Enslaving Connections: The Spanish Caribbean and the Río de la Plata, c. 1580–1640

During the Iberian Union (1580-1640), Cartagena de Indias, Veracruz, and Buenos Aires were the three main ports of disembarkation for enslaved Africans in Spanish America. Though the histories of the Spanish Caribbean and the Río de la Plata have traditionally been examined separately, these distant regions shared more than their status as slave ports. Portuguese merchants and mariners made transatlantic slaving voyages to both Caribbean and South Atlantic ports; the same individuals also transshipped Africans from Bahia and Rio de Janeiro to the northern and southern reaches of the Spanish Empire. Many illegal voyages to Spanish America made stopovers in a Brazilian port in order to sell captives, forge documents, or lend credibility to claims that their arrival in a Spanish American port was "accidental." Drawing upon a variety of documentation from Spain's Archive of the Indies, including royal officials' correspondence and investigations of suspected contraband traders, this paper explores the Luso-Atlantic trading networks that linked the Spanish Caribbean and the Río de la Plata. Examining the transatlantic and intra-American trades to these regions challenges separations between the slave trade to "Spanish" and "Portuguese" America and suggests how sixteenth and seventeenth-century Brazil was both a significant destination of enslaved Africans and a contraband emporium.