American Negro Slavery | Page 9

postponed, authorization
was promptly given for a supply of bozal negroes.

[Footnote 12: Las Casas, Historio de las Indias (Madrid, 1875, 1876);
Arthur Helps, Life of Las Casas (London, 1873); Saco, _op. cit_., pp.
62-104.]
The crown here had an opportunity to get large revenues, of which it
was in much need, by letting the slave trade under contract or by
levying taxes upon it. The young king, however, freshly arrived from
the Netherlands with a crowd of Flemish favorites in his train,
proceeded to issue gratuitously a license for the trade to one of the
Flemings at court, Laurent de Gouvenot, known in Spain as Garrevod,
the governor of Breza. This license empowered the grantee and his
assigns to ship from Guinea to the Spanish islands four thousand slaves.
All the historians until recently have placed this grant in the year 1517
and have called it a contract (asiento); but Georges Scelle has now
discovered and printed the document itself which bears the date August
18, 1518, and is clearly a license of grace bearing none of the
distinctive asiento features.[13] Garrevod, who wanted ready cash
rather than a trading privilege, at once divided his license into two and
sold them for 25,000 ducats to certain Genoese merchants domiciled at
Seville, who in turn split them up again and put them on the market
where they became an object of active speculation at rapidly rising
prices. The result was that when slaves finally reached the islands
under Garrevod's grant the prices demanded for them were so
exorbitant that the purposes of the original petitioners were in large
measure defeated. Meanwhile the king, in spite of the nominally
exclusive character of the Garrevod grant, issued various other licenses
on a scale ranging from ten to four hundred slaves each. For a decade
the importations were small, however, and the island clamor increased.
[Footnote 13: Georges Scelle, _Histoire Politique de la Traité Négrière
aux Indes de Castille: Contrats et Traités d'Asíento_ (Paris, 1906), I,
755. Book I, chapter 2 of the same volume is an elaborate discussion of
the Garrevod grant.]
In 1528 a new exclusive grant was issued to two German courtiers at
Seville, Eynger and Sayller, empowering them to carry four thousand
slaves from Guinea to the Indies within the space of the following four

years. This differed from Garrevod's in that it required a payment of
20,000 ducats to the crown and restricted the price at which the slaves
were to be sold in the islands to forty ducats each. In so far it
approached the asientos of the full type which became the regular
recourse of the Spanish government in the following centuries; but it
fell short of the ultimate plan by failing to bind the grantees to the
performance of their undertaking and by failing to specify the grades
and the proportion of the sexes among the slaves to be delivered. In
short the crown's regard was still directed more to the enrichment of
courtiers than to the promotion of prosperity in the islands.
After the expiration of the Eynger and Sayller grant the king left the
control of the slave trade to the regular imperial administrative boards,
which, rejecting all asiento overtures for half a century, maintained a
policy of granting licenses for competitive trade in return for payments
of eight or ten ducats per head until 1560, and of thirty ducats or more
thereafter. At length, after the Spanish annexation of Portugal in 1580,
the government gradually reverted to monopoly grants, now however in
the definite form of asientos, in which by intent at least the authorities
made the public interest, with combined regard to the revenue and a
guaranteed labor supply, the primary consideration.[14] The high prices
charged for slaves, however, together with the burdensome restrictions
constantly maintained upon trade in general, steadily hampered the
growth of Spanish colonial industry. Furthermore the allurements of
Mexico and Peru drained the older colonies of virtually all their more
vigorous white inhabitants, in spite of severe penalties legally imposed
upon emigration but never effectively enforced.
[Footnote 14: Scelle, I, books 1-3.]
The agricultural régime in the islands was accordingly kept relatively
stagnant as long as Spain preserved her full West Indian domination.
The sugar industry, which by 1542 exported the staple to the amount of
110,000 arrobas of twenty-five pounds each, was standardized in
plantations of two types--the trapiche whose cane was ground by ox
power and whose labor force was generally thirty or forty negroes
(each reckoned as capable of the labor of four Indians); and the

_inqenio_, equipped with a water-power mill and employing about a
hundred slaves.[15] Occasional slave revolts disturbed the Spanish
islanders but never for long diminished their eagerness for slave
recruits. The slave laws were relatively mild, the police administration
extremely casual, and