St. Peter Claver: San Pedro Claver, El Esclavo De Los Esclavos

San Pedro Claver, El Esclavo De Los Esclavos

Peter Claver Corberó known as St. Peter Claver, the slave of slaves, was a missionary priest and Jesuit Spanish born in Verdu ( Catalonia ) in June 1580 , and died in Cartagena de Indias on September 9th of 1654 . Passed to posterity for their commitment to alleviate the suffering of the slaves of slave port of Cartagena de Indias . It is the patron saint of slaves .

Shy and simple, Catalan short and long words into deeds, Pedro Claver Corberó, is one of the most fascinating figures of Christianity and daring of the seventeenth century , whose life was developed in the context of colorful adventures, passions and injustices of the slave port of Cartagena de Indias . His self-sacrifice to the black muzzles of which the theologians of that time discussing even possess a soul, is an admirable example of the practice of Christian liberation and defense of human rights. It is considered a heroic example of what should be the Church's preferential commitment to the poor and marginalized.

Slave ministry

Whereas Sandoval visited the slaves where they worked, Claver preferred to head for the wharf as soon as a slave ship entered the port. Boarding the ship, he entered the filthy and diseased holds to treat and minister to their badly-treated, terrified human cargo who had survived a voyage of several months under horrible conditions. It was difficult to move around on the ships, because the slave traffickers filled them to capacity. The slaves were often told they were being taken to a land where they would be eaten. Claver wore a cloak, which he would lend to anyone in need; a legend says that whoever wore the cloak received lifetime health and was cured of all disease. After the slaves were herded from the ship and penned in nearby yards to be scrutinized by crowds of buyers, Claver joined them with medicine, food, bread, brandy, lemons and tobacco. With the help of interpreters and pictures which he carried with him, he gave basic instructions and assured the slaves of their human dignity and God's saving love.

Claver had conflicts with some of his Jesuit brothers, who accepted slavery. Claver saw the slaves as fellow Christians, encouraging others to do so as well. During his 40 years of ministry he catechized and baptized an estimated 300,000 slaves, following up on them to ensure that as Christians they received their Christian and civil rights. His mission extended beyond caring for slaves, however. He preached in the city square, to sailors and traders and conducted country missions, returning every spring to visit those he had baptized, ensuring that they were treated humanely. During these missions, whenever possible he avoided the hospitality of planters and overseers; instead, he would lodge in the slave quarters.

Claver's work on behalf of slaves did not prevent him from ministering to the souls of well-to-do members of society, traders and visitors to Cartagena (including Muslims and English Protestants) and condemned criminals, many of whom he prepared for death; he was also a frequent visitor at the city's hospitals. Through years of work and the force of his own unique personality, the slaves' situation slowly improved. In time he became a moral force, the apostle of Cartagena.

Illness, death and legacy

Parkinsonism finally confined Claver to his room. He lingered four years, largely forgotten and neglected, and died September 9, 1654. The city magistrates, who had previously considered him a nuisance for his persistent advocacy on behalf of the slaves, ordered a public funeral and he was buried with pomp and ceremony. It was only after Claver's death that the vast scope of his ministry came to be realized; which was prodigious even before the astronomical number of people he baptized is added in. He was canonized in 1888, and Pope Leo XIII declared him the patron of missionary work among people of color. (source: Wikipedia)

Claver added a vow to his ordination signature: Latin: Petrus Claver, aethiopum siempre servus ("Peter Claver, slave of the Negro for ever").

Slavery in Colonial Mexico

Slavery in Mexico by Shep Lenchek, published on 1 Jan. 2001:  According to the reports of the first Europeans to visit the New World, slavery was almost universal in what is now Mexico and Central America. Theoretically, with the arrival of Europeans, that should have changed.

In 1493 Pope Alexander VI, while granting Spain the right to colonize the New World, mandated that the indigenous people be converted to Catholicism and prohibited their enslavement. However, he added a "catch 22" by going on to say that those who did not accept Christianity or reverted to their old religion, should be punished and could be enslaved. More positively, in 1500, Queen Isabella of Spain had expressly ordered, "all the Indians of the Spaniards were to be free from slavery." This order had no ifs or buts. When she died in 1504, her will instructed her successors to continue these policies.

Thus, when in 1519 Cortes and the Conquistadors invaded Mexico, both Spanish and Papal Law seemingly protected the Indians from enslavement. It is not surprising that Cortes, whose very invasion of Mexico was an illegal rebellion against the order of his superior, the Governor of Cuba, ignored the order of the Queen, and used the aforementioned "catch 22" to remain in compliance with the Papal order. As they moved toward Tenochtitlan, the Spaniards went through the motions of converting the Indians but offered them no religious instruction. The erection of a Cross, a speech outlining the virtues of Christianity by La Malinche and the destruction of the local idols was the standard procedure.

It was not until 1524, after the Aztecs had been conquered and enslaved, that 10 Franciscan Priests and 2 lay brothers arrived. Now, real religious instruction was offered to the Indians. In 1526, 12 Dominicans followed them. The first Jesuits who ultimately were to carry the main burden of religious instruction, did not arrive until 1572. Thus, in 1521 when Cortes gave his followers vast tracts of land called encomiendas, all indigenous people living within the boundaries of these land grants were bound to the land as slaves. Simply baptized, without follow up, it was easy to claim they had reverted to the worship of their old Gods. Thus the ecomienderos could claim they were in compliance with the second part of the Pope's directive. Recognized by the Spanish Crown as the military governor of New Spain, largely unsupervised, Cortes ran Nueva Espagna until 1526.

The first person to challenge this illegal enslavement was Father Bartoleme de las Casas. Long an opponent of slavery, he had fought against, it in both Santo Domingo and Cuba with little success, before coming to Mexico. Ironically, his proposed solution to enslavement of indigenous people was to import black slaves from Africa. Some effort was made to do this but the Portuguese who controlled the slave trade charged high prices and the number of black slaves available was not sufficient to meet the needs of the colony. Records indicate that about 6000 African slaves reached Mexico.

Those who did arrive remained largely in the Vera Cruz area and worked mostly in the sugar cane fields and factories. Perhaps this indicates that the Indians who lived near Vera Cruz, the first permanent Spanish settlement, had indeed received religious instruction in addition to baptism. Returning to Spain, in 1542 de Las Casas persuaded Emperor Charles V to promulgate "New Laws" that once again outlawed slavery. Returning to Santo Domingo, he was unable to gain acceptance for these laws. Appointed Bishop of Chiapas, he returned to Mexico. Here too, he met with no success.

Actually, the economy of Nueva Espagna depended almost entirely on slave labor. Agriculture and mining were labor intensive and need young, strong bodies. The recruiting of young male immigrants in Spain was impossible. The country was involved in European wars and the Army took all the able bodied young men who might have been willing to seek their fortune in the new world. After 1535 when the first Viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza had restored order to the Colony, some immigration started. The first to come in any number were "Conversos." Forcibly baptized Jews, they were mostly doctors, lawyers, teachers and business men who were fleeing the Inquisition. They brought much need skills but did not replace slaves.

Map of the Vice-royalty of New Spain

In the final analysis, while Bartoleme de las Casas failed to end slavery, he was the first voice within the Church to speak out against it and set a precedent that it was the duty of the Church to protect the Indians. Due to his influence, Juan de Zumarraga, the first Archbishop of Mexico who arrived in 1528 proclaimed himself as "Protector of the Indians. " He had recognized the impossibility of ending slavery. His approach was to attempt to regulate it. Cortes had gone back to Spain. An Audiencia, a court, dominated by Nuneo de Guzman, a bitter enemy of Cortes, was running the colony. He had launched a program of extortion and enslavement against the Indians. Spaniards who remained loyal to Cortes were also persecuted. It was not until Cortes returned to the colony in 1530, that Guzman was ousted and a second Audiencia took over. With this new Court in place, the treatment of the Indians improved although slavery was still their lot. Now, Archbishop Zumarraga and Vasco de Quiroga who he had appointed Bishop of Michoacan, brought churches, schools and hospitals to the indigenous people both enslaved on ecomiendas, the original land grants made to the Conquistadors and those still free and living in their own villages.

It was the new Viceroy who actually did the most for the indigenous people. While he recognized the impossibility of abolishing existing slavery, he set some standards for their treatment. No Indian, slave or otherwise could be forced to carry a load of more than 100 lbs. To protect the supposedly "free" Indians employed in the mines, government officials were appointed to collect and distribute their wages. In some cases a local priest performed this duty.

The system set up by the new colonial government to run the colony was based on strong municipal governments. Like other cities, native municipalities were also recognized as semi-autonomous units, with Indian officials handling local matters under the supervision of appointed Spaniards. Soon, the descendants of the original Conquistadors began to demand the same kind of land-grants received by their parents. To protect the remaining Indian villages from their encroachment, the Viceroy now set up the Ejido system. It granted title to land to a tribe, a village, a clan or even an extended family. The land was designated to be used solely for agriculture. It could not be divided and sold by individual Ejidoistas. This protection lasted until 1856, long after Mexico gained it's Independence from Spain. Ironically, it was the Liberal Party, headed by Benito Juarez, himself an Indian, that destroyed the system. There can be little doubt that it was this system that slowed down the enslavement of the Indians.

Under the Viceroys, "forced labor" to build roads, rather than slavery became the lot of the "free" indigenous people. In a sense, it was a form of tribute exacted by the Colonial Government in lieu of cash payment of taxes. Due to epidemics of smallpox, first in 1520 and again in 1545, 1576 and 1629, by 1630 the Indian population had shrunk to less than 800,000 from an estimated 10 to 12 million in the days before the Conquest. The majority of those who died were slaves who were in close contact with Europeans. The survival rate of those who lived in Indian villages or on Ejidos was much higher. A change from raising crops to raising cattle, much less labor intensive, also slowed the need for slaves. Now the Indian population grew rapidly. While population figures are not wholly reliable, in 1650 Mexico's total population was recorded at about 1.7 million. 1.3 million were Indians.

Now government controlled labor drafts called repartimientos, rather than slaves, provided workers to the Spanish-owned estates and mines at salaries set by the government. While the Plan of Iguala, proposed by Augustin de Iturbe in 1820 had abolished slavery, it was not until 1824 that a Constitution was adopted that actually freed them. Even so, it was not until 1829 that the last slaves were freed. Slavery did survive in the part of Mexico that is now Texas. Indeed, Mexican efforts to free slaves played an important role in the formation of the Republic of Texas. It was largely fueled by the desire of " Gringo" slave owners to retain their chattels.

Slavery in Colonial Mexico was quite different from that in the American South. The bulk of those enslaved remained on the land where they were born. There was no large scale buying and selling of Indian slaves. Even the blacks imported from Africa, like the Indians, were incorporated into the encomiendo system that bound them and their descendants to a particular plantation or hacienda. Over 75 percent of modern Mexico's population, have at least one Indian or Mulatto ancestor. The vast majority of them were slaves. Ironically, it is the Indians, never enslaved, who retreated into largely inaccessible mountain and jungle areas, that today make up the most destitute and deprived population in modern Mexico.  (source: mexconnect.com)

African Colonization: Serial Enslavers

As reported by the BBC "Slavery and the 'Scramble for Africa'" by Dr Saul David on 17 February 2011 -- What were the motives behind the European colonization of Africa at the end of the 19th century? Did the stamping out of slavery really play a part?

European colonisation

Until the 19th century, Britain and the other European powers confined their imperial ambitions in Africa to the odd coastal outpost from which they could exert their economic and military influence. British activity on the West African coast was centred around the lucrative slave trade.

Between 1562 and 1807, when the slave trade was abolished, British ships carried up to three million people into slavery in the Americas. In total, European ships took more than 11 million people into slavery from the West African coast, and European traders grew rich on the profits while the population of Africa's west coast was devastated.

As late as the 1870s, only 10% of the continent was under direct European control, with Algeria held by France, the Cape Colony and Natal (both in modern South Africa) by Britain, and Angola by Portugal. And yet by 1900, European nations had added almost 10 million square miles of Africa - one-fifth of the land mass of the globe - to their overseas colonial possessions. Europeans ruled more than 90% of the African continent.

One of the chief justifications for this so-called 'scramble for Africa' was a desire to stamp out slavery once and for all. Shortly before his death in May 1873 at Ilala in central Africa, the celebrated missionary-explorer David Livingstone had called for a worldwide crusade to defeat the slave trade controlled by Arabs in East Africa, that was laying waste the heart of the continent.

The only way to liberate Africa, believed Livingstone, was to introduce the 'three Cs': commerce, Christianity and civilization.

The Berlin Conference-- This was a period in history when few Europeans doubted their innate superiority over the 'lesser' races of the world.

The theory that all the peoples of Europe belonged to one white race which originated in the Caucasus (hence the term 'Caucasian') was first postulated at the turn of the 19th century by a German professor of ethnology called Johann Blumenbach.

Blumenbach's colour-coded classification of races - white, brown, yellow, black and red - was later refined by a French ethnologist, Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, to include a complete racial hierarchy with white-skinned people of European origin at the top.

Britons like Livingstone felt they had a duty to 'civilise' Africa.

Such pseudo-scientific theories were widely accepted at the time and motivated Britons like Livingstone to feel they had a duty to 'civilise' Africa.

The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, convened by Otto von Bismarck to discuss the future of Africa, had the stamping out slavery high on the agenda. The Berlin Act of 1885, signed by the 13 European powers attending the conference, included a resolution to 'help in suppressing slavery'.

In truth, the strategic and economic objectives of the colonial powers, such as protecting old markets and exploiting new ones, were far more important.

The Berlin Conference began the process of carving up Africa, paying no attention to local culture or ethnic groups, and leaving people from the same tribe on separate sides of European-imposed borders.

British interests

Britain was primarily concerned with maintaining its lines of communication with India, hence its interest in Egypt and South Africa. But once these two areas were secure, imperialist adventurers like Cecil Rhodes encouraged the acquisition of further territory with the intention of establishing a Cape-to-Cairo railway.

Britain was also interested in the commercial potential of mineral-rich territories like the Transvaal, where gold was discovered in the mid-1880s, and in preventing other European powers, particularly Germany and France, from muscling into areas they considered within their 'sphere of influence'.

Tens of thousands of Herero men, women and children fell victim to von Trotha's infamous extermination order.

As a result, during the last 20 years of the 19th century, Britain occupied or annexed Egypt, the Sudan, British East Africa (Kenya and Uganda), British Somaliland, Southern and Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia), Bechuanaland (Botswana), Orange Free State and the Transvaal (South Africa), Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, British Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nyasaland (Malawi). These countries accounted for more than 30% of Africa's population.

The other chief colonisers were France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Germany had only been unified in 1871 and so was a late starter in imperial terms. Its first acquisition in 1884 was German South-West Africa (Namibia), which at the time was peopled by two semi-nomadic tribes, the Herero of the arid central plateau and the Nama of the still more arid steppes to the south.

When the two tribes went to war over cattle grazing, German traders and missionaries persuaded their government to intervene and fill the political vacuum.

A later Herero rebellion in 1904, provoked by the brutality of the German settlers, was put down by General Lothar von Trotha with savage efficiency, and tens of thousands of Herero men, women and children fell victim to his infamous 'Vernichtungsbefehl' (extermination order).

'Spirit of Berlin'

The philanthropic 'spirit of Berlin', however, was not entirely hollow. Once it became known that slavery was alive and well in the Congo, which was run as a personal fiefdom of Leopold, King of Belgium, an international anti-slavery conference was held in Brussels in 1889-1890.

By taking the women of Congolese villages hostage, Leopold had turned the men into forced labourers.

The man who exposed the existence of slavery in Leopold's Congo was a French missionary to Africa called Cardinal Charles Lavigerie. During a sermon at St Sulpice in Paris in 1888, Lavigerie had shocked his audience by describing the horrors of the Congo slave trade: villages surrounded and burnt; men captured and yoked together; women and children penned like cattle in the slave markets.

The upshot of the Brussels conference was that Leopold cynically agreed to stamp out Arab slavery in return for the right to tax imports. He thereby overturned one of the key resolutions of the Act of Berlin, which had guaranteed free trade for the region.

But while Leopold made all the right noises, his agents in the Congo used forced labour (slaves in all but name) to extract rubber, his single most profitable export. By 1902, rubber sales had risen 15 times in eight years, and were valued at 41 million francs (£1.64 million).

By taking the women of Congolese villages hostage, Leopold had turned the men into forced labourers, with a monthly quota of wild rubber to collect from the rain forest. The system was harsh. Many hostages starved to death and many male forced labourers were worked to death.

More people were killed as rebellions were brutally crushed. Demographers today estimate that the population of the Congo fell roughly by half over the 40-year period beginning in around 1880.

The truth behind the Congo's rubber trade - 'legalised robbery enforced by violence' - was finally exposed by Edmond Morel, an Anglo-French ex-shipping clerk, who wrote a series of accusatory articles in 'The Speaker' in 1900.

By arguing that Leopold's illegal state monopoly was robbing British merchants as well as African peasants, Morel was able to enlist the support of both businessmen and humanitarians. A British consul, Roger Casement, was sent to investigate, and the publication of his damning report in 1904 was, for Leopold, the beginning of the end.

In 1908, in return for £3.8 million, Leopold handed over control of the Congo to the Belgian state. But even then, the forced labour system continued. It took a different form during World War One, when tens of thousands of Congolese were conscripted as porters for the Belgian army.

The forced labour system significantly changed only in the early 1920s, when Belgian colonial authorities realised the population was dropping so rapidly that they soon might have no labour force left.

An end to African slavery?

The signatories of the General Act of the Brussels Conference of 1889-1890 had declared an intention to put an end to the traffic of African slaves. This was extended, by the Convention of St-Germain-en-Laye in 1919, to include the complete suppression of slavery in all its forms and of the slave trade by land and sea.

Under all the colonial powers, forced labour remained in place into the 1940s.

In September 1926, the International Slavery Convention was signed at Geneva under the auspices of the League of Nations 'to find a means of giving practical effect throughout the world to such intentions'.

It defined a slave as a 'person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised', and undertook 'to bring about, progressively and as soon as possible, the complete abolition of slavery in all its forms'.

But this was never applied against the practice of forced labour in colonial Africa, for example, requiring a village to provide men to work on roads and other public works. Under all the colonial powers, forced labour of one kind or another remained in place into the 1940s, and the imposition of taxes forced people into low-paid mining, industry or agribusiness jobs when they might otherwise have remained farmers.

The first practical consequence of the convention was that Ethiopia became the last African state to abolish slavery in 1932. All colonial regimes had long since done the same. Yet even today slavery is not unknown in Africa, particularly in countries such as the Sudan where law and order are often absent.

Nor have the colonists ever really gone away. White-owned businesses still dominate the mining of Africa's most valuable natural resources - particularly gold and diamonds - and in the eyes of some the continent has never stopped being plundered.

(source: BBC)

Esmeralda Santiago: 'Conquistadora'

From the New York Times, "Tale of a Puerto Rican Plantation Mistress," Book Review by Gaiutra Bahadur: If the American South had Scarlett O’Hara as its Civil War antiheroine, the English-speaking Caribbean of the 1800s had Annie Palmer. The real-life mistress of a Jamaican sugar estate during the final days of slavery, Palmer was the subject of legend and many lurid novels, most enduringly 1929’s “White Witch of Rosehall.” Lore says (most likely inaccurately) that Palmer practiced obeah, or sorcery; bedded slaves, then killed them; and murdered three husbands. She set the standard for cruelty and debauchery in a woman presiding over a plantation.

In fiction, plantation mistresses have tended to be either unbridled despots (often with a touch of the “madwoman in the attic” à la “Jane Eyre”) or demure creatures who stay in the Great House, civilizing everyone in and around it. Esmeralda Santiago plays with, then capsizes, these caricatures in “Conquistadora,” which she has set in mid-19th-century Puerto Rico. Like Palmer, the novel’s heroine, Ana Cubillas, ends up a widow running a sugar plantation who becomes romantically involved with an overseer. Ana doesn't literally kill her husband, Ramón, though her mother-in-law makes her feel responsible for his death. Ana did, however, flatter him into leaving their pampered life in Spain for empire’s fatal edges. She married him because his family owned a plantation on the very island where, three centuries earlier, her illustrious colonizing ancestor had landed with Ponce de León. Ana believes it’s her destiny to seek her own greatness in Puerto Rico. Later, her husband claims she “bewitched” him into going. The “white witch” stereotype sticks to the hem of Ana’s skirt like cane-field mud. When she extols the healing powers of herbs, learned from her slaves, another character charges, “That sounds like witchcraft.”

But Santiago’s plantation mistress isn’t a shrew who derives sadistic pleasure from flogging her slaves. Nor is she their ministering angel, although she tends to the sick and oversees baptisms and prayers. Ana is something much more elusive and contradictory. She delegates the flogging, but flinches when the slaves scream.

Santiago, who was born in Puerto Rico, chronicled her personal struggle with a controlling partner in the memoir “The Turkish Lover” and has written before about strong-willed women trying to break free from machismo’s grip. In her previous novel, “América’s Dream,” a housekeeper flees an abusive relationship by emigrating. The Ana of “Conquistadora” is a feminist before her time. She is resented by her parents for not being the male heir they desired. Their private succession crisis overlaps with a bloody, public one — Spain’s Carlist wars, fought to allow a woman to inherit the throne. As that conflict unfolds, Ana makes furtive love to her friend Elena at their convent school. (Santiago, fancying symbolic if unsubtle names, calls it the Convent of Good Mothers.)

Esmeralda Santiago

A side benefit to Ana’s marrying Ramón is that she and Elena can continue with their affair, as Elena has long been promised to Ramón’s twin, Inocente. But that plan goes awry as the twins, who finish each other’s sentences and enjoy watching each other have sex with the same woman, both fall for Ana. They follow her to the plantation, and when Ana gives birth, it’s unclear who the father is. The plot turns, sometimes improbably, sometimes predictably. There’s a good deal of soap-operatic excess in “Conquistadora,” including some sensational fights between Ana and her mother-in-law.

The book’s strength is its Rubik’s Cube portrait of Ana, an unconventional, ambitious woman whose attitudes toward children, slaves and lovers perplex and engross. She isn’t much of a mother, but she takes in a humpbacked baby girl abandoned on her doorstep the same day she trades her own son away in order to keep running the plantation. She’s a liberal mistress, expressing interest in the African songs her maid sings and allowing the slaves’ midwife to deliver her son. (“We all look and function pretty much the same down there,” she declares.) Yet she achieves freedom by exploiting those who, starkly, lack it. Noting that none of her slaves have challenged her, Ana reflects: “But of course, they could. . . . She would, if she were one of them.”

Is Ana believable? Santiago herself has asked that question. “I worried that I was creating a character who would have been impossible in that time and that place,” she said in an interview on her publisher’s Web site. In fact, a small percentage of women did own or control plantations in the Caribbean. Whether the obstacles they faced in a world dominated by white men sensitized them to the oppression of slaves is another question entirely. White women in the 19th-century Caribbean were largely silent on the subject of slavery. Most who spoke publicly, defended it. With her tough portrait of a female planter, Santiago speculates, charitably but unromantically, about those who didn’t speak. Ana is emotionally intelligent enough to imagine how slaves might feel, to understand their longing for freedom, yet ruthless enough to use and punish them in order to flourish herself. Neither white witch nor angel, she is convincing despite her contradictions — indeed, because of them.

Annie Palmer’s Rose Hall plantation is now a vacation resort, offering a chance to tee off on the White Witch Golf Course or exchange vows in front of the Great House. Many historical novels function this way, too, mingling levity with solemnity, turning fact into entertainment. “Conquistadora,” for one, presents a guided tour of the history of sugar and empire. Santiago takes us through events of the past as if they were rooms, narrating the cholera epidemic that ravaged Puerto Rico in the 1850s here, depicting the secret abolitionist societies active in San Juan there, and, over all, divertingly evoking a place that was one of the last holdouts for slavery in the Americas. (source: New York Times, 15 July 2011)

Conversation: Esmeralda Santiago, Author of 'Conquistadora'

St. Augustine, Florida Slave Market

St. Augustine Record, on 2 December 2001, "St. Augustine once a hub of slave trade," by Margo Pope: ST. AUGUSTINE -- Four and a half centuries ago, St. Augustine was the hub of the slave trade in Spanish colonial Florida, a distinction that continued through the early 1800s. The slave trade was part of the city's economy from its founding in 1565, when Spanish explorer and founder Pedro Menendez de Aviles included black slaves among the New World's first Spanish settlers.

In fact, said St. Augustine historian Susan Parker, the Spanish Crown was one of the largest slaveholders, putting slaves to work on the city's defenses.

And, though many of the records from that period are lost, documents from the Catholic Church reveal slavery's deep roots in North Florida's history. In 1606, one year before the founding of Jamestown, Va., the first documented slave birth was recorded in St. Augustine. Agustin was baptized in the Catholic faith. He was the son of Agustin and Francisca, both listed as slaves in church baptismal records.

Church documents from what is called the First Spanish Period, 1565 to 1763, were taken from St. Augustine to Cuba in 1763 when the British occupied Florida. Some records were lost. But St. Augustine's main church, now called the Cathedral Basilica, has records dating to 1594.

Parker said church documents show how the royal government worked through slave owners to record slaves' marriages and births. "The Church is so prominent in this role," Parker said.

Parker said there are misconceptions regarding what early slavery was like in St. Augustine. Many people today have an image of slavery from movies about the pre-Civil War American plantations, she said. Though a plantation society did exist around St. Augustine in the 18th century, the first slaves, primarily from Africa, worked in Spanish households in town.

"In a lot of the homes, they did the hard tasks," Parker said."You would have a female domestic slave, a male slave for hard work but you wouldn't have slave quarters [as on plantations]."

And not all remained slaves. Fort Mose became the first town for free blacks in Spanish Florida, in 1738. Mose was then the northern defense outpost for St. Augustine. Those slaves who converted to Catholicism and worked at the fort were given their freedom.

Under British rule

From 1763 to 1783, when the British ruled Florida, more of a plantation society-style developed in St. Augustine. Historian Daniel Schafer said St. Augustine maintained its dominant position in the slave trade under British rule, but it did so with more of an economic and less of a domestic slant. Schafer is a professor of history at the University of North Florida and has studied the roots of slavery in Florida from its African origins.

In the 20-year occupation of St. Augustine by the British, slave ships regularly arrived, either after stopping in the American colonies or coming directly in from Africa.

As the British settled in East Florida, agricultural plantations were built apart from the center of town. British residents coming to Florida from the Carolinas and Georgia brought slaves with them to work in the fields. Florida's British Gov. James Grant had African slaves, but Lt. Gov. John Moultrie, Schafer said, had third-, fourth- and fifth-generation slaves born in America.

Principal slave suppliers to east Florida were South Carolinian Henry Laurens, who provided mostly African-born slaves, as well as John Graham of Savannah, Ga., and Richard Oswald of Scotland. Oswald, said Schafer, had a slave "factory" on Bance Island in what is now part of Sierra Leone, Africa. Oswald brought hundreds of slaves for his plantation near St. Augustine, as well as to sell to others.

Ships coming into the Port of St. Augustine would carry about 100 Africans at a time, Schafer said. The slave population of this period also included West Indies natives.

Slave buildings at the Kingsley Plantation, St. Augustine, FL The building on the right is made of crushed shells. It's also where the slaves undertook the dangerous and back-breaking task of processing the sugar cane.

Spanish rule returns  --  Spanish rule returned in 1784 and St. Augustine's slave center image remained. In fact, more than a quarter of the recorded population were slaves. According to a 1784 report by the Spanish governor back to Spain, St. Augustine recorded 574 black residents and 1,418 white residents, without distinction of free or slave. In 1797, the census recorded 1,007 white residents, 483 slaves and 102 free black residents.

By 1802, St. Augustine had been back under Spanish rule for almost 20 years. The slave trading business was changing worldwide as European countries, and the American colonies started banning the importation of African slaves. Spain did not.

"You have Liverpool, a center for the slave trade and all these ships from Africa there and suddenly, there is a ban," Schafer said. "So they pack up and head for [ports in] Fernandina and St. Augustine," he said.

 

The second Spanish occupation continued until 1821, when Spain transferred Florida to the United States. Parker said the slave culture in St. Augustine expanded because it not only included the slaves who returned with Spanish owners in 1784, but it still had some from the British period, African born and American born.

In this second Spanish period, she said, the slaves were also holding "jobs" when they are not working for their owners. This was an attempt to buy their freedom. They worked as butchers, seamstresses, rowers for boats. They held parties to sell products.

"Whatever they did, it took a long time," she said. "Most would have been paid only 1 1/2 to 2 pesos a day and the minimum to buy their freedom would have been about 400 pesos."

Parker said public slave sales likely were held on the steps of Government House at the opposite end of the town market on the Plaza de la Constitucion. But private sales also took place in town.

"They were private sales between owners and they may have been at the market to do other business when they did this," she said. (source: Florida Times Union)

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Ghanaian Times article "Less-Known Participating Nations In The Slave Trade,"from 26 February, 2011, by Godwin Yirenkyi, discusses the history of the transatlantic slave trade:

Recently I asked a Chilean journalist after a tour of the Cape Coast Castle whether there are black people, that is, descendants of the many African slaves taken there during the period as is the case in other South American countries. She answered no, apart from occasional visitors, adding that Chile never took part in that abominable trade. I showed her references to the contrary that slaves were taken there and she was surprised.

This short introduction is one reason behind the multi-national initiative led by UNESCO for more research and education to break a long silence surrounding the sordid story of to pave way for total healing, reconciliation and peace.

For even though you will not find forts and castles (infamous for their use as stations for the trafficking of African captives for use as slaves in the Americas between the 15th-19th ) belonging to nations like France, Spain and the United States on the Ghanaian coast where most of these relics are found in Africa, historical records show that these nations, and others shown in this article were, nevertheless, active participants in the slave trade.

Though contemporary history say that the Portuguese were the first to discovering Ghana (the then Gold Coast in 1471, the French historians claim their travelers were the first to have arrived in 1383, having founded two short-lived settlements named Petit Paris and Petit Dieppe somewhere along the western coastline as well as built a lodge at Takoradi. They say that the French trade had ended by the time the Portuguese arrived but until 1872 when Britain formally colonized the Gold Coast, the French navy never stopped foraging frequently along the coast.

The bastion de France

Fort William at Anomabu, for example, started was originally a French trading post built by them in 1751 but was captured two years later by the British. In retaliation, according to Reindorf, the French bombarded Cape Coast Castle and seized it from the British, thus enabling them to gain access to the gold and slave trade. In 1779 they captured Fort Orange, Sekondi, from the British but left soon afterwards. The French are also believed to have established a small fort at Amoku, 10 kilometers east of Anomabu on land purchased for 450 ounces of gold. They stayed at Christiansborg for some years and probably built a trading station at Ada that lasted for some time. France became the fourth largest slave trading nation and Nantes, in the Bay of Biscay became the slave trade capital just as Liverpool won disrepute as England's slave trade capital.

Ghanaian sailors have a legend that the frequent storms in the bay are the result of the many slave corpses dumped in the place by the slave ships.

Slave Trade maps show that the French sent many slaves from East Africa to the Seycheles, Mauritius and Madagascar.

Bunce Island, Serra Leone

Until the late 1700s the Spaniards, who started the trans-Atlantic slave trade with the Portuguese and later became the main buyers of slaves in the Americas, obtained their supplies from other Europeans without coming to the West African mainland. By the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, signed between Spain and Portugal, the African coast was awarded to Portugal by the Pope. Hence the Spaniards who got the New World did not feature prominently in direct trading activities in West Africa except for their enclaves of Equatorial Guinea and Sao Thome. Early records, however, indicate that they traded for sometime at Arguin in modern Mauritania in the 15th century.

The nearest that Spain ever came to settling in the former Gold Coast was in 1756 when the Danes sent an agent, Prof. Moldenhauer, to Madrid to negotiate, unsuccessfully, the exchange of their fort at Ada on the Volta River for the Spanish Crab Island, also known as Bisque, in the West Indies. By 1830, the Spaniards were visiting the country during the governorship of Captain George Maclean, and one of the charges brought against the governor by his opponents during investigations into his activities was that he allowed Spanish slavers to buy provisions on the coast. In 1848, the British warship Kingfisher and an American cruiser Yorktown attacked the last slave trading station run by the Spaniards at Cess River, in Liberia, and freed 3,000 captives.

Elmina Castle

The activities of the Portuguese, after they were driven away from Elmina Castle by the Dutch in 1637 is also not well known since it was generally assumed that they were driven away completely from the country after they ceded the rest of their possessions to the Dutch in a treaty in 1641. The treaty stipulated that they should not trade here and that if they wanted to trade on the Lower Coast, that is at Fida (Ouidah) and Porto Novo, they should first drop anchor first at the Dutch fort and pay a large tariff. Records, however, show that the Danes bought Christiansborg from them in 1660 and built another small fort called Fort Xavier in 1679 in the area from where they were driven off in 1683. Around this period they were also said to have put up another less-known trading lodge along the Accra coast which they named Ft. Vicente. Between 1811 and 1816, Portuguese vessels frequented Accra looking for captives to buy. During the abolition period, a notorious Portuguese slave trader by name Don Jose Mora continued buying slaves in the Keta area till he finally moved to Little Popo and Grand Popo in modern Benin after the Danes tried to arrest him.

Ft. Groot Fredericksburg at Princess Town, Ghana

The Portuguese stayed on in Guinea Bissau, Principe and Sao Thome where they had established large sugar plantations since the late 15th and 16th centuries. Sao Thome also served as an entreport for the slave trade to Europe and the Americas. Further down they held the monopoly in Angola where millions of captives were sent to Brazil from Fort San Miguel, and also along the East African coast where they operated from Mozambique, Zanzibar and Lamu Islands as well as Mombasa in Kenya. Their main legacy in Ghana today is the Elmina Castle, near Cape Coast. Linguists claim they also left a few words that have become part of the local Ghanaian vocabulary such as dash (gift), paano (bread), palava (meeting), fetish (idol) and sabola (onion). The word used for slave catching, panyarring was also believed to have come from the Portuguse word panyar, meaning catch.

Ft. Groot Fredericksburg at Princess Town, Ghana

Due to the name change, people often forget that the Brandenburgs, who in 1683 built Ft. Groot Fredericksburg at Princess Town, and two other lodges at Akwida (1685) and Takrama (1687), were Germans. Brandenburg was the name of East Germany before it was united with neighboring provinces to become Germany. In the 17th cenury they took over a Spanish station at Arguin in Senegal and were also present at Whydah, Benin, for sometime. However, the full extent of German involvement in the slave trade in West Africa and the Americas is not known. At one time they tried to acquire a part of the Virgin Islands, but Togo and Cameroon were the main centers of their activities in West Africa.

Ft. Groot Fredericksburg at Princess Town, Ghana

Virtually unknown among the European slave traders of West Africa were the Courlanders, a small Germanic nation (population 200,000) situated in the present Republic of Latvia in the Baltics. The Courlabders built a small fort on St. Andrews Island (James Island) in the Gambia in 1652 and colonized Tobago in the 17th century and established sugar, cotton and rum plantations wiith about 7,000 slaves. The British seized James Island in 1661.

Ft. Groot Fredericksburg at Princess Town, Ghana

It is not known how far Brazil which received the largest number of slaves participated in slave buying since most documents of the slave trade were purposely burnt in that country. But one Brazillian slave trader called Cossar Corquila Lima was known to have established a large trading post at Vodza, near Keta. After his death in 1862, his domestic slave and agent who inherited him renamed himself Geraldo Lima, married his wives and continued with the trade, causing much trouble with the Adas and their Danish allies.

Ft. Groot Fredericksburg at Princess Town, Ghana

West Africa was not the only place that suffered from the ravages of the slave trade. The huge Congo, for example, was owned by King Leopold II of tiny Belgium, who had no colonies in the New World yet sold thousands of slaves to the Americas and enslaved the natives at home in a manner far worse than what Arab slave traders were doing before the Belgians arrived.

According to the National Geographic (Sept. 1992) the greatest number of slaves taken to the Americas came from the Congo-Angola region while another report (March 1973) indicated that the Congo endured more than three centuries of slaving, losing hundreds of thousands of people to the labour-hungry New World. From Boma, 90km inland, the Flemish traders assembled the captives then moved them to Banana Island at the mouth of the Congo River their main slave port for shipment.

Simultaneously, the native population at home was brutally forced to collect ivory and rubber in what became known as the rubber atrocities, rigorously implemented by state agents long after the abolition of slavery. Belgium's Royal Museum of Central Africa has on display symbols of the shameful trade including shackles and collar rings that once bonded Congolese slaves. In the same museum can be seen life-size mannequins depicting Congolese slaves and Arab slave buyers.

Records indicate that American slavers in the 1700s took part directly in the buying of captives from Africa, which they called the Circuit trade as distinct from Triangular Slave Trade. The first American slavers dispatched by Boston merchants in 1644 included the Rainbow which took a number of captives to Barbados. Later they became more active and started using what became known as rum boats, which were smaller and faster than the European ones, to cross the Atlantic with cargoes of rum to intoxicate potential African slave traders, and then return to America via the West Indies to offload their captives and stock up with molasses to take home and make it into more rum. One hundred and fifteen gallons of rum bought a male captive and ninety-five for a female. Records indicate that about twenty rum boats were in service by 1758.

The Swedes played an active role in the slave trade within the brief 17 years that they spent in the Gold Coast. By 1638 they had founded a colony called New Sweden on the Christina River around present Wilmington in the Delaware River valley of the United States which they held till 1655 when it was abandoned owing to pressure by the Dutch who were staging a comeback after losing it previously to local Indians. In 1640 they constructed Fort Witsen at Takoradi then began another one at Anomabo. Ten years later the Swedish African Company led by Heinrich Caerlof constructed a short-lived lodge at Butre. In 1657 they made Carolusburg Castle, Cape Coast, their headquarters, before they lost it together with Christiansborg, Osu, to the Danes. They were not heard of again after they were driven off by the Danes shortly afterwards. In the West Indies they had one island, St. Barthelemy, for themselves from 1784-1877.

Sweden's eastern neighbour, Norway also took part in the slave trade jointly with Denmark of which it was then a part. That explains why a slave ship called the Fredensborg, named after an erstwhile fort at old-Ningo, near Tema, which was returning to its home port after discharging a cargo of slaves at St. Croix in the Caribbean sunk near the town of Arundel, Norway, in 1768. Dr. Paul Isert, a Danish surgeon who wrote extensively about the period stated how, for some inexplicable reason the climate seemed unsuitable for the Norwegians. When they arrive in this land, the surgeon wrote, even though they have never before in their lives been ill, they behave like a fresh-water fish that has been placed in salt water. They become misanthropic, fretful, and do not know why. First they complain of a headache, usually accompanied by vomiting; after 24 hours often follow convulsions, and the patient dies a man who had been perfectly healthy 48 hours earlier.

Another less-known aspect of the trans-Atlantic slave is the fact that besides the United States, Central America, the West Indies and Brazil which are often mentioned, several thousands slaves were also taken to Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay. Lima became a major redistribution center from where slaves, some brought directly from Africa around Cape Horn were sent into the interior of the continent never to be heard of again.

The atrocities of slavery were not limited to the black people of Africa. At the time of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the British, French and Australians were tricking and kidnapping thousands of Melanesian captives to work in the sugarcane fields of Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia and other Pacific colonies. Among the kidnappers, also known as the black birders was one Ross Lewin who often disguised himself as an Anglican bishop to trick islanders to come to his ship, while another called James Murray enticed villagers to paddle their canoes to his schooner with promises of trade in beads, pipes and tobacco and then took them by force and sold them.

(source: Ghanaian Times)