From the Galleons to the Highlands

Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas

Alex Borucki, David Eltis, David Wheat, Alex Borucki, David Eltis, David Wheat

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780826361172
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The essays in this book demonstrate the importance of transatlantic and intra-American slave trafficking in the development of colonial Spanish America, highlighting the Spanish colonies' previously underestimated significance within the broader history of the slave trade. Spanish America received African captives not only directly via the transatlantic slave trade but also from slave markets in the Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, and Danish Americas, ultimately absorbing more enslaved Africans than any other imperial jurisdiction in the Americas except Brazil. The contributors focus on the histories of slave trafficking to, within, and across highly diverse regions of Spanish America throughout the entire colonial period, with themes ranging from the earliest known transatlantic slaving voyages during the sixteenth century to the evolution of antislavery efforts within the Spanish empire. Students and scholars will find the comprehensive study and analysis in From the Galleons to the Highlands invaluable in examining the study of the slave trade to colonial Spanish America.

Understanding Latin America demands dialogue, deep exploration, and frank discussion of key topics. Founded by Lyman L. Johnson in 1992 and edited since 2013 by Kris Lane, the Diálogos Series focuses on innovative scholarship in Latin American history and related fields. The series, the most successful of its type, includes specialist works accessible to a wide readership and a variety of thematic titles, all ideally suited for classroom adoption by university and college teachers.

CHAPTER 1

The Size and Direction of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas

ALEX BORUCKI, DAVID ELTIS, AND DAVID WHEAT

THE SURGE OF SCHOLARLY INTEREST THAT BEGAN TO MOVE NEW World slavery into the historiographical mainstream after the mid-twentieth century has largely bypassed the story of how Africans arrived in the Spanish Americas. What happened to them and their descendants in the aftermath of those initial traumatic disembarkations is somewhat better known, but it would be surprising if the scholarly output on black people in the Spanish Americas amounted to more than a small percentage of what is now available on their counterparts in the Anglophone Americas. There are first-class studies of specific regions (e.g., Mexico, Peru, the Spanish Caribbean, and the Río de la Plata) and a number of excellent syntheses and collected works that address selected Spanish American sites in a broader context including Brazil and Haiti but, until recently, very few works devoted to Africans and people of African descent in the Spanish New World as a whole since Leslie B. Rout’s 1976 book.¹ As for an overview of the overall slave traffic into the Spanish colonies, the cupboard is even barer. Fragmentary studies based on a port or region exist, many of them decades old. But not even the launch of www.slavevoyages.org a decade ago has triggered scholarly interest in reassessing this least known branch of the transatlantic slave trade, much less any attempt to meld it with intra-American inflows of Africans. In fact, our reassessment of the Spanish slave trade draws on sources and applies techniques that have only recently become available and is the first to integrate research on the intra-American and transatlantic slave trades in the Spanish context, the former being of particular importance for the Spanish Americas. This chapter comprises a preliminary effort to recalibrate both trades to the Spanish colonies. It is written in the spirit of the Roslings’ comment that “the world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”² We begin with a presentation of our conclusions before explaining how we arrived at them and then spelling out some of their implications.

Figure 1.1 provides an overview of our new assessment. While the major Portuguese and British transatlantic slave trades rose and fell in a regular parabola from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, figure 1.1 shows the bimodal pattern of the traffic to Spanish America, with a first peak around 1620 and a second, higher peak in the nineteenth century. The U shape in between is emphatic. But the figure also adds information on intra-American voyages; that is, expeditions that transported enslaved Africans and people of African descent from the non-Spanish Caribbean and Brazil to the Spanish colonies. More than a quarter of the slaves arriving in Spanish America had departed from colonies of other European powers in the New World rather than directly from Africa. Figure 1.1 shows that the lowest point of the transatlantic Spanish trade’s U trend was somewhat offset by the transimperial intra-American traffic from 1640 until its ending by 1820, during the era of Spanish American independence.

Cartagena, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, and Hispaniola received the majority of slave arrivals shown by the first peak in figure 1.1, with many captives then reexported to additional destinations, including Lima and Mexico City. By contrast, Cuba and Puerto Rico account for almost all of the second peak. Nevertheless, some regions, such as the Río de la Plata—today’s Argentina and Uruguay—and to a lesser extent Venezuela, did experience this U-shaped trend. The Río de la Plata both absorbed slaves and was a major entrepôt, supplying Chile and Peru, whereas slaves arriving in Venezuela tended to remain there. In Mexico, the slave trade declined from the 1650s to the last recorded transatlantic slave arrival in 1735. Although vastly outnumbered by the viceroyalty’s large Amerindian populations throughout the colonial period, there was nevertheless a vibrant and naturally growing population of African ancestry in Mexico City and Puebla during the seventeenth century.³

Figure 1.1. The slave trade to Spanish America. Source: Table 1.1, column 6 and row 8.

The dual-peak structure of the slave trade to Spanish America also points to two major cycles of demographic change related to African arrivals (Africanization) and the intermixing of indigenous peoples, Africans, and Europeans in the Americas (mestizaje). These cycles provide a chronological framework that helps to explain why identities in the Spanish colonies evolved differently from those in what became the United States. While some Spanish American colonies experienced a cycle of Africanization followed by mestizaje during the first slave trade peak, and others experienced the same during the second peak, some regions can be said to have experienced both. The relative weight of these two processes varied across the Spanish colonies. With the possible exception of New Orleans (itself a Spanish colony from 1769 until 1803), it is difficult to imagine any city in the early nineteenth-century United States in which people of mixed origins outnumbered those of either full European or African ancestry, as was the case in Venezuela in 1810. For the antebellum United States, it is equally difficult to visualize the almost complete disappearance of “black” as a category of identity in official records, subsumed by multiple mestizo labels, as in early independent Mexico. Further, there was no equivalent in the United States of the diversity of African-based associations and religions that existed in urban centers in Spanish American regions such as Cuba and the Río de la Plata as late as the 1830s.

Estimates, Patterns, and New Directions

How can we be sure that the broad trends shown in Figure 1.1 are correct? To explain the Spanish slave trade, we first have to define it. Two rather different concepts are possible—on the one hand, the traffic into Spanish possessions under all national flags, and on the other, the smaller and less significant slave trade carried out on Spanish vessels alone.⁴ For anyone working with official documents of the early modern era, it must often appear that incompetence, smuggling, venal officials, and the hazards of everyday life undermine the reliability of state-generated data. For the slave trade, skepticism takes the form of doubt regarding whether every actual voyage could have left behind evidence, and whether the numbers of people on board such vessels are likely underreported. These problems loom large for the slave trade to Spanish America, notwithstanding the fact that the Spanish bureaucracy probably generated more documentation per imperial subject than any other empire before the nineteenth century.⁵

On this issue of contraband, for the British, French, Dutch, and Luso-Brazilian slave trades, internal and external (to the state, that is) checks are possible for some periods, so that one might assess the probability that ships were omitted from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (henceforth TSTD).⁶ Such checks are not yet possible for most of the Spanish transatlantic slave trade, but readers should keep in mind a broader perspective on the size and direction of the traffic into Spanish colonies. During the second half of the seventeenth century, the era in which Britain entered the transatlantic slave trade and solidified its presence in the Americas, observers in Jamaica indicated that slave prices were higher in the Spanish markets than in the British Caribbean.⁷ And Joseph Massie, an acute observer of the English sugar business, pointed out in 1759 that in the previous thirty years, low slave prices had underpinned the success of the English plantations.⁸ Contraband was significant, but it was not large enough to integrate the Spanish and British slave markets in the Caribbean to the extent that price differences reflected no more than the cost of sailing from one market to another. After 1790, by contrast, the captain of transatlantic slaving voyages typically checked slave prices in at least two of the major markets of Kingston, Havana, and Charleston (where by that time prices were similar) before deciding where to sell. The same voyage from Africa frequently showed up in more than one of these ports within the space of a month.

New archival data enable us to reassess key routes by which Africans entered the Spanish Americas, as well as to carry out a more refined inquiry into contraband. We are able to shed new light on two large branches of the slave trade to Spanish America: the transatlantic traffic for the period before the breakup of the Iberian Union in 1641 (when Portugal and its colonies were under Spanish Hapsburg rule) and the intra-American traffic that from 1661 to about 1800 became the Spanish Americas’ major source of African slaves. While we offer little new information on nineteenth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico in this chapter, new figures on different aspects of the Cuban traffic are shown in chapters 8 and 9.

Table 1.1 provides a breakdown of slave arrivals across broad regions of the Americas, together with a separate column to the right that presents our estimates of captives carried on Spanish vessels alone. The non-Spanish data in columns 1 through 5 and column 7 are from the Slave Voyages website estimates page created in 2010, but the two Spanish columns—one for the Spanish Americas (column 6) and one for enslaved people transported under the Spanish flag (column 9)—are new. The Spanish figures previous to 1641 draw on new archival data and in addition incorporate a fresh approach to estimating the large illegal influx of slaves into Spain’s colonies that occurred throughout the slave trade era. Table 1.1 shows that in the pre-1641 period, 529,800 captives arrived in the Spanish Americas from Africa. Thus, according to our calculations, almost 60 percent more Africans arrived in the New World than the 2010 Slave Voyages website estimates page displays. For the later period, too, new transatlantic voyages to Venezuela and the Río de la Plata have come to light.⁹ For the whole period, we found that 14 percent more slaves entered the Spanish Americas directly from Africa than was previously thought.

Whereas the 2010 TSTD contained 998 voyages prior to 1641, we now have information on 1,843 transatlantic slave voyages to the Spanish Americas in this era. The new material permits us to construct robust lower-bound estimates of the size and direction of the first half century of the traffic. Iberian registration and port-departure records constitute our only source of information for many slaving voyages up to 1580. Thus, most volume estimates for the years prior to 1581—including António de Almeida Mendes’s estimates for those years and the estimates page on the Slave Voyages website based on his work—are heavily influenced by research on slave trade licencias, permits that were awarded by the Spanish Crown but did not necessarily result in slaving voyages.¹⁰ Our data for this period, by contrast, consist primarily of slaving voyages that at least set out for Africa, and in most cases actually arrived in Spanish American ports.¹¹ Despite the different methodologies, the two approaches generate similar outcomes: 84,900 versus 82,000 slaves for 1526–1580. For the period 1581–1640, we currently have 583 more voyages than were shown in the original 2010 TSTD. While the work of Enriqueta Vila Vilar previously grounded our knowledge of the traffic during the Iberian Union, it now appears that her data account for less than half of all known ar...