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Captivity and Redemption: Aspects of Slave Life in Early Colonial Quito and Popayán*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Kris Lane
Kris Lane*
Affiliation:
The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
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Extract

In mid-July 1594 a notary recorded the last wishes of an elite woman on her deathbed in Quito. Ysabel de Baeza was a native of the old Kingdom of Granada, a four-time widow, owner of some houses in Seville and a modest estancia in Ambato, a few days' ride south of Quito. She also claimed five slaves: Magdalena and her four children, Luisa, Felipe, Juan, and Antón. Doña Ysabel's real estate was to go mostly to her children and grandchildren in Quito, but the fate of the slaves was more carefully circumscribed. Magdalena would serve her dying master's daughter for four years, after which she would be freed. Luisa was to serve Baeza's granddaughter, Leonor de Ayala, and Felipe a great-grandson, Alonso Bonifaz, both “until the time when they ransom themselves (se rescaten) and give each one on their own behalf four hundred pesos of current silver.” The younger Juan and Antón were to stay in the household of Baeza's executors until they also freed themselves, each for 300 pesos. The slaves were not to be sold by these temporary masters, and the 1,400 pesos thus collected was to be placed in a chaplaincy fund (capellanía) administered by Quito's Augustinians. The masses thus financed by the self-redemption of Ysabel Baeza's slaves would in turn help release her soul from the temporary captivity and untold pain of Purgatory.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 57 , Issue 2: The African Experience in Early Spanish America , October 2000 , pp. 225 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2000

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the UNESCO-sponsored conference, “La Ruta del Esclavo en Hispanoamérica,” at the University of Costa Rica, San José, 24 February 1999. Thanks to the participants for their criticism and suggestions, especially Jane Landers and Matthew Restall, and to later readers Robert J. Ferry, Michael Guasco, Rhys Isaac, and Philip D. Morgan. Research funding was provided by an IIE/Fulbright pre-dissertation grant in 1994-95 and a summer research stipend from the College of William & Mary in 1998.

References

1 Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, Ecuador (hereafter ANHQ) Notaria 1:6, DLM (notary initials), 19-vii-1594, ff.24-28v. See also ANHQ Notaria 6:9, RDO, pt.2 c.30-x-1598, f.812–15, will of Ysabel de Hermosilla, widow of Martín de Pino de Oro. Hermosilla left wealth to various Church organizations and some items to indigenous and apparently mixed-heritage servants, including meal grinding stones and empty wine and olive jugs, but her slave María Bran, whom she had purchased for 500 pesos “current silver” (see note 28), was to be sold to fund a chaplaincy for the master’s benefit. A codicil for Ynés de Alarcón (ANHQ Notaria 1:6, DLM, 19-iv-1596, f.397) asked that her two slaves, twenty-two-year-old Ysabel Biafara and twenty-year-old Antonio Bañol, be sold to fund a capellanía. On the mechanics of such chaplaincies in contemporary Spain, see Christian, William A., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 107,Google Scholar and Eire, Carlos, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 200–09.Google Scholar On the formation of early modern conceptions of Purgatory and economy generally I have consulted Le Goff, Jacques, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),Google Scholar and Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone/MIT, 1988). For very recent work in a similar vein for colonial Latin America, see van Deusen, Nancy E., “The ‘Alienated’ Body: Slaves and Castas in the Hospital de San Bartolomé in Lima, 1680-1700,” The Americas 56:1 (July 1999): pp. 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 See, for example, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI) Quito 20b, 3:25, 1557 letter from Puná Island cacique “don Diego” to Indies Council, and 22:16, 14-xii-1568 letter from Latacunga cacique don Sancho de Velasco to Council requesting rents, a coat-of-arms, and “dos negros con espadas andando con su persona.”

3 Bowser, Frederick, in The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974),Google Scholar Appendix B, records sale of c. 1,300 slaves in Lima, 1580–1600, with the percentage of women sold over the longer term (1560–1650, total 6,890 individuals) approaching 40%. It should be noted that the city of Quito was not a port of entry like Lima/Callao, but rather a final, interior destination; slaves entered the “kingdom” via Guayaquil and the northern and southern highlands, and many never reached the administrative capital. Some 300 “blacks” were said to be working in Popayán gold mines by c.1560, and 1573 and 1576 relaciónes of Quito suggest a population of only c.100 slaves in the city (of C.300 vecinos), along with several hundred free mulattos and “zambaigos.” Quito’s slave population c.1600 was probably more than twice this number, especially considering the fact that by 1604 a Guayaquil census recorded, in a city of only 152 vecinos, an enslaved population of 333 (sex ratio c. 1.85 [216 men to 117 women], and only 20 free people of color [7 men, 13 women]. Here the high number of men reflected the thriving port city’s demand for stevedores, lumberjacks, shipbuilders, sailors, polemen, and so forth. See Leiva, Pilar Ponce, ed. Relaciones histórico-geográficos de la Audiencia de Quito (hereafter RHGQ), 2 vols. (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1992), 1: pp.56, 221, 262, 264; 2: p. 16.Google Scholar

4 I follow Thornton’s, John list of ethnic categories, in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. xvi, 184–92.Google Scholar

5 ANHQ Notaria 1:1, ff.5, 386, 426,433; 1:3, ff.56v, 101v, 158v; 1:9, ff. 109v, 87v, 230v, 540v; 5:1, ff.1124v, 1300; 6:5, f.603; 6:6, f.85v. By the early eighteenth century one even finds descriptions like “black, the color of a slave” (negro color esclavo), ANHQ Fondo Especial, doc. 1226, f. 170 (Guayaquil, 1740).

6 ANHQ Notaria 1:5, DBL, 20-vii-1593, f.4.

7 ANHQ Notaria 1:4, DBL, 14-ix-1596, f.571v.

8 ANHQ Notaria 1:1, DLM, 3-xii-1585, f.316.

9 ANHQ Notaria 1:5, DBL, 29-iii-1596, f.380. Closer examination suggests a less optimistic appraisal, as the Dominicans disputed ownership of the properties and furnishings were minimal (a bed, two chairs, and a couple of empty chests). La Paz seems to have spent most of her income freeing her daughters, Juliana and Agustina.

10 ANHQ Notaria 1:5, DBL, 20-v-1595, f.l24v. Another free mule-skinner, Francisco de Palacios, borrowed over 300 pesos in cash from the merchant Domingo Pertegui to pay off other debts and maintain his mule train (ANHQ Notaria 1:5, DBL, 23-xi-1595, f.230, and f.331, 20-ii-1596).

11 ANHQ Notaria 1:2, DLM, 16-ix-1586, f. 1435v. I suggest his wife was indigenous since the skirt (anaco) was an indigenous-style garment from Quijós Province, in the Oriente.

12 Libros de Cabildo de Quito, 1573–74 (3-vi-1573), p. 42. Pike, Ruth, in “Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century: Slaves and Freedmen,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47:3 (August 1967): pp. 344–59,CrossRefGoogle Scholar noted the case of a mulatto slave making the rounds in Seville in 1598 with his master, the almotacén of the meat-market (349).

13 ANHQ Notaria 1:4, DBL, 16-xi-1596, f.614, and Archivo Municipal de Quito, Miscelánea #93, “tierras de Carangue,” f. 13. Hernández also testified on behalf of a rent-seeking Cayambe cacique, don Gerónimo de Puento; see AGI Quito 23:5, 26-iv-1586, f.24v. Another propertied “brown” Quiteño was Pedro Ramón, called a “householder and resident” (vecino y morador) in his will (ANHQ Notaria 6:6, DRD, 27-I-1597, ff.65-66v). Ramón was dying of wounds apparently suffered in the course of a dispute, but he appears to have been as strong-willed a character as Hernández. Pedro Ramón was a parishioner of the Santa Bárbara barrio, but asked to be buried in the Chapel of the Kings, “in the Great Church, where I am a brother.” He owned a house and estancia near the village of Quinche, northeast of Quito, along with seven mares, two studs, and a saddle with full tack; he left these things, along with two iron bars and a sword he was still paying for, to his wife and four children. Ramón was married to an indigenous woman named Francisca Començaña, and he himself may have been Afro-Indian, son of “brown Juan,” farrier, and “Ysabel.” Like other propertied Quiteños, he claimed to have enjoyed the services of indigenous mita workers on his farm—and he owed them back pay on the eve of his death.

14 ANHQ Real Hacienda, caja 37, vol. 2 (1593 alcabalas), f.l02v. Villorín apparently had to pay these taxes, since “indios” were exempted by law. Another person of color, Julian Larrea, “color moreno,” was said to owe alcabalas for selling a solar in the Barrio San Bias (135v). Bowser, in The African Slave in Colonial Peru, notes numerous cases of free women of color operating retail stalls and inns in early Lima and Cusco (pp. 106–09). As in Quito, vendors of African descent, in spite of their obvious enterprising spirit, were frequently penalized by discriminatory legislation.

15 ANHQ Notaria 1:6, DLM & MA, 8-1-1596, f.329. See also the concierto between Quito householder Melchor Villegas and Miguel Sánchez, “moreno horro,” involving oversight of mita farm laborers and care of 400 swine; payment would consist of one-fifth of annual herd growth (Notaria 6:5, DRD, 12-XÜ-1596, f.623). A more vague service agreement appears in the case of a twenty-year-old mulatto named Francisco, who signed on with Joaquín de San Román (as squire?) for one year at twenty pesos current silver (ANHQ Notaria 6:4, DRD, 2-iv-1596, f.l33v.).

16 I follow Bowser’s interpretation of this bizarre phrase (The African Slave in Colonial Peru, p. 84). Bowser credits Fernando Ortiz with deciphering it in Spanish. ANHQ Notaria 1:3, ff. 807, 852; 1:5, ff.53; 1:6, f.l46v; 1:9, f.361v; 5:1, f.l285v; 6:6, f.221v; 6:9, f.529.

17 ANHQ Notaria 1:1, ff.56, 41.0); l:3,ff.l69v; 1:6, ff. 146v, 191; 5:1, f.1112; 6:5, f.494; 6:6, ff.359v, 392; 6:7, ff.931; 6:8, ff.171, 376; 6:9, f.921.

18 ANHQ Notaria 1:9, ff.361, 817v, 6:6, f.l73v; 6:7, f.612.

19 ANHQ Notaria 1:3, f.257; 1:6, ff.434, 582; 1:9, f.448v; 5:1, f. 154; 6:5, f.603; 6:6, f.221.

20 ANHQ Notaria 1:10, FGD & DBL, 16-iii-1598, f.254.

21 AGI Quito 76, no.31 (24-1-1580), f.5, mentioned in letter of Bishop Peña to Council.

22 Maroons had holed up in a site called Matarredonda, on the upper Patia, north of Pasto by 1590, however. See AGI Quito 24:36 (8-iv-1596), Captain Juan de Mideros of Almaguer to Indies Council.

23 For contemporary price trends on the Gulf Coast of New Spain, see Carroll, Patrick J., Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), pp. 34-36.Google Scholar

24 ANHQ Notaria 1:5, DBL, 3-X-1594, f.40v, carta de libertad for “negra” Victoria Andrada, apparent self-purchase for 650 pesos current silver.

25 ANHQ Notaria 6:3, SH, 7-xii-1587, f. 172. In early 1596 a wheat estancia near Alangasí, including tools, oxen, and threshing horses, sold for 300 pesos current silver, about the price of an adolescent slave (ANHQ Notaria 1:6 DLM, f.335).

26 ANHQ Notaria 1:6, DLM, 20-viii-1597, f.536.

27 ANHQ Notaria 1:4, DBL, 17-viii-1596, ff.523-23v. Pedro de Atienza for Gil de Billarubia, cancelled 5-vii-1597.

28 ANHQ Notaria 5:1, JBM, 7-ii-1600, f.52v. The peso de plata corriente was worth 340 maravedis, or 10 reales; the “piece of eight,” or tostón, was worth 272 maravedis.

29 ANHQ Notaria 1:11, 9-I-1600, ff.9v-11v.

30 For example, ANHQ Notaria 1:1, DLM, 31-XÜ-1582, f.5. Here Juan Caro (presbítero) sent two gold disks worth 111 pesos fine gold with Quito merchant Juan Núñez to purchase a “negro o negra” aged five to twelve in Tierra Firme (i.e., Panama City or Nombre de Diós).

31 ANHQ Notaria 6:2, SH, 23-vii-1583, ff.991-91v. In reverse cases, slaves became currency, as in the 1583 swap of “nine bars assayed silver and a black” for a half-share in “a vessel named the San Juan,” carrying merchandise between Panama and Lima (ANHQ Notaria 6:2, SH, 27-vii-1583, ff.994v-95).

32 ANHQ Notaria 6:2, SH, 19-viii-1583, f.H30v. See also ANHQ Notaria 1:11, 19-ii-1600, f.221v, where Juan criollo (35) was traded for 506 pesos-worth of cloth from a local textile mill.

33 A fabulous study of the revolt is Bernard, Lavallé’s Quito y la crisis de la alcabala, 1580-1600 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1997).Google Scholar

34 Libros de Cabildos Quito II (10-vi-1551), 2: p. 412.

35 ANHQ Notaria 1:6, DLM & MA, 10-vi-1596, f.428v, and 28-iii-1596, f.354v.

36 ANHQ Notaria 1:5, DBL, 3-x-1595, f.192.

37 ANHQ Notaria 1:9, GA, 23-iii-1599, f.645. Another such agreement is found in ANHQ Notaria 6:7, vol. II, DRD, lO-vii-1597, f.486, where two native Angolan slaves, Juan and Manuel, were to learn shoemaking in two years from Sebastián Suárez. Their master, Diego de Molina Sotomayor, would pay for food and clothing, but the slaves would lodge with the shoemaker and carry out unspecified tasks (tareas).

38 ANHQ Notaria 6:1, AN, 11-iv-1581, f.34v. Other apprenticeship agreements in these years involved adolescent native Andeans and mestizos, often charged with vagabondage and petty theft, ordered by the city council to learn a trade as part of a criminal sentence.

39 Evidence of similar penetration of the contemporary New Spain market is in Carroll, Patrick J., Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, pp. 30-31.Google Scholar

40 For example, ANHQ Notaria 6:2, SH, 6-ix-1583, f. 1016; here Martín Hederr of the southern gold camp of Zaruma disputed the loss of seventeen slaves to an unscrupulous factor, Tomás de Vergara. Vergara was said to have traded some of the slaves for a sailing vessel, which he then took to New Spain. Hederr (a German?) purchased other slaves in Quito with gold ingots about the same time (Notaria 6:2, SH, 13-ix-1583, f.264v [marked ‘267’]). ANHQ Notaria 1:1, DLM, 27-vi-1585, f.3l lv, notes the sale in Quito of fourteen-year-old Cristóbal Criollo, formerly of the gold mining cuadrilla of Capt. Díaz Sánchez de Narváez in the Patia River Valley (between Pasto and Popayán), for 410 pesos current silver (other slaves had apparently been traded for gold dust in Pasto).

41 Ponce Leiva, RHGQ 1: p.530. Arias Pacheco claimed that this type of payment in installments had not proved feasible in placer districts, which yielded less gold (“minas de oro corrido que se lava con las bateas y no son de tanto aumento”).

42 Bakewell, Peter, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), pp. 191–93.Google Scholar Bakewell describes Spanish attitudes towards Africans in the south-central Andean context but does little to question these prejudiced views about race and supposed climate suitability. The same sort of solutions to indigenous labor problems proposed in Quito and Popayán were considered in the late sixteenth century, but as in the cases of Zaruma and Zamora, Africans never came to constitute more than a supplementary workforce. Most slaves were engaged in refining and, in the case of Potosí, minting tasks. On sixteenth-century conceptions of high altitude physiology in Peru, see Ford, Thayne, “Stranger in a Strange Land: José de Acosta’s Scientific Realizations in Sixteenth-century Peru,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 29:l(Spring 1998): pp. 19–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A widely distributed Spanish treatise on innate human characteristics and the effects of climate more generally was the physician Juan Huarte’s 1575 Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (altered after Inquisition censure in 1584).

43 Ponce Leiva, RHGQ 1 : p. 550 (relación of Pedro González de Mendoza). Despite legal restraints, African men did marry native women in gold-mining zones in these years, e.g., “a black slave named Juan married to an Indian woman,” mentioned in a dowry inventory from the far southern gold camp of Santa María de Nieva in 1584 (ANHQ Notaria 1:1, DLM, 18-xii-1584, f.296). A single female slave named María served the same household.

44 Leiva, Ponce, RHGQ 1: pp. 567–68.Google Scholar

45 Numerous such petitions flowed from the pens of Popayán governors and elite citizens; see, for example, AGI Quito 16.

46 Leiva, Ponce, RHGQ 1: pp. 518–26.Google Scholar “Tomás Moro” is cited on p. 524. More’s idea of utopia was rather authoritarian for modern tastes, and slavery was a prominent feature of his imagined community. Unlike European slavery in More’s time, however, utopian slavery was not an inherited condition and did not involve massive importation from other lands, but rather relied on war captives and criminals, such as adulterers. See More, Thomas, Utopia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980 [1516]), pp. 80–83.Google Scholar Even more curious is that unlike Auncibay’s Popayán, gold was scorned in Utopia and reduced to common uses, like the manufacture of chamber pots and, incredibly, the fetters and chains of slaves (pp. 62-63). Bowser, , in The African Slave in Colonial Peru, pp. 13–25,Google Scholar describes a number of similar proposals put forth by Peru’s viceroys before Toledo’s implementation of the mita system in the mid-1570s. As in Quito, none of these grand plans came to fruition due to the crown’s unwillingness to directly subsidize the slave trade.

47 Auncibay’s own ideas of what constituted “civilization” are not fully articulated, but Ortiz de la Tabla notes that he was known for his frequent denunciations of Quito’s encomenderos as “more merchants than gentlemen.” He himself was denounced by others as a philanderer and father of illegitimate children by both indigenous and slave mistresses. See de la Tabla Ducasse, Javier Ortiz, Los encomenderos de Quito, 1534–1660: Orígen y evolución de una élite colonial (Sevilla: EEHA, 1993), pp. 135, 165.Google Scholar

48 Leiva, Ponce, RHGQ 1: p. 521.Google Scholar

49 Ibid., pp. 523–24.

50 Ibid., p. 526. The Quito Cabildo established punishment codes for African slaves as early as the 1540s: Spanish masters were fined if their slaves were discovered living in indigenous villages, caciques were fined and then jailed for retaining runaways as servants, and the slaves themselves were subject first to one hundred lashes, then to loss of all toes on the right foot, and finally death upon a third offense (in ed. González, José Rumazo, Libro segundo de cabildos de Quito, 2 vols. [Quito: Archivo Municipal, 1934], 2: p. 18).Google Scholar Runaways were a continuing concern, and in January 1551 the cabildo mandated that any runaway slave captured after more than eight days absence would be punished corporally. Women would be given one hundred lashes and men would have their “genital members and testicles cut off.” For simply being found in the native marketplace (tianguez), black men and women were to be given one hundred lashes at the post. For carrying a sword while not in the company of the master, enslaved men were to be given fifty lashes. Most tellingly, the cabildo banned relationships between African men and indigenous women, saying that “it does great harm to the natives that black men lie with (se echen con) Indian women.” It was ordered that any indigenous woman known to have had sexual relations with an African slave be tied to the public pillory, given one hundred lashes, and further humiliated by having her head shorn (la trasquilan); the man would suffer the loss of his genitals (Libro segundo de cabildos de Quito, 2: p. 387). Evidence that such punishments were in fact carried out comes from the governor of the southernmost gold districts, Juan de Salinas Loyola. In 1572 he claimed that Spanish masters controlled their African slaves with lashes, but also punished marronage and other crimes (delitos) with genital mutilation: “The most effective punishment for them, in order to domesticate them, has been to cut off the genital member.” Quoted in Aguirre, Alfonso Anda, Indios y negros bajo el dominio español en Loja (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1993), p. 259.Google Scholar

51 See Marzahl, Peter, Town in the Empire: Government, Politics, and Society in Seventeenth-century Popayán (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 45.Google Scholar Vilar, Enriqueta Vila, in “La sublevación de Portugal y la trata de negros,” Ibero-Amerikanische Archiv, N.F. Jahrgang 2, Heft 3 (1976): pp. 171–92,Google Scholar notes that a mid-seventeenth-century estimate of slave populations in Spanish South America counted only 5,000 slaves in Popayán and some 6,500 in the rest of highland Quito. Slaves were only identified as gold miners in the Popayán case, however, referred to as “negros de batea,” or “black panners” (p. 176). More than 21,000 other “negros de batea” were said to be working in other parts of northern New Granada (mostly Antioquia, it seems) at this time. Quito was said to “consume” 250 slaves per year and Popayán 200. The accuracy of these estimates is not well known due to a lack of census data for comparison, but Vila Vilar suggests they offer a good general guide in terms of scale.

52 Colmenares, Germán, Historia Económica y social de Colombia, 3 vols. (Bogotá: La Carreta, 1979).Google Scholar See also West, Robert C., Colonial Placer Mining in Colombia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952).Google Scholar

53 For a brief description of this scandal see Marzahl, Peter, Town in the Empire, pp. 143–46.Google Scholar

54 ANHQ Religiosos, caja 1, 16-x-1613, f.5 (“de los quales sirven de sacar oro en las dichas minas treynta y tres bateas”). This phenomenon of referring to workers as tools is also noted in the colonial sugar industry of northeastern Brazil. Stuart B. Schwartz mentions the use of the term fouce (scythe) to refer to a male-female cane cutting-and-binding pair; see his “Plantations and Peripheries,” in ed. Bethell, Leslie, Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 77.Google Scholar

55 Marzahl, , Town in the Empire, p. 24,Google Scholar gives production figures for the crown-administered vein gold mines of Chisquío, just west of Popayán, between 1618 and 1631. The Chisquío mines, worked by about twenty-one native Americans held in encomienda, reportedly produced about twenty pesos of gold per week, or 1,040 pesos per year, again a relatively small sum. In terms of individual productivity, the fifty or so pesos per year produced by each indigenous miner at Chisquío was roughly comparable to the approximately forty pesos produced by a slave of the Encarnación cuadrilla. Variations in work schedules, weather, or ore quality (or the honesty of the overseer) could easily account for the difference, but recall that both operations were exceptional in their corporate ownership. The Chisquío mines were owned by the crown and supplied with crown-controlled encomienda labor; the only overhead costs were tools and a food-and-clothing ration for the indigenous workers, and a stipend to the mine administrator.

56 ANHQ Religiosos, caja 1, 16-x-1613, ff.5-6. The censo income was listed as 819 pesos of 20-k gold per year. The market value of the slaves probably exceeded 15,000 20-k gold pesos (estimating 300 pesos per slave).

57 ANHQ Religiosos, caja 1, 16-x-1613, f.5.

58 Some of these slaves may in fact have been part of a 1592 grant from Popayán’s second Bishop ( Marzahl, , Town in the Empire, p. 13),Google Scholar but see, for example, ANHQ Notaria 6:5, 22-viii-1596, f.426v, where Quito apothecary Pero Hernández donated a nine-year-old mulato named Magdalena to serve his daughter, Ynés, professing at the city’s Conceptionist convent.