Feb 27, 2007 - Sale 2105

Sale 2105 - Lot 1

Price Realized: $ 7,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 8,000
THE EARLIEST FREE BLACKS IN THE AMERICAS (PERU.) Document Signed by Hurtado de Mendoca, Marques de Canete, as Viceroy of Peru, ordering free blacks to the province of Carabaya. Single folio sheet (31x22 cm), paper evenly toned; creases where folded, slight wear to the edges. Written on both sides, recto written in a small, neat cursive script and signed at the bottom by Hurtado on 9 October, 1557; the verso written in a distinctly different, larger script and signed by the senior magistrate of Cuzco, Bautista de Munoz. Cuzco, 4 December 1557
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The Spanish Crown had difficulty importing slaves from Africa after the first quarter of the 16th century, a problem they did not solve until the various assientos of the 17th and 18th centuries. A significant number of Africans, however, had been brought over as servants and as mercenaries in the first half of the 16th century. Many had attained their freedom by fighting for Gonsalvo Pizarro and the Crown during the Almagro rebellion of 1553-54. As a result, the earliest free black communities in the New World existed in Peru.
The document points out that many of the free blacks were in debt, and that ordering them to the new gold regions would provide a means for them to both pay off their debts and pay the "encomienda," a form of tribute or tax. Signed first by Canete, giving the order and affirmed and signed by the senior magistrate of Cuzco.
When new gold fields were discovered in the tropical province of Carabaya, the viceroy decided to send the "idle free blacks," (Negros y Negras horras), men and women both, to work the ore deposits there. "To this end he appointed a Spaniard to govern the projected settlement and gave him 2000 pesos with which to bring the free blacks and mulattos from any where in the province. The scope of Canete's experiment is not known, but at least sixteen persons of color were taken to the site from the Lima area. As it happened, the mines of Carabaya did not live up to official expectations. Worse, from the Spanish point of view, the free blacks who settled there soon became the owners of agricultural land, cultivated by Indian labor. Fifteen years later, the town they had founded, San Juan de Oro was still in existence and had thirty to forty heads of household, most of them mulatto." (Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, pages 15-18).