A black Catholic from Brazil argues slavery down in front of the Pope

By the middle of the seventeenth century there were sizeable black Catholic communities in Brazil, Portugal, Angola and the Kongo, some of them organised into their own lay brotherhoods for prayer and mutual aid. A leader of one in Lisbon, Lourenco da Silva, used the title procurator general for a congregation of blacks and mulattos named after Our Lady of the Rosary, and claimed descent from the royal houses of Kongo and Angola. He was probably born in Brazil. In 1684 he got himself to Rome and protested to the Pope against the perpetual enslavement of black Christians and the cruelties inflicted on them. His case joined the Capuchin protests, convinced Propaganda Fide, and produced a broad condemnation of the slave trade from the Holy Office in 1686. It was blocked by the governments of Portugal and Spain and had no effect. The papacy was in a weak position to press it, since popes were still using purchased slaves in their galleys.

Drawn up in France at Colbert's instance and issued by Louis XIV in 1685, the Black Code set out how the official justification for slavery was to be handled. Article two required that every slave in the islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion. Article three forbade the public practice of any other. Gatherings of enslaved people, by day or by night, were outlawed, which was aimed squarely at African rites. The code regulated work, rest and family, and classed human beings as movable property with no rights at all. Of its sixty articles not one calls for any easing of the treatment slaves received. Its clauses on food, rest and religion are all designed to discourage flight and to leave the owner in complete command. An owner could in theory be punished for cruelty, but slaves could not be called as witnesses in any court, civil or criminal, which made the theory useless.

The raiders drove every person of African descent and every Spanish man out to Isla de Sacrificios, an islet off Veracruz where more than four thousand people were crowded with almost no drinking water. On the afternoon of 26 May the buccaneers formed two lines, drew their cutlasses and ordered the captives to strip. The Franciscan Juan de Avila, who watched, wrote that the black and mixed race women were left almost naked and weeping. The raiders then divided the black and mixed race men and women from the Spanish men. Interracial families were broken at that moment, which the friar did not mention. On 29 May a final choice was made and only the young and healthy were put aboard. About five hundred people described as old and sick were abandoned on the islet. On 30 May those left behind watched 1,463 relatives and friends sail away.

A census of Suriname in 1684 counted 4,137 enslaved Africans and creoles of African descent, 81 per cent of the population, along with 144 enslaved Indians. At the height of the English colony in 1663 the comparable proportion had been 55 per cent. The census of 1701 recorded 8,500 enslaved people and roughly a thousand maroons against 700 Europeans. Large sugar estates began pushing out the smaller ones in the middle of the 1680s, the enslaved population doubled again across the 1690s, and coffee added its own demand in the 1720s. By 1752 there were 37,835 enslaved people and they made up 95 per cent of everyone in the colony. The earliest surviving poison trial in the Suriname court records dates from 1731, and from 1735 to 1739 poison accounted for a tenth of all trials. The arithmetic of the plantation and the arithmetic of the poison docket moved together.