Trade and Empire in the Atlantic 1400-1600

David Birmingham, Professor David Birmingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134573547
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Trade and Empire in the Atlantic 1400-1600 provides an accessible and concise introduction to European expansion overseas during the early modern period. It explains why and how seafarers visited the Caribbean, South America and Africa, and looks at the history of the communities that lived around the ocean as they responded to the challenges and opportunities which sea trade opened for them.
Historical thinking on the subject of Empire is naturally controversial as is shown by this survey of the first four stages of early Atlantic colonisation from the conquest of the Canary Islands to the creation of slave plantations in Brazil. This history of the Atlantic Empires is an authoritative introduction to an essential topic in world history.

CHAPTER ONE
Colonising the Atlantic islands

The ideas and techniques of colonisation used by Europeans who settled foreign lands were often pioneered on islands. Some of these islands were uninhabited, as was Iceland when the Vikings began to settle there in the tenth century. Others were already peopled, as was Ireland when Norman colonisers introduced themselves by force of arms in the twelfth century. In the fifteenth century the inhabited Atlantic islands colonised by Spain were the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and later the Caribbean islands off the coast of America. At the same time, or even a little earlier, the Portuguese developed their colonising experiences on Atlantic islands that were not inhabited, Madeira and the Azores in the temperate zone, and the Cape Verdes and São Tomé in the tropics. As both Spain and Portugal stretched out from their home shores they learnt much about the economics of colonisation from the experiences of Genoa and Venice, the great merchant republics of Italy that had grown wealthy on colonial trade with the islands of the Mediterranean and the shores of the Black Sea. They also gained the new skills needed to venture out into the Atlantic through close contact with the seafaring peoples of the Netherlands who purchased the new colonial produce and supplied fine manufactures in return. Although the Portuguese became the great merchants of Africa, and the Spaniards became the great settlers of America, an important financial role was also played by Europe’s largest and wealthiest cities in Italy and the Netherlands. Together the merchants, emigrants, sailors and bankers of Europe played key roles in planting their concepts of production and exchange among the peoples of the Atlantic world. In 1400 this tropical world was scarcely known to Europe. By 1600 an Atlantic system of colonial trade and migration was fully functioning as peoples, plants and produce flowed along new sea-lanes.

In 1420 the first successful step was taken in the modern colonising of the Atlantic. The island of Madeira, 600 miles off the coast of Portugal and 400 miles from Morocco, was claimed by two conquerors who partitioned it between themselves. The northern and eastern half of the island was granted by a Portuguese royal charter of donation to Tristão Vaz, a cavalryman who had failed to make his fortune in the Christian raids on the Islamic mainland of Morocco and instead took a lease on half of the uninhabited, and previously neglected, offshore island. The southern and western half of Madeira was granted by donation to João Gonçalves, another lesser nobleman of Portugal with some experience of seaborne warfare. In addition to the two aristocratic claimants a third proprietor took possession of the small island of Porto Santo, off the north coast of Madeira. He was Bartholomew Perestrello, a middle-class member of Portugal’s influential community of Italian merchants. It was from among these Luso-Italians that the peripatetic court of Portugal had often appointed harbour officials to manage the trade of Lisbon. Thus it was that the court and the Italians played an early role in financing and staffing the Portuguese colonial ventures.

The new lords-proprietor of Madeira did not ‘discover’ the islands which they claimed in 1420. Their existence and approximate location had been known to seafarers, particularly Genoese seafarers, for a century or more. Any fourteenth-century adventurer sailing down the coast of Africa, and then wanting to find the best winds and currents to return to Europe or the Mediterranean, was quite likely to sail far enough offshore to sight Madeira. According to legend, one such merchant mariner was Robert Machin of Bristol who lived on Madeira after being shipwrecked there. His tale was told by members of his crew who paddled their way to the mainland and were eventually ransomed from Morocco and returned to Christian Europe. Machin’s name may survive in corrupted form as Machico, later to be the capital town of the eastern half of Madeira. Whether true or false, the legend symbolises real Atlantic experience and casual visitors from Catalonia, Normandy and elsewhere probably stopped quite regularly at Madeira to obtain fresh water and firewood for the galleys on their ships.

The formal colonisation of Madeira after 1420 did not immediately provide the new owners with wealth. On the contrary, making a profit from a rugged and heavily wooded land which had no indigenous people was a struggle. Foraging was the first economic activity and one of the few viable products was resin from the great trees of the virgin forest, a resin colloquially known as ‘dragon’s blood’ and sold to the weaving and dyeing industries of Europe for stiffening materials. A more important, if less picturesque, source of revenue was the wood itself, the product from which the island gained its name: Legname on early Italian charts or Madeira in Portuguese. Portugal was short of good timber and had to import its ships’ timbers from the Baltic at considerable expense. In addition to supplying shipyards, Madeira also furnished roofing timbers of such quality that the old Arab styles of roofing in Lisbon began to be replaced by wide tiled roofs supported on long beams. Although Madeira developed a logging industry, the extraction process was wasteful and many of Madeira’s great trees were not sawn up for export but simply burnt by settlers seeking farm land. Timber merchants had limited means of transport and much of the island was surrounded by cliffs without beaches suitable for loading ships. Settlers soon turned their hand from logging to agriculture.

The colonial farmers who settled on Madeira experimented initially with the growing of wheat. In later centuries the planting of wheat was to become one of the important activities of colonial settlers around the world when prairies were ploughed and great sailing clippers raced each other through the Atlantic to reach the European markets ahead of their rivals. The earliest precursors of these grain merchants supplied the Lisbon market by undercutting the price of Spanish corn from the neighbouring kingdom of Castile. Portugal had regularly needed to import one-fifth of its cereal requirements since three-quarters of the country’s arable land was barely cultivated. A lack of navigable rivers or cart tracks meant that it was cheaper to ferry wheat from islands out in the Atlantic than to bring it from the dusty and thinly peopled inland farms on the plains of the interior. The fertile soils of the islands, catching the wet Atlantic winds as they did, were nearly twice as productive as those on the Portuguese mainland.

The Madeira wheat farmers might have been more successful if they had not brought with them rabbits who soon escaped from their farmyard hutches and took to the wild, doing extensive damage to the crops that peasants sowed. Despite such hazards, wheat initially grew quite well on the newly cleared soils and the harvest sold profitably back in Europe. It can be argued that regular shortages of bread in the harbour-city of Lisbon had been one of the more important, if mundane, driving forces behind Portuguese overseas colonisation. In particular Lisbon had been seriously short of bread flour in 1414 when wheat shipments coming from Flanders and England had been diverted to Morocco where a poor harvest had temporarily made corn prices very attractive. To the Lisbon city fathers the prospect of ‘home-grown’ wheat, cultivated on Madeira by Portuguese peasants, and shipped by Portuguese boatmen, was an attractive alternative to foreign supplies that were subject to economic, climatic and political disruption. But although the Madeira captaincies sold some wheat to Lisbon, and occasionally even to Morocco, cereal production did not flourish. After 1450 it was the Azores Islands, further out into the ocean, which provided Portugal with island wheat. By the sixteenth century the Azores shipped some 400,000 bushels of wheat to Portugal each year. Madeira, meanwhile, moved on to a different economic plane and successfully adopted sugar cultivation.

Sugar cane was originally a succulent grass that became a ‘spice’ crop in both India and China during the first millennium AD. By the middle ages cane was being grown, and sugar was being pressed and purified, in Egypt and Syria before it became a Mediterranean crop on the islands of both Cyprus and Crete. From there it was introduced to Muslim plantations on the island of Sicily and in southern Spain. Christian merchants bought small quantities of sugar as an expensive luxury, or as a medicinal comfort, but it was only a sideline in their daily dealings with their trans-Mediterranean trade partners. The most westerly of the Muslim estates were in the Algarve, a kingdom conquered by Christian invaders in 1249 and thereafter permanently linked to the crown of Portugal. It was from the Algarve that the royal family of Portugal, with its distinctly non-aristocratic interest in trade, began to explore opportunities for sugar planting on the Atlantic islands.

In the 1450s, after thirty years of semi-successful foraging, logging and wheat gardening, the lords-proprietor of Madeira surrendered the colonial initiative to the Portuguese royal princes. The island was thereafter radically transformed politically, economically and technologically by the introduction of sugar cane. The quasi-revolutionary change from cereal farming to sugar milling created an economic model that was later to be adopted throughout much of the Atlantic world. The agents of the entrepreneurial princes apparently brought high-quality sugar-cane roots from Sicily, but obtaining a good strain of cane was only the first step in developing a new industry. Sugar production also required a considerable input of capital and technology. This the royal princes were little more willing or able to supply than had been the aristocratic captains whom they supplanted. They therefore approached Portugal’s semi-foreign ‘bourgeoisie’ for help and turned in particular to the Genoese community of Luso-Italians who had dominated so much of the mercantile life of Portugal in the two centuries since Christians had conquered the land. Italians provided the finance, the technology and the shipping for early Atlantic colonisation while the Portuguese provided the workforce.

The establishment of a sugar plantation required an extensive labour force. Men, women and children were needed to clear the land, till the soil, plant the canes and cut the crop when it reached maturity. During the the harvest the cane had to be processed rapidly before the juice in the sugar stem began to dry out. In favourable circumstances porters could use carts or canoes. Normally, however, they loaded the huge bundles on their backs and worked gruelling hours to carry the cane to the crushing mill. On Madeira most harvest workers were family members or hired immigrant labourers from Europe. The supply of willing migrant labour, however, was initially neither adequate nor reliable. For fifteenth-century Portuguese workers the idea of emigration was not the obvious escape route from poverty that it became in later centuries, since by 1450 Portugal had barely reached the population levels that had prevailed before the arrival of the Black Death. Portugal remained quite sparsely peopled and its landowners were reluctant to see their labourers leave the home soil to seek fortune in the infant colony out in the ocean. Early colonial migrants, like later ones, were often those who shifted as best they could on society’s margins, some of them malefactors who preferred emigration to serving a term of hard labour in prison. Even when the poor, the landless and a few criminals had offered their services there were still not enough labourers from Portugal to expand the Madeira sugar industry. In these circumstances some farmers pioneered a new labour policy by supplementing their workforce with one or two purchased slaves, a practice still normal at the time in southern Spain and Portugal where slaves were usually conquered and converted Muslims.

Slavery was to become a key institution in the development of the sugar industry of the early modern colonies both in the Old World and in the New American one. In Madeira slavery was theoretically viable but it was a costly labour option. It was viable because the island was relatively small and slaves who escaped into the hills from their harsh and unrewarding servitude were likely to be recaptured and chastised. But slaves were expensive. Early sugar planters bought some of their slaves from the Canary Islands off the south coast of Morocco. They had to pay the slave raiders the cost of their military actions as well as the capital depreciation on their ships. The wages of the crews which brought the live ‘cargoes’ to Madeira, and the rewards appropriate to the captains who managed the whole violent business, also added to the price of each slave. Despite the high risks, Italian ship owners took a prominent part in the early slave-carrying business. With encouragement from the Portuguese royal princes, new sources of supply were gradually investigated. Portuguese, Genoese and a few Venetian robber-captains began to visit the African shore south of the Canaries. When lucky they were able able to round up and capture unsuspecting victims whom they carried off as slaves.

One of the first Portuguese slave raids into sub-Saharan Africa was undertaken by a relative of João Gonçalves, the original lord-proprietor of Madeira. Young António Gonçalves was a page-boy in the service of Prince Henry and, despite the lad’s youth, the prince appointed him to serve on a small caravel that had been fitted out for a deep raid into the African tropics in about 1443. The wild young men of the prince’s household sailed beyond the most arid section of the Saharan coast and landed by night. At dawn they saw a column of water-carriers heading to a desert-side well. Seizing their weapons, they fell upon them, scattering the majority but capturing thirteen men and women. Some of their prizes were of a reddish colour but others were black-skinned. The captain of the expedition was so pleased with the exploit that the young António was recommended for a knighthood for the daring leadership he had shown during the raid. Back in Portugal Prince Henry was equally delighted with the lucrative, if inhuman, outcome of the venture.

Few of the slaves who were captured, purchased or bartered on the African coast went to Madeira. Most of them were either kept in Portugal or sold to southern Spain. Although some Africans did work on the Madeira sugar farms and in the mills, black people did not become a lasting slave caste or a distinctive racial group on the island. As in Portugal itself, where much larger numbers of black Africans worked on the farms and in some domestic sectors in the towns, the immigrants from Africa were steadily absorbed into the wider homogenised island population. Labour on the sugar fields, even slave labour, was essentially an extension of the traditional form of Portuguese farm labour in which workers were subservient family clients expected to turn their hand to all domestic or field work. Despite the cosmopolitan additions to its society, Madeira became and remained a Portuguese-speaking colony of white Roman Catholics.

Next to the labour force a second requirement of a successful sugar farm was an adequate supply of water. Where rainfall was adequate— as in many of the tropical plantations later established around the Atlantic—the cost of preserving water was not a significant contributor to success or failure. In Madeira, however, rainfall was seasonal and regional. The volcanic rock acted like a giant sponge that absorbed water in winter and fed the springs in summer. In order to grow sugar on the most favourable southern slopes it was necessary to build an expensive system of irrigation. Canals channelled out of the hillside, or even carved along cliff faces, brought water from springs to the most fertile agricultural terraces. Some channels ran for miles and had to be carefully maintained, to repair damage, and patrolled, to prevent pilferage and ensure that water was only taken from the sluices by those entitled to it. In later centuries engineers were able to cut tunnels through mountains to bring water across the island from the wetter northern slopes to the warmer southern slopes. To make the best use of the watered topsoil, many miles of terrace walls were built on the sunny side of the island.

Water was required on Madeira not only for irrigation but as a source of energy. One of the technological revolutions of Atlantic history was the introduction of the water wheel. This expensive but efficient substitute for animal and human labour was adopted on Madeira wherever the water supply was adequate. On large farms the treadmills worked by labourers, and the yoke mills turned by oxen, were replaced by watermills that could ceaselessly turn the crushing wheels of the sugar mills night and day. The cost of building a large watermill was beyond the reach of any peasant, and the sugar industry gradually came to be dominated by entrepreneurs with access to investment capital. Over time the speculators built a hundred mills on Madeira. Many of the sugar producers who supplied these mills, or invested in them, were neither noblemen nor farmers but members of the professional and artisan classes: cobblers, barbers, surgeons, stonemasons, carpenters or even members of the clergy. Mill owners crushed not only their own sugar, but the cane which their small-scale peasant neighbours brought to them for contract processing. Wherever possible they used water for energy since oxen were expensive to buy and had to be fed on hay that competed for land usage with the sugar crop itself. Maintaining the mills, however, was a skilled and expensive business. The specialised carpenters who came to Madeira to build and and maintain the water wheels were of such crucial importance to the island economy that all mill-owners constantly feared that craftsmen might emigrate to the African mainland to work in the flourishing sugar mills in the valleys of southern Morocco. Attempted flight by skilled artisans was made a punishable offence on Madeira.

One key to success in the sugar industry was the process used for purification. The first sugar growers allegedly dried their cane juice in the sun. It was later realised that to obtain better sugar it was necessary to heat the fresh juice artificially over a fire. The resulting molasses was heated again to obtain the best qualities of both white and brown sugar. An Italian witness, Julius Landi, provided a detailed account of the process. When the cane was crushed between wooden rollers the sap was collected in wooden tubs and then heated at five different temperatures in five successive metal vats. Impurities and froth were skimmed off from the first boiling and turned into the coarse rum-like alcohol that later became a famous item of barter in the African slave trade. The sugar passed through several more stages of heating, stirring, beating, filtering and moulding before being sold as seven different categories of sugar whose prices ranged from 220 to 530 reales per quarter-hundredweight. To undertake this refining it was necessary to make and maintain expensive metal boiling vats. Madeira had no mines of its own and therefore iron, tin and copper had to be bought from abroad. The skilled coppersmiths, tinsmiths and blacksmiths who made and repaired the sugar cauldrons were immigrants who could demand privileged wages. At the other end of the employment scale unskilled labourers had to cut, haul and stack huge supplies of firewood for the processing plant. Wood had to be collected and stored throughout the year so that the vats could be kept boiling during the harvest season. Heavy bundles of firewood increasingly had to be brought from many miles away as the supply of trees receded and the land planted with sugar expanded.

Despite the problems of obtaining skills and investments the Madeira sugar industry flourished for a hundred years and provided the industrial model for later plantation societies devoted to sugar. The Venetian chronicler Alvise Cadamosto reported that by 1455 the infant industry was already producing twenty tons of sugar per year. Fifteen years later the sugar exports had risen twentyfold, and by the end of the fifteenth century annual production probably exceeded 1,500 tons. By now the Portuguese crown had replaced the semi-autonomous princes as the driving force of empire and it had a deep financial interest in the industry. In 1505 King Manuel of Portugal claimed that Martim de Almeida, the contractor to whom Madeira’s taxes had been farmed out, owned him 600 tons of sugar. Production remained high for another half-century, but thereafter Madeira declined, soils became exhausted, erosion was not adequately stemmed, firewood became scarce, and newer, larger plantations in the South Atlantic began to offer stiff competition.

During its century of pre-eminence Madeira had created a market for Atlantic sugar that was to grow almost without limit for several centuries. Only a small proportion of what was produced went to Portugal. This modest scale of Portuguese imports reflected the relative poverty of a country in which the average consumption of sugar, at the end of the fifteenth century, was only three ounces per person per year. This average, however, was not evenly distributed and young people at the princely courts enjoyed receiving gifts of sugar at their Christmas festivities. A century later the dowager queen of Portugal and her ladies-in- waiting were particularly addicted to the candied fruits that were made with Madeira sugar. In the winter of 1571 the queen received ninety-seven small barrels of sweetmeats including sugared peaches, plums, pears, oranges, and candied lemon peel. The gourmets of France also appreciated the sugar-candy of Madeira. The most important customers for Madeira sugar, however, were the wholesale grocers of Flanders, in the southern Netherlands. Antwerp was one of the richest ports of Europe and its traders were well connected in all the main cities around the North Sea and the Baltic as well as in many riverside markets of the German hinterland. At least a quarter of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Colonising the Atlantic Islands
• Chapter Two: The Merchandise of Africa
• Chapter Three: Spain and the Ocean Crossing
• Chapter Four: Portugal and the South Atlantic
• Epilogue
• Further Reading