The Experiential Caribbean

Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

Pablo F. Gómez

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469630885
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gomez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gomez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gomez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.

1 Arrivals

The Caribbean is, in contrast, a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts.

—Édouard Glissant

A salvo of royal cannons erupted from Cartagena de Indias’ fortified walls on June 14, 1657, to welcome the Nuestra Señora de La Popa as she finished her transatlantic voyage. Anticipating the ship’s arrival was a city teeming with people from all over the Caribbean, Central America, and Peru. Its hostels, many of which were owned and administered by free black women, were overflowing. Its plazas and streets were filled with stalls where merchants, hustlers, and ritual practitioners from all over the Atlantic sold wares and dreams to visitors and residents alike. After weeks at sea, Cartagena surely struck the disembarking travelers as an urban mirage of fortified walls, oceangoing vessels of all sizes, and variegated pageantry flavored by foreign odors and sounds. On hand to receive the ship’s honored passengers was the provincial governor Pedro Zapata, together with a retinue of his advisors and representatives of the city’s council, military, and convents. In this maremagnum of sensorial input, the voyagers likely found the mass of faces peering at them from the dock familiar; as kindred survivors of a transatlantic crossing, these black faces presented potent symbols of their own fragmented histories.1

Leading the landing group was Ambassador Bans of the West African kingdom of Ardra on an official trip to Madrid for his ruler, Capoo. Below him, hundreds of less fortunate Africans transported for sale hunkered in the bowels of the ship, unwillingly entering the same realm. Many of them had perished during the crossing, and even more would die even before touching land.2 For those fortunate enough to survive their first weeks in the New World, existence entailed unwelcoming social and physical landscapes. Despite overwhelming odds, many of these black slaves would grow adept at making these spaces their own within a few years of their arrival. The paradigmatic early modern Caribbean city that Ambassador Bans encountered was one inhabited by mores, sounds, flavors, and smells derived from all corners of the then-known world. People and cultures from the New World, Africa, Europe, and even Asia converged in the crucible of the seventeenth-century Caribbean and invented new ways of feeling the world and acting upon it.3

Bans arrived in a city where visitors clearly recognized the ambassador’s countrymen—and perhaps his enemies—by their filed teeth and ritual facial scars.4 In the streets of the city, West African practitioners from Ardra openly plied their trade using ritual gourds and horns and displayed herbs and roots for sale. West and West Central African drum sounds represented a central part of the Caribbean city’s sonic landscape by the seventeenth century.5 Moreover, for West Africans like Bans, Cartagena’s foreign stones, corners, and walls were nevertheless inhabited by recognizable energies, sounds, and by the spirits of their departed brethren.

Ambassador Bans was hosted by Jesuit priests and Spanish officials in Cartagena and received all the honors reserved for foreign dignitaries, including banquets and audiences with the city council. Governor Zapata even dispatched one of his relatives, Felipe de Zúñiga, a chief of staff in the military company composed of the city’s free blacks, to accompany Bans on the rest of his journey to Spain.6 Before leaving Cartagena, Ambassador Bans was baptized in the cathedral and christened Felipe Zapata on September 16, 1657, with Governor Zapata himself serving as godfather. Continuing his journey aboard the royal galleon fleet, Bans’s next rendezvous occurred in Havana, where he received a similar reception to that granted to him in Cartagena. From Havana, he traveled to Sanlucar de Barrameda in Spain. King Philip then provisioned and paid for the return trip costs of Don Felipe (as Bans was referred to in Spanish communiqués following his ennoblement by Philip IV), who set sail from Cadiz on November 25, 1659, with a group of Capuchin missionaries. He arrived home on January 14, 1660, after completing a triangular journey quite different from that of most ships transporting people from Ardra to the Caribbean during the early modern era.7

Several of the main forces molding the early modern Atlantic world become apparent when examining Bans’s journey: the rise and consolidation of transatlantic trading networks of goods and people; the role of religion as a tool for political and commercial negotiation; the ways in which African and European rulers leveraged alliances and trading perks against competing powers; and the rise of New World urban centers mainly populated by communities of African descent. Yet, despite their obvious importance, these histories—the ones upon which scholarly analyses of the ambassador’s life and those of the bondsmen and women sailing beneath him are predicated—do not fully capture the fundamental forces that shaped Bans’s journey. Indeed, according to Bans, his ruler had sent him to discover the secrets behind European monarchs’ remarkable health.8 Concerned about his own mortality and dynastic succession, King Capoo wished to learn from European sovereigns and emulate their reputed longevity.9 King Capoo’s preoccupation with his own mortality reminds us that corporeality is inextricably intertwined with the very same economic, religious, and political issues comprising the bulk of canonical Atlantic histories.

This chapter describes the larger historical and social context in which Caribbean epistemological transformations concerning the natural world and human bodies transpired. These transformations directly resulted from encounters that occurred between the thousands of people who arrived in the Caribbean from all over the globe during the early modern period. Most of these immigrants were of African descent, and by the end of the seventeenth century they had transformed the Caribbean into a place where a new type of blackness was normative—one that used African inspirations to invent new realities. Black appropriation of the social and cultural landscapes of the Caribbean depended not only on the population of the realm of the living, but also of the underground. Otherworldly colonizers, the dead, represented powerful forces in Caribbean locales where cultural and social mores shaped by people of African descent were normative.

The circumstances of the seventeenth-century Caribbean differ in fundamental ways from the better-known histories of the plantation-based societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, this history is fundamental to our understanding of these subsequent historical spaces. By deconstructing obscure labels and reimagining social landscapes previously perceived through Old World imaginaries, this chapter explores the mutable character of physical and social spaces in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. The following pages introduce a geography of human beings and spiritual entities whose contours appear familiar but, upon closer scrutiny, morph into unknown, unsettling spaces.10 These newly textured spaces reveal themselves to be deeply imbricated in the making not only of the invisible histories this book aspires to educe, but also in the crafting of discernible and more familiar early modern histories of bodies and the natural world.

A Land in Flux

Caribbean spaces lacked the large Amerindian populations on which Spaniards built the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain. During the seventeenth century, crown functionaries sent repeated notices to Madrid and Seville concerning the lack of Indians in the Caribbean.11 By the early seventeenth century, the native population in the Caribbean hinterlands had experienced a massive collapse caused by repeated epidemics of Old World diseases that disproportionally affected Amerindians. Those who survived were further decimated by the brutality of forced labor they experienced on the encomiendas that peppered early modern Caribbean landscapes. Between 55 percent and 90 percent of the native population disappeared in Caribbean rural spaces during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.12 In the New Kingdom of Granada, Caribbean Amerindian populations reached their nadir around the mid-seventeenth century.13 Not surprisingly, Caribbean Amerindians and their descendants constituted a definite minority in the urban spaces that eventually emerged in the region, and they appear mostly on the periphery of surviving historical records. However, these communities did not disappear.14 They became crucial actors in the...