Commentary No. 044
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Date: 1555 August 13 – 1556, May 30. City of Santo Domingo.
Theme: A Portuguese ship that arrived in the port of Santo Domingo, La Española, with a cargo of enslaved Black Africans and without a Spanish shipping license; they were seized by the local colonial authorities and sold at an auction of Santo Domingo, and different social types from the city went to buy them.
Source: Archivo General de Indias, Justicia 103-A, CUNY DSI Dominican Colonial Documents Collection.
Smuggling European manufactured goods and enslaved Africans into La Española became an increasingly frequent practice throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, nurtured and justified by the local scarcity of metropolitan items and commodities needed by the settlers, a scarcity resulting from the dwindling numbers of merchant ships from Spain or carrying Spanish shipping licenses that visited or stopped at La Española in their journey across the Atlantic to and from the richer, and militarily safer, mainland colonies of Spain.
The arrival of non-Spanish merchant ships willing to do contraband with La Española’s residents, especially with those living in the coastal areas of the northwest, west and southwest of the island furthest from Santo Domingo City, went rather non-interfered by the Spanish colonial authorities during this period because the colony’s relatively small government personnel based at the capital port-city did not have the military means to scout and control effectively the relatively extensive coasts of the entire colony.
As a result of the scarcity of consumables and widespread and widely-known contraband by visiting foreign vessels, when a non-Spanish ship arrived in the colony and was captured by the authorities of Santo Domingo City, the visiting crew had to face a town’s population hungry for European commodities and authorities eager to enforce the colonial monopoly laws and to punish suspected smugglers with confiscation.
That is what happened to this Portuguese ship that in 1555 showed up in the port of Santo Domingo alleging to have been diverted off its route from Cabo Verde to Portugal by serious damages in its hull that reportedly forced them to reach for the nearest port to have fundamental repairs done that could, in turn, allow the ship to continue travel to Portugal. Santo Domingo’s colonial authorities did not buy the argument and seized the cargo of the ship, including several dozens of enslaved male and female Black Africans of different ages who were then sold away to the local residents, eager to acquire new slaves.
If we are to judge from the evidence about this particular ship confiscated in Santo Domingo and its occupants, for those thrown into the vessels as commodities of the Transatlantic slave trade, the journey was not only physically destructive but probably charged with constant uncertainty as to where and how it would end.
In a Spanish colony like La Española where, increasingly throughout the sixteenth century, colonial authorities complained of not receiving enough merchant ships bringing needed manufactured commodities from Spain, one of the items that seem to have been in constant demand were Black slaves with which to sustain the way of life, based on servile labor, the settlers and their descendants had established in the island-colony.
The record of a 1555 local auction in Santo Domingo City of slaves confiscated shortly before from a Portuguese slave ship arrived in La Española without the required license, gives us the opportunity to watch the types of Black Africans that at the time were being swallowed by the slave trade, the physical conditions in which they arrived after the crossing of the Atlantic, and the kinds of social types that bought them in the capital of this colony, as well as the price each of them was sold for.
A “creole” female slave of light-brown, “cooked quince-like color,” of unspecified age and without branding marks on her body, was sold for 203 pesos to a well known resident of Santo Domingo. An elder enslaved woman described as of the same color and with an “f ” mark on the left arm sold for 250 pesos. A Black small girl described as having visible scabs and manges and also with the “f “ mark was bought for 200 pesos by a local tailor. The auction lasted several days, some of the slaves being paid for at once in full and many sold on credit.