Hawkins breaks the Iberian monopoly with quiet crown cover

Across the 1560s John Hawkins ran a string of voyages to the Sierra Leone coast and on to the Spanish settlements of the Caribbean mainland. Spain had reserved the American trade to itself and forbade its colonists to deal with foreigners. The colonists wanted labour, Hawkins had it, and they paid in silver and gold. Spanish officials protested and at times resisted with force, and the ships kept arriving. Hawkins sailed with the quiet approval of the English crown, which risked no money it had to admit to and took a share of what came home. That arrangement, a private merchant carrying the exposure and a state supplying cover and legitimacy, is how northern Europe entered the Atlantic slave trade and how it went on operating for two centuries. England arrived late and arrived with the pattern already worked out. Within eighty years English colonists were growing sugar in Barbados with African labour, and the improvised scheme of a Plymouth captain had become a national industry.

Maize most probably crossed the Atlantic on one of Columbus's return voyages in the 1490s. By the 1560s it was being grown on the west coast of Africa and in the Hunan province of China, places far from the Americas and far from one another. In those same years Spanish friars set up the first wineries of Chile, Peru and California, and people in Mexico who had never seen cattle before the conquest were working ranches that ran to 150,000 head. Communities on the Angola and Congo coastline took up maize in the late sixteenth century faster than espresso moved inland from the two coasts of the United States four hundred years later. There was nothing mysterious in that speed. The grain accounting of that stretch of coast, down to the calories one person needed in a day, made maize the practical crop, so people planted it. Crops, animals and diseases had been crossing oceans for a century before anyone called the traffic new.

The Parlement of Guyenne, the sovereign court sitting at Bordeaux, declared that France, mother of liberty, permits no slaves. It was a statement about soil. Anyone standing on French ground was free by the fact of standing there, and the court said so in language grand enough to be quoted for the next two hundred years. Bordeaux is worth noticing. It became one of the great slaving ports of Europe, fitting out voyages to Africa and taking in the sugar of Saint-Domingue. The maxim survived all of that, because French law drew its line at the water. The principle governed the kingdom, and the colonies were held to be a separate legal world where the Code Noir applied instead. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of what it cost later. Free soil was real enough that enslaved people brought into France sued for their liberty and sometimes won them, and the state hearing those cases was at the same time building the largest slave colony on earth.

Systematic shipping of African captives to Brazil began around 1560, when Portuguese planters in Pernambuco and Bahia had sugar mills running and needed a workforce larger than indigenous labour and warfare could provide. The traffic continued until 1850. About forty-four percent of everyone forced across the Atlantic ended in Brazil, more than all the Caribbean islands together and more than twelve times the number landed in mainland North America. It was also organised differently. Ships were fitted out in Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro instead of Lisbon, financed by Brazilian merchants, and paid for in Brazilian goods, tobacco and sugar brandy that African buyers wanted. A direct commercial relationship ran across the South Atlantic between Brazil and Angola for three centuries with Europe barely involved. That is why the African inheritance in Bahia can be traced to particular regions with unusual precision, and why Candomble and Haitian Vodou share structures without either having borrowed from the other.