Date:  1518, January 26. Santo Domingo, La Española 

Theme: In a letter to the Crown, La Española’s oidor and governor Alonso Zuazo criticized the fears about potential rebellions by enslaved blacks, boasting of how his harsh style of ruling, with severe punishments, had reportedly stopped the stealing and the running away by blacks in this Spanish colony 

Source: PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles, Archivo General de Indias, PATRONATO, 174, R. 8,F.50R,52R-52V,55V. 

One of the aspects that calls the attention in this document is oidor Zuazo’s very peculiar combination of lofty feelings of submission and adoration for the person of the king, the highest authority of the empire, and his ruthless thinking about the enslaved black Africans, who represented the lowest echelon in social prestige in the imperial society, and about how to keep them subjected to enslavement, the harshest social condition of his times. 

Zuazo, who vindicates the notion of “New World” for the Americas in his letter, displays a number of expressions to convey to Charles V what he perceived to be the joy felt by the colonists of La Española for the king’s accession to the Spanish throne, described by Zuazo as “the newest thing that has occurred since God our lord created the world.”   

The intention of the letter seems to be providing the king with a broad overview of, and opinion about, the most salient events and issues that had been happening in the new colonies that Zuazo was aware of as to, among other things, their peopling and governance by the Spaniards.  One of the specific items that Zuazo considered worth addressing in his communication was the presence of black people in La Española, which Zuazo considered of great importance.  In view of the declining number of natives, the Crown, according to Zuazo, should allow the colonists of La Española a “general” license to import an unlimited amount of “black slaves” “because [they] are persons of strength and much work and with this they can stand any burden they throw upon them,” estimating the productivity of an enslaved black as more than eleven times that of a native.  According to Zuazo, the larger the black population, the larger the settlement of the island, and consequently the larger the taxes to be collected by the Crown. 

Zuazo also opposed the notion, held by some in the colony, of a large amount of enslaved blacks being a peril for the slavery-based colonial social order of La Española because of the potential or risks for rebellions, since he had a strong sense of stability being possible in a slavery society if enough severity or harshness was applied in punishing resistance by the enslaved.  Indeed Zuazo has been cited numerous times in the scholarship on the history of Dominican blackness because of his discussing in this letter of the efficiency of plantations held by the Portuguese in their Eastern Atlantic islands, where “there is a widow with no children who has under her rule eight hundred black slaves so quiet and so peaceful as your majesty will have the most impoverished village of all your kingdoms.”   

For Zuazo, again reportedly from looking at the Portuguese example, it was not an issue of how many slaves would concentrate in a given place but how effective (and implicitly, severe) the laws applied to them were.  He then went to describe succinctly what he considered his success as governor of La Española in controlling the enslaved blacks’ resistance, posing that “at the time that I arrived [in La Española] I found some slaves in this island turned into thieves and others that wandered along the wilderness, and soon I ordered them captured and some I had them flogged and another one I had his ears cut off, with other punishments that did so great a lesson in the said blacks that until now there has been no complaint, nor it has been said that any black may have done a thing he should not do.”   In a way Zuazo was a sixteenth-century true believer in what we would call today “law and order.”