Counting the Captives: Slave Licenses and Slave Voyages to Spanish America in the 16th Century
Counting the Captives: Slave Licenses and Slave Voyages to Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century
Before 1595, when the Spanish crown granted Portuguese merchants monopoly rights to import African slaves to Spanish America, the transportation of slaves was controlled through a system of royal “licenses.” One “license” corresponded to one captive, at least in theory, but not all licenses granted were used, while merchants imported many unlicensed captives. Royal oversight of the slave trade functioned in terms of licenses, but tracking their numbers does not fully capture the myriad ways that enslaved Africans were brought to Spain’s overseas colonies during the sixteenth century. For example, in early years, when many slaves were transported from Iberia, crown officials conceded exclusive grants of 4,000 licenses for set periods, but by the mid-1520s many Spanish emigrants were also taking advantage of the right they had gained to use two slave licenses per household. By the 1570s, African captives were much more often taken directly from African territories in dedicated slave ships using blocks of 50 to 300 slave licenses. Throughout the entire period, as royal policy on slave imports evolved, slave merchants and buyers in the Americas also sought ways to gain maximum advantage from the rights provided by licenses, or to evade royal oversight and royal imposts entirely. This paper explores the relationship between these royal licenses and slave voyages to Spanish America up to the 1570s, in an effort to reconcile the ways that the Spanish crown conceived of and counted slave imports with the actual movements of African captives during the sixteenth century.