Commentary No. 071
- transcription
- translation
- commentary
Date: 1492
Theme: Young Black man Juan Portugués (“John The Portuguese”) arrives in La Española with Christopher Columbus in his first trip to the Americas. The information is contained in a statement given by Juan Portugués in 1516 at Santa María del Darién (today’s Colombia)
Source: ‘Probanza del Fiscal, Santa María de la Antigua, 30 de octubre de 1515,’ in Pleitos Colombinos. IV- Probanzas del Fiscal (1512-1515), Ed. by Antonio Muro Orejón. Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1989, p. 287-308.
There is archival evidence that people of African ancestry were involved in the early modern European-led crossings of the Atlantic since their earliest beginnings. The most concrete case shown in the existing historical record is that of ‘Juan Portugués, negro,’ a free Black man who traveled with Columbus as a sailor in the 1492 trip that arrived in the Americas.
The scholarly news about Juan Portugués was first released in 1984 by Spanish linguist and historian Juan Gil. Gil found at the General Archives of the Indies of Seville the proceedings of a 1515 judicial inquiry launched by the Spanish crown that include the village of Santa María de la Antigua del Darién (on the Caribbean coast of today’s northern Colombia). This inquiry was related to claims by Christopher Columbus’ offspring of their inherited privileges in the Americas. The proceedings include a deposition of 1516 by a ‘Juan Portugués, negro’, then a mature man, referring to events occurred more than twenty years before involving Columbus himself. In responding to the questions by the prosecutor, Juan described a frequent and close interaction with Columbus in the late years of the fifteenth century, initially as a sailor and then as a servant or employee. He described his participation in the 1492 trip, and possibly in the ‘second’ trip of 1493 as well.
Juan Portugués stayed in La Española on different occasions, returned to Spain and was associated with Columbus in the early years of the decade of 1500, and then went back to the Caribbean in the ensuing years. By 1516, the year for which there is the latest documented data about him, he had sailed throughout the region and had met many of the captains and explorers that would later become famous and would go into the history books for their first encounters with peoples and places of the area during those same years.
Besides the insider-type of information provided by Portugués in the deposition, it may be argued that his calling by the Spanish authorities to testify, in their efforts to substantiate data about Columbus past acts in the region, and as part of a dispute between the Crown and Columbus’ descendants where there were important economic interests involved, is a clear indication that the Crown considered Portugués’ testimony trustworthy.
Juan Portugués is understood to be the same Juan Prieto or Juan Moreno that as a younger man worked as Columbus’s servant in La Española around 1500. (Document No. 003) He probably never suspected that his telling of what he knew about the actions of Columbus since his arrival in the Americas would in turn become, five hundred years later, a key evidence of the participation of Black people in those world-transforming and complex events.