Ejercicio y alimentación en la prevención del riesgo cardiovascular

In early November 1727, Captain Charles Burnham looked out from the top of the quarterdeck and saw several canoes paddling towards the Saint Michael. The lack of permanent trading factories in western Madagascar meant that asiento ships relied on local Malagasy mariners to locate safe anchorage. Burnham hoped to see Prince William, a provincial governor appointed by King Ramoni who played an important role in the formation of the Sakalava Kingdom in the early eighteenth century. The Sakalava

warrior-kings specialized in slave raiding and were an outgrowth of the growing demand for labor in European plantation-colonies. Much of the western coast of the island and beyond was controlled by the Sakalava.1 Burnham purchased Malagasy captives from

1 _{The surgeon on board the Saint Michael wrote that Morondava was “in the dominion of Ramoni King of}

Succulava. He is one of the most powerful kings upon the island. He has a great body of people under his subjection who possess a large part of this island. I could not get any exact account of the extent of his dominions but according to the best conjecture which I can make they are extended along the seashore from latitude 18° South to 22° South and across the island more than half way to the east side.” Journal of Saint Michael, 2 February 1727, HC 363/1299, Hispanic Society of America (HSA), New York. Typically identified as a ‘Journal and logbook of an anonymous Scottish sailor, 1725-1729’ the title of the manuscript belies its true value and content. Consisting of 182 folios in a neat and legible script, the manuscript is an especially rare manuscript as it is the only known journal of its type documenting the day-to-day slaving operations of an English asiento ship’s voyage. To date, no historian has interrogated its content or placed the voyage of the Saint Michael within the context of the South Sea Company’s trade to Spanish America or the operation of the transatlantic slave as I have done in this chapter.

Prince William and King Ramoni a decade earlier and hoped to renew their friendship on this occasion.

Prince William was not on one of the boats, but he greeted Burnham as he came ashore. As the longboat approached the beach, the unmistakable ruins of a ship rose from the sand like a wooden skeleton. Less than a year had passed since Malagasy slaves had risen up against the French crew of the Vautour, killing the majority of the sailors, running the ship aground and escaping into the interior. The French suspected that Prince William had intentionally incited the slaves to rebel. The shipwreck was a clear symbol of the vulnerability of overseas trade and of Malagasy rebelliousness. Prince William and Burnham quickly got down to business, and in a short time several hundred slaves were aboard the Saint Michael. One of the Sakalava men Burnham purchased had previously aided in a successful rebellion on the Vautour only to be recaptured and sold again. That same nameless Malagasy man would also become one of the ringleaders in a shipboard rebellion on the Saint Michael when it left several months later.2 Madagascar was capable of meeting demands of European slave ships but with certain inherent risks that made the island attractive and unappealing at the same time.3

The Saint Michael was chartered by the South Sea Company (SSC) in 1726 to carry slaves to Buenos Aires as the holder of the Spanish asiento contract. Granted to the company in 1713, the SSC played an important role in the economic development of 2 _{This scenario is drawn largely from the Journal of the Saint Michael located in the archives of the}

Hispanic Society of America. The location of the HSA in Harlem, considered by some as inconvenient, as well as its status as a museum has caused many to overlook the rich materials there dealing with the slave trade to Spanish America. The following secondary sources were also consulted. Arne Bialuschewski, “Anatomy of a Slave Insurrection: The Shipwreck of the Vautour on the West Coast of Madagascar in 1725,” French Colonial History 12, no. 1 (2011): 87–101; Stephen Ellis, “The History of Sovereigns in Madagascar: New Light from Old Sources,” in Didier Nativel and Faranirina V. Rajaonah, eds., Madagascar Revisitée En Voyage Avec Françoise Raison-Jourde (Paris: Karthala, 2009), 405-433.

3 _{For the surgeon’s account of the shipboard rebellion that took place on 15 February 1727 and the brutal}

torture afterwards see Appendix 1 - Shipboard Uprising at Madagascar.

136

Spanish America. Historians have approached the asiento and the SSC with various methodologies that have contributed to several entangled historiographies. Early economic studies gravitated towards the extent of illicit commerce carried on by the company.4 With the resumption of hostilities between Spain and England in the 1740s, scholars have considered the various factors that brought the trade to a halt.5 Over the last two decades, historians have considered the asiento and its relationship to international law, diplomacy and modern business methods.6 Recent studies have shifted the analysis back to the Caribbean to focus on the relationships that formed out of the frequent trade between Spanish and English subjects. In addition, scholars have examined the

relationship between the asiento and popular perceptions of the slave trade to Britain’s imperial projects in the Caribbean and beyond.7

Most economic studies of the SSC emphasize the infamous 1720 South Sea Bubble, when the company’s stock skyrocketed as a result of speculative future profits

4 _{Arthur S. Aiton, “The Asiento Treaty as Reflected in the Papers of Lord Shelburne,” The Hispanic}

American Historical Review 8, no. 2 (1928): 167–77; Vera Lee Brown, “The South Sea Company and Contraband Trade,” The American Historical Review 31, no. 4 (1926): 662–78; Curtis Nettels, “England and the Spanish-American Trade, 1680-1715,” The Journal of Modern History 3, no. 1 (1931): 1–32; George H. Nelson, “Contraband Trade under the Asiento, 1730-1739,” The American Historical Review 51, no. 1 (1945): 55–67; G. Scelle, “The Slave-Trade in the Spanish Colonies of America: The Assiento,” The American Journal of International Law 4, no. 3 (1910): 612–61; Lilian E. M. Batcheler, “The South Sea Company and the Assiento,” Historical Research 3, no. 8 (1925): 128–30; Harry Reibman, “Private Profits and the South Sea Company: Illicit Trafficking Under the Asiento,” Michigan Journal of History 9 (2012): 1–30.

5 _{Ernest G. Hildner Jr., “The Role of the South Sea Company in the Diplomacy Leading to the War of}

Jenkins’ Ear, 1729-1739,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 18, no. 3 (1938): 322–41; Nadine Hunt, “Contraband, Free Ports, and British Merchants in the Caribbean World, 1739-1772,” Diacronie. Studi Di Storia Contemporanea 13, no. 1 (2013).

6 _{Rafael Donoso, “Accounting and Slavery: The Accounts of the English South Sea Company, 1713-22,”}

European Accounting Review 11, no. 2 (2002): 441–52; Salvador Carmosa, Rafael Donoso, and Stephen P. Walker, “Accounting and International Relations: Britain, Spain and the Asiento Treaty,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 35, no. 2 (2010): 252–73; Andrea Weindl, “The Asiento de Negros and International Law,” Journal of the History of International Law 10, no. 2 (2008): 229–57.

7 _{Adrian Finucane, The Temptations of Trade Britain, Spain and the Struggle for Empire (Philadelphia:}

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

137

and suddenly collapsed with devastating effects on Britain’s imperial economy.8 As a result, some historians have downplayed the role of the slave trade to Spanish America and the company’s relationship with Africa.9 Prior to Philip Curtin’s groundbreaking census of the slave trade in 1969 and the explosion of scholarship on the African

Diaspora that resulted from it, Elizabeth Donnan made pioneering contributions towards our understanding of the organization of the transatlantic slave trade.10 Colin Palmer’s work on the British asiento trade to Spanish America is perhaps the most important to date, not only for its clarity and depth of analysis, but also because it was the first to integrate Spanish colonial sources with the records of the South Sea Company.11 More recently, Gregory O’Malley’s work on the intercolonial slave trade in the circum-

Caribbean has taken great strides in dissecting the operation of the asiento from Jamaica to Spanish American markets.12

8

Around the same time as the stock market crash in 1720, the directors of the South Sea Company made proposals to the Lords Proprietors to purchase the colony of South Carolina. Only a minority of the proprietors were interested in selling their shares so a deal was not struck. Colonial Office (CO) 5/383, f. 86-88, Kew, BNA.

9

John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (London: Cresset Press, 1960); Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Helen J. Paul, The South Sea Bubble an Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2011). For a work that analyzes the two great early modern financial fiascos in tandem see, Larry Neal, “I Am Not Master of Events”: The Speculations of John Law and Lord Londonderry in the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

10 _{Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade; A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969);}

Elizabeth Donnan, “The Early Days of the South Sea Company, 1711- 1718,” Journal of Economic and Business History 2 (1929): 419–50. Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America: 4 volumes (Washington, D.C: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930-1935). Although published in the same year, Platt's analysis was not included in Curtin's analysis and thus predates it. Virginia Bever Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1969): 548–77. An important work on the slave trade to Buenos Aires and the asiento based on Spanish sources, Elena Scheuss de Studer, La Trata De Negros En Río De La Plata Durante El Siglo Xviii (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Departamento Editorial, 1958).

11 _{Colin A. Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700-1739 (Urbana:}

University of Illinois Press, 1981).

12 _{Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807}

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

In general, historians’ detailed studies on the asiento trade to Jamaica and the Spanish Caribbean have neglected other geographic areas. In doing so, scholars have overlooked how the slave trade operated to Buenos Aires, the second most important market for asiento ships from 1715 to 1739. This chapter provides a much needed intervention into this largely discounted aspect of Britain’s slave trade to Spanish America. Moreover, this chapter shows how the asiento operated to Buenos Aires, the only Spanish American market to receive shipments of captive Africans directly from West and East Africa. Furthermore, few scholars have analyzed the political and social dynamics of the African side of the asiento trade. This chapter considers the rise of the Sakalava Kingdom in Madagascar and its impact on the asiento trade to that island and the ways in which Malagasy captives influenced outcomes of the slave trade. Moreover, some historians, such as John Sperling and Abigail Swingen, blame the company’s failure to fulfill the terms of the asiento trade on its poor functioning relationship with the Royal African Company (RAC).13 Regrettably, what this conclusion fails to consider is the African side of the trade, and the role West African elites had in influencing the flow of captives to the coast. To understand the operation of the asiento trade to Spanish America we must factor in the African side of the trade where the politics of power, war, violence and greed directly impacted the flow of captives to the coast.

This chapter builds on and departs from these works in several important ways. It integrates the official records of the SSC, the private papers of Lord Shelburne, the personal papers of London merchant Thomas Hall, and underutilized first-hand accounts of the slave trade in Madagascar and the Loango Coast in West Central Africa to provide 13 _{Swingen argues that the South Sea Company’s failure to “fulfill the terms of the asiento during its early}

years was a testament to the inability of the two companies to operate efficiently.” Swingen, Competing Visions, 195.

a more nuanced account of the operation of the asiento trade, from the top, while paying careful attention to the lived experience of the slaves, from the bottom. Several important questions guide the organization of this chapter. First, what was the nature of the slave trade in West Africa in the 1710s when the SSC received the asiento contract? How did the structure of Malagasy society and political culture impact the operation of the slave trade? How did the organization of the slave trade guide and inhibit the company’s access to captive Africans? What strategies did the SSC use to acquire slaves for Spanish

American markets and how did these strategies change over time?

This chapter argues that the SSC looked to Madagascar as a practical alternative for captives because of its limited access to West African labor supply centers. The RAC’s monopoly in West Africa meant that the SSC had to contract with the RAC for slaves. The Madagascar strategy was informed by the perception that the island was a more accessible, less competitive market where slaves could be purchased cheaply. The attempt to exploit Indian Ocean labor markets and connect them with plantation zones of the Americas was a calculated, yet risky, maneuver with potentially high financial rewards for the company. The South Sea Company explored the viability of the Madagascar market in two periods, from 1717 to 1719 and 1727 to 1730. The latter period is significant because from 1724 to 1732, Dutch traders, the second most active European carrier of slaves from Madagascar over that period, abandoned the island market to concentrate on revitalizing a factory on the Mozambique coast.14 This chapter argues that the company’s strategy was unsuccessful because of the political structure of Malagasy society, the cultural characteristics of the Malagasy people, the limited supply

14 _{James C. Armstrong, “The Slaves, 1652-1795,” in Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, eds., The}

Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820 (Cape Town: Longman, 1979), 78.

140

of the Madagascar market, and the human limitations of captive Malagasy for surviving the long voyage to Buenos Aires.

In 1730 the Madagascar strategy was abandoned all together and no asiento ship returned to the island. The company unofficially handed the asiento trade to Buenos Aires over to Thomas Hall, who was not a company employee but a wealthy London merchant specializing in the East Indies trade. At the same time, a new market, the Loango Coast, became the primary site for purchasing captives carried to Buenos Aires.15 Neither the asiento trade nor British ships were strangers to the Loango Coast. In the early 1720s, the RAC attempted to expand its operations on the Loango Coast by establishing a permanent factory at Cabinda to supply slaves to asiento ships. Over the long-term, the Loango Coast was a more accessible and reliable market for purchasing large numbers of captive Africans. This chapter charts the rise and fall of the asiento trade in Southeast Africa with the eventual return to Loango in West Central Africa.

Buenos Aires was one of the most important destinations for captive Africans in Spanish America.16 Recent studies on the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish America have thrown new light on the scope and volume of the commerce. These important works provide valuable context for the British asiento to Buenos Aires and other Spanish

Caribbean ports.17 Moreover, they have set the benchmark for future studies by emphasizing the necessity of foregrounding Africans and the African side of the slave

15 _{The Loango Coast refers to the coast regions between the Gabon and Congo River.}

16 _{On Buenos Aires as a critical terminal for early Spanish slave voyages see, Kara D. Schultz, “‘The}

Kingdom of Angola Is Not Very Far from Here’: The South Atlantic Slave Port of Buenos Aires, 1585– 1640,” Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 3 (2015): 424–44.

17 _{Tatiana Seijas and Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the Slave Market in Seventeenth-}

Century Central Mexico,” Slavery & Abolition 37, no. 2 (2016): 307–33.

trade.18 By engaging with these works, this chapter contributes to our understanding of the slave trade to Spanish America. Much of the literature focuses on the ports of

Cartagena and Vera Cruz, the two largest markets for captives over the long history of the slave trade.19 However, this was not the case during the years of the British asiento trade. Panama and Porto Bello and Buenos Aires received the largest volume of slaves from asiento ships because both markets were the chokepoints for the export of Peruvian excavated silver from Spanish America.20 Geographically, these markets were the closest British traders could come to Potosí. By focusing their activities on Panama and Porto Bello and Buenos Aires, British asiento agents engaged directly with the traders carrying the bullion from the Pacific. Potosi silver not only tied together markets across Spanish America, but was also the driving force behind the early modern Atlantic economy.21

Madagascar was critical to this equation because company officials believed they could purchase more slaves and cheaper at the island than in West Africa. Buenos Aires was the only Spanish American market to receive slaves directly from Africa. Asiento ships disembarking captives in Spanish Caribbean markets collected slaves at bulking centers on the islands of Barbados and Jamaica. The asiento ships arriving at Buenos Aires were nearly 50 percent larger than those that carried captives to the British and

18 _{David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North}

Carolina Press, 2016).

19 _{Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica y el Comercio De Esclavos (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-}

Americanos, 1977); Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Patrick James Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Alejandro de la Fuente, César García del Pino, and Bernardo Iglesias Delgado, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

20 _{Panama and Port Bello were essentially one factory. No asiento ship disembarked captives at Panama on}

the Pacific.

21 _{In the 1640s, the Buenos Aires silver trade attracted Portuguese slave ships from Angola. António}

Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana. Africa Ocidental (Lisboa: Divisão de Publicações e Biblioteca, 1952), vol. 10: 359; Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (2015), 456.

142

Spanish Caribbean.22 As a result, these vessels not only carried more captives but much larger cargoes to trade with Spanish customers at Buenos Aires. The Spanish port’s reputation as the capital of the contraband trade governed by notoriously corrupt officials made it easier for British ship captains and company factors to unload the large cargoes carried to Buenos Aires. Illicit commerce was the driving force that fueled the economy