The Other Slavery (51 page)

5. Martha C. Knack,
Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775–1995
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 56; John G. Turner,
Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 215–218.

6. Archaeological, linguistic, and historical information leaves absolutely no doubt that captivity and enslavement were practiced in various regions of the Americas prior to contact. See, for example, Elsa M. Redmond and Charles S. Spencer, “From Raiding to Conquest: Warfare Strategies and Early State Development in Oaxaca, Mexico,” in Elizabeth N. Arkush and Mark W. Allen, eds.,
The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006); Inga Clendinnen,
Aztecs: An Interpretation
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,”
William and Mary Quarterly
40:4 (October 1983), 528–559; John Parmenter,
The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), xliii–xliv, 45–51; William A. Fox, “Events as Seen from the North: The Iroquois and Colonial Slavery,” in Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds.,
Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Leland Donald,
Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Fernando Santos-Granero,
Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). I want to thank Heather F. Roller for bringing the last source to my attention.

7. Many local and regional studies document the trafficking of Indian slaves. For references to all the cardinal points mentioned in this paragraph, see Esteban Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano: Repartimiento, encomienda y esclavitud, 1492–1542
(Seville: Muñoz Moya Editor, 1997); Álvaro Jara,
Guerra y sociedad en Chile
(Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1971); Antonio Rumeu de Armas,
La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica
(Valladolid: Instituto Isabel la Católica de Historia Eclesiástica, 1969); and William Henry Scott,
Slavery in the Spanish Philippines
(Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1991).

8. I use the estimate of the number of African slaves from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
.

9. To my knowledge, Brett Rushforth provided the first comprehensive estimates of Indian slaves in the Americas of between two million and four million. Rushforth,
Bonds of Alliance,
9–10. My own estimates are somewhat higher, and in appendix 1 I provide a breakdown by region and time.

10. Numerous scholars have discussed the demographic impact of slavery on West Africa. For brief overviews, see John Thornton,
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 304–334; John Iliffe,
Africans: The History of a Continent
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137; and Alan Taylor,
American Colonies
(New York: Viking, 2001), 323–324. On the synergistic relationship between slavery and epidemics, see Paul Kelton,
Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), passim. David S. Jones makes the additional point that the epidemiological vulnerability of Native Americans was also dependent on environmental factors such as malnutrition or the chaos generated by European colonization. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,”
William and Mary Quarterly
60:4 (October 2003), 703–742.

11. This is an aspect of Indian slavery that has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Some of the key works in this regard include Carl Coke Rister,
Border Captives: The Traffic in Prisoners by Southern Plains Indians, 1835–1875
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1940); L. R. Bailey,
Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest
(New York: Tower Publications, 1966); David M. Brugge,
Navajos in the Catholic Church Records of New Mexico, 1694–1875
(Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College Press, 1985); Knack,
Boundaries Between;
James F. Brooks,
Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Ned Blackhawk,
Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Pekka Hämäläinen,
The Comanche Empire
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Brian DeLay,
War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S
.
-Mexican War
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Lance R. Blyth,
Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680–1880
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, “Captivity and Adoption Among the Comanche Indians, 1700–1875” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2006); Matthew M. Babcock, “Turning Apaches into Spaniards: North America’s Forgotten Indian Reservations” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Methodist University, 2008); and Paul Conrad, “Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500–1800” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2011).

12. For the variability of contemporary forms of bondage, see Louise Shelley,
Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), passim. Several authors have alluded to the multiple forms of bondage that characterized European-Indian relations in North America. For instance, see Juliana Barr, “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands,”
Journal of American History
92:1 (June 2005), 19–44. Joseph C. Miller has similarly argued that attempting to pigeonhole African slavery as “an institution” has been counterproductive and that historians would be better served by viewing slavery as a process.
Miller,
The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), passim.

1. CARIBBEAN DEBACLE

1. The quotes are from Bartolomé de Las Casas,
The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 27; and Christopher Columbus,
The Four Voyages
(New York: Penguin, 1969), 56, 92. The population debates have generated a large literature. For a comprehensive, if dated, introduction, see William M. Denevan, ed.,
The Native Population of the Americas in 1492
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976). For the best recent treatments with a focus on the Caribbean, see Massimo Livi Bacci, “Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Dem-ographic Catastrophe,”
Hispanic American Historical Review
83:1 (2003), 3–51; and Noble David Cook, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
32:3 (Winter 2002), 349–386.

2. Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,”
William and Mary Quarterly
33 (April 1976), 289.

3. Las Casas,
The Devastation of the Indies,
12–13; King Ferdinand to Diego Colón, Seville, July 21, 1511, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter cited as AGI), Indiferente, 418, L. 3, F. 92v–93. Friar Toribio de Benavente considered Las Casas “tempestuous, argumentative, short-tempered, offensive, and harmful.” Yet his own analysis of the demographic debacle of Mexico, offered in the guise of ten plagues
,
is remarkably consistent with the analysis offered by Las Casas. See Massimo Livi Bacci,
Conquest: The Destruction of the American Indios
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), 25–30.

4. On the delayed arrival of smallpox, see Alfred W. Crosby Jr.,
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 46; and Livi Bacci, “Return to Hispaniola,” 42. Carl O. Sauer noted as much in the mid-1960s in
The Early Spanish Main
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 204. Writing in 2002, Noble David Cook made the best case for an early introduction of smallpox to Española but conceded that no one had yet found any mention of the illness among the Taíno population in 1493 or 1494. Cook, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” 371. On the spread of syphilis, see Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo,
Historia general y natural de las Indias,
book 2, chap. 13. See also Livi Bacci,
Conquest,
56–63. For the influenza thesis, see Francisco Guerra, “La epidemia Americana de influenza en 1493,”
Revista de Indias
14:176 (1985), 325–347; and Francisco Guerra, “The Earliest American Epidemic: The Influenza of 1493,”
Social Science History
12:3 (Autumn 1988), 305–325. For a broader consideration of the role of epidemics in the early Caribbean, see Noble David Cook,
Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15–59.

5. See the sources in the previous note, as well as Cook, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” 369. Variola can survive outside the human body for weeks according to Frank Fenner, Donald A. Henderson, Isao Arita, Zdenek Jezek, and Ivan D. Ladnyi,
Smallpox and Its Eradication,
cited in Elizabeth A. Fenn,
Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 15. The large treatise by Fenner and coauthors is generally considered the definitive work on smallpox.

6. Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
34; Luis Arranz Márquez,
Repartimientos y encomiendas en la Isla Española
(Madrid: Ediciones Fundación García Arévalo, 1991), passim; Livi Bacci, “Return to Hispaniola,” 3–51.

7. For a very candid discussion of the methods used by one of the leading High Counters, see Woodrow Borah, “The Historical Demography of Latin America: Sources, Techniques, Controversies, Yields,” in Paul Deprez, ed.,
Population and Economics: Proceedings of Section V of the Fourth Congress of the International Economic History Association, 1968
(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1970), 187–188. See also the more recent discussion by David Henige, “Recent Work and Prospects in American Indian Contact Population,”
History Compass
6:1 (2008), 183–206.

8. Works that revise down the High Counters’ estimates for the Caribbean include Arranz Márquez,
Repartimientos y encomiendas;
Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
33–70; and Livi Bacci, “Return to Hispaniola,” 3–51. For an interesting study of the synergies between epidemics and the Indian slave trade in a different geographic area, see Kelton,
Epidemics and Enslavement,
passim. Indian vulnerability to disease was greatly affected by malnutrition, overwork, and other environmental factors, as David S. Jones has noted. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” 703–742.

9. Of the many biographies of Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison’s continues to exert enormous influence. Morison,
Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970). For an in-depth, more recent treatment of some of Columbus’s geographic assumptions, see Nicolás Wey Gómez,
The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). On the negotiations with the Spanish monarchs, see Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso, “La negociación Colombina de las Indias,”
Revista de Indias
14 (1954), 289–357. In his earlier negotiations with the Portuguese crown, Columbus had insisted on the very same terms he got from Spain.

10. Morison,
Admiral of the Ocean Sea,
358–359. The first quote is from Ferdinand and Isabella to Columbus, Barcelona, March 30, 1493, cited ibid., 354–355. Note that at this point, Ferdinand and Isabella did not know anything about the lands just discovered by Columbus. By “Indies” they meant distant lands to the west of Spain. On Columbus’s triumphal entrance into Barcelona and the other quotes, see Bartolomé de Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
3 vols. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986), 1:332–333. For details of the tropical birds, see Pietro Martire d’Anghiera,
De Orbe Novo,
2 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1:65.

11. Sauer,
The Early Spanish Main,
28.

12. For the meanings, uses, and value of spices in Europe, see Paul Freedman,
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

13. The quotes are from D’Ailly’s
Imago mundi,
cited in Wey Gómez,
The Tropics of Empire,
79–84. Wey Gómez’s analysis of how these ideas informed Columbus’s expectations is very persuasive.

14. On the connections between heat and gold, see Sauer,
The Early Spanish Main,
24; and above all Wey Gómez,
The Tropics of Empire,
40–42, where both Columbus and Ferrer de Blanes are quoted.

15. On Columbus’s observations of the color of Indians, see his journal entries for October 11 and 13, 1492, and the quotations in Wey Gómez,
The Tropics of Empire,
18, 22, 40.

16. The quotes are from Columbus’s diary, in Cristóbal Colón,
Textos y documentos completos,
ed. Consuelo Varela (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1984), 56. During his first voyage, Columbus took Indians from various places, including San Salvador and Cuba. For the captives from Cuba, see Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
1:232–234; and Carlos Esteban Deive,
La Española y la esclavitud del indio
(Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo, 1995), 45–46. In assessing the reliability of Las Casas’s writings, it is important to make a clear distinction between his incendiary
Devastation of the Indies
and his far more meticulous (and seldom read)
Historia de las Indias.