The Other Slavery (16 page)

Zenith and Downfall of a Slaver

Catching a slaver in the archival record is no mean task. Indian traffickers were influential, smart, and secretive, and they always had justifications for what they did. Many of their activities involved labor coercion but were legal. For example, according to the terms of his royal contract, Governor Carvajal had the power to “distribute” Indians in encomiendas to worthy colonists. Whereas in central Mexico the encomienda did not amount to enslavement, as Indians continued to live in their communities subject to their own authorities and simply paid tribute to their Spanish overlords, in the north it was tantamount to slavery, albeit with some peculiar features. Encomienda owners in the north were assigned bands of hunter-gatherers who, unlike the agriculturalists of central Mexico, had little to give but their labor. To profit from their encomiendas, encomenderos had to hunt down their “entrusted” Indians, transport them (often at gunpoint) to an estate, and make them work during planting or harvesting time without pay before releasing them again. This system of cyclical enslavement became widespread and quite characteristic of the encomiendas of Nuevo León. Granting nomadic peoples in encomiendas under these conditions was abusive, but it was entirely legal and well within Carvajal’s powers.
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Some of Carvajal’s other activities also fell into an extensive gray area. A good example is his foray into the Rio Grande delta in 1585–1586. At
that time, the mouth of the Rio Grande was a remote region seldom visited by Spaniards that lay more than one hundred miles from their closest settlement. The governor said that he went there looking for a suitable place to establish a fort and to locate a silver-laden ship that had reportedly capsized there. As the Spaniards were exploring the area, “a great quantity of Carib Indian thieves” came out of the marshes and attacked them, according to Carvajal’s affidavit. His use of the loaded term “Carib,” conjuring images of cannibalism, anticipates the tenor of his entire report. “And even though we required the Indians to come back in peace telling them that they would suffer no harm,” Carvajal explains further, “they continued to throw arrows at us with undiminished courage, and I took some of these Indians with their women and children.”
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Governor Carvajal had the power to apprehend Indians who had committed crimes and to sell their service to the highest bidder. In theory he was adhering to a protocol for waging war on the Chichimecs that had been vigorously discussed and painstakingly negotiated in Mexico City. But the particulars of the case lay bare Carvajal’s methods. First, most of the captives were women and children. Second, Carvajal chose not to determine their guilt in the Rio Grande delta, where they were caught, but instead marched them about 125 miles to the newly founded town of León (present-day Cerralvo), where he finally had them tried in March 1586. To be sure, the governor appointed a lawyer to defend the Indians, but the proceedings were a mere formality. Although some of the males confessed to having committed murder, the evidence was circumstantial at best for the women and children. Carvajal himself summarized the case against the Indians this way: “These Indians had made arrowheads from iron nails and pieces of swords and knives, and these and other objects may have come from Flemish caravels and clearly point to their crimes.” In fact, these people lived in a region so distant from any Spanish settlements that it was absurd to pin any crimes on them. Yet officials in Mexico City estimated that Carvajal’s raids on the Rio Grande delta yielded upwards of two thousand Indians.
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One of the Indians captured at the mouth of the Rio Grande was a thirteen-year-old boy who was given the Christian name Francisco. He had several stripes (tattoos) on his lips and chin. A long line ran from
the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose, and there were smaller lines around his eyes. Francisco had been condemned to fifteen years of service and assigned to Governor Carvajal, who then transferred the boy to his nephew, Luis de Carvajal, known as “el Mozo,” meaning “the Younger.” El Mozo had explored and settled Pánuco with his famous uncle and evidently served as his agent. As a “merchant of the mines and other parts,” el Mozo’s occupation included the selling of Indians. He transported Francisco from León all the way to the mine of Zacualpan, in central Mexico, where he sold the boy for 120 pesos to a miner named Alonso de Nava. Exactly how the governor and his nephew split the money remains unknown.
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Even more revealing is Governor Carvajal’s pacification campaign in the Sierra Gorda. In 1583 he gathered thirty or forty volunteers—“including some of the most delinquent and shady individuals that can be found in these parts,” as they would later be described to the king of Spain—to travel to the Sierra Gorda by way of Cuzcatlán. The Sierra Gorda was an extremely rugged region between Pánuco and Mexico City where many Indian groups had taken refuge and established strongholds. At the appearance of the Spanish force, the Indians immediately sent envoys and sued for peace. Governor Carvajal apparently played his part with consummate skill. He received the Indians warmly, begging them to send messengers to other rebels so everyone could receive “authority canes” (canes given to indigenous leaders to recognize their high standing) and take part in the agreement. The governor also insisted that women and children had to be present so that they could be baptized. The Indians themselves constructed an
enramada,
a makeshift church with branches, and arranged an adjacent area with a baptismal font. Everything was set for Sunday, January 8, 1584. At the eleventh hour, the priest refused to go through with the ceremony. He understood that he would be serving as bait for the Indians, and he reportedly said that it was wrong to deceive God. But it was too late. As the action was later reported to the Spanish king, “More than five hundred Indians between men and women came happily and in peace asking to be baptized, and he [Carvajal] had them manacled and initiated proceedings against them, and condemned eight of them to certain sentences and
all others without a single exception were given ten or twelve or fourteen years of service, and they were distributed to the soldiers separating wives from husbands and children from parents.”
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By virtue of his appointment as governor and captain general of the New Kingdom of León, Carvajal assumed a position that was in many ways analogous to the one his uncle Duarte de León had occupied as royal contractor of “the Rivers of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands.” Both possessed trading monopolies granted by their respective crowns, both relied on family members to build their networks of agents, and both exploited the availability of human slaves to create wealth. Uncle and nephew developed comparable systems in Africa and America. The notion of a trafficker and his slave network may seem simplistic, but it is crucial to understand the reality of Indian slavery not as a residue of colonial wars or a transitional phase until African slaves arrived in the New World in sufficient numbers, but as an established network with staying power in which a host of individuals, from imperial bureaucrats down to miners, governors, frontier captains, and Indian allies, had a stake.

Carvajal’s downfall occurred with the intrigue and precision of a Shakespearean play. His activities in Pánuco in the 1570s had unfolded at a time when he had enjoyed the support of Viceroy Enríquez. But when he became governor of Nuevo León in the following decade, he operated in a more hostile political environment that culminated in a major crackdown against Indian slavery. What had been acceptable to one viceroy was entirely out of the question to his successor. During the colonial era, periods of harsh treatment of frontier Indians were often followed by attempts at reform. Evidently Carvajal was caught in one of those cycles.

Yet Carvajal’s fall from grace did not occur solely because of his slaving. In the course of his career, he had made powerful enemies willing to use any means at their disposal to stop his ascent. And indeed they found a very powerful lever. When Carvajal was named governor of the New Kingdom of León in 1579, he had been allowed to take one hundred colonists and additional soldiers from Spain to Mexico. Ordinarily, royal officials at the powerful House of Trade (the agency in charge
of Spain’s overseas exploration and colonization) in Seville reviewed the backgrounds of all colonists bound for the New World to make sure they were not New Christians, who were barred from traveling to the Americas. But in this particular contract, Carvajal was allowed to choose his own passengers and make his own inquiries. It was up to the governor—and not zealous crown officials—to determine who could accompany him, as long as he made sure they were “clean persons and not of the forbidden to go to those lands.” In fact, a majority of the two hundred colonists who eventually signed up with Carvajal (there is no explanation for the discrepancy between this number and the number allowed by his contract) hailed from
la raya de Portugal.
Many of them were New Christians and crypto-Jews who viewed their journey to the New World as a unique chance to leave Iberia and its religious strictures behind. Moreover, among the passengers were several members of Carvajal’s family, including his sister and her husband, along with their children. One of these children was Luis de Carvajal, whose sobriquet “el Mozo” (the Younger) distinguished him from the governor, who came to be known as “el Viejo” (the Elder). The evidence suggests that Governor Carvajal himself was a Catholic but his immediate family was not.
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All of this would come to haunt Carvajal. The first one to be denounced as a practicing Jew and tried by the Mexican Inquisition was the governor’s niece. At first she refused to speak, but when she was forced to undress and lie on the torture rack, she could not hold back. When the ropes were tightened with the first turn of the ratchet, Doña Isabel implicated her mother, father, and brother; after the second turn, amid great screams of pain, she exposed all of her relatives as practicing Jews. The governor’s sister was also tortured. It took as many as five turns of the ratchet to break her down, but she too implicated her entire family.
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Yet the most damaging testimony was that of Luis de Carvajal el Mozo, the governor’s nephew and designated successor to the governorship of Nuevo León. El Mozo had traveled to the New World when he was thirteen. Together with his uncle, he had explored Pánuco and helped establish settlements there. A close bond had developed between
uncle and nephew, so close that one night when el Mozo had gotten lost in Pánuco and remained—as he put it—“thirsty and disarmed in the land of the Chichimeca enemies and fearful of a horrible death,” the governor had organized an all-out night rescue. When el Mozo was found, he reported, “the happiness and joy of my uncle and those who had stayed behind was great.”
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El Mozo’s parents were both practicing Jews, but they had refrained from telling him during his childhood—a practice that was common among crypto-Jewish families to avoid being accidentally denounced. Once in Mexico, however, when el Mozo discovered that he was Jewish, his devotion grew fierce. While in Pánuco, he constantly studied the Bible “and learned much while alone in the wilderness.” During his comings and goings as an itinerant merchant and while selling Indian slaves, he came in contact with a remarkable network of crypto-Jews. He also wrote a secret diary, signing it “Joseph Lumbroso” (Joseph the Enlightened). This process of religious self-discovery took a toll on el Mozo’s relationship with his Catholic uncle. At one point in his diary, the younger Carvajal referred to his older kinsman as “that miserable blind man [blind to Judaism] who was governor of that province.” El Mozo also resented his uncle’s attempts to “marry off the poor orphans, my sisters, or at least bring them into contact with Gentile soldiers or captains.” The Mexican Inquisition found el Mozo’s activities disturbing and aroused the inquisitors’ suspicions about what Governor Carvajal may have known about the religious beliefs of his closest family members.
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Out of respect for his high investiture, they did not subject Governor Carvajal to the rack or to any other form of torture. Although they concluded that he was a Catholic and not a Jew, they found him guilty of being “an abettor and concealer of heretics.” In the course of his life, Carvajal had been a trading agent in Cape Verde, a frontier captain in Pánuco, and a slaver in the New Kingdom of León. He must have killed, maimed, and sold into bondage innumerable Africans and Indians. Yet the Inquisition condemned Carvajal for one of the most magnanimous and courageous decisions of his life: offering passage to many New Christians and crypto-Jews who faced uncertain lives in the Iberian
Peninsula. Carvajal was banished from Mexico for six years for this transgression. It was a light sentence considering that his nephew, nieces, and sister would eventually be garroted and burned at the stake. Still, Carvajal would not see the light of day again. From his cell at the Inquisition, he was transferred to an ordinary jail to answer to the charges of Indian slavery.

Carvajal was merely one of several frontier captains who fought in the Chichimec Wars. His peers included the likes of Doctor Francisco de Sande, later nicknamed “Doctor Sangre” (Doctor Blood), who served in various slaving grounds, including northern Mexico, the Philippines, Guatemala, and Colombia; and Don Gonzalo de Las Casas, another memorable man of action, as well as the author of a courageous exposé of the enslavement of Indians. Mounted on large horses, carrying lances, and wearing padded cotton armor, buckskin jackets, and heavy boots, these frontier commanders may seem quaint to us. But they were surprisingly modern in one respect: they were all entrepreneurs faced with the logistics and financial burdens of outfitting expeditions into remote regions. Captains had to deal with partners, investors, and soldiers, all of whom were primarily concerned with turning a profit.
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