The slave trade in Latin America. Profit and human misery - Research Paper Example

? THE SLAVE TRADE IN LATIN AMERICA: PROFIT AND HUMAN MISERY By and number School School Location INTRODUCTION As early as the 15th century the Spanish were gaining a stranglehold on Mexico and the various tribal lands of Latin America. A series of conquistadors, essentially privateers, more adventurers than soldiers, struck out on their own to secure the spoils and riches of the new lands. Up to the 16th century activities in this part of world were predominantly exploratory treasure hunts. Standing in their way, however, were the multitude of sedentary and fierce nomadic indigenous tribes which had to be overcome if the land was to be subjugated. By 1502 the first shipload of Africans had been landed in Hispanola. By the time of the full conquest of Mexico in the 1520 and Peru in the 1530s, all the elements of the colonial system of Latin America were falling into place. In Mexico, farming and mining were underway. In Brazil, under the Portuguese, the initial period of some coexistence through bartering and trade with the Indians was morphing into formal Spanish and Portuguese royal control.1 Along with it came the beginnings of a plantation economy. On the main land, as in the Caribbean, indigenous resistance and subsequent depopulation was spreading throughout Latin America, and by 1570 war and disease had taken its toll. Traditional sources of free labor diminished, and within thirty years of the Spanish landing tribes had been decimated. Along with depopulation and the emerging economy came the recognition that a large labor force would be needed to work the mines, ranches and sugar plantations cropping up like seedlings throughout Latin America.1 Slaves were the logical answer. The development of the slave trade to Latin America had begun in full force. The years of the trade from the 16th through the18th centuries tell a grim tale of cruelty, greed and unparallel human exploitation—a lucrative business venture that made many rich on the suffering backs of others. The Portuguese Before the discovery, the Portuguese had long been satisfying Europe’s thirst for sugar by plying the slave trade and providing free slave labor to the plantations of Madeira’s, Canaries and Cyprus. With the discovery of the New World, the need for slaves expanded, prompting the Portuguese traders to explore new markets for their “product.” Within thirty years of Columbus’s discovery, the Portuguese, beginning in Brazil, tapped into the growing market and before long were supplying an unending cache of slave workers for a burgeoning sugar industry. Assessing the northeastern coast of Brazil as particularly adopted to sugar growth, they began importing thousands of African slaves to that area, each of which was “not a mere captive but a commodity… an investment…[that]… impelled a vast expansion of the American sugar dominions. 2—an expansion that would eventually evolve as a lucrative commercial enterprise over the next three centuries via numerous other European slave traders. Estimates say that “By 1700 nearly three-quarters of the population of the British West Indies was African.” 3 Many countries including the French, Dutch and British eventually became prominent in the slave trade. The details of the actual practice seem today stunningly inhumane. And least it be forgotten, the truth remains that “The slave trade [its practices] was so awful in itself that one is apt to forget that it was merely a means to an end.” 4 That end was profit. Life on the Slave Ship Numerous accounts exist of the misery, suffering and dehumanizing environment of the slave ship that defy all modern sense of morality “as a brutally efficient piece of technology and site of struggle.” 5 All of the Europeans—Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British, French and Italians--freighted ships laden with barter to trade with Africans for African slaves. To those slave traders 16th through the 18th century, practices that would now be condemned universally as nothing short of “deliberately concealed genocide” 6 were accepted by those for whom greed and economic convenience were primary goals. The horrific journey of the slave (as long as nine months in some instances) began long before their actual arrival to the ship that would transport them to the New World—a journey filled with both physical and psychological horrors unimaginable to the average freeman. In African coastal and inland villages where slaves were auctioned, both men and women were stripped, examined for imperfections and branded--the women not as deeply as the men.7 After being selected for transport, the slaves were then usually taken down river from interior villages to boats awaiting them in port. The following describes one women’s excruciating journey: Lying in the bottom of the canoe in three of four inches of dirty water…the woman could not see where they were taking her….Several times along the way she had been sold…Ahead lay the owba coocoo, the dreaded ship. She had heard about it in the most heated threats made in the village, where to be sold to the white man and taken abroad…was the worst punishment imaginable…After a while she could hear, at first faintly…other sounds—the waves slapping the hull of a big ship, its timbers creaking. Then came muffled screaming in a strange language. 8 Once aboard ship a series of impressions reinforced the terror of things to come on a long journey into the unknown. “In his Histoire de la traite des Noirs, Descamps describes life aboard a slave ship. A summary follows: In good weather the slaves were brought early on deck and hosed with sea water. [Undoubtedly, cuts and abrasions suffered during the long hours cramped beneath deck would sting from the salt]. Sparse meals of groats and dried vegetables were served thrice a day and exercise on deck usually consisted of forced dancing. In evening the slaves were tightly and painfully manacled beneath deck, where promiscuity, forced sexual activity and illness prevailed. Suicides were commonplace. 9 The overall condition under which slaves well into the 18th century were transported may be aptly described as “human creatures, packed, side by side…and reduced nearly to a state of being buried alive, with just air enough to preserve a degree of life sufficient to make them sensible of all the horrors of their situation”10 As can be imagined, outbreaks of sickness spread through the groups like wildfire, and it was not uncommon that with the first sign of illness, those infected might be thrown overboard—man, women or child—to protect the lucrative cargo. Life for women was specifically precarious in the sexual sense. Sailors, often at sea for many months, saw the women as vehicles to alleviate their needs. Given the nature and purpose of their cargoes, however, sailors were somewhat discouraged from relations with the women by their superiors as warnings about the women “whose natural hot and lewd temper soon wastes their bodies.” 11 Other reports suggest that officers using rank often brutally sexual abused the women. Yet it is not to suggest that all women aboard accepted their lot as victims. Women on some ships were given more freedom than the men shackled below deck. One incident in 1721 aboard the Robert is evidence of female complicity, at great cost, in a freedom break and violence against her captors: The woman had served as a lookout and alerted the leader as to the number of sailors on deck. She had also stolen all the weapons used in the mutiny. For her exceptional participation she paid dearly: ‘The Woman he hoisted up by the Thumbs, whipp'd, and slashed her with Knives before the other Slaves till she died’.12 Though as far back as the 1500s the Portuguese had laid down laws requiring ships to carry adequate provisions, more often than not these regulations were not enforced. Dysentery, dehydration, sea sickness, scurvy, and skin diseases were prevalent and rarely treated. “Brazilian historians recorded loses of 15 to 20 percent [of slave cargoes] in the sixteenth century,’13 though things improved later as more public attention was paid to the practice, and traders, wishing to maximize profits, took pains to ensure the delivery of as many bodies as possible for sale. This was particularly true of Brazil, where many thousands of slaves were needed to work the growing number of plantations. Hardly an environment for the practice of what had been in Africa joyful religious ceremonies, occasionally a kind captain would allow the slaves (particularly women and children) to come on deck and dance. The occasions were probably the single opportunity for the slaves to perform religious dances, the basis of their rites in Africa. All said, life aboard a slave ship from the early days through the 1800, when slavery finally came to an end, was gruesome and largely subject to a captain’s whims or sense of morality. Even the most sympathetic, however, could not alleviate what amounted to a forced journey, in horrible conditions, colored by disease, poor food, sexual abuse, suicide and what amounted, in many instances, to murder. Beginnings of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Mexico Even before the Portuguese discovered the lucrative possibilities of Brazilian slave trade, the Spanish had been importing slave labor to Hispanola and Mexico. It is interesting to note the dearth of material and evidence on the slave trade to Mexico. Estimates as to how many slaves were actually imported by Spanish traders in the 16th century [200,000] can not be verified, although it is generally acknowledged that some blacks fought beside the conquering Spaniards in other parts of Latin America. There is also logical evidence that African slaves were exported to the New World as early as 1510, and that “as early as 1570 there were said to be as many as twenty thousand African slaves in Mexico” 14 Communication from the King of Spain to his viceroy in Mexico in 1584 confirms that the Spanish were most interested in replacing Indians, “a weak people” with “mulattos, negroes and mestizos [mixed race] workers.” 15Once the Spanish realized the economic and profit advantages in using slave labor, the slave trader’s fate in the New World was secured. Regarding Mexico and its certain import of slave labor, Davidson supports the notion and writes the following: …nothing could stop the trade. There was too much money in it for the courts of Europe. The Spanish king was probably in receipt of cash from slaving taxes even before 1510, the date of the first big "license" for Negro slaves. In 1513 a royal tax was promulgated which made every license cost two ducats, a license being understood as the permit for shipping a single slaves; on top of this there was an export tax. These taxes immediately provoked smuggling; and it appears that the earliest African slaves shipped from Portugal to the Indies were sent out clandestinely by tax evaders. In 1515 there came the first Spanish shipment of slave-grown West Indian sugar and in 1518, as though by the sheer logic of the thing, the first cargo of African slaves directly from Africa to the West Indies [and from there to Mexico]. 16 Evolution without Amelioration Over three centuries, from the beginnings of the slave trade in the New World, maximum profits were the goal. While the Dutch pursued domination of the trade over the Portuguese from the 1600s, trafficking continued by privateers from many European nations. Slavery for the Europeans was a profitable enterprise for the slavers and for the entrepreneurs exploiting the burgeoning economic structure of the New World, particularly its sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil and Peru. Spanish captains of slave ships in the 1500s were probably no worse than those of the 17th and 18th century—all were in it for profit despite moral misgivings regarding the practice and the beings transported as so much chattel. One might say that in the two and half centuries of its western existence, slaving became a science of combined collusion between slavers, African slave traders, politicians and business men in both the old and New World. In Brazil alone, somewhere “After 1500 the volume of trade passed 2000 slaves per annum…” 17, and over time grew to overwhelming numbers that today represent the majority population, especially in the north. The need for slaves in the Peruvian, Ecuadorian and silver mines of Chili was also expanding to some degree, but never to the extent of Brazil. Additional workers were also needed for the newly discovered alluvial gold mines of the lowlands, for which Africans were better suited to the humid climes and could replace the indigenous Indians who died like flies in the heat of forced labor. Farms and plantations were also expanding throughout Latin America, some “employing” up to 20,000 slaves.18 A model for the rest of Latin America, Peru quickly trained slaves to perform skilled crafts and by mid-1600s and beyond, slaves could be found doing everything from tailoring to shoemaking. By the mid 1800s sugar plantation technology, supported by slave labor, was thriving in Cuba along with the advent of railroads. By the 1840s, well before the end of the Cuban slave trade, the demand for laborers remained intense. The growth of Cuba’s plantation system in the 17th and the early 18th century together with Dutch power grabs in the area did not put an end to the original Brazilian sugar industry, or to the thriving slave trade system upon which the economy relied. It did, however, in the profit sense affect its colonial economy in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. West Indian sugar plantations, thriving under new technology and farming methods, were in need of more and more slaves, which, from a supply and demand perspective drove up the cost of a slave. “By the last two decades of the [18th] century the Brazilian economy was in a depressed state, and an anxious Crown was seeking new markets and products to revive the colonial economy.”19 Thus began a thrust for a mineral wealth based economy that while demanding additional costly slave labor was positively weighed against the profit to be gained—both for traders and mining companies. By the 18th century in Brazil, a new type of slave economy had emerged: the mining of gold and diamonds. Indeed from 1710 to 1720 estimates from several historians indicate a huge surge of slave importation to work the mines from 20,000 to 50,000, creating a zone of slave labor and slave demand unparallel even in Brazil. 20 As originally brought to Latin America to replace indigenous slaves, “this ‘traded immigration’ as it was called, became a lucrative business, “structured and organized through European companies…a commerce which made a decisive contribution to changing the economy of the Western world” 21 Conclusion “The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which lasted over three hundred and fifty years and inextricably linked four continents, constituted history's largest forced migration and one of the seminal events in global history. Over twelve million Africans, mostly from coastal West and Central Africa and transported primarily on European ships, were landed in the Americas, primarily Brazil and the West Indies.”22 As a human tragedy the slave trade remains unparallel. As a human tragedy underpinned by greed, it is perhaps the most significant and blatant example. It is a hard point to argue in the face of practices such as pawnship, or the use of slaves “as pawns to underpin credit of slavers, or collateral.” 23 It is, however, interesting to note that Latin American slavery is generally considered less “harsh” in comparison to that practiced in the Southern United States, where the trade, controlled by the English, “operated under a system of unrestrained capitalism where maximization of profit was all…” 24 One might conclude that indeed the notion of importing Africans as slaves was begun with the conquest of Mexico. But it was not in Mexico that the widest use of slaves was most financially advantageous, or the basis for its economy. It was in the Caribbean and on mainland Brazil that economies were most completely built on the backs of African slaves. Evidence of this is clear to the visitor in the various countries, particularly Brazil, where African ancestry is somewhat dominant. Epilogue: Science, Technology and Economic Thrust: It is sometimes said that the slave trade fueled much of the advances in Europe during the industrial revolution. That said, such moves as those by pioneering French plantation owner Aime-Benjamin Fleurieau in situating plantations close to rivers and access to water and other emerging technologies brought better production and more profit. Despite the significant losses of slaves to disease, the losses were negligible compared to the profits gained. 25 Regarding the funding of industry in Europe, growers such as Fleurieau certainly took advantage of the huge gains gotten from their slave labor. “…it was wise of the family to collect some of the capital value so created to reinvest it in France” 26 Along with advances in medicine in the 1800s, which certainly improved survival rates among slaves, intermarriage, prevalent in Latin America, improved the immunities of slaves to disease. 27 Yet despite advances in both technology and science, not much changed in the lives of the slaves in the three centuries under discussion. From the landing of Columbus well into the 1800s, slaves, particularly in Brazil, we used until slavery’s banning in 1888. Bibliography Clark, Andrew F. “The Atlantic Slave Trade Revisited.” Journal of Third World Studies, Spring (2005). http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3821/is_200504/ai_n13642828/ (addressed 10 March 2011) Davidson, Basil. The African Slave Trade: Precolonial History, 1450-1850. Boston: Little Brown, 1961. Diene, Doudou. From Chains to Bonds: The Slave Trade Revisited. New York: Berghahn Books/UNESCO, 2001. Dow, George Francis. Slave Ships and Slaving. Salem, MA: Marine Research Society, 1927 Kaltenbacher, Kelly, Mehta, Pooja, and Nahas, Rebakha. Antebellum Slavery. http://cghs.dadeschools.net/slavery/antebellum_slavery/interstate_slave_trade/ship_life.htm Klein, Herbert A. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Lovejoy, Paul E. “The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa c. 1600 - 1810” Journal of African History, 42 (2001): 67-89. Mathieson, William Law. Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839-1865. 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