ABSTRACT
In spite of centuries of whitewash and legendizing, Francis Drake and the Hawkinses first entered the Caribbean as slave traders. How this unsavory business came to develop, not to mention its largely unpredicted consequences, is a story worth recounting. Still, we must not forget that the Portuguese had been capturing sub-Saharan African peoples and transporting them to the European and East Atlantic Island markets for over a century by the time Elizabeth I acceded to the throne of England. With the development of sugar and gold mining operations in the Caribbean, first staffed by indigenous laborers but soon demanding new inputs from abroad, the Portuguese began to trade slaves to their Spanish neighbors. This was legally accomplished only through the merchant guild of Seville (the Consulado), but some wily traders skipped this long and expensive detour and began to trade directly with the colonists of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Tierra Firme. The trade in human beings, whether taken by force or barter from the African coast, was as profitable as it was barbaric--only the gold trade yielded higher returns. And while Spanish moralists such as Bartolome de las Casas argued vehemently and effectively against the enslavement of Native Americans in the early sixteenth century, no one----not the Spanish, the French, the English, and least of all the Portuguese---questioned the morality of enslaving Africans, branding them like cattle, and transporting them to plantations and mines. Rather than condemn the trade for what it was, a bold rejection of the most fundamental of Christian teachings, Protestant or Catholic, religious scholars instead mined the scriptures for evidence of God's approval.
