The negroes whom Hawkins procured on his first voyage to Africa were carried by him to San Domingo. This was in 1563, the date of England's first venture in the slave-trade. The English had sent vessels to the African coast as early as 1551, on private account, for gold and ivory; but as they had no West-Indian colony, and the trade in slaves was a monopoly, they had no object to increase the risks of a voyage which infringed upon the Portuguese right to Africa by carrying negroes away. Vessels were fitted out in 1552 and 1553 to trade for ivory and pepper; in the two following years the English interest in Africa increased, and a negro was occasionally carried away and brought to England.[25] This appears to have been the first circumstance which attracted the attention of Queen Elizabeth, and drew remonstrances from her before it became clear that a good deal of money could be made out of such transactions. She blamed Captain Hawkins, who had succeeded by treachery and violence in getting hold of three hundred negroes whom he carried to San Domingo, and disposed of in the ports of Isabella, Puerto-de-Plata, and Monte Christi. Her virtue was proof against this first speculation, although it was an exceedingly good one, for Hawkins filled his three vessels with hides, ginger, and a quantity of pearls, and freighted two more with hides and other articles which he sent to Spain. It was after his third voyage, in 1567, when he sold his negroes in Havana at a profit greater than he could derive from the decaying San Domingo, that the Queen forgot her scruples, and gave Hawkins a crest symbolical of his wicked success: "a demi-Moor, in his proper color, bound with a cord," made plain John a knight.[26]
But the Portuguese jealously watched their privilege to export men from Africa, so that only about forty thousand negroes were brought yearly by lawful and contraband channels to the different islands. Cuba obtained most of these. The greater part of the Portuguese trade took the direction of Brazil, for the sugar-cane had been carried from Madeira to Rio Janeiro in 1531. Formidable rivalry in selfishness was thus sown in every direction by the early splendor of San Domingo. When the Genoese merchants bought the original privilege to transport four thousand, they held the price of negroes at two hundred ducats. Their monopoly ceased in 1539, when a great market for slaves was opened at Lisbon; Spain could buy them there at a price varying from ten to fifty ducats a head, but their price delivered in good condition at San Domingo, including the inevitable percentage of loss, made them almost as expensive as before.
The capital was shattered by an earthquake in 1684. The people melted away, and fine houses, which were deserted by their owners, remained tenantless, and went to ruin. Valverde,[27] a Creole of the island, is the chronicler of its condition in the middle of the eighteenth century. He observes that the Spanish Creoles were living in such poverty that mass was said before daylight, so that mutual scandal at dilapidated toilets might not interfere with the enjoyment of religion. The leprosy was common, and two lazarettos were filled with its victims. The negro blood had found its way into almost every family; a female slave received her freedom as a legacy of piety or of lust. She could also purchase it for two hundred and fifty dollars; and if she was with child, an additional twelve dollars and fifty cents would purchase for the new-comer all the glories and immunities of Creole society. These were to doze and smoke in hammocks, and to cultivate listlessly about twenty-two dilapidated sugar-plantations and a little coffee. The trade in cattle with the French part of the island absorbed all the business and enterprise that remained. Still Valverde will not admit that the Spanish Creole was indolent: it is in consequence of a deficiency of negroes, he explains, that they cannot labor more!
A great injury was inflicted upon the colony by the exclusive commercial spirit of the mother-country. Spain was the first European government which undertook to interfere with the natural courses of trade, on the pretence of protecting isolated interests. In the eleventh century a great commercial competition existed between some Italian, French, and Spanish cities. To favor the last, when they were already enjoying their just share of trade, the King of Aragon prohibited, in 1227, "all foreign vessels from loading for Ceuta, Alexandria, or other important ports, if a Catalan ship was able and willing to take the cargo"; the commerce of Barcelona was in consequence of this navigation act seriously damaged.[28] Spain treated her colonies afterward in the same spirit; and other countries, France in particular, pursued this narrow and destructive policy, wherever colonial success excited commercial jealousy and avarice.
"The commerce of the colony was all confined to the unwise arrangement of a Government counting-house, called the Casa de la Contratacion, (House of Trade,) through which all exports were sent out to the colonies and all remittances made in return. By this order of things, the want of free competition blasted all enterprise, and the exorbitant rates of an exclusive traffic paralyzed industry. The cultivation of the vine, the olive, and other staple productions of Spain, was prohibited. All commerce between the colonies was forbidden; and not only could no foreigner traffic with them, but death and confiscation of property were decreed to the colonist who should traffic with a foreigner,--slave-vessels alone being excepted."[29]
Thus the policy which ought to have favored the island first settled by Spaniards, against the attractions of Peru, Mexico, and Cuba, towards which the mother-colony was rapidly emptying her streams of life, was not forthcoming. These Spaniards, who were enslaved by the tenacious fancy that El Dorado still glittered for them in some distant place, needed to be attached to the soil by generous advantages, such as premiums for introducing and sustaining the cultivation of new productions, immunity from imposts either by Government or by the middle-men of a company, and liberty to exchange hides, tallow, and crops of every kind with the French, Dutch, and English, in every port of the island, to convert a precarious illicit trade with those nations into a natural intercourse, so that different articles of food, which were often scarce, and sometimes failed entirely, might be regularly supplied, until by such fostering care the colony should grow strong enough to protect itself against its own and foreign adventurers. But if all these measures had been accordant with the ideas of that age, they would have been defeated by its passions.
Other people now appear upon the scene, to put the finishing touch to this decay, while they freshen the old crimes and assume the tradition of excess and horror which is the island's history.
[To be continued.]
FOOTNOTES:
[1.] Herrera says, however, that Las Casas declared them to be legitimately enslaved, the natives of Trinity Island in particular. Schoelcher (Colonies Étrangèrés et Haiti, Tom. II. p. 59) notices that all the royal edicts in favor of the people of America, miserably obeyed as they were, related only to Indians who were supposed to be in a state of peace with Spain; the Caribs were distinctly excepted. It was convenient to call a great many Indians Caribs; numerous tribes who were peaceful enough when let alone, and victims rather than perpetrators of cannibalism, became slaves by scientific adjudication. "These races," said Cardinal Ximenes, "are fit for nothing but labor."