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THE FIRST GREAT WAVES: AFRICAN PROVENANCE ZONES FOR THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE TO CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, 1570–1640

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2011

DAVID WHEAT
DAVID WHEAT*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
*
Author's email: dwheat@msu.edu
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Abstract

Drawing on port entry records for 487 ships disembarking nearly 80,000 captives in Cartagena de Indias, the primary slaving port in early colonial Spanish America, this article provides a new assessment of the relative importance of major African provenance zones for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transatlantic slave trade. Upper Guinea and Angola furnished roughly equal shares of forced migrants to Cartagena between 1570 and 1640, with a smaller wave of captives from Lower Guinea. While Angola eventually replaced Upper Guinea as the main source of slave traffic to Cartagena, the shift was more gradual than scholars have previously believed.

Keywords

Central AfricaWestern AfricaAfrican diasporaslave tradeSouth America
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 E. Vila Vilar, ‘The large-scale introduction of Africans into Veracruz and Cartagena’, in V. Rubin and A. Tuden (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies (New York, 1977), 276. On the earlier trade, see García Fuentes, L., ‘Licencias para la introducción de esclavos en Indias y envíos desde Sevilla en el siglo XVI’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaftund Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas, 19 (1982) 1–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caballos, E. Mira, ‘Las licencias de esclavos negros a Hispanoamérica (1544–1550)’, Revista de Indias, 54:201 (1994), 273–97Google Scholar; A. de Mendes, Almeida, ‘Les réseaux de la traite ibérique dans l'Atlantique nord: aux origines de la traite atlantique (1440–1640)’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 4 (2008), 739–68Google Scholar; R. M. Pérez García and M. F. Fernández Chaves, ‘Sevilla y la trata negrera atlántica: envíos de esclavos desde Cabo Verde a la América española, 1569–1579’, in L. C. Álvarez Santaló (ed.), Estudios de Historia Moderna en homenaje al profesor Antonio García-Baquero (Seville, 2009), 597–622.

2 The trade's concentration in these ports intensified in 1604, when Cartagena and Veracruz were designated as the only authorized transatlantic slave trade hubs, with some exceptions made for Buenos Aires. See E. Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos: los asientos portugueses (Seville, 1977), 12, 19, 49, 70, 75–6, 102, 115–23, 207–9, 228–9 (insert); G. Scelle, La traite négrière aux Indes de Castille, contrats et traités d'assiento: étude de droit public et d'histoire diplomatique puisée aux sources originales et accompagnée de plusieurs documents inédits (Paris, 1906), I, 431, 443–5, 452; H. Lapeyre, ‘Le trafic négrier avec l'Amérique espagnole’, in Homenaje a Jaime Vicens Vives (Barcelona, 1965–7), II, 285–306; N. del Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias (Bogotá, 1981), 202–5; L. A. Newson and S. Minchin, From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 2007), 19, 23, 136; A. de Almeida Mendes, ‘The foundations of the system: a reassessment of the slave trade to the Spanish Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in D. Eltis and D. Richardson (eds.), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, 2008), 76.

3 Important studies of Cartagena during this period include Castillo Mathieu, La llave; M. del Carmen Borrego Plá, Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVI (Seville, 1983); A. Vidal Ortega, Cartagena de Indias y la región histórica del Caribe, 1580–1640 (Seville, 2002); M. C. Navarrete, Génesis y desarrollo de la esclavitud en Colombia, siglos XVI y XVII (Cali, 2005); H. Calvo Stevenson and A. Meisel Roca, Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVII (Cartagena, 2007); Newson and Minchin, From Capture, 136–86.

4 All slave trade voyages mentioned here have been submitted for inclusion in ‘Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database’ (TSTD), http://www.slavevoyages.org (last accessed 7 Feb. 2011).

5 See Table 1, below. The actual numbers of ships and captives disembarked are certainly much larger, since these figures do not account for unrecorded, contraband slave trading, or for periods in which we currently have only limited voyage data. TSTD presently lists Cartagena as ‘principal place of slave landing’ for 541 voyages between 1570 and 1640, but the ‘particular outcome of voyage’ remains unknown for more than fifty voyages; see http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1570&yearTo=1640&mjslptimp=41207 (last accessed 1 March 2011). Though future research may prove that these voyages landed captives in Cartagena or elsewhere, this article only addresses voyages currently known to have arrived in Cartagena.

6 http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom=1550&yearTo=1650 (last accessed 1 March 2011).

7 W. Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (New York, 1970), 100–13; G. E. Brooks, Landlords & Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder, CO, 1993), 235–7, 261–76; W. Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH, 2003), 91–115; W. Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (Cambridge, 2010), 61–96; D. R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia (3rd edn, Armonk, NY, 2010), 49, 99–101.

8 D. Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and their Neighbors under the Influence of the Portuguese, 1483–1790 (Oxford, 1966), 78–100; Heintze, B., ‘The Angolan vassal tributes of the 17th century’, Revista de História Económica e Social, 6 (1980), 57–78Google Scholar; Heintze, B., ‘Angola nas garras do tráfico de escravos: as guerras do Ndongo (1611–1630)’, Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos, 1 (1984), 11–61Google Scholar; A. Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford, 1985), 59–66, 71–8, 107–21; J. C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, 1988), 105–39; J. K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London, 1999), 99–125; I. do Amaral, O Consulado de Paulo Dias de Novais: Angola no último quartel do século XVI e primeiro do século XVII (Lisbon, 2000), 117–28; L. M. Heywood and J. K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007), 109–68.

9 The years 1593–1601 and 1617–25 roughly correspond to contracts or asientos awarded to Pedro Gómez Reinel (or Reynel) and Antonio Fernández Delvas, respectively. See Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 23–115.

10 As Table 1 indicates, the proportions for Upper Guinea and Angola given here fluctuate only slightly if known captives disembarked, rather than known slave trade voyages, are used as the basis for comparison. This study focuses primarily on the latter, since known voyages are less subject to interpretation than the numbers of enslaved Africans actually transported on each ship.

11 P. D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), 103–18.

12 While data for Cartagena indicates an increase in the flow of captives from Angola to the Caribbean during the 1620s and 1630s, we still know very little of the transatlantic slave trade to the Rio de la Plata during this period. In fact, at present only one voyage is known to have arrived in Buenos Aires before 1645 (TSTD 29561).

13 Pavy, D., ‘The provenience of Colombian negroes’, Journal of Negro History, 52:1 (1967), 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For recent editions of Alonso de Sandoval's tract De instauranda Aethiopum Salute (originally published in Seville in 1627), see Un tratado sobre la esclavitud, ed. E. Vila Vilar (Madrid, 1987); and Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute, ed. and trans. N. von Germeten (Indianapolis, 2008).

14 Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, 96–100.

15 F. P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford, 1974), 38–44. See also J. Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison, 1968), 172–5.

16 Bühnen, S., ‘Ethnic origins of Peruvian slaves (1548–1650), figures for Upper Guinea’, Paideuma, 39 (1993), 57–110Google Scholar; J.-P. Tardieu, ‘Origines des esclaves de la région de Lima, au Pérou, aux XVIe e XVIIe siècles’, in D. Diène (ed.), La Chaîne et le lien: une vision de la traite négrière, Actes du Colloque de Ouidah (Paris, 1998), 81–94; Hawthorne, Planting Rice, 68–72; Newson and Minchin, From Capture; R. S. O'Toole, ‘From the rivers of Guinea to the valleys of Peru: becoming a bran diaspora within Spanish slavery’, Social Text 92, 25:3 (Fall 2007), 19–36.

17 For useful studies of similar breadth focusing on the slave trade to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cuba, see de la Fuente, A., ‘El mercado esclavista habanero, 1580–1699: las armazones de esclavos’, Revista de Indias, 50:189 (1990), 371–95Google Scholar; and de la Fuente, A., ‘Esclavos africanos en La Habana: zonas de procedencia y denominaciones étnicas, 1570–1699’, Revista Española de Antropología Americana, 20 (1990), 135Google Scholar–60.

18 G. Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México, 1519–1810: estudio etnohistórico (Mexico City, 1946), 244–5; C. A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1976), 20–3; P. J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (2nd edn, Austin, 2001), 157–63; N. Ngou-Mve, El África bantú en la colonización de México, 1595–1640 (Madrid, 1994), 97–147, 151, 172–3; H. L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington, 2003), 25, 91, 99–101.

19 Ngou-Mve, El África bantú, 11–31, 184.

20 J. H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the Afro-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, 2003), 103–17, 132; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 49, 55–7, 238, 241, 262, 268.

21 Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 252–67. The total of 173 slave ships known to have entered Veracruz does not include six ships listed on page 173. All six arrived in Veracruz in 1615 or afterwards – five sailing from Angola, and one from Arda – but the approximate years of arrival are unknown.

22 Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, ix, 39. Their use of the term ‘wave’ to emphasize the numerical predominance of West Central Africans is more specific than Vila Vilar's use of the term. Grouping together all African captives exported, irrespective of their ports of embarkation, Vila Vilar argues that the years 1595–1601 represented ‘the first great wave’ of African forced migrants to the Spanish Americas (Hispanoamérica, 197, 211). In a separate article, she portrays the whole period from 1595 to 1640 as the ‘first great wave of Africans to come to the Spanish Indies’ (‘Large-scale introduction’, 276).

23 For examples, see Palmer, Slaves, 21; Bennett, Africans, 22; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 38–41, 48–9, 109, 160–1, 236; Mendes, ‘Foundations’, 66–7, 76, 85; A. de la Fuente, with C. García del Pino and B. Iglesias Delgado, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill, 2008), 42, 103, 167; S. B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, 2008), 163. For more cautious appraisals of Angola's role in the early seventeenth-century slave trade, see G. M. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, 2005), 159; and Pérez García and Fernández Chaves, ‘Sevilla y la trata’, 607.

24 See Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 256–75; Mendes, ‘Foundations’, 90 n. 18.

25 Iberian port departure records list over 1,200 slave ships or voyages registered to stop in African ports en route to Spanish America between 1570 and 1640; see H. Chaunu and P. Chaunu, Séville et l'Atlantique, 1504–1650 (Paris, 1955–9), III–V. For shipping records generated in the Cape Verde Islands and Angola, see F. Mauro, Le Portugal et l'Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670): étude économique (Paris, 1960), 175; T. B. Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verdes in Seventeenth-century Commerce and Navigation (Chicago, 1972), 199–201; Bowser, African Slave, 39, 364 n. 32; Heintze, ‘Angola nas garras’, 33; M. M. Ferraz Torrão, ‘Rotas comerciais, agentes económicos, meios de pagamento’, in M. E. Madeira Santos (ed.), História Geral de Cabo Verde, II (Lisbon, 1995), 42.

26 Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 9–14; Newson and Minchin, From Capture, 337.

27 Archive of the Indies (AGI), Santa Fe (SF) 72–4, ‘Cartas y expedientes de los oficiales reales de Cartagena’, 1535–1643.

28 AGI, SF 72, n. 33, ‘Ynformaçion secreta de como an usado sus officios los ofiçiales reales de Cartagena de las Yndias’, Cartagena, 15 Dec. 1578–8 July 1579, fos. 11v–12r, 19v–20r, 28r–28v.

29 Spanish-language sources for this period use the terms ‘pieza’ and ‘pieza de esclavo’ to refer to one enslaved person, regardless of sex, age, health, or provenance. The term ‘pieza de Indias’ does not appear in Spanish sources until later in the seventeenth century. See Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra, 38; Bowser, African Slave, 39; Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 186–93; M. da Graça Mateus Ventura, Negreiros Portugueses na Rota das Índias de Castela, 1541–1556 (Lisbon, 1999), 63; Navarrete, Génesis y desarrollo, 140 n. 126; Mendes, ‘Foundations’, 91 n. 30.

30 AGI, SF 37, r. 6, n. 103a/b, ‘Fee de los negros’, Cartagena, 15 July 1591. This relatively well-known list is cited or analyzed in Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, 96–100; Bowser, African Slave, 72; Borrego Plá, Cartagena de Indias, 58–61; Vidal Ortega, Cartagena de Indias, 161–5; and Newson and Minchin, From Capture, 62. Digital images of the original may be viewed online at http://pares.mcu.es (last accessed 7 Feb. 2010).

31 AGI, SF 72, n. 105, ‘Copia de la Relasion de Cartagena de los negros q Alli han entrado desde primero de mayo de 1600’, Cartagena, 27 July 1601, fos. 21r–26v. Compare with Garcia, R. Sampaio, ‘Contribuição ao estudo do aprovisionamento de escravos negros na America Espanhola, 1580–1640’, Anais do Museu Paulista, 16 (1962), 51–2Google Scholar, 151; Lapeyre, ‘Le trafic négrier’, 294–7; Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 248–51.

32 For further information on the contracts awarded to Pedro Gómez Reinel and the Coutinhos, see Scelle, La traite négrière, I, 347–402, 809–12; Mauro, Le Portugal, 157–62; Garcia, ‘Contribuição’, 33–64; Lapeyre, ‘Le trafic négrier’, 285–90; and Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 23–42, 104–11.

33 AGI, SF 74, n. 6, ‘Certificaçion de los negros que han entrado en Cartaxena desde primero de mayo de 1615 hasta 20 de marzo deste presente año de 1623’, Cartagena, 28 Mar. 1623. Approximately one-third of these ships may be found in Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 148–9, 174–5, 268–77. This list also overlaps with an account of 13 slave ships entering Cartagena in 1621–2: see AGI, SF 73, n. 110, Francisco de Rebolledo y Alonso de Corral a S. M., Cartagena, 10 Aug. 1622; J. Palacios Preciado, Cartagena de Indias, gran factoría de mano de obra esclava (Tunja, 1975), 19.

34 Scelle, La traite négrière, I, 443–4; Chaunu and Chaunu, Séville et l'Atlantique, V, 16 n. 60, 37 n. 44, 55 n. 42; Mauro, Le Portugal, 157–63; Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 24–8, 104–15; Newson and Minchin, From Capture, 18–21.

35 In early colonial Spanish Caribbean sources, the term ‘Guinea’ was shorthand for ‘the Rivers of Guinea’, or the Upper Guinea coast. On the interchangeability of these terms during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Bowser, African Slave, 37–9; Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 144–7, 165, and passim; Pérez García and Fernández Chaves, ‘Sevilla y la trata’, 612 n. 73; Newson and Minchin, From Capture, 62.

36 AGI, Contaduría (Ctdra) 1380, 1382, 1384–5, 1388; Borrego Plá, Cartagena de Indias, 58–61.

37 AGI, Ctdra 1385, n. 5, pliego 6; TSTD 29022.

38 AGI, Ctdra 1388, pliegos 265–6; TSTD 29870.

39 For related discussion of the years 1611–15, see Chaunu and Chaunu, Séville et l'Atlantique, IV, 489 n. 44

40 See above, n. 1.

41 Pérez García and Fernández Chaves, ‘Sevilla y la trata’. Of 11,196 captives registered to be taken to the Spanish Americas during this period, nearly 9,000 were to be acquired in the Cape Verde Islands.

42 AGI, SF 72, n. 28, Antonio Bermudes y Balthasar Carrillo a S. M., Cartagena, 25 Nov. 1577.

43 AGI, SF 72, n. 33, ‘Ynformaçion secreta’.

44 See Palacios, Gran factoría, 18.

45 AGI, SF 72, n. 113/114, Joan de Yturrieta y Francisco Sarmiento a S. M., Cartagena, 4 Aug. 1603; AGI, SF 73, n. 2, 4, 7, Joan de Yturrieta y Francisco Sarmiento a S. M., Cartagena, 26 Jan. 1604, 8 Aug. 1604, 18 Aug. 1606.

46 AGI, SF 38, r. 2, n. 65, Jerónimo de Zuazo a S. M., Cartagena, 7 Aug. 1604, fo. 1r.

47 AGI, SF 73, n. 5, Francisco de Rebolledo y Alonso de Corral y de Toledo a S. M., Cartagena, 1605.

48 See also Hall, Slavery, 159; Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 152.

49 http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1514&yearTo=1594&mjslptimp=41201.41203 (last accessed 2 March 2011). For the voyage in question (TSTD 28058), see AGI, Patronato 292, n. 3, r. 42, ‘Real Provisión ejecutoria a petición de Bento Báez, mercader … sobre cierta rebelión de esclavos en el mar’.

50 Calculated from D. Wheat, ‘The Afro-Portuguese maritime world and the foundations of Spanish Caribbean society, 1570–1640’, (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2009), 252–6; and Appendix A, below.

51 Mendes, ‘Foundations’, 86.

52 Wheat, ‘Afro-Portuguese maritime world’, 252–6; and Appendix A, below.

53 Sandoval, Un tratado, 151; Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, 55–9.

54 For examples of ships known to have disembarked more than 400 captives during this period, see TSTD 29444, 28135, 28180, 28183, 29593, 29317–18. According to Nikolaus Böttcher, a ship from Upper Guinea landed 900 captives in Cartagena in 1635! See N. Böttcher, Aufstieg und Untergang eines atlantischen Handelsimperiums: Portugiesische Kaufleute und Sklavenhändler und die Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias, von 1580 bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 160–1; TSTD 29507.

55 Newson and Minchin, From Capture, 141. See also Bowser, African Slave, 56; Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 166–7.

56 A. Vázquez de Espinosa, Compendio y descripción de las Indias occidentales, ed. B. Velásco Bayón (Madrid, 1969), 220.

57 AGI, SF 52, n. 172a, Carta de Miguel Corcuera y Baltasar Pérez Bernal, Bogotá, 27 June 1622, fo. 5r. Used in recent times to describe gold or silver, the term ‘de ley’ essentially means ‘authentic’ or ‘top quality’.

58 Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica, 173–4, 260–5, 278–9.

59 Quote from Mendes, ‘Les réseaux’, 741.

60 See, however, D. B. Domingues da Silva and D. Eltis, ‘The slave trade to Pernambuco, 1561–1851’, and A. Vieira Ribeiro, ‘The transatlantic slave trade to Bahia, 1582–1851’, in Eltis and Richardson, Extending the Frontiers, 95–154.

61 http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1514&yearTo=1640&mjslptimp=50000 (last accessed 2 March 2011).

62 Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 39.

63 Lovejoy, Paul E., ‘The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis’, The Journal of African History 23:4 (1982), 472–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eltis, David and Richardson, David, ‘The “Numbers Game” and Routes to Slavery’, Slavery & Abolition 18:1 (1997), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000).