A sale ledger in Dutch Brazil prices captives ten at a time

On the last day of 1640 a public sale in Dutch Brazil was written up line by line. The captives had arrived on the Wapen van Delf and had been taken at Guinea, at Ardra on the Slave Coast and at Calabar in the Niger delta. The clerk recorded who bought what. Gaspar Dias Ferreira took several lots of ten people, paying between 161 and 205 patacas a head. Moses Netto, Simon van der Neese and Jacob Aboaff appear as purchasers alongside him. Some lots ran past five thousand guilders. The document survives because the Dutch West India Company kept proper accounts, and it is worth more than a hundred pages of description: it names the buyers, fixes the prices, and shows a market in northeastern Brazil where Dutch and Sephardic merchants dealt in human beings by the batch of ten. Not one of the people sold that day is named. The ledger preserves the side of the transaction that somebody expected to need later.

In 1641 French buccaneers based on Tortuga, the small island off the north coast of Hispaniola, began settling on the mainland opposite. Nothing about it was official. They were men who hunted the wild cattle and pigs that had bred out of control since the Spanish herds were abandoned, cured the meat, sold hides, and took ships when the chance came. Spain had drawn its population into the east of the island decades earlier and left the west empty, and an empty coast attracts exactly this kind of settlement. What the buccaneers created was a fact on the ground. France had claimed nothing and administered nothing, yet Frenchmen were living, working and defending themselves on Hispaniola, and by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 Spain conceded the western third to France. Saint-Domingue begins here, and Haiti after it. The richest colony in the Atlantic world grew out of a camp of armed squatters that no government had sent.

A Dutch fleet sent from Brazil captured Luanda in August 1641 and held it for seven years. Nzinga, who had gone to Luanda in person in 1623 to offer peace and trade and had been fighting the Portuguese since, suddenly had a powerful and unexpected ally. In Kongo, Garcia II came to the throne the same year, and his reign to 1661 was the last stretch of effective Kongo unity. In 1645, while Portugal was tied up in war with Spain and Angola was under Dutch occupation, the first Capuchin mission slipped into Kongo over Portuguese objections. In 1648 Salvador Correia de Sa was sent from Brazil to drive the Dutch out, and the Portuguese came back to Luanda intent on subduing the kingdom that had backed their enemies. Nzinga did not negotiate again until 1656. By her death in 1663 Matamba had become a major broker in the slave trade.

The French and English driven out of Saint Kitts settled on Tortuga, taking it off the small Spanish garrison holding it. A contemporary called them smoked out hornets, which is close to accurate. What they built had no chief and no formal articles beyond the agreements men made with one another case by case, and an early writer described them as amphibious, since they lived half on land and half at sea. They hunted the wild cattle of northern Hispaniola and cured the meat on wooden frames over slow fires, a method taken from the indigenous people of the islands. The French word for the frame produced boucanier, which English turned into buccaneer, and the same practice gave every language the word barbecue. They called themselves the Brethren of the Coast. By 1667 their way of life had been written down by the first historians of the Antilles, so a stateless community of hunters and sea raiders was described in print while it was still going.