The Other Slavery (53 page)

49. On Juan Ponce de León’s dealings with the Indians of Florida and his royal patent of conquest, see William R. Swagerty, “Beyond Bimini: Indian Responses to European Incursions in the Spanish Borderlands, 1513–1600” (manuscript based on Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1981), 38–74; Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
295, 297; and Sued Badillo, “Guadalupe,” 46, 49. On Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón’s activities, see Paul E. Hoffman,
A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 41–47; Paul E. Hoffman, “A New Voyage of North American Discovery: Pedro de Salazar’s Visit to the ‘Island of Giants,’”
Florida Historical Quarterly
58 (1980), 415–426; and Paul E. Hoffman, “Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón’s Discovery and Colony,” in Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds.,
The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 36–49.

50. Bartolomé de Las Casas,
En defensa de los indios
(Barcelona: Biblioteca de Cultura Andaluza, 1985), 127. On the use of attack dogs, see John Grier Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner,
Dogs of the Conquest
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 3–34. On the holding pens, see the
juicio
de residencia a los jueces de Apelación
(a type of judicial proceeding), 1516, quoted in Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
265.

51. Both quotes are from Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
285. For Vázquez de Ayllón’s expeditions, see Hoffman,
A New Andalucia,
44. For transatlantic mortality rates, see Philip D. Curtin,
The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 275–290; and David Eltis and David Richardson,
Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 167–187.

52. On the determined resistance of the Carib Indians, see Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
294–302, and Whitehead, “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies,” 875–888.

53. For the number of Lucayos enslaved, see Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
289, 391–399; and Keegan,
The People Who Discovered Columbus,
218–223. Only a handful of islands became extraordinary refuges where displaced populations of both Taínos and Caribs refashioned themselves and found new homes. The large island of Trinidad, for example, remained populated. In 1511 Spanish authorities had pronounced the people of Trinidad man-eating Caribs, and over the next few years Europeans conducted raids there. But in 1520 the crown reclassified them as “a people of good will and friends of Christians.” Although the raids never ceased entirely, the people of
Trinidad survived partly through this flimsy legal protection and primarily by removing themselves from the exposed coastal areas to the inaccessible mountains of the interior. The most remarkable case of a refuge island is perhaps Dominica, in the Lesser Antilles. As late as 1534, Spaniards found twenty villages, dozens of canoes, and thousands of residents there. That so many Carib and Taíno Indians remained on an island so close to Puerto Rico after decades of the most intense slaving bespeaks their resourcefulness and indomitable will to survive. Their survival also shows that in the long run, opposing, fighting, and hiding from the colonists were better strategies than seeking accommodation. Linda A. Newson,
Aboriginal and Spanish Colonial Trinidad: A Study in Culture Contact
(London: Academic Press, 1976), 32, 72. In 1516 the infamous slaver Juan Bono—whom Las Casas called “Juan Bono, Malo” (“John Good, Bad”)—built a house on Trinidad, where he intended to enslave the residents of a nearby village. He shipped 180 to 200 of them to Puerto Rico. Las Casas,
Historia de las Indias,
3:186. In the Lesser Antilles, Santa Cruz became depopulated by the middle of the 1510s, and Guadalupe followed suit by the decade’s end. It is quite likely that many of these Indians migrated to Dominica. Sued Badillo, “Guadalupe,” 60–85. From the very beginning, a synergistic relationship developed between epidemics and enslavement. As the Caribbean experience shows, death caused by disease spurred slaving raids to replace dead or dying workers, and conversely slaving campaigns spread disease, thus closing an extremely insidious loop. This synergistic relationship has been documented in other regions and times. Historian Paul Kelton, for instance, has shown that it was not the arrival of Europeans in the southeastern United States that devastated the Indians there. Instead, it was the rise of the deerskin trade in the 1650s and the burgeoning Indian slave trade under English auspices that accelerated and magnified the spread of epidemic disease, culminating in what he calls the “Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic of 1696.” The synergistic relationship between epidemics and enslavement was real and occurred throughout the New World, with terrifying results. Kelton,
Epidemics and Enslavement
.

54. For a sound discussion of population dynamics in Europe during and after the Black Death, see Wally Seccombe,
A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe
(New York: Verso, 1992), 144–159. For the larger context, see Suzanne Austin Alchon,
A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

55. Livi Bacci,
Conquest,
6, 231.

2. GOOD INTENTIONS

1. A Web-based text of the New Laws can be found at “Leyes y ordenanzas: Nuevamente hechas por S. M. para la gobernación de las Indias, y buen tratamiento y conservación de los indios,”
Colección de documentos para la historia de México: Versión actualizada,
Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes,
http://bib.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/06922752100647273089079/p0000026.htm
. The italics in the quote are mine. The Spanish archives contain very little information about the meetings leading up to the promulgation of the New Laws. For the most detailed
treatment of the laws, see Ernesto Schäfer,
El Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias,
2 vols. (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2003), 2:77–88.

2. I was inspired in this section by recent works such as Brian P. Owensby,
Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); van Deusen,
Global Indios,
passim; and Ariela J. Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race in the Legal Regimes of Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia: A Comparison,”
North Carolina Law Review
91 (2013), 1699–1756.

3. The quote is from Harriet A. Jacobs,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 34. For a general study of the workings of the court system in the South, see Ariela J. Gross,
Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Court
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), passim.

4. Van Deusen,
Global Indios,
21. A thirteenth-century legal compendium known as
Las siete partidas
(The seven books) already regarded slavery as “the most wretched condition into which anyone could fall” and allowed slaves to act in court to lessen their sufferings. For example, in cases of cruel or abusive masters, “a slave may complain to the judge who will need to find the truth, and if so, the slave will be sold to a different master.” The fourth book dealt with domestic matters involving marriage, children, and—as an extension—“servants and slaves.”
Las siete partidas del sabio rey, don Alfonso el nono, nuevamente glosadas por el licenciado Gregorio López, del Consejo Real de Indias de Su Majestad
(1555) (Valladolid: Diego Fernández de Córdoba, 1587), book 4, law 6. See also Owensby,
Empire of Law,
chap. 5; Robin Blackburn,
The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800
(New York: Verso, 1997), 50–52; and Charles R. Cutter,
The Protector de Indios in Colonial New Mexico, 1659–1821
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), chap. 1. Studies that show how Indians used Spanish legal mechanisms to advance their interests abound. In addition to the works already cited, see Steve J. Stern,
Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); and William B. Taylor,
Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972).

5. For a broad comparative discussion, see Gross and de la Fuente, “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race.” Frank Tannenbaum’s classic study
Slave and Citizen
was among the first to draw attention to the significant differences between the legal regimes that emerged in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies—which he believed were relatively benign and conducive to freedom—and the harsher regimes prevalent in British America. Tannenbaum,
Slave and Citizen
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1946). Later social and legal scholars have tended to de-emphasize Tannenbaum’s sharp distinction by highlighting the harshness of the plantation slavery that emerged in Latin America. And yet recent scholars such as Gross and de la Fuente have documented the significant impact of the law on slaves’ lives. Indians made rapid use of the Spanish legal system to the point of litigiousness. For an excellent case study, see Susan Kellogg,
Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500–1700
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). In the early 1570s, a group of indigenous leaders from central Mexico acknowledged as much in a letter to the Spanish king: “In the time of our gentility we did not
often have lawsuits,” they wrote. “Now that we are Christians we have many lawsuits with other natives as well as with the Spanish people of your Majesty.”
Códice Mendieta,
quoted in Owensby,
Empire of Law,
2.

6. The exact estimate of the number of Indians sent to Spain is 2,442 according to Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano,
305–306; and Esteban Mira Caballos,
Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI
(Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2000), 111. See also the introduction to van Deusen,
Global Indios
. When we consider that this estimate is based on fragmentary export licenses and that several Natives were introduced without licenses, it is obvious that the real number was higher, perhaps considerably so. See Alfonso Franco Silva, “El indígena en el mercado de esclavos de Sevilla, 1500–1525,”
Gades
1 (1978), 25–35; and Juana Gil-Bermejo, “Indígenas americanos en Andalucía,” in Bibiano Torres Ramírez and José J. Hernández Palomo, eds.,
Andalucía y América en el siglo XVI
(Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1983), 535–555.

7. Gregorio López understood the institution of slavery through the prism of
Las siete partidas.
Ever the legal scholar, he believed that this elaborate set of laws and practical advice was so important to the daily lives of all Spaniards that he went through the trouble of preparing a new annotated edition. For his efforts on behalf of Indians, see “Gregorio López contra propietarios de indios,” Seville, 1543–1545, AGI, Justicia, 741, N. 3. More than eight hundred pages of documents survive for these trials alone. They are available online at Portal de Archivos Españoles (hereafter cited as PARES), the digital portal of the Spanish archives,
http://pares.mcu.es/
.

8. During my own archival work, I counted seventy-nine such trials. The number of lawsuits peaked in 1543, and although they decreased rapidly thereafter (with smaller spikes in 1548, 1553, and 1560), Indians continued to take their masters to court as late as the 1580s. After I wrote this chapter, I read Nancy E. van Deusen’s excellent
Global Indios,
which is a far more comprehensive study of these cases. See also Nancy E. van Deusen, “Seeing
Indios
in Sixteenth-Century Castile,”
William and Mary Quarterly
69:2 (April 2012), 205–234; and Nancy van Deusen, “The Intimacies of Bondage: Female Indigenous Servants and Slaves and Their Spanish Masters, 1492–1555,”
Journal of Women’s History
24:1 (Spring 2012), 13–43. The closest we can get to an Indian narrative in this early period is a complaint written by a Chichimec cacique named Don Francisco Tenamaztle during his imprisonment in Valladolid, Spain, in 1555. Don Francisco recounted the myriad abuses perpetrated by the Spaniards on his people in northwestern Mexico. But strictly speaking, his voice is that of an aggrieved Indian leader, not that of a slave, and his account is too brief and general to be of much use. “Informaciones hechas en Valladolid este año a pedimento del cacique don Francisco Tenamaztle, remitido preso desde la provincia de Xalisco, de donde era señor,” Valladolid, 1555, in Alberto Carrillo Cázares, ed.,
El Debate sobre la Guerra Chichimeca, 1531–1585,
2 vols. (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2000), 2:513–535.

9. On sex and age ratios for African slaves, see Eltis and David,
Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,
162–166. It is true that sex ratios were somewhat more balanced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than at the height of the transatlantic trade in the eighteenth century. But even in this earlier period, males constituted a
majority of those transported to the New World. African sellers of slaves typically offered more women and children than the buyers wanted. For an excellent discussion of this phenomenon, see David Eltis,
The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 4. Less than one in every ten slaves was a minor during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a ratio that increased in the eighteenth century, but only to one in five.