The Caribbean: The ‘Yoke of Slavery'
The inhuman death of Hatuey occasioned so universal a dread among the Indians of Cuba, that without further resistance they submitted to the yoke of slavery
J. H. Campe, 1799[226]
In the early months of 1515 a Spanish ship dropped anchor near Cumana, off the coast of Venezuela.
The ship's captain, Gomez de Ribera, went ashore with a small entourage, made contact with a local group identified simply as indios (‘Indians'), and invited them aboard his ship to trade. At the time this particular strip of Caribbean coastline was controlled by Dominican friars, and so its indigenous population spoke a little Spanish and had developed some trust in Spaniards - hence Ribera's success in persuading eighteen men and women to take the boats out to his ship. But instead of talking trade, the captain raised anchor and sailed to Hispaniola. There the eighteen ‘Indians', now chained and branded on the face, were sold as slaves.[227]This tiny tale is neatly illustrative of the larger story of Spanish-indigenous interaction in the Caribbean, circum-Caribbean, Central America and Mexico in the half-century following 1492. In general terms, those of the bare outline of facts, the incident reflects how indigenous peoples suffered various forms of violence - from betrayal, enslavement and displacement to rape, mutilation and massacre - despite competing Spanish visions of colonialism. Viewed thus, it is violent interaction, not God, gold and glory, that most characterised the earliest decades of European exploration and settlement in the Americas.
The more complex history of early Spanish colonialism in the region is also illustrated in the details of the 1515 anecdote, specifically in the legal loopholes and categories that Ribera used. For example, Ribera and his crew were not licensed slave traders; their mandate was to find the ‘Caribs' who had killed a pair of Spaniards on the island of San Vicente.
Since the first use of ‘Carib' - coined during the 1493 Columbus expedition - to designate hostile indigenous groups, Spaniards had reduced the ethnic complexity of the islands and circum-Caribbean coastal regions to a dichotomy of two invented categories. We might call them ‘good Indians' and ‘bad Indians', not labels officially used by Spaniards but ones recognisable to Europeans and their descendants in the Americas for centuries since 1493. We know the former as Tainos (although scholars recognise that this category is also invented, and the process of recovering pre-Columbian ethnic identities is still ongoing); nitaino is an adjective meaning ‘good, noble' in the Taino language. The latter, the caribes, were classified as violent cannibals (hence the name), whose nature thereby made it legal to slaughter or enslave them.There is no evidence that Ribera's ship bothered to sail to San Vicente at all. Most likely they found a convenient bay near a Dominican mission in order to trick peaceful indios into being kidnapped and reclassified as enslavable caribes: a quicker and less dangerous prospect than hunting ‘real' caribes. Such a manipulation of invented categories was standard Spanish practice throughout the region. Equally common was the collaboration in this abuse by Spanish officials; Ribera's eighteen captives were purchased in Santo Domingo (Hispaniola's capital) by local magistrates and encomenderos (Spaniards with licences to access the tribute and labour of specified communities), who surely knew that Ribera had fudged his documentation, even before a letter of protest reached the city from the friars on the Venezuelan coast. Among the eighteen were the baptised local cacique (indigenous chief or local ruler), don Alonso, and his wife; even within the contorted logic of Spanish law, the couple could not legally be enslaved.
The case was scandalous enough that it generated paperwork, and was preserved for posterity in the outraged phrases of the era's most famous Dominican, Bartolome de las Casas, the bishop-friar who campaigned at court in defence of indigenous rights (earning him infamy among the conquistadors but fame in the modern era).
But don Alonso, his family and compatriots were never returned to their homes. And by the end of 1515 the missions in the Cumana area were destroyed (either by men avenging don Alonso's kidnapping, or by enemies taking advantage of his absence). In 1518 the king ordered Judge Alonso de Zuazo on Hispaniola to find and repatriate don Alonso's wife (the unnamed cacica), but there is no evidence this was done, and the order ignores the other seventeen captives (although it does state that generally speaking illegally enslaved indios are to be deposited in Franciscan or Dominican monasteries). The details are again illustrative of larger patterns: there were laws in place designed to protect indigenous groups and facilitate peaceful colonial settlement, and there were Spaniards willing to fight to enforce those laws; but they were almost always outnumbered by those who viewed the legal loopholes as the very licences that made their presence and profits possible.[228]The quebrantamiento, the great ‘breaking' of the Taino population of the first decade of the century as a result of violence, enslavement and overwork in placer gold mining, led to a decade of slave raiding across the Caribbean - from Florida to the northern coasts of South America. The islands in between were decimated. Tens of thousands were enslaved. The slaughter and disruption to family life and food production caused the indigenous population to drop within a generation by hundreds of thousands - if not by millions, as Las Casas claimed (we may never know the precise numbers, which modern scholars have fiercely debated).[229]
Then a smallpox epidemic hit the greater Caribbean region in 1518, killing a quarter of the indio population of Hispaniola in a matter of months (or so Zuazo claimed), prompting a dramatic increase in the issuing of slave raiding licences. Faced with increasingly poor ‘harvests' of ‘Indians', Spaniards in the Caribbean jumped at the opportunity to reap the benefits of an untapped mainland. As it happened, in 1517 the governor of Cuba, Diego de Velazquez, had sent an expedition to explore the mainland coastline and what was then perceived to be a large island - Yucatan. The expedition (whose leader, Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, was fatally wounded) had returned with tantalising evidence of wealthy and well-populated indigenous kingdoms. As a result, 1517 would prove to be the starting date of a pair of interlocking thirty-year wars - a Spanish- Mesoamerican Thirty Years War and a Spanish-Maya Thirty Years War.[230]