Mar 01, 2012 - Sale 2271

Sale 2271 - Lot 37

Price Realized: $ 1,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) CUBA--CHINESE COOLIE LABOR. Emigracion China para La Isla de Cuba. CONTRATA. Single folio leaf, a printed contract, accomplished by hand for Chan Tao, a fifteen year old coolie laborer from Swatow in China; signed by Antonio and Eduardo Betancourt, Spanish agents, presumably with the coolie's permission--we could find no "X" or signature; archival paper repair to bottom of the contract. Swatow, Spanish Consulate, 11 August, 1857

Additional Details

A contract for ten years coolie labor in Cuba. Documents like these vary depending on who the agents recruiting labor in China might have been. Here the young man, Chan Tao, agrees to pay back an advance of 8 pesos for his passage and a set of clothes, valued at 6 pesos, for total debt of 14 pesos, to be taken from his salary of 8 pesos a month, one peso each month. Charges like these often continued on the plantation, in much the same manner as those in the South under Reconstruction.