The Cloth-Wine Context

David Ricardo (1772-1823), in his musings on the benefits of free trade, used the relationship between Portugal and Britain to demonstrate the principle of comparative advantage. In the early modern era, Portugal could potentially produce enough fabric to clothe its own people, but since it could produce wine comparatively cheaply, the Portuguese would benefit more by specializing in and exporting wine, and using the proceeds to buy English cloth. More people could obtain more cloth in this way, Ricardo argued, than by relying on home production; the British, in turn, would gain access to a lake of cheap Iberian wine.

David Ricardo (I think)

 

The economist Cahal Moran recently demonstrated that Ricardo's observation was grossly incomplete and ahistorical. Cloth, a necessity, was much more valuable in the aggregate than wine (a luxury), and a nation that exclusively traded the latter for the former would eventually run a trade deficit and lose hard currency. This was, in fact, the purpose of the 1703 Treaty of Methuen, which lowered Portuguese import tariffs in return for British naval protection. Portugal had an abundance of specie to cover the deficit: in 1693 prospectors had discovered gold in the southern interior of Brazil. The ensuing gold rush eventually drew several hundred thousand peninsulares from Portugal to Brazil, and accelerated the forced transport of enslaved Africans to South America. It also offered an irresistible temptation to stronger nations - either to steal Brazilian gold through smuggling and piracy, or to extract precious metals from the Portuguese through uneven trade agreements, backed by military force.

Britain didn’t need to push Portugal that hard. The two nations were already bound by dynastic ties: the reigning British monarch’s step-aunt was Catherine of Braganza, regent of Portugal. And, in return for its colonial wealth, Portugal obtained from Old Albion much that the ruling classes wanted and that ordinary people needed. In October 1710, T. LeFevre informed the Earl of Dartmouth that the Brazilian fleet had just arrived in Lisbon, bearing gold bullion, tobacco, and sugar to the value of 1.8 million pounds sterling - about 270 million GBP (US$345 million) in today’s currency. All of this, wrote LeFevre, already belonged to British merchants who had sold on credit “all the dyed cloth” and 75 percent of the wheat consumed in the port city and its dependencies. Portugal’s elite thus obtained, admittedly at a high price, the luxuries they wanted (fine textiles and American beaver hats), and the necessities their depopulating country found harder to produce, and not least important, the British naval protection their overloaded merchant fleets required.

Some of the gold, at least, went for architecture.

British merchants, meanwhile, grew wealthier. There was usually a good market for tobacco and sugar in Britain, and there was always a market for gold. The latter often never even touched Portugal’s shores, instead sailing east with a British convoy and transshipping in Lisbon harbor to English merchantmen. There is a name for commerce built on stolen labor, channeled by armed ships, and structured to build up a surplus of gold in the dominant trading partner’s homeland, and that name is not “free trade.” What British traders and diplomats in Lisbon had instead created was a very successful example of mercantilism. What David Ricardo created a century later was a very influential example of economic propaganda. A lot of that going around, actually.

Sources: Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, 1: 298 (Eyre & Spottiswood, 1887); (CR Boxer, “Brazilian Gold and British Traders in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (Aug. 1969): 454-72, esp. 459-60; Timothy Walker, “Lisbon as a Strategic Haven in the Atlantic World,” in Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Prentice-Hall, 2005), 60-75.

Voyagers to the East, Part XXII

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If you had lived in France during the sixteenth century, and had been a person of at least moderate wealth (sufficient to allow you to travel throughout the kingdom), there is an excellent chance you would have been able to meet, or at least see, a Native American traveler during your lifetime. There were approximately 100 Indian visitors to France between 1505 and 1613, beginning with a Carijo chief's son, baptized as Binot de Gonneville, whose biracial descendant became an abbot. The mariner Thomas Aubert brought 7 Micmacs -- the first North American sojourners in France - to Rouen in 1508, and Verrazzano may have brought back a southeastern Algonquian boy in 1524. Explorer Jacques Cartier apparently took a Brazilian Indian girl to France in 1527, though her subsequent fate is unknown (Olive Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism, 210). Nine years later, Cartier kidnapped Huron chief Donnaconna, his two sons (who had previously been to France), two other chiefs, and five children, and brought them to St. Malo. Most of this cohort died within a few years, but one of the Huron children, a girl, survived to adulthood in France (Dickason, 210-11).

The number of Indian arrivals increased as the French fishing and fur-trading businesses in North America, and French trade with Brazil, expanded later in the century. In 1547 King Henri II granted an audience to Diogo Alvares, a Portuguese shipwreck survivor who had been adopted by the Tupinamba Indians, and his Tupinamba wife Paraguacu, whom Catherine de Medici gave her own name. Henri invited both to remain in France, but they chose instead to return to Brazil (Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 211-212). Henri encountered a much larger cohort of Brazilian Indians in 1550, during his royal entry into Rouen, when he was greeted by several hundred "Indians" - mostly disguised Frenchmen and women, but including 50 actual Tupi-Guarani - who staged a mock battle for him. (At some point during his reign, possibly during this very procession, Henri II received several Tupinamba captives as gifts, and gave them to various nobles as servants.) Henri's successor, Charles IX, also had presented to him several Native American captives, including a Brazilian "king," during his own entries into Troyes and Bordeaux in March 1564 and April 1565, respectively.

Public viewing of Native Americans in 16th-century France peaked with these processions, but at least a dozen more Indians arrived in the kingdom by the early seventeenth century. According to Jacques Noel, between 1550 and 1587 French fur traders brought several North American Indians to the port of St. Malo, where they were baptized and lived at least part of their lives; they included a Micmac or Beothuk man, Jehan, who was baptized in 1553 (Dickason, 211). Around 1570, sailors brought to France a Micmac chief, Messamoet, who subsequently returned to Canada and became an intermediary between his kinsmen and French traders. Shortly after the turn of the seventeenth century, Henri IV received several Montagnais boys brought to France by Francois Grave du Pont and other survivors of Pierre de Chauvin's short-lived colony on the Saguenay River. One of these boys became a companion to the Dauphin (he died in 1603); two others learned French and returned to Canada in 1603 with Grave du Pont and Samuel de Champlain, whom they served as translators during a diplomatic feast, or tabagie, at Tadoussac. (David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream [New York, 2008], 117, 126, 139.) And a decade later, in 1613, six Tupinambas came with missionaries to Paris, where they exchanged their "native" garb (including feathers and maracas, possibly inauthentic) for French clothing and were baptised, with the King and Queen serving as their godparents. (Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 214-17) For the French, the transport of Indians to the metropole was often accompanied by baptism and presentation to the monarch - that is, the submission of exotic strangers to both the Church and the monarchy, in rituals that conjoined the authority of both institutions and were intended to strengthen both.

Voyagers to the East, Part XVI

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As I've noted in the previous two posts in this series, during the first half of the 16th century Portuguese and Spanish sailors transported at least 500, and perhaps more than 1,000 Brazilian Indians to southwestern Europe for sale as slaves. These were not the only native Brazilians to cross the Atlantic, however. In 1549, for example, the city fathers of Rouen employed fifty Tupi-Guarani people in their pageant for King Henry II (see "Voyagers to the East," Part VIII). Moreover, there were a few Indians who voluntarily traveled from Brazil to Europe in the 1500s. In 1501, Amerigo Vespucci brought three Indian volunteers to Lisbon, presumably to display them as curiosities, while in 1505 the French explorer Binot Paulmier de Gonnevile took the son of a Carijo chief to France, where de Gonneville renamed the boy for himself, educated him, and (in 1521) married him to his daughter, Suzanne. Meanwhile, in 1513 three Tupinikin men from the region of Porto Seguro visited King Manoel I of Portugal, who received the Indians while they were attired in feathers and carrying bows. (John Hemming, Red Gold, 11-12.)

During the second half of the 16th century, Jesuit missionaries in Brazil selected a few Indian boys to send to Portugal, where they were baptized and educated. I am uncertain of their numbers - 10-20 is a guess - and their eventual fate, though I think it unlikely that all of them survived to return home. Metropolitan Portuguese interest in evangelizing native Brazilians appears to have declined in the seventeenth century, but the French elite remained fascinated with the region and its inhabitants. In 1613 French missionaries brought six Tupinambas to Paris for baptism, with King Louis XIII and Marie de Medici serving as godparents. Later in that same century, incidentally, Jean Paulmier de Courtonne, a descendant of the Carijo boy Binot de Gonneville and his wife Suzanne, became an abbot in Lisieux, in Normandy. (Hemming, op. cit., 103, 532; Luca Codignola, "The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and Spanish North America," in Karen Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness [Chapel Hill, NC, 1992], p. 217.)

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Voyagers to the East, Part XV

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Hoping to secure his kingdom's contested claim to Brazil, in 1532 King Joao III of Portugal divided the Brazilian coast into colonial districts, or donatories, which he then granted to fourteen Portuguese magistrates and noblemen. The donatory grants placed the grantees, also known as captains, under a number of legal restrictions. One of these pertained to Indian slaves: the captains could employ Native American slaves on their plantations in Brazil, but could only export 24 to Portugal each year.

I don't know the reason for this restriction – I suspect that Joao was trying to protect the interests of merchants involved in the African slave trade – but whatever the cause, it seems likely that the Brazilian captains followed the Indian slave-export rule. I base this guess upon a simple economic fact: the demand for Indian slave labor on the Brazilian side of the Atlantic far outweighed the European demand. By 1526, Portuguese settlers had learned that coastal Brazil had an ideal climate for sugar cultivation, and sugar cane was as labor-intensive as it was profitable. By 1540 Joao's donatory captains had lined the Brazilian coast with plantations, each manned by hundreds of Native American slaves who (under threat of torture and death) spent their days planting, weeding, cutting, and pressing sugar cane. The cane fields were graveyards for Indian laborers, who died from hunger, exposure, overwork, and imported Old World diseases, like malaria and amoebic dysentery. (John Hemming, Red Gold, 36-39; Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange [Westport, CT, 1972], 39-40, 69).

The combination of intense local demand for slave labor and high indigenous mortality naturally limited the supply of Brazilian Indian slaves for the European market. John Hemming, an expert on Indian-white relations in colonial Brazil, gives no estimate of the number of slaves taken to Portugal during the first period of Brazilian colonization (1534-49), but he does note that one of the most successful donatory captains, Alfonso de Sousa, only sent 48 Indian slaves across the Atlantic during his entire career. (Hemming, op. cit., 538.) If we assume that this was an average per capita figure, then the fourteen captains would have shipped about 670 Indian slaves to Europe by 1550. This is probably a high estimate, because some of the donatory captains never actually claimed their grants.

After 1549, when Brazil became a royal colony, several new developments further curtailed (and probably stopped) the shipment of Brazilian Indian slaves across the Atlantic. First, the demand for slave laborers in Portugal and Spain declined in the second half of the sixteenth century, as Europe finished replacing the population losses it had sustained in the Black Death. (George Huppert, After the Black Death [Bloomington, 1986], 112.) Second, the Brazilian Indian population began to collapse as smallpox, the most consistently lethal of Old World diseases, arrived in the ports and plantations. A 1562 smallpox epidemic killed 30,000 Indians within four months, then attacked and annihilated countless coastal Indian villages. Portuguese and allied Tupi Indian slave raiders were forced to conduct long-range slaving expeditions into the Brazilian highlands, and the captives they brought back to the coast were just as short-lived as their predecessors. By 1576, Portuguese planters in Brazil were beginning to meet their labor demands by importing African slaves – 40,000 by 1600, and hundreds of thousands in the subsequent century. These new bondsmen brought with them additional smallpox outbreaks which decimated both the Brazilian Indian population and the colony's Indian slave trade. (Dauril Alden and Joseph Miller, "Out of Africa: The Slave Trade and the Transmission of Smallpox to Brazil, 1560-1831," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (1987), 195-224.) I've not located any accounts of Brazilian Indian slaves traveling to Europe after 1550, though a few Tupi-Guarani Indians did cross the Atlantic voluntarily, of whom more later.

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Voyagers to the East, Part XIV

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During the first quarter of the sixteenth century, Spain maintained a near-monopoly on the exploration and exploitation of the Americas. In only two regions of the Western Hemisphere did other Western European nations challenge Spain's dominance: Newfoundland, where sailors of nearly every seafaring country came to exploit the cod fisheries, and Brazil. While claimed by Portugal under the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Brazil remained outside of the effective control of any single European power, and it possessed two commodities Europeans desired: brazilwood (the source of a bright and cheap red dye), and human slaves. The latter were either the prisoners of internecine wars, or captives taken by well-armed European slaving parties. Most were destined to end their lives on plantations in the West Indies or on the Brazilian coast, but a fair number, according to John Hemming's Red Gold (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), wound up in Western Europe. The following is a short summary of the cases Hemming reports, by year:

1503: Four Spanish ships brought gold, brazilwood, and Indian slaves to Seville in this year. There is no indication how many people were on each ship, but 100 seems a likely maximum - the ships were carrying other cargo, so it is doubtful that the crewmen packed in as many slave passengers as did Columbus's men in 1495. Fatalities en route probably ranged from 13% (Vespucci's figure in 1500) to 35% (Columbus's figure), leaving 260-350 survivors to be sold in Seville. This is, of course, only a guess. (Hemming, 531)

1513: The ship Bentoa brought 35 Indian slaves from Brazil to Lisbon, where they were probably sold as household servants or field hands. (Hemming, 10-11)

1515: A German correspondent described a Portuguese ship bringing "young [Indian] men and women" to Lisbon. Apparently, the ship captain had duped these passengers into coming to Europe voluntarily, then sold them into slavery after landing. The correspondent did not record the number of passengers, but 50-100 seems a reasonable range. (Hemming, 11)

1526: Sebastian Cabot, the son of John Cabot, took four chiefs' sons captive while in southern Brazil (Carijo), and sold them in Spain. (ibid)

This gives us a range of 349 - 489 Brazilian Indians sold as slaves in Iberia between 1503 and 1526. These figures are speculative and imprecise, but are based on the solid research in Hemming's book and thus at least convey the order of magnitude of this involuntary migration.

The sale of Brazilian Indian slaves in Portugal increased somewhat after the Portuguese began formally colonizing Brazil in 1534. That is a story for my next entry in this series.

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Voyagers to the East, Part VIII

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A noteworthy feature of 16th-century French political culture was the ceremonial entry of a new king into each of the principal cities of his realm. These "joyeuses entrees" were festive events marked by parades, pageants, feasts, public addresses, and (usually) the city's presentation of a large gift to the king. The festival of entry satisfied the king's need for homage, but it also served two important purposes for the local citizens: it allowed them to re-affirm their special corporate identity as city-dwellers, and it gave them the opportunity to express their community's aspirations. (Frederic Baumgartner, Henry II: King of France, 1547-1559 [Duke University Press, 1988], 92-93.)

In October 1550 the city fathers of Rouen, a maritime community on the Seine estuary, organized an unusual entry festival for King Henri II and Catherine de Medici, one intended to promote royal interest in overseas colonization. In a field outside of the city walls the inhabitants prepared a simulated Brazilian forest and village, complete with fake brazilwood trees, imported parrots and monkeys, log huts with thatched roofs, hammocks, and dugout canoes. The tableau included over three hundred "Brazilians," who paraded before the monarchs and conducted a mock battle with bows and clubs.

Fifty of these tribesmen were actual Brazilians, probably Tupi-Guarani kidnapped by Portuguese slavers and sold to sailors involved in the lumber trade. (Brazil's primary export in the early 16th century was brazilwood, which Europeans used as a dyestuff.) Some of the other 250 participants were French sailors familiar with the Brazilian coast, its inhabitants, and their language. Most were ordinary young French men and women dressed, or rather undressed, as Indians, wearing little more than a coating of red dye. (This must have been chilly in early October). The pageant thus represents one of the earliest recorded examples of a cultural activity that would, in time, become quite popular in British America: "playing Indian."

Rouen's merchants and sailors hoped that the pageant would build political support for trade with the Indies and colonization in America, and their hopes were soon realized. In 1555 Henri II commissioned a party of adventurers to establish a French colony in southern Brazil, near the site of present-day Rio de Janeiro. The settlement of "France Antarctique" survived for twelve years, and descriptions of its Native American neighbors inspired Michel de Montaigne to write his essay "Of Cannibals," an early exploration of the theme of the "noble savage." (Parts of his theme found their way into Act II, Scene 1 of The Tempest). It seems possible that some of the kidnapped Tupi-Guaranis who participated in the 1550 pageant came to the new colony as guides and translators, though there is no certain documentary proof of their fate.

A contemporary description of the Brazilian pageant, titled La deduction du sumpteux order plaisantz spectacles et magnifiques theatres dresses ... par les citoiens de Rouen ... a la sacrée maieste du treschristian roy de France, Henry seco[n]d ... et à tresillustre dame, ma dame Katharine de Medicis [Rouen, 1551], p. 67, can be found here on the British Library website. A 2006 book on the pageant, Michael Wintroub's A Savage Mirror, is available from Stanford University Press.

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Voyagers to the East, Part VII

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During the first half of the sixteenth century England was a minor maritime power, and few English sailors joined the French and Spanish effort to explore the Americas. One adventurer, though, played a small but significant part in the creation of a trans-Atlantic economy: in the early 1530s William Hawkins of Plymouth (1455-1554) made three voyages to Brazil and West Africa, and introduced the English to Brazilian hardwoods and African ivory. (His son, Admiral Sir John Hawkins, later inaugurated the English slave trade by selling 300 African slaves he had captured from Portuguese traders.) Hawkins returned from his second voyage to Brazil (1531) with a Brazilian "king," who apparently came willingly and became a prized guest at the court of Henry VIII. According to contemporary chroniclers, King Henry's courtiers were particularly impressed with the chief's pierced cheeks and with the great jewel mounted in his "nether lip." Hawkins probably wanted his guest to help inaugurate regular commerce between England and the native peoples of northeastern Brazil, but there's no evidence that the chief learned much English, and in any event he died during the return voyage in 1532. (Alden Vaughan, "Sir Walter Ralegh's Indian Interpreters," William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 59 [April 2002], 344; Giles Milton, Big Chief Elizabeth [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000], 7-8.)

Hawkins's Brazilian king made such a splash that several Englishmen decided they could make a lot of money by kidnapping other Native Americans and putting them on display in London. In 1535-36 a company of wealthy gentlemen, headed by the merchant Thomas Hore, organized an expedition to America to seize human trophies. The adventurers hired the ships William and Trinity, sailed from London in April 1536, paused in Newfoundland to take on supplies, then sailed up the coast of Labrador in search of "savages." Finally they encountered a small party of Inuit or Beothuk hunters paddling out to meet their ship, but when the Englishmen attempted to capture the Americans their quarry escaped. The explorers later discovered that the Trinity had suffered so much ice damage that it had to be laid up for repairs. While these were underway the Englishmen ran out of food and some resorted to cannibalism.

Finally, Richard Hore and his followers hailed a French fishing vessel, which they managed to seize from its crew, and returned thereon to England. When the English explorers landed in Saint Ives in October 1536, they returned not in triumph but weak, hungry, disgraced, and empty-handed. Their failure chilled Englishmen's interest in exploring the Americas for another quarter-century. (Milton, op. cit., 9-15. See also Richard Hakluyt's account of the voyage, here.)

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