the 1550s, the Portuguese crown was in the habit of auctioning off to well-heeled individuals monopoly rights to such crucial Portuguese outposts in Africa as the coast of Guinea, the fort of São Jorge da Mina, and the island of São Tomé. Several of these bidders were New Christians whose finances were undiminished by their forced conversions and who appreciated the religious freedom of Portugal’s overseas colonies. Duarte
de León acquired the trading rights to “the Rivers of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands,” but there was only so much he could do from Lisbon. To profit from his concession, he needed agents in Africa—a business network.
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Carvajal was fourteen or fifteen when he started working for his uncle in the Cape Verde Islands. Even for someone like him, who had seen slaves in Portugal, the experience of Cape Verde must have been eye-opening. Located four hundred miles from the westernmost tip of Africa, the archipelago was remote and forbidding. Winds from the southern Sahara blew all the way to these ten islands and five islets, sweeping them barren. Only Fogo and Santiago received much rain. The principal “product” of these islands was evident on arrival. Santiago, where Carvajal established himself, had a total population of around 13,400. Of these, 11,700, or nearly ninety percent, were African slaves forcibly transported from the mainland. Some of these slaves toiled on a few scraggly plantations, but most of them merely waited to be resold. The island was like a gigantic holding pen.
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Cape Verde’s specialty was supplying African slaves to Spanish America. Because the Spaniards possessed no slaving ports of their own in western Africa, they had to rely on the Portuguese to obtain black slaves. Cape Verde was ideal for this purpose. The archipelago lay in the same latitude as the Spanish Caribbean and was four hundred miles closer to it than the African coast. As in all forms of commerce, time was of the essence. But this was particularly so in a business in which the length of the passage determined the survival rate. Every additional day of travel represented more dead slaves and lost profits. By virtue of being the part of Africa closest to Spanish America, the Cape Verde Islands developed as the preeminent reexport center for slaves.
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In 1551 the young Luis de Carvajal started his work in Cape Verde as a “trading agent.” Eight years later, he was appointed “royal treasurer of the assets of those who died or became absent from the islands of Santiago and Fogo.” Considering that Cape Verde lay two thousand miles from Portugal, that deaths and disappearances were common, and that on average every Portuguese residing on the islands of Santiago and Fogo possessed nine or ten slaves, this appointment gave Carvajal considerable access to unclaimed slaves.
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However, Carvajal’s commercial success owed less to his business acumen than to his membership in a family trading syndicate spanning Portugal, the African coast, and the Cape Verde Islands. The head of the syndicate was Duarte de León, who owned the trading rights to “the Rivers of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands.” From his headquarters in Lisbon, he negotiated slave contracts and oversaw all operations. Duarte’s brother, Francisco Jorge de León, was in charge of the coast of Guinea. He was posted in the minuscule village of São Domingos, at the end of a river that brought more slaves from the interior of Guinea than any other. Completing this triangular network was Carvajal in Cape Verde. As a trading agent in a slave reexport center, he was principally concerned with selling slaves to captains headed to the New World. He could purchase these slaves locally or even procure them from deceased slave owners or those who had gone missing. But Carvajal’s chief advantage over his competitors was his ability to get slaves directly from the source in São Domingos. In other words, Carvajal could always undersell all the other slave merchants because his uncle Francisco Jorge de León controlled the cheapest and most abundant source of slaves on the coast of Guinea.
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