![]() ![]() In the superstitious beliefs of the time, his pitiable condition and physical deformity were interpreted by some as evidence of bewitchment. Charles was afflicted with an almost bizarre ugliness in him the classic Habsburg physiognomy – a prognathous jaw and elongated skull – was exaggerated to an almost cartoonish degree. The prince was a sorry spectacle, and his feeble health caused the family to fear for his life. “So it is really kind of horrifying to read things like this and realize they’re talking about human beings.The precarious situation of the Spanish Habsburgs, who were on the verge of extinction due to the lack of male heirs, manifested itself in rumours that the son marked so disastrously by the consequences of massive inbreeding was in fact a daughter who had been presented to the world as a boy out of panic that the dynasty was at an end. “When a slave dies they’ll send somebody to what the brand was on the slave and what they died of and keep a record, and that’s all again for commercial purposes-they can claim that as loss later on,” Eagle continued. ![]() On a report about a slave revolt, he noted, “the whole report is about a captain who’s trying to justify the fact that he’s lost some goods to his investors, and it really is just like he’s talking about merchandise.” The crowded deck of a slave ship.Įagle, a history professor at Western Kentucky University, observed that when it came to dealing with the “casual brutality” in the records he found, the slaves were treated just as merchandise. Wheat, however, noted that small numbers of free people of color were in Iberian societies around the Atlantic.įrom the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas in 2019 an essay by Wheat and Eagle looks at the matter in detail. While during this period, other people could be enslaved, Black people were in the majority. With native people the Spaniards enslaved increasingly dying from European disease and colonial violence they increased the number of enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean after 1518 estimated in the thousands, according to Wheat. Portugal were already masters of the slave trade by 1518, forcing enslaved Africans to work on islands in the eastern Atlantic while Spanish ships brought captive Africans to the Iberian Peninsula, forwarding some to the Caribbean. The trade in humans was so lucrative that Portugal established in the mid-1400s São Tomé, a colonial island port off the west coast of Africa. Merchants, captains and their crew on the defenseless enslaved. ![]() With the edict came increased brutality inflicted by the slave Together with historian Marc Eagle, the pair identified about 18 direct voyages from Africa to the Americas in the immediate years after Charles I’s authorization. “Some of the same really horrible and violent and brutal aspects of the slave trade that was seen much later on, we’re seeing them already in these voyages from São Tomé in the 1520s.” “This is also some of our earliest examples of enslaved people throwing themselves overboard, people dying of malnutrition,” Wheat added. It’s difficult to trace which parts of Africa the captives on board came from, since many were captured on the mainland and shipped to island ports off the coast before Spanish boats took them to the Americas. ![]()
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