Layered Archipelagos: Portuguese Island Networks, Curaçao, and the Atlantic Slave Trade

In the fall of 1661, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) organized a convoy of five ships from Amsterdam to the “coasts of Guinea” and the island of Annobón to purchase African captives for redistribution through Curaçao to Spanish America. Although formally sailing under WIC auspices, the voyage was financed through bottomry loans rather than Company capital, revealing a broader investment network embedded within Atlantic island circuits.

The investors complicate any straightforward classification of the expedition as simply “Dutch.” The majority were Dutch merchants, municipal officials, and ship captains, among them four women. There also were a visible minority of Portuguese and Spanish merchants, all Jewish of New Christian descent, who together accounted for 12.7 percent of the capital. Rather than representing a distinct “Jewish” bloc, these investors represented older Portuguese trade associations whose members (both Jewish and Catholic) had long-standing ties to Atlantic islands including São Tomé, Cape Verde, Madeira, the Canary Islands, and the Azores, as well as newer ties to the WIC’s Caribbean headquarters in Curaçao.

This paper argues that Curaçao’s emergence as a slave-trading entrepôt depended not only on WIC corporate initiative but on the incorporation of pre-1640 Portuguese island networks into Dutch financial and logistical frameworks. Islands functioned as durable commercial infrastructures as sites of credit exchange, brokerage, and stopovers for the transshipment of people and goods. Imperial conquests did not erase these island infrastructures; rather, new regimes relied upon them to navigate and integrate preexisting political economies. Situating Curaçao within this layered archipelago reveals how the seventeenth-century Caribbean political economy was structured by overlapping merchant ecologies that superseded imperial boundaries and depended on long-standing interregional networks.