Category Archives: Portugal

by Joel | 17 January 2025 · 6:46 am

Magellan in Spain

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 52-55:

Columbus’s exploits loom so large in our understanding of the past that other great discoveries recede into the background. In truth, any reasonable observer at the turn of the sixteenth century would have conceded that, even after Columbus’s famous voyages, Portugal’s lead in the global race had widened until becoming almost unassailable. Portuguese navigators reached the tip of Africa in 1488 and found the route to India a decade later. King Manuel I of Portugal took pleasure in writing lengthy letters to the Spanish monarchs, his in-laws and rivals, informing them, “Our Lord has miraculously wished India to be found” and telling them about the spices, precious stones, elephants, exotic peoples, and the immensely profitable trade carried on there. “We are still awaiting news from the twenty-five ships that we sent the previous year [1502],” Manuel gloated to Ferdinand and Isabella in one of his letters, “and after they come back in September there will be time to send some more.”

In the meantime, Spain could point to only a few Caribbean islands and inklings of an unknown continent, but no precious spices, porcelain, or silk. The new lands did offer some gold, but they never replaced the original quest of finding a western approach to the incalculable riches of the Far East. Spaniards explored the continent blocking their way, looking for a passage that would connect the Atlantic with the Pacific. They came up empty-handed until Fernão de Magalhães—a Portuguese defector like the Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín a generation later—put Spain back in the race. Ferdinand Magellan had come of age during Portugal’s torrid expansion into Asia in the 1500s. Yet he had a falling-out with the Portuguese crown and went knocking on neighboring doors. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Magellan’s move to Spain.

Magellan caught up with the roving Spanish court at the town of Valladolid. For someone accustomed to the sound of waves and the proximity of sailboats, it must have been strange to have to journey to the middle of Iberia to propose a maritime venture in a town surrounded by agricultural fields and interminable plains. He did not arrive alone but was accompanied by two brothers, Rui and Francisco Faleiro, both cosmographers whose reputations exceeded Magellan’s. The trio complemented one another well. Magellan came across as a man of action who had fought in India, Malaysia, and North Africa, while the Faleiros were armchair academics. As they waited for an audience with the Spanish king in February and March of 1518, the Portuguese visitors grew unsettled by what they heard. The new monarch, Charles I, was an awkward eighteen-year-old who had come from Belgium just a few months before and had great difficulty communicating in Spanish let alone Portuguese. Worse, the trio had to tread carefully in a court riven by a power struggle between Charles’s advisers recently arrived from Belgium and the old Spanish officials from the previous monarch.

Interestingly, during the early negotiations Rui Faleiro rather than Magellan emerged as the leading voice. The older of the two Faleiro brothers, Rui was deferentially referred to as a bachiller (or bacharel in Portuguese), the highest university degree one could get at the time. Before leaving Portugal he may have been considered for a new chair in astronomy established at the oldest university in the kingdom (what is now the University of Coimbra) by the Portuguese king himself. It was the highest position in the field. One of the reasons that perhaps impelled Rui Faleiro to join Magellan in Spain was being passed over for this prestigious appointment; academic rivalries and pettiness were already alive and well in the sixteenth century! In spite of this setback, and notwithstanding a rumor that “he was possessed by a familial demon and in fact knew nothing about astrology,” Rui Faleiro remained a top European cosmographer. Sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described Rui Faleiro as “a great man in matters of cosmography, astrology, and other sciences and humanities.” There is little doubt that he was extremely accomplished if mercurial and mentally unstable. Rui’s younger brother Francisco Faleiro was just as talented and would go on to find long-term employment in Spain as a leading nautical expert. Together the two Faleiros and Magellan were very credible petitioners.

On the day of the audience, Magellan and Rui Faleiro arrived not with charts as would have been expected but with “a globe that was very well painted and showed the entire world, and on it Magellan traced the route that he would follow.” The two petitioners explained that they intended to cross from one ocean to the other “through a certain strait that they already knew about.” Even though the globe was detailed, the portion of South America where the strait was supposed to be had been left intentionally blank. Magellan and Faleiro had evidently taken some precautions in case anyone present at the audience should wish to steal their project.

Their knowledge of a passage between the oceans—the alpha and omega of many New World explorations—would have been more than enough for the royal sponsorship. But Magellan and Faleiro went further. As one witness at the audience recounted, “They offered to demonstrate that the Moluccas [Spice Islands] from where the Portuguese take spices to their country are on the side of the world that belongs to Spain, as agreed by the Catholic Monarchs and King Juan of Portugal.” The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had established a line of demarcation running from pole to pole through the Atlantic but did not contemplate extending the line to the other side of the world. As Portugal and Spain, however, had continued to sail in opposite directions, such an antimeridian had become necessary. Measuring longitude or east-west distance was still extraordinarily difficult in the early sixteenth century, so no one knew quite where to draw this line in the distant Pacific. All the same, in the early 1510s the Portuguese had planted trading forts in Malaysia and the Spice Islands while Spain had stood by helplessly. Yet in the winter of 1518, Magellan and Faleiro had become persuaded that the Spice Islands were actually on the Spanish side, a conclusion all the more startling in Spain because it was coming from these top Portuguese navigators and cosmographers.

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Filed under economics, Indonesia, Latin America, migration, nationalism, Philippines, Portugal, science, Spain

by Joel | 16 January 2025 · 4:37 am

Columbus in Portugal

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 38-41:

What made this contest [between Portugal and Spain] all the more startling was the stark differences between the two competitors. To put it bluntly, it was a race between a dolphin and an elephant. With a population of barely one million by 1500, Portugal was just too small to take over the world. Lisbon was a very modest capital and base of exploration of around forty thousand people. As it expanded through western Africa, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and China—even if only to establish trading forts or feitorias—the Lusitanian nation became overstretched. Everyone at home was scrambling to keep things running or consumed by one of these ventures halfway around the world. Still, what Portugal lacked in population it more than made up for in experience, cutting-edge nautical technology, and clarity of purpose.

In contrast, the kingdoms that coalesced into Spain contained some five to seven million inhabitants, easily dwarfing Portugal in human and material resources. Yet this aggregation of kingdoms was difficult to manage. Some of them possessed significant maritime experience: elephants do swim. Yet the core of this composite monarchy, the Crown of Castile, was more terrestrial than Portugal. This land orientation is evident in the cities where the Spanish court tended to reside: Valladolid, Toledo, and finally Madrid, right in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula, as far as possible from any coast or sea.

There is no better way to get a sense of these two contenders and understand the nature of the race than by following in Columbus’s footsteps. He lived in Portugal for a decade before moving to Spain and setting the contest in motion by proposing to his new hosts “to reach the east by way of the west.” Columbus’s initial arrival in the Iberian kingdoms had been entirely unplanned. Pirates had attacked the ship on which he was traveling and a great fire had broken out, forcing everyone to jump into the water, “and Columbus, who was a strong swimmer,” a near-contemporary chronicler informs us, “swam for two leagues [seven miles] to the closest land, holding onto an oar to get some rest along the way.” The twenty-five-year-old Columbus washed up on Portugal’s southwestern tip in 1476. It was probably the farthest he had ever been from his native Genoa. Up to that time, Columbus had been trading wools and textiles on behalf of his family, mostly within the Mediterranean.

Once in Portugal, the future “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” remade his life. After drying off his clothes and resting his weary limbs, he made his way to Lisbon where he found a community of Italian financiers, merchants, and nautical experts deeply involved in Portugal’s ventures of exploration. This group included Columbus’s own brother, Bartholomew Columbus, who had moved out of the family household years earlier and relocated to Portugal. The two brothers formed a partnership and made a living by drawing nautical charts and selling books. A contemporary who met Columbus in those years described him as “a dealer in print books of great intelligence although little book learning, and very skilled in the art of cosmography.”

Lisbon, surrounded by massive walls except along the waterfront, was a town on the move at the time of Columbus’s arrival. Sitting on the highest hill was the Castle of São Jorge, a structure that looked ancient even in the fifteenth century. It had a commanding view of the Tagus River and the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1470s through 1490s, when Columbus lived in Lisbon, the castle remained the nerve center of Portugal’s exploration activities. A huge map of the world mounted on gold-plated wood in a cavernous room signaled Portugal’s grand design. Officials bustled around the premises, keeping accounts, levying taxes, and organizing sales of exotic goods coming from Africa as well as from Asia and America later on. Some of these items were on display, including two lions kept in a pen to impress visitors.

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by Joel | 9 September 2024 · 5:43 am

Caribbean Return to Indentured Labor

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 399-402:

The Caribbean of today began to form half a millennium ago, impelled by European colonial expansion harnessed to nascent capitalism and centered on resource extraction and sugar plantations producing for a global market. Within 50 years of Columbus’s landing, indigenous Caribbean populations had been dramatically reduced, largely due to disease and the harsh conditions of labor imposed by the Spanish colonizers. This diminution of indigenous peoples was accompanied by the addition of foreigners from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and later Asia—a socially engineered assemblage of disparate ethnolinguistic groups under conditions of coerced labor and massive wealth accumulation. The imported groups included indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and, later, indentured Africans and Asians.

The transformations of the plantation system had various effects on the racial and demographic composition of different colonial territories. For example, the Hispanophone Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico, was not significantly developed for the global sugar market until the 19th century (although by mid-century Cuba and Puerto Rico had emerged as the first and third largest producers of sugar in the hemisphere), and the proportion of European populations compared to non-European populations was far greater there than in the Francophone and Anglophone colonies.

Over the 19th century, slavery was gradually abolished in the Caribbean. Newly independent Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) abolished slavery in 1804, followed by the British West Indies in 1838, the French possessions in 1848, all Dutch territories by 1863, and Cuba in 1886. Emancipation presented plantation owners with a dilemma: ensuring sugar and other production at high levels without the benefit of enslaved labor, or with diminishing numbers of freed workers willing to engage in plantation labor under the conditions offered by the plantocracy. One strategy implemented by Britain and France was that of freeing Africans from the slave trade of other European colonizers (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) and then sending them to British and French Caribbean colonies as indentured laborers. Almost 40,000 Africans were thus sent to the British West Indies and approximately 16,000 to the French West Indies (Schuler 1980).

Another form of 19th-century indenture brought immigrant laborers from Asia into the region. Organized as either state projects or private enterprises, indenture schemes evolved over eight decades and changed the demographic, cultural, and social terrain of the Caribbean as irrevocably as African slavery had done earlier. Between 1890 and 1939, for example, the Dutch recruited almost 33,000 Javanese, primarily from Central Java and Batavia, for their Caribbean colony of Suriname. The two principal source regions of indentured labor, however, were India and China. Itself a British colony, India experienced indenture as a government-regulated industry, with laborers recruited primarily from the regions of Oudh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh and shipped out from the ports of Calcutta and Madras. Between 1838 and 1917, almost 400,000 Indians arrived in the British Caribbean, the majority in Guyana and Trinidad. Although China was never colonized, its political vulnerability allowed private interests to orchestrate indenture schemes, largely from Canton. Between 1840 and 1875, approximately 142,000 indentured Chinese arrived in Cuba (Helly 1993, 20); from 1853 until 1866 and in trickles thereafter, about 18,000 Chinese were indentured in the British West Indies (Look Lai 1993, 18). Later—beginning around 1890, and concentrated between 1910 and 1940—a second wave of Chinese immigrants, this time not under indenture, arrived in the Caribbean.

The relationships of Asian indentured laborers with the local populations they encountered have influenced the values, identities, and cultural practices of their respective societies. To one extent or another, all the Asian immigrants were initially viewed by the locals as labor competition. Particularly where they constitute a large percentage of the population, Indians have been represented by local anti-indenture interests as “scab” labor, yet historically they also have been pitted against Afro-Caribbean workers. The tensions arising from perceived and actual labor conflicts have left a monumental legacy of racial politics in such contemporary societies as Guyana and Trinidad, where Indians represent more than 40% of the population. Perhaps because of their relatively smaller numbers, Chinese and Javanese laborers have had less fraught relationships with established populations, especially with those in similar occupational and class positions. In Cuba, for example, Chinese indentured laborers worked side by side with enslaved Africans. Enmity between these two groups was encouraged by colonial authorities as a divide-and-rule strategy, but tensions expressed in racial terms did not significantly persist into the present, either in Cuba or in other parts of the region. Once the Chinese found their economic niche primarily in the retail trades and shopkeeping, they no longer represented labor competition to other populations.

Migrants to the Caribbean from the Levant—known as “Syrians,” “Syrian-Lebanese,” or árabes—also began to arrive in the 1860s, increasing their numbers significantly by the 1890s. Most were Maronite Christians leaving Ottoman-occupied regions. Lebanese immigrants came first, followed by Syrians and Palestinians. Although they spread out across the Caribbean (and into Latin America, where they are also called turcos), certain communities predominated in particular countries. For example, of the three groups from the Levant, Lebanese comprise the largest population in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and Palestinians in Haiti (Nicholls 1980). These immigrants came as individuals, or sometimes in families, rather than in an organized migration arrangement; over the years, other family members followed. Although a few went into agricultural production, others became itinerant peddlers. Within a few generations these communities branched out into import-export trading, and today they comprise a large population of affluent and politically active citizens.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, Caribbean, China, France, Indonesia, industry, labor, Lebanon, migration, Netherlands, Portugal, slavery, South Asia, Spain

by Joel | 18 August 2024 · 8:30 pm

African Origins of Caribbean Slaves

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 246-247:

Between 1500 and 1870, the Caribbean region (construed as the islands and associated mainland rim) was the destination of about 5.75 million Africans, about 46% of all captives involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Four years after the first black slaves came from Seville in 1501, 17 African slaves arrived in Hispaniola to work in its copper mines and 100 or so in its gold mines. In 1525, 213 captives from São Tomé landed in Santo Domingo, marking probably the first slave voyage from Africa to the Americas. For the next century Africans continued to arrive in small numbers (perhaps 7,000 total) in the Spanish Caribbean islands. Not until the second quarter of the 17th century did a significant number (about 27,000) arrive in the British Caribbean. The 18th century was the high point of the trade, accounting for two-thirds of all Africans shipped to the Caribbean, although Cuba received most of its slaves (710,000) in the 19th century. The British Caribbean received the most Africans—almost 2.8 million—with the French next at 1.3 million, the Spanish about 1 million, the Dutch about 500,000, and the Danish just 130,000. About 15% to 20% of Africans arriving in the Caribbean were subsequently traded within the Americas.

The origins of these Africans varied. Overall, West-Central Africa supplied the most slaves—about 1.6 million. After 1595 Angola became the leading source of slaves for Spanish America; later it contributed about one-third of Africans brought into Cuba. The next most important region was the Bight of Biafra, which supplied about 1.3 million slaves, while the Gold Coast supplied just over a million, mostly to the British West Indies. The Bight of Benin exported just under a million, over a third of them to the French West Indies. The three regions of Upper Guinea—Senegambia (500,000), Sierra Leone (300,000), and the Windward Coast (300,000)—were minor suppliers despite being geographically the closest to the Caribbean. South East Africa sent fewer than 200,000.

Particular islands drew on specific regions of Africa for considerable periods of time. Before 1725, about three-quarters of Africans in Jamaica came from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, accounting for the early prominence of so-called “Coromantees” from the former coastal region and Adja-speakers from the latter on the island; later, however, Jamaica received most of its Africans from the Bight of Biafra. In the first quarter of the 18th century, 60% of African arrivals in Saint-Domingue were from the Bight of Benin; by the third quarter of the century, 60% came from West-Central Africa. Overall, about half of Saint-Domingue’s Africans came from Angola and the Congo. When the slave trade into Cuba began in earnest in the late 18th century, about a third of its Africans were from the Gold Coast. Thereafter, West-Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra predominated.

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by Joel | 14 August 2024 · 6:15 am

Dutch & Portuguese Role in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 142-145:

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil became the site where the Portuguese first managed to reinstall the sugar plantation complex they and the Spanish had pioneered on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and to achieve its continuity and growth. By 1526 Brazil was exporting sugar, and in the early 17th century its output superseded not only that of earlier Atlantic outposts but also that of the rapidly declining Spanish-Caribbean sugar industry. Part of the reason for this success was that the Portuguese straddled both shores of the Atlantic. Most of the slaves, on whose labor the early Brazilian sugar industry depended, came from the Portuguese colony in Angola, the civil war-ridden neighboring kingdom of Kongo, or the Portuguese factories in the Bight of Benin and Cape Verde (which drew on Senegambian sources). As a result, Portuguese planters in Brazil did not face a problem their Spanish colleagues in the Caribbean would unsuccessfully struggle with for another two centuries: the highly restrictive and inefficiently organized asiento system by which Spain provisioned its New World colonies with African slave labor. While Spanish plantations floundered after the turn of the 17th century, the same period marked the beginning of a boom in Brazil. If the British and French in the Caribbean were looking for a model for hyperprofitable overseas agricultural enterprises, by that time it would not have been Hispaniola or Cuba but the northeastern Brazilian province of Pernambuco.

But what about the Dutch? Like other northern European nations, the Dutch initially began to prey upon the Spanish fleet in the second half of the 16th century. Like the British and French, they also perceived the advantages of piratical raids on the Spanish mainland colonies. By the early 17th century, however, the new Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, embarked on a different course of action. Its novel approach was not merely to skim off profits by raiding Iberian colonies or preying upon the homeward-bound fleet, but to take over the very source: fully developed colonial enterprises.

Aware of the advantages the Portuguese enjoyed by maintaining a connection between Angola and northeastern Brazil, the Dutch seized control of both places at once. Between about 1630 and 1650 they achieved three distinct but interrelated goals: they subjected both regions to a rigorous scheme of capitalistic development, pumping in the requisite cash and credit for building up the plantation infrastructure of Brazil; they continued their role as major maritime architects of legal and illegal commercial links between the Caribbean colonies of various nations; and they turned Amsterdam—which already was the center of finance and banking in northern Europe—into one of the major international European markets for sugar. In contrast to the Portuguese, the Dutch apparently had no strong interest in monopolizing sugar production. In their view, profit lay in offering credit and taking over commercial shipping and distribution.

…

While the importance of the Dutch introduction of sugarcane to Barbados in 1637 is open to question, the crucial role of Dutch merchants in providing financial backing with which British settlers built the first sugar mills on that island is beyond dispute. Dutch planters and sugar masters also taught the British Barbadians what they came to call the “method of Pernambuco”—which included not only the know-how of planting, milling, and processing cane, but also the rudiments of a legal code regulating slavery. Dutch ships, finally, linked Barbados’s emerging plantation economy both to the supply of African labor provided by the Atlantic slave trade and to the effective and profitable distribution networks in the Netherlands. Although the extent of Dutch involvement has lately become the subject of debate among historians, it may be safe to say that within little more than the decade between 1640 and 1650, the Dutch helped to transform Barbados from a slaveholding society with a large yeoman population engaged in fairly diversified economic pursuits into a slave society solidly based on sugar monoculture.

…

These developments were due in no small measure to a fortuitous Atlantic conjuncture. For the “sugar revolution” in Barbados occurred at a time when English metropolitan control over the island faltered. What allowed the Barbadians to engage in such principally illegal dealings with the Dutch was the colonial result of the turmoil in the metropole incited by the English Civil War. As the eminent historian of that war, Christopher Hill (1986), put it, between 1641 and 1650, Barbados virtually became an independent state, or at least approached a state of home rule. As a consequence, the emerging planter elite began to control legislative and executive matters in a manner unprecedented in any New World colony. Only when the British Parliament sent the fleet in the fall of 1651 did the Barbadians finally resubmit to imperial control. They arguably did so, however, because they had become too afraid of their own slaves and rebellious servants to risk giving out arms to them—a situation foreshadowing the agonizing decisions the Jamaican planter elite made when the protest of the 13 North American colonies against British commercial legislation began to escalate into a full-scale colonial war more than a century later.

Still, the intervening period had allowed the Barbadian planter elite enough autonomy to achieve three major objectives: first, to engineer the crucial economic takeoff with the help of Dutch capital and distribution networks; second, to forge a brutal slave code—first properly codified in 1661, but developed in the 1640s—that allowed masters almost unlimited power to exploit their human chattel; and third, to begin a process of concentration of landholding that effectively pushed small freeholders off the island.

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Filed under Angola, Brazil, Britain, Congo, economics, Equatorial Guinea, labor, migration, Netherlands, Portugal, slavery, war

by Joel | 11 August 2024 · 3:41 pm

Sugarcane on the Atlantic Islands

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 77-80:

From the mid-15th century, the Portuguese took slaves to work on Madeira: Moroccans and Berbers, black Africans, and Canary Islanders. The number of slaves who could be profitably employed was limited because the Madeiran sugar establishments were still relatively small in comparison to the later Caribbean and Brazilian plantations. Because of population growth in Portugal itself in the 16th century, many free Portuguese laborers migrated to Madeira, further lessening the demand for slaves. There were even proposals to export some of the slaves already there. In the 15th century, Madeira was a precursor of the future American colonial areas, but by the early 16th century its development had transformed it into a replica of metropolitan Portugal.

The Portuguese established sugar production on other Atlantic islands, but none rivaled the early profits of Madeira. In the Azores sugar production met with little success because of the unfavorable climate; there grain and dyestuffs were always more important, and slaves were few in number. Portuguese agriculture in the arid Cape Verde Islands concentrated on cereals and fruits and was complemented by cattle raising. São Tomê, which became a crucial entrepôt for the transatlantic slave trade, experienced a sugar boom in the 16th century and can also be seen as a prototype of the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

With sugar production and trade prospering, shiploads of sugar were delivered to the large European markets: Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, and cities of the Mediterranean. Although most of the plantations and mills were in the hands of Portuguese, the bulk of the export trade was controlled by foreigners, many of them Italians resident in Portugal. Columbus traded in Madeiran sugar early in his career and lived on the neighboring island of Porto Santo for a time in the 1470s. The European demand for sugar was strong, and the lower costs of Madeiran sugar caused heavy competition for the longer-established Mediterranean producers.

The Portuguese were not the only Europeans who were developing the Atlantic islands during this time. In the early 15th century, Castile began sponsoring conquests in the Canaries, and by the end of the century it had secured control of all the islands. Unlike the other Atlantic islands, the Canaries had a native population who were likely akin to the Berbers. Foreshadowing events in the Americas, the Spaniards subdued the islanders and enslaved those who resisted. Of these, a number were exported to Europe or Madeira, while others were employed on Canarian sugar plantations.

The island population was relatively small to begin with, and its numbers fell due to epidemic disease after the European incursion. Members of indigenous groups whose leaders had signed treaties could not be enslaved legally, unlike members of the non-treaty groups, and those who were enslaved frequently attained manumission. In the early years of the 16th century, the Canarian slave trade to Europe ceased as the islanders increasingly assimilated European culture and intermarried with the colonists. Since native workers never filled the labor needs of the Canaries, the islands witnessed an influx of other workers, including a number of free Castilian and Portuguese settlers. Wealthier settlers brought their own slaves with them from the peninsula. Portuguese slave traders brought in blacks from West Africa, and Castilian mariners raided the coast for North Africans, Berbers, and other slaves. Following the first Spanish contact with the Americas, a few American Indians were sold in the Canaries, but the Spanish crown soon outlawed the slave trade in Indians.

These sugar establishments on Madeira and in the Canary Islands turned out to have some important features of the Caribbean plantations that would emerge in the 16th century, including elements both agricultural (growing the cane) and industrial (refining the sugar), the use of slave labor, and the export of a product to be sold in the growing markets of Europe. The significant difference between the sugar establishments on the Atlantic islands and the later plantations of the Caribbean was size; the former had smaller plots of land and fewer laborers. Those Atlantic islands provided a link between Mediterranean sugar production and the plantation system that was to dominate New World slavery and society into the 19th century.

Madeira and the Canaries formed the staging area from which sugar cultivation and refining would reach Hispaniola, the island where sugarcane was first planted in the Caribbean. Columbus, knowledgeable in the Portuguese sugar trade, had ships of his second transatlantic voyage stop in Madeira for additional supplies. These included refined sugar as a medicinal store and cuttings of sugarcane, which were later planted at Columbus’s ill-fated settlement of La Isabela on the north shore of Hispaniola. The first canes grew but failed to establish permanent sugar production. Only in the first decade and-a-half of the 16th century did successful sugar plantings and newly introduced sugar mills on Hispaniola establish the foundations for the fateful beginning of the colonial plantation complex in the Americas.

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by Joel | 16 May 2024 · 5:20 am

Sicily Under Spain, from 1479

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 148-149, 152-153:

The accession of [Aragon’s King John II]’s son Ferdinand in 1479 was of immense historic importance, since Ferdinand was already married to Queen Isabella of Castile. This marriage united the two kingdoms and created a third—that of Spain itself. Sicily thus suffered a further loss of importance. But a worse misfortune lay ahead. In 1487 there arrived the first members of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition. This had been established by Ferdinand and Isabella as early as 1481—with the blessing of Pope Sixtus IV—and remained under their direct control. It was intended principally to ensure the orthodoxy of those who had recently been persuaded to convert to Christianity from Judaism or Islam; and after the royal decrees of 1492 and 1501—which ordered Jews and Muslims to convert or leave the country—it substantially tightened its grip. Few converts slept soundly in their beds for fear of accusations that they were secretly observing the old customs, the punishment for which was burning at the stake.

Both the Inquisition and the expulsion decrees struck Sicily hard. The Muslim population, which had once been a majority in the island, was now relatively small, but the Jews were many; in the cities and towns they may well have constituted more than a tenth of the population. And Sicily needed them: they were active as merchants, as metalworkers and weavers, and especially as doctors and of course moneylenders. Doctors tend to be popular among the people; but moneylenders are less so and there were, after the middle of the century when interest rates climbed above ten percent, occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, the citizens of Palermo appealed to Spain on behalf of their native Jews, protesting that they were doing no harm and begging that they might be allowed to remain. Their request went unheeded.

History shows us all too many cases of Jewish persecution, and in every case the persecuting country ends up impoverished. Spain and Sicily were no exception. We do not know the numbers involved—how many Jews decided to emigrate rather than deny their faith and how many “converted”—although the converts too lost much of their property, and even then were never safe from the Inquisition. But whatever the proportions, there can be no doubt that Sicily—like Nazi Germany in more recent years—lost a vast number of her most skilled, talented and intelligent citizens. And her economy suffered accordingly.

Another somewhat unsettling trend made itself evident during the sixteenth century’s opening decade: a steady increase in royal authority. For well over two centuries the barons had had things very much their own way. Thanks to corruption, carelessness on the part of the authorities, or quite often simply the passage of time, many of them held estates that were technically crown property, or had long since been allowed to forget their feudal obligations. But those days were over. With every passing year it became more evident that King Ferdinand was gradually tightening his grip. This was confirmed in 1509, with the appointment as Viceroy of a general named Ugo Moncada, who was bent on the conquest of North Africa and saw Sicily as the obvious springboard. From the beginning the barons hated him. Not only did he show them no respect; on his arrival he instituted searching inquiries as to their legal positions—in many cases with extremely embarrassing results. Arrests were made, frequently leading to imprisonment; fiefs were confiscated, including several that had been formally claimed by the Church. Meanwhile, the Inquisition was making its presence increasingly felt, particularly after it began burning its victims alive in the public squares.

…

The events of the last decade of the fifteenth century had changed the civilized world. On April 17, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella had given their formal approval to Christopher Columbus for his voyage, putting at his disposal three tiny caravels—the largest of them little more than a hundred feet long. Moreover, just four years before the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María set sail, the Portuguese Bartholomew Diaz had rounded the Cape of Storms (renamed by John II of Portugal the Cape of Good Hope); just six years afterward, on May 20 1498, his compatriot Vasco da Gama had dropped anchor at Calicut on the Malabar coast. Not only had he found a continuous sea route to India; he had proved that Portuguese ships were capable—just—of getting there and back.

The stories of these three great adventurers are not ours; what is important to us is the effect they had on the fortunes of the Mediterranean. Henceforth the writing was on the wall. Until now, even if the Turks did not make trouble—as they usually did—all cargoes bound for the further east had to be unloaded in Alexandria or some Levantine port. Thence they would be either transported overland to the pirate-infested Red Sea or consigned to some shambling camel caravan across central Asia which might take three or four years to reach its destination. Now, merchants could look forward to a time when they could sail from Lisbon—or London—and arrive in India or Cathay in the same vessel. Meanwhile, thanks to Columbus and those who followed him, the New World was proving infinitely more profitable than the Old, possessed as it was of fabulous wealth, the lion’s share of which went to Spain—and legally too. Within only seven months of Columbus’s first landfall, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI—himself a Spaniard—had issued the first of his five bulls settling the competing claims of Spain and Portugal over the newly discovered territories; within twenty-five years the galleons were regularly returning to their homeland loaded to the gunwales with loot. No wonder the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella had their eyes fixed so firmly on the west.

It was not immediately apparent that this sudden opening up of the oceans on both sides had dealt trade in the Mediterranean what would prove to be a paralyzing blow. Gradually, however, men realized that, at least from the commercial point of view, the Middle Sea had become a backwater. East of the Adriatic the Turks now allowed passage to western ships reluctantly or not at all. To the west, it was still indispensable to Italy; but France was nowadays finding her northern ports on the English Channel a good deal more useful than Marseille or Toulon, while Spain, now entering her years of greatness, had other, tastier fish to fry. Not for another three centuries, until the building of the Suez Canal, would the Mediterranean regain its old importance as a world thoroughfare.

And Sicily, as always, was the loser.

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Filed under economics, Mediterranean, migration, Portugal, religion, Spain

by Joel | 13 August 2023 · 5:56 am

Early Danish Explorers

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-184:

In Europe, the fifteenth century was the period of the great explorers. This led, among other things, to a collaboration between Portugal and the Danish Empire to find a route to India (Jensen 2007). The Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator had written to Christopher of Bavaria about the project, and a Danish nobleman Vallarte arrived in Portugal in 1448 and participated with the Portuguese Order of Christ in a long expedition south of Africa to Cape Verde, where he lived the rest of his life in captivity of the local tribal chief, who turned out not to be Christian, as the expedition had expected. In 1461, King Afonso V of Portugal wrote to Christian I and warmly recommended Christian’s herald Lolland. Heralds could function almost as ambassadors and were often named after provinces or landscapes (i.e. Lolland). Lolland had participated in the Portuguese crusades and voyages of discovery to North Africa, and Afonso was so impressed by his bravery that the king knighted him when he returned to Portugal. These connections between Denmark and Portugal were later expanded. Around 1471, when Christian presented his grand crusade plan to the imperial diet in Regensburg, an expedition to the north embarked, led by well-known captains Didrik Pining of Denmark, Hans Pothorst of Iceland, and João Vaz Corte-Real and Alvaro Martins Homem from Portugal. They reached Greenland, where they erected a large memorial on one of the more recognizable mountains. From there, they proceeded to America and reached Newfoundland, which was known among Portuguese fishermen as “terra do bachalau,” the land of the stock fish. The goal was to find the northwest passage to India. This was reattempted later. In 1519, Christian II equipped a new expedition under the leadership of the notorious pirate and admiral Søren Norby: prior to this, he had wrought papal bulls that authorized the raid as a true crusade. The goal was to win Greenland back from the pagans, which would only be the beginning. At the time of Christian II it was believed that Greenland was the outermost peninsula of the great Asian continent, and if one could lead a crusade there, one would be able to confront the Muslims with a two-front war. At the same time, Christian’s army would land in the Far East near where the legendary Christian priest-king Prester John was supposed to live in a giant kingdom ready to support Christian Western Europe in the fight against Islam. During the fifteenth century, it was said that Prester John was descended from Holger the Dane, hero to Charlemagne, and thus King Christian’s distant ancestor. The Danish empire was so large that it included not only huge areas of the north with diverse peoples, but also a bridgehead to Asia. However, the Great Crusade to Greenland and Asia never commenced, because Christian II became preoccupied with problems in Sweden [trying to maintain the Kalmar Union].

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Filed under Africa, North America, Portugal, religion, Scandinavia, South Asia, travel

by Joel | 22 March 2023 · 5:25 am

Losing Your First Language: Portuguese

From Face[t]s of First Language Loss, by Sandra G. Kouritzin (Routledge, 1999), pp. 164-165:

After immigrating to Toronto from Portugal at the age of 1 or 2, Michael didn’t learn to speak English until he began Grade 1. When he started school, it became obvious to his teacher that Michael couldn’t speak English very well, and so she encouraged his parents to speak to him in that language at home. They tried, but by the time Michael was in Grade 3 and able to function well in school, they reverted to Portuguese in the home. The pattern was well-established however, and Michael continued to reply to them in English.

Apart from his language difficulties, Michael doesn’t recall much of his early years of school except that he was in trouble a lot. He “spent a lot of time in the corner” (November 17th, 1995, p. 1), which he attributes to “language issues,” and to the fact that he didn’t get a lot of support at school. Later, his language issues were multiplied when, during puberty, he simultaneously returned to Portugal for a visit, and also began having speech difficulty when his voice started changing. According to his speech therapist, he began using his false vocal chords; he began feeling very self-conscious using the English language. When he visited Portugal during the summer vacation, he began to feel more comfortable around the Portuguese language, and, at the same time, he stopped using his false vocal chords. It is a chicken-and-egg question whether he feels more comfortable with the sounds and rhythm of Portuguese than with English because his language difficulty was solved in Portugal, or if his language difficulty was solved in Portugal because he felt more comfortable with the language. Either way, it is a moot point; he can no longer speak the language, even having difficulty in retrieving single words.

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Filed under Canada, education, language, migration, Portugal

by Joel | 14 September 2022 · 5:12 am

Learning Magyar on the Go, 1934

From Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (Journey Across Europe Book 2, NYRB Classics, 2011), Kindle pp. 60-62:

Later, as Malek and I tittuped past a sleepy railway-halt called Pusztapo, the scene clears a bit; its name has stuck only because of its oddity. Hamlets like this were hardly more than a row of thatched cottages on either side of the dusty way. Sometimes I would stop and buy some oats; when the word kocsma over a door or painted in white on a window-pane indicated a tavern, I would dismount and sit on the bench among the budding hollyhocks over a small glass of a fierce country schnapps called seprü, or cseresznye, when made of cherries. Sometimes, blinking in the sun and the dust, a waggoner or two might be on the same bench and, though we were incommunicado, I was among friends at once because of the prevalent sympathy for horses: Malek’s fine looks won all hearts, and everyone stroked him. “Nagyon szép!” they would murmur, “Very beautiful” or “Az egy szép ló,” “He’s a fine horse…” (Sketchy vocabularies are jotted in the journal here and there: zab, oats; ló, horse; lovagolok, I ride; lovagolni fogok, I will ride; lovagolni fogok holnap Mezötúrra, I will ride to Mezötúr tomorrow. Gyönyörü! excellent or first class, it continues, and Rettenetes!, terrible! and so on.) Sitting with the reins loose in my hands under the transparent leaves of the acacias, I felt like a lone cowboy venturing among little-known tribes and the Gypsies and the shepherds with their tomahawk-staves supplied corroborative detail.

When a village fell behind, we were alone once more in a flat and now familiar landscape, half desert and half sown, with its flocks and its herdsmen and its solitary sweep-wells and its cloud-processions along the horizon. In the late afternoon we were picking our way through another enormous herd of cattle with those long straight horns. Soon Gypsy hovels appeared and a straggle of kilns and sheds and thousands of bricks set out to dry and a rambling overgrown churchyard; then solider houses multiplied and we were on the outskirts of the substantial country-town of Mezötúr.

Smaller than Szolnok, it was a place of some consequence nevertheless. (Between two coffee-houses in the main street with kávéház helpfully inscribed across their fronts, another shop-window full of cosmetics and lotions and pictures of women with lowered lids stroking their soft complexions had a mysterious superscription: Szépség Szálón. After a few seconds’ delay, like the working of a slow calculating machine, ‘Beauty Parlour’ came to the surface…) Many of the shops had Jewish names, German in origin but spelt in the Hungarian way. Others were simple Hungarian words—Kis, Nagy, Fehér, Fekete—which may have been translations of Klein, Gross, Weiss and Schwarz, changed during Magyarising drives in the past. A grocer called Csillag—Stern?—set me on the right track for stabling. There were plenty of horses about and many country carts; old and battered four-wheelers with their hoods down waited patiently under the leaves or trundled about in the dusty evening light. Down a back lane at the stables I fell in with an ex-student called Miklos Lederer. He had just been apprenticed to a chemist; when Malek had been watered and fed, he helped me carry all the tack to a room in the house where he had taken digs. Half Hungarian and half Swabian, he too spoke German. Like everyone else at this time of the day, we strolled about the town, while busy swallows whisked by; there was something indefinably oriental in the atmosphere of the place. (I only discovered later on that south of varying parallels of latitude the corso—this universal evening promenade—was a phenomenon that stretched all the way from Portugal to the Great Wall of China.)