Alonso de Sandoval, Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana... de todos Etiopes (Seville, 1627)
The book in which a Jesuit at Cartagena de Indias set down, in print and in Spanish, what the Atlantic slave trade did to the people carried in it: the chains, the closed hatches, one bowl of meal a day, a third dead on the crossing, twelve or fourteen shiploads a year into one port. It also prints, in full, the letter from a fellow Jesuit at Luanda telling him not to ask the captives whether they had been lawfully taken.
Why this wins its question: Sandoval is usually met through a single quotation — the Luanda letter with its instruction not to ask the captives whether they were lawfully taken — lifted into a general argument about the Church and slavery, with the book around it unread. The 1627 Seville sheets, quoted here from the pages, carry both halves of the record and they belong together: the armazón of three to six hundred and the twelve or fourteen shiploads a year into Cartagena alone; six people chained at the neck and two at the feet under hatches closed from outside; one bowl of meal every twenty-four hours; a third dead on a passage of more than two months; thirty survivors of nine hundred on the Negrillos shoal. And beside them, the same author reporting that the writer of that letter preached publicly in Luanda against unjust captivity, recording his own astonishment at the contradiction, making a slave-ship captain restore a fortune — and, on another page, declining to enter the intrinsic justification of the traffic at all. The Ambrose passage on not looking at whether a man is white or black, free or slave, and the chapter on interpreters drawn from the enslaved, sit in the same volume as the refusal to adjudicate. No summary that keeps only one of those wins the question; this object keeps all of them, each bound to the page it stands on.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The engraved title page reads "NATVRALEZA, POLICIA SAGRADA I PROFANA, COSTVMBRES I RITOS, DISCIPLINA I CATECHISMO EVANGELICO DE TODOS ETIOPES, POR EL P. ALONSO DE SANDOVAL NATVRAL DE TOLEDO, DE LA COMPAÑIA DE JESUS, RECTOR DEL COLLEGIO DE CARTAGENA DE LAS INDIAS. EN SEVILLA POR FRANCISCO DE LIRA, IMPRESOR, ANNO M.DC.XXVII", flanked by two mottoes, from Psalm 67 and from Esther 1. The copy digitised here carries the stamp of the British Museum on the title-page verso. The work is better known by the Latin title of its second edition, De instauranda Aethiopum salute.
The second chapter, headed "De la naturaleza de los Etiopes, que comunmente llamamos negros", establishes the vocabulary before the argument: it works through the ancient etymologies of the name, settles on the derivation that makes it mean men of burnt countenance, and then insists on a distinction the trade did not make, that under the general name stand particular nations, "como son Guineos, Caravalies, Ardas, Lucumies, Congos, Angolas, Cafres, Macuas, y otros". The book's long ethnographic first part is built on that refusal to treat the cargo as one people.
The principle the author works from is quoted out of Ambrose and applied without qualification: the faithful labourers should hold one man and another in the same esteem the Lord holds them, "y no han de mirar si es blanco, o negro, libre, o esclavo, para emplear en su ayuda y remedio el talento que el Señor les dio, sino si es alma necessitada redimida con la sangre de Christo Señor nuestro". Whether a man is white or black, free or slave, is declared irrelevant to the duty owed him.
The scale is given in the trade's own units. A lot large enough to fill a ship — three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, even six hundred people — is called an "Armazon"; and of such ships, he writes, those entering this city alone are ordinarily "doze, o catorze cada año, con este numero, o mas de negros en cada uno". Cartagena de Indias, one port, twelve or fourteen shiploads in an ordinary year. The sentence that opens the passage is left unsoftened: "Cautivos estos negros con la justicia q Dios sabe" — taken captive with what justice God knows.
The crossing is described in detail, and the detail is the point. They are put in the long chains called corrientes and never taken out of them at sea or on land until they are disembarked; they come "de seys en seys en argollas por los cuellos", six together by the neck, and the same men two by two in fetters at the feet, "de modo que de pies a cabeça vienen aprisionados"; they are below deck, shut in from the outside, where they see neither sun nor moon, and there is no Spaniard who dares put his head to the hatch without being overcome, nor stay inside an hour without risk of grave sickness. Their whole ration is, every twenty-four hours, one middling bowl of maize or millet meal and a small jar of water, "y no otra cosa, sino mucho palo, mucho azote, y malas palabras". Of this, and of the terror they carry with them that they are being taken to be made into oil or eaten, the author writes that "viene a morir desto el tercio en la navegacion, que dura mas de dos meses" — a third of them die on a passage of more than two months.
He qualifies his own account twice on the same page, and both qualifications are kept here. The figures and the conditions are attributed — "me certifican los mesmos que lo saben" — to men who knew at first hand, not to his own observation of the crossing, which he never made. And he adds that he well believes some of the shipowners treat them with more benignity and gentleness, "principalmente ya en estos tiempos". What he did see was the landing: they arrive made into skeletons, are put ashore naked and set in a great yard, where crowds come, some drawn by greed, some by curiosity, some by compassion, and among them the men of the Society of Jesus.
One episode fixes the arithmetic. A ship out of Angola struck a shoal called the Negrillos within sight of Cartagena, and of the nine hundred people she carried, thirty escaped — "solamente escapò treynta, de novecientos que en el traya". The author records his own reaction in two verbs: the case grieved him, and the number he was then told of the people held for ransom in Angola astonished him.
The book prints the justification of the trade in the words of the man who gave it, and this is the most cited thing in it. Asked whether the captives were lawfully taken, the Jesuit rector at Luanda replied that the residents of those parts may buy without scruple, since the merchants bring them in good faith and a possessor in good faith may sell; that the scruple, if any, belongs at the African end and not at the American; and then, in the sentence that has followed the letter ever since: "tengo hallado por cierto, que ningun Negro dize ser bien cautivo, y assi Vr. no les pregunte, si son bien cautivos, o no, porque siempre han de dezir que fueron hurtados". Some, he concedes, are wrongly taken; but to search among "diez o doze mil Negros, que cada año salen deste puerto" for the few is impossible, and to lose so many souls that might be saved for the sake of a few appears to him not to be God's service.
The author does not let the letter stand alone, and the correction is as revealing as the letter. He reports being told that many captives in Angola had been set free out of respect for what the same rector "predicava publicamente" against the injustice of their captivity; he says he showed his astonishment at hearing it, "por aver sido informado muy al contrario del mesmo Padre" — having been informed of quite the contrary by that very father — and was answered that it would not apply in the present case. A man preaching against unjust enslavement in Luanda and writing to Cartagena that the buyers should not ask: both are on the same pages.
His own practice, where he states it, is stricter than the letter he prints. Consulted on a case, he writes, it was necessary to resolve that a captain and owner of armazones who had made many voyages should make restitution of a great fortune, "por quanto llanamente certificava, que en todos ellos avia encargado notablemente su conciencia" in the manner of acquiring and assembling the people he carried. And he draws the general inference from an African king known to him who held for sale to the Spaniards the whole lineage of anyone who had angered him: if that is the justification the ransom rests on over there, "bien se demuestra qual serà el trato".
On the same subject he also declines the question, and that has to be recorded too. Of the people shipped by way of Cape Verde he writes that custom has settled that there is no difficulty about their being slaves, because those who carry them buy at third or fourth hand and form no scruple, any more than the buyers in the American ports do — and therefore, "sin meternos en la justificacion intrinseca de la cosa", he passes on to the next port. The book is a manual for a ministry, not a case for abolition; its author denounces particular titles, obtains particular restitutions, and steps around the legality of the traffic as such.
What the ministry actually required is set out as a practical problem in the third book, whose second chapter is headed "De la precisa necessidad que tienen los obreros destos Etiopes del uso de los interpretes, y lenguas ladinas, y fieles". Without an interpreter of the sick or healthy person's own nation, the author writes, everything else is useless, since they do not understand our speech nor we theirs; and the difficulty is twofold — the masters ordinarily keep no interpreters and will pay nothing to find them, and it is morally impossible for the priests to learn all the languages themselves, because of their multitude and because there is no general language among them. The interpreters were drawn from the enslaved population itself, and the book treats securing them as the precondition of the whole enterprise.
The limits of the document are worth stating plainly. It is written by the rector of the Jesuit college at Cartagena to recruit his own order to a ministry, so it argues rather than surveys; its account of the Guinea coast and of the crossing is second-hand by the author's own admission; and its purpose is the baptism and instruction of the people it describes, not their liberation. Its value as evidence is that a Spanish priest, writing for a Spanish readership with a licence to print, set down the mechanics and the mortality of the traffic in 1627, and printed the reasoning by which men of his own order told themselves it was permissible.