Commentary No. 057
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Date: 1594, October 21 [Santo Domingo, La Española]
Theme: Testimony about the smuggling of Black slaves near Bayajá, village on the Banda del Norte, in La Española
Source: Archivo General de Indias,Escribanía de Cámara 17-A. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Dominican Colonial Documents Collection
Increasingly from the mid-sixteenth-century onwards, with La Española’s alluvial gold mines exhausted and a very small indigenous population available to be cheaply subjected to forced labor, the settlers resorted to importing enslaved Africans as labor force for a cane-sugar and cow-hides exporting business to European markets. But the Crown’s monopolistic policies that restricted the ports in Spain that could send and receive ships to and/or from La Española forced its inhabitants to buy the items they needed and sell the commodities they produced without the benefits of the competing prices of an open transoceanic market.
The above was compounded by the Crown’s decisions to focus security on the shipping routes connecting with other richer ports and regions of the Spanish Americas, further discouraging and reducing the numbers of Spanish merchant ships interested in visiting La Española. Exporting to and importing from Spain in accordance to the imposed monopoly became less and less feasible to the local population. And all this, together with a stronger attraction by the richer and more promising areas of the empire upon new Iberian settlers willing venture into crossing the Ocean, also translated into a stagnation of the Spanish population of the colony.
This scenario soon led a majority of La Española’s mostly rural and mostly Black and mulatto, society to engage in widespread contraband with non-Spanish merchant ships, even enemies of Spain, for decades. The types of commodities they could only get rarely and at high prices from their metropolitan fellow empire subjects, they began getting from foreigners in what amounted to a broad and active illegal maritime free trade. At the same time, these settlers could in exchange pay these foreigners with the local staple productions of cane-sugar, hides, lard and other items that these non-Spaniards were eager to buy, in an offer-and-demand setting less economically asphyxiating than the Spanish imperial monopoly.
Since the contraband became rampant throughout the rather marginalized colony, the colonial local authorities of Santo Domingo City tried, or pretended to try, to persecute and suppress it, sending every now and then military or police detachments or deployments from the capital town to investigate or apprehend the often physically remote violators of the imperial monopoly’s laws. They would interrogate the inhabitants as witnesses in places like the village of Bayajá on the north central Atlantic coast, and hundreds of judicial testimonies were thus generated that have survived in the colonial archives.
The depositions would mention names of settlers practicing the smuggling, their foreign counterparts (French, British, Dutch, Portuguese) that they interacted with, the commodities traded and the quantities and sometimes the prices, as well the coastal locations where the encounters took place. Among the traded items were frequently enslaved Black Africans, and through the depositions we learn about their names and given African ethnonyms, their gender, approximate age, as well as the prices they were bought for and who bought them.