Abstract
Despite a wealth of scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade produced over the past two decades – notably including the project Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database – advances in the field have thus far bypassed most of the sixteenth century. Yet historians of the Cape Verde Islands have long held that the first full-fledged slaving voyages from Africa to the Americas must have taken place as early as the mid-1510s, with captives transported directly to newly-founded Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. Calling further attention to Iberian slave trafficking in the Cape Verde Islands and along the Upper Guinea coast during this pivotal era, Trevor Hall’s Before Middle Passage provides English-language translations of customs accounts compiled by royal officials based on the Cape Verdean island of Santiago from 1513 to 1516, and the logbook of a slave ship that set out from Lisbon in 1526.
Annotated transcriptions of each of these sixteenth-century Portuguese manuscripts have previously been published, but very few of the original documents have been translated into English before. The book’s first six chapters reproduce Cape Verdean customs records. Chapter 1 contains information on ships leaving and entering the port of Ribeira Grande, on the island of Santiago de Cabo Verde, in 1513 and 1514. Chapters 2 through 5 list vessels arriving in the Cape Verde Islands between 1514 and early 1516, bringing captives and commodities such as ivory and rice from the West African mainland. Chapter 6 is an account of taxes paid to Cape Verdean officials by merchants and shipmasters traveling to or from ports in Europe and the Canary Islands between 1513 and 1515. Supplementing the previous chapters, Chapter 7 is the logbook of a slaving voyage that sailed from Lisbon to Sierra Leone and back in 1526, with stops along the way in the Cape Verde Islands, São Domingos (off the Cacheu River), and the island of Terceira, in the Azores. The logbook includes instructions issued to the ship’s scribe and captain prior to departure from Lisbon, and a list of trade goods to be exchanged for captives. This translation is both more literal and more complete than an earlier partial translation of the same logbook by P. E. H. Hair, published in the Africana Research Bulletin in 1977, which Hall does not appear to have consulted.
Although the book’s introduction, footnotes, and chapter prefaces are primarily addressed to a general readership, they highlight topics that should fascinate anyone interested in the social history of the Cape Verde Islands during the first decades of the sixteenth century. Hall is particularly attentive to the presence and agency of mariners, traders, and townspeople of African descent. As the sources presented here make clear, both men and women described as ‘black’ regularly participated in local and regional commercial networks that sometimes included slave trafficking. Even enslaved individuals could be found traveling from the Cape Verde Islands to the Upper Guinean mainland and back, procuring captives on behalf of their owners (pp. 63, 67). Hall’s hypothesis that Portugal and Spain could not fully control their overseas territories is not fully born out here (four years’ worth of customs records are perhaps not the best evidence for making this claim). But his argument regarding the prevalence of endemic, unauthorized trade between the Atlantic Islands, Upper Guinea, and the Caribbean is prescient (pp. 5–6), fitting comfortably within a growing scholarly consensus that essentially views mercantilism as a metropolitan fantasy. The Iberian imperial spheres are increasingly found to have been less rigid, and more porous, than institutional histories and royal biographies might lead one to expect.
Before Middle Passage also provides instructive examples of interpretative issues that arise when working with 500-year-old Iberian sources. How to deal with archaic or non-standardized capitalization and punctuation, words that are spelled in multiple forms, or abbreviations that can justifiably be translated in more than one way? As Hall notes, historical dictionaries are an invaluable resource for finding the meanings of unfamiliar terms. Yet some words remain open to historical interpretation regardless. For example, the ethnic and racial identities ascribed to individuals listed in late medieval and early modern Iberian sources do not always correspond well to modern national identities. Some Portuguese may have ‘despised’ Castilians (p. 4), but the differences separating ‘Portuguese’ from ‘Spanish’ people may not have been so clear cut during the early sixteenth century. Indeed, Chapter 6 reveals a surprising number of Spanish or Castilian ships sailing to and from the Cape Verde Islands, as well as Spanish merchants traveling on Portuguese vessels and vice versa. Likewise, while the racial term mulato is often assumed to have originated from the word for ‘mule’ (p. 77), some historians propose as an alternate etymology the Iberian term muladí, derived from the Arabic muwallad: a person of mixed or partially-foreign origins raised within the predominant culture. The degree to which surnames such as ‘de Évora’ (p. 81) and ‘Alemão’ (p. 101) might reliably indicate a person’s place of origin is also open to question. Few if any Hispanists would agree that the surname ‘Moscoco’ signified that someone was from ‘Moscow, in Russia’ (p. 219).
Hall’s analytical interventions engage rather lightly with the historiographies of the Cape Verde Islands and Upper Guinea Coast. While this approach may enhance the book’s accessibility to a broader audience, readers familiar with African history will find some of the editorial commentary to be dated or inaccurate. Colonial-era anthropological classifications such as ‘animist’ and ‘ancestor worshipper’ have fallen out of use among historians of Africa. Cultural practices, social relations, and political loyalties are now understood to have often been fluid and complex; such nuances tend to be downplayed or obscured by analysis that relies on conceptual categories such as ‘Portuguese’ and ‘Cape Verde colonists’ in opposition to ‘West Africans’. Although ‘São Domingos / Cacheu’ is regularly depicted here as a single ‘European settlement’ (p. 36) or ‘Portuguese settlement’ (p. 121) on the Upper Guinea coast, these were two different places, neither of which was subject to European rule during the sixteenth century. The Bañun town of Buguendo was located north of the Cacheu River, on a tidal creek known as the Rio de São Domingos. A Portuguese trading post there – which for at least part of its existence appears to have existed mainly on the deck of a ship – was also known as São Domingos. Iberian sources sometimes used the term ‘River of São Domingos’ as shorthand for the whole Cacheu River area. The port of Cacheu itself was a Brame town situated on the Cacheu River’s southern bank. Cacheu and Buguendo were likely important hubs for regional commerce long before the arrival of Iberians. During the period under study, the presence of European merchants, missionaries, and officials was fairly limited in both sites, and largely depended on maintaining the goodwill of their Brame and Bañun hosts.
In sum, although specialists in the histories of precolonial Africa and the early modern Iberian world will find some flaws, Before Middle Passage constitutes a significant scholarly contribution that will be especially welcomed by readers interested in the early formations of the transatlantic slave trade. These translations retain much of the flavor of the sixteenth-century Portuguese texts, providing insight into the writing styles, issues of interpretation, and types of information that can be gleaned from historical materials of the era. Hall is to be commended for making these important primary sources accessible to a broader public.