Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500-1900 9780300179927, 2012012359

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Atlantic Networks and Local Frontiers
2 New Spain
3 Louisiana
4 Barbuda
5 The Pampas
6 The Tasajo Trail
7 Legacy and Promise
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Citation preview

YALE AGRARIAN STUDIES SERIES James C. Scott, series editor

The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural society—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived-experience of rural people are especially encouraged. —James C. Scott, Series Editor James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food Parker Shipton, The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa Alissa Hamilton, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice Parker Shipton, Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa Bill Winders, The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. Agricultural Policy in the World Economy James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside Parker Shipton, Credit Between Cultures: Farmers, Financiers, and Misunderstanding in Africa Paul Sillitoe, From Land to Mouth: The Agricultural “Economy” of the Wola of the New Guinea Highlands Sara M. Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia Michael R. Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo Patrick Barron, Rachael Diprose, and Michael Woolcock, Contesting Development: Participatory Projects and Local Conflict Dynamics in Indonesia Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue, eds., American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit www.yalebooks.com.

andrew sluyter

Black Ranching Frontiers AFRICAN CATTLE HERDERS OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1500–1900

new haven and london

Copyright © 2012 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala and Scala Sans types by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sluyter, Andrew, 1958– Black ranching frontiers : African cattle herders of the Atlantic World, 1500-1900 / Andrew   Sluyter.    p.  cm.—(Yale agrarian studies series)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-300-17992-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ranching—America—History.  2. Cattle herding—America—History.  3. Africans— America—History.  4. Blacks—America—History.  5. Cattle herders—America— History.  6. Frontier and pioneer life—America.  7. Social networks—America—History.  8. America—Social life and customs.  9. America—Race relations—History.  10. America—Civilization—African influences.  I. Title. SF196.A43S48 2012 636′.010896073—dc23 2012012359 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For my family, the most patient teachers and loving students I know

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contents

Preface  ix Acknowledgments  xi 1  Atlantic Networks and Local Frontiers  1 2  New Spain  19 3  Louisiana  61 4  Barbuda  98 5  The Pampas  140 6  The Tasajo Trail  169 7  Legacy and Promise  211

v i i i   c o n t e n t s

List of Abbreviations  221 Notes  225 Index  297

preface

On a research trip along the Gulf Coast in 1988, I came across a road sign south of Veracruz that caused me nearly to veer off the road. The name of the approaching hamlet was Mandinga, the same as that of the rice-growing ethnic group with whom I had worked in The Gambia. —Judith A. Carney , Black Rice (2001)

a decade after judith carney nearly veered off the road just south of the port of Veracruz I visited her department at the University of California at Los Angeles to give a seminar on the establishment of cattle ranching in that part of Mexico in the sixteenth century. Her book on the African origins of rice cultivation in South Carolina, Black Rice, would not appear until three years later, so I was unprepared when she chided me for failing to consider the role of blacks in my research. In a reaction typical of an academic I protested that the lack of primary sources simply precluded understanding much about the involvement of blacks. Now, a dozen years later, my better-considered response has become the diametric opposite: the very dearth of primary sources provides the imperative to study them thoroughly rather than an excuse to ignore them. The result has been a book about the role of blacks in establishing cattle ranching in a range of places throughout the Americas. It joins Black Rice and an increasing number of other efforts by historians, anthropologists, and geographers. Collectively these works demonstrate that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing production systems so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the colonies that their consequences persist to the present. Such revisionism counters characterizations of blacks in American history that emerged during slavery and have lasted until today, for example, the political ix

x    p r e f a c e

rhetoric that asserts how much better life was for African Americans before the Civil War than now, black nuclear families supposedly living passively under the wise tutelage of beneficent masters. This book focuses on a sequence of cases, each concerned with a particular ranching frontier and its connections to other places. In the first case study I revisit colonial Veracruz after more than a decade to investigate how blacks might have been involved in establishing the herding ecology of its cattle ranches, the first in New Spain, not only as laborers but as creative participants. Similar case studies follow for Louisiana, Barbuda, the Pampas of South America, and the salt-beef trade to Cuba. Archival documents remain the principal primary source for retracing the networks through which Africans and others brought together ideas and materials from throughout the Atlantic world to create ranching frontiers in those places. So many of those documents elide blacks, however, that I also employed other types of evidence, from material culture items such as saddles and architectonic vestiges such as wells to oral histories and the ecological relationships between landscape elements. The results not only counter the conventional wisdom I previously helped to perpetuate but also demonstrate the effectiveness of using complementary primary sources in an approach that encompasses Atlantic networks. My findings encourage me and, I hope, will encourage others as well to pursue further case studies that build on this initial sample. Recently, upon returning to the city of Natal from my first visit to the Sertão, a region in northeastern Brazil characterized by cattle ranching with a herding ecology, material culture, practices, and putative origins different from those in the case studies in this book, I found myself strolling along Ponta Negra Beach. Looking at the sunrise over the Atlantic, I began to reflect on the networks that might have connected the Sertão to Africa, far distant over the horizon yet closer to the surf that broke around my feet than to any other place in the Americas. Other potential projects, from the Lowcountry of South Carolina and the coastal valleys of California to the Venezuelan Llanos and the Cauca Valley of Colombia, will, I hope, compel others to engage the topic and method.

acknowledgments

r e t r a c i n g a t l a n t i c n e t w o r k s requires creating new ones through travel to many places and therefore engenders many debts to a great variety of people. I offer the greatest thanks to my family, Carina and our two daughters, Sophia and Nicole, for traveling with me to so many places. In Argentina, Graciela Prio Lofuedo generously shared her home and knowledge of cattle ranching. Amy E. Potter not only helped with archival and field research at the National Anthropological Archives and on Barbuda but first told me about that incomparable island and its extraordinary people. I also take great pleasure in thanking the numerous others who contributed to this project. So many helpful librarians and archivists assisted me in so many places that general praise for their essential professions seems more appropriate than individual acknowledgment. The text integrates the sage advice of those who provided feedback on drafts or memorable commentary at presentations: Riva Berleant-Schiller, William Boelhower, Malcolm Comeaux, Judith A. Carney, Chris Duvall, Jay Edwards, Christian Fernández-Palacios, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, David R. Harris, Paul E. Hoffman, David Lowenthal, Julio Ortega, Glen Richards, Veront Satchell, and the anonymous readers and reviewers. I offer special thanks to Clifford “Dupe” Duplechin and Mary Lee Eggart of the Cartographic Section of the Department of Geography and xi

x i i   a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Anthropology at LSU for initial drafts of several of the figures, Helene Ducros for assistance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Vera M. Kutzinski for help with Alexander von Humboldt’s essay on Cuba, Matthew Restall for resolving a paleographic issue, David R. Harris for copies of photographs he took on Barbuda in the early 1960s, William E. Doolittle for copies of photographs he took in the Dominican Republic in 1992, Case Watkins for creating the Geographic Information System of Atlantic voyages, and Mariano Barriendos Vallvé for sharing a draft database of Catalan logbooks. Several institutions, organizations, and other groups provided funding and other support: the American Geographical Society, the Foreign Military Studies Office of the United States Army, the Association of American Geographers, the Louisiana Board of Regents, Cambridge University, the Institute for Historical Studies of the University of Texas at Austin, and LSU through its Office of Research and Economic Development, College of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Department of Geography and Anthropology. Finally, as the project comes to fruition, I thank the people who stewarded it through the many stages of publication, especially Jean Thompson Black at Yale University Press and James C. Scott, the editor of the Yale Agrarian Studies Series. The initial results of this project appeared in scholarly journals over the past several years. While this book refines and extends those articles, in some cases reaching somewhat different conclusions on the basis of additional sources, original publication credits should nonetheless go to “The Role of Black Barbudans in the Establishment of Open-Range Cattle Herding in the Colonial Caribbean and South Carolina,” Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009): 330–49; “The Hispanic Atlantic’s Tasajo Trail,” Latin American Research Review 45 (2010): 98–120; and “The Role of Blacks in Establishing Cattle Ranching in Louisiana in the Eighteenth Century,” Agricultural History 86 (2012): 41–67.

c h a p t e r one

Atlantic Networks and Local Frontiers

As a result of these research biases, scholars have been slow to consider the proposition that slaves may have actively shaped landscapes of the Americas not solely by their brawn but also with their brains. —Judith A. Carney and Robert A. Voeks , “Landscape Legacies of the African Diaspora” (2003)

the role of africans in establishing cattle ranching in the Americas has long remained unknown. Until recently the literature on creation of the colonial landscapes of North, Middle, and South America generally emphasized the labors of enslaved blacks over their ideas, both those that survived the Middle Passage and those created in novel environments through innovation and hybridization with those of people of native, European, and mixed origins. In part such an emphasis on the unskilled labor of blacks over their knowledge and creativity derives from reliance on documentary archives created by racially biased whites. And in part it derives from the intellectual biases of the scholars who later interpreted those documents, including various admixtures of the assumptions that all useful knowledge originated in Europe and diffused to its colonies, that slavery so disempowered people that they could not have played active social roles, and that white males dominated in terms of initiative and creativity.1 Yet an increasing number of scholars are now employing methodological innovations to demonstrate the active roles blacks played in the emergence of places throughout the Americas. One key to that effort has been the compilation of comprehensive digital databases related to the slave trade. Another has been the expansion of primary sources beyond documents to include landscape vestiges, oral histories, botanical 1

2    a t l a n t i c n e t w o r k s a n d l o c a l f r o n tiers

materials, genetics, material culture, and linguistics. In one prominent example, such revisionism has revealed the active role of blacks in establishing landscapes of rice cultivation in colonial South Carolina. That maturing body of scholarship promises fundamental revision of our understanding of the places of the Americas, one that goes well beyond acknowledging the role of blacks in the history of musical genres such as jazz. After all, rice cultivation and other production systems were so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the colonies that their consequences persist to the present.2 That body of scholarship has matured enough to begin to reflect on its own weaknesses, in particular a tendency to trade racism for other types of categorical reasoning such as cultural and environmental determinism. Cultural determinism prevails when research emphasizes quanta of knowledge diffused whole across the Atlantic to the exclusion of the creation of new knowledge in the Americas. Louis Hartz’s simplification thesis is one influential example. With a logic that parallels the biological concept of the founder effect, Hartz emphasized selective migration of European social elements, a feudal fragment dominating the colonization of Latin America and a liberal bourgeois one the later colonization of North America. Those founders thereby established exaggerated versions of their respective portions of more complex European societies, a simplification of Europe in its colonies. In 1941, in the seminal Myth of the Negro Past, Melville J. Herskovits similarly argued for the significance of the diffusion of specific African ideas and practices across the Atlantic.3 In contrast, environmental determinism prevails when research virtually ignores the possibility of European and African antecedents to focus instead on the novel social and environmental relations of the Americas, as in Frederick Jackson Turner’s use of the frontier qua frontier as an explanatory category. Turner’s frontier thesis has much in common with the biological concept of adaptation, emphasizing the transformation of European social structure through accommodation to the relatively low cost of land and high cost of labor along the North American frontier, conditions that supposedly proved inimical to feudal relations and transformed colonial society into a democracy of independent farmers. Using a similar logic, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price published the influential Birth of African-American Culture (1976), concluding that innovations in ethnically diverse Caribbean slave societies produced a Creole culture

a t l a n t i c n e t w o r k s and local frontiers    3

largely bereft of particular African ideas or practices. The fundamental opposition between the Herskovits and creolization schools shaped much subsequent research on the role of Africans in forming society in the colonial and postcolonial Americas.4 One response to those categorical tendencies has been to reconceptualize the Atlantic from a dead space of separation into a living space of flows. Doing so shifts the emphasis from static categories to dynamic processes. As categories such as Africa, Europe, the Americas, Africans, Europeans, native peoples, Creoles, environment, culture, and so on all dissolve into decentered networks of heterogeneous actors, their actions become the focus of research. The goal becomes understanding how such actors mobilized African, European, and American knowledge and materials along dynamic networks that intersected in particular places and times to create novel social and environmental relations through hybridization and innovation. The uniquely American places that emerged in turn reconfigured the networks to introduce additional actors, ideas, and materials into those places, in an ongoing process of transformation through variable degrees of hybridization and innovation.5 The theoretical imperative to get back to the actors themselves poses a practical challenge, however, because the documentary sources elide most of the actions of, among others, enslaved blacks. For any given research project that challenge can either encourage retreat into categorical reasoning or stimulate methodological innovation that pushes diverse but complementary primary sources to reveal as much as possible about the actors. One priority involves reconstruction of the biographies of actors who mobilized ideas and materials along diverse networks. Yet at the same time, because those ideas and materials intersected in places where particular landscapes, languages, material cultures, and practices emerged, researchers must enter the networks through the archives, secondary literatures, and other characteristics of those places. Doing so requires the sort of place-based expertise that can yield methodological innovations that reveal the long-obfuscated actors involved in a given network: for example, the recent use of probate inventories to reconstruct the precise origins of West African slaves on rice plantations in the Brazilian Amazon and the use of historical linguistics to reconstruct the precolonial emergence of diverse West African agricultural ecologies and their entry into colonial Atlantic networks.6

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This book takes such an Atlantic actor–network approach to contribute to the collective effort to understand more thoroughly the processes that connected places in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. More specifically, it uses diverse but complementary primary sources to contribute to a better understanding of the roles of blacks in the networks through which open-range cattle ranching emerged in several places in the Americas: New Spain, Louisiana, Barbuda, the Pampas of South America, and the salt-beef trade that connected the Pampas to Cuba. Those case studies provide an initial sample by which to assess the method and the role of blacks. A large body of scholarship has established the general process through which open-range cattle ranching frontiers emerged and proliferated in the Americas. By the time the Norse first transported cattle across the Atlantic to Greenland in the tenth century, Europeans, Africans, and Asians had for many millennia been raising domesticated members of the genus Bos, mainly breeds of the humped zebu in the tropics and the humpless taurine in temperate latitudes. The Norse never expanded south of northern latitudes, had entirely abandoned their American colonies by the fifteenth century, and therefore never had a hemispheric impact. The next introduction, however, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1493, resulted in broad and lasting consequences for all of the Americas.7 The cattle from the Canary Islands that Christopher Columbus disembarked on Hispaniola during his second voyage multiplied as rapidly as the population of the native people declined, the herds expanding across an open range of tropical savanna and moribund agricultural fields. The natives of the Canary Islands, the Guanches, had brought goats, pigs, and possibly sheep with them from Africa when they settled the archipelago but did not have cattle when the Spaniards began to colonize the Canaries in the early fifteenth century. The Spaniards introduced cattle from Europe and through raids for slaves and livestock along the nearby mainland coast of Africa. By 1493 large numbers of cattle of mixed European and African ancestry grazed on some of the Canaries, and Columbus transported a small herd of them to Hispaniola. Over the next five centuries their offspring, together with subsequent introductions from Europe and Africa, went on to graze other ranching frontiers throughout the Americas.8

a t l a n t i c n e t w o r k s and local frontiers    5

Along with the cattle came grasses. Many millennia of association between livestock and grasses in Africa, Asia, and Europe ensured a greater symbiosis than that between the cattle and the grasses of the Americas. The non-American grasses were not only more palatable and nutritious, but the cattle preferentially propagated them, favoring them when grazing, carrying their seeds inland from the coast, and fertilizing them with manure. That situation especially prevailed in the tropics, which lacked any large grazer such as the bison of the Great Plains of North America. African grasses such as Guinea and Pará thereby became established from Mexico to Brazil as seeds included with dried stalks used for bedding on slave ships or fodder for livestock shipments established beachheads near ports. In the subtropics, Bermuda grass, which had originated in the belt of savanna that stretches across Africa from Senegambia to the headwaters of the Nile River, reached Bermuda by way of the Canary Islands in the seventeenth century and became prominent from South Carolina to Texas over the eighteenth century. As herders recognized the productivity of the introduced grasses and encouraged their growth through planting and, in some cases, annual burning, they spread from one ranching frontier to the next.9 Each of those frontiers differed in particular ways, but they shared the general characteristics of open-range cattle ranching. All shared an emphasis on raising large herds of cattle for beef, hides, and tallow to the virtual exclusion of raising crops. All privileged ownership of cattle over ownership of land. All had an open range, sometimes common property and sometimes not but in either case not divided by fences. Other livestock such as sheep and pigs may also have occurred, but cattle dominated. Brands and earmarks, distinctive patterns of slits or notches cut out of the ears, rather than fences served to distinguish ownership of the mobile property. As the herds wandered the open range for much of the year without much contact with people, controlled breeding, or castration, they became wild and grew imposing horns to protect themselves against predators and herders alike. At roundup time, the cowboys, vaqueros, vaqueiros, and vachères rode horses to chase down and manage those feral cattle.10 Such frontiers proliferated through the nineteenth century before a major retreat in the twentieth due to the expansion of cropland, from sugar plantations along the Gulf Coast of Mexico to wheat farms on the

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Great Plains and Pampas. Figure 1.1 maps the frontiers through time, although the scale obscures small areas of ranching such as narrow Andean valleys and small Caribbean islands.11 The centennial temporal resolution similarly obscures many details, such as the elimination of open-range cattle ranching from the central highlands of New Spain over the 1550s. Moreover, the map excludes areas of open-range cattle herding not directly relevant to this book, for example, eastern Africa and the Hungarian Plain. The map also excludes the ranching frontiers of the nineteenth century associated with the culmination of genocidal wars against native peoples and a boom in the demand for beef and leather. Mapping of those late frontiers would fill in much of the Great Plains and other areas of western North America as well as a large portion of southern and interior South America. Relative to the Americas, the extent of cattle herding in Europe and Africa remained relatively stable for the

Figure 1.1.  Areas of open-range cattle herding in the Atlantic world over the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The locations of the case studies addressed in this book appear in bold italic with chapter numbers in parentheses.

a t l a n t i c n e t w o r k s and local frontiers    7

period mapped; although, again, the map scale obscures many detailed changes that did occur, for example, the expansion of sheep range at the expense of cattle in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. One of the most prominent areas on the map stretches across Africa and has been a major center of open-range cattle herding for millennia. It approximately coincides with the sub-Saharan steppes that span Africa from the Indian Ocean to Senegambia, where the Senegal and the Gambia Rivers flow into the Atlantic. To the south, the tsetse fly spreads nagana in cattle; like sleeping sickness in people, nagana invades the nervous system and results in lethargy and death. To the north, the Sahara lacks the water, pasture, and fodder to support large herds of cattle. The Tuareg and other Berber groups who occupy the Sahara raise mixed herds in which sheep, goats, and camels predominate over cattle. A series of relatively more humid and extensive grasslands occur along the Atlantic coast of the Sahara and support larger numbers of cattle but also in mixed herds in which sheep and goats are dominant. Some of the cattle that stocked the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century seem to have derived from Spanish raids on those humid enclaves, such as the Sous Valley.12 In sixteenth-century Senegambia, the Wolof, Serer, Mandingo, Mende, Bamana, and other groups grew sorghum, millet, and rice in conjunction with raising cattle. When the rainy season began in May or June and the crops began to germinate, those groups sent their herds northward with the Fulani, who specialized in cattle herding, to graze the open range of the Sahel as far north as the fringes of the Sahara. As the rains ended in September or October and the Sahel again turned from green to brown, the Fulani returned southward to the river valleys of Senegambia to trade cattle products for grains and graze the herds on the stubble of the harvested crops, manuring those fields in the process. In return for caring for the cattle of their neighbors during the cropping season, the Fulani kept a proportion of the increase in the herds.13 Accounts by Europeans over the sixteenth century through the eighteenth describe that herding ecology. Many of the observers simply noted the abundance of cattle and the trade in hides and beef.14 But a few of them detailed aspects of the herding ecology. One of these was André Alvares de Almada, who provided an early, vivid account based on his experience in Senegambia from the 1560s through the early 1590s:

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“These Fulani enter throughout the coastal land of the Wolof, Serer, and Mandingos with their livestock and cattle. In the winter they approach the coast and in the spring slowly return again to the hinterland, leading their cattle along the pools of water and ponds that formed during the winter. Many of these herders travel along these two beautiful rivers, the Senegal River and the River of Cantor (that is, the Gambia River), pasturing their stock along them.”15 As the slave trade intensified, demand for beef and other provisions impacted Senegambia’s political ecology, including the herding ecology, but its general characteristics nonetheless persisted.16 The herds of cattle continued to move northward with the Fulani during the summer rainy season and return to the coastal valleys in the winter to graze on crop stubble, as observed by Francis Moore along the Gambia River in 1730: “The sides of the river are for the most part flat and woody, for about a quarter of a mile inland, in some places not so much, and within that are pleasant open grounds, which they use for their rice, and in the dry season it serves the cattle for pasture.”17 Table 1.1 summarizes some general characteristics of the Senegambian herding ecology. Despite the unfenced, open range, the cattle were quite docile for several reasons. Castration both subdued the majority of the bulls and facilitated selective breeding. None of the cattle roamed freely; even during the day a herder was always in attendance. Nightly penning of the entire herd further ensured tameness. The lack of water in the Sahel generally controlled the cattle, forcing them to drink from the buckets of water drawn by their herders from the wells. And the daily contact with the lactating cows for milking also tamed them. That docility allowed the herders to manage the cattle on foot rather than from horseback. In West Africa, in fact, the social elite prohibited cattle herders from owning horses, reserving their use for the aristocracy and its cavalry. The herders did use lassos, a long rope with a running noose, to restrain rebellious bulls but cast the rope over the horns while standing or running rather than riding. A heavy stone or piece of wood tied to the free end of the lasso tired the bull until the herders could approach on foot to subdue it. Earmarking rather than branding served to distinguish ownership of any cattle that went astray on the open range. 18 Several areas of open-range cattle ranching occurred in Europe in the sixteenth century, among them the wetlands known as the Marismas

Table 1.1  Some characteristics of open-range cattle herding in Africa and Europe. C h a r a c t e ristic

Cattle predominant over other livestock Open range used Transhumance used Long-distance transhumance used Sustained contact between herders and cattle Milking of cows Nightly penning of cattle Hay used as cattle feed Wells used to water cattle in dry season Feral cattle common Horses used to herd cattle Lasso used Lasso used from horseback Pike pole used Whip used Herder dogs used Brands used Earmarks used

SeneGambia

The Marismas

The Camargue

Auverg n e and Brit t a n y

Highland Britain

yes yes yes yes yes yes yes no yes no no yes no yes no no no yes

yes yes yes no no no no no no yes yes yes no yes no no yes yes

yes yes yes no no no no no no yes yes yes no yes no no yes yes

yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes no no no no no no no no yes yes

yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes no no no no no no yes yes yes yes

1 0   a t l a n t i c n e t w o r k s a n d l o c a l f r o ntiers

along the lower Guadalquivir River, in Andalusian Spain.19 The cattle made an annual transhumant circuit, known as a travesío, between the wetlands and surrounding hill lands. As the floodwaters of the Guadalquivir River receded each spring, herders branded their calves and drove the stock into the Marismas to graze the lush new growth. Largely untended during the long dry season, uncastrated and isolated among a labyrinth of sloughs, the animals became feral. Solanos blowing out of Africa parched the open oak and pine woodlands of the surrounding hills, and the ranchers set the grass understory ablaze in late summer. As the rains returned each October, mounted herders rounded up the feral stock and drove them upslope before the Marismas flooded, the wildness of the cattle dictating the use of horses. Before turning the cattle into the fresh regrowth of the hill pastures, ranchers collected their stock in corrals scattered around the margins of the Marismas in order to cull the herds for marketable animals, each owner’s cattle being distinguished by a brand or earmark. Those vaqueros used pike poles, known as garrochas, to control the cattle. They did spin lassos, or lazos, from the local esparto grass but never cast them from horseback; instead, they used the lasso to free cattle from mudholes by dismounting, placing the running noose around the animal’s horns, tying the other end to the tail of a horse, and then pulling. The Greek geographer Strabo, the author of the Geographica in the first century AD, provided a description of the Marismas that suggests, albeit vaguely, that a similar herding ecology had pertained there since the Romans controlled Andalusia between the second century BC and the fourth century AD: “Herds in passing over to the islands that are in these estuaries are sometimes drowned and sometimes surprised in the islands, and endeavoring to cross back again to the continent, are unable, and perish in the attempt.”20 Open-range livestock herding also occurred to the north of the coastal lowlands of Andalusia, in Extremadura and Castile; however, small livestock, principally sheep but also goats and pigs, dominated those highland ranges. A similar herding ecology occurred along the lower Rhone River in Mediterranean France, an area of wetlands known as the Camargue.21 There, gardians mounted on distinctive white horses rounded up feral black cattle in the salt marshes as they began to flood with the winter rains, driving the herds to pastures in the surrounding uplands. Key practices included branding and earmarking; use of a pike pole known as a

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ficheiroun that consisted of an iron trident mounted on a wooden staff; use of a saddle with prominent cantle and pommel; and use of a horsehair lasso, or seden, while on foot. The antiquity of specific aspects of that herding ecology remains in doubt because gardian culture underwent a major transformation in the early twentieth century, including adoption of an idealized folklore, distinctive clothing, and other practices influenced by the tour of France by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Exhibition in 1905. Although the Romans, according to Strabo, raised cattle in the Camargue after clearing them of their woodlands as a source of lumber for shipbuilding, he provided even fewer details than for the Marismas. The description by Pierre Quiqueran de Beaujeu of Provence in the early sixteenth century, however, reveals that at least by then the gardians wielded pike poles tipped with tridents from horseback to herd thousands of cattle in the Rhone delta: “The Island of Arles [the Camargue] alone supports over four thousand mares and no less than sixteen thousand oxen. . . . Of all these amusements, the branding, or the registration with a red [hot] iron of the owner’s mark on the rump of the cattle, is the most famous. . . . All those gathered are armed with a sort of pike pole which cannot wound or kill a bull. . . . On its thickest end, three iron spikes are mounted. . . . The gardians remount their horses and at a slow trot approach the herd. . . . Thence the most ferocious bull in the herd is goaded with great trident jabs.”22 An early nineteenth-century account also describes herding from horseback with tridents but adds the possibility that the gardians were by then using lassos, well before any possible influence by Buffalo Bill’s show: “To tame the oxen to pull the plow, the herders on horseback, armed with tridents, and on foot with strong ropes, surround the one destined to work: those on horseback drive him with trident blows toward the cart and there force him into harness; those on foot securely tie him by the horns, and thus place him beside an ox named Tamer, aged in the work of plowing, who regulates the pace, and teaches him to plow a toilsome furrow.”23 Further north in Europe, the herding ecology differed dramatically. Some open-range cattle herding occurred in the British highlands as well as in the Auvergne and Brittany regions of France.24 Herders moved their herds between unfenced, communal pastures at high elevations during the summer and fenced pastures, fallow agricultural fields, and recently harvested fields at low elevations during the rest of the year. For most of

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each year, then, herders remained in close contact with the cattle, feeding them hay, allowing them to graze crop stubble, milking them, and even sheltering some in sheds. The consequent docility allowed pedestrian herders to manage the cattle, with horses reserved for transportation. Leather bullwhips and herder dogs, at least in Britain, were the main instruments of herd control. And earmarks and brands allowed owners to distinguish their cattle while they were grazing the open range in summer. Some have argued that branding did not occur in Britain, but Edmund Spenser’s account of Ireland in the sixteenth century offers clear evidence of that key practice: “Hereunto also is to be added that good ordinance, which I remember was once proclaimed throughout all Ireland; that all men should mark their cattle with an open several mark upon their flanks or buttocks, so as if they happened to be stolen, they might appear whose they were.”25 With the initial introduction of cattle into Hispaniola in 1493 and establishment of a growing herd in little more than a decade, ranching frontiers began to proliferate throughout the Americas, first on the other Greater Antilles of the Caribbean.26 Cattle reached Puerto Rico in 1505, Jamaica in 1509, and Cuba in 1511. The herds ranged largely untended across seasonally flooded savannas, moving upslope in the wet season and downslope in the dry season. The near total demise of the native population combined with the rapid increase in herd size to produce such a surplus of beef and lack of labor that ranchers had little incentive or ability to carefully cull animals and drive them into towns for butchering. Instead, relatively few herders chased down the feral herds with dogs and the desjarretadera, a pike pole tipped with a crescent hocking knife, for their hides and tallow (fig. 1.2).27 The mounted vaqueros would pursue cattle until they were able to sever a rear hamstring, dropping the animal in its tracks remote from any settlement, take the hide and perhaps the tallow and some meat but leave the bulk of the carcass to the dogs. José de Acosta described that sixteenth-century Caribbean herding ecology in his Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias: “In that manner cows have multiplied on Hispaniola and elsewhere in those parts so that they go ownerless through the woods and fields by the thousands. They use these cattle for leather. Blacks or whites go out on horses with desjarretaderas and chase the bulls or cows, and any animal they cut and drop is theirs. They skin it

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Figure 1.2.  Use of the desjarretadera in the Caribbean in the sixteenth century. Reproduced courtesy of Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

and take the hide but leave the meat behind because there is such a surplus that no one wants to pay for it.”28 Acosta not only mentioned blacks in that account but prioritized them before whites in the sentence because nearly all the vaqueros on Hispaniola in the mid-sixteenth century were Fulani, Wolof, and Mandingo.29 Those Caribbean ranching frontiers changed over the succeeding centuries as the British incorporated Jamaica and several of the Lesser Antilles into their colonial empire, the French established the colony of Saint-Domingue on the western section of Hispaniola, and plantation agriculture replaced most of the open range. While plantation agriculture increasingly marginalized ranching throughout most of the Caribbean, Antillean cattle and herders did establish new frontiers on the adjacent mainland. Beginning in the 1520s Caribbean cattle and herders reached New Spain, Florida, and the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of northern South America. From coastal enclaves such as Margarita Island and Guayaquil, herders in the 1540s advanced into the extensive grasslands of the interior Llanos, the Cauca Valley, and as far south as the Central Valley of Chile. Similarly, cattle ranching in New Spain spread from beginnings in the lowlands fronting the Gulf of Mexico into the central highlands during the 1530s and the lowlands of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and Pacific coast during the

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1540s. From Chile cattle herders crossed the Andes in the 1550s and over the next two decades occupied the northern Pampas as far east as the Río Paraná as well as parts of the open woodlands, or monte, that fringed those extensive grasslands to the west and north. Only in the seventeenth century, however, did cattle reach the Pampas east of the Río Paraná. In New Spain the cattle herders pushed northward along both the Gulf Coast and through the highlands, but even though cattle initially reached the northern borderlands in the sixteenth century ranching did not become established in Texas and California until the eighteenth century. Similarly, cattle from Puerto Rico reached Florida early, possibly by 1513 and certainly by 1521, but ranching did not become established until the seventeenth century, along an axis connecting the Atlantic and Gulf Coast. As the French and British also became established in the Caribbean and founded colonies along the coasts of nearby North America, cattle ranching reached South Carolina late in the seventeenth century and Louisiana in the eighteenth century. The Carolinians meanwhile drove their herds southward into Florida, westward along the Gulf Coast toward Louisiana, and across the Appalachian Mountains into interior grasslands such as the Bluegrass Basin. Cattle also reached colonial enclaves along the Atlantic coast of South America in the sixteenth century, but not from the Caribbean. Those cattle instead came from Portugal, the Cape Verde Islands, and mainland Africa.30 From beachheads established in the 1530s, ranching first spread into the Sertão during the seventeenth century. Over the next century the herders drove their cattle even deeper into the interior as well as southward, toward the Río Paraná and Río de la Plata. As those frontiers proliferated, the cattle herders of each region modified aspects of their herding ecologies and hybridized them with those of other frontiers, as evident in material culture. For example, the many forms of saddle involved in the process reflect the diversity of the herding ecologies of those frontiers and their antecedents on the other side of the Atlantic, in places such as the Camargue and the Marismas (fig. 1.3).31 Moreover, saddles themselves played a role in the process through which herding ecologies diversified. If the herding ecology involved lassoing cattle from horseback, the saddle might have some sort of device to secure the free end of the rope so that the shock of bringing the animal to a halt would not unhorse the rider. The saddle horn played

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Figure 1.3.  Historic saddles used for cattle herding in the Camargue, Mexico and Texas, the Pampas, the Marismas, and Hispaniola.

that role in Mexico and Texas and later on the Great Plains, but not on any other frontier. On the Pampas, gauchos fastened the free end of the rope low down on their saddles. On the Llanos of Venezuela, lassoing from horseback did not require a saddle at all, the free end of the rope instead being “firmly tied to the horse’s tail, using its long hair for the purpose” and to absorb the shock of stopping cattle.32 The practices involved in each herding ecology thereby related to each type of saddle,

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and the two, the performance and the element of the material culture, interacted in a process of transformation that diversified the herding ecology among frontiers. While those general processes and patterns seem clear enough, the role of blacks does not. In the 1960s the pioneering research of Philip Durham and Everett Jones on the Great Plains certainly demonstrated the active roles of many blacks on that frontier.33 For the trail drives north from Texas alone, one eyewitness estimated that between 1868 and 1895 “fully 35,000 men went up the trail with the herds” and that “about one third were negroes and Mexicans.”34 In addition to those thousands of blacks who drove herds to the railheads in Kansas, many more worked on ranches throughout the Great Plains, although the precise number remains as elusive as the definition of such categories as black, white, and native. Many of those blacks were anonymous cowboys, but a few owned large herds, and some, like Bill Pickett, became famous for their skilled handling of horses and cattle. Yet the ranching frontier on the Great Plains emerged nearly four centuries after the one on Hispaniola, rendering the following conclusion by Durham and Jones quite parochial: “Thus the story of the Negro cowboys began in Texas and the Indian Nations before the Civil War. There thousands of Negroes, most slaves, some free, learned to ride and rope and brand.”35 No doubt many blacks did learn to rope on that frontier, as did many whites. That practice, however, involving a cowboy mounted on a horse casting a lasso over the heads of cattle, while it became iconic of that frontier, did not begin there. Other cattle herders, perhaps some of them black, created lassoing from horseback on an earlier frontier, sometime and someplace between Hispaniola in the late fifteenth century and Texas in the nineteenth century. The inquiry must therefore address how cattle herders established such practices on antecedent frontiers, and thus far the predominant conclusion about those frontiers has been that blacks played a minor role beyond passive labor. The longest standing conclusion was that “slavery and ranching did not mix” because it “was obviously impractical” to allow slaves to herd cattle without close and constant supervision by whites.36 More recently, in his authoritative North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers, Terry G. Jordan attempted to resolve the issue on the basis of

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evidence rather than assumptions but still concluded that, at most, blacks had labored on the ranching frontiers but had little creative role in establishing them: “I find no compelling evidence of meaningful African influence in the cultures and adaptive systems of the various American cattle frontiers. . . . Seek the vivid New World impress of the African in plantation culture, not on the ranching frontier.”37 Jordan did not in principle oppose the idea that blacks in certain places and times may have made creative contributions. But he demanded, and was not able to find, evidence that challenged the conventional assumptions that knowledge of ranching had originated in Europe and diffused to its colonies, that slavery had been so disempowering that blacks did not play active roles, and that white males therefore created the ranching frontiers of the Americas. While evidence is also central to the current investigation, it rejects such assumptions in favor of quite different ones. The first assumes that actors of African, European, native, and mixed origins from throughout the Atlantic world came together with cattle and land in particular times and places in the Americas to create ranching frontiers. The second assumes that on any given frontier any or all of those diverse actors may have played creative roles as well as providing labor. The third assumes that understanding the emergence and particularities of each frontier demands understanding the Atlantic networks that connected them to one another and to Africa and Europe. And the fourth assumes that a better understanding of the processes involved requires the use of diverse primary sources that include not only such documents as civil and church records to reconstruct the biographies of the principal actors, but also landscape vestiges, oral history, language, and material culture. Each of the succeeding chapters therefore focuses on the roles of blacks in the emergence of cattle ranching on a particular frontier as well as on the networks that connected each frontier to others and to Africa and Europe. Chapter 2 treats New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on the lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico where cattle ranching first became established. The emergence of cattle ranching in eighteenth-century Louisiana provides the case study for chapter 3. The fourth chapter concerns the role of blacks in the open-range cattle

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herding of Barbuda, one of the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, from the seventeenth century onward. In chapter 5 the topic is the Pampas of Argentina and Uruguay in the nineteenth century. The final substantive chapter shifts the emphasis from that frontier to its nineteenth-century relationship with the Caribbean, principally Cuba, through the trade in salt-cured beef.

c h a p t e r t wo

New Spain

If any substantial African influence is to be found in ranching, it entered Moorish Las Marismas and Andalucía with black slaves before the time of Columbus—a topic deserving additional research. —Terry G. Jordan , North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers (1993)

i clearly recall how in the mid-1990s, while perusing sixteenthcentury land grants at a long wooden table in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, I dropped my pencil in surprise when I read the name Villalobos and it made me think I might be able to locate the very first cattle ranch of New Spain. The archive of those land grants, known as mercedes, permits reconstruction of the process through which cattle ranches came to dominate the lowlands of Veracruz over the century following 1519 (fig. 2.1).1 That year the conquistadors landed there under the command of Hernán Cortés, and he described the tropical lowlands inland from his sandy beachhead as “very flat and with very beautiful bottomlands and river banks. . . . very apt and agreeable, and to travel through and pasture all sorts of livestock.”2 That the name Villalobos appeared in one of the mercedes that record the realization of Cortés’s vision so excited me because a century ago a well-known scholar named Fanny Bandelier was working in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville when she uncovered a testament of 22 October 1554 to the merits and services of a Gregorio de Villalobos. The document credits him with being the first to introduce cattle into New Spain: “After the pacification of the city of Mexico and the other provinces of this New Spain, the said Gregorio de Villalobos, with the intention of remaining in it permanently, at the time that he came from the islands of Santo Domingo brought 19

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Figure 2.1.  The Veracruz lowlands: the belt of dunes fronting the Gulf of Mexico, the narrow coastal plain with its wetlands, and the broad piedmont dissected by the ravines of the streams draining the escarpment of the Sierra Madre Oriental to the west.

a number of yearling calves, so that there might be cattle, he being the first to bring them to New Spain, and from them arose and multiplied all the cows that are in this said New Spain.”3 Bandelier’s transcription subsequently became widely known through publication in Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Viscaya, and Approaches, and the literature on the establishment of cattle ranching in New Spain subsequently enshrined Villalobos’s status as its founder. The land grant in front of me on that table in Mexico City therefore raised the possibility of gaining fresh insights into the very earliest moments of cattle ranching in New Spain, immediately after the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521. Mapping the land grants preserved in the volumes of mercedes initially permitted reconstruction of the process of colonization, location of the Villalobos ranch, and explication of the herding ecology and practices he helped to establish.4 Now,

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they provide the basis for a belated investigation into the role of blacks in that process. Mapping the mercedes facilitates reconstruction of aspects of the process of colonization through which a densely settled and intensively cultivated precolonial landscape became a largely unpopulated colonial cattle range. The first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, instituted a centralized land-grant register in the 1540s, now preserved mainly as the eighty-six volumes of mercedes in the Archivo General de la Nación (scattered mercedes are housed in other archives). The grants specify the date of award, the awardee, the number and location of land units, and whether for large or small livestock, respectively, ganado mayor or ganado menor. Ganado mayor grants imply cattle unless specified as being for horses or mules, and ganado menor grants imply sheep unless specified as being for goats or pigs. Beginning in 1536 a series of viceregal ordinances also made clear that estancias for ganado mayor had an area of 1,747 hectares and a minimum stocking rate of five hundred head. Estancias for ganado menor had a legal area of 776 hectares and a minimum stocking rate of two thousand head. For the Veracruz lowlands, between 1541 and 1617 the viceroys granted 233 estancias, 118 for large livestock and 115 for small livestock. The extant mercedes for those estancias permit reconstruction of the pattern of land granting over much of the first century of colonization.5 Mapped by decade, the mercedes reveal how the land-granting process incrementally incorporated territory (fig. 2.2). The 1540s and 1550s represent a transitional period between the few precocious estancias of the 1520s and 1530s, which lacked mercedes, and the land rush of the 1560s. The cattle estancias of the 1540s and 1550s mainly cluster in the environs of La Antigua Veracruz, prompted by Mendoza’s order of 1542 that several of its vecinos, or municipal citizens, who had cattle grazing nearby must establish estancias a minimum of three leagues from town, about thirteen kilometers.6 They thus reflect the absorption of local, informal grazing arrangements into the viceroy’s centralized control over land use during the 1540s. Two main factors catalyzed the flood of granting during the 1560s: first, the midcentury boom in silver mining stimulated a population boom that increased demand for meat at the same time that the mines increased demand for tallow to make candles and hides for containers; second, the viceroy ordered the removal

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Figure 2.2.  Synoptic maps of grants for cattle and sheep estancias by decade, 1540s–1610s.

of cattle estancias from the central highlands to reduce livestock damages to agricultural fields near population centers such as Mexico City. The increased competition for pasture in the Veracruz lowlands prompted ranchers to seek legal title, both for new estancias and ones occupied informally for many years. Sheep estancias began to appear in the 1560s in the drier terrain of the dunes, near the market for naval mutton and away from the wetlands, which encouraged ovine diseases like foot rot. A relative hiatus during the 1570s reflects a change in viceroy and policy in response to suits by native communities throughout New Spain against livestock damages to their agricultural fields. Over the 1580s and 1590s, as the colony’s textile industry grew, a land rush for sheep estancias occurred along the new camino real between Veracruz and Puebla in order

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to provide pasture for highland flocks during the dry season. Meanwhile, the military campaigns of Philip II generated a vast demand for leather, encouraging grants for cattle estancias to fill in gaps on the coastal plain and push up the piedmont and into the dunes. Such infilling continued through the 1600s and 1610s, with a lagging rush for sheep estancias in the relatively isolated central piedmont. The cessation of granting during the 1620s paralleled the colony’s reduction in economic growth over the seventeenth century. By the end of the first century of colonization, livestock estancias had thoroughly replaced native settlements in the Veracruz lowlands. Hundreds of thousands of natives were gone—victims of violence, forced relocation, and epidemic diseases—and no more than a few thousand colonizers had resettled the region.7 Instead of people, tens of thousands of head of cattle and, seasonally, hundreds of thousands of sheep grazed lush pastures amid moribund cities and villages, recalling Oliver Goldsmith’s epitaph for “The Deserted Village” (1770) of another landscape: “The country blooms—a garden, and a grave.” Even as early as 1580 the district governor at La Antigua Veracruz could boast about a landscape “so fertile and full of pastures that more than 150,000 head of livestock, between the cows and the mares, ordinarily graze within little more than seven leagues all around, even without counting the innumerable sheep that descend from the highlands to over-winter.”8 But at the same time he bemoaned the native depopulation: According to the tradition of the oldest residents of this land, at the time that the Spaniards came, there were many places and large Indian populations within six leagues all around this city. These have become so diminished that many have become completely depopulated, leaving no trace except the memory of a name; and others now have so few residents and people that, compared to what was, the extreme to which they have been reduced is sad to see. . . . In this notable way the natives of this district have declined since the Spaniards mastered the land; and each day the towns continue to disappear, two or three places joining together into one in order better to preserve themselves, in such a way as one cannot expect anything but that those remaining will come to total ruin and destruction.9

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By the 1620s some 2,954 square kilometers of estancias occupied more than half the area of lowlands, and Andrés Pérez de Rivas, the historian of the Jesuit mission to New Spain, could claim that not a single native lived within sixteen leagues of Veracruz.10 That dominance of livestock over people persisted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and into the nineteenth, when one observer noted that neither “towns nor villages are found in these extensive districts, but merely here and there the solitary farms of the cattle-proprietors, or of the herdsmen.” 11 The record of fossil pollen preserved in the sediments of a small lake near the center of the coastal plain tracks that dramatic landscape transformation. The sudden increase in the pollen of tropical trees and invasive, secondary shrubs and herbs around five hundred years ago reflects the extreme depopulation of the early colonial period and the consequent oldfield succession of former agricultural fields. The cattle ranches expanded into the resulting matrix of grassland with patches of low deciduous woodland, but grass pollen production actually decreased as grazing negatively impacted the flowering of grasses. Only in the mid-twentieth century did the landscape once again undergo so dramatic a transformation, also reflected in the pollen record, as sugarcane cultivation vastly expanded on the basis of drainage of wetlands, irrigation of hill lands, and clearance of woodlands.12 The spatial pattern of cattle estancias also reveals a central aspect of the herding ecology that became established in colonial Veracruz, a local transhumance similar to the annual movement of cattle in Andalusia between dry-season pastures in the Marismas and wet-season pastures in the surrounding hill lands (fig. 2.3). A German resident of Veracruz in the early nineteenth century, Carl Sartorius, provided the first comprehensive account of that herding ecology. During the summer wet season, ranchers would graze their cattle on the piedmont: “The tropical rains call forth a lively green, thousands of cows pasture in the rich juicy grass” (fig. 2.4).13 But with “the cessation of the rains, the prairies fade, the soil dries up, the trees lose their foliage, the herds seek the forests and chasms, and in the cloudless skies, the sun scorches up the unsheltered plains.”14 For travelers between Veracruz and Xalapa or Córdoba, the only respite from the piedmont’s dry savanna and patches of deciduous woodland and shrubland came when the road dipped into the comparatively verdant barrancas, or ravines, of the streams that drain the escarpment and

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Figure 2.3.  A generalized transect across the Veracruz lowlands illustrating the environmental zones between which cattle moved in a system of local transhumance. Compare the environmental zones across the bottom with figure 2.1.

Figure 2.4.  The view westward across the savanna country of the piedmont in the early nineteenth century: grasslands with thickets of shrubs and low trees cut by ravines, the Sierra Madre Oriental in the background, cattle grazing in the foreground.

dissect the piedmont into a ragged apron abutting the coastal plain. Those streams, before cutting through the cordon of sand dunes along the coast, meander across the coastal plain and form a belt of backswamps that harbor wet savanna studded with palm trees and evergreen woodlands.

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The coast itself is a jumble of sand dunes, some cresting at over a hundred meters and trending north–south for several kilometers, interspersed with the stagnant ponds that in the nineteenth century harbored the mosquito vectors of yellow fever. As the winter dry season progressed and the floodwaters receded from the backswamps, ranchers would drive their cattle downslope to graze the wet savanna and then wait until the piedmont pastures became tinder dry to set them alight, “partly to destroy the clouds of tormenting ticks and tarantulas, partly to call forth a new crop [of grass] from beneath the ashes.”15 Around June, as flooding streams once again began to inundate the backswamps of the coastal plain and threaten to strand cattle on quickly forming islands, the vaqueros rounded up the herds to drive them upslope to the wet-season pastures of the piedmont. Because of the open range, sparse human population, and consequent isolation of the herds from people for much of the year, just as in the Marismas, the cattle were so feral and aggressive that the vaqueros had to ride horses during the roundups for branding, culling, and driving the herds between seasonal pastures. At least some elements of the herding ecology that Sartorius described in such detail in the early nineteenth century also pertained to early colonial times, most notably the annual burning of pastures during the dry season, the feral cattle, and the local transhumance. In 1571, Arias Hernández, the priest of La Antigua Veracruz, noted that ranchers used fire to open and maintain pasture and that the burning tended to occur during the dry season: “Plains, all made into pastures,” “habitually burned at Christmas.”16 Hernández portrayed the majority of the cattle as being feral: “Many cows and many wild ones, and many bulls and very fierce.”17 The preferred meat was veal, “which is the best one can eat,” making cows much more valuable than bulls.18 Impossible to round up like the cows and the calves, the surplus of fierce, uncastrated bulls became the objects of cattle hunts in which vaqueros used desjarretaderas to drop them in their tracks and take only the hide and tallow, leaving the rest of the carcass to the dogs and buzzards far from any settlement: “The meat from the wild bulls and desjarretaderas is not used because they die far away.”19 The spatial pattern of granting over the sixteenth century corresponds to a herding ecology involving the movement of cattle between wet-season pastures on the piedmont and dry-season pastures on the coastal plain.

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More than a third of the estancias for ganado mayor, 41 out of 118, straddled the transition zone between piedmont and coastal plain (fig. 2.5).20 That strategic location provided access to pasture on the piedmont during the summer wet season, when large areas of the coastal plain flooded, and on the coastal plain during the dry season, as the piedmont pastures dried up, became unpalatable, and were set ablaze. The spatial relations among multiple grants to individuals or single families reveal the imperative to secure pasture on both the coastal plain and the piedmont or, later, in the cordon of dunes as an alternative to the piedmont. The pattern probably includes only some of the spatial connections among suites of estancias that encompassed wet-and dry-season pastures, the remainder obscured by the use of surrogates to acquire grants or subsequent sales and purchases.

Figure 2.5.  Proliferation of the Marismas herding ecology over the first century of colonization in Veracruz. The panel on the left shows estancias for large stock that straddled the piedmont–coastal plain transition zone. The panel on the right shows groups of estancias for large stock belonging to the same individual or family.

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Toponyms echo the seasonal movement of the herds between summer and winter pastures. In the valley of the Atoyac River, Paso Vaquero and Paso del Toro recall colonial cattle trails. Paso generally indicates a pass or some type of crossing along a route, such as a ford across a stream. The addition of vaquero and toro, meaning, respectively, “cowboy” and “bull,” evokes the dominance of ranching in colonial times. The striking similarity to the herding ecology of the sixteenth-century Marismas suggests that Andalusia was a major source of knowledge in the establishment of cattle ranching in Veracruz, despite some differences. Unlike the Marismas, where saline waters provided the cattle with salt, in Veracruz the vaqueros used salt as a lure. Also unlike the Marismas, where the rains of winter urged the herds to move upslope, in Veracruz the rainy season occurs in the summer. In both places corrals of wooden poles or stones located near ecological transition points on the annual transhumant circuit served for culling and branding, the cattle passing the corrals twice yearly, but the seasons were reversed. The great annual roundup and branding, or herradero, that punctuated the downslope portion of the annual cycle therefore took place in the fall in Veracruz and in the spring in the Marismas.21 In addition to the similarities of the herding ecologies in the two places, the origin of some of the original conquistadors, the approximately four hundred men who sailed with Cortés, suggests the importance of Andalusian antecedents in the establishment of cattle ranching in Veracruz. Because Cortés and so many of the other conquistadors came from Estremadura the literature long emphasized Spain’s semiarid plateau as the principal source of knowledge for the establishment of cattle ranching in New Spain.22 More recent scholarship, however, has revealed that sheep rather than cattle dominated herding in Estremadura, a fact that has relegated it to a minor role in recent literature on the establishment of ranching in the Americas. Instead, the Marismas, where Andalusians on horseback herded feral cattle, is a more likely source for the relevant knowledge and practices. Moreover, although not a majority, nearly a third of the original conquistadors hailed from the Andalusian provinces bordering the Marismas: Seville, Huelva, and Cádiz.23 And Andalusians from these places continued to form a large proportion of emigrants to the Indies, as Spaniards then referred to the Americas, throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century.

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The reference to Villalobos in one sixteenth-century land grant therefore promised new insights into the earliest moments of cattle ranching in New Spain, such as whether he had used the calves he brought to establish a ranch that straddled the piedmont and coastal plain, a location suggestive of the herding ecology of Andalusia rather than that of Estremadura. The grant dates to 1583 and thus postdates Villalobos’s death, and it names one of his sons, Gabriel, rather than Gregorio himself: “[In] the name of his Majesty, we grant Juan de la Párraga one cattle estancia in the district of the city of [La Antigua] Veracruz, between the estancia of Gonzalo de Alegría and [that of ] Francisco de Cocas, which used to belong to Gabriel de Villalobos, on the other side of the Jamapa River. . . . 14 November 1583.”24 Nonetheless, I thought that combining the locational reference with the biographies of the Villalobos family might lead to the location of the first ranch in the Veracruz lowlands and thereby help to elaborate on the establishment of cattle ranching in New Spain. Unlike some of the conquistadors, Gregorio de Villalobos left behind a relatively meager record of his life. He conducted no voluminous correspondence like Cortés. He wrote no chronicles like the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the author of the True History of the Conquest of New Spain, and others. The few biographical deeds and dates mainly derive from passenger lists, land grants, and posthumous probanzas de servicios y méritos, similar to the many other proofs of services and merits that lauded the past deeds of conquistadors in order to secure future privileges for their scions.25 Those sources nonetheless facilitate reconstruction of some aspects of the network that brought Villalobos across the Atlantic to the lowlands of Veracruz. He grew up in the Andalusian town of Almonte, in the hills north of the Marismas (fig. 2.6). His parents, Diego de Padilla and Teresa de Villalobos, had moved to Almonte from Jerez de la Frontera. The shipping lists of Seville record his passage to the Antilles in 1516, when he was twenty-two years old. In Cuba two years later, he must have heard about how Juan de Grijalva, an explorer and conquistador, had encountered Montezuma’s emissaries in 1518 at Chalchicueyecan, now the site of the port of Veracruz. In early 1521, two years after Cortés had left Cuba to follow up on Grijalva’s report and six months before the fall of Tenochtitlán, Villalobos sailed for Mexico to ride with the conquistadors.

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Figure 2.6.  The lowlands of Veracruz and of Andalusia as they pertain to the biography of Gregorio de Villalobos.

He arrived at Villa Rica aboard a ship of reinforcements, probably the same one that brought Julián Alderete, the royal treasurer who was to ensure that Charles V would get his share of any booty.26 Rather than proceeding inland to take part in the battle for Tenochtitlán, however, Villalobos remained as part of the garrison at Villa Rica, kept there by the direct orders of Cortés and serving on its town council. By the mid-1520s he had left Villa Rica. He first served as majordomo to Cortés at Medellín, a Spanish settlement founded about 1524 along the lower Jamapa River. Sometime after abandonment of that incarnation of Medellín in about 1525, and without doubt by 1533, he had become a vecino of La Antigua Veracruz. Like so many other conquistadors, he received a grant of native labor and tribute, or encomienda, as his primary reward for helping to conquer New Spain. The natives so commended to Villalobos lived at Ixhuatlán, about midway between Puebla and the Gulf

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of Mexico. By 1542 he had relocated from Veracruz to Puebla, serving in the municipal government and receiving land grants to establish a garden plot in town and a farm on its outskirts. The reason for that move to a more urbane locale may have been his marriage to Beatriz García de la Fuente. They wed sometime after 1527, that being the year her first husband died, and raised a daughter named Luisa and two sons, Gabriel de Villalobos and Baltasar de Padilla, the older brother taking his paternal grandfather’s last name. Gregorio de Villalobos died before 1544. The encomienda of Ixhuatlán went to Baltasar, as the eldest son; as late as 1560 he was receiving 110 pesos per year from its natives, but by 1565 he had died and the encomienda escheated. Gabriel, as the younger son, inherited the estancia near Veracruz. Gabriel testified as to the services and merits of his dead father in 1544 and the next year received a grant for a sheep estancia near Puebla, where he was a vecino. He died sometime thereafter without heirs. Those spare biographies certainly do not directly fix the date that Gregorio de Villalobos imported the calves with any greater precision than does the phrase “after the pacification of the city of Mexico and the other provinces of this New Spain.”27 In fact, too literal an interpretation of such biographical fragments only confuses the issue. Villalobos could not literally, after all, have come from Cuba half a year before the fall of Tenochtitlán, imported the cattle at some time after the fall of Tenochtitlán, and have brought some calves “at the time that he came from the islands of Santo Domingo.”28 Clearly the last statement must be figurative, the context implying that Villalobos either made more than one voyage between Cuba—the Greater Antilles then being known collectively as “the islands of Santo Domingo”—and New Spain or that he had someone ship him the calves once he had become established. Such archival fragments lack precision and consistency; lacunae abound; and exaggerations probably do as well. After all, the descendants of conquistadors testified to such probanzas de servicios y méritos to secure rewards from the viceroy. Gabriel, in fact, seems to have received the grant for a sheep estancia in 1555 as a direct consequence of testifying about his father’s services the year before, clearly ample motive for exaggeration.29 Yet while not directly addressing the issue of when and where Gregorio de Villalobos introduced the calves, by sketching his background and

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peregrinations the sources do provide context and thus permit some reasonable inferences. Quite significantly and somewhat uncharacteristically for a conquistador, he seems to have lived in the Veracruz lowlands continuously for much of the 1520s. Beginning that lowland residence at Villa Rica in 1521, he later moved south to be Cortés’s majordomo at Medellín. Although Cortés himself had scouted out the site for Medellín around 1524, intending that settlement on the Jamapa River to become the principal port of New Spain, Spaniards had largely abandoned it by 1527. Its former residents moved to a refounded Veracruz, established about 1525 on the left bank of the Antigua River, at present-day La Antigua Veracruz. Thereafter, La Antigua Veracruz remained the sole Atlantic port of New Spain for the rest of the sixteenth century, with launches ferrying goods from the deep-water anchorage at San Juan de Ulúa along the coast and up the Antigua River. Together with other residents of Medellín, then, Villalobos moved to La Antigua Veracruz in the mid-1520s, relocating to the highlands sometime after 1533. He would by that time have had not only a long familiarity with the lowlands but also a broad one: more than a decade split between Villa Rica in the north, the lower drainage of the Jamapa River in the south, and La Antigua Veracruz in between. Villalobos seems primarily to have lived in the lowlands that long in order to serve his employer, Cortés. Yet that residence may well have yielded the knowledge, motive, and opportunity to import some calves and found a cattle ranch to propagate them.30 Further context helps to hone such inference, particularly as to when and where Villalobos might have landed those calves. In 1523 the ranchers of Hispaniola and Cuba lobbied to prohibit livestock exports to the mainland. As a measure of the Antillean ranchers’ determination to stymie potential competition by the new colony, a death penalty enforced that embargo. As a measure of its success, the cattle population of New Spain remained almost nil until after a royal decree of 1526 ended the embargo. Consequently, the residents of Mexico City, despite constituting a major concentration of meat eaters, did not establish even a small beef market until 1526. And only in 1526 did Cortés report that he had begun raising cattle in the Toluca Valley, just west of Mexico City. By the seventeenth century, however, the cattle population of New Spain had boomed, and two dominant ranching districts had emerged: the environs of the port of Veracruz and the lowlands along the Pánuco River, inland from

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present-day Tampico, some four hundred kilometers to the northwest of Veracruz. Minor ranching districts became established along the Pacific coast, but not until the 1540s. Even the progenitors of the vast Pánuco herds did not arrive until after the embargo had ended in 1526 because the Spaniards had conquered and settled the Pánuco in 1523, just as the embargo was beginning. In the Veracruz lowlands, however, Villalobos apparently beat the embargo. He probably did not bring the calves on his initial voyage to join the conquistadors, six months before the fall of Tenochtitlán, when he still lacked firsthand knowledge of potential pastures and, more pointedly, would have had conquest rather than ranching on his mind. Yet he must have shipped the calves before the embargo began sometime in 1523, either making another trip himself or sending for them. He therefore landed the cattle in late 1521, in 1522, or possibly early 1523. Given that until the founding of Medellín around 1524 he lived in Villa Rica, he would have landed the calves there and pastured them nearby for a year or two. Accepting for the moment the veracity of these inferences, his initiative combined with the success of the embargo would have made the Villalobos calves not only the first cattle to reach New Spain but quite likely the only ones to arrive during the entire first half decade of the colony.31 Such context also provides insight into the size of Villalobos’s herd, its rate of increase, and whether, as his son testified in 1554, “from them arose and multiplied all the cows that are in this said New Spain.”32 As noted, Villalobos must have initially pastured the calves near Villa Rica, increased the size and maturity of the herd, and then moved it south after Cortés founded Medellín about 1524. Since his son used the term becerras rather than terneras in his testimony, they seem to have been weaned yearlings and therefore quite capable of breeding on arrival. Moreover, the use of becerras rather than becerros implies a preponderance of heifers over bulls. All in all, such a herd would have been appropriate to ship on one of the characteristically small vessels and to seed a ranch with: still relatively small animals so that more could fit aboard; already mature enough that they would have been weaned, not need a milk cow aboard, and be ready to breed on arrival; and mainly female, since one or two bulls could service a small herd of heifers. According to all accounts, such livestock had a remarkable fecundity in the Antilles and New Spain.33 While herds of cattle likely did not double every fifteen months, as some

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contemporaries claimed, birth rates did so far outstrip death rates that the annual growth rate must have approached 10 percent. For the Pánuco, a fairly analogous context to the Veracruz lowlands, the annual growth rate seems to have been about 8 percent, a doubling time of between eight and nine years. Using that same rate of increase for the Villalobos yearlings and assuming an initial herd of ten head in 1521 yields fourteen head by 1525 and twenty by 1529. Assuming an initial herd of twenty head yields twenty-eight by 1525 and thirty-nine by 1529. The herd Villalobos must have trailed southward from Villa Rica when he relocated to Medellín would therefore have been small. Even by the end of the Antillean embargo in 1526, the Villalobos herd could have contained no more than a few dozen animals, and they could not have been the direct progenitors of all of the subsequent vast herds of New Spain. With the end of the Antillean embargo, further cattle imports to the Pánuco and Veracruz populated New Spain with cattle. Even though those herds grew relatively quickly, they grew too slowly to meet the demand for beef. By 1531, five years after the end of the embargo and the establishment of a beef market in Mexico City, an ordinance still prohibited the killing of cattle. Presumably the market’s beef came from animals that died of natural causes. Only as the size of the herds continued to increase over the 1530s did the cost of beef fall, by three-quarters between 1532 and 1538.34 The Villalobos herd nonetheless remains notable for an impact out of all proportion to its size, well worth tracking along the cold trail of tenuous biographical fragments into the depths of the archives. Villalobos, after all, owned the only cattle in all of New Spain for the first half decade of colonization, from 1521 to 1526. During that time he established a particular herding ecology that through its success would have influenced the ranchers who in ever-greater numbers after the Antillean embargo ended in 1526 established other herds in the Veracruz and Pánuco lowlands. Determining that herding ecology begins with locating the prototypic Villalobos ranch. The grant to Juan de la Párraga in 1583 for an estancia that “used to belong to Gabriel de Villalobos” is the initial clue to that location.35 The viceregal scribes did not begin recording grants for estancias until the early 1540s, well after Gregorio de Villalobos had moved to Puebla and

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just about the time he died; therefore, the mercedes volumes contain no grant in his name. Yet the grant of 1583 reveals that his son Gabriel had run the family cattle ranch along the lower Jamapa River after his father’s death. Locating the estancia granted to Juan de la Párraga in 1583, “between the estancia of Gonzalo de Alegría and [that of ] Francisco de Cocas . . . on the other side of the Jamapa River,” would thus also locate the preexisting estancia founded by Gregorio de Villalobos and later run by Gabriel de Villalobos.36 The documents to locate the Párraga, Alegría, and Cocas estancias are scattered well beyond the volumes of mercedes.37 For the Alegría estancia, only the writ, known as a mandamiento acordado, that ordered the inspection of the requested grant survives, and then only as a copy within an inspection report prompted by Juan Rodríguez de Villegas’s request in 1575 for an estancia along the Jamapa River. Owing to the opposition of a neighboring rancher, Pedro Núñez de Montalbán, the viceroy apparently never granted Villegas his request. But Alegría did receive his estancia, as a series of documents makes clear: first, the grant to Párraga itself confirms that Alegría had somehow acquired an estancia before 1583; second, on 10 March 1573 the alcalde mayor, or district governor, responded to the writ by recommending that the viceroy make the grant; third, a map from another inspection report refers to an estancia belonging to a Pedro de Alegría in the lower Jamapa drainage around 1573, the reason for the different first name being obscure but probably signifying nothing more than a scribe’s error; fourth, Alegría secured a permit in 1575 to drive cattle to his new estancia; and, fifth, a map accompanying the Villegas inspection report confirms the existence by 1575 of the Alegría estancia. Moreover, the Villegas map of 1575 not only confirms the award but also locates the Alegría estancia and, by association, the neighboring Párraga and Cocas estancias. The Párraga estancia was somewhere south of the Jamapa River, “on the other side of the Jamapa River” from La Antigua Veracruz, but it was also north of the Atoyac River, named “El Río Grande de Medellín” on the Villegas map.38 In general terms, then, the Villalobos estancia was between the Jamapa and the Atoyac Rivers, somewhat upstream from their confluence. A grant issued in 1606 to Francisco Párraga for a license to open an inn confirms and more closely specifies the location of the Párraga estancia and thereby the Villalobos estancia.

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Because Licenciado Francisco Párraga, vecino of the new city of Veracruz . . . has his stocked cattle estancias in the district of the old city of Veracruz near the river called Jamapa along the royal highway that goes from the said new city to Mexico [City, and because] many persons of those who cart goods and travel on the said highway during the rainy season are not able to cross and continue there due to the river rising[, and because] in order to prevent that damage . . . he endeavored to build and found an inn and a boat or canoes for people to cross and proceed . . ., that well within the limits and bounds of the said estancias, next to the river that they call Jamapa, he can found, build, and establish an inn.39 Presumably Francisco Párraga was a son of Juan de la Párraga. By 1606 the Párragas had more than one estancia, seemingly contiguous. And in the midst of them, on the banks of the Jamapa River, Francisco Párraga founded a ferry service and inn, or venta, and called it the Venta de Jamapa. The route of the highway subsequently changed, however, and the establishment of a second Venta de Jamapa at the ford on the new highway has muddied the location of Párraga’s inn. Fortunately, several eighteenth-century maps help to sort out that toponymic confusion—a naming, renaming, and translocation of places that characterizes these lowlands.40 During the eighteenth century, people distinguished the two inns as the Venta Nueva de Jamapa versus the Venta Vieja de Jamapa— the New Jamapa Inn versus the Old Jamapa Inn. The Venta Vieja was in the small village of La Venta, which still retains the toponym if not the colonial inn. During the first decade of the colonial period, then, Gregorio de Villalobos moved his small herd south from Villa Rica to graze it along the Jamapa River near the present-day village of La Venta. Although the Villalobos family lacked formal title, the youngest son took over operation of the estancia upon Gregorio’s death, sometime before 1544. During the early 1560s the formal granting of estancias began in the lower Jamapa drainage. As that ranching frontier boomed, the Villalobos estancia lay abandoned but still remembered, near what would become the Párraga estancia in 1583, the Venta de Jamapa in 1606, the Venta Vieja during the eighteenth century, and then the village of La Venta. There, the hilly fringe

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of the piedmont abuts the coastal plain with its extensive wetlands, a site well suited to the characteristics of the herding ecology of Gregorio de Villalobos’s boyhood home—Almonte, in the hills fringing the northern edge of the Marismas of Andalusia. Andalusians, having witnessed the fecundity of the cattle Columbus had introduced into the Antilles in 1493, diffused the Marismas herding ecology to New Spain. Villalobos did so first, during the 1520s, when he established a prototypical ranch just inland from Veracruz. During the 1530s, with the end of the Antillean embargo, other Andalusians established that model in the Pánuco district, also a seasonally inundated coastal plain. In the 1550s, escalating a process begun by Viceroy Mendoza because of damages to native agriculture, Viceroy Luis de Velasco virtually eliminated cattle ranches from the more densely settled parts of the highlands around Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca. Then, with the mining boom and a consequent surge in immigration from Spain, the colonial economy grew rapidly in the second half of the sixteenth century. As demand for meat, tallow, and hides increased in parallel with Velasco’s attempts to banish cattle from the highlands, the Gulf Coast emerged as prime cattle country. By the seventeenth century Veracruz and Pánuco had become the two dominant cattle districts of New Spain. From Pánuco, vaqueros took the practice of herding cattle from horseback northward into Texas.41 The process that over the sixteenth century had populated the Veracruz lowlands with vast herds of cattle thoroughly extirpated the human population, and native peoples therefore played no direct role in establishing the ranches or herding ecology. Prior to the New Laws of 1542 that made grazing cattle on encomienda lands illegal, Villalobos and a few additional promiscuous ranchers may have done so. If so, he would have grazed cattle near Mictanguautla, held in encomienda by Cortés until it escheated in 1532. As Cortés’s majordomo at Medellín, Villalobos would have managed nearby Mictanguautla, just fifteen kilometers downstream from his estancia. His own encomienda of Ixhuatlán was perched at an elevation of twelve hundred meters on the escarpment of the Sierra Madre Oriental, about seventy kilometers inland from his estancia and too far away to use as pasture. Early ranchers may also have used encomienda labor to build houses and provide domestic service on their estancias, but they do not seem to have used natives to herd cattle. Only as the

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size of the herds grew through the mid-sixteenth century would ranchers need large numbers of vaqueros, but by then few natives remained in the lowlands.42 Years ago, having reconstructed the foregoing details of the process through which cattle ranching became established in Veracruz, I stopped short of considering how blacks might have been involved. In hindsight, three well-known circumstances render that oversight egregious. First, Africans had been living and working in Andalusia for centuries before Villalobos introduced the herding ecology of the Marismas into Veracruz. Some scholars have therefore suggested that those blacks may have introduced African herding knowledge and practices to the Marismas long before Villalobos had even been born. Second, blacks also moved along the networks that increasingly connected the Veracruz lowlands into the emerging Atlantic world of the 1520s, numbering among the conquistadors who arrived with Cortés in 1519, those like Villalobos who followed over the next several years, and as slaves in the retinues of the wealthier conquistadors. Third, the increasing numbers of slaves to enter New Spain over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did so mainly though Veracruz, which became a major node in the networks of the Black Atlantic, and blacks thereby became a large segment of the population of the port and surrounding lowlands. Some were slaves and others were free, whether manumitted and living in Spanish settlements or as so-called cimarrones in communities of slaves who had freed themselves.43 The first aspect of potential African involvement recognizes that networks had connected Andalusia to Africa for centuries before Villalobos sailed for the Americas. Various circum-Mediterranean empires first linked Andalusia to North Africa. Carthaginians disputed southern Spain with the Greeks, initially, and then with the Romans. Carthage controlled Andalusia from the fifth through the third centuries BC as part of an empire that included much of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of North Africa. The Romans, who succeeded Carthage at the end of the second Punic War in 201 BC, maintained and elaborated the networks that integrated the African and European shores of the Mediterranean. Those connections waned under the Visigoths, successors to the Romans over the fourth century AD and converts to Christianity in the fifth.

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The so-called Moors, however, did the most to develop those networks, reestablishing them in the eighth century and extending them southward across the Sahara into West Africa. In 711 Arabs led armies of Berbers across the Strait of Gibraltar to battle the Visigoths for control of the Iberian Peninsula. In less than a decade they conquered the territory, naming it al-Andalus after the Vandals who had occupied Andalusia in the fifth century before establishing themselves in North Africa. And they named the first large river they had to cross during the campaign Wada-IKebir, meaning “large river.” With the Reconquista, culminating in the joint Castilian–Aragonese defeat of the Emirate of Granada in 1492, those Arabian toponyms became Andalusia and the Guadalquivir, the river that forms the Marismas as it meanders across the coastal plain between Seville and Cádiz.44 Of the various groups from North Africa that ruled al-Andalus, none did more than the Almoravids to elaborate the networks integrating Andalusia and sub-Saharan Africa (fig. 2.7). The Almoravids, a Berber group, established their capital at Marrakesh about 1070. They first extended their empire southward to control the gold and iron mines of Senegambia. Then they pushed northward into Iberia, first when hired as mercenaries by the emirates to resist the Reconquista and then as conquerors. By 1090 they had established an empire that stretched from the Senegal River in the south to the Tagus River in the north. The networks that integrated the Almoravid empire carried materials, people, and ideas northward and southward. Precursor trans-Saharan networks preceded the Almoravids, but during their rule the flows of goods and people dramatically increased as a portion of the southward and eastward trade of West Africa reoriented toward the north. Gold, leather goods, elephant tusks and, to some degree, slaves traded northward; monotheism, salt and, to some degree, textiles and dried fruit traded southward. Islam became established along the Senegal and the Niger Rivers, the Almoravids became the major minters of gold coins in the western Mediterranean, and blacks increasingly became a component of the population of al-Andalus. Some were slaves, but many traveled north freely to work or fight in al-Andalus. The eleventh-century French “La Chanson de Roland” refers to them as being “blacker than ink”: Their noses are big and their ears broad, And together they number more than fifty thousand.

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Figure 2.7.  The empire of the Almoravids in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Who are blacker than ink And whose teeth alone are white.45 While the Almoravids’ Moorish successors incrementally lost political control of al-Andalus, blacks continued to comprise a noticeable proportion of the population. For example, the Reconquista reached Seville in 1248, but even 150 years later the city had so many blacks that the Catholic Church established a hospital for them, run by a black confraternity. 46 In addition to the black population that persisted from Moorish times, the Reconquista actually rejuvenated the Almoravid networks that

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linked Andalusia to sub-Saharan Africa and brought additional blacks northward. The Portuguese, whose goal was to gain direct access to West African gold, pioneered a sea route that bypassed the Saharan caravans and began selling West Africans into slavery in 1444 at the Mercado de Escravos at the port of Lagos. The pace of that Portuguese trade increased from hundreds per year in the 1450s to perhaps as many as thousands per year entering Lisbon by 1500. However imprecise the estimates of how many people that harbinger of the Atlantic slave trade shipped northward, a large proportion definitely came from Senegambia, where the cattleherding belt of the sub-Saharan steppes meets the Atlantic.47 The Portuguese slave traders began to sell to the Andalusian market in the early 1460s, and Seville became both a consumer of slaves and the major Spanish slave market. The Andalusian market sold both locally and to other parts of Spain, and not only Africans from the Portuguese trade but Moors enslaved during the final decades of the Reconquista, natives of the Canary Islands enslaved during their conquest, and Greeks and Slavs brought from the eastern Mediterranean by Catalan traders. Over the sixteenth century the population of enslaved and free blacks steadily increased in Andalusia. The first two black slaves appear in the Seville notarial records in 1453, but by the early sixteenth century slaves in Seville numbered in the hundreds, the majority blacks, followed by Moors. A census of 1565 reveals that out of a total population of 85,538 Seville had 6,327 slaves, the vast majority of them blacks, mainly Senegambians of Wolof and Mandingo origin.48 Generally in both Portugal and Spain slaves lived in cites and worked as domestic servants, artisans, and menial laborers, only a small minority serving as herders and field hands in rural areas. In his treatise on agriculture, Libro de Agricultura (1513), Gabriel Alonso de Herrera bemoaned that so much rural work was done by “rented workers who think only of their pay, or careless servants, or vile slaves.”49 Yet no known documents conclusively relate black slaves to livestock herding in Andalusia. Rural districts around Seville, like the city itself, experienced a dramatic increase in the number of slaves between the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, albeit on a small base; the total number remains unknown but was seemingly very low. Not all of those slaves were black, but the modest remaining mudéjar population, Moors who did not convert to Christianity, that persisted after the Reconquista may have included additional, free

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blacks. Yet the limited sources indicate that the rural slaves held occupations that mirrored those in the city, mainly domestic servants and artisans living in villages. The reasons for that pattern include the high cost of slaves versus the low cost of agricultural labor, driven by the prevailing rural landlessness and poverty. Those who could afford slaves therefore considered them a symbol of prestige, to be used for domestic rather than agricultural labor. Only a few documents, in fact, contain examples of black slaves working anywhere in Andalusian agriculture, and those sources specify plowing of fields with teams of oxen, sowing wheat and barley, and harvesting olives.50 Although networks connecting Iberia to West Africa had been bringing blacks to Andalusia for centuries before Villalobos introduced cattle into Veracruz, they do not seem to have played a role in establishing the herding ecology of the Marismas. Certainly the presence of so many free and enslaved blacks in Andalusia during and after Moorish rule suggests, despite the lack of direct evidence, that at least a few of them may have herded cattle in the Marismas. If so, however, the longer-term circumstances suggest that other groups had established the essential characteristics of the herding ecology long before blacks arrived. When the Moorish armies first crossed the Wada-I-Kebir in 711, herders had been grazing their cattle in the Marismas for more than a millennium. Castilians would later corrupt Wada-I-Kebir into Guadalquivir, but the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and Visigoths who had preceded the Moors had had their own names for the river as well as for a region long known for its herds of fat cattle. According to Strabo, the Greeks called the Guadalquivir the Tartessus and the region Erythia, meaning “the fortunate land,” in part because of “the excellence of its pasturage” and “superabundance of cattle.”51 That reputation as high-quality cattle range provided the setting for the Greek myth of the tenth labor of Heracles (Hercules to the Romans), in which he traveled beyond the Strait of Gibraltar to Erythia in order to steal a herd of fat oxen from the monstrous Geryon, erecting the twin Pillars of Hercules on the return voyage. The Carthaginians and the Romans variously referred to the Guadalquivir as the Bætis and to the region as Bætica or Turdetania. As noted in chapter 1, Strabo hinted that the annual movement of cattle between wetlands and adjacent hill lands, the distinguishing characteristic of the herding ecology of the Marismas, was characteristic by the first century AD.52

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The Marismas continued to be a major cattle-raising region during Almoravid times, when West Africans first arrived in Andalusia, but by then others had already established the distinctive herding ecology of the Marismas. As early as the tenth century the Arabian geographer Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Rāzi described the Marismas as sufficient to pasture all the cattle in al-Andalus.53 The Senegambians who arrived with the Almoravids in the eleventh century may have modified the Marismas herding ecology, just as the Moors in general modified many other aspects of Visigoth agriculture, from the establishment of sorghum cultivation to the introduction of the animal-driven water-lifting device called the noria.54 But the basic herding ecology involving large herds grazing on open range in the wetlands during the summer and in the surrounding hills during the winter seems by then to have been well established. The second aspect of potential African involvement recognizes that Andalusian blacks generally participated in the earliest stages of the colonization of the Americas, including the conquest and the establishment of the colonial economy. Blacks arrived in Veracruz with Cortés in 1519 and the next year with the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition. Some were slaves, like Francisco de Eguía, whom Díaz del Castillo made the scapegoat for introducing smallpox at Zempoala, the principal precolonial city in the lowlands.55 The best known black conquistador, however, was the free black who claimed to have been the first to plant wheat in New Spain: Juan Garrido. Like Gregorio de Villalobos, Garrido appears in an entry in Francisco Icaza’s compilation of the conquistadors’ probanzas de servicios y méritos: “Garrido (Juan), African black, baptized in Lisbon.”56 He had been born in West Africa about 1480, enslaved by the Portuguese in the late 1490s, and sold into slavery in Seville. His owner brought him to Hispaniola about 1503 and then, with the Cortés expedition, to Veracruz in 1519. In the aftermath of the conquest of Tenochtitlán in 1521, Garrido, perhaps already free, settled in Mexico City and in 1538 testified that he “was the first in New Spain to have the inspiration to plant wheat and see if it produces.”57 A white conquistador, Andrés de Tapia, wrote an unpublished account of the conquest of New Spain that seems to confirm Garrido’s claim by attributing the colony’s first wheat crop to a “manumitted black,” albeit without specifically naming Garrido.58 Yet de Tapia’s account also claims that Cortés ordered the anonymous free black to plant

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the wheat, thereby emphasizing how all such documents emerge from the very social relations under investigation, were as much contested then as now, and cannot stand apart from and adjudicate the facts of their own emergence. Yet the case of Garrido illustrates how Africans may have played fundamental economic as well as military roles in the colonization of New Spain. While Garrido lived in Mexico City and had only passed through Veracruz on his way inland, the sources do name other blacks who were involved in cattle ranching in the lowlands fronting the Gulf of Mexico and may have played creative roles regarding cattle similar to his regarding wheat. A Juan Villanueva, known as Juan el Negro, was one of the early ranchers in the Pánuco. He had left Granada and crossed the Atlantic in 1526 to serve in Pánuco under Nuño de Guzmán, receiving an encomienda of “pueblos y estancias” near present-day Ciudad Valles for his role in the conquest.59 The Suma de Visitas de Pueblos, an anonymous compilation of inspection reports dating to 1547–50, records that Juan el Negro still held the encomienda at midcentury and describes it as coastal plain “with shrublands and savannas suitable for a livestock estancia.”60 The Suma de Visitas also lists a Benito el Negro as holding a neighboring encomienda, similarly suitable for an estancia.61 Those sparse sources yield few details, but circumstances provide additional insights. Juan el Negro certainly numbered among the earliest livestock herders in the Pánuco, arriving only half a decade after Villalobos, just as the Antillean cattle embargo ended. Benito el Negro seems to have been a contemporary, receiving an encomienda and estancia for serving in the conquest of New Spain. Like Villalobos, they founded their estancias too early to appear in the volumes of mercedes. That both herded cattle on those estancias, though, seems certain given that over the 1530s the Pánuco emerged as one of the colony’s dominant cattle-ranching districts. Their names, or nicknames, indicate that both had dark skin, but that alone does not demonstrate an African origin similar to Juan Garrido’s. Juan el Negro claimed he came from Andalusia, specifically from Granada, the last emirate to succumb to the Reconquista.62 He may have been born there before Moorish rule ended in 1492 or shortly thereafter but in either case could have descended from Africans who had settled in al-Andalus during Almoravid rule. In that case he must have been a morisco, a Christianized

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Moor, or the son of moriscos to have been allowed to participate in the conquest of New Spain. Some black conquistadors, then, like their white peer Villalobos, received encomiendas and participated in the establishment of cattle ranching just as Garrido participated in the establishment of wheat cultivation. Whether those blacks introduced African knowledge into that process, however, remains a question. Juan el Negro almost certainly was not African. His ancestors had probably been living in Andalusia for many generations, and he was therefore as Andalusian as Villalobos. Benito el Negro may have been Andalusian, like Juan el Negro, or African, like Garrido. Yet even Garrido, definitely born in West Africa and enslaved as a teenager, must have learned about wheat cultivation in Portugal or Spain rather than among the rice, sorghum, and millet fields of his birthplace. The third aspect of potential African involvement recognizes that La Antigua Veracruz became a major slave port in the 1530s and that blacks, both slave and free, formed a large proportion of the lowland population. The slave trade to the Spanish Americas began in 1502, and in 1518 the Crown began to allow shipments directly from Africa instead of requiring transshipment through Seville. Over the next three centuries some two hundred thousand African slaves disembarked in New Spain, the majority in La Antigua Veracruz and Veracruz. More than three-quarters of them arrived before 1650. And they came from many parts of Africa, sold through licenses the Spaniards granted to Portuguese, French, and British slavers.63 Many of the earliest arrivals came from Senegambia, where the transAfrican cattle belt intersects the Atlantic, and some of them would have brought knowledge of the herding ecology of the sub-Saharan steppes (fig. 2.8).64 The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database records that 35,430 Senegambians disembarked between 1531 and 1650 in Spanish Central America, about 17 percent of the total to arrive during that period. As the volume of the slave trade increased, so did the number of Senegambians to arrive: from 1,607 in 1531–50, averaging 85 per year; to 9,704 in 1551–1600, some 198 per year; to 24,119 in 1601–50, about 494 per year. But the proportion of Senegambians among the total arrivals decreased just as steadily: from 85 percent in 1531–50, to 20 percent in 1551–1600, to

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Figure 2.8.  West Africa with areas of open-range cattle herding, northern limit of the range of the tsetse fly, general locations of selected ethnic groups, and slave coasts.

15 percent in 1601–50. Between 1551 and 1652, in fact, only 20 percent came from West Africa while the other 80 percent came from embarkation points near the mouth of the Congo River and other parts of West Central Africa, reflecting the general southward shift over the sixteenth century of the regions of origin of the slave trade to the Spanish Americas. Inventories from estates and other records confirm the decline in Senegambian dominance over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in parallel with the increase in West Central Africans, mulattos, Creoles, and free blacks. An inventory from 1549 of Cortés’s sugar estate near Cuernavaca records 123 slaves: 7 had no indication of origin; 29 were Creoles, born in New Spain; 83 came from Africa; and 4 had other origins, such as the Canary Islands and Portugal. Senegambians composed 88 percent of the Africans whose origins were specified, mainly of Wolof, Mandingo, and Serer origins. An inventory of the Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo at the end of the seventeenth century yielded the origins of 501 slaves: nearly 13 percent were Creoles, 80 percent had been born in Africa, and 7 percent had other origins, such as Brazil and Spain. Of the Africans only about 6 percent were Senegambians, with 21 percent from West Africa more broadly and the other 79 percent from West Central Africa. The origins of slaves sold in Veracruz at the Xalapa market between 1578

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and 1700 display a similar southward shift in African origins. Meanwhile, Veracruzan estate, church, and civil records reveal that, as in New Spain in general, the proportion of African-born blacks decreased over the seventeenth century in parallel with increases in the proportions of Creole blacks, mulattos, and those of combined African and native origin.65 Only a small proportion of the slaves that disembarked in the Veracruz lowlands remained there, the inland sugar plantations and mines consuming the vast majority. Of those that did remain, during the sixteenth century most were concentrated at La Antigua Veracruz. The Spanish population of the city fluctuated around a thousand for much of that century, undergoing great seasonal swings prompted by the arrival of the fleet from Spain in late summer and its departure for Havana the next spring. The first report of blacks there dates to 1571, the priest claiming “more than 600 black male and female slaves” as well as some mulattos and a few free blacks.66 Others also noted the substantial slave population at La Antigua Veracruz in the 1570s: “It has 200 houses, 300 Spaniards, 500 slaves, 500 horses.”67 La Antigua Veracruz was the third largest city in New Spain, following Mexico City and Puebla, and the only one of the three with such a large majority of black slaves.68 Slaves also had a substantial presence at the island fortress of San Juan de Ulúa during its construction, which began in the 1560s. John Chilton, an English merchant, reported that in 1568 “about 50 soldiers, and captains, that keep the forts, and about 150 negroes, who all the year long are occupied in carrying of stones for building, and other uses, and to help to make fast the ships.”69 The priest of La Antigua Veracruz confirmed the substantial number of blacks working on the fortress, claiming they lived in “twenty houses,” and Alonso Ponce reported less precisely that there were “many black males and females” building the fortress.70 With the viceregal order of 1597 to move the port to the mainland opposite San Juan de Ulúa, La Antigua Veracruz declined into a small village, and the present location of Veracruz grew over the next two centuries into a city of sixteen thousand residents, “without counting soldiers and seamen.”71 In 1609, after most of the population had moved to the new Veracruz, Bishop Alonso de la Mota y Escobar found only eight Spaniards and an unspecified majority of free blacks living at La Antigua Veracruz. As the new port grew over the seventeenth century, free and enslaved blacks seemingly formed as large a proportion of its population as they had at its former site: “All the

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Spanish residents [of Veracruz] have many male and female black slaves, besides the many free blacks.”72 Besides urban blacks, who worked mainly in construction and stevedoring, there was a rural black population in the lowlands. Some worked in logging and transportation, especially in the dense forests of southern Veracruz and along the royal highways that linked the port to Mexico City through Xalapa and, later, Córdoba.73 Others worked on sugar plantations, such as the one that Rodrigo de Albornoz, the former royal auditor of New Spain, founded in the 1530s at his encomienda of Zempoala. He obtained licenses to import 150 slaves to work there and in his other enterprises because most of the natives of that former metropolis had died in the smallpox epidemic of 1520.74 After he had, in the words of Díaz del Castillo, destroyed Zempoala, Albornoz abandoned the encomienda and relocated to Xalapa, some fifty kilometers inland, where a major sugar district was emerging as the lowlands became the domain of cattle ranchers.75 In 1543, the year before his Zempoala encomienda escheated, he obtained a land grant for a sugar plantation near Xalapa, but local native communities mounted such opposition that the viceroy appointed a commission to investigate.76 During the ensuing proceedings the natives stressed “the damage and prejudice that the blacks, oxen, horses, and other livestock of the said mill could cause to the said natives and their crops” and cited as evidence “the mill that the said Auditor [i.e., Albornoz] had in the province of Zempoala, which was entirely faded away and depopulated through the said cause.”77 Other blacks lived and labored on the estancias of the cattle barons who came to dominate the lowlands over the sixteenth century. Gonzalo de Córdova, the patriarch of the Ruiz de Córdova family, began a ranching empire in spite of not holding an encomienda he could draw on for native labor. He was in New Spain by 1535, became a merchant and a vecino of La Antigua Veracruz and Mexico City, and was already wealthy by 1556. From 1547 to 1593, between father Gonzalo and sons Hernán and Gaspar, the Ruiz de Córdova family received grants of one sheep and twelve cattle estancias, controlled others through surrogates, and bought still others. In 1571, the priest at La Antigua Veracruz claimed that Hernán “had two hundred blacks and twenty estancias.”78 By the time the family entailed their holdings as the Mayorazgo de Santa Fe, sometime after the death of Gonzalo in 1581 or earlier, it included thirty-three estancias.79

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Francisco de la Higuera was another cattle baron who controlled the lowlands. He too lacked an encomienda but accumulated capital through the labor of African slaves on his sugar plantations in the environs of Xalapa. His sugar mill Santísima Trinidad became one of the largest of the early colonial period, with a workforce of some fifty slaves by the 1630s and eighty by the 1660s. By the early seventeenth century the Higuera family had acquired more than twenty cattle estancias in the lowlands, entailed their estate as a mayorazgo, and intermarried with the Ruiz de Córdova family. Although specific records remain elusive, the conjunction of slave ownership, estancias, and intermarriage with a family known to have used black vaqueros suggests that blacks also herded cattle on the Higuera family’s cattle ranches.80 Some of those many rural blacks numbered among the ones that came to village churches to be confirmed by Bishop Alonso de la Mota y Escobar during his itineraries through the Veracruz lowlands in 1609 and 1617, but others were cimarrones. Slaves in New Spain could escape slavery by purchasing their freedom or being manumitted by their masters, but the surest and swiftest path to freedom involved becoming a runaway, a cimarrón. As the number of slaves in the colony increased over the sixteenth century, so did the number of revolts and cimarrones; numerous and increasingly large cimarrón communities became established starting in the 1560s. The most populous of those Veracruzan palenques was Yanga, founded about 1580 on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre Oriental, an area rugged enough to defend against recapture but near enough to Spanish settlements to raid them. Yanga bore the name of its leader, Gaspar Yanga, possibly Ñanga or Ñaga, reputedly a Brong from the Gold Coast of West Africa despite a name that seems more West Central African. His main purpose in raiding towns, plantations, estancias, and the royal highways that connected the coast with Mexico City was the liberation of more slaves, and by the end of the sixteenth century his palenque had grown to a hundred adults and their children. They subsisted not only by raiding but also by growing their own crops and raising cattle and other livestock. A major military expedition in 1609 forced Yanga to terms, and in return for freedom he and the other cimarrones agreed to resettle along the royal highway between Veracruz and Córdoba. They founded the village of San Lorenzo de los Negros, renamed Yanga in the twentieth century. Other slaves continued

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to escape, however, and the Veracruz lowlands and slopes of the Sierra Madre Oriental harbored many palenques, small and large, over the colonial period.81 Such cimarrón communities, from the palenques of New Spain to the quilombos, or Maroon communities, of Brazil and the Maroon villages of the Guianas, were central to establishing an African botanical legacy in the Americas. Beyond direct Spanish surveillance and control, cimarrones had some latitude to grow crops and raise livestock in ways of their own choosing. Such communities of blacks who had freed themselves became not only key to preserving African knowledge but also central to the creation of Creole knowledge that hybridized African, European, and Native American elements. Particularly in places where colonization extirpated natives, whether in the Caribbean or the Veracruz lowlands, Africans became conservationists of the native thread in that creative process.82 In Veracruz, however, most black communities retain little obvious African identity. Those located near major highways and cities, like Yanga and Mandinga, preserve no observable African characteristics beyond their suggestive toponyms. Only a few remote villages continue to display obvious African legacies, the primary example being Coyolillo, near Xalapa. Others include Mozomboa, Playa Mocambo, Mozambique, Las Iguanas, La Matamba, Mata Clara, Las Palmillas, and Río Moreno.83 The African legacy in the landscape of Veracruz might now seem minor, yet the sheer number of enslaved and free blacks who lived there during the colonial period suggests that they may well have played roles in the establishment of cattle ranching. Villalobos must be credited for founding the general herding ecology in the early 1520s on the basis of his experience in the Marismas of Andalusia. But the many blacks, including a preponderance of Senegambians early in the sixteenth century, who worked on estancias or lived as cimarrones may well have added vital modifications to the Veracruzan herding ecology that over the sixteenth century and the seventeenth differentiated it from that of the Marismas. Free blacks like Benito el Negro and Juan el Negro participated in elaborating that herding ecology when it also became instituted in the Pánuco in the late 1520s. Other blacks, many of them slaves and therefore even more anonymous than either Benito or Juan el Negro, seem to have been

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involved in at least two modifications. The first involved inventing the practice of throwing the lasso from horseback, which eventually became characteristic of cattle ranching throughout the Americas; the second involved the use of living fences to protect crops from cattle. Europeans and Africans had long used the lasso, but not from horseback. In the two places in Europe where herders used lassos in the sixteenth century, the Marismas and the Camargue, they used them, as noted earlier, to free cattle mired in mudholes. The vaqueros of the Marismas spun their cords from esparto grass and called them lazos but never cast them from horseback. Instead, the herder always dismounted, placed the running noose over the horns, tied the other end to the tail of a horse, and then pulled until the animal emerged onto solid land. The historic Andalusian saddle therefore lacks both a horn to cinch the lasso and long stirrups to brace against the jolt involved in roping from horseback. In Africa herders managed their tame cattle on foot. They would lasso a rebellious bull by snaring a foot or horn with the running noose, tie a heavy stone or piece of wood to the other end of the rope, and then wait until the animal had tired enough to subdue it. But lassoing from horseback was not part of West African herding practice. Throwing the lasso from horseback did not emerge until after Europeans and Africans had crossed the Atlantic, sometime in the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century the practice occurred throughout New Spain. The traveler Pierre-Marie-François Pagès described lassoing as it was done near San Antonio, Texas, in 1767: “They take a long snare rolled on top of their arm, throw it at either the neck or the feet, and halting their horse, they stop the ensnared animal.”84 Among the many keen observations Sartorius made in the nineteenth century in the Veracruz lowlands, he described the use of lassos by the cattle herders who lived in isolated dwellings they called ranchos: “They are a peculiar people, simple and hardy, well mounted and excellent riders . . . and may be recognized at once by their leather garments, the huntingknife at their side, invariably on horseback, with a lasso of leather hanging down from the saddle, and with long spurs on their capacious boots.”85 His fellow German Johann Moritz Rugendas sketched a vivid image of a vaquero using his lasso to catch a bull, the straining rope cinched around the saddle horn and the rider’s legs braced straight in the long stirrups of the heavy saddle (fig. 2.9).86

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Figure 2.9.  Use of the lasso on the coastal plain in the early nineteenth century.

An illustration from the early 1640s records the earliest phase of the emergence of that distinctive practice (fig. 2.10).87 The image portrays a demonstration in Madrid by vaqueros from the Americas of a thennovel lassoing technique. As in Andalusia, the rider had the end of the lasso tied to the tail of the horse, suggesting that the saddle, not visible in the illustration, lacked a horn. But unlike herders in Andalusia, the rider lassoed the bull from horseback, as described in the caption: “They do this with a pole of twelve to thirteen palms, placed in the loop of a lasso, carrying both towards the bull and struggling with the long pole to reach the point to throw, and the other [end] is very securely tied to the tail of the horse; and the rest of the rope or cord is gathered in the rein hand, and all of it runs out, from the tail to the bull, to the length of six horses. And although they tend often to miss the throw, they try until they get it.”88 When Villalobos established ranching in Veracruz, therefore, lassoing from horseback did not exist there, in Andalusia, or on the Antilles. Given the rudimentary version displayed in Madrid in the early 1640s and the broad occurrence throughout the Americas by the mideighteenth century, vaqueros of the late 1600s or early 1700s must have refined the practice of lassoing from horseback and the associated modifications to saddles and stirrups.

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Figure 2.10.  A Creole slave from the Americas demonstrating how to lasso a bull in Madrid in the mid-seventeenth century. The caption refers to the rider, despite his apparently light complexion, as a slave from the Americas. Reproduced courtesy of Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Labor scarcity may have prompted that major modification of the herding ecology of New Spain. Hernán Ruiz de Córdova managed twenty estancias with a mere two hundred blacks, after all. That low ratio of herders to cattle persisted into the early nineteenth century, a single herder tending from five hundred to eight hundred head of cattle, according to Sartorius. In contrast, the ranchers of the Marismas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could rely on population growth, landlessness, and poverty to make plentiful labor available at low cost.89 The image of the lassoing demonstration in seventeenth-century Madrid also provides a clue that blacks may have played a major role in the development of lassoing. Although the rider in the plate has pale skin, the caption reads, “In the Plaza of Madrid, some Creole slaves from the Indies demonstrated the next skill, which caused much admiration in all.”90 Exactly where in the Americas (then known as the Indies) those slaves came from remains unknown. But sometime between that demonstration and the mid-eighteenth century, the pole would be abandoned, a suitable saddle developed, and the practice of throwing the lasso from

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horseback would become firmly established in the Veracruz lowlands and elsewhere in New Spain. The ordinances of the Mesta, the association that regulated cattle ranching and sheep herding in New Spain, may have encouraged blacks to take the lead role in transforming the lasso from little more than a rope with a running noose into a highly efficient method of rounding up cattle from horseback.91 The municipal council of Mexico City founded the Mesta in 1537 and prescribed a code of seventeen ordinances to regulate conflicts among livestock herders and others. In 1574 Viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almanza promulgated a much-expanded code of eightythree ordinances that applied to all of New Spain. He hoped that the many new ordinances would reverse the decline in the livestock population. For example, the viceroy in part blamed the decline on native communities that apparently used dogs to stampede cattle from estancias into pits dug on the outskirts of their villages, subdued their catch with nets and lassos, and slaughtered them; thus he prohibited natives as well as mestizos and mulattos living in villages near estancias from owning nets and lassos.92 He also promulgated a general ban on the burning of pastures, failing to recognize the nuanced relationship among vegetation, livestock, and fire.93 But he seems to have recognized the primary cause of the decline in the cattle herds: the silver boom of the sixteenth century so inflated the price of hides, tallow, and veal that ranchers began to slaughter not only their excess males but also their female calves and mature cows, the hembras de vientre. In the absence of that breeding stock, rates of herd growth slowed, prices increased even more, and so did the indiscriminate slaughter by ranchers and rustlers. With a market driven by mining and a bust ever imminent, ranchers would have had great incentive to increase cull rates while high prices lasted. As a consequence, the Mesta code of 1574 prohibited the indiscriminate killing of female cattle.94 In order to ensure compliance the viceroy restricted the killing of most cattle to licensed slaughterhouses so that each animal’s age, sex, and brand could be inspected before slaughter. Even ranchers who wanted to sell their own cattle directly to the public or use them to feed their vaqueros had first to secure a license and submit to an official inspection before proceeding with any slaughter. As a further obstacle to the indiscriminate slaughter of cattle, the viceroy also prohibited vaqueros from continuing to chase down cattle with desjarretaderas, even criminalizing

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their ownership. The killing of female cattle continued nonetheless, the profits in hides and tallow made with the desjarretadera outweighing the ability of the Mesta to enforce the ordinances, and subsequent viceroys therefore issued repeated prohibitions against the slaughter of cows through at least the end of the sixteenth century.95 The biased penalties the Mesta imposed for violations of its ordinances was a strong encouragement for nonwhite vaqueros to learn how to cast the lasso from horseback. While the ordinances generally banned the use of the desjarretadera, only nonwhites were fined or punished simply for possessing one: “That there be no desjarretaderas, nor any hocked livestock . . . any native, mulatto, black, or mestizo that has been a vaquero . . . cannot carry or possess a lance or desjarretadera for any reason, under penalty of twenty pesos de oro de minas, . . . and he who incurs the said penalty and does not have the means to pay will be given a hundred lashes in public.”96 Given that enslaved vaqueros did not receive wages, the severe public lashing would have been the default penalty. Even free black and mulatto vaqueros received such low wages that twenty pesos de oro de minas would have been many months of salary. The detailed records of the Cortés estancias in Tehuantepec reveal that in 1588 mulatto vaqueros received an average monthly salary of three pesos de oro común, worth about two pesos de oro de minas.97 The fine for owning a desjarretadera therefore equaled ten months’ salary for nonwhite vaqueros. While white vaqueros could continue to use the desjarretadera without fear of a ruinous fine or a brutal public lashing, the revised Mesta ordinances of 1574 compelled black vaqueros to develop an alternative way to catch feral stock. Moreover, black vaqueros had not only strong motive to innovate but also ample opportunity. Many vaqueros of the Veracruz lowlands were black. The fifteenth ordinance of the Mesta code of 1574 stipulates that for every two thousand head of cattle, an estancia had to have four black or native workers, at least two of them mounted.98 In the Veracruz lowlands, where few natives survived past the mid-sixteenth century, blacks made up the majority of residents on the cattle estancias: Hernán Ruiz de Córdoba alone had two hundred blacks on his twenty estancias. The code also reveals that at least some of those blacks, whether free or enslaved, were mayordomos in charge of daily ranch operations: “Many livestock ranchers do not want Spaniards as majordomos, in order

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to avoid the many costs and troubles they have with them, and take on mestizos, and mulattos, and natives and their own slaves as majordomos, and entrust them with the said livestock, as genuine and trustworthy people.”99 In addition, the saddle horn, so important to lassoing from horseback, had West African antecedents. While West Africans did not use horses to herd livestock, the military and social elite did ride using saddles with horns that served as a rest for the rein hand and as a hanger for bags.100 Twentieth-century ethnographers and nineteenth-century explorers report such saddles as early as the 1820s for the sub-Saharan herding belt from Senegambia to the shores of Lake Chad. The West African saddles bear a striking resemblance to those developed by the vaqueros of colonial New Spain (fig. 2.11).101 Whether or not the memory of such antecedent West African saddles among black vaqueros in Veracruz actually stimulated invention of similar horned saddles used to lasso cattle from horseback must remain speculative, but Andalusians and other Europeans had no such antecedents at all. No wonder, then, that in Madrid in the mid-seventeenth century enslaved black vaqueros from the Americas staged a performance of the earliest phase of the process of transforming the lasso from a rope with a

Figure 2.11.  Two historic West African saddles with horns, dating to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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running noose into a method of catching cattle from horseback. Blacks would continue to develop that practice until they could reliably catch cattle from horseback without permanently incapacitating them with the desjarretadera, thereby complying with Mesta ordinances and avoiding public lashings. That substantial modification of the herding ecology allowed vaqueros to round up and corral live cattle in order to sort them by age, sex, and brand before driving them to market. By 1800 the lasso had become the preferred method of rounding up cattle in New Spain, not only among blacks but generally. And the desjarretadera had become an anachronism. Regarding living fences, Sartorius observed that they were a vital element of the pastoral landscape in the Veracruz lowlands of the early nineteenth century, protecting small agricultural plots from cattle. He described in great detail a typical rancho, home to an extended family that worked for a rancher but also tended its own small herd and agricultural field, paying the landowner a grazing fee and part of the maize harvest. On a slight rise in the savanna country of the piedmont, a cluster of houses occupied an area cleared of all grass and other vegetation except for a few trees that shaded the thatched roofs. Among many other questions, Sartorius asked the family that lived there why they had planted their maize so far from the house. Their response offers great insight into the importance of living fences in relation to cattle ranching: “Ah! You don’t understand that,” he returns. “My plantation lies down there in the hollow, surrounded by wood, because the soil there is excellent and the horned cattle can do me no harm; but one can’t live there for the intermittent fever, and because there are too many snakes, mosquitoes and garrapatas. . . . One must live up here in the pure air; but here I can’t plant, because in the dry season, the cattle would leave me no rest by night or day, and would break through the hedges which would here require much labour to repair. The savanna, too, sometimes catches fire, and might destroy my labour in a few moments.”102 What Sartorius seems to be describing is an agricultural plot enclosed in a wood or woodland, “von wald umschlossen,” in his words. The reference to “hedges” in the English version is deceptive because the original

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reads “einzäunung,” which means enclosure or fence in general rather than a particular type of fence like a hedge, which would be hecke in German. Whatever reason the translator had for giving Sartorius’s “einzäunun” more specificity, that is, a hedge rather than the more generic fence, the passage does describe an agricultural plot enclosed in a wood, a strategy to protect crops found throughout the tropical Americas that seems to derive from African practices. Farmers grow such live fences from cuttings of trees or shrubs to produce a dense barrier that protects crops from livestock. Since the late nineteenth century, when wire fencing became available, farmers have increasingly planted more widely spaced trees that serve as live posts to support strands of smooth or barbed wire. Denser live fences, or hedges, continue to persist, though, because they provide secondary crops such as livestock browse and fiber. Precolonial farmers in the Veracruz lowlands grew strips of agave and cactus along the boundaries of their fields, but they did not require protection from livestock and so did not plant dense hedges. Instead, the first evidence of densely planted live fences in the Americas comes from sixteenth-century cimarrón communities and echoes their widespread earlier use in West Africa as defensive works.103 One of the earliest descriptions of live fencing for all of the Americas, in fact, comes from Yanga. A Spanish attack on that cimarrón community in 1609 resulted in a comprehensive description of its defensive works, including dense live fences, as related by a Jesuit who accompanied the expedition. Yanga had concentric defensive hedges surrounding a palisade: “They had made a roza of trees, vines, and shrubs, where people that wanted to attack were obstructed and entangled.”104 Roza, in this context, means of an area of low trees, vines, and shrubs—a broad hedge or live fence, in other words. Rozar literally means “to scrape” but in an agricultural context means to clear low woody or herbaceous vegetation or that vegetation itself. Tumbar, in contrast, refers to clearing large trees. The Jesuit account of Yanga thus refers to the use of a live fence as a defensive perimeter similar to those pictured for Senegambian towns of the period. Quilombos in colonial Brazil may also have employed defensive perimeters that included live fences. Whether the rural Veracruzans Sartorius spoke with also used the word roza, which he then rendered as “wald,” remains unknown.105

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Revisiting Veracruz after a dozen years to study the limited primary sources relevant to the role of blacks in the establishment of its cattle ranches and herding ecology has not refuted my previous conclusions. First, Gregorio de Villalobos played a leading role in establishing the first ranch, its herding ecology, and its practices. Second, these factors derived from the Marismas of Andalusia. And third, the Villalobos ranch proved prototypical for the herding ecology of the lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico from Veracruz northward to Texas. In fact, my revisiting of Veracruz has resulted in a richer, more complex understanding, one that includes a broader diversity of actors. Reexamination of the sources that pertain to natives confirms that their early, near-total extirpation from the lowlands precluded any significant role for them, even as passive labor, let alone as creative participants. But the sources that pertain to blacks force revisions. The long-standing but previously unexamined proposition that black vaqueros herded cattle in the Marismas and therefore had an influence on herding practices on that side of the Atlantic does not withstand scrutiny. Senegambians who came to Andalusia via the Portuguese slave trade during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rarely did any sort of rural work, let alone cattle herding. Senegambian Moors may have worked as herders in the Marismas between their arrival with the Almoravids in the eleventh century and the thirteenth century, when the Reconquista reached Seville, but a significant influence on the herding ecology seems doubtful because the Visigoths and their predecessors had herded cattle in the Marismas for a millennium before the Moors arrived and al-Rāzi noted well-developed cattle herding there by the tenth century, well after the beginning of Moorish control in the eighth century. The sub-Saharan Africans who first arrived in the eleventh century thus encountered a herding ecology established by diverse groups over more than a millennium and one that the Moors had already mastered, possibly modified, and certainly controlled for two centuries. Any Senegambian cattle herders who settled in the Marismas during Almoravid times, in other words, would have been more likely to accept well-established local practices than try to introduce new ones. Blacks actually had much more opportunity to make creative contributions in the Americas than in either al-Andalus or Andalusia. Despite the social disempowerment of many American blacks, enslaved and free,

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in contrast to sub-Saharan Moors, the creation of novel social and environmental relations in the Americas stimulated innovation amid the hybridization of ideas with diverse origins. Even the many similarities between the Marismas and the Veracruz lowlands did not permit Villalobos to replicate exactly the Andalusian herding ecology. Differences in environmental and social relations prompted modifications as ranchers over the sixteenth century occupied the lowlands fronting the Gulf of Mexico. Many were conquistadors, including many whites like Villalobos but also blacks like Juan el Negro and Benito el Negro. More anonymously but of greater consequence, the many enslaved and freed blacks of the Veracruz lowlands also modified the Andalusian herding ecology. The limited sources reveal two such modifications for which blacks had both motive and opportunity: casting the lasso from horseback, a practice that would later become iconic to the ranches of the Great Plains of North America; and the use of live fences to keep cattle from devastating the garden plots of the vaqueros. Some two centuries after cattle ranching became established in Veracruz, tejano vaqueros reached the Texas–Louisiana borderlands with their herds. There they intersected and hybridized with the two other herding ecologies established in the coastal lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico. One had emerged in Louisiana during French rule, in the first half of the eighteenth century. The other arrived during the succeeding half century, after the transfer of Louisiana to the Spanish colonial empire, but it arrived with Anglo ranchers who had driven their herds westward from South Carolina. The distinctive herding ecology and practices that emerged from that hybridization came to dominate much of the North American Great Plains during a brief florescence in the late nineteenth century, first spurred by post–Civil War industrialization and then overwhelmed by it as barbed wire closed the range.106

c h a p t e r t hree

Louisiana

French Louisiana was a chaotic world where the cultural materials brought by Africans often turned out to be the most adaptive. —Gwendolyn Midlo Hall , Africans in Colonial Louisiana (1992)

scanning through microfilm of colonial documents in the Special Collections Reading Room at Louisiana State University, I was stunned by a single row in the summary table of a census of Louisiana from 1766 (fig. 3.1). The existence per se of an eighteenth-century Spanish census of Louisiana did not seem surprising given that the Bourbon bureaucracy produced many such enumerations during its imperial incorporation of the former French colony in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. Quite predictably, in that Louisiana thereby became the frontier between the Spanish and British empires in North America, each row of the summary table concerns a militia company. The columns record the name of the captain of each company followed by the respective post’s number of households, men and women, male and female adolescents and children, slaves, area of land granted, equines, cattle, other livestock, and muskets.1 The census enumerated only 160 Ishak “able-bodied men” living in four villages associated with the Attakapas Post, representing a total population of about 500 and fitting the pattern of extremely rapid native depopulation owing to the violence, dislocation, and epidemic diseases characteristic of the colonization of the Americas. Depopulation typically approached 90 percent within a century of first contact, and by the time of the census the Ishaks had been interacting with Europeans for more than two centuries: from the shipwreck of Cabeza de Vaca in the early 61

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Figure 3.1.  Lower Louisiana in the eighteenth century, showing places referenced in this chapter.

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sixteenth century through the founding of Natchitoches and New Orleans in the early eighteenth century, the establishment of ephemeral trading posts among the Ishaks in the late 1730s, settlement by enough pioneers to form a militia and found the Attakapas Post on Bayou Teche during the 1750s, and the flood of Acadian settlers in the 1760s. Significantly perhaps, the census locates the surviving Ishaks far from the Attakapas Post, their four villages spread out along the coast from the mouth of the Vermilion River to that of the Sabine or the Trinity.2 The table claims that the first large group of Acadians to arrive in Louisiana had acquired a herd of 1,040 head of cattle and 312 other livestock within a year of settling along Bayou Teche near the Attakapas Post in April 1765. The French caretaker government, headed by Charles Philippe Aubry and Denis Nicolas Foucault, had supplied the nearly fifty Acadian households with seed to grow rice and maize but not with livestock. Yet apparently each family had rapidly amassed an average of more than 20 head of cattle.3 The particular row that stunned me read, “Five old cattle ranches in the Attakapas District”: no households or militia, 50 slaves, 2 leagues of land granted, 15,000 cattle, 300 horses, 100 other livestock, and 50 muskets.4 That single row raised the unexpected possibility that blacks might have played a major role in establishing the first large cattle ranches in Louisiana. It implied that 50 enslaved blacks armed with muskets and under no direct supervision by whites were riding around on five preAcadian ranches that contained more than half of the cattle in the Louisiana colony, an astounding 15,000 head. The table totals all of Louisiana’s cattle at 28,491, including 1,149 head in the Arkansas and Illinois settlements, and reveals that the only districts other than the Attakapas with more than 2,000 head were Pointe Coupée with 2,263 and the German Coast with 2,290. Even the Opelousas Post, which the French had established in the 1760s about 80 kilometers north of the Attakapas Post and which would become notable for cattle ranching over the late eighteenth century, had only 1,350 head. Somehow, between the initial incursions of traders in the late 1730s and the influx of Acadians less than three decades later, five ranches in the Attakapas District came to dominate cattle herding in Louisiana; and blacks came to dominate the human population of those ranches. Previous scholarship largely ignores most aspects of pre-Acadian

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ranching in Louisiana and therefore does not provide even a description of those ranches, let alone an explanation of how they became established or how blacks came to dominate them. Lacking the research, some have simply assumed that the earliest ranching in Louisiana derived its knowledge and practices from the French Caribbean, principally SaintDomingue, and that the ultimate inspiration therefore derived from Spanish precedents on Hispaniola.5 The relatively large literature on Acadian ranching certainly acknowledges pre-Acadian antecedents but makes no effort to investigate them or differentiate them from Acadian ranching.6 Moreover, that literature by default emphasizes the roles of whites because Acadians in the Attakapas did not begin to acquire large numbers of slaves until the nineteenth century. The proportion of Acadian households that owned any slaves at all increased from less than 4 percent in 1794 to 56 percent in 1810.7 In contrast, focusing on pre-Acadian Attakapas ranching permits an evaluation of the possibility that blacks played a key role in establishing cattle ranching in Louisiana. First, locating the five pre-Acadian ranches identified in the census of 1766 and their herds of cattle identifies local landscape relationships that facilitate understanding of the herding ecology involved and how it might have differed from that of the Acadian ranchers who followed. Second, reconstructing the biographies of the ranchers and slaves connects them to Atlantic networks in order to identify the different types of knowledge and skills they contributed to cattle ranching in the Attakapas in the mid-eighteenth century. Determination of the locations of the five pre-Acadian ranches draws on the voluminous documentation generated as the U.S. federal government vetted claims to private property after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The United States considered all of Louisiana to be public land except for those tracts individuals had acquired through grants from the antecedent French or Spanish governments or through purchase from native peoples. The General Land Office (GLO), founded in 1812, put much effort into accumulating evidence of colonial land grants and their subsequent subdivision and conveyance through sale, inheritance, exchange, or donation in order to make recommendations to Congress regarding the validity of each claim. The GLO commissioners for the Southwestern District of Louisiana, which included the Attakapas,

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deposed witnesses who had lived there since the mid-1700s, collected originals or copies of grants and associated land surveys, and interviewed the surveyors who had worked there. The resulting archive ranges from the fundamental evidence of colonial documents and transcripts of testimony through case summaries and reports, acts of Congress confirming approved claims, the resulting surveys and patents, and the original plat maps for each township.8 Those documents reveal that five—and only five—Attakapas land grants predate 1771, the year in which the Acadians who settled there received their first grants. The French caretaker government had not granted the Acadians land upon their arrival in 1765, and their participation in the rebellion of 1768 that ousted the first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, did not encourage the new regime to grant them land for several years thereafter. Only under the third Spanish governor, Luis de Unzaga y Amezaga, did Acadians begin to receive grants, beginning with two dozen in 1771 and following with twice that many the next year.9 Figure 3.2 locates the five pre-1771 grants and indicates the years of their initial occupation, the year of the French grant, and the year of any subsequent Spanish grant as reconstructed on the basis of extant colonial documents, GLO depositions and surveys, and other relevant primary sources. André Massé established the first ranch in the mid-1740s and on 10 October 1763 requested a grant based on his long occupancy. Award of the grant, however, awaited the arrival of the Acadians. To assist in their settlement, Aubry brokered a deal in which Jean Antoine Bernard Dauterive would provide the Acadian families with a small herd of cattle and Massé would provide them with pasture at the Attakapas Post. The Acadians, for their part, would raise those cattle and annually turn some of the growing herd over to Dauterive. In addition, Aubry would award Massé and Dauterive a grant for a tract of land as vast in extent as its boundaries were vague: an area known as the Vermilion Prairie, bounded by Bayou Tortue and Lac Flamand on the east, the Vermilion River on the north and west, and the coast to the south. The deal fell through, however, when the Acadians instead chose to settle several kilometers downstream from the Massé ranch and purchase cattle from Jean Baptiste Grevemberg, another pioneer rancher. Aubry therefore withdrew the grant of the Vermilion Prairie, and Massé remained on his ranch at the Attakapas Post. In 1771, however, Dauterive claimed he had purchased his former

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Figure 3.2.  Pre-Acadian ranches of the Attakapas District, showing the Teche Ridge, which parallels Bayou Teche, and the bluff that demarcates the eastern edge of the prairies of southwestern Louisiana. (See figure 3.1 for location.)

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partner’s share and successfully solicited a grant for the tract from Unzaga, the Spaniards having agreed to confirm all existing French grants upon assuming control of Louisiana.10 Congress accepted the claims for private lands founded on that grant and surveyed them as irregular sections on the original township plats, as mapped in figure 3.2.11 Four other pioneer ranchers followed Massé’s initiative in requesting land grants in the Attakapas. In the early 1750s Grevemberg purchased land from Charles Toutin, a trader who had purchased the land from another trader, Joseph Blancpain, who had supposedly purchased the land from the Ishaks. In 1765 Grevemberg successfully petitioned Aubry for a grant that formalized his occupation of that land while at the same time arguing that the Acadians should not receive grants even though he had sold them some cattle. Like Massé, Grevemberg requested an enormous tract with vague boundaries, its focal point being the compound meander in Bayou Teche known as Fausse Pointe. Grevemberg claimed he intended to use a relatively short fence across the narrow neck of Fausse Pointe to enclose it as a pasture. After the second Spanish governor, Alejandro O’Reilly, issued an ordinance in 1770 that no land grant should exceed one square league, Grevemberg successfully petitioned on behalf of himself and his five sons to ratify a reduced version of the earlier grant.12 That Spanish grant served as the basis for Congress’s acceptance of land claims, and the patented sections appear in figure 3.2. That second grant did not extend far enough downstream to include the Fausse Pointe area he coveted, however, because Aubry had already allowed many of the Acadians to settle there even as he ignored their requests for land grants.13 The third pioneer rancher, Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire, purchased two leagues of land from the Ishaks in November 1760. A grant in 1764 from Aubry’s predecessor, Jean Jacques Blaise d’Abbadie, ratified that purchase and Fuselier’s occupancy. Like Grevemberg, however, the ordinance of 1770 spurred Fuselier to petition for a grant for a smaller tract. Congress accepted claims based on the resulting Spanish grant, as mapped in figure 3.2.14 Jean François Ledée, the fourth pioneer rancher, purchased a tract of land on 8 March 1762 from André Jung, a New Orleans merchant who had purchased the land from the Ishaks. In 1769, presumably prompted by the influx of Acadians, Ledée sought to improve his title by petitioning

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for a grant from Aubry, again serving as acting governor while awaiting the arrival of the second Spanish governor, O’Reilly. Aubry granted the tract and Congress accepted all claims founded on it: figure 3.2 maps the resulting sections.15 The fifth pre-1771 grant pertains to Joseph Deville Degoutin. On 13 June 1764 he received a grant from d’Abbadie for a tract of 2,500 arpents—in Louisiana the arpent, a measure of both distance and area, had a length of 58.5 meters and an area of 0.3424 hectares—on the left bank of Bayou Teche. The grants, echoing the usage in France, typically use the terms left bank and right bank in preference to cardinal directions because of the extreme sinuosity of the streams of southern Louisiana. (In Paris, for example, when one faces downstream on the River Seine the Left Bank always falls to the left even though it becomes the east bank of the river when viewed from the Eiffel Tower and the west bank when viewed from the Bibliothèque Nationale.)16 To be clear, figure 3.2 maps the locations of the cores of the five pre-Acadian grants rather than any more extensive, vaguely bounded predecessors. As Grevemberg claimed in his petition of 1765, referring to himself in the third person, the original sales or grants to himself and the others had been much larger: “No determinate quantity being expressed in the sale by which the land was conveyed to him, the memorialist has not considered himself confined to any quantity, particularly as the quantities claimed by Massé and Dauterive, Ledée, Fuselier, and Courtableau, which reach to the sea and for much larger quantities than that claimed by the memorialist, have never been disputed by any person.”17 Over the 1760s, however, such enormous landholdings became progressively untenable, especially after the arrival of the Acadians, encouraging the pre-Acadian ranchers to seek more secure title for their core tracts. The Grevemberg case illustrates the process: by 1760 initial acquisition through purchase from the Ishaks of an immense but vaguely bounded tract; in the 1760s successful opposition to grants for newly arrived Acadians and confirmation of title through a grant from the outgoing French government; in 1770, as the new Spanish government limited grants to a maximum of one square league, retreat to a smaller core tract in exchange for better-defined boundaries and more secure title. Beginning in 1771, when the Spanish government began to grant land to the Acadians, the earlier settlers acquired further land though grants and

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purchases, at least partially rebuilding their original holdings and thereby remaining politically and economically dominant in the Attakapas. The Grevemberg family, for example, received Spanish grants totaling 5,013 hectares in the 1770s and 1780s.18 If land is one major element of ranching, livestock is another. The census of 1766 provides the first enumeration of livestock in the Attakapas, but cattle had arrived on the banks of Bayou Teche long before then. Feral horses and cattle derived from Spanish efforts to colonize Texas constituted part of the French trade with the natives during the early eighteenth century. Antoine Simon le Page du Pratz lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734 and observed the involvement of the Avoyelles people in that trade: “Horses, oxen, and cows sought out in New Mexico for the French in Louisiana.”19 As the French and Spanish increasingly settled the Texas– Louisiana borderlands, a contraband trade developed in which cattle made up part of the eastward flow. In contrast, only a small proportion, if any, of the cattle grazing along Bayou Teche by 1766 had come through New Orleans, shipped from Saint-Domingue, Cuba, Florida, and Veracruz. Ultimately all of the cattle, the many head that came from northern New Spain and the few that came through New Orleans, derived from the Spanish livestock of Hispaniola and would have been lean, rangy longhorns.20 While the census of 1766 provides the first enumeration of those cattle, its limitations become obvious upon perusal beyond the summary table. That table claims that 16,040 head of cattle grazed in the Attakapas that year: 15,000 on the five old ranches and another 1,040 belonging to fifty Acadian households. Yet only forty-seven Acadian households appear in the census’s detailed tables and only five of them had any cattle at all: three with 1 animal each, another with 2, and the last with 7—totaling a mere dozen head, far short of 1,040.21 Apparently the Acadians had not really amassed an average of more than 20 head per family within little more than a year, as the summary table claims. In fact, other documents reveal that the Acadians had a difficult time acquiring their initial cattle. In April 1765 they signed the contract to settle on Massé’s ranch and raise some of Dauterive’s cattle in return for half the increase after six years. Each of eight families would receive a bull, 5 cows, and 5 calves. But the Acadians neither settled at the Attakapas Post nor

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consummated that contract, instead settling at Fausse Pointe and purchasing, according to the census, about a dozen head of cattle from Grevemberg. Whatever the true size of the Acadian herd in 1766, seemingly much closer to 10 head than to 1,000, the detailed tables agree more with the summary one about the vastly larger non-Acadian herd. The majority of the cattle pertained to the Massé and Dauterive ranch: Dauterive owned 10,000 head and Massé 20.22 Only 8 of the remaining 4,080 head claimed in the summary table appear under someone else’s name, that of Antoine Bonin. Ledée, Grevemberg, and Fuselier do not appear in the census in any jurisdiction, despite owning large tracts of land. Degoutin does appear in the enumeration for New Orleans but with no cattle to his name.23 Other sources suggest that the census of 1766 missed enumerating some cattle. A letter from 1756 by Jacinto de Barrios, then the Spanish commandant at Los Adaes in Texas, suggests that Massé may well have owned many more head than the 20 the census reports, claiming that just ten years prior he had owned “700 head of large livestock.”24 Another reference to the size of the non-Acadian herd comes from Grevemberg’s petition of 1765, in which he claimed to have more than 3,000 head of cattle.25 Only conjecture suggests that Ledée, Degoutin, and Fuselier may have accounted for any of the remainder of the 15,000 non-Acadian cattle claimed in the summary table. The census of 1771 comes too late, six years after the arrival of the Acadians, to do more than echo the situation in the mid-1760s but does list the following: Fuselier with 450 cattle on 1 league of land with title; Dauterive with no cattle mentioned but 11/2 leagues of land with title; Massé with 300 cattle on 1 league of land without title; Grevemberg with 300 head on 11/2 leagues with title; Ledée with 450 head of cattle but no land mentioned; and Degoutin not mentioned at all.26 That same year, Dauterive testified that he had 6,000 livestock at Attakapas.27 The overall assessment, then, must be that the census of 1766 accurately captured the size of the non-Acadian herd. Dauterive owned the vast majority of cattle, perhaps as many as 10,000. Grevemberg followed with a smaller herd but still in the thousands. Massé, Fuselier, and Ledée each had herds in the hundreds but fewer than 1,000. And Degoutin, being perhaps more of a land speculator than a rancher, had no cattle at all.28

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Brand registries complement censuses as sources for locating cattle, albeit not enumerating them. Of the roughly 25,000 brands in the three old brand books for the Attakapas District several predate the arrival of the Acadians in 1765, the earliest entries dating to the late 1730s (fig. 3.3).29 Several others predate the flood of Acadian brand registrations that began in 1766 as Acadians acquired cattle in advance of beginning to acquire titles to land in 1771. The earliest brands bear dates of 1739 and the names of two of Grevemberg’s sons: Louis and Barthélémy. Louis, however, would have

Figure 3.3.  Brands relevant to pre-Acadian ranching in the Middle Teche Valley.

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been about four years old that year, and Barthélémy was not even born for another fifteen, in the mid-1750s. The brand registered in Louis’s name consists of a 5 joined to an F and seems to derive from the father’s nickname, or dit-name, of Flamand and his number of sons, five. If so, Grevemberg certainly could not have registered the brand until the birth of the youngest son, Barthélémy. The brand registered in Barthélémy’s name consists of a G joined to a B, seemingly indicating his initials in reverse. For some reason, then, Grevemberg backdated the brands for his eldest and youngest sons to 1739. Grevemberg himself and two of his other three sons, Augustin and Jean Baptiste, both born in the mid-1740s, apparently never registered brands in their names. The other son, François, and Grevemberg’s wife, Anne Judith Chenal, did register brands in the 1770s and 1780s, when Barthélémy also registered a new brand. All incorporated initials that referred to Grevemberg, Flamand, François, or Barthélémy. They probably related to an expansion of the Grevemberg herds through acquisition of additional land grants in those decades as well as to the stipulation in O’Reilly’s ordinance of 1770 that all cattle had to be branded by the age of eighteen months.30 Neither Fuselier, Degoutin, Ledée, Massé, nor Dauterive registered brands before the Acadians began to do so in 1766, but Fuselier and Ledée did so afterward. Fuselier registered a hexagram brand in 1784, just five years before his death. Another brand for a Gabriel Fuselier, registered in 1802, seems to relate to the birth of his namesake, a grandson, in 1801. Ledée registered two brands: an equilateral triangle and an X. The triangle or delta brand lacks a date but clusters with others dating to the 1780s and might represent one he used for decades before dying in 1785, whereupon his executor may have registered it in order to sell the herd. The X brand that appears beside his name bears the date 19 April 1799, fourteen years after his death, and therefore probably represents a copying error.31 Three other ranchers, all associated with Massé, appear in the brand book with pre-1766 registration dates. Jacques Joseph Sorrel, a protégé of Massé according to Charles César Robin, supposedly registered a brand in 1758. The census of 1766 does not list Sorrel, but the census of 1771 lists him with 180 head of cattle and lacking title to land. Bonin registered a brand in 1764, the censuses crediting him with 8 cattle in 1766 and 24 in 1771 but lacking title to land. He was likely another Massé associate, the

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census of 1766 listing him and Massé together as Alibamones, indicating they had come from Fort Toulouse des Alibamons near present-day Montgomery, Alabama. Bonin was married to Marie Marguerite Tellier and thereby related to George Tellier, who registered a brand in 1761. 32 In sum, the pre-Acadian ranchers ranged from those like Dauterive, Grevemberg, Fuselier, and Ledée, who had herds in the thousands and the hundreds, to those with herds of a dozen or fewer, like Bonin. The large ranchers had title to thousands of hectares of land and mainly, except for Grevemberg, did not trouble to register their brands until well after the Acadians arrived. The small ranchers lacked title to the lands where their few cattle grazed and therefore had much more incentive than the large ranchers to register the brands that marked the little property they did own, namely, the cattle. Massé played some sort of intermediary role between the large and the small ranchers, in terms not only of the size of his herd but also of his partnership with Dauterive, on the one hand, and his social associations with Sorrel and perhaps Bonin and Tellier on the other. Degoutin seems to have been more of a land speculator than a rancher, there being no indication he ever herded cattle on his grant. While the land and the cattle represent two major local elements of preAcadian ranching in the Attakapas, the ranchers and slaves created a network of relationships that linked that place to the Atlantic world and thereby applied different types of knowledge, skill, and creativity to the land and the cattle. Reconstructing the origins and hemispheric networks of people in eighteenth-century Louisiana poses many difficulties. Census and other documents are incomplete and of uncertain accuracy; records of individuals can be highly dispersed, as people moved between France, Canada, Alabama, Louisiana, and beyond; the spelling of names was highly variable, including French and Spanish variants; and dit-names sometimes prevailed. Yet the records that survive dispersed across many archives allow reconstruction of a basic biography of each rancher. Born on 27 August 1722 in the St. Nizier Parish of Lyon, Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire was the youngest of three sons of a wealthy family of textile merchants who owned an estate called Le Grand Claire in the Lyon suburb of Vaise and land in nearby Montigny (fig. 3.4).33 Gabriel’s father died in 1738 and left the estate to the eldest brother, Claude Pierre. The

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Figure 3.4.  Origins of the pre-Acadian ranchers in France, with the French borders of the early eighteenth century, areas of open-range cattle herding, and provinces and places referenced in this chapter.

middle son became a Jesuit, and by 1748 Gabriel had left France for Louisiana as the representative of a consortium of Lyon textile merchants. After successfully establishing himself as a New Orleans wholesaler he purchased land in the Attakapas from the Ishaks in 1760, married a Louisiana Creole named Jeanne Roman in 1764, and about that same time became commandant at the Attakapas Post. After bearing a son and a daughter, Agricole and Ludevine, Jeanne died in 1770, the same year Fuselier became commandant of the Opelousas Post in addition to continuing in that position at the Attakapas Post. The next year he married another Creole, the much younger Helene Elizabeth Soileau of Natchez. By the time Fuselier retired as commandant of the two posts in 1774, still

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in his early fifties, his land along Bayou Fuselier had become known as “by far the most elegant and costly in appearance in the two posts of Attakapas and Opelousas, and a portion of the said land then in as high a state of cultivation as any other in the quarter.”34 The Fuseliers also owned land and houses in New Orleans, Natchez, and Baton Rouge. After Spain took control of the Florida Parishes in 1779, Fuselier and Soileau seem to have moved to Baton Rouge. Fuselier died in Bordeaux a decade later, on 12 October 1789, while on a business trip, leaving behind his widow, eleven surviving children from his two marriages, and two brothers and two sisters in France.35 André Massé was also born into a rich family of southwestern France, but in Grenoble rather than Lyon and more than two decades earlier than Fuselier, in 1700. Massé nonetheless preferred to live a modest but liberated life on the Louisiana frontier, where, according to Robin, he could be, apparently, “more the father than the master” to his many slaves.36 He may have come to Louisiana originally in 1722 as a lieutenant in the military but, in any case, had by 1731 acquired land along the Mississippi just upstream from New Orleans, near Dauterive and Blancpain. In his petition of 1763 to the commandant at Pointe Coupée for a land grant, Massé claimed to have operated a cattle ranch at the Attakapas Post since about 1747, and the first known sacramental acts recorded there were in fact the baptisms and marriages in 1756 of several of his slaves. From that base, following the lead of his former neighbor in New Orleans, Blancpain, he traded with the Ishaks as far west as the Trinity River in Texas. On 19 July 1756, two years after the Spaniards had arrested Blancpain, Massé and the first Catholic priest to serve the Attakapas Post, Pierre Didier, petitioned the viceroy of New Spain to found a settlement along the lower Trinity. They claimed they desired to free Massé’s many slaves, manumission requiring a petition to the government under the French Code Noir but not under Spanish law. Didier was a Benedictine who served Natchitoches, Pointe Coupée, and Attakapas in the 1750s and early 1760s and who on 5 June 1756 performed the first recorded church ritual at Attakapas, the baptism of one of Masse’s slaves. Although a House of Massé appears in eastern Texas on a Spanish map of 1757, the viceroy denied the petition, and Massé remained at the Attakapas Post, receiving the land grant of 1765 jointly with his other former New Orleans neighbor, Dauterive. The Attakapas census of 1766 lists Massé as the

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captain of the militia and an Alibamon, thereby implying he had lived in Alabama, whether at Fort Toulouse or Mobile, while in the military in the 1720s. He died intestate in 1775, resulting in a dispute over his estate between his sister Claudine in Paris and Dauterive.37 Jean Antoine Bernard Dauterive and his brother Joseph were born in Belley, about halfway between Lyon and Grenoble, sons of a military officer named Bernard d’Auterive and Marie Jeanne St. Laurent. The family moved to New Orleans in 1719 so that the father could assume the post of royal treasurer. By 1731 the family had acquired land just upstream from the city, near Massé and Blancpain. Dauterive served as a captain in the military, married Elizabeth de Montault in 1764, and had a son named Claire Joseph in 1768. In 1765 Dauterive entered into the agreement with Aubry and the Acadians to raise cattle on what until then had been the Massé ranch. On the collapse of that agreement, Dauterive somehow gained unilateral control of the ranch. He also owned a large plantation at Barataria, south of New Orleans, and an even larger one at Bayou Goula, across the Mississippi from Baton Rouge. He remained a lifelong resident of New Orleans who made regular trips to his rural properties, especially Bayou Goula. He died there in 1776, beset by creditors and an ongoing dispute with Unzaga over financing the construction of a church at the Attakapas Post.38 Born about 1710 in Flanders, Johannes Grevemberg arrived in Louisiana in the early 1720s to work as a laborer on a concession along the Ouachita River. He changed his name to Jean Baptiste, married a German immigrant named Anne Judith Chenal, and acquired the nickname Flamand, meaning “Flemish.” In the 1730s the couple began to have children, who eventually numbered four daughters and five sons: Genevieve, Anne Marie, Angelique, Perrine, Louis, Augustin, Jean Baptiste, François, and Barthélémy. Through the 1740s the growing family lived in New Orleans, where Grevemberg contracted with the government to supply lumber and labor for public works. With his growing wealth he began purchasing land around 1750, including the Fausse Pointe tract from Toutin. In 1752 he purchased a house and three lots in New Orleans from Nicolas Henry and the following year traded one of those lots for L’Isle a Corner, a barrier island just off the coast between New Orleans and Mobile now known as Horn Island. Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, the Sieur de Bienville, had in 1717 received the

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original concession for Horn Island but gave it to Charles Tranquille, Count de Noyan. When Noyan died in 1739 the island passed into a trust for his young children. Page du Pratz described the island shortly after Bienville acquired it: “Horn Island is very flat and somewhat woody . . . [with a] quantity of cattle . . . the first Canadians who had established themselves on Dauphine Island, [having] introduced most of the livestock and in great quantity; by which they enriched themselves while sleeping. The animals on this island have no need to be tended or of any additional hay, [and] have multiplied so that their owners have earned large sums. . . . All these islands are very flat and have the same white sand foundation; their woods, especially of the first three, are of pines.”39 But the Noyan family considered Horn Island unproductive and readily agreed to trade it to Grevemberg for the house lot in New Orleans. For his part, Grevemberg probably wanted the island to cut pine for the New Orleans market but also to raise cattle.40 In the 1760s, as Grevemberg’s sons entered their twenties and the British gained possession of Louisiana east of New Orleans, the family began to focus their efforts westward, on the Attakapas. In 1760 he borrowed funds from Augustine Chantalou to buy another tract of land and about eighty slaves from Governor Louis Billouart, the Chevalier de Kerlerec, although the location of that land remains unknown. Then, in 1765, with the imminent loss of Mobile to the British, the Grevembergs improved their title to the Fausse Pointe tract by securing a land grant from Aubry. The next year they sold Horn Island and its five hundred head of cattle to a group of Anglos. With his sons operating the ranch in the Attakapas and their ownership affirmed by O’Reilly’s grant in 1770, Grevemberg died in New Orleans in November of the following year.41 Jean François Ledée, born in 1718 in the St. Barthélémy parish of Lille in Flanders, arrived in Louisiana about 1750 after a sojourn on Martinique. (He was not the François Le De who sailed for Louisiana in 1719 and was not related to the extensive Ledet family of Louisiana.) Ledée established himself as a wholesale merchant in New Orleans and in 1762 purchased land along Bayou Teche together with all of its livestock, buildings, and other improvements. By the time he was awarded the grant of 1769, then, he had already owned the land for nearly seven years. And by the 1770s, if not earlier, he was living on his ranch, his name and age appearing in the censuses of 1771 and 1777 but not in that of 1766. A notarized document

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from 1772 and his last will and testament, dated 1785, both refer to him as a resident of the Attakapas. He remained a bachelor, died without heirs, and was buried in New Orleans on 9 March 1785. His executor, Solomon Mallines, conducted an estate sale of his goods in May and June of that year and of his land the following March.42 By 1747 Joseph Deville Degoutin was living in New Orleans and had married Marie Jeanne Caron, the couple having nine children over the 1750s and 1760s, including a son of the same name as the father. He received his grant on Bayou Teche in 1764, but the notarial and other documents consistently refer to him as a resident of New Orleans until his death sometime before 1786, when the documents began to refer to Caron as a widow. She continued to speculate in land in the Attakapas, obtaining an additional grant in 1786 for a tract of 2,000 arpents, about 685 hectares, on the right bank of Bayou Teche and selling the land grant of 1764 to Charles Jumonville de Villiers. Neither Degoutin nor Caron seem ever to have lived in the Attakapas, grazed cattle there, or otherwise occupied their land along Bayou Teche.43 The group of non-Acadian ranchers who lacked title to land and owned small herds also had much else in common. Bonin, Tellier, and Sorrel were either from Grenoble or elsewhere in the Dauphiné province of France, had lived in Alabama, or both. Antoine Bonin dit Dauphiné was born about 1716 in St. Laurent Parish in the Isère department of Dauphiné province. By the time of his marriage in 1740 to Marie Marguerite Tellier, a Creole born in Mobile in 1726, he had held military postings in Mobile and Fort Toulouse. Both he and his son of the same name were soldiers at Fort Toulouse in 1762, but the entire family relocated to the Attakapas upon their discharge in 1763 and the British occupation of Mobile the following year. Bonin seems to have begun herding cattle immediately upon arriving in the Attakapas, registering a brand in 1764 and having eight head of cattle by 1766. By the census of 1771 he was fifty-five years old, had no slaves, owned thirty-four head of cattle, and lacked title to land. George Tellier was presumably related to Bonin’s wife. He too had come to the Attakapas via Alabama, but a few years before the Bonin family, registering a brand in 1761.44 Jacques Joseph Sorrel was a longtime associate of Massé and, like him, from Dauphiné province, born about 1736 in the Isère department. Also like Massé, Sorrel had rich parents: Claude François Sorrel and Anne

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Antoinette Combet de la Rayne. He arrived in Louisiana in the early 1760s as a military officer, moved to the Attakapas Post upon being discharged in 1763, and by 1768 had settled about twenty-five kilometers downstream of Fausse Pointe. He received a grant for a small tract of land with 6 arpents of frontage on the right bank of Bayou Teche and 30 arpents of depth, approximately 351 by 1,755 meters, at what became the village of Sorrel. The census of 1771 lists him as being thirty-five years old and in possession of two young male slaves and 180 head of cattle. His arrival in the early 1760s suggests that he registered his brand not in 1758, as claimed in the brand registry, but in 1768 when he received the grant, the difference of a decade representing a copying error. Until then he seems to have been living with Massé.45 Massé also befriended another pre-Acadian rancher from Dauphiné province, Jean Baptiste Bérard. Born about 1737, Bérard settled in the Attakapas in the 1760s and married an Acadian named Anne Broussard. One of their five children married Fuselier’s eldest son, Agricole. Bérard registered a brand in 1767, requested a grant in 1768, and by 1771 had fifty-four head of cattle and title to a small tract of land. He served as syndic general, meaning justice of the peace, from about 1770 through his retirement in 1795. Bérard died in 1821, well into his eighties. 46 The traders and land speculators from whom Fuselier and Grevemberg purchased their tracts do not seem to have been involved in ranching. André Jung, like Degoutin, resided in New Orleans and engaged in various businesses but not ranching. Joseph Blancpain, born in Flanders in 1698, was by 1727 a New Orleans merchant who focused on trading among the Ishaks for horses, buffalo hides, deerskins, and bear grease; the Spaniards arrested him in 1754 for a trading incursion into New Spain near present-day Houston, and he died in prison in Mexico City in 1756. Charles Toutin was a soldier who came to Louisiana from Chartres, just southwest of Paris; after his discharge from the military he traded with the Ishaks and other natives, established a tobacco plantation near Natchitoches, and died in 1758.47 Generally, the ranchers with large herds and title to vast tracts of land were a diverse group in terms of their Atlantic networks. Two of them, Grevemberg and Ledée, came from Flanders. Three came from southwestern France: Fuselier from Lyon, Massé from Grenoble, and Dauterive from Belley. In terms of residence, three lived for long periods

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in the Attakapas: Massé, Fuselier, and Ledée. Grevemberg spent some time there, but more so his sons, all of them Louisiana Creoles. Dauterive seems to have visited the Attakapas only occasionally. And Degoutin, whose origins remain unclear, probably never even set foot on the banks of Bayou Teche, let alone had any influence on its cattle ranching. The group of ranchers with small herds and without title to land seems much more homogenous in terms of their Atlantic networks. Bonin, Sorrel, and Bérard all came from Dauphiné province in southwestern France. Tellier’s origins remain unclear, but he had lived in Mobile and Fort Toulouse, like Bonin. In terms of residence, they all lived in the Attakapas rather than New Orleans. Socially, they came to be intermediaries between the owners of the large ranches and the Acadians. Bérard exemplified that social position, marrying into the large Broussard family of Acadians while his daughter later married into the Fuselier family. He was popular enough among both Acadians and non-Acadians to hold elected office as justice of the peace for some twenty-five years. Bérard, Sorrel, Bonin, and the Telliers were also associated with Massé, and that rancher stands out in several other ways. He was the first nonnative resident of the Attakapas, having settled on the banks of the Teche in the mid-1740s at what first became the Attakapas Post and later St. Martinville. He had been born wealthy but preferred the frontier life. He seems to have given Sorrel and Bérard their start in ranching, neither acquiring their own cattle or land until after the arrival of the Acadians. He might, like Bonin and Tellier, have previously lived in Alabama. And he had many slaves with whom he maintained close relations, perhaps familial ones.48 The biographies and Atlantic networks of black slaves and other marginalized people such as natives and free blacks pose even greater challenges of reconstruction than those of white ranchers. Many of the same issues pertain, including few, inaccurate, incomplete, and dispersed records. But in addition the dehumanization of slavery entailed the commodification of thousands of people with individual personal names, identities, family relationships, and life histories into a few categories of anonymous workers identified mainly by gender and age, sometimes by skin color, and more rarely by origin or ethnicity. Furthermore, such characteristics for a given individual do not always appear consistently in parallel documents,

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such as the probate inventory and bills of sale associated with a given succession. Vague approximations of age, variable designations of skin color, arbitrary categorization of origin and ethnicity on the basis of slave ports rather than homelands, and differences between the present-day and historical ethnic geography of Africa all introduce further uncertainty.49 By the time of the census of 1766 the vast majority of slaves in Louisiana had come from Senegambia. A few blacks who had escaped slavery in New Spain were living in the Louisiana–Texas borderlands as early as 1700, as reported by Bienville while he was exploring the valley of the Red River. But thereafter, most, nearly 6,000, about 4,000 of whom were male, came on twenty-three voyages between 1719 and 1743 direct from Africa to Louisiana, some two-thirds of the voyages and the slaves originating in Senegambia. By the 1740s slaves had become a majority in Louisiana: of the 6,200 nonnatives in 1741, 1,320 were slaves from Africa and 2,680 were Creole slaves, born in Louisiana. They included some Bantu speakers, mainly Wolof, also known as Senegal, and Fulani, also known as Fulbe and Poulard. But the majority spoke Mande languages: mostly Bamana, sometimes called Bambara, and Mandingo, also known as Malinke or Maninga. With the coming of Spanish rule, slave shipments resumed, shifted to incorporate a broader spectrum of origins than Senegambian, and used transshipment via the Caribbean rather than direct voyages from Africa.50 The census of 1766 again demonstrates its limitations when one peruses more than the summary table. While that table claims fifty slaves for the five ranches and twenty-four for the rest of the Attakapas Post, the detailed tables account for only four on the Dauterive ranch and twenty living with Massé.51 Since the Acadians did not have any slaves in 1766, the other fifty claimed in the summary presumably pertained to the other ranchers. Of them, however, only Degoutin appears in the census; he had four slaves at the time, but he and they lived in New Orleans. Nor does the census reveal anything about the names, ages, or origins of the slaves enumerated, whether twenty-four, fifty, or seventy-four. The earliest volumes of records from what became Saint Martin of Tours Church in St. Martinville reveal much more about the individual people behind the numbers in the census. In 1765 Dauterive indeed did have at least two black men at Attakapas: Claude César and Joseph, who served as witnesses at a baptism. The other two of his four slaves

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enumerated in 1766 may have been Nanette and Anne, both black and both of whom gave birth to daughters baptized at the Attakapas Post in the 1770s. The census of 1771, although conducted well after the impact of the Acadian influx and therefore of limited relevance, enumerated only three middle-aged black men and someone named François Izuro at the Dauterive ranch. Dauterive certainly kept many more slaves in New Orleans, Barataria, and Bayou Goula than in the Attakapas, the archives recording his numerous emancipations and sales.52 Similarly, the church records confirm that Massé had about twenty blacks living with him in 1766, although some were free rather than enslaved. Jacinto de Barrios’s letter of 1756 in support of the petition by Didier and Massé confirms that he had at least that many blacks living with him a decade earlier: “more than twenty slaves.”53 The church records add much detail, identifying one slave couple named Marie and Jean dit Ingui, she Wolof and he Mandingo, with two grown daughters named Marguerite and Victoire born in the early 1740s and therefore presumably Creoles. Another couple, Pierre and Lisette, had three children together whom Massé emancipated upon their baptisms in 1762: Claude, Pierre, and Dominique. The record identifies Lisette as being black and the children as griffes, meaning of mixed African and native descent and implying that Pierre was either a native or himself a grif. Lisette also had two older daughters: Magdaleine, born in 1749; and Françoise, born in 1753 and variously identified as a grif or mulatto. Another couple, Marie Flore and André Leveille, were free blacks living with Massé; they had a daughter named Claudine in 1755, consequently also free. Other blacks living with Massé included a second man named Jean and three children named Anne, Marianne, and Pierre born about 1765 to free blacks who were formerly slaves of Massé. In addition, Massé had an Apache slave, born in 1749 and named Therese dit la Bombe. The census of 1771 generally reflects that many people of African and native descent lived with Massé, enumerating the slaves as a native male of twenty-five, a native female of seventeen, no mulattos, and sixteen blacks: four men, three women, three teenagers, and six children.54 Fuselier also had at least a few slaves by the mid-1760s, although they do not appear in the census of 1766. At a minimum, the adults were Claude Cafar and Pierre, both black, and the children were Joseph and Marguerite, black twins born about 1762. But names that show up in the

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late 1760s and early 1770s might well have been present as early as 1766, if not before. In 1770 Thomas and Marie, both black, had a daughter named Catherine. Jeanne, variously identified as mulatto and black, had a daughter Rose in 1769 and a son Agustín in 1772. Julie, a black, also had two children about that time: Jean Baptiste in 1771 and Jean Pierre in 1773, both black. Others appear in the church record by the early 1770s as sponsors for baptisms: Agobard and Mathieu, black slaves; Ludivine, a mulatto slave; and Guillaume, a free mulatto living at the Fuselier ranch. Fuselier’s marriage contract with Soileau, dated 1771, inventories some of the property he brought to their union, including twenty-four slaves of unspecified ages and origins. The census of 1771 provides additional detail, although not names, listing Fuselier’s black slaves as five men, four women, two teenagers, and eleven children and the mulatto slaves as one man, one teenager, and three children, a total of twenty-seven. Among all those records, however, the only reference to African origins relates to a black slave named Serafin, born about 1771 among the Thiamba of the Bight of Benin and baptized in the late 1780s. But the census of 1777, which was the first to record slaves by name, does not list a Serafin, so he probably arrived in the Attakapas in the 1780s.55 Grevemberg also had at least one slave in the Attakapas in 1766. A baptismal record of 1765 from Saint Martin of Tours Church names Claudine as a daughter of former black slaves of Massé but nonetheless apparently sold or given to Grevemberg. Other Grevemberg slaves began appearing in baptismal records only by the late 1770s. Louis Grevemberg had two female slaves who gave birth to children: Rose to Alexandre, baptized in 1776; and Angelique to Rossete, baptized in 1782. François, Agustín, and Barthélémy Grevemberg also had several slaves baptized in the 1770s and 1780s, seemingly adult slaves inherited from the estate of their father upon his death in 1771. One born in the mid-1760s, Henry, was Wolof, but he does not appear with the other Grevemberg slaves in the census of 1777 and so probably did not live in the Attakapas until the late 1770s at the earliest. Despite having purchased some eighty slaves around 1760, then, Grevemberg had few of them at his Attakapas ranch during the 1760s; even the census of 1771 lists only nine: four black men, two black women, two black children, and a mulatto teenager.56 The baptismal records reveal only a single slave associated with Ledée: Louise, a mulatto girl born in 1765. By 1771 the census indicates a

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substantial increase, to eight: one mulatto man, two black men, one black woman, two black teenagers, and two black children. Ledée certainly had many more slaves by the time of his death in 1785, as becomes clear from the documents related to his succession. They yield a list of twenty slaves ranging in age from infant to sixty-five. Fifteen of them were alive in 1771, with an age and gender distribution that covers most of the slaves enumerated in the census that year. Although the inventory does not provide information on ethnicity or place of birth, all but one of the fifteen were born after the last of the French slave imports, so if they were in the Attakapas in the 1760s they would have had to be Creoles. Only a single man, Oreste, was born early enough to have been African. The succession inventory proves particularly valuable because, despite its lateness, it constitutes one of the few records of occupation for Attakapas slaves, albeit only for two of them. One of them was a servant, but the inventory lists the other as vacher, that is, a cowboy. That cowboy, Scipion Jean, was born about 1757 and is therefore possibly the male teenager listed in the census of 1771. The probate inventory includes a Scipion Rouge, born in the early 1760s and possibly a younger brother of Scipion Jean.57 None of the other ranchers definitely had slaves in the mid-1760s. In the late 1780s Bérard baptized a twenty-year-old Mina named Antoine. Given his age, Antoine might have been with Bérard in the Attakapas as early as the late 1760s, except that the census of 1771 does not list him. By the census of 1777 Bérard did have six slaves, and by the time he drew up his last will and testament in 1817 he had more than two dozen. The Bonins had no slaves even as late as the census of 1771, but that same document lists Joseph Sorrel with two, both twenty-year-old black men whom he might have brought with him to the Attakapas in the early 1760s.58 Those blacks, mulattos, and griffes of the Attakapas, both slave and free, had relationships that connected the various ranches. In 1771 Massé and Fuselier freed two of their slaves, Françoise and Guillaume, so that they might marry and live together to raise their daughter, Félicité. Also, slaves of one ranch acted as sponsors and witnesses at the church ceremonies of slaves from other ranches. For example, in 1765 two of Dauterive’s slaves, Joseph and Claude César, served as witnesses at the baptisms of two of Fuselier’s slaves, Joseph and Marguerite. In other cases, the ranchers sold or gave each other slaves, such as Massé’s transfer of Claudine to Grevemberg.59

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In sum, the slaves who worked on the ranches in 1766 and earlier were mainly living with Massé and possibly with Fuselier. Grevemberg and Dauterive had substantial numbers of slaves elsewhere but kept only a few in the Attakapas. Degoutin also had slaves in New Orleans but seems to have never occupied his Attakapas grant.60 Ledée was probably resident at Attakapas by 1766 and kept all his slaves there but had few that early. To account for the fifty slaves that the summary table of the census of 1766 claims were living on the five ranches, then, about twenty pertained to Massé, four to Dauterive, perhaps a dozen to Fuselier, fewer than half that many to each of Ledée and Grevemberg, and none to Degoutin. The additional twenty-four slaves that the summary table claims lived at the Attakapas Post probably double count the twenty-four already attributed to the ranch of Massé and Dauterive. The documents do not detail the occupations of those slaves, but they do directly confirm that at least one worked as a cowboy by 1785. The census of 1766 gives no information on age or gender, but by the time of the census of 1771 about half the slaves were men or teenage boys who could have been working as cowboys. The documents do not specify the origins of most of the blacks, but they do confirm that at least some were Senegambians. By 1766, more than two decades after the last slave imports of the French period and before those of the Spanish period would begin, many of the Attakapas blacks would have been Creoles, which explains the lack of references to origins in the records. The few such references that do occur predictably indicate Senegambia: the baptism in 1756 of Massé’s Wolof woman, Marie, and her Mandingo husband, Jean. No Fulani or Bamana Senegambians appear in the records, although the general characteristics of Louisiana’s slave population during the French period certainly suggest such origins in addition to Wolof and Mandingo. That some of the slaves were native, grif, or mulatto—of partial native or white parentage—also conforms to the general characteristics of Louisiana’s slave population. Reconstruction of the locations of the first ranches and their herds of cattle offers new insights into the herding ecology involved in the establishment of ranching in Louisiana. Moreover, a better understanding of the herding ecology in combination with the reconstruction of the biographies of the diverse individuals involved affords insights into their

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various roles in that process. Previously, lack of such research allowed two long-standing assumptions to prevail: the first asserted that the Acadian herding ecology closely resembled the pre-Acadian herding ecology; the second asserted that the pre-Acadian herding ecology derived from Saint-Domingue.61 Together, those assumptions resulted in accounts that credited Europeans with establishing ranching in Louisiana over the eighteenth century and relegated blacks to a noncreative role. Determination of the location of the first ranches disproves the first of those assumptions by demonstrating that the early Acadian herding ecology differed fundamentally from the pre-Acadian herding ecology. Pre-Acadian ranchers like Grevemberg grazed large herds on open range and had no interest in growing crops. In contrast, the earliest Acadian cattle owners, who had acquired about a dozen head of cattle and begun to register brands by 1766, lacked land titles and tended small, docile herds in conjunction with crops of rice and maize. The Acadian knowledge of herding derived from Acadia, where they had been expelled from similar mixed farms by the British during the preceding decade. When the Acadians did begin to acquire land titles in 1771 they received grants of the relatively small mixed farming tracts O’Reilly had specified in his ordinance of 1770 rather than the large tracts reserved for ranchers with herds of at least a hundred head. The Acadians received grants with 6–8 arpents of frontage and 40 arpents of depth, an area of approximately 100 hectares. In contrast, even the relatively small Degoutin tract was 50 arpents on a side and covered 856 hectares. The other four, larger ranches measured in the thousands of hectares.62 The contrast between the land uses of the ranchers and those of the Acadians was so great, in fact, that it resulted in persistent social conflict. The Acadians filed complaints against the ranchers when their herds of cattle invaded fields and damaged crops, and the ranchers filed complaints against the Acadians when they retaliated by killing the cattle. That conflict prompted O’Reilly to include stipulations in the ordinance of 1770 that required fencing in crops, branding cattle by the age of eighteen months, maintaining a minimum of two slaves to herd every hundred head, paying for crop damages caused by stray cattle, and allowing herds to range freely only from November until March, after the fall harvest and before the spring planting. The ordinance also emphasized the distinction between tame and feral cattle, noting that herds of feral cattle

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“infested” the Attakapas and would need to be destroyed in order for the tame cattle to increase. The conflict between ranchers and Acadians and the distinction between feral and tame cattle reflect the gulf between the pre-Acadian and early Acadian herding ecologies: they were not only different but also fundamentally in conflict.63 Moreover, even when Acadians did begin to establish large ranches focused on beef production, starting in the 1780s, they did so on the prairies to the west of the valley of Bayou Teche and in concert with cattle herders of diverse origins. Acadians supplied only 10–20 percent of the 150 head of cattle driven to New Orleans each month in 1781 but thereafter became the colony’s major cattle producers. Expanding indigo, tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane plantations along Bayou Teche, however, increasingly forced the ranchers onto the prairies beyond the bluff that bounds the Teche Valley on the west (fig. 3.5). Until the 1780s settlement extended little more than ten kilometers west of that bluff, but as the demand for beef grew along with the colony’s population and wealth the frontier pushed westward and ranchers increasingly occupied the prairies. Many of those ranchers were Acadians, but others numbered among the five hundred or so Spaniards from Málaga who in 1779 had settled at

Figure 3.5.  A generalized transect across the valley of Bayou Teche, showing the Teche Ridge that parallels the bayou, the bluff that demarcates the eastern edge of the prairies, and the wetlands of the western Atchafalaya Basin. Compare the environmental zones across the bottom with figure 3.2.

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New Iberia, just downstream from Fausse Pointe. Yet others were Anglos, Germans, and Irish who had begun to filter into Louisiana during the American Revolution. Americans of diverse origins followed in the 1780s and 1790s. The last group included ranchers who employed a herding ecology developed in lowland South Carolina in the late seventeenth century. Their ancestors incrementally migrated westward through the pine belt that parallels the Gulf Coast until they reached the prairies of southwestern Louisiana and eastern Texas in the late eighteenth century. There, in the Louisiana–Texas borderlands, the Acadians, Anglos, and others intersected with tejano ranchers who employed a herding ecology derived from the one established in the Veracruz lowlands during the sixteenth century.64 The influences from diverse actors resulted in the emergence of a herding ecology that resembled neither that of the pre-Acadian ranchers nor that of the Acadian mixed farms along Bayou Teche. For one, the new herding ecology involved long-distance annual drives between summer pastures on the inland prairies and winter pastures in coastal marshes. Tejanos contributed, among other elements, throwing the lasso from horseback and its associated elements, such as a saddle with a horn and longer stirrups. In southwestern Louisiana that herding ecology became most closely associated with Cajuns, as Acadians became known in the nineteenth century (fig. 3.6).65 More broadly, especially in the manifestation that dominated much of the Great Plains during a brief florescence in the late nineteenth century, practices such as roping became most closely associated with Texans.66 The quite different environments in which pre-Acadian and Acadian ranching took place also precluded a similar herding ecology emerging on the prairies. The pre-Acadian ranchers established themselves along the Teche Ridge while the Acadians occupied the prairies beyond the bluff to the west. Bayou Teche created both the bluff and the Teche Ridge between thirty-five thousand and twenty-five thousand years ago, when it carried the combined flow of the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya Rivers. That flow, much larger than that of present-day Bayou Teche, cut the bluff that marks the western edge of the Atchafalaya Basin in the same way that the Mississippi has more recently cut a bluff between Baton Rouge and Natchez on the eastern edge of the basin. The large flow down the Teche Valley also created broad, relatively high levees, now known as the

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Figure 3.6.  Nineteenth-century illustration of an Acadian cattle herder sitting on a saddle with a horn and long stirrups. Reproduced courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University.

Teche Ridge, a rather anomalous cordon of higher land within the Atchafalaya Basin. To the west, Bayou Tortue and the Vermilion River drain the backswamps between the Teche Ridge and the bluff. To the east, the backswamps of Bayou Teche merge into the more extensive ones of the Atchafalaya. Atop the Teche Ridge two other, parallel sets of smaller

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levees occur: the first was built after the Mississippi took up a new main channel further east while the lesser flow of the Red River continued to descend Bayou Teche; the second, the innermost and more modest, was built by Bayou Teche after the Red River again became a tributary of the Mississippi.67 When Massé and other settlers crossed the Atchafalaya Basin from east to west, the Teche Ridge would have been the first relatively hospitable terrain they encountered. They would not have seen such an extensive area of comparatively high ground since departing from the levee of the Mississippi River. Along the Teche Ridge grew woodlands of bottomland hardwoods, oaks and hickories along the levee tops grading into willows and cottonwoods at lower elevations. In the backswamps, cypress, tupelo, and cane grass dominated. Between the ridge and the backswamps, tall grasses and sedges thrived with the seasonal rise and fall of the floodwaters. Eduardo Nugent and Juan Kelly, inspecting the Attakapas for O’Reilly in December 1769, described the country between the Grevemberg and Fuselier ranches as “expansive meadows, with admirable pasture and very high grass, fine and free of thistles and thorny plants.”68 The flood regime that produced those grasslands largely mimicked the Mississippi and Atchafalaya, with snowmelt upcountry creating the highest and most regular flooding every spring, from late March through early June. But, as Nugent and Kelly observed, locally heavy rainfall in any season could cause the bayous “to overflow their banks and inundate the land.”69 The Teche Ridge therefore also provided a safe retreat in case of particularly severe flooding, as dramatically described by Francisco Bouligny when the unusually high waters of spring 1779, which rose quickly in April and did not subside until June, forced him to relocate New Iberia to just downstream of Grevemberg’s ranch from an original location some thirty-five kilometers further down Bayou Teche.70 The similarity in the locations of the ranches, anchored atop the Teche Ridge but stretching toward the bluff to the west, suggests their herding ecology. The short elevational gradient between the higher frontlands along Bayou Teche and the lower backlands that descend toward Bayou Tortue and the Vermilion River to the west create equally short hydrological and vegetational gradients that provide easy access to plentiful forage and water throughout the year (fig. 3.7).71 Cattle could forage in complementary environments appropriate to each season. As floodwaters rose in

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Figure 3.7.  Partial transcription of a connected plat dating to the land claim of 1815 of the Attakapas Church. Note the vegetation zones from the woodlands of bottomland hardwoods along the levees of Bayou Teche and Bayou Tortue to the cypress backswamps, labeled marais and Isle des Cyprès [sic]. (See figure 3.2 for location.)

the spring, herds moved into the woodlands along the Teche Ridge. As water receded through the summer, the cattle moved steadily downslope into the strip of grassland. Then, with winter, as the grasses died back and blue northers chilled the cattle, they moved into the margins of the backswamps among the cane grass to shelter from the cold winds and forage on the cane leaves, which remained green all winter. A document from 1795 confirms that when the Acadians arrived the land between Bayou Teche and the bluff was the primary focus of ranching. That right bank provided access to pasture, water, and shelter from flood and wind throughout the year. It also limited herd movements to the island formed by Lac Flamand, the Vermilion River, and Bayous Teche, Fuselier, and Tortue. The earliest Acadians therefore initially settled on the left bank at Fausse Pointe instead of on the right bank near the Attakapas Post in order to minimize crop damages from the ranchers’ herds.72 In contrast, both the Atchafalaya to the east and the prairies to the west presented poor conditions for ranching. The Atchafalaya was too wet even for cattle drives, the ranchers having to trail their herds to market

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down the levees of Bayou Teche to those of Bayou Black, then up Bayou Lafourche to the Mississippi River just downstream from Baton Rouge, and then down the levee of the Mississippi to New Orleans. The prairies had the opposite problem, a scarcity of water during the summer because of an impermeable clay subsoil that caused soil saturation during heavy rains and desiccation in droughts. That clay substratum partially explains why an eastern outlier of tallgrass prairie occurs in southwestern Louisiana: alternation between waterlogged and parched soil favors herbaceous over arboreal vegetation. Another cause may have been persistent burning by native peoples like the Ishaks, both to drive game and to promote grasslands that attracted buffalo herds. Only along larger streams that eroded through the clay subsoil, created levees of alluvium, and acted as fire breaks did gallery forests of drought-resistant live oak occur. Yet despite the abundance of grass, the prairies did not provide good pasture during the winter, when that grass went to seed, died back, and became unpalatable. Ranching in such an environment required the Acadians and others who settled the prairies in the late eighteenth century to drive their herds to winter pastures in the coastal marshes, which remain green all year: “The reeds are eaten by cattle and horses in the winter, and afford a valuable and inexhaustible resource of food in that season when the Prairies yield little or none.”73 When those coastal canebrakes became untenable in the summer owing to hurricanes and insects, the ranchers drove their herds inland again to feed on prairie grasses (fig. 3.8).74 The pre-Acadian herding ecology had been much more local than that of the prairies, involving grazing along a local vegetational gradient throughout the year rather than the long-distance drives to and from the coast that emerged on the prairies. The two herding ecologies did, however, share some elements, such as the use of cane grass as winter feed, open range, and feral cattle. Yet other elements of the hybrid system that emerged in the Louisiana–Texas borderlands seem to echo the herding ecology of Veracruz, for example, the annual burning of grasslands and casting the lasso from horseback; others echo the herding ecology of South Carolina, for example, using calves to attract cows for milking and growing maize crops in conjunction with herding cattle. 75 Reconstruction of the biographies of the ranchers and blacks counters the second of the long-standing assumptions by demonstrating that

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Figure 3.8.  Nineteenth-century illustration of a cattle trail through a coastal canebrake of the Louisiana–Texas borderlands. Reproduced courtesy of the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

the pre-Acadian ranching ecology did not derive from Saint-Domingue. All but one of the ranchers had come to Louisiana directly from France. Ledée sojourned in the Caribbean but on Martinique, which lacked cattle ranching. In any case, he settled in the Attakapas at least a decade after the other pioneer ranchers had already established themselves. In addition, the blacks living in the Attakapas by 1766 had either been born in Louisiana or come directly from Africa, not via the Caribbean. The Caribbean therefore might well have supplied the cattle, mainly by way of New Spain, but not the knowledge of ranching. Ruling out the Caribbean might suggest more direct European origins, but none of the evidence demonstrates that any of the ranchers brought relevant experience from France. The only open-range cattle herding in France occurred in the marshlands of the delta of the Rhone River and in the hill lands of the Auvergne and Brittany. Flanders, the birthplace of Grevemberg and Ledée, is well north of Brittany and the Auvergne. Lyons, Fuselier’s birthplace, is east of the Auvergne and while on the Rhone much nearer its headwaters than its delta. Grenoble and

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surrounding Dauphiné province as well as Belley—the birthplaces of Dauterive, Massé, and the small ranchers like Sorrel and Bonin—are all in the foothills of the Alps. Furthermore, no detail of the individual biographies suggests direct knowledge of ranching before arriving in Louisiana. Grevemberg was a very young unskilled laborer when he emigrated, and the other large ranchers came from various military and commercial backgrounds that did not involve ranching. So while the herding ecology of the Camargue and its brands somewhat resemble that of the pre-Acadian ranches of the Teche Valley, none of the evidence suggests, let alone demonstrates, the sort of networks and individuals that connected the Marismas of Andalusia to Veracruz in the sixteenth century.76 Disproving the two long-standing assumptions permits reevaluation of a possible creative role for blacks. The reconstruction of the biographies of blacks in the eighteenth-century Attakapas demonstrates that at least some of them may have had prior knowledge of open-range cattle herding, in contrast to the demonstration that none of the ranchers had any such experience. Two of the blacks had definitely come from Senegambia: Marie, a Wolof, and Jean, a Mandingo. While the ethnicities of most remain unknown, the general characteristics of Louisiana’s black population during the period of French sovereignty suggest that many others were of Senegambian origin. At least some would have been familiar with the open-range herding ecology of the sub-Saharan steppes that intersect Africa’s Atlantic coast in Senegambia. They would certainly have experienced the annual movement of the herds between seasonal pastures, a characteristic central to the pre-Acadian herding ecology. Much also differed, however, between cattle herding in the Attakapas and in Senegambia. In the Attakapas the cattle were feral, whereas Senegambians castrated the majority of the bulls, milked the cows, and penned herds nightly. The resulting docility of the cattle permitted Senegambians to herd on foot rather than on horseback. Also, the seasonal movement between pastures involved long distances in Senegambia and short distances in the early Attakapas. In the Attakapas, moreover, flooding drove the cattle upslope into the bottomland hardwoods, and the cold of winter drove them downslope into the stands of cane in the backswamps; in Senegambia the herds

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followed the rains northward in summer before retreating southward again in winter. One of the most significant differences is that cattle herding and farming have a complementary relationship in Senegambia, the herds grazing crop stubble during the dry season and manuring the fields before the next planting; the pre-Acadian ranchers of the Teche Valley, in contrast, did not grow crops. Beyond such major distinctions, various details also differ, such as the use of earmarking rather than branding to distinguish cattle ownership in Africa. This comparison prompts closer scrutiny of two enigmatic characteristics of pre-Acadian ranches: the use of horses and of brands. If neither the French ranchers nor the African slaves who crossed the Atlantic were familiar with branding or herding cattle from horseback, those practices may have become established in the Attakapas through other networks. And identification of those networks might provide further insights into the emergence of the herding ecology. The establishment of branding in the Attakapas may have involved an attenuated network that did connect to the French Caribbean. Grevemberg seems to have established branding in the Attakapas in the 1750s at the same time he was raising cattle on Horn Island, a herd originally established on the basis of imports from Saint-Domingue. The French had introduced cattle from Saint-Domingue during the expeditions that Iberville commanded between 1699 and 1702, both at Horn Island and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Mobile. Those cattle may well have born brands, common in the Spanish Caribbean and a practice that the ranchers who turned western Hispaniola into the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the 1660s continued. Even so, none of the French owners of Horn Island would have had any reason to employ branding because, as sole owners of the island, all its cattle belonged to them—from Bienville and Noyan to, ultimately, Grevemberg. Those cattle ran feral during Bienville’s tenure, according to Page du Pratz; the Noyan family considered Horn Island unproductive; and Grevemberg would therefore have taken over a herd of unbranded, feral cattle and have had no need to begin branding them.77 The other possible network, for both branding and herding from horseback, connected the Attakapas to New Spain through Texas. There is no direct evidence of mounted herders on the pre-Acadian ranches along

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Bayou Teche, but according to the census of 1766 they had three hundred horses among them, a fact certainly suggestive of a need for mounts to herd the thousands of head of cattle. Senegambians had much experience with horses for transportation and warfare but not for herding. The French also used horses mainly for warfare and transportation, except in the singular case of the mounted cattle herders of the Camargue. Tejanos, however, did herd from horseback as well as brand cattle, and both practices may therefore have come into the Attakapas from the west along with the vast majority of the cattle. Massé had experience as far into Texas as the Trinity River, but no evidence remains that he ever used a brand or herded from horseback. The main actors in the network would more likely have been the natives and griffes who lived with Massé on his ranch or traded cattle, whether feral or rustled, from northern New Spain into the Attakapas. Despite the Eurocentric assumptions that have long dominated the literature, the pre-Acadian ranching of the Attakapas did not resemble the Acadian system that emerged on the prairies to the west late in the eighteenth century and did not derive from the French Caribbean or France. Pre-Acadian and Acadian ranching shared some characteristics, such as branding, feral cattle and, probably, mounted herders. But the first ranches of the Attakapas raised cattle in a relatively restricted area, between Bayou Teche and the bluff, that provided access to water and pasture throughout the year. The Acadians and others who expanded ranching into the quite different prairie environment west of the bluff drove their herds long distances between inland summer pastures and coastal winter pastures. Moreover, none of the people involved in establishing ranching in the Attakapas had direct experience with Caribbean ranching, whether on Saint-Domingue or elsewhere. The only possible connection to the French Caribbean may have been a highly attenuated one through Horn Island. Instead, actors of African, European, native, and mixed origins participated in a Creole act of creation on those first Louisianian ranches. Reconstruction of the biographies of the inhabitants of the pre-Acadian ranches demonstrates that more evidence exists to suggest that actors of black, native, and mixed origins—especially griffes—rather than whites participated in Atlantic networks that brought knowledge of cattle herding to the Attakapas. Furthermore, refuting a clear dichotomy between

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powerful free whites and powerless enslaved blacks, some whites had land and capital while others did not; some blacks were slaves while others were not; and many of the actors had mixed origins that included native ones. Whether or not the sources can ever more fully reveal the processes involved remains an open question, but that question has now definitively replaced the default Eurocentric assumption that whites played the main creative role by reproducing the ranching ecology of Saint-Domingue in Louisiana. The pre-Acadian herding ecology and practices became no more than one component of a complex hybrid that emerged in the late eighteenth century on the prairies of the Louisiana–Texas borderlands and came to dominate the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century. To that process Anglos contributed a herding ecology that had originated in lowland South Carolina beginning in the late seventeenth century and had for several generations been migrating westward along the pine belt that parallels the Gulf Coast from the Atlantic to eastern Texas. That South Carolinian herding ecology had in turn derived from antecedents in Britain, Africa, and the British Caribbean, specifically, Jamaica.78 The literature’s emphasis on the Greater Antilles in that process, however, neglects the possible involvement of people from the British Lesser Antilles. Yet most of the South Carolina settlers came from the Lesser Antilles, principally Barbados but also the British Leeward islands. Blacks became a large proportion of the populations of those islands and entirely dominated some, such as Barbuda.

c h a p t e r four

Barbuda

The two negro huntsmen who accompanied us were intelligent sort of beings. —Trelawney Wentworth , The West India Sketch Book (1835)

as the trail entered the grassy opening in the midst of the shrubland, the well for watering livestock that came into view astonished me. Amy Potter, a graduate student, and I were on the Caribbean island of Barbuda to conduct research on its system of land tenure, one based on usufruct rights to a commons rather than on private property (fig. 4.1). Potter intended to use the experience as a foundation for her doctoral dissertation project on the Barbudan transnational community, many of whom live in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City. We had read a lot about that small island in the Leeward Lesser Antilles before arriving, not only the literature on land tenure but much of the rest of the diverse academic publications as well as A Small Place by the novelist Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Time Bomb by the journalist Robert Coram.1 Those readings depicted Barbuda as one of the Caribbean’s relatively unspoiled places, little developed and sparsely populated compared to most of its neighbors in the Leewards, a characterization borne out upon our arrival (fig. 4.2).2 Comparison with Antigua, the other major island in the country of Antigua and Barbuda, illustrates Barbuda’s anomalous character. In 2001 Antigua had a population of 75,561 on 280 square kilometers, a density of 270 people per square kilometer; in comparison, a mere 1,325 people lived on Barbuda’s 161 square kilometers that year, a density of 8 people per square kilometer. Satellite imagery reveals 98

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Figure 4.1.  Location of Barbuda and other places referenced in this chapter.

Antigua’s commensurate lack of vegetative cover relative to Barbuda, the latter’s broken by little more than the single village of Codrington and the main road connecting the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts. In addition, seemingly endless mass-tourism resorts line Antigua’s beaches, whereas Barbuda’s three small, exclusive hotels close seasonally and cater only to the wealthy—Princess Diana, for one, before her death in 1997.3 Some of the existing literature on Barbuda addressed the relationship between livestock herding, communal land tenure, and lack of tourist development. Unlike the so-called family lands that emerged in many parts of the Caribbean during emancipation in the nineteenth century, in which the descendants of the owner of a single small plot inherit in perpetuity the right to use that land in common, the entire community of

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Figure 4.2.  Map of Barbuda, showing the locations of rock-walled livestock wells, the village wall, and other landscape elements circa 1968.

Barbudans claims common ownership of the whole island. Previous scholarship established how Barbuda’s system of communal land tenure emerged during the twentieth century out of Barbudans’ strong sense of place and community identity as well as out of their island’s land-use history, mainly emphasizing the impact of three centuries of open-range livestock herding. In contrast, Antigua’s private and public lands derived from a colonial history of privately owned sugar plantations and Crown

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lands. Of all the previous studies of Barbuda, however, only the anthropologist Riva Berleant-Schiller had documented some aspects of the island’s herding ecology, practices, and material culture.4 None of that literature had prepared me for my first sight of the livestock well (fig. 4.3).5 The well itself consisted of a substantial coaming and drinking trough of mortared limestone blocks, the whole more than ten meters long and nearly a meter high, excluding the wooden windlass hoist. Still more intriguing, a stone wall surrounded the well, enclosing a rectangular area approximately twenty meters wide by forty long. The wall was about a meter thick and two meters high and consisted of courses of limestone blocks laid dry, without mortar. We had entered through the single entrance, a gap of about three meters in one of the end walls. A rusty length of chain-link fencing lay on the ground to one side, presumably once the gate. The interior of the enclosure supported almost no vegetation, the powdery soil covering only patches of the exposed bedrock of coral limestone. The back corner of the enclosure, diagonally opposite the entrance, provided a further surprise: a gap of about two meters in the

Figure 4.3.  Olin Well in 2007, one of the best preserved of the livestock wells, retaining even its hoist. (See figure 4.2 for location.)

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wall led into a second, much smaller enclosure. It also had walls a little more than two meters high but measured only some ten-by-ten meters and had mortar between the courses of limestone blocks. That walled livestock well gave the immediate impression of a substantial investment, now largely abandoned, in open-range herding of large livestock such as cattle and horses. The trough was too large for small stock such as the goats and donkeys we had seen along the road near the village of Codrington. We had not seen any fences except those around houses. Moreover, the enclosure around the well could not have been a paddock in which to pasture cattle because it lacked grass, even soil in which grass might once have grown. Whatever the purpose of the enclosure, the well must once have watered large stock such as cattle and horses that foraged beyond the confines of the walls, browsing on leaves in the extensive scrubland and grazing in its small grassy openings. As our initial astonishment at seeing the walled well subsided and we began to find others throughout the island, surprise turned into the realization that scholars had ignored the possibility that colonial Barbudans, overwhelmingly enslaved blacks, might have played a role in establishing cattle ranching in the Americas. The existing literature demonstrates that the Caribbean was central to that process: Columbus introduced cattle onto Hispaniola in 1493 and others, like Gregorio de Villalobos, subsequently shipped the descendants of those animals from Cuba to Veracruz. Yet the existing literature focuses on the Greater Antilles—Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola—to the exclusion of the Lesser Antilles. Supposedly, that archipelago of smaller islands separating the Caribbean from the open Atlantic played no role in establishing cattle ranching in the Americas because colonization generally did not occur until the seventeenth century and plantation agriculture quickly and overwhelmingly came to dominate land use.6 The walled livestock wells of Barbuda seemed to contradict that existing literature with evidence of considerable cattle ranching activity at some time in the past on at least one of the British Lesser Antilles. Significantly, over the 1670s settlers from that archipelago, principally Barbados but also the Leewards, established open-range cattle ranching in South Carolina. As rice plantations came to dominate the Atlantic coastal plain and the colonizers defeated the Yamassee in 1715, the ranchers moved westward until reaching the Louisiana–Texas borderlands in the

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late eighteenth century and participating in the creation of the cowboy culture that became most closely associated with Texans when it briefly dominated much of the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century. The possibility that black Barbudans might have played some role in establishing cattle ranching in the Lesser Antilles thus deserves study, both because understanding the unique social and environmental relations that emerge in particular places has intrinsic value and because networks of relationships among such places create more general effects.7 Precisely when livestock first arrived on Barbuda remains unclear, but the documents reveal that a system of cattle ranching involving the walled wells and open-range became established at least as early as the mideighteenth century. The Spaniards made abortive colonization attempts during the 1520s in the Leewards, possibly on Barbuda and certainly on neighboring Antigua. Before the native Caribs expelled them, the Spaniards may have followed their usual practice of introducing livestock to run feral and provide a source of food for future colonization attempts. A series of occupations of Barbuda by the British began in the late 1620s, intermittently at first owing to Carib resistance but by the 1650s with a “colony of three to four hundred men [who] find the wherewithal to survive comfortably.”8 By the 1660s colonization had become effectively continuous, a report to the Privy Council of England noting that thirty colonists then lived on Barbuda and that the island was suitable for raising “cattle, horses, and sheep.”9 Cattle had certainly become well established by 1668, when Samuel Winthrop, Joseph Lee, Francis Sampson, and William Milden leased the island to produce oxen for sugar mills on neighboring Antigua and Nevis, even though Barbuda was considered “not inhabitable for Christians.”10 Philip Warner, the governor of Antigua, summarized British colonization up to 1676: “Barbuda . . . was twice settled by the English and both times the inhabitants were cut off by the Indians. Now it is only made use of as a farm, having been by lease granted to four persons by the Lord William Willoughby [governor of Barbados, 1667–73], who do continue 18 or 20 lusty men at a strong house to secure the stock, it being their only end to make it a market of provisions for the other islands.”11 Although the Caribs attacked again in 1681, killing eight colonists, Barbuda had, by the late seventeenth century, developed a reputation for its herds of cattle and horses.12

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The Crown continued to lease out the use of the entire island until 1898, with open-range cattle production becoming well established. The Codrington family held the lease from 1684 through 1870 and periodically attempted to establish plantations for cotton and other crops. Those efforts failed, however, because of the shallow soils, average annual rainfall of only nine hundred millimeters, a long winter dry season, frequent droughts, and a paucity of surface water. Sales of cattle for beef to the Royal Navy and draught oxen to sugar plantations on neighboring islands yielded most of the income from Barbuda, the remainder coming from the salvage of ships wrecked on the island’s many reefs and sales of mules, horses, sheep, goats, leather, wood, charcoal, fish, manure, turtles, salt, and other provisions. In contrast to neighboring Antigua, St. Kitts, and Nevis, so thoroughly dominated by sugar plantations during the 1700s and 1800s, Barbuda’s lack of private property and land enclosure—other than a few walls and fences to exclude stock from the lone village of Codrington and the few perennially faltering agricultural fields—helped to ensure that open range persisted through emancipation in 1834, termination of the last lease in 1898, and subsequent direct management by the Colonial Office.13 At least as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, a herding ecology that involved the walled wells had become well established, as revealed in the published accounts of several visitors between 1790 and 1850. No matter the season of the visit, those travelers invariably noted the thorny shrubland, the modest riding horses, and the feral cattle. They variously applied the terms huntsmen and hunters to the black herders, mentioned the leather hats and leggings used for protection from the thorns, the lassos thrown over horns or around rear legs, and the use of herding dogs. Captain Greville called them Puerto Rico bloodhounds, seemingly a reference to the Puerto Rican mastiff that closely resembles the British bullmastiff. Some visitors also mentioned stocktrails known as avenues or rides and the construction of rock walls to both exclude cattle from the village of Codrington and to trap them at the wells. One visitor described “stone walls and wattles to prevent depredations from the wild cattle” that surrounded the village and “rudely constructed pens around a pond, to serve as traps for the wild cattle.”14 Some travelers wrote extended descriptions of beef production, whether for local consumption or live shipment to the slaughterhouse on Antigua:

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At daybreak, next morning, I rode to a hunt of wild cattle, to freight the drogher with Christmas beef for Antigua. Our road to the pen was as bad as bad could be. . . . We came on the ground at length, and, before I knew where I was, I was startled by the yells of men and the yelping of dogs, and saw a herd of cattle rushing down towards me . . . followed by the black huntsmen. . . . We then got into the next field, when I heard another uproar and dismounted, and got on a stone wall six feet high, leaving my steed to take care of himself. Close to this wall came one of the wildest of cows, with tail erect and bellowing fearfully; under which circumstances they attack all who come in their way—the hunters following close after her. The plan is, when the wild one is brought to bay by the dogs, for the men to rush in, catch hold of her tail and throw her down, when a tame ox is brought and linked to her by a strong chain. The captive shows fight, but is quickly dragged off by the decoy trained for the purpose, and obeying the voice of the huntsmen. Thus were four taken and sent off to the beach, each chained to the decoy. 15 The hunters were a family of Caribs, who from their childhood had been accustomed to that exercise; they pursued the bull mounted on horses trained for the purpose, without any saddle, and nothing but a string in their mouths to guide them through the mazes of the woods; each hunter was armed with a spear, and they were accompanied by a parcel of fierce bulldogs, who, after a chase of two hours, fastened on the wearied animal, that made the whole country echo with his roarings, and pinned him to the ground, till the hunters arrived, and struck him dead with a hatchet.16 Although the romantic claim of Carib herders renders the overall veracity of the second account doubtful, the immediate slaughter of the bull indicates an intention to locally butcher and consume the beef. Other visitors focused on ox production, which involves the neutering of young bulls to promote docility and musculature so that they can be used as draft animals. The herders castrated young bulls, released them, and allowed them to run feral another year before rounding them up again for sale as oxen to sugar mills on neighboring islands:

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[It] would have puzzled the best huntsman in England to have displayed more judgment, skill, and dexterity, in selecting and separating a young but full-grown bull from a large herd, than my two black friends did. As soon as this was accomplished, the bull generally made, at a furious rate, for the thickest parts of the wood, followed by myself and motley companions. The hunstmen carried long ropes before them, and whenever they could get sufficiently near to the bull, they skillfully threw them over the animal’s horns, and not unfrequently seized the creature by the tail, and by a sudden peculiar jerk, succeeded in turning the bull over. Its hind legs were in a moment secured with ropes, and in about one minute more the creature rose from the ground under a new name, and the hunstmen and sportsmen were flying with their utmost speed from the enraged animal.17 The two negro huntsmen . . . had each six or seven horses allowed them, with two or three assistants who travelled on foot. . . . As soon as they find a herd, they select a young full grown bull, which is separated, with considerable tact from his companions, and he immediately seeks safety in flight. The chase then commences, helter skelter in all directions, through thickets and passes, over rocks and breaks, heads down, heels up; and as soon as the huntsman approaches near enough to the chase, he attempts to throw a long rope over the animal’s horns, with such practiced dexterity that he seldom fails in his object, or in doing so, he catches the tail of the affrighted creature with his hand, and either succeeds in throwing him on his side by a singular twist of the appendage, or runs with him till he stops in a state of exhaustion. As soon as the bull is secured, he submits to the mystical ordeal of receiving a new name, when he is allowed to depart to enjoy the range of the wilderness, as a sort of freemason among the untractable herd, until he is again chased to be sent on his travels.18 Together, the accounts describe diverse elements of the colonial herding ecology. It produced both beef and oxen on open range. A wall excluded the cattle from the village. The herders were blacks. They

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rounded up cattle both on the range and by trapping them at the walled wells. They used horses and dogs to chase down the feral cattle. They used various techniques to subdue them: one involved riding or running up behind a bull or cow and twisting its tail to make it lose its balance and stumble, in a manner similar to that used in the coleadero event in the charreadas of Mexico and parts of the U.S. Southwest and in the coleo of Venezuela and Colombia. Another technique involved a lasso thrown, apparently from either foot or horseback, around the horns or legs.19 The so-called Codrington Papers, which preserve correspondence between the Codrington family and representatives on Barbuda and Antigua as well as other documents spanning the seventeenth century through the twentieth, push the initial establishment of the wells and related herding ecology back to at least the mid-eighteenth century.20 Much of the relevant Codrington correspondence relates to repeated attempts to tame Barbuda’s feral cattle though the use of paddocks, introduction of British breeds, and controlled breeding. As early as 1720 William Codrington directed his manager to sell off all of Barbuda’s wild cattle, as the leaseholder referred to them. Many attempts followed to introduce purebred bulls and build walled pastures called parks to produce larger, more docile cattle. The limitations of soil and rainfall, however, precluded the growing of sufficient hay or sustaining pasture through the dry season within those paddocks and rendered such efforts futile. Any tame herd within the walls dwindled away while the feral herds beyond them grew as numerous as five thousand during the 1700s. Because the feral herds avoided contact with people, such enumerations required waiting until the dry season, “when they are urged to haunt the watering places and springs.”21 Herding dogs are another major theme in the Codrington Papers. Letters, particularly in the late 1700s, refer to the need during the rainy season for more so-called bull dogs (at that time a generic term for herding and fighting dogs rather than the name of any specific breed), even while William Codrington complained that using them only made the cattle even wilder. One of his attorneys on Antigua noted that the use of dogs resulted in cattle reaching market “in a most shocking condition.”22 The account books, however, confirm that the managers of Barbuda purchased many such dogs. They realized that whenever rainfall provided the cattle with abundant sources of surface water, herding dogs

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became absolutely necessary: “We have a great many cattle, but are greatly in want of dogs to catch them, there is so much water now in the island they will not go into the pens, and the larger ones absolutely bid us defiance.”23 Apparently, then, roundups with horses and dogs prevailed during the wet season and the use of the walled wells as traps during the dry season.24 Sporadic references relate to other aspects of the herding system. For example, a letter of 1740 notes how cattle used to become stuck and die in mudholes on the stocktrails until the completion of stone pavement in low spots.25 Other letters refer to manure exports to Antigua, for use as fertilizer on the Codrington sugar plantations.26 An account entry of 1781 records the purchase of four hog skin saddles and girths “for the use of the white people and negro hunters.”27 A letter of 1792 complains that Barbudan beef had a peculiar flavor because of the leaves that the cattle browsed.28 And a letter of 1837 reports that even after a drought of two years, the stockwells furnished “an abundant supply of fresh water.”29 The letters of Henri de Ponthieu, however, provide the earliest comprehensive account of the herding ecology.30 In 1780, on a commission from William Codrington, Ponthieu visited Barbuda to assess its potential for commercial cropping. In the process he explicitly described the dual system of hunting cattle on the open range, mainly during the wet season, and trapping them at the walled wells during the dry season. He noted such elements as the ponds that form throughout the lowlands during the rainy season and the grassy stocktrails cleared through the shrubland. In particular, he unmistakably identified the existence of walled wells with drinking troughs used as traps: “The advantages from digging wells, making troughs and strong enclosures in different parts with only one opening are very great. As wild cattle are necessitated to resort in dry weather to such places where they are easily taken. This often furnishes a good opportunity of culling the males and getting the females covered.”31 The Codrington Papers also include a map that gives some indication of the number and distribution of walled wells around the time of de Ponthieu’s visit in 1780 (fig. 4.4).32 The map shows ten walled wells symbolized as a square with a smaller square abutting one corner and labeled “watering pens where we catch cattle and horses.” The exact date of the map remains uncertain but relates to Dennis Reynolds’s tenure as

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Figure 4.4.  Partial transcription of a map of Barbuda by Dennis Reynolds dating to the visit of Henri de Ponthieu in 1780 showing ten walled livestock wells, the village of Codrington within its wall, and Highland House, built by the Codringtons as their occasional residence at the highest point on the island. (Compare figure 4.2.)

manager from 1779 through 1793. The map is labeled in his handwriting, and he hosted de Ponthieu, who complained that the map he was given proved so inaccurate as to be useless. And indeed the map both seriously distorts the shape of the island and the distances and directions between recognizable landmarks as well as fails to name any of the wells and cannot therefore serve to precisely locate the walled wells of the time. 33

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Other documents indicate that the herding ecology was in place at least by the mid-eighteenth century. The first explicit indication of well construction dates to the period of a sublease of 1746–61 that William Codrington made to Samuel Martin and William Byam: “Barbuda, after a whole year’s drought, has at last fine weather; but not withstanding the severest drought there ever known, we lost but 4 old cows by it. Thus we have prevented our ruin by excavating all the old springs and opening new ones.”34 The occupations listed in slave inventories offer further clues. An inventory of 1766 lists five stock hunters in the first gang, meaning middle-aged and young men and women: Ned, Robin, Philbear, Bennar, and Tom Beazer. In 1783 two slaves worked as stock hunters: John Bailey and, again, Tom Beazer. The Beazer name clearly relates to the extant Beazer Well. The inventory of 1783 also lists four males in their sixties as “drawing water for the wild stock at your different catching pens”: Cock, Fortune, Quashy, and Scipio.35 In 1786 Reynolds argued that using the grass gang to draw water with buckets saved keeping “a strong negro man at the wheel” of the recently introduced “water engine.”36 Further insight into how those walled wells served as traps emerges through study of the extant wells, now largely unused but still common property. Beginning with associated statehood in 1969 and escalating with independence as the country of Antigua and Barbuda in 1981, Barbudans have successfully argued that the island became their common property rather than public domain. The argument lacks a clear legal basis because the West Indies Act of 1967 and the Antigua Termination of Association Order of 1981 made all Crown lands into public lands administered by the new national government of independent Antigua and Barbuda, at least in law if not in practice. Yet many Barbudans maintained that the island had become their communal property because soon after the end of the final lease, in 1898, the Barbuda Ordinances of 1901 and 1904 made all Barbudans joint Crown tenants and thereby, they argued, joint owners upon independence. That legal argument sufficed to maintain the communal tenure in practice because the land uses that prevailed during the twentieth century required common access to unenclosed land. Barbudans had taken over and divided the colonial cattle herd, branding individual head as private property and selling the meat on Antigua. Those Barbudans with the largest herds were also the

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wealthiest, but they continued to rely on hunting the cattle on an open range and trapping them at the walled wells. Land thus remained unalienated and mostly unfenced because the politically most powerful Barbudans argued for communal land tenure to maintain their access to the range. Owners of small herds of cattle and goats, shifting cultivators, fishers, and charcoal burners had good reason to support the struggle to maintain communal land tenure in order to protect their own usufruct rights to land and resources. The national resource politics of the twentieth century also gave Barbudans cause to unite behind a legal argument for communal land tenure. Antiguans, who are in the majority, control election of the national government, and the family of V. C. Bird led that government for most of the second half of the twentieth century. The Birds enriched themselves by developing tourist resorts on public lands, to the social and environmental impoverishment of Antiguans. The uncertain status of land tenure on Barbuda limited such depredations there because developers had difficulty raising capital to build resorts without clear title to land.37 The reasons for the decline of open-range cattle herding since independence are multifaceted and complex. Perhaps most basically, the demand for Barbudan cattle products steadily declined after emancipation in 1834 because the Antiguan sugar industry mechanized and eventually collapsed, decreasing the demand for Barbudan oxen; over the 1900s synthetic materials increasingly replaced such cattle products as leather, tallow, and bone char; and independence eliminated the Royal Navy as a customer for beef at the same time that Antiguans began to prefer foreign over the peculiarly flavored Barbudan beef for themselves and to feed the increasing numbers of tourists. Also, as tourism reached Barbuda with the building of several luxury hotels along the south coast, beginning with the Coco Point Lodge in the 1960s, local opportunities for wage labor began to expand. Since 1975 mining of sand for use in resort construction projects throughout the Caribbean has resulted in detrimental environmental impacts such as groundwater contamination but also in government royalties and a vast expansion of the Barbudan civil service to around four hundred employees, about a third of the island’s population. Remittances and seasonal migratory employment have increased as the size of the Barbudan transnational community expanded greatly after 1945, in parallel with the rest of the British Caribbean.

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Moreover, manual labor, particularly rural vocations, and the wells and other aspects of the colonial landscape carry negative connotations associated with slavery. And politically, over the 1980s the long-standing process of negotiation among alliances of herd owners to determine ownership of unbranded calves deteriorated as the owner of the largest herd became increasingly dominant, claimed nearly every unbranded calf, and thereby discouraged the owners of small herds from continuing to herd any cattle at all.38 With the end of the Bird dynasty in 2004, Barbudans could begin to negotiate the formalization of their communal land-tenure system, but at a time when the land uses that had supported it had become rare. The result was the Barbuda Land Act of 2007, which passed into law on 17 January 2008 after several years of negotiation among Barbudans and between the Barbuda Council and the national government. In general, that legislation codifies and enshrines Barbudans’ communal ownership of their island, their usufruct rights, the inalienable status of the land, and the role of the Barbuda Council in administrating land use. Although the act explicitly mentions grazing of livestock as one possible land use, the Barbuda Council has mainly been allocating land for the construction of houses and tourism developments financed by remittances and returning expatriates.39 As a result, cattle herding has become largely moribund since independence, and the largely unused walled wells have fallen into disrepair even while some two thousand feral cattle as well as additional horses, sheep, goats, donkeys, and wild pigs roam the island (fig. 4.5).40 Of the seven known walled wells, four, Indigo, Jam, Beazer, and Olin Wells, have largely intact walls. Two more, Spring Well and Sam Spring Well, retain but the barest remnants of such walls. A rock wall also surrounds Low Pond, actually a natural water hole rather than a well. Some of the wells have alternate names: John instead of Jam Well; Beazels instead of Beazer Well; and All In or Only instead of Olin Well. Poor repair characterizes all the wells, several having broken drinking troughs and all but Olin Well lacking buckets to draw water. The Barbuda Council has designated five of the stockwells as historic sites, and efforts to repair, if not quite restore, them are underway. In the meantime, goats and donkeys drink at any of the wells with intact troughs whenever rainwater accumulates or someone draws water with a portable pump. They also drink at Low Pond despite the overgrowth of shrubs. Surveys of groundwater resources dating to the

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Figure 4.5.  Spring Well in 2007, one of the worst preserved of the livestock wells, suffering from a partially collapsed coaming and retaining only vestiges of the rock walls that once enclosed it. (See figure 4.2 for location.)

late colonial period record a dozen other wells dotting the lowlands, none of them enclosed by rock walls but a few of them, such as Bumpy and Highland Wells, with drinking troughs and enclosures of wire fencing. The general design of the rock-walled wells suggests use by large stock even though Barbudans claim, and the lack of cow flops confirms, that cattle no longer drink there. The wells themselves consist of a coaming some four meters in diameter and three-quarters of a meter high built of mortared limestone blocks, with the water table two to three meters below ground level (fig. 4.6).41 Of identical construction as the coamings and built into their sides, the drinking troughs measure about nine meters long, one-and-a half meters wide, and nearly three-quarters of a meter high. At some wells shallower pans ranging from one to three meters on a side and about a third of a meter high serve small stock. The troughs and pans rest directly on the bedrock of coral limestone that, except for occasional patches of soil, floors the enclosures. Based on Olin Well, people raised water to the surface with a bucket attached by a rope to a windlass and dumped the bucket onto a short flume built into the end of

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Figure 4.6.  Sketch encompassing the architectural elements of all the known rock-walled stockwells.

the trough nearest the coaming. The walls that enclose the wells are between three-quarters and one meter in width and between two and twoand-a-half meters in height. Most of the enclosures consist of dry-laid inner and outer walls filled with rubble except near entrances and corners, where solid, mortared walls lend greater strength. Rather than continuous upper courses, the highest walls consist of double wooden rails. A narrow, continuous step or, in some cases, a series of discontinuous steps about half a meter high runs around the interior bases of many of the walls. An opening some three meters wide gives entry to each enclosure, with a narrower opening leading into a smaller enclosure built into a corner of the main one. Iron hinge pins mortared into the sides of those openings indicate that gates once controlled access to the main and smaller enclosures, known as catching pens. Only Indigo Well, however, retains the type of double gate of wooden pickets that probably used to be common to all; the remains of more recent gates made of chain-link fencing lay beside both entrances at Olin Well. Systematic analysis of the form of the well enclosures uses aerial and ground-level photographs that antedate the dismantling and crushing of some walls for airstrip and road construction during the 1970s, including the wall that used to exclude livestock from the village. Together with field mapping in June 2007, archival photographs and maps yield plans for each of the known walled wells (fig. 4.7).42 The plans reveal a relatively

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Figure 4.7.  Plans of the seven extant rock-walled stockwells circa 1968 and those on maps of 1780 and 1813. Note that Indigo Well had a larger enclosure before reconstruction in the 1970s, hence the “Old” and “New” Indigo Wells; and that the 1780 and 1813 plans are neither to scale nor oriented.

consistent model for form but with some variation in size. Except for Low Pond and Indigo Well, all have the keyhole-plan well and trough as well as, in some cases, an additional watering pan or pans for smaller stock. Low Pond instead relies on a pool of brackish water and Indigo Well on a well located outside of the enclosure, the top of the coaming being level with the top of the wall; the well delivers water to a trough and pan inside the enclosure via a curved flume and hole through the wall. The name and atypical configuration suggest indigo processing might once have occurred at this well, but if so, no evidence remains of the usual cascade

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of three vats.43 The aerial photographs also reveal that Indigo Well had a larger enclosure before reconstruction in the 1970s, and the ground-level photographs confirm that the rebuilding retained the same well, flume, and trough configuration. The locations of the two entrances at “Old” Indigo Well as well as of the entrance to the main enclosure at Sam Spring Well remain indeterminable. In terms of size, the main enclosures range from 1,991 square meters for Low Pond to 443 square meters for Sam Spring Well, while the catching pens range from 186 square meters for Jam Well to 57 square meters for Spring Well and, as a proportion of the main enclosure, from 20 percent for Jam Well to 5 percent for “Old” Indigo Well. The main enclosures average 1,211 square meters and the catching pens 107 square meters. That variation in the dimensions of the enclosures contrasts with the relative consistency in those of the wells and troughs, and the variation does not seem related to the wells’ distances from Codrington. Because of the distortions of the 1780 map in figure 4.4 and lack of name labels for the ten wells it depicts, it cannot refer any of them to any of the seven extant wells or otherwise precisely locate the eighteenthcentury wells. Seven of the ten may well correspond to the seven extant wells, but one that clearly does not appears near the Atlantic coast, probably at a spring emerging near the base of the cliffs that rim much of the eastern side of the island. The other two unknown wells might relate either to extant wells with troughs but with no evidence of ever having had associated walls or to others long abandoned, collapsed, and now unknown. Certainly by 1837, three years after emancipation, one report noted the poor condition of the stockwells—walls “tumbling down, and out of the whole number . . . only one trough that will hold any quantity of water for the cattle”—implying abandonment, rebuilding, and perhaps relocation of wells through time.44 While all the extant wells might not correspond directly to those of the 1700s, their location in the lowlands rather than the highlands has remained relatively consistent over three centuries. And, if the early map’s symbol accurately portrays the wells, their general form has also remained stable: the well and trough located within a large enclosure abutted by a much smaller catching pen. The oral history of retired cattle herders combined with descriptions from Berleant-Schiller’s archived field notes, dating to the early 1970s, explicate

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the function of those rock-walled stockwells within the herding ecology before their subsequent decline in use. Crews of cattle runners typically numbered from four to six men who employed two methods for catching cattle: hunting them on the open range at any time of year and trapping them at the walled wells during the winter dry season. In the bush, the crews chased a herd on horseback until a cow or bull tired enough to be cut out and brought down with dogs, a tail twist, or a cattle runner on foot with a lasso. Another technique, used for bringing down smaller animals, required a flying leap from horseback to wrestle the animal to the ground, in a style similar to that of the bulldogging event of North American rodeos. At the walled wells, the crews watched at night during the dry season. As other water sources dried up throughout the lowlands, cattle could not avoid coming to the wells to drink. Fencing around perennial ponds that did not dry up, such as Horse Pond, forced more cattle to come to the walled wells. When they entered the main enclosure to drink, the cattle runners would shut the gate and chase the cattle into the smaller catching pen, also known by derivations such as the kitchen pen. Once all the stock had entered the catching pen, the crew shut its gate and reopened the main one so more cattle could enter the large enclosure to drink and also be trapped. Inside the catching pen, cattle runners subdued the cattle with tail twisting, lassoing from atop the walls, or bulldogging. Anytime a bull turned on a cattle runner, the built-in steps provided an escape route to the top of the wall. Once the cattle were subdued, the cattle runners tied them together in a line to lead them to Codrington, sometimes with an ox at the head of the column and other times with half of the crew holding onto the rope in front of the cattle and the other half behind.45 Barbudans of that time considered cattle running a prestigious occupation, and the crews both owned cattle themselves and herded for other owners, most of whom had half a dozen head but a few of whom had up to a hundred. Brands and earmarks established ownership, and the beef provided cash income though live exports to Antigua as well as feeding Barbudans. For example, in the early 1970s a calf had a value of $70 Eastern Caribbean, a breeding cow $150, and a bull from $150 to $230 depending on size, which could range from a small 181 kilograms to an even smaller 113 kilograms. The cattle runners were between the ages of twenty-five and and forty-five, and they earned $30 per crew for every animal caught on commission for another owner.46

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The current cattle herders have abandoned use of the walled stockwells to trap cattle but nonetheless offer some additional insights into the historic herding ecology. The wells became dysfunctional and began to deteriorate as cattle herding declined in parallel with population growth, hurricane damage to housing, and increasing automobile ownership. During most of the colonial period a limestone wall measuring more than a meter high and half a meter thick had enclosed the village of Codrington, and virtually all Barbudans lived within it. That wall kept livestock out of the village and villagers in, the purpose of the Codringtons being to monopolize the use of land and resources beyond the village. As Barbudans gained more control over the island in the twentieth century, archival photographs and maps reveal how they began to remove the wall and expand the village, first southward and then eastward (fig. 4.8).47 Several major factors encouraged households to move out of the core village, especially

Figure 4.8.  Expansion of the village of Codrington to about 1850, 1968, and 2005 in relation to the rock-walled livestock wells.

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long-term population growth from 492 in 1832 to 1,325 in 2001 and catastrophic damage done to the colonial housing stock by hurricanes, Donna in 1960 and Luis in 1995. Other factors attracted people to the new suburbs: piped water reduced reliance on the village well; an increase in the number of cars from 15 in 1977 to 220 in 2008 eased travel to and from the village core; and more funds—whether derived from remittances, migratory employment, and the pensions of returned retirees or from wage labor for the hotels, sand quarry, and government—became available to purchase construction materials, loans being uncommon because of the lack of title to serve as collateral. As a result, more families built new houses beyond the former wall, and more derelict houses came to mark the colonial core. The village wall itself provided a ready source of limestone blocks to crush into gravel for road and airstrip construction. 48 In turn, the expansion of the village into the zone of stockwells negatively impacted the herding system, ending the practice of trapping cattle during the dry season. The construction activity made the feral cattle too wary to drink at the wells, and some residents of the new suburbs even shot at the cattle to discourage their use of the wells. Many Barbudans, in fact, now consider not only cattle but donkeys and horses a nuisance because of their feces, or “mess.” Only a few still ride either horses or donkeys. The low demand for abundant cattle makes cattle hunting much more productive than trapping, which would require maintaining the wells. As use of the wells declined along with the number of cattle runners, the runners initially decreased the size of the enclosure at Indigo Well to more easily maintain it and eventually stopped using all but Olin Well, one of the wells furthest from the village. The walls around Spring Well and Sam Spring Well then joined the village wall in the stone crusher, and now even at Olin Well the gate lies on the ground beside the entrance.49 The three young men who now hunt cattle do so mainly as a diversion from their jobs but also to earn a little extra money, and their practices echo some of those of the colonial period. Since feral cattle occur in such abundance relative to the demand for beef, branding no longer occurs. Instead, the feral herds have become common property that the single crew of avocational cattle runners hunts for themselves or on commission for other Barbudans. Commercial beef production has come to focus on small herds of recently introduced zebu crosses, tame in contrast to the feral stock, tethered while grazing, owned as private

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property, and paddocked at night to prevent loss. The owners sell them to butchers on Antigua, and some of the meat, once processed and chilled or frozen, comes back to Barbuda for sale.50 The avocational cattle runners now periodically ride out on horses with a pack of pit bulls to hunt down the small, short-horned feral cattle. The hunts typically begin on Friday at midnight so that the hunters can sell the meat on Saturday morning to locals for family barbeques or, given a large enough animal, on the hoof to a butcher on Antigua. The crew chases a large cow or bull on horseback until it tires enough for the pit bulls to corner it, sink their teeth into its face and neck, and bring it to its knees. The cattle runners then rush in on foot to tie a rope around the animal’s horns to lead it back to Codrington for slaughter. Mentored by one of the retired cattle runners, they also continue the practices of tail twisting and bulldogging.51 Mapping the diverse primary sources—archival documents, published accounts of travelers, maps, photographs, oral histories, extant practices, and landscape vestiges—onto the Barbudan landscape results in a general model of the colonial herding ecology (fig. 4.9). The wells tap the

Figure 4.9.  A generalized transect across Barbuda illustrating the environmental zones between which cattle moved. Compare the environmental zones across the bottom with figure 4.2.

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relatively high water table of the lowlands, which centuries of browsing and charcoal burning have cloaked in a xerophytic, open evergreen shrubland that includes succulents, thorny invasives such as acacia, and grassy openings. In contrast, wells cannot tap the much deeper water table of the highlands, a plateau of older and more eroded limestone that rises to an elevation of thirty-eight meters, forms the cliffs of the Atlantic coast, and retains at least some closed evergreen woodland that during the 1900s supported shifting cultivation. In the wet season, throughout the lowlands finely textured soils and exposed bedrock retain surface water in solution potholes and broader shallow depressions, known as slabs. In the dry season, only a few notable areas of open water persist in the lowlands, however: the freshwater Bull Hole and Horse Pond and several saline ponds, known as flashes, along the coast. The deeper soils of the highlands drain more freely and make surface water scarce at any time of year except at the bottoms of the many sinkholes.52 During the dry season, then, as water sources progressively dried up, feral cattle would come to the walled wells near Codrington to drink, and cattle runners could relatively easily catch, castrate, and cull them. Fencing around perennial ponds forced more cattle to the wells. At any time of year, but necessarily during the wet season, crews hunted down the feral cattle on the open range by using horses and dogs, bulldogging, tail twisting, and lassoing. That uniquely Barbudan herding ecology dates to at least the mideighteenth century, and perhaps a century earlier, and displays a great deal of continuity over the centuries. The major difference between the colonial herding ecology and the postcolonial one involves slave versus free labor and associated issues such as monopoly leasehold of land and ownership of livestock versus communal land tenure and multiple cattle owners. The colonial system would not have employed branding or earmarking, since all cattle belonged to the Codringtons. The period of the sublease to Martin and Byam is an exception: they branded their cattle TG and SMB or, alternatively, cut off one horn. The TG brand might relate to the name of Martin’s plantation on Antigua, known as the Greencastle Estate. The SMB brand seems to combine three of the initials of Samuel Martin and William Byam. The colonial system also employed relatively more castration, almost exclusively for ox production rather than to manage breeding. As the Antiguan sugar industry mechanized and then

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collapsed after emancipation, the use of castration declined in parallel with the demand for oxen. Most recently, the decline in demand for Barbudan beef and expansion of the village of Codrington have reduced the wells to moribund vestiges. Even so, some of the basic herding practices persist among the few remaining cattle runners, including the use of horses and dogs as well as the practices of bulldogging, tail twisting, and lassoing.53 That blacks herded cattle on colonial Barbuda seems clear enough from the eyewitness accounts of their role as cattle runners, but determining their role in establishing the herding ecology requires reconstructing the various Atlantic networks that brought whites and blacks with diverse knowledge and skills to that island. Those who attempted to settle Barbuda in the early and mid-seventeenth century were mainly, possibly exclusively, whites. But by the eighteenth century, when the first fairly reliable population estimates begin to occur, Barbuda had a black majority. In 1715, 93 blacks and 25 whites lived on the island. Thereafter, the number and proportion of whites steadily decreased as the black population grew. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the entire white population consisted of a single white manager, always male, sometimes with a wife and sometimes with one or two other white men to assist. The black population, meanwhile, increased to 172 in 1746, 190 in 1756, 196 in 1761, 291 in 1779, 314 in 1804, and nearly 500 on the eve of emancipation in 1832.54 Precisely dating the transition from white to black majority remains elusive, but it probably took place with the beginning of the lease by the brothers Christopher and John Codrington in 1684. Their father, also named Christopher, had arrived in Barbados about 1628, established successful sugar plantations in the 1640s, when sugar and slavery became firmly established on that island, and died in 1656. His sons received land grants on Antigua in the 1670s, founded several large sugar plantations, including Betty’s Hope and Clare Hall, and transferred many slaves from the family’s Barbados plantations to Antigua and, after obtaining the lease in 1684, to Barbuda. The younger brother, John, lived on Barbuda from 1684 until his death in 1688. The elder brother, Christopher, became governor general of the Leewards in 1689. His son, yet another Christopher Codrington, inherited the Antigua and Barbados plantations

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in 1698 as well as taking over the Barbuda lease and succeeding his father as governor general. On his death in 1710, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts inherited the Barbados plantations while a cousin, William Codrington, inherited the Antigua plantations, took over the Barbuda lease, and resettled it after the French depopulated it in 1710 during the War of the Spanish Succession. William Codrington was the son of John Codrington and had been a minor when his father died in 1688. Although he grew up on Barbados, Antigua, and Barbuda he moved to England, married Elizabeth Bethell in 1717, and soon thereafter became the first Baronet of Dodington. When he died in 1738 his teenage son of the same name inherited the title together with the Antigua plantations and Barbuda, but his mother managed the estate in trust until 1740. When the second William Codrington died in 1792, he left his estate to a nephew named Christopher Bethell-Codrington, who made the infamous comment about Barbuda being a “nursery for Negroes.”55 Barbuda’s seemingly atypical rate of natural increase throughout the eighteenth century did in fact contrast with the high death rates that made continual slave purchases necessary on some other islands, but several scholars have demonstrated that the Codringtons did not use Barbuda to breed and produce slaves. After Christopher Bethell-Codrington, a series of Christophers and Williams, Codringtons and Bethells, and various combinations thereof inherited the Barbuda lease until relinquishing it in 1870—nearly two centuries after it began.56 The principal black settlement of Barbuda therefore seems to have taken place during the period 1684–1710. Some blacks may have been on Barbuda much earlier, but if so the sources do not reveal them. The blacks that the Codringtons settled on Barbuda between the beginning of the lease in 1684 and the French depopulation of 1710 must mainly have come either by way of Barbados or Antigua. Those brought from the Codrington plantations on Barbados had been born either on that island as early as the 1640s, when plantation agriculture and slavery became established there, or in Africa. Others, or their immediate ancestors, had come directly from Africa to Antigua after the 1670s, when that island entered directly into the transatlantic slave trade. The blacks that repopulated Barbuda in 1710, however, must have come exclusively by way of Antigua because that year the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel inherited the Codringtons’ Barbados plantations and thereby eliminated

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that source of supply. The blacks on Barbuda after 1710, therefore, must have mainly been born on Antigua or come from Africa by way of Antigua. Thereafter, no more than a few additional blacks arrived on Barbuda because the island’s relatively high rate of natural increase made it a potential exporter of slaves to the Codringtons’ Antiguan plantations rather than an importer. Even if such exports were small and infrequent, the Codringtons would have had no reason to send additional new slaves to Barbuda.57 The Codrington Papers reveal little about the blacks involved in cattle ranching on Barbuda beyond the names of some. Not many actual herders are listed in the slave inventories. Five middle-aged and young men, Ned, Robin, Philbear, Bennar, and Tom Beazer, appear as stock hunters in the inventory of 1766.58 The inventory of 1783 lists only two: John Bailey, a “mustee” of thirty-two, and, again, Tom Beazer, a “mullatoo” of about sixty.59 As in the 1900s, the cattle runners of the 1700s enjoyed social status and did not have to look after the herding dogs or draw water for the cattle, meaning that other slaves were involved in cattle herding in those roles. The inventory of 1783 lists an “old nanny” of sixty years of age in the grass gang—meaning the children, elderly, and infirm—as “feeding the hunting dogs” and two other “old women” as doing the washing for the cattle runners. The same inventory lists four elderly men, Cock, Fortune, Quashy, and Scipio, who drew water at the “catching pens.” Much about the origins of those individuals remains obscure and general. They would have numbered among either the many Africans enslaved and shipped to the British West Indies beginning in the 1600s or their Creole descendants born in the Caribbean. Of the 2,318,252 African slaves listed in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database as disembarking in the British Caribbean between 1606 and 1842, the vast majority came from West Africa. About 85 percent embarked between the Bight of Biafra in the south and Senegambia in the north.60 Only a little over 5 percent, however, embarked in Senegambia. Barbados and Antigua, respectively the second and third largest slave importers in the British Caribbean, following Jamaica, had somewhat higher proportions of Senegambians: Barbados with 7.5 percent and Antigua with 10 percent. And before 1711, by which time most of the blacks who would arrive on Barbuda during the eighteenth century had already done so, 7.5 percent

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of the some 216,000 slaves to disembark on Barbados and about 14 percent of the nearly 18,000 to disembark on Antigua were Senegambians. The lack of any ethnic identifiers in the eighteenth-century Barbudan slave inventories, other than references to mustees and mulattoes, indicates a Creole population of mixed African and European origins. Given the pattern of slave disembarkations in the British Caribbean and in Barbados and Antigua more specifically, some of the residents of Barbuda in the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth came from Africa, many from West Africa and a substantial number of those from Senegambia. Many others, however, even at that early date, were Creoles born on either Barbados or Antigua. By the late eighteenth century the black Barbudan population had undergone several decades of natural increase, with few departures or arrivals, and consisted nearly exclusively of Creoles, some of whom were of partial white parentage. The names listed in the inventories do not reveal much more but seem to confirm the predominance of West African origins. Most Barbudan slaves had common British names or names of classical and Christian derivation, such as Scipio and Philbear. Quashy represents the only indubitably African name, a typical rendition of Kwasi, a day-name in Akan, the lingua franca of the Gold Coast, typically translated as “Sunday.” Tom Beazer’s name might also have an African origin, perhaps deriving from the Arabic name Basir and therefore suggesting a possible origin among the Fulani or other Muslim peoples of the cattle herding belt of West Africa. In the inventory of 1783, which lists him as a cattle runner, however, Beazer’s age is given as about sixty, and he bears the designation mulatto, meaning he was born in the 1720s, probably on Barbuda and of a white father. The slave inventory of 1746 lists him together with several other Beazers: Will, Johnny, Robert, and Daniel. 61 None of the sources demonstrates that any African cattle herders from Senegambia ever disembarked on Barbuda. The general characteristics of the slave population of the British Lesser Antilles, especially Antigua and Barbados, certainly suggests some might have. A few of the names of those involved in cattle herding also suggest West African origins, even roots among the Fulani cattle herders of Senegambia. The black population of Barbuda had mostly arrived by 1710, however, before any of the sources demonstrate the existence of the walled wells or other defining characteristics of the herding ecology. By the time the slave

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inventories begin to record cattle runners in the 1760s, most of them would have been Creoles. Even the oldest blacks involved in cattle herding, such as Quashy, who turned sixty-five in 1783 and drew water at the walled wells, had been born eight years after William Codrington repopulated the island in 1710. He may have been West African, but more likely the parents who named him were and had come to Barbuda from the Gold Coast by way of Antigua or Barbados in 1710. Whites like the Codringtons and their attorneys and managers must, given their social power over Barbudan blacks, have played a role in establishing the herding ecology. The managers generally lived on Barbuda and the attorneys on Antigua, overseeing all the Codringtons’ affairs on both islands (table 4.1).62 Before the 1740s the leaseholders lived in the Leewards, often on Antigua and sometimes even on Barbuda, and consequently did not require attorneys to manage local affairs. Verbal communications with any managers or other employees on Barbuda would have dominated, and thus the events of the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth remain relatively obscure. After 1738 the second William Codrington inherited the estate and became the first entirely absentee leaseholder; as a result, the correspondence between the Codringtons and their attorneys and managers began to leave a better record of events. While those archival documents elide much about the relative roles of blacks and whites in the emergence of the herding ecology, the reconstruction of as much as possible of the biographies of the leaseholders, attorneys, managers, and other employees at a minimum reveals whether any had prior experience with cattle ranching, whether in Britain or elsewhere. The first leaseholders, from 1668 to 1684, were Samuel Winthrop, Joseph Lee, Francis Sampson, William Milden, and their heirs. Winthrop was the son of John Winthrop. He was born in Suffolk, England, but grew up in the Massachusetts Bay colony and, before settling in the Leewards, traveled widely, visiting, among other places, London, Amsterdam, the Azores, and the Canaries (fig. 4.10).63 By the 1650s he and his Dutch wife, Elizabeth, had established themselves on St. Kitts, but they relocated to Antigua after the French invasion of the Leewards in 1666. When Winthrop died on Antigua in 1674, he left his share of the Barbuda lease to his wife and sons, who had their own plantations on Antigua. Lee had

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Table 4.1.  The leaseholders of Barbuda until 1792, their known attorneys on Antigua, and their known managers and other employees on Barbuda. Period

M a nagers and Attorneys o t her employees

Leaseholders

1668–84

Unknown, if any

None

1684–98

Unknown, if any; John Codrington lived on Barbuda in 1684–88

None

1698–1710 Unknown, if any

None

1710–38

Unknown, if any

None

1738–40

Unknown, if any

1740–46

Simon and Mrs. Punter, Thomas Beech, and Mr. McNish Mr. Hodge, William Brunsel, Mr. Reed, and Charles Baird

Benjamin King, beginning in 1740 Benjamin King

Samuel Winthrop, Joseph Lee, Francis Sampson, William Milden, and heirs Clement Tudway, George Turney, John Codrington, and Christopher Codrington (II) Christopher Codrington (III) William Codrington (I) Elizabeth Bethell, in trust for William Codrington (II) William Codrington (II)

1746–61

1761–79

1779–92

William Keeling, Matthew Meech, Johnson Weeks, Nicolas Jackson, and Abraham Webber Dennis Reynolds and Abraham Webber

None

William Codrington (II) but subleased to Samuel Martin and William Byam William Codrington (II)

Samuel Redhead, who periodically lived on Barbuda with a slave named Sally Bullock Richard Clarke, William Richard Oliver, Codrington (II) Langford Lovell, and J. L. Walrond

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Figure 4.10.  Origins of the leaseholders and attorneys of Barbuda in Ireland and Great Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with areas of open-range cattle herding and places referenced in this chapter.

acquired land on Antigua in 1648 and died in 1669, a year into the lease, leaving his estate to a son. The Sampson family owned a plantation on Barbados, with Francis running affairs in London while his brother John operated the plantation. In 1663 Francis sailed for Barbados and also visited the Leewards, where he acquired a plantation on Nevis and later also became a partner in the Barbuda lease. When he died on a voyage, his widow and heir, Mary Sampson, assigned her quarter of the Barbuda lease to William Stapleton. Stapleton had grown up in Tipperary, Ireland, was in the Leewards by the 1660s, founded plantations on Nevis and Montserat, and became governor of the Leeward Islands in 1672. Milden was a Bristol merchant and shipper who owned a plantation on Nevis,

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sold it when he became the Winthrops’ son-in-law in order to buy another on Antigua so that his wife could live near her family, and died in 1669.64 Those first leaseholders used Barbuda to raise oxen for their plantations on the neighboring Leewards, and although the Crown had granted them the lease from 1668 until 1700 they sold their rights to Barbuda in 1684 to Clement Tudway, George Turney, and Christopher and John Codrington. Turney died two years after taking over the lease, and Tudway died three years later. Turney, who was from London and had acquired a plantation on Antigua in 1673, died in 1686. Tudway was one of three brothers who were the sons of a clerk from Windsor: Charles managed their plantation, living on Antigua in 1687–92; Clement acted as their London agent; and Richard operated the ships. When Clement died in 1689, Charles continued to manage their interests in Antigua, principally Parham Plantation, until they passed to absentee heirs established at Wells, just south of Bristol. Neither the Turney nor the Tudway heirs seem to have pursued their interest in the Barbuda lease after the deaths of the two Codrington partners in the 1680s.65 The first Codringtons to hold the lease were Christopher and John. Their father had grown up in Gloucester, England, but both sons were born on Barbados and moved to Antigua as young men in the 1670s to establish sugar plantations. John moved to Barbuda about 1684, dying there in 1688, and Christopher lived on Antigua until his death in 1698. His son, again of the same name but having an unknown mother, was born on Barbados in 1668, attended Oxford from 1685 to 1694, served as a captain in the Foot Guards in Flanders and London, returned to live on Antigua until 1703, and then retired to the estates he had inherited on Barbados, where he died without heirs in 1710. John’s son, William, therefore inherited the estate. He was born on Antigua and may have lived with his father on Barbuda in the mid-1680s but moved to Gloucester and ran Barbuda as an absentee leaseholder until his death in 1738. His son and heir, also named William, was a minor in 1738, so his mother, Lady Codrington, administered Barbuda in trust. When William came of age he continued the practice of running the family’s West Indian estates in absentia, living his entire life at Dodington House and administering Barbuda through his attorneys and managers. Over the course of a century, then, the Codringtons came from and returned to Gloucester, located in the Cotswold Hills that form part of the southern rim of the

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area of British open-range cattle herding. Their experience beyond England seems to have been entirely in the Lesser Antilles, where they made a fortune from slavery and sugar.66 From 1746 to 1761 William Codrington sublet Barbuda to Martin and Byam. Both their grandfathers had grown up in Ireland but settled in the Caribbean: first on Barbados in the 1650s, then in Surinam, until the British exchanged it with the Dutch in return for Manhattan in 1667, and finally on Antigua, where they established sugar plantations. Both of the grandsons, then, were third-generation Antiguans. Martin, however, lost his father in 1697, at about the age of five, and his mother sent him to live with relatives in Ireland, probably in Dublin, where his grandfather had grown up. After earning a degree at Cambridge and marrying, he returned to Antigua from about 1714 through 1729 to run the plantation he had inherited as a minor. During the 1730s and 1740s, however, the Martin family lived in England, at least part of that period in Shaftsbury, and ran the Antiguan estate through managers. Near the end of that period of absentee ownership Martin and Byam jointly leased Barbuda, the two being not only business partners but stepbrothers because Martin’s mother, Lydia Thomas, had in the interim married Byam’s father. Byam also had a degree from Cambridge, attending in the 1720s before returning to Antigua to run his family’s plantation. When in 1750 Martin also returned to Antigua, he found his plantation in such poor condition that he stayed for two decades to rebuild it, during which time he wrote the well-known “Essay on Plantership,” which warned of the perils of absentee ownership. At least as early as 1750 the partners tried to terminate their sublease of Barbuda but could not agree with Codrington on the terms. With Byam’s death in 1755, Martin redoubled his efforts to end the contract, working mainly through his son of the same name, a member of Parliament who lived in London. Codrington and Martin finally agreed on the terms to end the lease in 1761. Martin remained on Antigua until retiring to London in the 1770s, where he died in 1776. 67 The attorneys that the Codringtons hired to run their affairs on Barbuda over the eighteenth century were Benjamin King, Samuel Redhead, Richard Clarke, Richard Oliver, Langford Lovell, and J. L. Walrond. Only the first three may have played a role in establishing the herding ecology because the last three postdate Ponthieu’s visit in 1780, by which time at least ten walled stockwells already existed. King was a

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third-generation Antiguan, his grandfather having acquired land in 1671; he moved to London in the 1750s, after William Codrington sublet Barbuda to Martin and Byam, and died in 1758. Redhead, also born on Antigua, in 1704, the son of a carpenter, became the Codrington attorney in 1761 and purchased his own sugar plantation in 1763. After his wife, Anne Crump, died in 1742, Redhead cohabitated with one of the Codrington slaves, Sarah Bullock, sometimes living with her on Barbuda. With the end of his tenure as the Codringtons’ attorney in 1779, Redhead retired to London, dying there in his early eighties in 1785. Clarke came from a family established on Antigua for several generations, descended from the Nathaniel and Samuel Clarke who had acquired land grants there in the 1670s.68 Most of the whites who lived on Barbuda were known as managers, others as governors. In the early 1740s they included Simon Punter, Thomas Beech, and a Mr. McNish. Punter lived on Barbuda with his wife but quit when she died there. Not many archival traces remain regarding Beech, but he had moved to Antigua by 1744 to marry Ann Gamble, a fourth-generation Antiguan, and they had a son together in 1767. McNish, probably the Nathaniel McNish who witnessed a will on Antigua in 1740, died on Barbuda in 1745 in a slave revolt. That uprising may have prompted William Codrington to sublet the island to Martin and Byam the next year. They employed various managers, including a Mr. Hodge in 1750, William Brunsel in 1756, Mr. Reed in 1757, and Dr. Charles Baird in 1761. Reed and Baird remain obscure, but Hodge likely numbered among the third Antiguan generation of that large family, its patriarch settling on the island in the 1600s. Before managing Barbuda, Brunsel had lived on Antigua since at least 1753, when he appears in a census; he resigned as manager in 1756, the year his wife inherited part of her father’s estate, to return to Antigua and practice medicine. At the end of the sublease William Codrington hired William Keeling as manager, but he quit the next year because he married, and his wife, Margaret Barry, being from an old Antiguan family of planters, refused to move to Barbuda. Keeling was a widower when he took the job in 1761; his first wife was Susanna Barter; he died on Antigua in 1784. Matthew Meech, who had managed one of the Codringtons’ Antigua plantations during the early 1750s, replaced Keeling on Barbuda, but he too quit because his wife refused to live there. Redhead then successively hired Johnson Weeks and Nicolas

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Jackson, the latter a nephew and ship’s master who had lived on Antigua since at least the census of 1753. In 1779, as Redhead retired as attorney, Reynolds took over management of Barbuda for an extended period, from 1779 to 1793. Reynolds was of Irish origin, causing the English author of the economic history of Barbuda to disparage him as “an Irishman of apparently little education” despite his evident competence, well-written letters to William Codrington, and long tenure as manager.69 Some of the Barbuda managers had as many as three white overseers working for them at various times, but turnover was high, and they remain largely anonymous. Abraham Webber proved an exception: he lived on Barbuda from 1765 to 1786, oversaw the turtle catch, and fathered several mulatto children.70 None of the sources demonstrate that the whites who may have played a role in establishing the Barbudan herding ecology had any prior experience with cattle ranching. Most of the leaseholders and their attorneys were Creoles, born in the Lesser Antilles. Some of their parents and grandparents had come from regions of Britain or Ireland with openrange cattle herding, such as Christopher Codrington. Half a century after he had left Gloucester for Barbados in the 1640s, his grandson William left Barbuda and Antigua for his ancestral home in the Cotswold Hills and ran Barbuda in absentia after inheriting it in 1710. William may well have observed British cattle herders in the Cotswolds, but his and his son’s persistent orders to their Barbuda managers to build paddocks suggests a lack of familiarity with the advantages of open-range herding in certain environments. Some of the leaseholders of the 1660s and 1670s may also have had knowledge of British cattle herding. Milden came from Bristol, in the Cotswolds, and Stapleton from Tipperary, in Ireland. While the use of an open range on Barbuda has parallels in both Europe and Africa, table 1.1 reveals that other aspects of the herding ecology suggest Senegambian over British influences. The numerous stockwells of Barbuda are one of the defining characteristics of its herding ecology and suggest African practices. Cattle herders in both the British highlands and the Andalusian Marismas could rely on surface water throughout the year and did not generally use stockwells. In contrast, in Senegambia and more generally throughout the sub-Saharan steppes, stockwells were as integral an element of the herding ecology as on

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Barbuda. Although walls did not enclose Senegambian stockwells, herders relied on them to water their stock during the dry season. Lasso use also echoes Senegambian practice. British herders did not use lassos at all, whereas Senegambians did, although only while on foot, not from horseback. Conversely, other Barbudan practices parallel those of the British highlands rather than those of Senegambia. In particular, British herders used dogs to manage cattle while herder dogs did not occur at all in Senegambia. Yet other Barbudan practices echo neither Senegambian nor British herding ecologies but instead those of the Spanish Caribbean. British and African herders did not allow their cattle to become feral, a key characteristic of both herding ecologies being maintenance of close contact between herders and their herds in all seasons, including regular milking of the cows and castration of some of the bulls. Feral cattle, in contrast, typified the Marismas, Spanish Caribbean, and New Spain. Moreover, two visitors to Barbuda in the early nineteenth century reported seeing cattle runners casting their lassos from horseback, a practice that emerged in New Spain in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.71 Barbudans must therefore have independently invented lassoing from horseback or the idea had somehow reached the island from the North American mainland west of the Mississippi River, where it occurred from Mexico to Louisiana and California by the early nineteenth century. Perhaps most tellingly, the use of horses to herd cattle did not occur in either Britain or Senegambia but became central to the herding ecology of the Spanish Caribbean. One possible source of those Hispanic elements in the herding ecology of Barbuda may have been the cattle herders of Jamaica, which began as a Spanish colony in the sixteenth century but became a British one in 1655. Cattle ranching became established in Jamaica in 1509, while under Spanish rule. The island’s seasonally flooded savannas, like those of Veracruz, were similar enough to those of the Marismas that the same general herding ecology prevailed. Feral herds ranged largely untended across the savannas, moving upslope in the wet season and down in the dry. The herders wielded lances from horseback to round up the feral cattle for branding and culling. A low demand for beef combined with a rapid increase in herd size resulted in a pattern similar to those of

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Hispaniola and Veracruz: vaqueros used dogs to chase down cattle and the desjarretadera to hamstring them, took the hides and tallow, and left most of the meat on the ground as the dogs’ reward. On Jamaica pigs became an integral part of the herding ecology, foraging in the woodlands that bordered the savannas. After the British occupation in 1655, that herding ecology underwent fundamental modification even while retaining some antecedent practices. Use of open range and herding dogs, both familiar to British highlanders, along with the ancillary herding of pigs remained. The uncastrated longhorns, feral and unmanageable by means of the pedestrian herding practices of Britain, forced the new colonizers to learn how to herd from horseback, albeit armed with the British bullwhip. More fundamental modifications that echoed British practices followed over time: nightly penning in enclosures of picket fences made the cattle more docile; so did castration; and the manured ground of the cattle pens, periodically relocated, served to grow crops. By the 1670s the Jamaican herding ecology had stabilized into a unique hybrid of diverse elements that retained the integration of pig herding in bordering woodlands and the mounted herding of cattle, albeit more docile ones. The roles in that process of black vaqueros in Spanish Jamaica and of black cowmen in British Jamaica remain unexamined.72 In terms of the characteristics of the Barbudan herding ecology, then, its origins seem diverse and partially endogenous. It shared the use of open range with Senegambian, British, and Hispanic cattle herders. The use of dogs was a British practice also found in Jamaica, New Spain, and the Spanish Caribbean. The lasso cast while on foot echoed the practices of Senegambian and Andalusian herders. The feral cattle and use of horses were similar to Andalusia, the Spanish Caribbean, New Spain, and Jamaica. Tail twisting and lassoing from horseback also occurred in New Spain. And wells played a similarly integral role in the herding ecology of Senegambia. Yet the stone walls that enclosed the wells, turning them into cattle traps, seem to be unique to Barbuda. The sources do not demonstrate that any individual or group played a leading role in the establishment of cattle ranching on Barbuda. Only the general characteristics of the slave population suggest some Senegambians with cattle herding experience may have disembarked on Barbuda late in the seventeenth century or the early eighteenth, although the names of a

barbuda    135

few of the black cattle herders suggest origins in West Africa. Similarly, only vague relationships suggest that any of the whites had any prior experience with cattle herding anywhere in Europe or the Americas, including Jamaica. A few had lived in regions of Britain where open-range cattle herding occurred: Milden and William Codrington in the Cotswolds and Stapleton in Tipperary. But in the case of Codrington, who had more social power than anyone else involved, all the evidence demonstrates that he ignored the possibilities of transferring aspects of British open-range herding ecology to Barbuda. Instead, he insisted on attempting to establish paddocks, hay production, and docile cattle. He even disapproved of the use of herding dogs to manage the cattle, a distinctly British practice. A reasonable interpretation of the Barbudan herding ecology suggests that it was subject to diverse influences and local innovation because of the lack of antecedent knowledge among those involved in its emergence. While the open range was common to Senegambia, the British highlands, and, in general, the ranching frontiers of the Americas, the Barbudan herding ecology incorporated elements that variously echoed those of Europe, Africa, and other parts of the Americas, including the use of dogs and horses, lassos cast on foot and from horseback, feral cattle, tail twisting, and wells. Moreover, enclosing those wells in walls and using them to trap cattle during the dryseason was unique to Barbuda and presumably represents a radical local innovation. Networks did link Barbuda into the broader Atlantic world, and the possibility remains that other places either influenced or were influenced by what now appears to be an idiosyncratic herding ecology. For example, Barbuda shared its initial colonization history, dry season, and lack of surface water with nearby Antigua, where open-range cattle herding also occurred until sugar plantations prevailed over the late seventeenth century. As they did on Barbuda, the Spaniards made an abortive attempt to colonize Antigua in the sixteenth century and seem to have introduced cattle. The French followed in 1629 but also failed to establish a permanent settlement. The British had more success in 1632, and by the midseventeenth century Antigua apparently was so “naturally stored with wild game as hogs, goats, cattle etc.” and “abundant in fish, in game, and in all sort of domestic livestock” that it exported cattle to Barbados and other islands:73 “At present diverse [Antiguan plantations] are in a hopeful way upon the design of sugar, cotton, indigo, and other commodities, and

1 3 6   b a r b u d a

all of them generally very well stocked with cattle that they transport them from thence to the Barbados and all other English plantations in those parts.”74 At that time walled stockwells similar to those of Barbuda may have occurred on Antigua. In comparison to Barbuda, however, Antigua had extensive areas of fertile soils that, together with the construction of water cisterns and slavery, facilitated its conversion into a populous island dedicated to sugar production. In the late 1660s Antigua had a population of “about 1,700 (where of 300 women) besides 700 Negroes.”75 In 1678, shortly after Christopher Codrington helped to establish the Barbados model of sugar production on Antigua, 4,480 people lived on the island, about half of them enslaved blacks. By 1708 the population had increased to 15,852, more than 80 percent black, and plantation cultivation occupied well over half the island. If the herding ecology of Barbuda ever occurred on Antigua, the island’s transformation into a landscape of sugar plantations has obscured any vestiges or memory of walled stockwells from the mid-seventeenth century. Determining whether the Barbudan herding ecology also occurred on Antigua would require reconstruction of that island’s early landscape. And determining whether or not and, if so, how that herding ecology originated on Antigua and only later became established on Barbuda would require reconstruction of the biographies of Antigua’s early settlers, white and black.76 The possibility that Barbuda has long preserved a relic of a herding ecology once, albeit briefly, more broadly distributed in the British Lesser Antilles raises the possibility that it may also have influenced the establishment of cattle ranching in South Carolina. In the late seventeenth century, open-range cattle herding became established on the coastal plain around Charleston as about a hundred settlers, predominantly from Barbados but also from other islands in the British Lesser Antilles and Jamaica, settled there in 1670. The herders called their ranches cowpens and also raised herds of pigs on associated crawls in the woodlands that fragmented the coastal grasslands. Feral cattle ranged nearly untended, with a spring roundup for branding and castration and the penning of calves over the summer in paddocks made of pickets woven together with vines. That practice simultaneously protected the calves from predators and used them as bait to trap their mothers for daily milking. A fall roundup then culled the marketable steers after a summer of fattening on the range, the herders driving them into Charleston for slaughter. The

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calves, released from the pens, rejoined the herd to forage untended on the winter range before the next spring roundup renewed the annual cycle. The herders became known variously as cowpen keepers, rangers, cattle hunters, and crackers. They wielded the British bullwhip from horseback to manage the feral cattle and used the manure that accumulated in the pens as fertilizer for gardens of maize and vegetables. Whether they also used dogs remains uncertain, but they did use bulldogging. After rice plantations came to dominate South Carolina’s coastal plain and the colonizers defeated the Yamassee in 1715, the herders moved southwestward through the pine belt and reached the Louisiana–Texas borderlands by the late eighteenth century.77 Some have argued that Senegambians who came to South Carolina as slaves played a major role in establishing that herding ecology, since the majority of whites came from Barbados and lacked experience with cattle herding. Others have concluded that the small minority of white settlers who came from Jamaica transferred many elements of that island’s herding ecology to South Carolina. And yet others have argued that the small minority of whites and blacks who came from the Leewards may have included those involved with cattle ranching on Barbuda or Antigua in the mid-seventeenth century.78 Both the Barbudan and the Jamaican systems differed substantially from that of the South Carolina lowlands but also shared some traits. All three relied on open range and used pens or enclosures of some type. On Jamaica, though, tame cattle occupied the pens on a daily basis. In Barbuda and South Carolina, in contrast, the pens acted as traps for feral cattle left largely untended throughout the year. The bait differed: calves in South Carolina and water on Barbuda; the purpose differed: milking in South Carolina and culling or castrating on Barbuda; and pen construction differed also: wooden pickets in South Carolina, stone walls in Barbuda. But in both systems the mature, feral stock spent little time in the pens and much time out of contact with the herders, quite unlike the herding ecology that emerged on British Jamaica in the second half of the seventeenth century. Other commonalities remain only partially known, but none were as fundamental to the Barbudan and South Carolinian herding ecologies as the use of enclosures to trap feral cattle. While this analysis relies on comparisons of herding ecologies and general circumstances rather than on detailed reconstruction of the

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networks that connected early South Carolina to other places in the Atlantic World, so do the two competing interpretations. The Jamaican thesis cites, for example, linguistic evidence: “The most obvious and persuasive evidence of the Jamaican herding connection is etymological and toponymic. Both pen (or cowpen) and the Spanish-derived crawl attained early usage in South Carolina, in their distinctive Jamaican meanings of ‘cattle ranch’ and ‘pig farm.’ ”79 The Senegambian thesis similarly cites linguistic evidence: “Might not the continued predominance of ‘cowboy’ over alternative terms such as ‘cattleman’ represent a strange holdover reflective of early and persistent black involvement in the American cattle industry . . .? As late as 1865 young Negroes with livestock responsibilities were still being designated as ‘cow boys’ (two words) in the plantation records of the Southeast.”80 The networks of commerce and migration simply remain too poorly known to derive a more definitive conclusion about broader Barbudan relationships. South Carolina, Jamaica, and the Leewards certainly engaged in a thriving trade as beef, lumber, and other products flowed south in return for sugar, rum, and slaves. That Barbudans influenced South Carolinian ranching in the late seventeenth century and that Jamaicans and South Carolinians may have influenced the Barbudan herding ecology in the eighteenth century therefore both present intriguing possibilities.81 Pending the results of further research, Barbuda appears to present a case of an idiosyncratic herding ecology that blacks and whites created together over the eighteenth century and perhaps as early as the seventeenth century. No other herding ecology features the sophisticated trap wells, and no one who settled Barbuda demonstrably had any prior knowledge of cattle herding. The herding ecology represents only one aspect of the novel and unique social and environmental relations that emerged out of the intersection of varied Atlantic networks on Barbuda: others include the common property regime and relative unimportance of a plantation crop like sugar, cotton, or tobacco. Black slaves, not the Codrington’s white managers, certainly built the walled stockwells that defined Barbuda’s herding ecology. Speculatively, and in accord with much of the racially biased literature in which blacks provide “brawn” and whites “brains,” a white manager entirely unfamiliar with stockwells may have

barbuda    139

planned the entire herding ecology while blacks passively labored to build and operate it. Or, just as speculatively but much more reasonably, given the greater familiarity with wells among African than among British herders, Barbudan blacks may have conceived the entire herding ecology and the Codringtons simply profited from their creativity in the same way they profited from their labor. In either case, the comprehensive reconstruction of the Barbudan herding ecology demonstrates that open-range cattle ranching existed in the British Lesser Antilles during the colonial period. It demonstrates further that blacks certainly operated that system and perhaps even conceived it by drawing on Senegambian antecedents such as the key role of wells during the dry season.

c h a p t e r five

The Pampas

NOTICE. Two Negro slaves belonging to Don José Hernández, called Nicolás and Manuel, of advanced age, have fled from the farm where they were well treated, in order to become day laborers; 12 pesos are offered for each one delivered to the justice of the peace. —José Hernández , La Gaceta Mercantil (1827)

as i sat in the biblioteca rocha in July 2008 looking through issues of the Gaceta Mercantil for shipping news about nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, the notice that serves as the epigraph above caught my eye—for two reasons.1 First, although scholars have increasingly demonstrated that blacks comprised a large proportion of the population of the Pampas during much of the colonial period and into the nineteenth century, most of the emphasis has been on blacks who lived in the cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo rather than those of the surrounding countryside.2 The notice in the Gaceta Mercantil named two black rural laborers rather than urban artisans or domestic servants. Second, quite surprisingly, the author of the notice had the same name, José Hernández, as the author of two classics of Argentine literature: The Gaucho Martín Fierro and its sequel, The Return of Martín Fierro. Those epic poems celebrate the gauchos who herded cattle across the Pampas and contain many references to blacks: for example, the knife fight between a black gaucho and Martín Fierro outside a pulquería, the notorious rural bar of the Pampas; Fierro’s all-night payada, a contrapuntal duel of improvised verses, with a black payador; and, more obliquely, the parallels between the structure of Martín Fierro, such as its eight-syllable lines, the classic payada, and some forms of African verse. Eventually that rural payada transformed into the urban milonga and, ultimately, into tango.3 140

the pampas    141

A hurried check of a biography of that celebrated author proved revealing. Martín Fierro did not appear in print until 1872, and its author was not born until 10 November 1834, nearly eight years after the notice appeared in the Gaceta Mercantil. He had, however, been born on an estancia on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and grown up working on cattle ranches with his father and grandfather, Rafael and José Hernández, respectively. The grandfather, therefore, had the same name as the author of Martín Fierro and probably wrote the notice offering a reward for the apprehension of Nicolás and Manuel. Although the grandson may never have known those two blacks, he would have met many other members of the black Bonaerense population while living and working among the gauchos of the Pampas in the nineteenth century, eventually converting that firsthand experience into both fiction and a treatise on how to run an estancia.4 While Hernández acknowledges black gauchos in Martín Fierro, whether or not they participated creatively in the establishment of any aspects of the Pampa’s herding ecology has long remained unknown. Scholars have certainly accepted that not only fiction but also paintings and archival documents prove that during the colonial period and the nineteenth century blacks labored as gauchos on the Pampas of both Buenos Aires and the Banda Oriental, now Uruguay (figs. 5.1, 5.2).5 However, investigation of the possibility that blacks played a role more creative than labor alone requires systematic analysis of the slave trade into the Río de la Plata, including the involvement of Senegambians and other West Africans who might have had experience with African openrange cattle herding, of whether any of these people lived in rural areas and worked as gauchos, and of whether the herding ecologies of the Pampas and West Africa share any practices or other characteristics.6 Because of the prevalence of contraband in the slave trade of the Río de la Plata, the archives will never yield precise figures of how many Africans disembarked along its banks. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database tabulates 67,246 disembarkations between the 1650s and early 1830s alone, about half arriving before 1750 and the rest afterward. As a round estimate, between the founding of Buenos Aires in 1580 and the end of the slave trade on the Río de la Plata in the 1830s, a minimum of 100,000 blacks disembarked. Buenos Aires, initially founded in 1536 by Pedro de

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Figure 5.1.  A fragment of the lithograph Corrales de Abasto (1833) by César Hipólito Bacle showing black gauchos working in a slaughter yard on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Mendoza but abandoned by 1541 in favor of Asunción and refounded by an expedition that Juan de Garay lead downriver in 1580, dominated that trade for most of the colonial period. Montevideo, established in 1726 by an expedition from Buenos Aires, became the leading slave port of the Río de la Plata in the 1780s. Those two ports together accounted for threequarters of all documented slave disembarkations between the late sixteenth century and the early nineteenth.7 The database reveals those people’s diverse African origins, including Senegambian. Of the 34,280 disembarkations in the Río de la Plata included in the database for the period before 1750, 74 percent originated in West Central Africa, 6 percent in Southeast Africa, and 20 percent in West Africa. That pattern shifted and became less concentrated after 1750, when of 32,964 disembarkations only 29 percent originated in West Central Africa, 45 percent in Southeast Africa, and 26 percent in West Africa. The vast majority of the West Africans, however, both before and after 1750, embarked along the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, and the Bight of Biafra rather than in Senegambian ports. Only 2,569 originated in Senegambia, a mere 3.8 percent of the total. Moreover, 85 percent of

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Figure 5.2.  The Pampas of Buenos Aires province and the Banda Oriental, now Uruguay, showing the inland extent of land grants for estancias in 1580, the principal settlements of the partidos with extant detailed enumerations for the rural census of 1815, the Río Salado, which formed the nominal frontier between the colonizers and natives at that time, and the cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

those Senegambians arrived too late to have influenced the initial establishment of cattle ranching in the late sixteenth century, disembarking between 1800 and 1806 from fifteen vessels variously flying the Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, and U.S. flags.8 The majority of slaves of all origins, whether recorded or unrecorded, who disembarked along the Río de la Plata passed through the ports on their way to plantations and Andean mines far upcountry, but by the nineteenth century blacks nonetheless composed a substantial proportion of the urban populations of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The census of Buenos Aires in 1810 recorded 9,615 blacks out of a population of 32,558.

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The vast majority of those black porteños were enslaved, despite some colonial-period manumissions, and were pardos rather than morenos, the first term denoting mulattos and connoting Creoles, the second term denoting purely black parentage and connoting African birth. Similarly, out of a total population of approximately 9,400 in Montevideo in 1805, some 3,300 were black, 86 percent of them enslaved.9 Following the region’s achievement of political independence from Spain, that substantial black presence began to decline. Between 1810 and 1887 the number of blacks in Buenos Aires fell from 9,615 to 8,005 and from 30 percent to less than 2 percent of the total population. Explanations for that decline include the abolition, at least in law, of the slave trade in 1813 and the resulting reduction in the number of African arrivals. Parallel legislation emancipated children at birth and adult males through enlistment in the army, possibly resulting in disproportionately high death rates among black males in the many regional and civil wars of the nineteenth century and certainly resulting in a steady decline in the number of slaves until 1861, when Bonaerense ratification of the constitution of the Argentine Confederation abolished slavery altogether. Other causes of the decline of the black population include a disproportionately high death rate among blacks because of poverty; miscegenation with whites; the overwhelming influx of European immigrants in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth; and discursive elision of blacks from censuses and historiography in order to represent Argentina as European, modern, and progressive. Similar processes occurred in nineteenth-century Montevideo, throughout the Pampas, and in many other parts of the Americas.10 Although most scholars have focused on the urban black population and its social relations, some have demonstrated that the rural Pampas also had a substantial black population from colonial times through the middle of the nineteenth century. Sources ranging from newspaper advertisements and censuses to estancia probate inventories and account ledgers demonstrate that the rural black population may have been smaller than its urban counterpart but no less socially significant:11 “The countryside surrounding the city . . . has traditionally been considered a space inhabited by whites and mestizos. It was assumed, moreover, that an African population was scarce there because the high cost of slaves in

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the Río de la Plata made their use as rural labor unprofitable. To the contrary, the latest studies demonstrate that slaves were a fundamental element in the development of the estancia in rural areas.”12 A census of the Bonaerense countryside in August 1815 provides the earliest detailed enumeration of the rural Pampas and thereby reveals where those blacks lived. Outside of Buenos Aires, some 41,036 people lived in twenty-three partidos that stretched from the Río de la Plata and Río Paraná southward to the frontier at the Río Salado. Except for that 150-kilometer-wide strip along the Río de la Plata and Río Paraná, native peoples controlled most of the territory that the new Bonaerense government claimed. Carmen de Patagones and its salinas formed an isolated outpost far to the south, its 432 inhabitants connected to Buenos Aires mainly by coastal shipping. Between the Río Salado and Carmen de Patagones, the census enumerated only 132 settlers, all concentrated near the Atlantic coast. Over the nineteenth century a series of military campaigns incrementally pushed the frontier southward and westward until 1879, when the genocidal campaign known as the Conquest of the Desert asserted effective Bonaerense control over the entire area encompassed by the provincial boundaries. The detailed enumerations that record the inhabitants as negro or moreno, white, pardo or mulatto, native, and several other categories remain extant for only seventeen of the partidos. Nonetheless, those seventeen include 77 percent of the total rural population and have a broad distribution across the Pampas south of the Río de la Plata and north of the colonization frontier.13 That census reveals the basic characteristics of the rural blacks of 1815 (table 5.1).14 They made up 13.6 percent of the total population in the seventeen partidos, 4,316 out of 31,676 inhabitants. Of those blacks, 54 percent were pardo and 46 percent moreno, with 71 percent of the morenos claiming African birth.15 The bias toward males in the slave trade makes the respective gender imbalances predictable: while only 54 percent of the whites and 53 percent of the pardos were male, 67 percent of the moreno population were. Among the 1,402 morenos of definite African birth, about 4.4 percent of the total rural population, the imbalance was even greater, nearly 70 percent male. While much variation in those basic characteristics occurred across the rural Pampas, all but one partido had in excess of 9 percent blacks, and five had more than twice

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Table 5.1.  Some characteristics of the rural Bonaerense population for the seventeen partidos with extant detailed enumerations from the census of 1815. Group

Male

Female

Total

Percentage

White

12,601

10,707

23,308

73.6

Black

2,553

1,763

4,316

13.6

  Moreno/negro

(1,322)

(666)

(1,988)

(6.3)

  Pardo/mulato

(1,231)

(1,097)

(2,328)

(7.3)

Native

951

611

1,562

4.9

Other

162

167

329

1.1

Unspecified

1,001

1,160

2,161

6.8

Total

17,268

14,408

31,676

100

that proportion (fig. 5.3).16 The only notable variation among the partidos involves the dominance of morenos over pardos in the immediate environs of Buenos Aires and the opposite in the upstream partidos. The census also records the specific origins of some of the 1,402 Africans. The largest single group came from West Africa, principally designated as Guinea and Mina but also Hausa and a single Moro; they composed some 64 percent of the Africans and 2.8 percent of the total rural population. Of the remainder, 19 percent were West Central Africans identified as originating in Angola, Congo, Banguela, Camundá, Gabón, Lubolo, Poros, and Quitambo; 2 percent came from Mozambique and Madagascar in Southeast Africa; and 15 percent lacked any designation more specific than African. The rural black Bonaerense population, then, seems to have included a disproportionate number of the West Africans recorded in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, only about onequarter of the 32,964 disembarkations after 1750 but two-thirds of the rural Africans in 1815. That the 1,402 rural Africans therefore included at least some of the 2,175 Senegambians who disembarked between 1800 and 1806 seems reasonably certain.17 The census provides much less information about the occupations of most of those rural blacks, especially the Africans, but does demonstrate that many were involved in ranching. The enumerators listed about a

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Figure 5.3.  Proportion of blacks relative the total population in 1815 for each of the seventeen rural partidos with extant detailed enumerations, grouped according to their location relative to Buenos Aires. (See figure 5.2 for locations of the partidos.)

third of the pardos generically as slaves but provided specific occupations for many others, including 139 peones de campo and nine capataces de campo, those two categories designating rural laborers and foremen. The census, however, records about 90 percent of the 1,988 morenos only as slaves, with only 9 moreno peones de campo and 2 moreno capataces de campo. Nonetheless, hacendados, meaning owners of livestock herds, owned most of those slaves. In two representative partidos, hacendados owned the majority of slaves: in San Nicolás, out of 262 slaves,

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50 hacendados owned 151 in numbers ranging from 1 to 13; and in Chascomús, out of 79 slaves, 17 hacendados owned 50 in numbers ranging from 1 to 15. Probate inventories from the late colonial and early national periods demonstrate that at least some of those slaves herded cattle. Some of them even owned their own small herds of cattle, awarded to them by the ranchers to discourage flight.18 The Uruguayan Pampas lack a comparably detailed and comprehensive rural census until the mid-nineteenth century. Ongoing warfare between Buenos Aires, Spain, and Brazil initially prevented such enumerations. Even with the beginning of Uruguayan independence in 1828, internal conflicts such as the civil war of 1839–52 militated against a rural census. Late colonial censuses, however, suggest that the Uruguayan Pampas had a rural black presence similar to that of the Bonaerense Pampas. A census of 1778 for the rural districts around Montevideo enumerated a total population of 5,018, approximately 76 percent white, 23 percent black, and 1 percent native. A census of 1780 gives a total population of 3,774 living within the walls of Montevideo, 68 percent of them whites, 2 percent natives, and 30 percent blacks, a little more than half of them slaves and the rest free. In the surrounding countryside and villages, 72 percent of the 4,304 inhabitants were white, 3 percent natives, and 25 percent blacks. Those 1,082 rural blacks included 271 free pardos, 156 free morenos, and 655 enslaved pardos and morenos. The 109 infant slaves had a relatively balanced gender distribution, but the other 546 displayed the gender bias typical of slave populations: 70 percent male versus 30 percent female.19 By the early nineteenth century, then, about the time Manuel and Nicolás liberated themselves from the elder José Hernández, the rural black population of the Pampas had characteristics that at least allow for the possibility that they not only provided ranch labor but played a creative role in modifying colonial herding ecology and practices. Those rural blacks certainly did not have the visibility of their counterparts in the city of Buenos Aires, who numbered around ten thousand and made up nearly a third of the urban population. In contrast, assuming that the rural population as a whole had the same percentage of blacks as in the seventeen partidos with detailed enumerations, only about five thousand blacks lived in the Bonaerense countryside among a total population of over forty thousand. Yet while those rural blacks numbered fewer than the urban

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black population, were dispersed over a much larger area, and formed a smaller proportion of the population, they did include a disproportionately large number of West Africans. Moreover, the majority of them worked on cattle ranches and, in contrast to colonial times, they included a substantial number who had embarked along the coast of Senegambia. The immense expansion and transformation of ranching over the early nineteenth century that the opening of the Río de la Plata to international trade stimulated suggests that those Senegambians potentially played a creative role in modifying colonial herding ecology and practices. The extension of the so-called comercio libre to Buenos Aires in 1778 had prompted some initial expansion of ranching, as measured by the growth in exports of cattle hides from tens of thousands per year in the mideighteenth century to hundreds of thousands per year in the 1780s. But the end of Spanish control of the Río de la Plata over the 1810s opened entirely new markets in Britain, France, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. Exports of hides grew from half a million per year during the 1810s to more than a million per year after 1840. In parallel, exports of other cattle products such as tallow and tasajo, or salt-cured beef, also boomed. As ranching became more profitable, the number of ranches increased, the size of the herds grew larger, and the herding ecology had to change dramatically from that of the late colonial period—in the process becoming open to creative modifications and entirely new ideas and practices.20 In contrast, the herding ecology of the late colonial period had emerged out of the hybridization of Spanish and native practices rather than African ones. Although the colonial government did not produce comprehensive rural censuses like that of 1815, partial enumerations, probate records, and other documents demonstrate that blacks certainly lived and labored on cattle ranches before the nineteenth-century. Few, if any, of those colonial black gauchos had any knowledge of open-range cattle herding in Africa, however, because so few Senegambians arrived in the Río de la Plata before the nineteenth century, only 452 over the entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries according to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database.21 The material culture involved in rounding up cattle illustrates the colonial-period hybridization of Spanish and native practices. Like the

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vaqueros of New Spain, the earliest gauchos used desjarretaderas to chase down cattle on the open range, sever their hamstrings, and drop them in their tracks. Two other practices, one derived wholly from natives and the other in part, allowed gauchos to capture cattle without having to kill them. Precolonial natives had long used boleadoras and lassos to capture animals ranging from ostriches to jaguars. Boleadoras consist of three balls connected together by cords that natives whirled over their heads and threw at the legs of animals in order to entangle and capture them. They also used ropes with a running noose at one end and a heavy stone or piece of wood tied to the other to hunt various animals. Upon acquiring horses when the Mendoza expedition to the Río de la Plata attempted to establish Buenos Aires in the 1530s, the natives began using boleadoras and lassos from horseback. According to the account of Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, who was born in Asunción and served in the military throughout the Pampas in the sixteenth century, the Mendoza expedition “left behind five mares and seven stallions, which in less than sixty years multiplied so much” that they occupied the Pampas from the Atlantic coast inland to the Andes mountains.22 By the mid-eighteenth century the Jesuit Florian Paucke was painting and describing natives using boleadoras and lassos from horseback and on foot to capture cattle, horses, and jaguars around the mission of San Xavier, where the Pampas grasslands meet the scrublands of the Chaco about 450 kilometers upriver from Buenos Aires.23 The boleadoras became the main nonlethal means gauchos employed to restrain cattle, the lasso playing a secondary role. By the mid-eighteenth century, gauchos had developed a method of using the lasso from horseback that, unlike the technique practiced in North America, did not involve a saddle horn to cinch the free end of the rope and thereby ease the jolt. Instead, as described by George Anson along the Atlantic coast during his circumnavigation of the world in 1740, like the natives far to the north illustrated in Paucke’s paintings, the gauchos fastened the free end of the rope low down on their saddles. In order to prevent the jolt of stopping a large bull from breaking the lasso or tearing the saddle off the horse, gauchos had to work in pairs, as described in detail by Anson: This . . . lash . . . is made of a thong of several fathoms in length, and very strong, with a running noose at one end of it. This the

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hunters (who in this case are mounted on horseback) take in their right hands, it being first properly coiled up, and having its end opposite to the noose fastened to the saddle; and thus prepared they ride at the herd of cattle. When they arrive within a certain distance of the beast, they throw their thong at him with such exactness, that they never fail of fixing the noose about his horns. The beast, when he finds himself entangled, generally runs, but the horse, being swifter, attends him, and prevents the thong from being too much strained, till a second hunter, who follows the game, throws another noose about one of its hind legs; and this being done, both horses (for they are trained to this practice) instantly turn different ways, in order to strain the two thongs in contrary directions, on which the beast, by their opposite pulls, is perfectly overthrown, and then the horses stop, keeping the thongs still upon the stretch.24 By the early nineteenth century gauchos had developed the use of the boleadora and lasso into a sophisticated practice for rounding up and corralling live cattle, as described and portrayed in paintings by many observers at the time. The effectiveness of boleadoras allowed lassos to take on a secondary role compared to New Spain, Texas and, eventually, much of North America. The lack of a saddle horn precluded as precise a control of the strain on the rope as the method developed in New Spain but, at the same time, allowed for a lighter, more flexible saddle and more agile horsemanship.25 The pasture grasses did not derive from Africa either, at least not to the same degree as in the tropical Americas. The process by which introduced grasses replaced native grasses was similar to that of the tropics: so-called pasto blando or pasto tierno (“soft grass”) replacing various species of the genus Stipa, known as pasto duro or pasto fuerte (“hard grass”) because of their thick stems. But most of the species involved arrived via networks that connected the subtropical and temperate Pampas to Europe rather than to Africa. The earliest botanical surveys of the Pampas date to the 1870s and therefore only partially record the flora of the late colonial period; yet they do precede the even greater transformation of the twentieth century, in which cropland and cultivated pasture largely obliterated the grasslands. Those surveys identify Bermuda grass

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as one of the many “plantas Europeas” that had become prevalent along the Río de la Plata. Bermuda grass, or Cynodon dactylon, actually originated in the African savanna. Known on the Pampas as pasto argentino and pata de perdiz (“partridge foot”), it spread like many other invasive species to become prominent throughout the American subtropics over the eighteenth century: “It grows in sandy wasteland, along the sides of trails, abundant above all along the banks of the Río de la Plata.” Similar surveys from the early twentieth century also identify Bermuda grass as a forage plant and add another from the African savanna belt that also became prominent in the American subtropics: Johnsongrass, Sorghum halepense, a near relative of sorghum known in Argentina and Uruguay as sorgo de Alepo and sorguillo. The role of those two African grasses on the Pampas, however, pales in comparison to the role of such African grasses as Guinea grass in the emergence of ranching frontiers in the tropical Americas.26 During colonial times blacks do not seem to have played a creative role in establishing herding practices on the Pampas nor African grasses a major role compared to the American tropics, but the conjunction of a large number of Senegambians on Bonaerense ranches and the transformation of the colonial herding ecology in the early nineteenth century demands closer scrutiny. As ranching expanded, new practices dramatically transformed the colonial herding ecology. One such practice, enclosing estancias with wire fencing, ultimately ended open-range herding on the Pampas just as surely as on the Great Plains. A key aspect of that transformation, one in which Senegambian blacks may have played a creative role, involves the supply of drinking water to the expanding herds. Senegambian herders were expert in supplying water during the long drive southward from the fringes of the Sahara to the banks of the Senegal River as the rains ended and the vegetation of the Sahel turned from green to brown. Bonaerense ranchers faced a similar challenge when expanding into pastures distant from the major perennial streams. Water rather than grass became the essential limitation on ranching during its dramatic expansion over the nineteenth century. As Walter Prescott Webb noted regarding the Great Plains, “Water was the sine qua non of the cattle country” because the digestive biology of cattle and other livestock makes water that essential.27 They can eat grass and other plant

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material predominately made up of cellulose only because their digestive tracts provide an environment for microbes to reproduce prodigiously and, in the process, ferment and breakdown fodder. Cattle absorb energy and nutrients from the protein-rich bodies of dead microbes as well as from such products of fermentation as fatty acids. That fermentation requires a voluminous digestive tract, including four stomachs that fill three-quarters of the torso. Fermentation also requires a great volume of water to produce the saliva that buffers the acids the microbes produce, to saturate and disaggregate the large volume of plant material, and to lubricate its movement along the digestive tract, including up the esophagus into the mouth for repeated mastication, or cud chewing. Cattle with insufficient water cannot digest fodder, and they sicken and die within a few days.28 Consequently, cattle drink deeply and regularly, preferably up to half a dozen times per day. The actual amount varies greatly depending on weather, terrain, cattle breed, maturity, water salinity, type of fodder, lactation, and herding practices. As a generalization though, mature beef cattle drink twenty-five to seventy-five liters of water per day, toward the lower end of the range in cool weather and the upper end when hot. Dairy and lactating beef cows drink even more. Horses generally drink just as much as cattle, varying with temperature and workload. Sheep weigh less, eat less, drink only about seven liters per day unless lactating, and can survive longer than cattle or horses without water.29 During much of the colonial period, water supply posed little problem to ranchers on the Pampas. When the Spaniards refounded Buenos Aires in 1580, Garay awarded land grants for estancias as long lots along major, perennial streams. The settlers drew lots for the estancias, the properties thereby becoming known as suertes de estancia, each of which had a river frontage of 2.5 kilometers and stretched inland for 7.5 kilometers. Downstream of the grid of streets and house lots that marked the new city of Buenos Aires, twenty-nine estancias fronted the Río de la Plata as far as Magdalena, in the area outlined on figure 5.2. Another thirty-seven estancias fronted the Río Matanza and the Río Paraná and its tributaries: the Río de las Conchas, now the Río de la Reconquista, the Río Luján, and the Cañada de la Cruz. Subsequent governors continued to award similar types of estancias, for example, the grant to Sebastián Sánchez Cataplasma in 1588: “Torres de Vera, Adelantado Gobernador y Capitán General of

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this province, grants in the name of the Crown to Sebastián Sánchez Cataplasma on the Río de Luján, jurisdiction of this city, on this side of the river, an estancia with 3,000 varas [2.5 kilometers] frontage and a league and a half [7.5 kilometers] inland, that borders the last estancia upstream on the said river.”30 That arrangement gave the herds ready access to water while the meanders and junctions of the streams, known as rincones, served to confine and separate herds in the era before fencing.31 Once the ranching frontier expanded beyond that first rank of estancias, however, some sort of artificial water supply became necessary. After the governors had granted all the land with stream frontage, ranchers who sought to expand their estancias had to request the land that bordered the back boundary of their own land, the slightly higher terrain that had plenty of grass but little or no water. The properties with stream frontage became known as suertes principales and those without as cabezadas, distinguishing the principal parts of the ranches from the less valuable ones, the “back forty” in the terminology of the Great Plains. Each successive inheritance divided those ranches into increasingly narrower long lots in order to maintain an essential fraction of stream frontage, a trend that the cadastral map of 1830 clearly illustrates. As land division created ever-smaller ranches, some came to lack access to perennial streams altogether and had to develop artificial water supplies at regular intervals so that cattle did not have to walk so far to drink that they lost weight. Drought years, when even usually perennial streams dried up, further increased the number of estancias reliant on such artificial water supplies. During the three-year Great Drought that began in 1827, for example, thousands of thirsty cattle floundered and died along the muddy banks of the Río Paraná, trampled by even more cattle as even usually perennial streams on the Pampas dried up. As early as the late colonial period, therefore, ranchers had developed several types of artificial water supply.32 Similar to the dugout found in the United States, the tajamar could somewhat expand the availability of surface water. By digging out a shallow reservoir at the foot of a slope and embanking the spoil in a U-shape with the open end upslope a rancher could concentrate and store surface runoff from rainfall. A clay lining minimized seepage to the water table. A fence of wooden stakes with a gate regulated access by livestock, and a rough pavement of more stakes layered flat on the ground between the gate and the water provided surer footing and reduced damage from

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trampling that would otherwise result in sediments from the bank being washed into and filling up the dugout. Even with such an investment of labor and scarce wood, a tajamar at best provided a seasonal and uncertain water supply. At worst, as the sun evaporated the water, salts precipitated and a tajamar became a brackish pond rimmed by a salt-encrusted mudflat, unfit to water livestock.33 Accessing groundwater therefore provided the only practicable alternative to the marginally useful tajamar. Through much of the Pampas the water table approaches the surface, and even shallow walk-in wells, known as jagüeles, can produce water throughout the year. While the Taíno of the Caribbean used the word jagüel to signify a pond of fresh water, the Spaniards who adopted the term and spread it throughout much of Latin America used it to mean a livestock watering hole, either natural or excavated in part or in whole. The earliest reference to the jagüel in Argentina might be in a report of 1582 by Pedro Sotelo de Narváez, who wrote of hand-dug “jagüeyes” in the northwestern province of Tucumán. By the nineteenth century the typical jagüel of the Pampas was an oblong hole a little less than two meters wide, nine meters long, and six or seven meters deep. Stock drank from the meter or two of water that accumulated in the bottom of the jagüel by walking down a steep earthen ramp. As in the case of the tajamar, wooden stakes used to regulate access to the ramp and pave its surface extended the life of the jagüel. The advantages of the jagüel over the tajamar, gained through a proportionately greater investment of labor, included access to groundwater rather than to surface runoff from rainfall, and thereby a larger, more reliable source of water was available throughout the year. Although jagüeles are now uncommon on the Pampas, ranchers in the semiarid, Andean province of Mendoza continue to use them to water stock.34 Smaller wells known as pozos de balde were common on estancias and farms during colonial times and in the nineteenth century. A well with a shaft about a meter or so across, known as the pozo, and a rope with a bucket, known as the balde or pelota, to haul up the water involved much less excavation than the jagüel. Moreover, livestock could not foul pozos de balde because a low wall, or coaming, protected the opening. Yet they produced enough water only for domestic use, to water a kitchen garden, or to sustain a few milk cows, horses, and oxen during droughts. Pozos de balde commonly were five or six meters deep and had a large leather

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bucket in the form of a half sphere with an iron hoop to hold the mouth open. Two gauchos hauled water by feeding a rope tied to the bucket over a pulley hanging above the well opening and attaching the end of the rope to the cinch strap of a horse; one gaucho rode the horse away from the well to lift the water while the other dumped the bucket, into a covered cistern if for human consumption or an open trough if for livestock. If the well was shallow enough a single gaucho could raise water with a cimbra, a long pole mounted near its middle on a fulcrum, with a bucket suspended from one end and a counterweight from the other. The cimbra is similar to the well-sweep used in the United States, the Roman tolleno, Arab shaduf, Spanish cigüeña, and Mexican bimbalete.35 As the ranching frontier expanded southward in the nineteenth century, eventually beyond the Río Salado, those long-known and widely used water-lifting devices proved inadequate. Estancias expanded into pastures that lacked perennial surface water, and, after midcentury, fences made access to nearby perennial streams even more difficult. At the same time, labor to draw water from wells grew scarcer for several reasons: the slave trade ended, more estancias with larger herds demanded more gauchos, and the frontier wars with native peoples diverted potential laborers into the military. Proposals to bring water to the surface via artesian wells and other large-scale projects, such as the one by José Vicente Chilavert in 1801, never came to fruition. Instead, beginning in the 1820s a series of innovative devices successfully addressed the problem of lifting enough water from wells in a way that allowed use of all the available pasture with a limited labor force.36 The balde sin fondo (“bottomless bucket”) was the first of those nineteenthcentury water hoists. It provided water without having to excavate the large pit of the jagüel; operated with the labor of a single person, even a child, on a horse; and had the capacity to raise three times as much water with each lift as the pozo de balde. In the 1840s, near Chascomús, William MacCann described the operation as “so rapid and simple, that a man with a change of horses can water two thousand head of cattle in about eight hours.37 The balde sin fondo employed a skin bag that was open at both ends and had two ropes attached. A thick rope running over a pulley to a horse lifted the bucket. A thin rope with one end attached to the horse and the

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other to the bottom of the bucket held it closed until it had emerged from the mouth of the well and was spilled into a cistern or flume that discharged the water into a drinking trough (figs. 5.4, 5.5):38 It was easily made of the skin of a calf or a foal removed in one piece from the animal, without longitudinal cuts, in order to form a sort of coat without seams. An iron hoop was put in the mouth formed in the skin of the hind parts, and it emptied through the neck and front leg openings. By means of a cord

Figure 5.4.  The earliest known diagram of a balde sin fondo, dating to 1853 and showing how the main soga del caballo, or horse rope, hoists the bucket while the lower, subsidiary rope holds the bottom of the bucket closed until it emerges from the mouth of the well. Reproduced courtesy of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

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Figure 5.5. A photograph of a balde sin fondo, circa 1900. Reproduced courtesy of the LSU Library, Louisiana State University.

that attached the neck opening to the draw rope, the bucket came up doubled over, thus conserving the water taken from the well, until just stretching the pull rope dumped a great amount of water, extracted from any depth. One of these buckets lasted fifteen to twenty days, and as there were many animals at hand it was very easily repaired and at little cost.39 A picket fence kept cattle and horses away from the mouth of the well to prevent them from damaging it, falling in, or polluting the water with urine and feces. The rider kept the two ropes taut so that they did not become fouled with mud and excrement and pollute the well. Subsequent refinements transformed the balde sin fondo in various ways.40 Even before midcentury, canvas began to replace calfskin so that the bucket in what became known as the manga de lona (“canvas sleeve”) would last an entire year. Rubber then replaced the canvas, and it became known as the manga de goma (“rubber sleeve”). The most widely adopted devices based on the principle of the balde sin fondo, however, were the balde volcador and the manga de madera or chapa: respectively, the self-dumping bucket and the wooden or sheet-iron sleeve. The devices

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designated as sleeves—whether made of canvas, rubber, wood, or sheet iron—were open at the discharge end and attached to a pivot fixed to a cistern or flume beside the mouth of the well. The other end was open but closed with a valve, from the simple doubling over of the canvas and rubber versions to a flap valve in the wood and sheet-iron versions. When the single rope lowered that end into the well, water rushed in through the valve. Then, as the horse pulled on the rope and lifted, the water could not flow out until the sleeve reached a horizontal position and emptied through the end attached to the pivot. The various types of sleeves could therefore lift water only from relatively shallow wells. Deeper wells still required the balde sin fondo or its metallic descendant, the balde volcador, in which a horse lowered an iron bucket into the water, the water rushed in through a flap valve in the bottom, the weight of the water closed the valve when the horse lifted the bucket, and various mechanisms automatically dumped the bucket when it reached a flume mounted at the mouth of the well. Inventors patented such water hoists in the 1850s and 1860s, but while several workshops in Buenos Aires were producing such devices by the 1860s, either components such as canvas sleeves or entire self-dumping buckets, manufacturing capacity would remain extremely limited until the emergence of the first mechanized factories beginning in the 1870s.41 As ranchers accumulated capital they invested in more costly devices, namely the noria, an animal-driven wooden waterwheel, and the windmill, the second eventually becoming dominant. The noria, used from India to Morocco as well as northward into Europe, especially Spain, and also known as the senia, saqiya, and zawafa, initially attracted the most interest. While the norias that became popular on the Pampas beginning in the 1870s were iron instead of wood, whether imported from Europe or manufactured by the growing number of small factories in Buenos Aires, they followed the same principle as those of Spain. An animal attached to a horizontal pole walked a circular path to drive a shaft geared to a vertical wheel with buckets attached, either to the rim for shallow wells or to a chain that allowed the buckets to reach water at greater depths. A modification used the gear to drive a crankshaft that raised and lowered the pistons of a pair of suction pumps with leather valves.42 Windmills also had an ancient heritage but underwent major modifications in the mid-nineteenth century. After North American inventors

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added a steel tower, steering rudder, automatic governor, and suction pump that could be inserted into wells hundreds of feet deep, mass production grew steadily through the 1870s. In the 1880s ranchers on the Pampas began to import such windmills from the United States. In the 1890s factories in Buenos Aires began to manufacture them domestically, under license from U.S. companies. By the early twentieth century windmills had rendered all the other water-lifting devices largely obsolete, although the balde sin fondo remained in use as an affordable, readily made alternative. While in 1884 the province of Buenos Aires had 90 norias and only 28 windmills, by 1908 the agricultural census reported that Bonaerense cattle and sheep ranches operated 12,231 windmills worth 28 percent of the value of all their machinery.43 Conventional wisdom attributes the invention of the pivotal balde sin fondo in the early nineteenth century to a white man. Carlos E. Pellegrini, the father of the Carlos E. Pellegrini who served as president of Argentina from 1890 to 1892, first claimed that in the mid-1820s a Spaniard named Vicente Lanuza “invented the balde sin fondo.”44 Pellegrini had emigrated to Buenos Aires from French Savoy in 1828 and worked as an engineer, artist, architect, author, and publisher. In 1837, seeking to escape the increasingly brutal repression of the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Pellegrini purchased the estancia La Figura near Cañuelas, about fifty kilometers south of the city. He returned when Rosas went into exile in 1852 and became head of the Bonaerense Office of Industrial Patents until 1863. In 1853 he published an article in his periodical, Revista del Plata, about his new invention, the balde volcador: “We propose an iron, copper, or wooden cube, cylindrical in form, which dumps itself.”45 He acknowledged that the balde sin fondo had inspired the invention of the balde volcador, essentially a higher capacity and more durable application of the seminal principle that Pellegrini attributed to Lanuza, who by then had died. Many others have since repeated the claim that Lanuza invented the balde sin fondo that allowed the initial nineteenth-century expansion of ranching and served as the prototype for subsequent devices such as the balde volcador.46 Neither Pellegrini nor those who subsequently repeated his claim, however, seem to have realized that Africans and Asians have used nearly identical water-lifting devices for many centuries. They occur in a broad

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belt that stretches from India in the east to Morocco in the west and southward into the Sahel. The device is known as motes in India and as nasba in Iran; other designations, such as delou and cˇ erd, prevail among Arabic speakers. They date to at least the seventeenth century, when Engelbert Kaempfer saw them in Iran and drew an illustration of what appears remarkably like a balde sin fondo (fig. 5.6).47 Three main differences occur: an ox provided the motive power; it walked down an excavated ramp while lifting the water; and the dump rope attached to the bottom of the bucket ran over the same pulley as the main rope and doubled around a second pulley or pivot before attaching to the bottom of the bucket. Gravity thereby helped the ox to lift more water with each lift of the bucket, and it dumped into a cistern on the side of the well opposite the animal. A description and illustration from a French treatise of 1823 on rural machines by Charles de Lasteyrie, but based on unspecified “travelers discussing the way irrigation water is raised in some parts of the Orient,” illustrates a device even more similar to the balde sin fondo of the Pampas, including the use of a horse, lack of an excavated ramp,

Figure 5.6.  Water hoists in seventeenth-century Persia, now Iran. Reproduced courtesy of the Rare Books Collection, Tulane University Special Collections.

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and a dump rope attached directly to the bottom of the bucket so that it emptied on the same side of the well as the animal (fig. 5.7).48 The Asian and African devices differ from the balde sin fondo only in that their water bags, or buckets, typically consist of a camel hide rather than calfskin and that oxen rather than horses most typically provide the traction, as illustrated in a drawing based on photographs taken among the Tuareg during the 1950s, in the area north and east of the valley of the Niger River (see fig. 2.8) (fig. 5.8).49 The similarity between African water hoists and the balde sin fondo raises possible alternatives to the long-standing belief that Lanuza

Figure 5.7. A nineteenth-century Middle Eastern water hoist. Reproduced courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

Figure 5.8. A twentieth-century Tuareg water hoist from the area to the north of the Niger River, used in this case to irrigate crops instead of to water stock and powered by an ox instead of a horse but otherwise similar to the balde sin fondo.

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invented it. On the one hand, he certainly may have introduced it to the Pampas, either reinventing it entirely independently or seeing illustrations of such devices in Kaempfer’s Amoenitatum Exoticarum or Lasteyrie’s Collection de Machines and adapting the design to a different environment. On the other hand, as a more radical alternative to the longstanding conventional wisdom, a cattle herder of African birth may well have introduced the balde sin fondo to the Pampas; and when Lanuza saw it he used his social power to appropriate the credit. The patent documents preserved in the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires seem, at least on their face, to support the first possibility. Only with the Constitution of 1853 did the federal government systematically begin to recognize inventors’ ownership of their creative work for various periods of time and record their patents in a central registry. Moreover, because Buenos Aires did not join the Argentinean Confederation until 1862, the Bonaerense Office of Industrial Patents maintained its own registry during the 1850s and 1860s, under the direction of Pellegrini. The concept of patenting inventions nonetheless preceded the Constitution of 1853, so in November 1826, when Lanuza wanted to ensure his “exclusive privilege of manufacture for five years” of what he referred to as “a bottomless bucket” and another of “his inventions,” he made the request directly to the Bonaerense government.50 As yet lacking a formal patent office, the minister responsible appointed a special commission to assess the request. The commissioners concluded that Lanuza had invented a device worthy of a patent, and in December 1826 he received the exclusive right of manufacture for a period of four years for the balde sin fondo but not for the other device, a type of pump. Pellegrini, as the head of the patent office during the 1850s, likely had access to the files containing such antecedent patent requests and used them to conclude that Lanuza had independently invented the balde sin fondo.51 Other documents reveal details of the financial profit Lanuza hoped to realize from the patent, possibly motive enough to claim credit for a device he did not really invent. The patent granted him the right to charge a royalty to those who wanted to build a balde sin fondo between December 1826 and December 1830. In January 1827, a month after receiving the patent, he placed a notice in the city’s major commercial newspaper offering to sell licenses to build baldes sin fondo for a royalty

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of one hundred pesos per year. Given that 1827 marked the first year of the Great Drought, during which thousands of cattle would perish from thirst, Lanuza should have made his fortune. The simplicity of the design and artisanal character of the construction, however, prompted others to ignore his patent and build baldes sin fondo without paying royalties. In March 1827 Lanuza began complaining to the police that unlicensed baldes sin fondo were proliferating across the Pampas. After investigating several cases, the police responded that they could not enforce the patent because the violators easily removed and hid the distinctive bottomless bucket when not in use, leaving only a well and hoist that appeared similar to a conventional pozo de balde.52 Despite Lanuza’s inability to realize a profit on the patent, the financial motive raises the possibility that he read books that illustrated African and Asian water hoists, adapted their design to use on the Pampas, and claimed he had independently invented the balde sin fondo. He was certainly literate, having written and signed the documents related to the patent request and complaints to the police about its violation. He therefore may have read Kaempfer’s Amoenitatum Exoticarum or Lasteyrie’s Collection de Machines. The first edition of Amoenitatum Exoticarum appeared in 1712, well before Lanuza’s birth, and the first edition of Collection de Machines came out in 1820, six years before he claimed to have invented the balde sin fondo. Those books were as rare then as now, however, whether as first or subsequent editions. WorldCat lists only 102 libraries with copies of Amoenitatum Exoticarum and 44 with Collection de Machines. Moreover, European and North American libraries hold nearly all the copies; not a single one appears to be in a South American library.53 The likelihood that Lanuza read either of those books in Buenos Aires therefore seems minimal, but he may have done so while still in Europe. He clearly arrived in Buenos Aires sometime before he solicited the patent in 1826, but the passenger disembarkation registries that might have recorded his immigration survive for only 1821–22 and 1825–26. They do not list him. Nor does he appear in any of the extant census records for the late colonial period or the census of 1815, although that absence might have more to do with the incompleteness of those enumerations and their partial preservation than his actual absence. The census of 1815, for example, preserves only summary tables for the urban neighborhoods and all but seventeen of the rural partidos. He does,

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however, appear in the partially extant urban census of 1827: the only resident of 226 Peru Street, a few blocks south of the Plaza de Mayo, age thirty-six, civil status single, birthplace France, the owner of a vessel. His year of birth, seemingly 1791, explains why the passenger lists of the Casa de la Contratación, which recorded all emigrants to the Spanish colonies until its closure in 1790, do not contain an entry for his embarkation. His age and solitary residence in 1827 suggest that he arrived as a young man in his twenties or thirties during the 1810s or 1820s rather than as a child with his family during the 1790s or 1800s. Excluding arrival during the Spanish blockade of the rebellious port, which lasted into 1814, as well as during years with surviving disembarkation registries, 1821–22 and 1825–26, suggests that Lanuza settled in Buenos Aires during either 1814–20 or 1823–24. The reason for Pellegrini’s claim that Lanuza was a Spaniard even though the census of 1827 lists his birthplace as France might relate to the location of the Lanuza family’s ancestral home, perhaps his own birthplace: the Aragonese village of Lanuza, located high in the Pyrenees about ten kilometers south of the border with France. In any case, if he emigrated from France or Spain to Buenos Aires in 1814–20 and took the idea for the balde sin fondo from a book he had read in Europe, it must have been Amoenitatum Exoticarum. If he emigrated as late as 1823–24, the book could have been Amoenitatum Exoticarum, Collection de Machines, or both.54 If Lanuza took the idea for the balde sin fondo from those or any other books, however, some of the members of the special commission that evaluated his patent application would just as likely have read the same or similar books. The commissioners’ report, in fact, reveals that they realized that the balde sin fondo was not an entirely original invention: “Although it is not a new idea, whatever might be its origin it is in this country a much more useful invention, on account of which it will rapidly become widespread because of its simplicity and low cost.”55 The head of the commission, José Maria Romero, would actually have been more liable than Lanuza to have read Amoenitatum Exoticarum, although not Collection de Machines, because he had come to Buenos Aires from Madrid in 1814 to head the Bonaerense civil engineering department. Pedro Carta, an Italian, had come to Buenos Aires in 1821 to found the physics department at the new university and therefore could have been familiar with both Amoenitatum Exoticarum and Collection de Machines.

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Another commissioner, James Bevans, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1822 from England and became head of the hydraulic engineering department. He also may have read the two books before emigrating, although he resigned from the commission nearly immediately because he objected to being subordinate to a civil engineer. The last two commissioners probably had no familiarity with published descriptions of African and Asian water hoists: Avelino Díaz had been born in Buenos Aires and worked in the cartographic department; and John Whitaker had come from England and manufactured domestic hand pumps and plumbing.56 The commissioners’ acknowledgment that Lanuza’s putative invention was not entirely original may also relate to a possibility radically opposed to the conventional wisdom: the balde sin fondo became established on the Pampas through a network that connected directly to Africa rather than through European publications about Africa. A slave, perhaps one of the 2,175 Senegambians who disembarked between 1800 and 1806, may have built a balde sin fondo based on his experience herding cattle across the Sahel, from the valley of the Gambia, Senegal, or Niger River into the southern fringes of the Sahara, where Tuaregs continue to use a very similar device. Impressed by the efficiency of the slave’s creation, Lanuza used his social power to appropriate the design as his own invention and patent it in an attempt to profit financially. Despite his failure to extract royalties from those who built baldes sin fondo, they became a key element of the herding ecology that emerged over the early nineteenth century as ranching expanded and its ecology became transformed. Much remains uncertain about that final possibility, such as whether Lanuza owned either slaves or an estancia. The census of 1827 did not enumerate anyone else, slave or free, living with him at 226 Peru Street. On the one hand, that urban address may have been no more than a townhouse, his permanent residence being an estancia with many slaves in the Bonaerense countryside. On the other hand, his name does not appear in the Bonaerense archive of land surveys that began to accumulate in 1824, and the census lists his profession as the owner of a vessel, “dueño de un barco,” rather than an hacendado. The generic barco does not help to specify the type of vessel, which could have been anything from an open boat to an oceangoing ship. Nonetheless, whether engaged in trade up the river, along the coast, or across the Atlantic, Lanuza’s

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vocational orientation seems to have been toward transport and commerce rather than pastoral production. Unsurprisingly, given his arrival in Buenos Aires in 1814 at the earliest, Lanuza does not appear in any of the detailed enumerations that survive from the rural census of 1815. The first comprehensive national census came too late, in 1869, to reveal any other possible residences. Even by 1855, the first year with a complete census of the city, Lanuza was dead and could not appreciate Pellegrini’s posthumous praise.57 The place the commissioners went in order to observe the balde volcador and evaluate the patent application provides no more than a thin lead in establishing a connection between Lanuza and any specific estancia and its slaves. The commissioners name the place as the “quinta de Vergara,” presumably a rural property owned by someone named Vergara, not Lanuza. The Vergara family, however, owned a large number of rural properties distributed widely across the Bonaerense countryside. Between 1609 and 1640 the Vergaras amassed many land grants: eleven estancias, between the suertes principales and the cabezadas; four farms, known as chacras; and a site for a grist mill. Juan de Vergara, a perpetual city alderman, received most of the mercedes. His brother, Alonso Agreda de Vergara, served as the chief scribe to the governor of the Río de la Plata and doubtless facilitated acquisition of that land empire but officially received only a single chacra. The Sevillian siblings were socially powerful in Buenos Aires and involved in smuggling, including the contraband slave trade. Between 1636 and 1640 three of Alonso’s sons received four additional estancias. Even by the mid-seventeenth century, however, those Vergara lands spread across many partidos, and a relationship between any of them, subsequent acquisitions by their heirs, the “quinta de Vergara” of the commissioners’ report of 1826, and the slaves listed in the partially extant rural census of 1815 remains elusive.58 Pellegrini’s praise for Lanuza in 1853 was not only posthumous but probably undeserved. No direct evidence exists that Lanuza independently invented the balde sin fondo other than his own claim in a patent application from which he hoped to derive a financial benefit. Nor does any direct evidence exist that he took the idea from Kaempfer’s Amoenitatum Exoticarum or Lasteyrie’s Collection de Machines and adapted the design to the Pampas. Nor does any direct evidence exist that Lanuza saw a slave,

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whether his own or any other, build the first balde sin fondo on the Pampas and then used his social power to appropriate that black’s knowledge as well as labor. Of the three possibilities, however, the third seems the most probable because of the many Senegambians who arrived in the Río de la Plata in the early nineteenth century and the likelihood that some were familiar with the nearly identical form of the balde sin fondo used in the Sahel of West Africa. A shift in Atlantic networks that opened new markets for the estancias of the Pampas coincided with one that brought a substantial number of Senegambians to those estancias. Their expertise in African cattle herding thereby coincided with an opportunity to influence the nineteenth-century transformation of the colonial herding ecology. Yet those shifting networks connected the Pampas not only to Senegambia but also to other places in the Americas. While many of the livestock products that gauchos, whether black or not, produced during the nineteenth century, most prominently hides, flowed to Europe, one flowed northward to feed slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations. That “tasajo trail” involved salt-cured beef, an Atlantic commodity unlike others such as sugar because blacks not only helped produce it but also consumed it in enormous quantities.

c h a p t e r s ix

The Tasajo Trail

Down in the narrow streets [of Havana, Cuba] among the Spanish warehouses one encounters the same old smell of tasajo from the Argentines, dried or suncured beef in bales like sole-leather. —Thomas R. Dawley , “Havana After Three Years” (1901)

i have so far largely followed the prevailing currents of the Atlantic world’s emergence, that suite of latitudinal flows and counterflows that swept across the ocean from Europe and Africa to the Americas and vice versa. An eastward setting current of precious metals matched a westward one of deadly pathogens: silver and gold to Europe in exchange for smallpox and yellow fever to the Americas. Other currents carried crops such as maize and potatoes eastward in a flow opposite to those carrying cattle and grasses westward. The flow of African slaves along the middle passage matched that of Caribbean sugar along the homeward one. And other flows of many types of materials and ideas similarly blew back and forth across the Atlantic on the prevailing trades and westerlies to intersect in places like Veracruz, Louisiana, Barbuda, and the Pampas. The epigraph above refers, however, to a relatively unknown meridional flow that involved cattle ranching and blacks but that supported the Cuban slave trade and sugar plantations: namely, the tasajo trail. Tasajo was salt-cured beef produced along the Río de la Plata in Argentina and Uruguay during the nineteenth century, shipped to Cuba, and consumed by slaves on sugar plantations. Such meridional flows typically lack the prominence and well-developed literatures of the latitudinal ones. The outward passage, which carried manufactured goods like cloth and guns from Europe to Africa, is the most prominent exception, illustrating 169

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just how integral such meridional flows were to the entire Atlantic circulation. They deserve just as much study as scholars have devoted to the latitudinal flows. I deal here with the little-known northward flow of tasajo from one part of the Americas to another. In contrast to other agricultural commodities, tasajo in all its aspects has evoked no more than a minimal literature. At the Cuban end of the tasajo trail, the salt-cured beef from Argentina played too mundane a role in social relations to have elicited scholarly attention. At the Platense end of the trail, tasajo played a role in early capital accumulation, albeit minor relative to hides and wool, leading some historians to reconstruct the changing scale of tasajo exports and aspects of its production. The trail itself, the people and vessels that linked the ports of the Río de la Plata to those of Cuba, remains nearly entirely unknown, an aspect of the general scholarly attitude toward the Atlantic as an uninteresting, dead space of separation rather than an intriguing, living space of agency.1 Such scholarly neglect has not prevailed because of any lack of primary sources. Nineteenth-century descriptions and images of tasajo production, shipping records, the logbooks of vessels that sailed the tasajo trail, and other documents all help to elaborate on its role in Atlantic networks related to cattle herding and blacks. These sources facilitate understanding the reasons for the growth and decline of the tasajo trail over the nineteenth century in relation to the more prominent latitudinal flows of sugar and slaves. They allow explication of the changing characteristics of tasajo and the roles of blacks in both its production and consumption. And they reveal the people, places, and vessels involved in the tasajo trail as well as their involvement in other Atlantic networks. Only at the end of the colonial period did Platense tasajo exports expand (fig. 6.1). Before the early nineteenth century meat exports included only small amounts of various sun-dried and salt-cured products variously called charque, charqui, cecina, and carne salada—the last, barrels of salt beef for the Spanish navy, being the most prominent. The end of Spanish control of the Río de la Plata over the 1810s opened it to foreign shipping, however, and during the nineteenth century Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States became the major sources of manufactured imports and the destinations for exports of such livestock products as cattle hides,

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Figure 6.1.  The Platense region, showing places referenced in this chapter.

sheepskins, wool, horsehair, and tallow. Cuba and Brazil, in contrast, became the primary destinations for tasajo exports.2 The flow of tasajo northward out of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the two major Platense ports, grew from a trickle to a flood over the first half of the nineteenth century (fig. 6.2).3 The frequent civil and international conflicts during that period at times disrupted the growth in tasajo exports and precluded the accumulation of complete series of export statistics, especially in regard to Montevideo. The Spaniards withdrew from Buenos Aires in 1810 but continued to occupy Montevideo, and the final ousting of the viceroy of the Río de la Plata in 1814 only signaled the beginning of a series of further armed conflicts. In 1817 the Brazilians began an occupation of Montevideo that ended in the war with Buenos Aires of 1825–28, which resulted in Uruguayan independence. The civil

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Figure 6.2.  Tasajo exports from the port of Buenos Aires, 1810–62; tasajo exports from Uruguay, 1855–62; and tasajo imports into Cuba, 1826–59.

strife of 1839–52 that followed in Uruguay involved a near-continuous siege of Montevideo. Bonaerense involvement in those conflicts led to a series of blockades of Buenos Aires that hindered its exports: in 1811–14 a blockade by the Spaniards based in Montevideo; in 1825–28 by the Brazilians; in 1838–40 by the French; and in 1845–48 by the British and French jointly. The graph of tasajo exports through Buenos Aires reflects the impact of those blockades but nonetheless illustrates the growth from hundreds of metric tons per year in the 1810s to thousands during the 1820s through 1840s to tens of thousands by midcentury. Montevideo and other Uruguayan ports also exported tasajo during that period, but much of the tonnage went unrecorded owing to the blockades and the clandestine use of small coastal vessels to transfer tasajo to foreign vessels waiting offshore or across the river.4 Cuba became such a large importer of tasajo over the nineteenth century because after Haiti achieved independence in 1804 Cuba became Spain’s leading plantation colony, most of its land and an enormous enslaved labor force dedicated to tobacco, coffee, and, above all, sugar production. The Haitian revolution, which brought more than a decade of

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violent rebellion against French rule and slavery in the archetypal sugar colony of Saint-Domingue, so reduced the Atlantic sugar supply and inflated its price that by 1810 Cuban planters had doubled their production relative to the 1780s. As a direct consequence, Cuban slave imports boomed: at least 656,000 slaves entered the island between 1811 and 1867, despite the illegality of the trade after 1820, compared to some 122,500 in the preceding centuries. Although clandestine trade precludes precision, the flow of slaves into Cuba during the nineteenth century alone represents about a third of the total for all of the Hispanic Americas from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth and some 6 percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade, estimated conservatively to involve more than 10 million Africans. By 1867 Cuban slave imports had ended, but the island’s enslaved population numbered more than 370,000, some 40 percent of them working on sugar plantations and directly producing 41 percent of the world’s sugar cane.5 Within that system of human exploitation, tasajo from Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and especially the Río de la Plata became the dominant source of protein powering the nineteenth-century conversion of Cuba into an enormous sugar plantation and unrelenting slave society. At the beginning of the century Alexander von Humboldt, who visited Cuba twice between 1800 and 1804, noted that “tasajo (sun-dried meat) from Buenos Ayres and Caracas is given to the slaves; or salt cod (bacalao) when the tasajo is too expensive.”6 According to Humboldt, the Venezuelan port of Barcelona shipped 1,112 metric tons of tasajo to Cuba in 1792; Venezuela as a whole exported 1,588 metric tons to the Antilles in 1800 and 2,268 metric tons to all destinations in 1809. The cheapness and nutritional content of tasajo drove that trade. The Cuban slave code of 1842, the Reglamento de Esclavos, stipulated a minimum daily ration that included eight ounces, about 227 grams, of either meat or salt cod. That amount of salt cod contained 161 calories, providing less than 8 percent of the minimum of 2,100 daily calories necessary to sustain an adult. The same amount of tasajo, in contrast, yielded 36 percent of the minimum caloric intake. A practical guide to managing a sugar plantation, the Cartilla Práctica del Manejo de Ingenios (1862) strongly recommended tasajo as the main source of protein for Cuban slaves. Plantation owners even lobbied to modify the Catholic restriction on Friday meat consumption so that they could feed their slaves tasajo instead of bacalao all week.7

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The Cuban demand for slaves and the tasajo to feed them grew during the cane harvest every January through June. As in the rest of the Caribbean, in Cuba the harvest largely coincided with the winter dry season. Planting took place during the summer wet season, nominally August through November; the cane grew for approximately a year and a half; then, as the dry season encouraged sugar production in the stalk, the harvest moved successively from the first fields to mature through the last, from those planted in August through those planted in November. Cane cutting and processing proceeded simultaneously and incessantly. The cutters tried to keep up with the ripening cane, cutting each field before the proportion of sugar in the cane began to decline. The mills tried to keep up with the piles of cut cane, extracting the juice before it began to ferment and rot the cane. The boiling houses tried to keep up with the supply of juice from the mills, reducing it to a semi-crystalline state. And the curing houses then had to drain the molasses and process the sugar until it was ready for shipment. The demand for tasajo increased during the harvest not only because the plantations owners needed more slaves to implement such a brutal production schedule, but also because the slaves did not have time to grow their own food in their provision plots. Only during the tiempo muerto, the so-called dead season that lasted from July through December, could the enslaved workers again grow their own food while carrying out the relatively less demanding work associated with planting.8 By midcentury Cuban tasajo imports had grown to tens of thousands of tons, most of it supplied by Argentina and Uruguay. Tasajo had become one of Cuba’s eight principal imports, together with bacalao, rice, wheat flour, fresh and salt pork, fresh beef, and wine. Havana dominated the tasajo trade through the 1840s, accounting for more than 90 percent of the tonnage imported, but by midcentury about a quarter of the swelling volume was entering through other ports, such as Matanzas and Cárdenas. The buques tasajeros, or tasajo boats, nonetheless remained so prominent at Havana that port officials dedicated a section of the docks to that trade and limited the amount of time each vessel could spend unloading. While Uruguay and Argentina both supplied Cuba, the former emphasized the Brazilian market while the latter exported mainly to Cuba, with about two-thirds of the tasajo shipped out of the port of Buenos Aires destined for Cuba until the close of the 1850s (fig. 6.3).9 During the

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Figure 6.3.  Tasajo exports from the Río de la Plata as a whole and from Argentina and Uruguay, 1867–1908. The graphs use five-year averages to capture overall trends and ignore exports to Spain, Portugal, and Puerto Rico because they composed minuscule tonnages relative to Brazil and Cuba, in the mere hundreds of metric tons per annum.

1850s Buenos Aires alone supplied around three-quarters of all Cuban tasajo. The value of those Platense tasajo exports to Cuba never amounted to a large proportion of all livestock exports, only about 10 percent in Argentina’s case, lagging far behind the more valuable trades in hides and wool to Europe and the United States. Argentineans and Uruguayans themselves did not consume tasajo, preferring their plentiful supply of fresh beef. But over the nineteenth century the tasajo trail became as integral to Atlantic sugar production as the slave trade, a cheap protein that fueled captive labor to produce a valuable carbohydrate.10 The decline of the tasajo trail at the end of the century related to a combination of factors in both Cuba and the Río de la Plata. The protracted Cuban wars for independence beginning in 1868, the abolition of slavery

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over the 1880s, and the Spanish-American War of 1898 all decreased demand. In parallel, the supply of low-quality beef that the Platense meatsalting plants had relied on to make cheap tasajo increasingly became subject to competing demands. As wool exports grew after midcentury, sheep displaced cattle from pastures and reduced the beef supply. At the same time, European immigration rapidly increased the urban population of the Pampas and created a greater demand for fresh beef: Buenos Aires grew from approximately 62,000 inhabitants in 1836 to 178,000 in 1869 to 678,000 in 1895; and Montevideo’s population increased from 23,000 in 1835 to 105,000 in 1872 to 270,000 in 1890. The final and greatest threat to the tasajo producers’ supply of cheap beef, however, came from new technologies. One involved preservation of meat through cooking and canning in various forms, such as Liebig’s meat extract and corned beef. The other involved the mechanical refrigeration technology that had emerged over the mid-nineteenth century: in 1876 the French refrigerated ship Frigorifique dramatically demonstrated the possibility of marketing high-quality Platense beef in Europe, and by the 1880s regular exports of frozen beef had begun. As the boom in frozen and then chilled beef gained momentum, the meat freezing plants, or frigoríficos, so drove up the quality and price of beef that the tasajo industry began to decline. As the Brazilian tasajo market also declined with that country’s abolition of slavery and implementation of import tariffs to protect its domestic tasajo producers, known as charqueadas, Argentina virtually ceased tasajo production in the early twentieth century. Uruguay continued to produce tasajo but on a minuscule scale compared to the nineteenth century. In 1920, for example, Montevideo exported only 12,482 metric tons, including 211 to Puerto Rico, 4,116 to Brazil, and 7,114 to Cuba, supplying approximately 80 percent of the Cuban market.11 Despite that decline in the early twentieth century, the persistence of the tasajo trail for much of the preceding century ensured that tasajo became an integral element in Cuban culture. According to one longlived former slave, Esteban Montejo, even the royal decree that abolished slavery in 1886 could not abolish tasajo as the protein that fueled plantation labor. Tasajo therefore persists as an ingredient in a cuisine born in slavery and as a thread in Cuban social memory. Although requiring soaking for an entire day, with two or three changes of water and subsequent thorough rinsing, tasajo remains a key ingredient in such dishes as

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ajiaco, a meat and vegetable stew, and plays a similarly intermingled role in Cuban cuisine, history, culture, and society as various root crops. 12 Consequently, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier could evoke the colonial Havana of his novel El Siglo de las Luces (1962) with a reference to tasajo. He made the colonial port of the novel figuratively reek of the pungent, bitter smell of tasajo, to the degree that the stench of Cuban slavery defied even the pious incense of the Catholic Church: “But the tasajo, impossible to mistake, it smelled like tasajo: omnipresent tasajo, retained in all the basements and undertones, its bitterness ruling the city, invading the mansions, permeating the curtains, defying the incense of the churches, getting into the shows at the opera. The tasajo, the mud and the flies were the curse of that emporium, visited by all the ships of the world, but where only the statues . . . standing on their pedestals, tarnished with red earth, could be at ease.”13 Foreigners similarly invoked the distinctive social associations of tasajo. Humboldt did so when he wrote that the “smell of tasajo or improperly dried meat often corrupts the houses and winding streets” of Havana.14 A century later, three years after U.S. troops had occupied Cuba in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, Thomas R. Dawley echoed Humboldt: “Down in the narrow streets among the Spanish warehouses one encounters the same old smell of tasajo from the Argentines, dried or sun-cured beef in bales like sole-leather, codfish, oil, and garlic. The newcomer turns up his nose and sniffs contemptuously, as he wonders in what way Havana has been purified. It is the same old smell which we used to attribute to the sewers.”15 Most of the tasajo consumed in Cuba in the nineteenth century began in Platense mataderos and saladeros, the slaughter yards and meat-salting plants that various contemporaries described so well. Charles Darwin, visiting Buenos Aires in 1833, described one matadero as “horrible and revolting”: the ground “almost made of bones; and the horses, and riders are drenched with gore.”16 Darwin’s French peer Alcides d’Orbigny contributed a detailed description of tasajo production based on his observations of April 1829, in which he simultaneously applauds the dexterity of the gauchos and condemns their brutality. Each evening the gauchos would herd the next day’s cattle into a corral adjoining a large salting shed. Beginning at dawn mounted gauchos would lasso each animal by

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the horns and lead it out of the corral to just outside the shed, dexterously avoiding the horns and kicks of the frantic animals. Then, without dismounting, they would reach down with a knife to cut the hocks of the rear feet and leave the animals rolling in the dust, unable to escape the executioner who approached to slit their throats. In the case of difficult bulls the gauchos would drive a long knife into the nape of the neck to sever the spinal cord. At times the cattle groveled in the dirt for hours, awaiting their executioners—lowing, abandoned to the slaughter-yard dogs that ripped at their tongues. By eight or nine o’clock the hundred or so head to be salted that day lay dead, and the gauchos proceeded to dress them, a spectacle of eight to ten men dripping with blood, knives in hand, working in the yard in front of the shed. Two men to an animal, they cut open the skin of the belly from head to tail and then down the inside of each leg to the knee, chopping off the lower legs and head, dividing the carcass into quarters and extracting the intestines. The heads would yield dried tongues and, once putrefaction had eased their removal, horns for sale to the makers of knife handles and buttons. Orbigny summarized the scene grimly: “There, a bull expiring; here a body still intact, but inanimate, the skeleton bare of flesh, the pieces of meat dispersed; and all amid the laughter of the gauchos and cries of the birds of prey attracted by the offal, flying overhead, waiting their turn or fighting the dogs for the discards.”17 After the slaughter, children removed the suet from the intestines while the gauchos carried the hides and carcasses into the shed. There they hung the quarters from the rafters on iron hooks and “with a deftness and rapidity difficult to believe” cut them into large pieces, tossing the bones to one side and the meat onto hides stretched on the ground.18 Once they had roughly dressed the hundred or so carcasses, they removed the fat from the cuts of beef, covered some hides with a thick layer of coarse salt, followed with a layer of pieces of meat, then another of salt, another of meat, and so on until attaining a square pile and capping it with a second hide. For ten to fifteen days the piles remained untouched while the hygroscopic salt absorbed much of the meat’s water content. Thereafter the gauchos daily disassembled each pile in the morning, hung the salt-encrusted meat on cords to air dry, and then reassembled each pile in the evening for the salt to draw more water to the surface of the meat until the tasajo was ready.

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The process also yielded other products, which Orbigny noted in detail. The salt-cured hides had the greatest value, but the horns and dried tongues also sold well, as did several types of fat. Melting the suet produced tallow: of low value, shipped in casks, and used to make candles and soap. The fat cut from the meat, once rendered through boiling and stored in stomach bladders and large intestines, sold as cooking grease. And breaking the bones and scraping out the marrow with wooden splinters produced the most valuable fat of all, also rendered by boiling but poured into small kegs and sold to gourmets for cooking. The broken bones themselves formed enormous discard piles along the river banks. Artists complemented such textual descriptions with paintings, lithographs, and engravings (fig. 6.4).19 Some of the most striking include Carlos E. Pellegrini’s El Matadero, Juan León Palliere’s El Saladero, and Emeric Essex Vidal’s El Matadero del Sudoeste en Buenos Aires. They depict gauchos on horseback using lassos to drag cattle by the horns while others cut the hamstrings or hocks so that the animals fall rolling in the dirt of the slaughter yard. Other workers kill the cattle by cutting their throats. Yet others dress the dead animals while bending over them or sitting on their severed heads. Workers load various pieces of the carcasses into wheelbarrows and two-wheeled carts. Dogs and pigs gorge on offal.

Figure 6.4.  Juan León Palliere’s lithograph of a Bonaerense saladero in the 1860s.

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The salting sheds rise in the background: thatched roofs supported by poles, the sides either entirely open or walled with insubstantial screens. To the side, corrals of close-set wooden pickets hold the next cohort of victims. Above all wheel birds waiting to pick clean the scattered skeletons. And on the horizon the masts of vessels wait to load cargoes of tasajo, hides, and tallow for shipment to Atlantic ports. Each metric ton of tasajo exported consumed 15–20 head of cattle. In 1823, for example, Bonaerense saladeros slaughtered 65,515 head and exported 4,042 metric tons of tasajo: an average yield of 1 metric ton for every 16.2 head, or about 62 kilograms per head. Assuming an average live weight of, at best, 350 kilograms for the rangy Platense cattle of the early nineteenth century, the yield of 62 kilograms per head suggests a reduction to a little less than 18 percent of the live weight after butchering, deboning, and drying. Humboldt gave a roughly similar figure for the cattle of the Venezuelan Llanos, which he claimed averaged 284 kilograms and produced 45–57 kilograms of tasajo, a reduction to 16–20 percent of the live weight.20 The substantial removal of water from the meat gave tasajo several advantageous characteristics over other forms of preserved beef, such as the carne salada that the gauchos of colonial times had brined, packed in barrels between layers of salt, and shipped to Cádiz for the Spanish navy. The greater dryness of tasajo relative to carne salada reduced both weight and volume and thereby lowered shipping costs. The greater dryness allowed bulk loading into the holds of vessels, so that tasajo shipped “in bales like sole-leather” without the need for expensive, heavy, bulky barrels or any other sort of container.21 The greater dryness also preserved the beef longer after slaughter: it lasted for many months even in tropical climates unless exposed to excessive moisture. Those same characteristics, however, precluded the sale of tasajo to anyone except plantation owners, who could force their captive workers to consume a product that had lost a portion of its soluble proteins and required mincing and lengthy soaking to reconstitute and desalinize before cooking. Those characteristics made tasajo the meat of choice to provision the enslaved workers of an island dedicated to sugar production.22 As the tasajo trade reached tens of thousands of metric tons per year after midcentury and saladero owners accumulated capital, they invested in innovations that increased labor efficiency, consumed nearly every part

the tasajo trail    181

of the slaughtered cattle, and generated many detailed observations (fig. 6.5).23 In these new saladeros, the prototypical Platense factories, a small, triangular holding pen floored with wood planks, known as the brete, connected via a gate with the main corral. Both the corral and the pen consisted of a stockade of closely set, vertical poplar trunks or of windrows of discarded bones and skulls. The apex of the pen connected to an open-sided slaughtering shed, the galpón, via a passageway along which a four-wheeled cart ran on wooden or iron rails. The workers, by then specialist peones rather than generalist gauchos, would drive a dozen or so head at a time from the corral into the pen. The capataz, or foreman, of the corral stood near the pen’s apex on a raised gallery a meter or more above ground level. From that vantage he would lasso an animal around the horns. The tail rope of the lasso passed around a pulley fixed at the apex of the pen to several horses or oxen, and, upon the signal “¡Dale!” from the capataz, the gaucho in charge of the team would ride out and thereby haul the lassoed animal into the throat of the passageway. There, as the horns of the victim pulled up tight against a beam across the passageway, the capataz would sever the spinal cord with a long knife. As the paralyzed animal fell onto the waiting cart, a gang of workers would pull the beam out, push the cart along the passageway to the galpón, and roll the carcass off onto its sloping planked floor, or playa. While that gang

Figure 6.5.  Engraving of a saladero along the Riachuelo, near Buenos Aires, in the 1860s.

1 8 2   t h e tasajo t r a i l

pushed the cart back to await the next victim, another crew skinned, gutted, and quartered the animal in about five minutes. With the blood running off the sloped playa into the ditch that surrounded the saladero, yet another crew loaded the various pieces into wheelbarrows for distribution to specialized processing areas where everything became an export: horn for utensil, tool, and umbrella handles as well as for buttons and combs; grease for cooking; bone ash for sodium nitrate fertilizer and bone china; bone char for sugar refining; tallow for candles and soap; tails for oxtail soup; lower legs with hooves for neat’s-foot oil; and hides for leather. The beef quarters hung from hooks in a walled shed to cool for about an hour before butchers cut out and deboned the slabs of meat for salting. As in Orbigny’s description, workers usually created piles of alternating layers of meat and salt, measuring about six meters square, but some saladeros used a brine wash to accelerate, or “force,” the process when demand for tasajo became particularly high. Wooden rails set on posts in the yard in front of the galpón, called tendales and always oriented north-south so that the sun’s rays would strike the slabs of meat most directly, had replaced the earlier hanging cords in the air-drying step. During the day workers would disassemble the piles to drape the saltencrusted meat over the tendales to dry, reassembling the piles in the evening. The entire process took from one to two weeks. Once the tasajo was dry enough crews either loaded it directly into the holds of vessels anchored in the stream adjoining the saladero or stacked it along the bank and covered it with tarpaulins while awaiting shipping.24 Some of the same observers also commented on the labor relations of the midcentury saladeros. Slaughtering and tasajo production continued to take place in summer, when cattle weighed more and warmer temperatures dried the meat faster, and saladeros therefore took on a larger temporary workforce during that season. But the new saladeros retained some workers throughout the year to process additional ancillary products such as bone ash and char. French Basque and Irish immigrants had come to dominate the labor force, largely displacing the Creole gauchos, some of them blacks. The largest salting works, such as that owned by the Frenchman Antoine Cambacères, employed about three hundred workers during the summer and could kill, quarter, and hang three to four hundred head between 3:00 am and 3:00 pm each day. Each area of specialization—from the corral to the shed to the yard full of drying

the tasajo trail    183

piles—had its own capataz. The mayordomo, overseeing all, lived on the premises in a house that also served as the accounting office.25 As the saladeros grew in number and output over the nineteenth century, the ones ringing Buenos Aires increasingly competed with the city’s citizens for meat and polluted their water and air. Those porteño saladeros, mainly the half dozen principal ones and their many minor neighbors concentrated along the banks of the Riachuelo on the southern margin of the city, had become the main Bonaerense producers. By midcentury they were slaughtering some 325,000 head per year to produce an average annual output of 18,162 metric tons of tasajo. Some porteños celebrated those so-called saladeros perfeccionados, their productivity based on mechanization and labor specialization, as harbingers of modernization; others decried the corollary destruction of tradition and the self-sufficient gaucho culture; but most mainly noted the associated pollution. One observer in the early 1850s, described “ditches filled with blood instead of water, actually in all stages of putrefaction; miles and miles of fences, three or four feet high and two thick, dividing off the different establishments skirting the road, and forming corrals, made entirely of the bones of the bullocks’ horns.”26 The cattle packed those corrals for days during the summer, awaiting slaughter, standing in their accumulating excrement, unfed and uncared for as their waste ran off into the Riachuelo. By the late 1860s other visitors noted how “the Riachuelo river has been used as a sewer to carry off the offal and filth of the saladeros, and the malaria arising herefrom has been most prejudicial to public health: the water of the river is often blood-red and poisons all the fish.”27 As bone ash and char had become profitable exports, the fires that reduced the bones added air pollution, creating a stench that blew into the city on the south wind. The use of every waste scrap of hide, sinew, hair, bone, and offal that escaped the pigs and dogs to fuel the steam vats that rendered the marrow, fat, and suet created yet more air pollution. Even the dry waste product of the rendering process, known as carne cocida, became fuel for the boiler fires.28 As the porteño population grew rapidly after midcentury, from some 178,000 in 1869 to 678,000 in 1895, the citizenry became increasingly hostile toward the saladeros. The government initially reacted by regulating the tasajo industry through public health and hygiene ordinances but eventually, prompted especially by the cholera and yellow fever

1 8 4   t h e tasajo t r a i l

epidemics of 1868 and 1871, largely banished saladeros from the city and its environs. They relocated either across the Río Paraná and up the Río Uruguay to neighboring Entre Ríos province or elsewhere in Buenos Aires province: to Mar de Ajó on the Atlantic coast, downriver to Ensenada or Magdalena, or upriver to San Nicolás de los Arroyos or beyond, to Rosario in Santa Fe province.29 Montevideo, in contrast, experienced more modest population growth than Buenos Aires and continued as a center of tasajo production. The Uruguayan capital grew from 105,000 inhabitants in 1872 to 270,000 in 1890, prodigious growth but less than its Platense neighbor in both relative and absolute terms. In the 1870s nine saladeros operated in Montevideo, about half of all those in Uruguay, with the others mainly along the Río Uruguay. Even into the 1920s Montevideo had thirteen saladeros while seven more occupied the eastern bank of the Río Uruguay and another operated at Paso de los Toros.30 The saladeros of the late nineteenth century had reached, just before their virtual extinction, an undeniably industrial scale (fig. 6.6).31 For example, in 1872 the Cambacères saladero relocated from the Riachuelo to Ensenada, some fifty kilometers downstream, then the better port, recently connected to Buenos Aires by rail and soon to grow into the new provincial capital of La Plata. That new, much-expanded Cambacères saladero and the neighboring one owned by Juan Berisso together employed some two thousand workers. A U.S. Department of Agriculture report based on information supplied by State Department officials in Buenos Aires and Montevideo describes such saladeros at the fin de siècle in an effort to determine whether U.S. manufacturers could profitably supply Cuba with tasajo in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. While the saladeros had become larger than those of midcentury, they continued with generally the same technology. Some differences included the use of sheds with corrugated iron instead of wooden or thatched roofs and the standard addition of an initial brining step to hasten drying. Workers immersed boneless cuts of beef in brine for five to ten minutes before draping them over racks to allow them to air dry overnight. The next day they rubbed salt into the leanest side and again left the meat to dry overnight. On the third day they repeated the procedure for the other side. On the fourth day they brushed off as much of the salt as possible and layered the meat into piles. The next day they disassembled the piles,

the tasajo trail    185

Figure 6.6.  Engraving of the inside of a saladero at Fray Bentos in the 1880s. Reproduced courtesy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.

dipped the meat into water to wash off the remaining grains of salt, and layered it into piles three to three and a half meters high, five meters wide, and five to eight meters long. They then covered the tops of the piles with tarpaulins held down with large stones and allowed them to sit for several days, depending on the air temperature and humidity, while liquid trickled down the sides of the piles to puddle on the ground. The workers thereafter periodically disassembled the piles to hang the meat across the racks to air dry during the day, piling the meat up again each evening in reverse order to ensure even, thorough drying.32 The saladeros were producing a true commodity: a relatively uniform product differentiated into standardized classes that sold for a common price determined by the market. Of those standardized classes, Habanera

1 8 6   t h e tasajo t r a i l

was the leanest and highest quality grade, followed by bonita, buena gorda, and gorda. The leaner, more expensive tasajo came from the forequarters and hindquarters, or postas, required four exposures, or tendidas, in summer and five in fall, and went to Cuba because it could better withstand the longer voyage. The cheaper, fattier tasajo came from the side cuts, or mantas, required only three exposures in summer and four in fall, and went to Brazil because of the need to compete with the tariff-protected charqueadas. Because the production of tasajo required reasonably warm air temperatures, it occurred mainly from October through June, the equivalent of April though December in the northern hemisphere.33 The vessels and people that transported the tasajo across the Atlantic from the Platense saladeros to the Cuban sugar plantations have remained largely anonymous, and the conditions aboard as well as the routes from the ports of the Río de la Plata to those of Cuba nearly unknown. Woodbine Parish, the British chargé d’affaires at Buenos Aires from 1825 to 1832, identified some of the actors involved, even if in the rather imprecise terms of nationality. Parish claimed that “besides their direct trade, the North Americans have at times found a profitable employment for their shipping in carrying Buenos Ayrean produce (jerk beef) to the Havana.”34 At least before midcentury U.S. shipping certainly held a relatively prominent place in the Río de la Plata. Of the 68 vessels that sailed into Buenos Aires in 1820 to engage in overseas trade, 15 percent flew the U.S. flag while 13 percent were French and 62 percent British. Even as late as 1850–51, when the total number of vessels had increased by more than 500 percent, to 377, and the entry of the Spaniards and Sardinians had reduced the British component to 28 percent, the U.S. and French proportions had held relatively steady at 14 percent each. Similarly, over the period 1836–42 some 4,000 foreign vessels used Montevideo: 20 percent of them from Britain, 18 percent from Brazil, and between 10 and 14 percent each from the United States, France, Spain, and Sardinia. 35 While Parish focused on the involvement of the United States in the early tasajo trail, British vessels certainly also participated. Some sailed directly from England. For example, the Peter Ellis, a vessel of 262 tons with a crew of twelve arrived in Buenos Aires under Master Robert Rhodes on 16 February 1829 with a cargo of dry goods from Liverpool valued at £1,646; it departed for Havana on 15 April with a load of tasajo

the tasajo trail    187

worth £2,833. Others carried Spanish goods, Platense ports being closed to vessels from Spain until 1836, when Spain acknowledged the independence of its former colonies. For example, the Nautilus, a vessel of 135 tons with a crew of nine arrived on 30 September 1834 from Málaga with a cargo of wine and oil valued at £3,224; it departed for Havana on 15 December with a hold full of tasajo worth £1,403.36 The decline of the U.S. merchant marine after midcentury, however, especially relative to the rise of British steamship lines, seems to have ended most, if not all, North American participation in the tasajo trail. By 1887, compared to the 363 British, 172 French, 151 German, 130 Belgian, 99 Italian, and 43 Spanish steamships that called at Buenos Aires that year, the United States sent only 7, all of them opportunistic tramp freighters rather than vessels on regularly scheduled routes. Trade between the United States and Buenos Aires certainly grew steadily after midcentury, but the lack of direct shipping routes ensured that the bulk of the Platense hides and wool as well as flour, cottons, woolens, lumber, furniture, and agricultural machinery from the United States traveled via European ports on European vessels. Some tasajo may have reached Cuba on U.S. vessels sailing out of North American ports, as that trade also grew steadily over the nineteenth century, but only after European vessels had first carried it across the Atlantic to a port such as Liverpool and then to the United States.37 Platense and Cuban vessels did not engage in any consequential shipping between the Río de la Plata and the Caribbean. The Platense merchant marine remained largely limited to regional trade via coastal and river shipping. Vessels identified as Cuban so rarely sailed into the Río de la Plata that only 15 entered the port of Buenos Aires between 1818 and 1822, an average of 3 per year. By midcentury the number of so-called Cuban vessels had increased to an average of 4.5 per year but remained inconsequential compared to those of European origin. For example, of the 377 vessels to enter Buenos Aires in 1850–51, only 4 had Cuban registry.38 European vessels thus dominated overseas shipping in the Río de la Plata in the second half of the nineteenth century as the magnitude of the tasajo trail swelled to tens of thousands of metric tons per year. In 1820, of the 68 vessels engaged in overseas trade through Buenos Aires, 84 percent were European. As the total number of vessels grew to 377 by 1850–51, the same proportion remained European. And by the 1880s, 17

1 8 8   t h e tasajo t r a i l

European steamship lines provided regularly scheduled service from Buenos Aires to Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany without competition from a single U.S. company. The European vessels often followed a triangular route that carried, for example, manufactured goods from Britain to Buenos Aires, wool from there to the United States, and then lumber back to Britain.39 Vessels from Catalonia dominated the tasajo component of that European triangular trade after the Río de la Plata reopened to Spanish vessels in 1836, possibly displacing the earlier involvement of the United States that Parish had noted. A major sea power in the Mediterranean during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Catalonia barely participated in Atlantic trade until the Bourbon reforms of the mid-eighteenth century ended the Andalusian monopoly. In the 1740s vessels from Spanish ports other than Cádiz could sail to the Americas if they did so through that Andalusian port. Then the decree of 1765 allowed Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, and other selected Spanish ports to trade directly with the Caribbean. And in 1778 the Crown extended that so-called comercio libre more generally to other ports in the colonial empire, including Buenos Aires. That policy reform renewed Spanish emigration to the colonies, and over the 1800s Catalans became so dominant among Cuba’s merchants that they “virtually controlled the importation and distribution of merchandise throughout the island.”40 The Compañia Trasatlántica Española conducted much of that trade, its founder Antonio López having made his fortune in Cuba before moving to Catalonia as the Marqués de Comillas. As a result, Catalonia dominated Spanish shipping by the mid-1800s, with nearly a quarter of all merchant marine tonnage registered in Barcelona until overtaken by Bilbao at the end of the century.41 Catalan involvement in the trade of the Río de la Plata grew rapidly after 1836. Apparently a Catalan captain, Juan Mirambell of El Masnou, violated the Platense prohibition on the entry of Spanish vessels into the river when in 1834 he sailed a brig named the Constancia into Montevideo. The cargo of wine and other goods proved welcome enough to reopen the Río de la Plata to Spanish merchant vessels, and by 1850–56 some 17 percent of the foreign vessels calling at Buenos Aires were Spanish: 63 percent sailing out of the Andalusian ports of Cádiz and Málaga; and 37 percent out of Barcelona and other Catalan ports. In addition, given the Catalan dominance of Cuban trade, the twenty-seven vessels of that

the tasajo trail    189

period recorded as Cuban in the records of the port of Buenos Aires may well have effectively been part of that Catalan merchant fleet.42 Catalan shipping followed three major routes across the Atlantic. The first participated in the slave trade and marked a triangle from Catalonia to Africa to Cuba and back with sugar, tobacco, and coffee. The second involved a more direct trade with Cuba, without involvement in slavery. And the third carried Catalan flour, wine, dried fruit, and manufactured products such as shoes and textiles to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, took on Platense tasajo for Cuba, and there loaded sugar, coffee, and tobacco for Spain. One variation on that Catalan tasajo trail involved loading Platense hides for Spain in addition to tasajo for Cuba. Another variation proceeded in ballast from Cuba to New Orleans, Charleston, or other U.S. ports to take on raw cotton for the Catalan textile industry.43 The logbooks of the Catalan vessels involved in the tasajo trade, many of them preserved in the archives of Barcelona and neighboring ports, greatly amplify the understanding of the tasajo trail. Such logbooks take various forms, and the archives designate them as diarios de navegación or cuadernos de bitácora in Castilian and diaris de navegació or quaderns de bitàcola in Catalan. As official documents, however, the Catalan captains and pilots kept them in Castilian. They primarily record daily position at noon, the temporal divide between the end of one singladura—the twentyfour-hour period that began each noon and filled a single page in a logbook with notations regarding wind and cloud, course and speed, sightings of land and calculations of position—and the beginning of the next. Those positions employ latitude and longitude but with the prime meridian set at Cádiz or the neighboring port of San Fernando rather than Greenwich. They also record weather, sightings of land, and information about the cargos and crews. The descendants of the captains and pilots who kept those logbooks subsequently donated some of them to the many municipal archives and maritime museums of the Catalan coast, not only the major Museu Marítim de Barcelona but also those of such towns as Sitges, El Masnou, and Tossa del Mar.44 Scrutiny of five of the logbooks partly reveals the oceanic component of the tasajo trail. Those five logbooks represent a cross section along several axes (table 6.1 and fig. 6.7).45 The voyages span the nineteenth century, dating to 1837–38, 1851, 1859–61, 1892–93, and 1899–1900. The

1 9 0   t h e tasajo t r a i l

Table 6.1.  General characteristics of voyages by the five vessels. (See figures 6.1 and 6.7 for port locations.) Year

N a me

1837–38 Teresina

Type

Crew Port

Cargo loaded and passengers

Polacra

N/A

Barcelona Málaga

Wine, preserved fruit, shoes, paper, cloth

Rio de Janeiro Montevideo

Cotton, ipecacuanha syrup Tasajo, tallow, horns, hides Cotton Lignum vitae wood N/A Wine, paprika, paper, bacalao, misc., six passengers

(small brig)

1851

Pepe

1859–61 Villa de Tossa

Bergantín 17 (large brig)

Corbeta (barque)

13

Recife San Juan Barcelona Barcelona Málaga Rio de Janeiro Buenos   Aires Matanzas Maó, Menorca Barcelona Montevideo Fray Bentos Montevideo Matanzas Havana Matanzas Montevideo Havana Barcelona

Coffee Tasajo, tallow Not known N/A Wine, misc., two passengers Ballast Tasajo Nothing Nothing Unspecified ballast Sugar, aguardiente Not known; probably tasajo Not known; possibly sugar N/A

the tasajo trail    191

1892–93 Pronta

1899– 1900

Goleta 10 (schooner)

Soberano Bergantín

11

Barcelona Not known Montevideo Not known Buenos Aires Not known; probably tasajo Cárdenas Aguardiente Vigo Nothing Marseille Not known Barcelona N/A Rosario Tasajo Port of Spain Nothing (repair water tank) Havana Rock ballast Brunswick Pine lumber Barcelona N/A

vessels reflect much of the diversity of the Catalan merchant marine in terms of size and sail-plan, including a goleta (“schooner”), a polacra (“small brig”), two bergantines (“large brigs”), and a corbeta (“barque”). They include the principal ports of the triangular trade—Barcelona, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Havana—but also the major Brazilian ports of Rio de Janeiro and Recife, the more minor Cuban ports of Cárdenas and Matanzas, the Platense river ports of Fray Bentos and Rosario, and other Spanish ports such as Málaga, Vigo, and Maó. In addition, the voyages include San Juan, Puerto Rico; Port of Spain, Trinidad; Brunswick, Georgia; and Marseille, France. In terms of cargo, tasajo figures prominently but so do various manufactured products, preserved fruit, sugar, cotton, wood, wine, and aguardiente, a potent alcoholic drink made from sugar cane. All the vessels had Catalan captains and crews. The Teresina was a polacra registered in El Masnou with a tonnage of 3,000 quintales, equivalent to 138 metric tons, and on the voyage of 1837–38 the logbook lists Isidro Maristany as captain and Gabriel Roses y Alsina as pilot. Another Maristany, named Pedro, captained the Pepe, a brig registered in El Masnou at 253 metric tons with a crew of seventeen. The Villa de Tossa, registered in Barcelona but named for the town of Tossa del Mar, was a

1 9 2   t h e tasajo t r a i l

Figure 6.7.  The tasajo trail in the Atlantic world, with relevant ports, prevailing winds, the hurricane zone in the North Atlantic, and the routes of the Teresina, Pepe, Pronta, Villa de Tossa, and Soberano, 1837–1900.

corbeta of unknown tonnage that on the voyage of 1859–61 had a crew of thirteen under a captain named Jaime Ferrer. A goleta from El Masnou, the Pronta, had a registered capacity of 253 metric tons, a crew of ten, and a captain named Antonio Isern on its voyage of 1892–93. The Soberano, a bergantín from El Masnou, had a registered capacity of 368 metric tons, a crew of eleven, and on its voyage of 1899–1900 the captain was Jaime Maristany y Olivé.46 Goletas like the Pronta were much like other schooners that sailed the Atlantic in the nineteenth century (fig. 6.8).47 Such vessels had two or more masts rigged fore and aft rather than square to the wind, in other words, with the plane of the sails in line with the keel rather than at right angles to it. On the one hand, that sail-plan conferred some advantages over square-rigged vessels: fewer sails and simpler rigging required a lower initial investment and a smaller crew even while allowing higher

the tasajo trail    193

Figure 6.8.  The profiles and sail-plans of the goleta Pronta, polacra Teresina, corbeta Villa de Tossa, and bergantines Pepe and Soberano as inferred from general Catalan designs for each of those types of vessel.

maneuverability upwind and respectable speed downwind. Square-rigged vessels, on the other hand, had the speed advantage when sailing with the wind. Many schooners were small, with only two masts and registered at 150–300 metric tons, although those with three masts could reach 500 metric tons. The Pronta, at 235 metric tons, probably had two masts.48 Polacras like the Teresina as well as the Soberano, Pepe, and other bergantines were all brigs. They had two square-rigged masts with a foreand-aft-rigged sail on the lower aft-mast. That sail-plan combined the downwind speed advantage of square sails with the upwind maneuverability of fore-and-aft sails. The costs of sailing a bergantine were higher than for a schooner, however, in terms both of the initial investment in the greater number of sails and the ongoing cost of the larger crew necessary to handle the more complex rigging. Polacras were small brigs, with displacements on the order of 150–200 metric tons; bergantines were large brigs, with displacements exceeding 200 metric tons, the largest ones able to carry in excess of 300 metric tons. At 138 metric tons, then, the Teresina was an extremely small brig. The Soberano, at 368 metric tons,

1 9 4   t h e tasajo t r a i l

ranked as a large brig but even so seems to have had only one more crew member than the Pronta, a schooner of medium capacity that could carry only two-thirds as much cargo. And the Pepe, at 253 metric tons, was a brig of medium capacity and had an inordinately large crew of seventeen. Corbetas like the Villa de Tossa did not equate to corvettes, which in English typically designates a naval vessel smaller than a frigate but larger than a cutter. Rather, corbetas were barques, also spelled bark: threemasted but square-rigged only on the fore- and main-masts, with the sails on the aft-mast rigged fore and aft. In contrast, frigates were true ships, a term reserved for vessels with at least three square-rigged masts. Both barques and frigates were larger than brigs, but frigates had more sails than barques, required larger crews, could sail faster downwind but sacrificed maneuverability upwind. Both frigates and barques could be nearly as small as large brigs, with displacements on the order of 300 metric tons, but barques could reach 700 metric tons and frigates as much as 1,000 metric tons. Although the logbook of the Villa de Tossa does not specify its tonnage, the crew of thirteen, only two more than the Soberano, suggests a capacity on the order of 400–600 metric tons. Such relatively small, shallow-draft vessels seem to have dominated the tasajo trail. Of the Platense tasajo ports, only Montevideo had a relatively deep anchorage that would have allowed large frigates. Buenos Aires and the ports of the Río Paraná and Río Uruguay had poor port facilities for most of the nineteenth century (fig. 6.9).49 Yet even the largest of the five vessels, the barque Villa de Tossa, could call at river ports such as Fray Bentos. The series of monthly export statistics from the British Packet and Argentine News reveals that from 1850 to 1857 the port of Buenos Aires shipped Cuba an annual average of 10,713 metric tons of tasajo in 63 vessels with an average size of 205 tons. Some years those figures were higher or lower: as much as 13,620 or as few as 6,938 metric tons; as many as 78 or as few as 44 vessels; and as large on average as 216 metric tons or as small as 187. Adding the Bonaerense shipments to Brazil increases the average annual amount of tasajo shipped to 16,839 metric tons and the average number of vessels to 116 but only slightly drops their average size to 199 metric tons. Vessels of about 200 metric tons capacity, small brigs and schooners similar to the Teresina, Pepe, and Pronta, clearly dominated the Bonaerense tasajo trade at midcentury. The captains of barques such as the Villa de Tossa understandably preferred

the tasajo trail    195

Figure 6.9.  Several brigs and other small vessels in the 1880s at La Boca, the mouth of the Riachuelo, the principal port of Buenos Aires until the completion of Puerto Madero at the end of the nineteenth century as well as the location of many of the Bonaerense saladeros until the 1870s. Reproduced courtesy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.

the deeper anchorages of Montevideo and even river ports such as Fray Bentos over Buenos Aires. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, dredging of the Riachuelo anchorage and construction of Puerto Madero likely resulted in an increase of the average tonnage of the vessels that used the port of Buenos Aires. As an estimate, assuming an average capacity of 300 metric tons, a mix of 240 schooners, brigs, and barques could have shipped the total Platense tasajo exports of some 72,000 metric tons in 1870. During the peak tasajo production season, from October through June, those 240 vessels would have arrived in the Río de la Plata at an average rate of nearly one per day.50 Not only are the types of vessels diverse in terms of sail-plan and size, but their combinations of routes and cargoes define a diverse pattern of trade, albeit with the consistent element of tasajo shipments from the Río de la Plata to the Caribbean (table 6.2).51 The Teresina left Barcelona in October 1837 loaded with 110 metric tons, 80 percent of its registered capacity, stopped in Málaga for additional cargo, and then sailed for Rio

Table 6.2.  Detailed itineraries of the voyages of the five vessels. Name of vessel

Port visited

Teresina

Barcelona

Pepe

Villa de Tossa

Arrival date (d.m.y)

Departure date (d.m.y)

Time in port (days)

Time to next port (days)

Cumulative time (port/sail days)

N/A

03.10.1837

N/A

8

N/A/8

Málaga

11.10.1837

16.10.1837

5

43

5/51

Rio de Janeiro

28.11.1837

11.12.1837

13

12

18/63

Montevideo

23.12.1837

27.01.1838

35

28

53/91

Recife

24.02.1838

09.04.1838

44

20

97/111

San Juan

29.04.1838

02.05.1838

3

35

100/146

Barcelona

06.06.1838

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Barcelona

N/A

12.01.1851

N/A

8

N/A/8

Málaga

21.01.1851

29.01.1851

8

46

8/54

Rio de Janeiro

07.03.1851

24.03.1851

17

12

25/67

Buenos Aires

06.04.1851

17.05.1851

41

44

66/111

Matanzas

30.06.1851

14.10.1851

106

73

172/184

Maó, Menorca

26.12.1851

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

19.06.1859

N/A

74

N/A/74

01.09.1859

04.10.1859

33

4

33/78

Barcelona Montevideo

Pronta

Soberano

Fray Bentos

08.10.1859

27.10.1859

19

3

52/81

Montevideo

30.10.1859

09.11.1859

10

50

62/131

Matanzas

29.12.1859

06.02.1860

39

1

101/132

Havana

07.02.1860

05.05.1860

87

1

188/133

Matanzas

06.05.1860

25.05.1860

19

80

207/213

Montevideo

13.08.1860

20.11.1860

99

67

306/280

Havana

26.01.1861

25.04.1861

89

41

395/321

Barcelona

05.06.1861

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Barcelona

N/A

26.10.1892

N/A

64

N/A/64

Montevideo

29.12.1892

Not known

51

1

51/65

Buenos Aires

Not known

11.04.1893

51

47

102/112

Cárdenas

28.05.1893

22.06.1893

25

31

127/143

Vigo

23.07.1893

09.08.1893

17

25

144/168

Marseille

03.09.1893

Not known

N/A

N/A

N/A

Barcelona

Not known

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

19.12.1899

N/A

40

N/A/40

Port of Spain

Rosario

28.01.1900

05.02.1900

8

13

8/53

Havana

18.02.1900

04.04.1900

45

6

53/59

Brunswick

10.04.1900

03.05.1900

23

38

76/97

Barcelona

10.06.1900

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

1 9 8   t h e tasajo t r a i l

de Janeiro. Most of the cargo consisted of 188 casks of red table wine and 1,000 crates of raisins, but it included smaller quantities of other dried fruits, more costly wines such as marsala, serge cloth, jarred grapes, writing paper, and shoes. Whether the merchants of Rio de Janeiro acquired any of that cargo remains unknown, but during the nearly two weeks in that port the Teresina did load 20 sacks of brown cotton and 30 jars of ipecacuanha syrup, an emetic derived from the roots of a Brazilian plant. In any case, the cargo’s consignee in Montevideo, Jose Ríos, emptied the hold in order to load to capacity with 113 metric tons of tasajo, 30 dried hides, 1,500 cattle horns, and 20 flasks of tallow. The logbook specifies Havana as the destination for the tasajo, with the hides, horns, and tallow presumably being bound for Barcelona. A stop in Recife, however, changed that plan. Although the logbook does not record the details, Captain Maristany must have secured a better price for the tasajo than he had hoped to get in Havana, remaining in port for forty-four days to unload the tasajo and load 600 sacks of cotton. On the way north to find the westerlies for the return to Barcelona the captain stopped in Puerto Rico for three days, long enough to take on a deck cargo of 4.6 metric tons of lignum vitae, the ironwood that shipwrights used to make rudder bearings and deadeyes.52 The Pepe sailed from Barcelona in January 1851, stopped in Málaga to round out its cargo, and proceeded to Rio de Janeiro with wine, paprika, blank paper, bacalao, playing cards, embroideries, garters, esparto grass, and six passengers. Whether Maristany sold any cargo in Rio de Janeiro remains unclear, but the Pepe did load 407 sacks of Brazilian coffee for Buenos Aires. There, the consignee, the E. Ochoa Company, emptied the hold and loaded the Pepe to more than its registered capacity with 50 boxes of tallow plus 275 metric tons of tasajo, all destined for Cuba. What cargo Captain Maristany obtained in Matanzas is not known, but from there he sailed to Maó on the Island of Menorca.53 The barque Villa de Tossa sailed from Barcelona in June 1859 under Captain Ferrer. It carried two passengers, a main cargo of wine, and miscellaneous other products of Spain.54 The Villa de Tossa unloaded its cargo during the thirty-three days spent in Montevideo, the first port of call, and proceeded from there in ballast up the Río Uruguay to secure a cargo of tasajo at either Fray Bentos on the Uruguayan side or Gualequaychú on the Argentinean side. Apparently encountering a good

the tasajo trail    199

price at a saladero in Fray Bentos, the Villa de Tossa loaded 184 metric tons of tasajo there. A planned brief stop in Montevideo to drop off the river pilot before sailing for Cuba became a stay of ten days “owing to the good strong reign of icebergs” off the mouth of the Río de la Plata. On 9 November the barque sailed for Matanzas loaded to less than half its estimated capacity. Apparently unable to make a good bargain for the tasajo in Matanzas, Ferrer decided to leave after thirty-nine days and instead sold the cargo in Havana, returning to Matanzas in ballast to load sugar and aguardiente. Instead of proceeding to Barcelona, however, the Villa de Tossa returned to Montevideo, sold the sugar and aguardiente, loaded tasajo again, and returned to Cuba before finally sailing home to Barcelona, probably with a cargo of sugar.55 The schooner Pronta sailed for Montevideo from Barcelona in 1892 with an unknown cargo. Apparently unsatisfied with trade in Montevideo, Captain Isern took his schooner across the river to Buenos Aires. From there the Pronta sailed with a cargo of tasajo for Cárdenas, loaded Cuban aguardiente, and returned to Spain. After briefly putting into Vigo, Isern proceeded to Barcelona but upon approaching port received a message from his business partners to proceed to Marseille with the aguardiente.56 The large brig Soberano left Rosario in December 1899 with a “bulk cargo” of tasajo for Havana.57 On the way to Cuba, however, a water tank ruptured, and Captain Maristany y Olivé put into Port of Spain for repairs before continuing to Havana. There the newspaper Diario de la Marina recorded the arrival on 18 February 1900: “el bergantín español Soberano, de Rosario (B. A.) con tasajo.”58 Having unloaded the tasajo in Havana, the Soberano proceeded in ballast to Brunswick to take on a cargo of some 197,000 board feet of loblolly pine lumber for Barcelona: “180,195 board feet below deck and 16,800 on deck.”59 That amount of green pine, 465 cubic meters, would weigh about 219 metric tons (or even less if seasoned and partially dry), only about 60 percent of the capacity of the Soberano. The logbooks also reveal some aspects of life aboard such vessels, bringing the Atlantic component of the tasajo trail to life. The crews consisted of the captain, the maximum authority; the pilot, second in command and charged with primary responsibility for helping the captain with navigation; sometimes a pilot in training known as the gregat, literally “Greek”; a mate, third in command; a sail master; a carpenter; a master helmsman;

2 0 0    t h e tasajo t r a i l

the ordinary seamen; and sometimes, in the case of large crews, a cook and a purser in charge of provisions. A contract signed by the captain and crew regulated social relations aboard, stipulating wages and duties. The sizes of the crews of the five vessels were typical, ranging in size from about ten for a small schooner like the Pronta to twice that many for large barques, the largest frigates having as many as thirty. Until the emergence of large shipping firms in the late nineteenth century, which were associated with the greater capitalization necessary to build and operate steamships, the captains often owned such vessels, sometimes in partnership with a few other owners, and managed not only the ship but also the buying and selling of cargoes.60 While sailing the Río de la Plata or its major tributaries, the Paraná and the Uruguay Rivers, the Catalan captain typically supplemented that crew with a local river pilot. In the Mediterranean and Caribbean the captains typically served as their own pilots once in sight of land, navigating from one landmark to the next. The Paraná and the Uruguay Rivers, however, had strong, shifting currents with treacherous sandbars and other shoals, making detailed local knowledge a necessity. On exiting the Río de la Plata, the river pilots would depart the vessel at either Montevideo or, on the Argentinean bank, at Punta Indio. The papers of the port authority of Buenos Aires contain many notices by the agencies that contracted river pilots, particularly the major Lemanes Agencia de Prácticos, advising when a pilot had been dispatched to a vessel. With repeated trips the Catalans did accumulate local knowledge that decreased their reliance on river pilots. In one case a hand-drafted river chart preserves the knowledge accumulated by one Catalan captain or pilot (fig. 6.10).61 It shows the islands and shoals of the Río Paraná between its mouth and Rosario, portraying the shipping channel and turns, the various towns that occupied the banks, and the saladeros and other facilities relevant to shipping, such as a tonelero, or cooperage. As steam began to replace sail in the Catalan merchant fleet, beginning in the 1870s, maneuverability improved but the rivers remained treacherous, and, in any case, sailing vessels seem to have continued to dominate the tasajo trail.62 On the open ocean the pilot and captain navigated by using charts, instruments, and whatever skills they had acquired in one of the Catalan nautical schools and refined as student pilots. The largest such school was L’Escola Nàutica de Barcelona, founded in 1769, but many smaller

the tasajo trail    201

Figure 6.10.  Partial transcription of a nineteenth-century navigational chart of the Río Paraná, as drawn by the captain or pilot of a Catalan vessel on the back of a printed navigational chart of the Río de la Plata published in 1837. The chart shows the city of San Nicolás de los Arroyos, other river ports, saladeros, a cooperage, and the headings and turns of the shipping channel.

coastal towns like El Masnou had their own. Although logbooks generally did not list the navigational instruments aboard, an exception probably provides a typical inventory: “two sextants, a chronometer; two ordinary clocks, a calendar, large-and small-scale charts.”63 Most of the routes mapped in figure 6.7 describe relatively efficient paths between ports. Only the leg from the mouth of the Río de la Plata into the South Atlantic displays much zigzagging, caused not by poor navigation but by contrary winds. Sailing northward from the Río de la Plata required sailing against the prevailing wind until reaching the latitude of the southern hemisphere trade winds, which allowed sailing downwind to the equator before running before the northern hemisphere trades into the Caribbean. Until reaching tropical latitudes, then, vessels sometimes had to sail far out into the South Atlantic before turning more directly north.64 Everyday life aboard followed a strict regimen punctuated with long stints in port and occasional hazards. Watch followed watch through the

2 0 2    t h e tasajo t r a i l

course of each singladura. Each crew member except the captain had his superior and regular duties. Only diseases, storms, and other misfortunes disrupted that routine. Yellow fever apparently plagued the crews that sailed the tasajo trail. A doctor in Havana noted, “On board the vessels from Buenos Aires, which come laden with tasajo, the disease generally proves very fatal on account of the virulent exhalations to which the men are continuously exposed.”65 Such diseases were of great concern to port authorities, and health certificates in many languages appear in the papers of the Port Authority of Buenos Aires. The logbooks sometimes note the extensive inspections of ships and crews by local medical authorities. The logbook of the Soberano emphasizes how much a part of every voyage such health concerns and quarantines could occupy. Before departing from Havana for Georgia, a doctor working for the U.S. government inspected the vessel and issued a health certificate: “Departure from Havana . . . in stone ballast for Brunswick, Georgia with eleven crew all told, after the American doctor had inspected all the crew members, hold, mess and stores of the vessel and granted a bill of health in duplicate.”66 Yet even though Cuba had been occupied by the United States since 1898 and despite the doctor’s certification, the port authority at Brunswick forced the Soberano to endure fumigation and a quarantine of five days upon arrival: “At dawn the doctor came and imposed on us five days of quarantine to be counted from when the ballast was unloaded, the vessel fumigated, washed down and all the baggage of the crew disinfected, after which we would be free to circulate on 19 April 1900 at 8:00 in the morning.”67 The Pepe had endured a similar quarantine at Buenos Aires half a century earlier. Although two Bonaerense newspapers agree with the logbook that the Pepe arrived in sight of the Riachuelo on 6 April 1851, the port authority did not record entry until twelve days later. The reason for the delay involved an order from the Capitanía del Puerto that all vessels arriving from Brazil must undergo quarantine because of a report of a yellow fever epidemic in Santos, the port of São Paulo. The Pepe therefore remained anchored in the Río de la Plata for nearly two weeks under the guard of an Argentinean naval corvette that was to prevent all communication with shore and other vessels. Inspection, fumigation, and washing of the crew’s clothing would follow before the Pepe received clearance to enter the Riachuelo.68

the tasajo trail    203

Another hazard involved damage to the vessel. Even fairly minor damage could force changes to the itinerary and delays, as when the water tank of the Soberano sprang a leak off the mouth of the Amazon. The leak was serious enough that, despite being less than three weeks from Havana, it required an unscheduled stop at the nearest port. The Soberano spent a week in Port of Spain to repair and refill the water tank before continuing to Havana.69 Damage to cargo, in contrast, could render the entire voyage unprofitable, and tasajo was particularly susceptible to spoilage if it became wet. The brig Prudente, for example, was carrying a cargo of tasajo from Paysandú to Cuba in 1884 when the crew discovered “symptoms of putrefaction” because of dampness in the hold.70 After selling a small amount of the tasajo in Cuba and attempting to sell the rest in Puerto Rico, Captain Maristany dumped the remainder in the sea, as duly witnessed in the logbook by the signatures of three crew members in order to avoid charges of fraud by his business partners. The Prudente then carried a cargo of Cuban sugar to Montevideo, used the proceeds to again load tasajo at Paysandú, and returned to Cuba to salvage some profits from the voyage. Storms, however, presented the greatest hazard of all. The ominous annotation pampero appears on many of the logbook folios that pertain to the approach to the Río de la Plata. For example, strong pampero winds plagued the Villa de Tossa on both of its approaches to Montevideo, in 1859 and 1860. In late August 1859 the Villa de Tossa was sailing southwestward off the coast of Uruguay when a pampero struck and forced the vessel to turn and run northeastward before the wind; then in early August 1860, off the coast of southern Brazil, a series of weaker pamperos considerably slowed southwestward progress. Most captains simply noted the word pampero in their logbooks, but that of the brig Romántico provides an extended description. While sailing from Rio de Janeiro to Montevideo in March 1863, the crew of the Romántico battled a pampero nearly the entire way: large waves tossed the brig up and down, opening the gaps between the planks of the hull and cascading over the deck so that the crew continuously worked the pumps to stay afloat; storm clouds and lightning filled the sky; squalls and hail pounded the rigging.71 One of the most vivid accounts of a pampero comes from Robert Fitzroy, the captain of the Beagle, in his account of the voyage that took

2 0 4    t h e tasajo t r a i l

Darwin around the world. On 23 July 1832 that barque of 242 tons was approaching the mouth of the Río de la Plata from the east when shortly before six the upper clouds in the south-west quarter assumed a singularly hard, and rolled or tufted appearance, like great bales of black cotton. . . . Gusts of hot wind came off the nearest land, at intervals of about a minute. The fore-topsail was just furled, and the men down from aloft, the main-topsail in the gaskets, but the men still on the yard, when a furious blast from the north-west struck the ship. The helm was put up, and she paid off fast; yet the wind changed still more quickly, and blew so heavily from south-west, that the foresail split to ribands, and the ship was thrown almost on her beam-ends, apparently capsizing, when topmasts and jib-boom went, close to the caps, and she righted considerably. Both anchors were cut away (for the land was under our lee), and a cable veered upon each, which brought her head to wind, and upright. . . . As the depth of water was small, and the ground tenacious clay, both anchors held firmly, and our utmost exertions were immediately directed towards clearing the wreck, and saving the remains of our broken spars and tattered sails. Had we suffered in no other way, I should have felt joy at having escaped so well, instead of the deep regret occasioned by the loss of two seamen. . . . One young man fell from the lee yard-arm into the sea. Poor fellow, he swam well, but in vain. . . . Another man was supposed to have been carried overboard with the main-topmast, as he was last seen on the cap.72 Even when sailing within the Río de la Plata vessels faced the possibility of grounding when a pampero blew: Singular fluctuations occur in the river Plata before and after these pamperoes [sic]. For some days previously the river rises, and it is always higher than usual when the south-west wind begins: but, after a few hours, the water falls rapidly, and vessels are left aground: indeed instances have been known of the upper parts of the river, near Buenos Ayres, being so much emptied by strong south-westerly, or westerly winds, that men

the tasajo trail    205

have rode several miles into its bed, to places where ships usually anchor.73 Fitzroy already had considerable experience with storms and treacherous sailing conditions, such as those around Cape Horn during the previous voyage of the Beagle, in 1826–30, but even he judged the pampero to be one of the Atlantic’s fiercest storms: “Never before or since that time have I witnessed such strength, or, I may say, weight of wind: thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, came with it, but they were hardly noticed in the presence of so formidable an accompaniment.”74 While pamperos made approaching the Río de la Plata treacherous, icebergs could make leaving difficult, albeit rarely and only in spring. Icebergs off the mouth of the Río de la Plata trapped the Villa de Tossa at Montevideo for more than a week in November 1859. When sailing for Cuba, pilots set a course as directly north as possible after exiting the Río de la Plata, but the prevailing winds of the South Atlantic typically forced them to take a more easterly course before turning northward, and sometimes even a southeasterly course that took vessels as far south as 38° latitude. Icebergs sometimes occurred that far north—and still do, such as those that made front-page news in Argentina in November 2002.75 In the North Atlantic, hurricanes were the greatest threat. Hurricane season lasts from the beginning of June until the end of November, but the peak in terms of both frequency and severity occurs from mid-August through mid-October. Imposing the tracks of all hurricanes from 1851 through 2008 on figure 6.7 defines an area shaped like a horn, a cornucopia of destruction with its tip near the Cape Verdes and its mouth enveloping the coasts of North America from Mexico to Newfoundland. Born in the eastern North Atlantic, hurricanes gain ferocity as they approach the Caribbean. All five voyages made by the Teresina, Pronta, Villa de Tossa, and Soberano from the Río de la Plata to the Caribbean arrived there after the end of one hurricane season and before the beginning of the next (fig. 6.11).76 The Pepe did arrive at Matanzas in late June, but still more than a month before peak hurricane season began. Only one of the four voyages from the Caribbean to Barcelona left as late as June, but the Pronta reached Vigo before peak hurricane season began in mid-August. Three others departed in April or May and had already arrived in Barcelona or were already well across the Atlantic by June. The Villa de

2 0 6   t h e tasajo t r a i l

Figure 6.11.  The timing of the voyages relative to the North Atlantic hurricane season, the Platense peak tasajo production season, and Cuban peak tasajo consumption during the cane harvest season.

Tossa, on its seemingly idiosyncratic voyage from Matanzas to Montevideo, did not leave the Caribbean until late May but within a month had passed to the west of the Cape Verdes.77 Much of each voyage was spent in port, largely beyond the reach of pamperos and hurricanes. All the vessels spent about half of their voyages in ports, and none of the major legs of any voyage involved being under sail for more than two to three months (table 6.3).78 The longest leg involved sailing from Matanzas to Montevideo in 1860, which took the Villa de Tossa eighty days. More typically, the longest leg was the outward voyage from Barcelona to the Río de la Plata, averaging sixty-seven days but taking the Villa de Tossa seventy-four and even the speedy Teresina sixty-three. The next longest leg tended to be from the Río de la Plata to

Table 6.3.  Summary statistics for the voyages of the five vessels. Name of vessel

Total voyage length (days)

Time in port (%)

Time under sail (%)

Barcelona to Río de la Plata (days)

Río de la Plata to Caribbean (days)

Caribbea n to Barcelon a (days)

Caribbean to Río de la Plata (days)

246

41

59

63

48

35

N/A

Pepe

356

48

52

66

44

N/A

N/A

Villa de Tossa

716

55

45

74

50 and 67

41

80

Pronta

312

46

54

64

47

53

N/A

Soberano

173

44

56

N/A

53

44

N/A

Averages

N/A

47

53

67

52

43

80

Teresina

2 0 8   t h e tasajo t r a i l

the Caribbean, averaging fifty-two days but taking as many as sixty-seven by the sluggish barque Villa de Tossa. The shortest leg was home from the Caribbean across the North Atlantic, sailing before the wind the entire way. Under those conditions, the schooner Pronta was the slowest, at fiftythree days; the brig Teresina the quickest, at thirty-five days; and the Villa de Tossa and Soberano close to the average of forty-three days. Reputedly, the shortest crossing of the North Atlantic by a Catalan sailing vessel was by the Pablo Sensat, a barque registered in El Masnou at 348 metric tons, which made the voyage from South Carolina to the Strait of Gibraltar in fifteen days owing to hurricane-force winds.79 The schedules and route maps of the five vessels also reveal the seasonal rhythm of the tasajo trail in relation to the supply of and demand for tasajo. Cuban demand for tasajo increased during the cane harvest from January through June. Tasajo production, meanwhile, took place during the nine months of October through June, the southern hemisphere’s spring, summer, and fall. During the winter, in contrast, pasture was less nutritious, the cattle weighed less, and in any case the air temperature was too cold to dry tasajo. Consequently, all the voyages from the Río de la Plata to Cuba included in figure 6.11 departed during the peak season of tasajo production, and all but one arrived during the season of peak demand to maximize the price differential between the purchase of the Platense tasajo and its sale in Cuba. Only the Pepe arrived at the end of the harvest season in late June. In addition, the Teresina left Montevideo in January bound for Havana with a cargo of tasajo and would have arrived during March or April but ended up selling the tasajo in Recife in late February and March before stopping in Puerto Rico in April. The demand for tasajo in northeastern Brazil would also have peaked during the dry season and the sugar harvest, which in that region lasted from August through April.80 The monthly export statistics for the 1850s reflect the same seasonal rhythm of the tasajo trail. Year after year shipments of tasajo through the port of Buenos Aires dipped dramatically during July and August (fig. 6.12).81 In September, as cattle began to fatten and temperatures to increase, tasajo shipments began to increase, arriving in Cuba by November or December in anticipation of the cane harvest that would begin after Christmas. By April shipments began their decline toward the nadir of July and August. Platense supply remained high, but a shipment

the tasajo trail    209

Figure 6.12.  Timing of tasajo exports to Cuba through the port of Buenos Aires during the 1850s relative to the hurricane season, Platense production, and Cuban peak consumption.

leaving in late April would not reach Cuba until the cane harvest was winding down in late June. That fortuitous correspondence between the timing of tasajo supply and demand also facilitated avoidance of the Caribbean during peak hurricane season. The tasajo trail stands out as uniquely significant within the Atlantic networks through which blacks participated in the establishment of cattle ranching in the Americas. Vessels transported its defining product northward rather than eastward or westward, a meridional rather than a latitudinal flow. It involved a commodity that slaves not only produced but consumed on a grand scale in comparison to other such cases, for example, the relatively limited amount of beef that Barbudan slaves produced for plantations on neighboring Antigua. It underpinned the more prominent latitudinal flows of sugar and slaves that have defined so much research on the Atlantic world. It grew prodigiously over the

2 1 0   t h e tasajo t r a i l

nineteenth century to link Buenos Aires and Cuba more closely than they had ever been while both were part of the Spanish colonial empire. The involvement of tasajo in the landscape transformations of the Cuban terminus remains less well understood than in the case of the Bonaerense terminus. Tasajo fed slaves on sugar plantations, and a low-value commodity thus became essential to the production of a highvalue commodity. Yet archives tend to record less about what slaves consumed than what they produced. Tasajo consumption produced some import statistics, sporadic and succinct accounts by observers such as Humboldt, and equally brief mention in the slave code and plantation instructional manuals. Somewhat ironically, then, tasajo has persisted as an integral element in Cuban culture and everyday life, appearing in novels as well as recipes. In contrast, tasajo has virtually disappeared from the Platense scene. There, tasajo was also associated with slavery, both through the production process and its market destination. Slaves produced many livestock commodities, most of them exported as industrial inputs to Europe and North America but in the case of tasajo explicitly dedicated to feeding the enslaved plantation workers of Cuba and Brazil. That production and shipping generated not only census and port statistics but detailed descriptions and images of the changing saladeros as well as laws to regulate their hygiene, pollution, and location. Yet, equally ironically but for the opposite reason, despite the wealth of traces that tasajo has left behind in Platense archives and museums the social memory of that product and its relationship to the networks of the Black Atlantic has all but disappeared.

c h a p t e r s even

Legacy and Promise

Time the destroyer is time the preserver, Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops. —T. S. Eliot , “The Dry Salvages” (1943)

the preceding case studies significantly improve our understanding of the legacy of blacks in the establishment of cattle ranching in the Americas. Concerted analysis of the limited primary sources, from eyewitness accounts to shipping lists and material culture, has confirmed that the Andalusian Marismas provided the overall model for the herding ecology of early New Spain, but also that blacks added key elements, specifically lassoing from horseback and live fencing. Both practices may have been critical to the operation of that herding ecology in particular times and places. While the passage of time has obscured most of the details of the historical processes involved, history has made lassoing from horseback an icon of North American cattle ranching and cowboy culture. Another frontier involved in the emergence of the herding ecology and culture of the Great Plains has yielded similar results. The ranching frontier that emerged in the Teche Valley of Louisiana in the first half of the eighteenth century influenced the frontier that emerged on the prairies to the west later in the eighteenth century, but the two herding ecologies only superficially resembled each other. The first ranches of the Attakapas District raised cattle in the area between the levees of Bayou Teche and the bluff that marked the eastern margin of the prairies to the west. That location gave the herders access to water and pasture 211

2 1 2   l e g a c y a n d p r o m i s e

throughout the year without engaging in the long-distance drives between the prairies in the summer and coastal marshes in the winter that later became the norm to the west. Reconstruction of the biographies of those involved demonstrates that free and enslaved actors of black, native, and mixed origins—not whites—played the leading roles in creating the herding ecology of the early Attakapas, overturning the conventional wisdom that it derived from the French Caribbean and that white males played the leading roles. Caribbean frontiers were involved in the overall process, of course, but on many of them blacks became the majority of the population, Barbuda being a chief example. There, blacks and whites together created an idiosyncratic herding ecology, certainly as early as the eighteenth century and perhaps even as early as the seventeenth century. It featured elaborate walled wells that served to trap cattle during the dry season and that now occur nowhere else. It emerged out of the novel social and environmental relations that resulted from the intersection of varied Atlantic networks on Barbuda. As a more speculative inference, one of those networks probably brought people familiar with the key role of wells during the dry season in the Senegambian Sahel. That inference certainly seems more reasonable than the conventional one that a single white manager from Britain, where wells were not key elements of the cattle herding ecology, designed a herding ecology in which hundreds of blacks built those walled wells and herded the cattle. Although on Barbuda the dominance of blacks remains obvious through the present, their legacy on the Pampas is much less clear. Tens of thousands of Africans entered Buenos Aires and Montevideo as slaves. While the majority passed through the ports on their way to plantations and mines far upcountry, by the end of the colonial period blacks made up roughly a third of the total porteño population, worked as gauchos on the surrounding ranching frontier, and participated in the creation of some of its distinctive practices. In particular, the Senegambians who arrived at the end of the colonial period were involved in the transformation of the Pampas herding ecology over the early nineteenth century. The most notable contribution involved the balde sin fondo, which facilitated the initial expansion of ranching into areas with grass but limited surface water. The balde sin fondo also served as the prototype for a menagerie of other water-lifting devices based on the same principle, particularly the

l egacy and promise    213

balde volcador, involved in the further expansion of ranching until supplanted by windmills in the late nineteenth century. Just as central to understanding the legacies of black herders, research focused on networks such as the tasajo trail reveals how those frontiers integrated with the broader Atlantic world as it emerged and changed. Although largely ignored by scholars of the Pampas, of the Caribbean, and of Atlantic commodities, the meridional tasajo trail proved essential to the more prominent latitudinal flows of sugar and slaves. Blacks not only produced tasajo on the Pampas but consumed vast amounts of that salt-cured beef on Cuban sugar plantations. As its flow increased over the nineteenth century those two places became increasingly transformed, cattle ranching virtually disappearing from Cuba while dominating an ever-greater area of the Pampas. Additional research holds great promise for further enriching the understanding of the African legacy in American cattle ranching. For New Spain alone, while the environs of the port of Veracruz were the first ranching frontier and therefore deserving of detailed study, ranches proliferated in several other districts over the sixteenth century. Even before midcentury, vaqueros were herding cattle throughout the Pánuco, the lowlands of the Pacific coast, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and northern sections of the highlands. Somewhat distinct herding ecologies emerged in each of those districts, but the role of blacks in each remains largely unstudied. The stretch of Pacific coast that includes the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca, in particular, retains a vibrant African heritage and might well produce highly pertinent results. Similarly for Louisiana, the large herds that ranged the Attakapas in the mid-eighteenth century, more than half of all the cattle enumerated in the census of 1766, suggest the significance of that place relative to others—but not to their exclusion. Just because the Attakapas had the largest herds by the mid-eighteenth century does not mean that other districts with open-range ranching did not play a part in its establishment. The Opelousas District, for example, emerged as a major cattle ranching area over the second half of the eighteenth century. Even as early as 1769 Eduardo Nugent and Juan Kelly reported 2,419 cattle in the Opelousas compared to 1,323 in the Attakapas. The seemingly large reduction in the Attakapas herds in just three years reflects O’Reilly’s orders to ignore the

2 1 4   l e g a c y a n d p r o m i s e

open-range, feral cattle in favor of the tamer, penned ones. Yet the relative size of the enumerations for the two districts signaled the emergence of the Opelousas as a major ranching district over the second half of the eighteenth century.1 Moreover, although the founding of the Opelousas Post in the 1760s lagged that of the Attakapas Post by about a decade, traders and pioneer ranchers were active in both districts around the same time, and some intriguing sources suggest that a few of them were blacks. Jean Joseph Le Kintrek dit Dupont, who had come to New Orleans from France in 1716, partnered in the late 1730s with Blancpain to trade for horses, buffalo hides, deerskins, and bear grease in the Attakapas and the Opelousas Districts, purchased land from the natives, settled in the Opelousas, and died in the 1750s. Jacques Guillaume Courtableau, a Creole from Alabama, also traded and settled in the Opelousas in the 1750s, received a grant for 8,000 arpents (2,739 hectares) in 1765, served as the post’s militia captain during the census of 1766, and by the time he died in the early 1770s owned a herd of about 300 cattle, although he never registered a brand.Intriguingly, the census of 1766 enumerated eighty-five slaves at the Opelousas Post compared to twenty-four at the Attakapas Post and fifty on its surrounding ranches. Even more intriguingly, in 1762 Pierre Ricard and Francois Alain of Pointe Coupée contracted with a free mulatto named Louis to establish a cattle ranch in the Opelousas, Louis to receive a tenth of the calves born each year. Two decades later the archives of the Opelousas Post record a free mulatto named Louis Ricard, presumably the same man, as the owner of not only a herd of cattle but also a tract of land.2 Many other American places also demand the sorts of research the foregoing chapters model. Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and California seem obvious candidates in North America, but so does Alabama, especially Dauphin and Horn Islands. In the Caribbean, all of the Greater Antilles as well as Margarita Island and some of the Lesser Antilles such as Antigua remain compelling candidates for relevant case studies. Although plantation agriculture marginalized ranching throughout most of the Caribbean over the colonial period it persisted in some interstices such as Barbuda as well as parts of the Greater Antilles, especially in Hispaniola and Cuba. Likewise, the involvement of blacks in ranching in the Sertão and the Llanos suggests the need for intensive study but not to

l egacy and promise    215

the exclusion of other South American places, such as the Cauca Valley of Colombia. Some places in Central America also had early but relatively little known ranching frontiers that have left a lasting legacy, for example, the toponym Cowpen in Belize, former British Honduras. Equally, however, research must address the networks that connected frontiers. The shift to a more inclusive approach to the study of Atlantic networks, one that includes connections among the ports of the Americas as well as their connections to Europe and Africa, has revealed that much remains to be understood about how people, materials, and ideas circulated among Jamaica, Antigua, Barbuda, and South Carolina; among the Spanish Caribbean, Horn Island, and Florida; and among Veracruz, Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Spain. For example, Gregorio de Villalobos spent half a decade on Santo Domingo and Cuba before he settled in New Spain, but anything more specific about his Caribbean sojourn remains, to date, unknown. Networks that connected places as different as the Sertão and the Río de la Plata also remain relatively unknown. Yet blacks were involved in ranching in both regions, and the transshipment of Africans bound for slavery on the Pampas through Brazil suggests that ideas and materials related to ranching might also have followed that network. Between 1742 and 1806, for example, at least a thousand blacks arrived in the Río de la Plata after first landing in the Americas in Pernambuco and Bahía.3 Other, unexpected relationships also command investigation. For example, in the summer of 1683 a fleet of pirates sacked the port of Veracruz and carried off many blacks and mulattos. One of the vessels sailed out of Charleston and returned to sell “some two hundred blacks and mulattos” into slavery.4 Whether any of those blacks had experience as vaqueros in Veracruz or became cowboys on the ranching frontier then emerging in South Carolina seems a fundamentally important question that extant sources might be able to address. Also, research has only recently begun to reconstruct the networks that connected Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean, including cattle ranching frontiers such as Margarita Island and the environs of Cartagena.5 Just as critically, a better understanding of the highly dynamic places and peoples of West Africa over the sixteenth century through the nineteenth demands further attention. The slave trade impacted their agriculture through the introduction of new crops such as maize,

2 1 6   l e g a c y a n d p r o m i s e

increased demand for others such as oil palm, and reconfigured political and ethnic geography. The maps of areas of open-range cattle herding in West Africa that appear in the first two chapters thus remain provisional, a static approximation of a still-unknown dynamic geography. Similarly, the descriptions of herding ecologies and practices require nuanced elaboration if we are to understand their historical, geographical, ethnic, and social diversity.6 Even the tasajo trail, now somewhat known, requires further explication. Despite the several insights the logbooks and other sources have yielded into the tasajo trail as an oceanic phenomenon, further analysis would provide even more understanding about its relationship to the broader networks of the Atlantic. For example, salt does not appear in the logbooks of the Teresina, Pepe, Pronta, Villa de Tossa, or Soberano despite being fundamental to tasajo production. According to Darwin, the salt mined from salinas along the southern frontier of the province of Buenos Aires, around Carmen de Patagones, did not produce good tasajo. The saladeros of the early nineteenth century therefore, he claimed, mixed Patagonian salt with salt imported from the Cape Verdes. That archipelago certainly became one of the major salt suppliers of the Atlantic during the long nineteenth century, and British ships partially loaded with manufactured goods for Buenos Aires would stop en route at the Cape Verdes to load salt for the saladeros. As the Bonaerense population and demand for manufactured goods grew after midcentury, however, the British abandoned that practice in favor of carrying higher value cargoes. The saladeros of midcentury seem to have imported some of their salt from the saltpans of the Bay of Cádiz. But they continued to import salt from the Cape Verdes as well, so much that during the seven-year period from 1850 through 1856, a hundred ships arrived in Buenos Aires from that archipelago, some 4 percent of the total foreign shipping for that period. The Argentine Confederation even established a vice-consul on the island of Sal, the main salt producer of the Cape Verdes. By the early twentieth century, however, the Uruguayan saladeros nearly exclusively relied on salt from Cádiz because of its low water content relative to other sources. Although the Teresina, Pepe, Pronta, and Villa de Tossa all passed near both Cádiz and the Cape Verdes, none of those vessels entered port to load salt. Initial perusal of additional logbooks, however, reveals that other vessels did; for example, the brig Prudente sailed from

l egacy and promise    217

Barcelona in February 1884 with a ballast of sand, dumped it at Cádiz to load salt, and sailed to the Río de la Plata to deliver that cargo to a saladero at Paysandú and load tasajo for Cuba. Other logbooks might therefore also yield a better understanding of the relationship between the tasajo trail and the salt trade.7 The relationship between the tasajo trail and the slave trade also requires study. Tasajo supported the enormous Cuban slave population of the nineteenth century, but the same Catalan vessels and crews that transported tasajo might also have been more directly involved in the slave trade. In 1817 Spain signed a treaty with Britain to end the slave trade north of the equator and extend that ban to south of the equator in 1820, but until 1867 the flow of slaves from Africa to Cuba continued nonetheless. As the British and others withdrew from the trade, Catalan slavers increasingly came to dominate it. The clandestine character of the trade renders impossible any precise estimate of Catalan involvement, but Catalan vessels comprised 23 percent of the interceptions between 1821 and 1845 by the English antislaving patrols off the African coast. Most of the Catalans likely sailed directly from Africa to Cuba, but those sailing for the Río de la Plata might also have put in along the coast of West Africa to pick up slaves for Brazil or the Río de la Plata. The Bonaerense government abolished the slave trade in 1813, but legal exceptions and clandestine landings certainly continued until the abolition of slavery in 1861. For example, during the war of 1825–28 with Brazil, Bonaerense privateers who captured Brazilian ships could legally sell the cargoes, including slaves, in Buenos Aires. Uruguay abolished slavery earlier, in 1830, soon after achieving independence, but Brazil waited until 1888. Although the Teresina and Villa de Tossa passed near West Africa between 1837 and 1861, neither entered a port to load enslaved blacks. Neither do those vessels nor their captains during that voyage, Isidro Maristany and Jaime Ferrer, appear in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, although the family names Maristany and Ferrer certainly do, including the captain of the infamous Amistad, Ramón Ferrer. The captains of slave vessels obfuscated African landings in their logbooks: but enough precise route maps of Catalan vessels bound for the Río de la Plata would reveal such duplicity or its lack and thereby address whether or not the tasajo trail and the slave trade were more directly related or not. Another way to gain insight into the complexities of the involvement of Catalan captains,

2 1 8   l e g a c y a n d p r o m i s e

crews, and vessels in Atlantic networks and bring them to life entails focusing on a single Catalan family of mariners over several generations and treating their voyages in all their detail and diversity.8 The discursive processes that have so long elided the participation of blacks in the establishment of cattle ranching in the Americas, instead assigning the active roles to white males, deserve as much attention as the material and performative processes. The previously unexamined proposition that black vaqueros herded cattle in the Marismas provides some insight into the current scholarly manifestation of those discursive processes. Superficially, the statement that “if any substantial African influence is to be found in ranching, it entered Moorish Las Marismas and Andalucía with black slaves before the time of Columbus—a topic deserving additional research” seems to be a straightforward scholarly injunction to do more research and achieve greater understanding.9 In fact, after having done the research and concluded that blacks played no significant creative role in the Marismas, the statement begins to seem more like a discursive justification for not researching potentially more proximate legacies of Africans in the Americas. The trope involves stipulating “substantial African influence” but immediately minimizing just how substantial it might have been through temporal and spatial distancing. Temporal distancing with the phrase “before the time of Columbus” does most of the work of minimization, but spatial distancing to the other side of the Atlantic also minimizes the significance of any such role for blacks. The assertion that those blacks would have been slaves provides additional rhetorical leverage by implying passivity. Moreover, the suggestion that others actually do the research implies its low priority. The discursive effect of the statement, then, is that a possible role for blacks in the distant past on another continent has so little significance that no one has yet studied it but that raising the issue fulfills the obligation to consider the possibility and thereby diverts attention from the obligation to research the roles of blacks on American ranching frontiers. The trope should be familiar enough to academics: “She should not get tenure because she really did not help us to develop the idea all that much, mainly just taking the notes during discussions; while we have to admit that her doctoral advisor might have helped to inspire the idea years ago at a university in another country, we cannot say for sure because he

l egacy and promise    219

published in a foreign language and none of us has read the papers— although someone should.” The long-standing belief that a white European invented the balde sin fondo is an example of the contemporaneous elision of black roles, part of a general process that eliminated blacks from the Argentinean and Uruguayan nationalist discourse. With the legal abolition of the Bonaerense slave trade in 1813, slaves had largely disappeared from the probate inventories of estancias by the time Pellegrini posthumously praised Lanuza for inventing the balde sin fondo in the 1850s. José Hernández does not even mention slaves in his Instrucción del Estanciero (1882) because he wrote it two decades after the abolition of slavery in Buenos Aires in 1861. In parallel with that material disappearance of slaves, however, the liberals who exiled Rosas in 1852 characterized blacks as being ignorant and minimized their roles in creating Argentinean culture and society. Blacks had helped form the armies that kept Rosas in power from 1829 until 1852, and in an effort to categorize democratic Argentina as European, modern, and progressive, liberal historiography made whites the exclusive protagonists of the new national narrative. So when Pellegrini attributed the archetypal balde sin fondo to Lanuza and others uncritically accepted and reiterated that claim, they were all participating in the prevailing discourse. Only now, more than a century and a half later, has that discourse faded enough to realize that Pellegrini’s published account as well as the patent documents preserved in the archive emerged from the very social relations under investigation and cannot stand apart from, be an impartial witness to, or adjudicate the facts of their own emergence. Only application of a broader array of primary sources, from material culture to the contextual statistics of the slave trade and censuses, can begin to reveal the intertwined material, performative, and discursive processes that resulted in a century and a half of belief in the autodidactic genius of Lanuza and elision of his anonymous black teacher.10 Yet such nationalist, postcolonial discourses did not emerge homogenously throughout the Americas, even in places linked through a network such as the tasajo trail. In Argentina the social memory of tasajo and its relationship to slavery has all but disappeared. In Cuba, by contrast, tasajo has persisted as an integral element in culture and everyday life, appearing in novels as well as cuisine. One place became a

2 2 0    l e g a c y a n d p r o m i s e

center of Europhilic hubris and the other a capital of the black Atlantic. Once linked by the tasajo trail, they now share little but a common language and Comrade Che.11 Despite the interminable promise of arriving at better understanding through more research, this book has already demonstrated that blacks played a creative role in the establishment of cattle ranching in at least a few American places. Reinterpretation of the documents, a great diversity of documents, and their integration with other types of primary sources such as material culture reveals the biased assumptions and erroneous conclusions of much of the existing literature. Just as for the cultivation of commodities such as rice and a host of noncommodity crops, blacks were prominent among the diverse actors who mobilized African, European, and American knowledge and materials along networks that intersected on particular ranching frontiers at particular times where novel social and environmental relations emerged. Those dynamic, heterogeneous networks are simultaneously historic and present, local and hemispheric, performative and material, natural and social, and discursive and representational. The ongoing process spanned a hemisphere and centuries. It involved hybridization of materials and ideas that arrived via shifting networks, repeated infusions of ideas and materials across the Atlantic and within the Americas, and actors of African, European, native, Creole, and mixed origins. Their legacy echoes down to the present, both in particular ways in specific places and in general throughout the Americas.

a b b r e v i at i o n s

Archives AGI Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain)   AGI-SD   Audiencia de Santo Domingo   AGI-IG   Indiferente General   AGI-PC   Papeles de Cuba   AGI-PAT   Patronato Real AGNA Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires, Argentina)   AGNA-DC   Período Nacional, Documentos Contables   AGNA-DG   Período Nacional, Documentos de Gobierno AGNM Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico City, Mexico)   AGNM-CV   Correspondencia de los Virreyes   AGNM-M   Mercedes   AGNM-T   Tierras AHMM Arxiu Històric Municipal del Masnou (El Masnou, Spain) AHG-MOP Archivo Histórico de Geodesia, Ministerio de Obras Públicas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (La Plata, Argentina) AHMS Arxiu Històric Municipal de Sitges (Sitges, Spain) ANO-C13a Archives Nationales d’Outre-mer, Correspondance à l’Arrivée en Provenance de la Louisiane, Séries C13a (Aix-en-Provence, France) BC Biblioteca de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain) BL British Library (London, UK) HNOC Historic New Orleans Collection (New Orleans, Louisiana) LOC Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.) LSA Louisiana State Archives (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) 221

2 2 2    a b b r e v i a t i o n s LSM

Louisiana State Museum Historical Center (New Orleans, Louisiana)   LSM-CR   Cabildo Records   LSM-SCR   Superior Council Records LLMVC Louisiana State University, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) NAAB-CP National Archives of Antigua and Barbuda, Codrington West Indian Estate Papers (St. John’s, Antigua)   NAAB-CPA   Accounts   NAAB-CPC   Correspondence NONA New Orleans Notarial Archives (New Orleans, Louisiana) SLO State Land Office (Baton Rouge, Louisiana)   SLO-SWD   Claim Papers for the Southwestern District   SLO-FSG   Abstracts of French and Spanish Grants   SLO-OLC   Book 1 Opelousas Land Claims SMPC St. Martin Parish Courthouse (St. Martinville, Louisiana)   SMPC-OA   Original Acts   SMPC-BBA   Brand Book A   SMPC-BBB   Brand Book B SMT St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church (St. Martinville, Louisiana) TU Tulane University, Special Collections (New Orleans, Louisiana)   TU-KC   Kuntz Collection   TU-LLG   Louisiana Land Grants, 1753–1769 UKNA United Kingdom National Archives (Kew, UK)   UKNA-CO   Colonial Office Records   UKNA-FO   Foreign Office Records ULL University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Special Collections (Lafayette, Louisiana) UMCL-LM University of Michigan, Clements Library, Louisiana Manuscripts (Ann Arbor, Michigan) UT-F 24,995 University of Texas at Austin, Benson Latin American Collection, Codrington Correspondence, 1 microfilm reel (Austin, Texas)

P u b l i c at i o n s AHGD ASP-PL BRCC NOCC

and

D ata b a s e s

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy Databases, www.ibiblio.org/laslave. American State Papers, ser. Public Lands, 8 vols. (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832–1861). Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records, 23 vols. (Baton Rouge: Diocese of Baton Rouge, 1978–2007). Archdiocese of New Orleans Sacramental Records, 19 vols. (New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1987–2004).

abbreviations    223 SWLR

TSTD

Donald J. Hébert, Southwest Louisiana Records: Church and Civil Records, 43 vols., (Rayne, Louisiana: Hébert Publications, 1974–1997). Paul Lachance, Manuel Barcia Paz, Steve Behrendt, David Eltis, Manolo Florentino, Antonio Mendes, David Richardson, and Jelmer Vos, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org.

Terms Add. bk./bks. chapt./chapts. cont./conts. exp./exps. fig./figs. f./ff. leg./legs. lib./libs. ms./mss. no./nos. p./pp. pt./pts. rm./rms. r ser. v vol./vols.

Additional book/books chapter/chapters container/containers expediente/expedientes (file or dossier) figure/figures folio/folios legajo/legajos (bundle or dossier) libro/libros (book) manuscript/manuscripts number/numbers page/pages part/parts ramo/ramos (branch or division) recto (front of a folio) series verso (back of a folio) volume/volumes

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notes

For all editions other than first, the year of publication is followed by brackets containing the year in which the first edition appeared or, in the case of works that went unpublished for many years after completion, the approximate year of manuscript completion. All translations from other languages into English are by me unless otherwise stated. And I have modernized the orthography of all quotations from premodern English sources. C H A P T E R O N E . A T L A N T I C N E T W O R K S A ND LOCAL FRONTIERS   1. James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford, 1993); Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Andrew Sluyter, “Colonialism and Landscape in the Americas: Material/Conceptual Transformations and Continuing Consequences,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (2001): 410–28; Andrew Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); and Judith A. Carney and Robert A. Voeks, “Landscape Legacies of the African Diaspora in Brazil,” Progress in Human Geography 27 (2003): 139–52.   2. For overviews, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); George R. Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For edited collections, see Akinwumi Ogundiran and Toyin Falola, eds., Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora 225

2 2 6   n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 – 4 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Toyin Falola and Kevin David Roberts, eds., The Atlantic World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); and Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet, eds., The African Diaspora and the Disciplines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). For some of the monographic studies on particular places, including South Carolina, see Carney, Black Rice; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); David C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Frederick C. Knight, Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Edda L. Fields-Black, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). For the databases, see David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database, CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy Databases, CD-ROM (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); for online, updated editions of those databases, see AHGD and TSTD.   3. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 1329–58; Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, 1964); and Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper, 1941).   4. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920); Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 [1976]); and Manuel Moreno Fraginals, ed., Africa en América Latina (Paris: UNESCO, 1977).   5. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Andrew Sluyter, “(Post-)K New Orleans and the Hispanic Atlantic: Geographic Method and Meaning,” Atlantic Studies 5 (2008): 383–98.   6. Paul E. Lovejoy, “The African Diaspora: Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion Under Slavery,” Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation 2 (1997): 1–23; Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil; and Fields-Black, Deep Roots.   7. Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 392–427; Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45–56; Carl O.

notes to pages 4–6    227 Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (New York: American Geographical Society, 1952), 84–100; Charles B. Heiser, Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 43–48; John E. Rouse, World Cattle, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970–73); Andrew Rimas and Evan D. G. Fraser, Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World (New York: Harper, 2008); and Judith A. Carney and Richard N. Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 10–14. Biologists continue to revise the taxonomy of the genus Bos, but B. indicus still serves to designate the zebus and B. taurus the taurines. Besides those two species, which dominate the Atlantic world, the genus Bos includes the Himalayan yak (B. grunniens), Balinese banteng (B. javanicus), Indian gaur (B. gaurus), and crossbreeds of zebu, taurine, yak, banteng, and gaur. The wild ancestor of domesticated cattle, the enormous auroch (B. primigenius), went extinct in the seventeenth century.   8. Samuel E. Morrison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 2:59; Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 70–72, 156–57; Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), 75–77; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 79–95; and Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow, 52–53, 157–58.   9. James J. Parsons, “The ‘Africanization’ of the New World Tropical Grasslands,” Tubinger Geographische Studien 34 (1970): 141–53; James J. Parsons, “Spread of African Pasture Grasses to the American Tropics,” Journal of Range Management 25 (1972): 12–17; and Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow, 23, 166–171. Guinea grass (Panicum maximum) is known as capim colonião in Brazil and privilegio or zacatón in Mexico; Pará grass (Brachiaria mutica) is known as Egipto in Mexico and capim Angola in Brazil; and Bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylon) also goes by dog-tooth-grass and devil-grass. 10. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching; Richard W. Slatta, Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Richard W. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Paul H. Carlson, ed., The Cowboy Way: An Exploration of History and Culture (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2000). The generic terms for cowboy and cowboys in French are vacher and vachères, in Spanish vaquero and vaqueros, and in Portuguese vaqueiro and vaqueiros; many other terms prevailed regionally: gaucho in Uruguay and much of Argentina, gaúcho in southern Brazil, charro in central Mexico, guajiro in Cuba, llanero in parts of Venezuela and Colombia, chagra in Ecuador, huaso in Chile, cattle runner in the British Caribbean, and cowpoke, cowpuncher, buckaroo, wrangler, and cracker in North America. 11. The base map uses a Robinson Projection with the central, straight meridian set at 50° west, generated using Geographic Information System (GIS) software: Environmental Systems Research Institute, ArcMap 9.3.1 (Redlands: California, 1999). The scale of the map varies across its surface, but 20° of latitude always

2 2 8   n o t e s t o p a g e 7 equals about 2,220 kilometers, and 20° of longitude at the equator equals the same distance. The northern limit of the tsetse fly derives from International Livestock Research Institute, Livestock Production in the Subhumid Zone of West Africa: A Regional Review (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: ILRI, 1979), fig. 6. The openrange cattle ranching areas come from Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, figs. 2, 3, 13, 15, 17, 27, 32, 35, 38, 39, 46, 54; fig. 1 in Karl W. Butzer, “Spanish Colonization of the New World,” Erdkunde 45 (1991): 205–19; Alistair Hennessy, The Frontier in Latin American History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 10, 15; César Caviedes and Gregory Knapp, South America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995), figs. 6.4, 6.7; J. Vicens Vives, Historia Social y Económica de España y América, vol. 3 (Barcelona: Editorial Teide, 1957), 560–61; fig. 12.3 in C. Gary Lobb, “Brazil,” in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Systematic Regional Survey, ed. Brian W. Blouet and Olwyn M. Blouet (New York: John Wiley, 1993), 357–89; fig. 2.3 in Robert C. West, “Aboriginal and Colonial Geography of Latin America,” in Latin America and the Caribbean, 34–80; Robert C. West and John P. Augelli, Middle America: Its Lands and Peoples (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966), fig. 10.7; Nicholas P. Cushner, Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial Argentina, 1650–1767 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), ii; fig. 7 in William E. Doolittle, “Las Marismas to Pánuco to Texas: The Transfer of OpenRange Cattle Ranching from Iberia Through Northeastern Mexico,” Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers Yearbook 13 (1984): 3–11; and fig. 2 in Karl H. Offen, “Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia,” in Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 92–129. 12. Edmond Bernus, “Dates, Dromedaries, and Drought: Diversification in Tuareg Pastoral Systems,” in The World of Pastoralism: Herding Systems in Comparative Perspective, ed. John G. Galaty and Douglas L. Johnson (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 149–76; Abdellatif Bencherifa and Douglas L. Johnson, “Adaptation and Intensification in the Pastoral Systems of Morocco,” in The World of Pastoralism, 394–416; and Johannes Nicolaisen, Ecology and Culture of the Pastoral Tuareg, With Particular Reference to the Tuareg of Ahaggar and Ayr (Copenhagen: National Museum of Copenhagen, 1963). 13. For a general historical overview of Senegambia during the period of the slave trade, see B. Barry, “Senegambia from the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Century,” in Africa from the Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Century, ed. B. A. Ogot, vol. 5 of General History of Africa, ed. UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, 8 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 262–99. For Senegambian environment and political ecology during the same period, see George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 1–36. For a more focused discussion of Senegambian cattle herders, see Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 55–64. For the relationship between herders and agriculturalists, see Carney, Black Rice, 46–49; and Fields-Black,

n otes to pages 7–10    229 Deep Roots, 101–3. For pastoralism in West Africa in the twentieth century, see Mahdi Adamu and A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, eds., Pastoralists of the West African Savanna (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986); Andrew B. Smith, Pastoralism in Africa: Origins and Development Ecology (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992); Nikolaus Schareika, Know to Move, Move to Know: Ecological Knowledge and Herd Movement Strategies Among the Wodaabe of Southeastern Niger (Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization, 2003); Marguerite Dupire, Peuls Nomades: Étude Descriptive des Wodaabe du Sahel Nigérien (Paris: Institute d’Ethnologie, 1962), 78–84; and John Aron Grayzel, “Markets and Migration: A Fulbe Pastoral System in Mali,” in The World of Pastoralism, 35–67. 14. Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow, 156–57. For examples, see the accounts of the Gambia River based on observations over the 1560s–1590s by André Alvares de Almada, over 1620–1621 by Richard Jobson, and over the 1640s–1660s by Lemos Coello, in The Discovery of the River Gambra (1623) by Richard Jobson, ed. David P. Gamble and P. E. H. Hair (London: Hakluyt Society, 1999), 96, 276, 294; and the account of the Senegal River in the early eighteenth century by Jean Baptiste Labat, Nouvelle Relation de l’Afrique Occidental, 5 vols. (Paris: Chez Guillaume Cavelier, 1728), 2:189. 15. André Alvares de Almada, Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo-Verde (Porto, Portugal: Diogo Köpke, 1841 [1594]), 11: “Entrão estes Fulos por toda aquella terra da costa dos Jalofos, Barbacins e Mandingas, com suas criações e gados; e no inverno se achegão á beira mar, e no verão se tornão a metter pelo sertão de vagar, trazendo o gado ao longo d’alguns charcos d’agoa e alagoas que faz o inverno; e muitos destes criadores andão ao longo destes dous formosos rios, o de Sanagá e o de Cantor (que he o de Gambia), pascentando o gado ao longo delles.” 16. Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow, 157; and James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 32–33. 17. Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London: Edward Cave, 1738), 37. 18. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, table 2; and Robin Law, The Horse in West African History: The Role of the Horse in the Societies of Pre-Colonial West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 176–96. 19. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 23–26, 35–41; and Andrew Sluyter, “The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle Ranching in SixteenthCentury New Spain,” Geographical Review 86 (1996): 161–77. 20. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, trans. H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer, 3 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892), 1:215–17, 254–55; quote on 215. 21. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 16, 84; André Vialles, “Camargue: The Cowboy Country of Southern France,” National Geographic 42 (1922): 1–34; Lorraine d’Entremont Rawls, Wild Provence: Savor the Lives and Flavors of France’s Cowboys of the Camargue (New York: Three Stone Press, 2007); Michel Droit, La Camargue (Paris: Arthaud, 1961); Annelyse Chevalier, Les Gardians de Camargue (Arles, France: Parc Naturel Régional de Camargue); Robert Zaretsky, Cock

2 3 0   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 1 – 1 3 and Bull Stories: Folco de Baroncelli and the Invention of the Camargue (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 15–16; Judy Greaves Rainger, “French Cowboys: The Gardians of the Camargue and Buffalo Bill,” in The Cowboy Way, 167–78; and Strabo, The Geography, 1:271–82. 22. Pierre Quiqueran de Beaujeu, Louée Soit la Provence, trans. Véronique Autheman (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 1999 [1551]), 86–93: “L’île d’Arles nourrit déjà plus de quatre mille juments et pas moins de seize mille bœufs. . . . De tous ces amusements, la ferrade, ou on inscrit au fer rouge la marque de maîtres sur la fesse du bœuf, est le plus célèbre. . . . Tous ces gens, attroupes là, sont armés d’une sorte de pique qui ne peut pas blesser le taureau ou le tuer. . . . Sur la plus épaisse de ses extrémités, on monte un fer à trois pointes. . . . Les gardians remontent sur leurs chevaux et s’acheminent au petit trot vers le troupeau. . . . De là, à grands coups de trident, on lance le taureau le plus farouche de la troupe.” 23. Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison, Voyage dans les Départements du Midi de la France, 4 vols. (Paris: Chez Gabriel Dufour, 1807–11), vol. 4, pt. 1, 23: “Pour dompter les bœufs et les mettre à la charrue, des bouviers à cheval, armés de tridents, et à pied, tenant de fortes cordes, entourent celui qui est destiné au travail: les gens à cheval le poussent à coups de trident vers la charrue et le forcent de s’y atteler; alors les gens à pied l’attachent fortement par les cornes, et l’accolent ainsi avec un bœuf appelé domptaire, vieilli aux travaux du labourage, qui règle ses pas, et lui apprend à tracer un pénible sillon.” 24. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 42–55; and Ray August, “Cowboys v. Rancheros: The Origins of Western American Livestock Law,” Southwest Historical Quarterly 96 (1993): 457–88. 25. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland as It Was in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth: Written by Way of Dialogue Between Eudoxus and Ireneus (Dublin: Laurence Flin and Ann Watts, 1763 [1596]), 251–52. 26. For more detailed accounts—albeit ones that reproduce the emphasis on the roles of white males that characterizes the secondary literature they synthesize—of the historical geography of ranching frontiers throughout the Americas that this section summarizes, see Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas, 9–27; and John E. Rouse, The Criollo: Spanish Cattle in the Americas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 34–87, 291–93. 27. The figure reproduces part of a plate titled “De la montería de los toros cimarrones en las Indias Occidentales” in pt. 2, bk. 1, chapt. 37 of a copy of Gonzalo Argote de Molina, Libro de la Montería (Seville, Spain: Andrea Pescioni, 1582) in the Laurence Roberts Carton Hunting Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. For a detailed description of the use of the desjarretadera, see William H. Dusenberry, The Mexican Mesta: The Administration of Ranching in Colonial Mexico (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), 136. 28. José de Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (Madrid: Casa de Alonso Martín, 1608 [1590]), 276: “De este modo han multiplicado las vacas en la isla

n otes to pages 13–19    231 Española, y en otras de aquel contorno que andan a millares sin dueño por los montes y campos. Aprovéchense de este ganado para cueros: salen negros o blancos en sus caballos con desjarretaderas al campo, y corren los toros o vacas, y la res que hieren y cae es suya. Desuéllenla, y llevando el cuero a su casa dejan la carne perdida por ahí, sin haber quien la gaste ni quiera por la sobra que hay de ella.” 29. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 135. 30. Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow, 156–57. 31. The figure is based on sketches I made in 2010 of historic saddles at the Centro de Visitantes Palacio El Acebrón (near Almonte, Spain), the Musée Camarguais (near Arles, France), and the Museo Pampeano (Chascomús, Argentina); fig. 3, plate 22, vol. 25 in Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences des Arts et des Métiers, 28 vols. (Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton, and Durand, 1751–72); Edward B. Taylor, Anahuac: Or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 162; and a photograph of a saddle taken by William E. Doolittle in 1992 in the Dominican Republic. On saddles in general and the introduction of horses and associated material culture into the Americas, see Russel H. Beatie, Saddles (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981); Angel Cabrera, Caballos de América (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamérica, 1945); and Robert M. Denhardt, The Horse of the Americas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975 [1947]). 32. Ramón Páez, Wild Scenes in South America: Or, Life in the Llanos of Venezuela (New York: Charles Scribner, 1862), 157. 33. Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones, The Negro Cowboys (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965); and Sara R. Massey, ed., Black Cowboys of Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), xiii–xvi. 34. George W. Saunders quoted in J. Marvin Hunter, ed., The Trail Drivers of Texas (Nashville: Cokesbury Press 1925 [1920]), 453. 35. Durham and Jones, The Negro Cowboys, 19 (emphasis added). 36. Arnold Strickon, “The Euro-American Ranching Complex,” in Man, Culture, and Animals: The Role of Animals in Human Ecological Adjustments, ed. Anthony Leeds and Andrew P. Vayda (Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1965), 229–58; quote on 242–43. 37. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 311–12. CHAPTER TWO. NEW SPAIN   1. Note that the location of the city and port of Veracruz shifted several times during the sixteenth century. On Good Friday in 1519 the Spaniards initially founded, but in name only, la Rica Villa de la Vera Cruz at Chalchicueyecan, the current location of Veracruz as labeled on the map. Later in 1519 they refounded the town some fifty-eight kilometers to the north, at present-day Villa Rica, too far up the coast to appear on the map. About 1525 the town moved to the left bank of the Antigua River with the abbreviated toponym Vera Cruz, at

2 3 2   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 9 – 2 0 present-day La Antigua, labeled La Antigua Veracruz on the map. Launches ferried goods from the deepwater port at San Juan de Ulúa, a fortress at the original location at Chalchicueyecan, across the bar at the mouth of the river, and upstream to the river port. Beginning with a viceregal order of 1597 and progressing over a transitional period of several years, Veracruz shifted back to its first location at Chalchicueyecan, and at that time the river port became known as La Antigua Veracruz, eventually just La Antigua. For details and documentation, see Andrew Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 31–32.   2. Hernán Cortés, Cartas de Relación (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1988 [1519– 26]), 20: “La tierra adentro y fuera de los dichos arenales, es tierra muy llana y de muy hermosas vegas y riberas en ellas; y tan hermosas que en toda España no pueden ser mejores, así de apacibles a la vista como de fructíferas de cosas que en ellas siembran, y muy aparejadas y convenibles, y para andar por ellas y se apacentar toda manera de ganado.” The five dispatches from Cortés to Charles V span the years 1519–26. The first of them provides the foregoing quote and was signed on 10 July 1519 by the Justicia y Regimiento de la Rica Villa de la Vera Cruz; however, Cortés wrote or dictated the dispatch and intended that the signature of the town council legitimate his political break with the governor of Cuba by establishing an independent governing body.   3. AGI-PAT leg. 60, no. 3, rm. 4, Méritos y servicios de Gregorio de Villalobos, exp. 2, ff. 2v–3: “Que después de pacificado la ciudad de México y las demás provincias de esta Nueva España el dicho Gregorio de Villalobos con intento de permanecer en ella al tiempo que pasó de las islas de Santo Domingo trajo cantidad de becerras para que hubiese ganado y fue el primero las trajo y pasó a la Nueva España, y de ellas que se dieron y multiplicaron toda la cantidad de vacas que hay en esta dicha Nueva España.” Fanny R. Bandelier transcribed the passage sometime between 1913 and 1915, and it appeared together with a translation into English in Charles W. Hackett, ed., Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Viscaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, 3 vols. (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1923), 1:40–41. Donald D. Brand and William E. Doolittle, among others, have used the published version of that testament to attribute the first introduction of cattle into New Spain to Villalobos; see Brand, “The Early History of the Range Cattle Industry in Northern Mexico,” Agricultural History 35, no. 3 (1961): 132–39; and Doolittle, “Las Marismas to Pánuco to Texas: The Transfer of Open Range Cattle Ranching from Iberia Through Northeastern Mexico,” Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers Yearbook 13 (1987): 3–11.   4. Andrew Sluyter, “The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle Ranching in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” Geographical Review 86 (1996): 161–77; and Andrew Sluyter, “Orígenes Ecológicos y las Consecuencias de la Ganadería en la Nueva España Durante el Siglo XVI,” in De las Marismas del Guadalquivir a la Costa de Veracruz: Cinco Perspectivas Sobre Cultura Ganadera, ed. José Velasco

n otes to pages 21–23    233 Toro and David Skerritt Gardner (Xalapa, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 2004), 14–37.   5. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, 133–40. Most of the extant mercedes, the bases for 204 of the estancias, reside in AGNM-M; others, both duplicates of some in AGNM-M as well as twenty-five unique ones, occur in AGNM-T and the Protocolo section of the Archivo Notarial de Xalapa (Xalapa, Mexico); a further four derive by inference from mention as neighboring estancias in extant mercedes; the two known errant volumes of mercedes, one in the Kraus Collection at the LOC and the other in the Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago do not contain grants for relevant estancias. On methods, see Andrew Sluyter, “Archival Research on Livestock and Landscape Change in Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers Yearbook 23 (1997): 27–39; Andrew Sluyter, “From Archive to Map to Pastoral Landscape: A Spatial Perspective on the Livestock Ecology of SixteenthCentury New Spain,” Environmental History 3 (1998): 508–29; Richard Hunter, “Methodologies for Reconstructing a Pastoral Landscape: Land Grants in Sixteenth-Century New Spain, Historical Methods 43 (2010): 1–13; and Richard Hunter and Andrew Sluyter, “How Incipient Colonies Create Territory: The Textual Surveys of New Spain, 1520s–1620s,” Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011): 288–99.   6. AGNM-M vol. 1, f. 31, Ordenanza hecha sobre las estancias de los ganados; and ff. 36v–37, Sobre si ser abre que tres leguas alrededor. The Spaniards used two types of league in New Spain: the legua común, or common league, of 5.6 kilometers; and the legua legal, or legal league, of 4.2 kilometers; see Manuel Carrera Stampa, “The Evolution of Weights and Measures in New Spain,” Hispanic American Historical Review 29 (1949): 2–24; and Roland Chardon, “The Linear League in North America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70 (1980): 129–53.   7. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, 35–62.   8. UT, Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection ms. xxv-8, Descripción de la ciudad de la Veracruz y su comarca, f. 5: “tan fértil y abundante de pastos que en poco más de siete leguas a la redonda se apacientan de ordinario más ciento y cincuenta mil cabezas de ganado mayor, entre vacas y yeguas, sin la innumerable cantidad de ganado menor que baja cada año a invernar a esta comarca.”   9. Ibid., ff. 5v–6v: “consta por la tradición de los antiguos vecinos de esta tierra, al tiempo que los españoles entraron en ella, había dentro de seis leguas a la redonda de esta ciudad muchos lugares y poblaciones grandes de indios. Los cuales han venido en tanta disminución que muchos de ellos se han despoblado de todo punto, sin quedar rastro de ellos ni más memoria que solos los nombres; y otros tienen ahora tan poca vecindad y gente que, para lo que fueron antes, es lastima de ver el extreme y poquedad a que han venido. . . . De manera que ha sido muy notable la quiebra y falta que en los indios de esta comarca ha habido después que los españoles señorearon la tierra; y cada día se van deshaciendo las poblaciones y juntándose los de dos lugares, y tres, en uno, para

2 3 4   n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 4 – 2 6

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17.

18. 19.

se acompañar y conservar mejor, de manera que no se puede esperar sino una total ruina y acabamiento de los que quedan.” Andrés Pérez de Rivas, Corónica e Historia Religiosa de la Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de México, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, 1896 [circa 1655]), 2:195. Carl Sartorius, Mexico: Landscapes and Popular Sketches, trans. Thomas Gaspey (London: Trübner, 1859 [1852]), 10; and Sartorius, Mexiko: Landschaftsbilder und Skizzen aus dem Volksleben (Darmstadt: Lange, 1859 [1852]), 15: “Nicht städte, nicht dörser findet man in dem weiten revier, sondern nur hin und wieder einzelne gehöfte der viehbesitzer oder der hirten.” The first edition of this work appeared in German as Mexiko und die Mexicaner (Darmstadt: Lange and Koehler, 1852), followed by an English translation three years later: Mexico: Landscapes and Popular Sketches, trans. Thomas Gaspey (London: Lange and Koehler, 1855). Sartorius’s account proved popular enough that it was reprinted several times in both languages, the German editions being retitled to match the English ones. Throughout this chapter, quotes come from the English edition of 1859, but the endnotes provide Sartorius’s original words from the German edition of the same year. Andrew Sluyter and Gabriela Dominguez, “Early Maize (Zea mays L.) Cultivation in Mexico: Dating Sedimentary Pollen Records and its Implications,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 1147–51. Sartorius, Mexico, 9; and Sartorius, Mexiko, 14: “In den sommermonaten, von Junis bis October, rusen die tropischen regen ein lebhastes grün hervor, tausende von kühen weiden in dem setten weichen grase und beleben die einsörmigkeit der landschaft.” The figure comes from a copy of Sartorius, Mexico, in the author’s collection: engraved plate opposite p. 37, original sketch by Johann Moritz Rugendas circa 1833. Ibid., 9; and Sartorius, Mexiko, 14: “Mit dem Verschwinden der Regen ergrauen die Grasflächen, der Boden vertrocknet, die Bäume verlieren das Laub, die Heerden suchen die Wälder und Schluchten, und von dem unbewölkten Himmel brennt die Sonne auf die schattenlosen Flächen.” Sartorius, Mexico, 9; and Sartorius, Mexiko, 15: “In dieser zeit werden häufig die weiden angezündet, theils um die menge plagender zecken, taranteln und dergleichen zu vernichten, theils um unter der asche jungen graswuchs hervorzurusen.” AGI-IG leg. 1529, no. 5, ff. 1–11, La Veracruz de la Nueva España [por] Arias Hernández el 3 de noviembre de 1571 en Madrid, f. 5: “es la tierra llana, toda empradescida; “suelen la quemar por Navidad.” Ibid., f. 8v: “son vacas muchas y muchas cimarronas y muchos toros y muy bravos”; the author of the ms. originally wrote “algunos toros” before striking it through and substituting “muchos toros.” Ibid., f. 9: “la carne que se pesa es vaca ternera que es lo mejor que se come.” Ibid., f. 8v: “de la carne de los toros bravos y desjaretaderas no se aprovecha por caer lejos.”

n o tes to pages 27–29    235 20. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, 127–32. 21. Sartorius, Mexico, 182, 184. 22. For the Estremaduran thesis, see Charles J. Bishko, “The Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle Ranching,” Hispanic American Historical Review 32 (1952): 491–515; John E. Rouse, The Criollo: Spanish Cattle in the Americas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977); and Brand, “The Early History.” For the Andalusian counter thesis, see Doolittle, “Las Marismas to Pánuco”; Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 18–42; and Karl W. Butzer, “Cattle and Sheep from Old to New Spain: Historical Antecedents,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78 (1988): 29–56. 23. Peter Boyd-Bowman, Indice Geobiográfico de Cuarenta Mil Pobladores Españoles de América en el Siglo XVI, Tomo I, 1493–1519 (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1964), xli; and Peter Boyd-Bowman, “Patterns of Spanish Emigration to the Indies Until 1600,” Hispanic American Historical Review 56 (1976): 580–604. 24. AGNM-M vol. 13, f. 20, Merced a Juan de la Párraga de un sitio de estancia para ganado mayor en términos de la Veracruz: “nombre de su majestad hacemos merced a Juan de la Párraga de un sitio de estancia para ganado mayor en términos de la ciudad de la Veracruz entre la estancia de Gonzalo de Alegría y Francisco de Cocas que solía ser de Gabriel de Villalobos de la otra banda del Río de Jamapa. . . . catorce del mes de noviembre de mil quinientos ochenta y tres anos.” 25. AGI, Casa de la Contratación leg. 5536, lib. 1, f. 425; AGI, Catálogos de Pasajeros a Indias lib. 1, exp. 2029; AGI-PAT leg. 60, no. 3, rm. 4, exp. 2, Méritos y servicios; AGI-PAT leg. 64, rm. 2, Relación de los servicios presentados por don Gregorio Romano Altamirano . . . servicios de Gregorio de Villalobos y Padilla, bisabuelo del suplicante; AGI-PAT leg. 180, rm. 20, Renuncia de Francisco de Montejo del regimiento de la Villa de Veracruz el 19 de febrero de 1527 en Sevilla; AGI-PAT leg. 180, rm. 51, Aprobación de las ordenanzas de buen gobierno de Veracruz hecho en 1533; AGNM-M vol. 1, ff. 68–68v, Merced a Gregorio de Villalobos vecino de la ciudad de los Angeles; AGNM-M vol. 4, f. 107, Merced a Gabriel de Villalobos vecino de la ciudad de los Angeles; AGNM-M vol. 13, f. 20, Merced a Juan de la Párraga; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1986 [circa 1584]), 505; and Cortés, Cartas de Relación, 199. Also see Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria Relación de las Cosas de la Nueva España con Noticia Individual de los Conquistadores y Primeros Pobladores Españoles (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1987 [circa 1604]), 173; Francisco A. de Icaza, ed., Diccionario Autobiográfico de Conquistadores y Pobladores de Nueva España, 2 vols. (Madrid: Adelantado de Segovia, 1923), 1:223; Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, ed., Epistolario de Nueva España, 16 vols. (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1939–40), 9:18; Edmundo O’Gorman, Catálogo de Pobladores de Nueva España, Registro de Informes de la Real Audiencia, Último Tercio del Siglo XVI–Principios del Siglo

2 3 6   n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 0 – 3 3 XVII (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, 1941), 214; France V. Scholes and Eleanor B. Adams, eds., Relación de las Encomiendas de Indios Hechas en Nueva España a los Conquistadores y Pobladores de Ella, Año de 1564 (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1955), 33; Boyd-Bowman, Indice Geobiográfico 1493–1519, 59; Peter Boyd-Bowman, Indice Geobiográfico de Cuarenta Mil Pobladores Españoles de América en el Siglo XVI, Tomo II, 1520–1531 (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1968), 150; and Robert Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521– 1555 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 261. Note that another Gabriel de Villalobos sailed for the Americas from Andalusia but from Antequera, near Málaga; later, in 1555; and to Peru, not New Spain; see AGI, Catálogos de Pasajeros a Indias lib. 3, exp. 2539. 26. Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera, 310. 27. AGI-PAT leg. 60, no. 3, rm. 4, exp. 2, Méritos y servicios, f. 2v: “Que después de pacificado la ciudad de México y las demás provincias de esta Nueva España.” 28. Ibid., f. 2v: “al tiempo que pasó de las islas de Santo Domingo.” 29. Ibid., ff. 1–3; and AGNM-M vol. 4, f. 107, Merced a Gabriel de Villalobos. 30. AGI-IG leg. 1529, no. 5, La Veracruz de la Nueva España, f. 4v; Cortés, Cartas de Relación, 165, 199; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de las Indias, 5 vols. (Madrid: Atlas, 1959 [circa 1549]), 4:188–89, 244; Francisco de Aguilar, Historia de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1938 [circa 1570]), 94; Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Colección de Documentos para la Historia de México, 2 vols. (Mexico City: J. M. Andrade, 1858–66), 1:495; Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, ed., Papeles de Nueva España, 7 vols. (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1905–6), 5:194; and Paso y Troncoso, Epistolario de Nueva España, 1:84. Medellín had a different location during the 1520s than at present: the first founding was in 1521 at about sixteen hundred meters’ elevation on the escarpment of the Sierra Madre Oriental, possibly at present-day Tataltetelco; circa 1524 Cortés moved it to the lower Jamapa River, somewhere on its left bank about five kilometers west of present-day Medellín; about 1525 the Spaniards began abandoning Medellín, but it survived as a native settlement; by the early 1570s the Spaniards had founded another Medellín, at its current location on the right bank of the Jamapa River, subsuming the native settlement of Mictanguautla that had occupied that site; the former Medellín then became known as Medellín Viejo, (“Old Medellín”). 31. Cortés, Cartas de Relación, 204, 471–72; José Matesanz, “Introducción de la Ganadería en Nueva España, 1521–1525,” Historia Mexicana 14 (1965): 533–66; Miguel Aguilar Robledo, “Land Use, Land Tenure, and Environmental Change in the Jurisdiction of Santiago de los Valles de Oxitipa” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1999); Doolittle, “Las Marismas to Pánuco”; Lolita Gutiérrez Brockington, The Leverage of Labor: Managing the Cortés Haciendas in Tehuantepec, 1588–1688 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 8–11; and Rolf S. Widmer, Conquista y Despertar de las Costas de la Mar del Sur (1521–1684) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 125–35.

n otes to pages 33–36    237 32. AGI-PAT leg. 60, no. 3, rm. 4, exp. 2, Méritos y servicios, f. 2v: “de ellas que se dieron y multiplicaron toda la cantidad de vacas que hay en esta dicha Nueva España.” 33. François Chevalier, La Formation des Grands Domaines au Mexique: Terre et Société aux XVI–XVII Siècles (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1952), 115; Lesley Byrd Simpson, Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century, IberoAmericana, no. 36 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 2–4; Carl. O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 156–57; Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), 85–90; David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture, and Environmental Change Since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 104–5; and Doolittle, “Las Marismas to Pánuco,” 6–7. 34. Chevalier, La Formation, 103, 114–15. 35. AGNM-M vol. 13, f. 20, Merced a Juan de la Párraga: “que solía ser de Gabriel de Villalobos.” 36. Ibid., f. 20: “entre la estancia de Gonzalo de Alegría y Francisco de Cocas . . . de la otra banda del Río de Jamapa.” 37. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, figs. 3.3, 3.4; Richard J. Morrisey, “The Northward Expansion of Cattle Ranching in New Spain, 1550–1600,” Agricultural History 25 (1951): 115–21; AGNM, General de Parte vol. 1, exp. 188, Licencia a Gonzalo de Alegría para pasar el ganado que resta a poblar una estancia en la Veracruz, 12 octubre 1575; AGNM-M vol. 13, f. 20, Merced a Juan de la Párraga; AGNM-T vol. 2672, exp. 8, Diligencias hechas sobre la merced . . . entre los arroyos llamados Amayuca y Soyolapa; and AGNM-T vol. 2764, exp. 18, ff. 225–60, Diligencias realizadas en virtud . . . merced de un sitio para ganado mayor en términos de Xamapa. 38. Ibid., f. 260; and AGNM-M vol. 13, f. 20, Merced a Juan de la Párraga: “de la otra banda del Río de Jamapa.” 39. AGNM-M vol. 25, f. 143, Al licenciado Francisco Párraga: “por cuanto el licenciado Francisco Párraga vecino de la nueva ciudad de la Veracruz me hizo relación que él tenía sus estancias de ganado mayor pobladas en términos de la vieja ciudad de la Veracruz cerca del río que llaman Jamapa en el camino real que viene de la dicha nueva ciudad hasta de México y muchas personas de los que tragan y siguen el dicho camino en tiempo de aguas respeto de venir crecido el río no lo pueden pasar y se queda allí y para prevenir este daño . . . pretendía hacer y fundar una venta y una chalupa o canoas para que la gente le pasa se y para proceder . . . que libremente dentro de los límites y términos de las dichas sus estancias junto al río que llaman de Jamapa pueda asentar hacer y fundar una venta.” 40. AGNM, Ríos y Acequias vol. 2, exp. 6, ff. 286–87, Sumaria información recibida de don Miguel Ignacio de Miranda; AGNM, Fomento Caminos vol. 1, f. 91, Mapa del 1784 por Miguel de Corral; and AGNM, Indiferente de Guerra vol. 452A, last f., Mapa del 1787 por Miguel de Corral.

2 3 8   n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 7 – 4 0 41. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 123–45; and Doolittle, “Las Marismas to Pánuco.” 42. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, 89–91, 163–71; Recopilación de Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias, 4 vols. (Madrid: Boix, 1841 [1680]), 2:266 (bk. 6, title 9, law 17); Paso y Troncoso, Epistolario de Nueva España, 13:38; and Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 360. 43. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 34, 312; Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 52–63; and Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 40–53. 44. Moors is a European term collectively applied to the Arabs and their Berber and other allies who conquered and settled Iberia, Berber referring to ethnic groups from North Africa, Arabs to those from Arabia, and the term Blackamoor generally relating to the sub-Saharan Africans among the Moors. 45. Gerard J. Brault, trans., Oxford Text and English Translation, The Song of Roland: An Analytical Edition, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), vol. 2, verses 143–44:

La neire gent en ad en sa Baillie, Granz unt les nes e lees les Oreilles, E sunt ensemble plus de cinquante milie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Ki plus sunt neirs que nen est arrement, Ne n’unt de blanc ne mais que sul les denz.

46. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, fig. 15; Ruth Pike, “Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century: Slaves and Freedmen,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47 (1967): 344–59; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 37–41; I. Hrbek and J. Devisse, “The Almoravids,” in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, ed. M. Elfasi and I. Hrbek, vol. 3 of General History of Africa, ed. UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, 8 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 336–66; J. Devisse, “Trade and Trade Routes in West Africa,” in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, 367–435; D. T. Niane, “Relationships and Exchanges Among the Different Regions,” in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, ed. D. T. Niane, vol. 4 of General History of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 614–34; J. Devisse and S. Labib, “Africa in Inter-continental Relations,” in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, 634–72; Ray A. Kea, “Expansions and Contractions: World-Historical Change and the Western Sudan World-System (1200/1000 B.C.-1200/1250 A.D.),” Journal of World-Systems Research 10 (2004): 723–816; and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1–7.

n o tes to pages 41–43    239 47. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 17–21; A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 4–10, 19–27; William D. Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 133–48; Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9–10; and David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), map 3. 48. Pike, “Sevillian Society,” 345; Saunders, A Social History, 28–29; Alfonso Franco Silva, La Esclavitud en Sevilla y su Tierra a Fines de la Edad Media (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1979), 59–72, 95–103, 131–53; Alfonso Franco Silva, Los Esclavos de Sevilla (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1980), 19–22; and Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 10–20. 49. Gabriel Alonso de Herrera, Libro de Agricultura: que Trata de la Labrança y Criança y de Muchas otras Particularidades y Provechos del Campo (Medina del Campo, Spain: Francisco del Canto, 1569 [1513]), f. 3: “Más como ahora ande tratada la tierra de obreros alquiladizos, que no curan de más de su jornal; o de criados sin cuidado, o de viles esclavos, enemigos de su señor.” 50. Saunders, A Social History, 176; Franco Silva, La Esclavitud en Sevilla, 193–201; Mercedes Borrero Fernández, El Mundo Rural Sevillano en el Siglo XV: Aljarafe y Ribera (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1983), 379–88; José Luis Cortés López, La Esclavitud Negra en la España Peninsular del Siglo XVI (Salamanca, Spain: Universidad de Salamanca, 1989), 182–84; and Mercedes Borrero Fernández, La Organización del Trabajo: de la Explotación de la Tierra a Las Relaciones Laborales en el Campo Andaluz, Siglos XIII–XVI (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2003). 51. Strabo, The Geography, trans. H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer, 3 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892 [circa AD 24]), 1:209, 212, 222; 3:217, 254–55. 52. Ibid., 1:215. 53. Butzer, “Cattle and Sheep,” 39. 54. Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 74–75, 103–5; Expiración García Sánchez, “Agriculture in Muslim Spain,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992), 986–99; and Judith A. Carney and Richard N. Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 31. 55. Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera, 244. 56. Restall, Seven Myths, 52–63; Peter Gerhard, “A Black Conquistador in Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 451–59; Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 16–17; and Icaza, Diccionario Autobiográfico, 1:lxix: “Garrido (Juan), negro africano, bautizado en Lisboa.”

2 4 0    n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 3 – 4 7 57. AGI, Audiencia de México leg. 204, exp. 3, f. 2, Probanzas de servicios y méritos de Juan Garrido: “yo fui el primero que hizo la inspiración en esta Nueva España para sembrar trigo y ver si se da.” 58. For a transcription of the account by de Tapia, see García Icazbalceta, Colección de Documentos, 2:593: “tres granos de trigo: mando a un negro horro [a manumitted black] que lo sembrase.” 59. Icaza, Diccionario Autobiográfico, 2:263–64: “Guzmán le fue encomendados los pueblos y estancias de Tançuy.” 60. Paso y Troncoso, Papeles de Nueva España, 1:229–30: “tierra llana y de montes y sábanas donde se puede hacer estancia de ganado.” 61. Ibid., 1:230. 62. Icaza, Diccionario Autobiográfico, 2:263–64. 63. Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 7–11, 26–27, estimates that 110,525 had arrived by 1639; Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 46, estimates that a total of 200,000 slaves disembarked in New Spain; and TSTD, accessed 20 May 2010, includes 267,500 disembarkations between 1531 and 1817 for a region termed Spanish Central America, which extends well beyond New Spain to include the major slave port of Cartagena, Colombia. 64. The figure combines information from Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, fig. 15; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas, map 8; International Livestock Research Institute, Livestock Production in the Subhumid Zone of West Africa: A Regional Review (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: ILRI, 1979), fig. 6; and Central Intelligence Agency, Africa: Ethnolinguistic Groups, map scale 1: 10,400,000 (Washington: CIA, 1996). 65. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 96–99, 112–13; Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 178–79; Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 23–30; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La Población Negra de México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972 [1946]), 197–223, 240–41; and Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), tables 3, A-8, A-13. 66. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, 153–62, 185–87; and AGI-IG leg. 1529, no. 5, La Veracruz de la Nueva España, f. 3v: “Hay más de 600 negros y negras esclavos pocos libres aunque algunos. No hay mestizos ningunos, aunque algunos mulatos.” 67. Pérez de Rivas, Corónica y Historia Religiosa, 2:197; Francisco Javier Alegre, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Nueva España, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Carlos María de Bustamante, 1841–42 [circa 1777]), 1:151; and AGI-IG leg. 1529, no. 41,f. 3, Relación de pueblos de españoles en Nueva España: “Veracruz . . . tiene dos cientas casas, tres cientos españoles, quinientos esclavos, quinientos caballos.” 68. Palmer, Slaves of the White God, table 1.2; circa 1570 Mexico City had a population of approximately seventeen thousand, including eight thousand enslaved blacks; Puebla had a total of about fourteen hundred, including five hundred enslaved blacks.

n o tes to pages 47–48    241 69. Richard Hakluyt, ed., The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903–5 [1598–1600]), 9:361. 70. Antonio de Ciudad Real, Tratado Curioso y Docto de las Grandezas de la Nueva España: Relación Breve y Verdadera de Algunas Cosas de las Muchas que Sucedieron al Padre Fray Alonso Ponce en las Provincias de la Nueva España Siendo Comisario General de Aquellas Partes, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1976 [circa 1590]), 1:118: “San Juan de Ulúa . . . muchos negros y negras que tiene allí el rey para el servicio de la fortaleza que allí esta edificada y oficiales y soldados de ella”; and AGI-IG leg. 1529, no. 5, La Veracruz de la Nueva España, f. 9v: “hay veinte casas para los negros que trabajan en la obra.” 71. Alexander von Humboldt, Essai Politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, 3 vols. (Paris: F. Schoell, 1811), 1:279: “La population habituelle de Veracruz, sans compter la milice et les gens de mer, est de 16,000,” a figure which Humboldt took from the Censo de Revillagigedo, the first general census of New Spain, conducted a little more than a decade before he was in Veracruz in February and March 1804. 72. Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, “Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala,” Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia 1 (1939–40 [1609–24]): 191–306; quote on 215: “es esta ciudad toda de vecinos españoles; tienen muchos negros y negras esclavos y otros muchos libres.” 73. Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, “La Esclavitud Negra en Veracruz,” in El Caribe: Región y Relaciones Internacionales, ed. Johanna von Grafenstein Gareis and Laura Muñoz Mata (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 2000), 11–31. 74. Aguirre Beltrán, La Población Negra, 22. 75. Silvano García Guiot, Rodrigo de Albornoz: Contador Real de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, 1943), 161–62; and Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera, 531: “trajo Rodrigo de Albornoz licencia de Su Majestad para hacer un ingenio de azúcar en un pueblo que se dice Cempoal, el cual pueblo en pocos años destruyó.” 76. AGNM-M vol. 2, ff. 173v–74, Merced al Contador de un sitio para ingenio; Paso y Troncoso, Epistolario de Nueva España, 4:76–78; and García Guiot, Rodrigo de Albornoz, 167–69. 77. AGNM-M vol. 2, ff. 250v–53, Comisión a Bernardo del Castillo . . . para ingenio: “el daño y perjuicio que los negros, bueyes, caballos, y otros ganados del dicho ingenio pueden hacer a los dichos indios y a sus sementeras”; “el ingenio que el dicho Contador tenía en la provincia de Cempoal, la cual toda estaba desteñida y despoblada por la dicha causa.” 78. AGI-IG leg. 1529, no. 5, La Veracruz de la Nueva España, f. 5v: “Hernán Ruiz de Córdoba, el cual tiene doscientos negros y veinte estancias de ganado.” 79. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, 129–30; Boyd-Bowman, Indice Geobiográfico 1520–1531, 118; Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 9:346; Guillermo S. Fernández de Recas, Mayorazgos de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Universidad

2 4 2   n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 9 – 5 2 Nacional Autónoma de México, 1965), 399–400; and AGNM, Vínculos vol. 269, Títulos del mayorazgo y hacienda de Santa Fe. 80. Archivo Notarial de Xalapa, Protocolo vol. 1600–08, ff. 383v–87, Don Francisco Hernández de la Higuera y su esposa . . . fundan un mayorazgo en favor de su hijo primogénito; AGNM-T vol. 589, exp. 1, Dueños de la hacienda de San Ildefonso Buenavista . . . contra Josefa Petronila de la Higuera, dueña de las haciendas de Santa Fe, Buenavista y Moreno; Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, table A-8; Fernández de Recas, Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, 379–80; and Gilberto Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, El Mayorazgo de la Higuera (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987), 24–31, 35–44, 51–52, 75–77, 86. 81. Mota y Escobar, “Memoriales del Obispo,” 209–10, 289–90; David M. Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1650,” Hispanic American Historical Review 46 (1966): 236–53; Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 122–31; Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 91–92; Pérez de Rivas, Corónica y Historia Religiosa, 1:285; Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, “De San Lorenzo de los Negros a los Morenos de Amapa: Cimarrones Veracruzanos, 1609–1735,” in Rutas de la Esclavitud en Africa y América Latina, ed. Rina Cáceres (San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001), 157–74; and Chege Githiora, Afro-Mexicans: Discourse of Race and Identity in the African Diaspora (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008), 25–31. 82. Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow, 80–122; and Joan C. Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 151–59. 83. Alfredo Martínez Marranto, “The Afromestizo Population of Coyolillo,” Callaloo 27 (2004): 142–49; and Githiora, Afro-Mexicans, 17, 31, 41–44. 84. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 93–94; Jack Jackson, Los Mesteños: Spanish Ranching in Texas, 1721–1821 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), 79–84; and Pierre-Marie-François Pagès, Voyages Autour du Monde et Vers les Deux Pôles par Terre et par Mer, Pendant les Années 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1773, 1774, et 1776, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez Moutard, 1782), 1:86: “Lorsqu’ils l’approchent, ils tiennent un long lacet roulé sur le haut du bras, ils le lui lancent, soit au cou, soit aux pieds, et rompant la direction de leur cheval, ils arrêtent l’animal lacé.” 85. Sartorius, Mexico, 10; and Sartorius, Mexiko, 15: “Es ist ein eigenthümliches volk, einsach und hart gewöhnt, gut beritten und geübt in allen reiterkünsten: dabei zuverlässig, gesällig und stets, guten humors. Man nennt sie rancheros und kennt sie aus den ersten blick an ihrer lederkleidung, einen hirschsänger an der seite, stets zu pferd den lazo von leder an dem sattel und die langen sporen an den weiten überstiefelen.” 86. The figure comes from a copy of Sartorius, Mexico, in the author’s collection: engraved plate opposite p. 181, original sketch by Johann Moritz Rugendas circa 1833. 87. The figure comes from plate 11, titled “Del modo de echar el lazo al toro,” in a copy of Gregorio de Tapia y Salzedo, Ejercicios de la Gineta al Príncipe Nuestro

n otes to pages 52–55    243 Señor D. Carlos Baltasar (Madrid: Diego Díaz, 1643) in the Laurence Roberts Carton Hunting Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 88. Ibid., caption for plate 11: “Hacen esta caballería con un palo de doce a trece palmos, puesto en la punta del un lazo que coge ambas hasta del toro, y a manera de quien torea con vara larga llegan a echarle aquella punta, y la otra está atada muy fuertemente en la cola del caballo; y lo restante de la soga o guindaleta la tienen recogida en la mano de la rienda, y toda ella será de largo, desde la cola al toro, como seis cuerpos de caballo. Y aunque muchas veces suelen errar el modo de echarla, vuelven a intentarlo hasta conseguirlo.” 89. AGI-IG leg. 1529, no. 5, La Veracruz de la Nueva España, f. 5v; Sartorius, Mexico, 182; and Borrero Fernández, La Organización del Trabajo, 379–88. 90. Tapia y Salzedo, Ejercicios de la Gineta, caption for plate 11: “En la Plaza de Madrid, unos esclavos criollos de las Indias hicieron la habilidad siguiente, que causó en todos mucha admiración.” A facsimile edition (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1980 [1643]) has colored plates: the rider’s skin is pink, the horse white, and the bull black. 91. The Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal in Mexico City preserves the Mesta code of 1537 as recorded in the minutes of the meeting of the Mexico City municipal council on 14 November 1542, transcribed in William H. Dusenberry, The Mexican Mesta: The Administration of Ranching in Colonial Mexico (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), 211–14. AGNM, Reales Cédulas Duplicados vol. 3, ff. 169–91, preserves the revised Mesta code of 1574, transcribed in Eusebio Ventura Beleña, Recopilación Sumaria de Todos los Autos Acordados de la Real Audiencia y Sala del Crimen de Esta Nueva España, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1991 [1787]), vol. 1, pt. 2, 27–64. 92. Ibid., 44–45. 93. Ibid., 62. 94. Ibid., 36, 60–62. 95. Ibid., 41, 43, 60–62; and Chevalier, La Formation, 131–32; and Dusenberry, The Mexican Mesta, 136–40. 96. Ventura Beleña, Recopilación Sumaria, vol. 1, pt. 2, 41–43: “Que no haya desjarretaderas, ni desjarrete ganado alguno . . . ningún indio, ni mulato, negro ni mestizo que haya sido vaquero, y esté en pueblos de indios de los comarcanos a las dichas estancias de ganados, o de alguna de ellas, no puede tener ni tenga lanza ni desjarretadera de ninguna suerte ni manera que sea, so pena de veinte pesos de [oro de] minas, aplicados como dicho es: y el que incurriere en la dicha pena, y no tuviere con que pagar, les sean dados cien azotes públicamente.” 97. Gutiérrez Brockington, The Leverage of Labor, table 13; and Paul E. Hoffman, The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535–1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 245–56. 98. Ventura Beleña, Recopilación Sumaria, vol. 1, pt. 2, 32–33.

2 4 4    n o t e s t o p a g e s 5 6 – 5 8   99. Ibid., 43: “Que por cuanto muchos señores y criadores de ganados no quieren tener en sus estancias españoles por mayordomos, por evitar las muchas costas y molestias que con ellos tienen, y toman por mayordomos mestizos, y mulatos, y indios y esclavos suyos propios de ellos, y fiando de ellos los dichos ganados, como de gente verdadera y segura.” 100. Robin Law, The Horse in West African History: The Role of the Horse in the Societies of Pre-Colonial West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 98–100, 176–96. 101. Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the Years 1822, 1823, and 1824 (London: John Murray, 1826), plate following p. 269; and G. Boyer, Un Peuple de l’Ouest Soudanais: Les Diawara (Dakar, Senegal: Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, 1953), fig. 21. 102. Sartorius, Mexico, 180; and Sartorius, Mexiko, 308: “Wie ihr das auch versteht! erwiedert er. Meine saat liegt da unten, in einer schlucht von wald umschlossen, weil da der boden vortrefflich ist und mir das rindvieh keinen schaden thut; aber da kann man nicht wohnen, wegen der wechselfieber, und weil das geschmeiß zu arg ist, schlangen und mosquitos und garrapatas. . . . Und nur hier oben im freien ist es auszuhalten. Hier aber kann ich nicht pslanzen, weil mir in der trockenzeit das vieh tag und nacht keine ruhe ließe, und die einzäunung, die hier große arbeit ersordern würde, durchbräche. Zudem kommt ost die savane in brannt und könnte meine arbeit in wenigen augenblicken zerstören.” Clearly Sartorius did not record the quote verbatim, instead concocting a composite dialogue with a ranchero family based on many similar conversations over several years. 103. Sidney W. Mintz, “Living Fences in the Fond-Des Nègres Region, Haiti,” Economic Botany 16 (1962): 101–5; Chris S. Duvall, “A Maroon Legacy?: Sketching African Contributions to Live Fencing Practices in Early Spanish America,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30 (2009): 232–47; and Andrew Sluyter and Alfred H. Siemens, “Vestiges of Prehispanic, SlopingField Terraces on the Piedmont of Central Veracruz, Mexico,” Latin American Antiquity 3 (1992): 148–60. 104. Pérez de Rivas, Corónica y Historia Religiosa, 1:287: “habían hecho una roza de arboles, bejucos y matorrales, donde la gente que quisiese acometer se embarazase y enzarzase, y si se quisiese retirar se hallase atajada,” from a letter of 1609 by Padre Juan Laurencio to Padre Rodrigo de Cabredo. 105. Francisco J. Santamaría, Diccionario de Mejicanismos (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1959), 948, 1094; Leovigildo Islas Escarcega, Diccionario Rural de México (Mexico: Editorial Comaval, 1961), 223, 264; and Duvall, “A Maroon Legacy,” 236–38, fig. 1. Duvall interprets a “crosshatched area around the settlement” on a map of a quilombo in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais, Brazil, as showing a defensive “hedge 10 hands high.” For a somewhat different interpretation of the same map, see Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow, 84–86, which refers to that same quilombo and another one as defended by perimeters of trenches, not hedges.

n o tes to pages 60–63    245 106. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 184–89, which substantially revises his earlier Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981) on this point. For a critique of Trails to Texas, see Jackson, Los Mesteños, 436, 587, 593–96. For a comparison of the differences between Trails to Texas and North American Cattle-Ranching, see Richard W. Slatta, Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 188–89. Tejano means “Texan” in Spanish and herein indicates nonnatives living in the Texas province of the colony of New Spain. CHAPTER THREE. LOUISIANA   1. The original document resides in AGI-SD leg. 2595, ff. 1–52, Estado general de todos los habitantes de la colonia de la Luisiana según los padrones que se han hecho el año de 1766; the summary table occupies both sides of f. 26. The column headings read capitanías o comandantes, vecinos, hombres de armas, mujeres, hijos varones grandes, hembras grandes, niños, niñas, esclavos, tierras asignadas, bestias caballar, ganado mayor, ganado menor, and fusiles. Since the census categorizes equines separately under bestias caballar, ganado mayor in this case must include cattle alone. For a general overview of shifts in political boundaries in southeastern North America owing to the Seven Years’ War, see Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986–2004), 1:267– 88. Also known as the French and Indian War, the conflict ended with the partition of Louisiana. Britain, in addition to taking possession of Florida from Spain, acquired from France that part of Louisiana east of the Mississippi River and its distributaries. Meanwhile, France transferred rule over the remainder of Louisiana to Spain. Thus Mobile, Natchez, and Baton Rouge became British, but New Orleans became Spanish despite being east of the Mississippi proper because of its location west of the line of distributaries that then connected the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico from just south of Baton Rouge through Bayou Manchac, the lower Amite River, Lake Maurepas, Manchac Pass, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Rigolets. The area between the Mississippi and those distributaries became known as the Isle of Orleans.   2. Lauren C. Post, “Some Notes on the Attakapas Indians of Southwest Louisiana,” Louisiana History 3 (1962): 221–42; Fred B. Kniffen, H. F. Gregory, and George A. Stokes, The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 44–47; William A. Read, Louisiana Place Names of Indian Origin (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008 [1927]); and William C. Foster, Historic Native Peoples of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 218–30. The Attakapas Post, or Poste des Atakapas, was at present-day St. Martinville, the current name becoming established only in the 1800s. The French and Spaniards called the Ishak people the Attakapas and variants thereof such as Atacapa, actually a derogatory Choctaw term meaning “cannibal.” The census enumerated only the “hombres de armas de las naciones de Indios salvages dependientes de los puestos” and locates the four

2 4 6   n o t e s t o p a g e s 6 3 – 6 4 villages as being between twelve and fifty-five leagues south and west of the Attakapas Post. The French lieue, or league, in colonial Louisiana measured 4,916 meters, and the Spaniards continued to use that length in preference to their own legua legal of 4,180 meters or legua común of 5,573 meters; see Roland Chardon, “The Linear League in North America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70 (1980): 129–53. For more detail on that broad swath of Louisiana history, see John G. Clark, New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970); Marcel Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, 5 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974–91); and Paul E. Hoffman, Luisiana (Madrid: Editorial Mapre, 1992).   3. AGI-SD leg. 2595, f. 10 specifies that the enumeration took place on 25 April 1766. ANO-C13a vol. 45, ff. 30–30v, Account of 30 April 1765 by Foucault of goods supplied to the Acadians; and ANO-C13a vol. 45, ff. 21–24, 31–33, Reports of 30 April and 30 September 1765 from Aubry and Foucault to Etienne François de Choiseul. The last French governor, Jean Jacques Blaise d’Abbadie, died on 4 February 1765, only months after publically announcing the transfer of Louisiana to Spain; the first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, did not arrive until 5 March 1766; during the interim thirteen months, Aubry continued as military commander but also served as acting governor, and Foucault continued as the chief financial and legal administrator. For a detailed account of the Acadian settlement of Louisiana, see Carl A. Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).   4. AGI-SD leg. 2595, f. 26, the row beginning “5 Vaquerías antiguas en los Atakapas.” The German and Acadian Coasts, or Côtes d’Allemagne et Acadian, designated the banks of the Mississippi between Bayou Manchac and New Orleans. After the partition of Louisiana, the British controlled the east bank of the Mississippi River upriver from Bayou Manchac, the so-called Florida Parishes; the west bank above Bayou Manchac went by the name of Pointe Coupée in French and Punta Cortada in Spanish. The Opelousas Post was, like the Attakapas Post, located along Bayou Teche, near the present-day town of Washington rather than at the present-day city of Opelousas; see Winston DeVille, Opelousas: The History of a French and Spanish Military Post in America, 1716–1803 (Cottonport, La.: Polyanthos Press, 1973), 33.   5. The authoritative text on the establishment of cattle ranching in North America musters no more than a page and a half on “French Louisiana, 1700–1760” and concludes that ranching in pre-Acadian Louisiana derived from SaintDomingue; see Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 120–22. For a similarly brief and vague description of eighteenthcentury ranching in the Attakapas, see Jack Jackson, Los Mesteños: Spanish Ranching in Texas, 1721–1821 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), 426–28.

n o tes to pages 64–65    247   6. Lauren C. Post dominates the literature on Acadian (or Cajun, as Acadians became known in the nineteenth century) ranching; see his “Cultural Geography of the Prairies of Southwest Louisiana” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1937); Cajun Sketches from the Prairies of Southwest Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962); “The Domestic Animals and Plants of French Louisiana as Mentioned in the Literature with Reference to Sources, Varieties and Uses,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 16 (1933): 554–86; “The Landscape in its Annual Cycle on the Prairies of Southwest Louisiana,” Journal of Geography 38 (1939): 267–75; “The Old Cattle Industry of Southwest Louisiana,” McNeese Review 9 (1957): 43–55; and “Cattle Branding in Southwest Louisiana,” McNeese Review 10 (1958): 101–17. Other notable contributions include James W. Taylor, “The Agricultural Settlement Succession on the Prairies of Southwest Louisiana” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1956); Bill Jones, Louisiana Cowboys (Gretna, La.: Pelican, 2007); and Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia.   7. Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 188–97.   8. Harry L. Coles, “The Confirmation of Foreign Land Titles in Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 38 (1955): 1–22; Ory G. Poret, “History of Land Titles in the State of Louisiana,” Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society ser. 1, vol. 1 (1973): 25–42; Henry P. Beers, French and Spanish Records of Louisiana: A Bibliographical Guide to Archive and Manuscript Sources (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 113–49; Paul E. Hoffman, “La Documentación Colonial en la Luisiana,” Archivo Hispalense 68 (1985): 333–52; and Glenn R. Conrad, Land Records of the Attakapas District, 2 vols. (Lafayette: University of Louisiana Press, 1990), 1:3–13. GLO reports to Congress appear in ASP-PL. The GLO district offices in Louisiana retained many of their working papers, and most of those spared by fires, inundations, pests, the Civil War, and numerous relocations as the district offices progressively finalized their work and consolidated had by the early twentieth century come to reside in the single remaining office in Baton Rouge. In 1939 the survey of federal archives conducted by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) transcribed some of the documents that had come from the office for the Southwestern District of Louisiana (sometimes called the Opelousas District because of its location in the city of Opelousas) and bound the transcriptions into two indexed volumes: Book 1 Opelousas Land Claims, 2 pts. When the GLO ceased operations in Louisiana, the Louisiana State Land Office (SLO) acquired the archive, including 385 volumes of land claims, 761 volumes of the surveyors’ field notes, 1,407 volumes of correspondence, 26,700 plat maps, thousands of other documents, and the two WPA volumes, which preserve some documents that went astray after transcription. The SLO archive lacks more than rudimentary organization and indexing but is nearly entirely available as page images on the Internet at doa.louisiana.gov and is cited herein by the name and number of the volume and the numbers of the relevant page images rather than the unsystematic internal numbering of folios. The original French and Spanish grants and

2 4 8   n o t e s t o p a g e s 6 5 – 6 7 associated surveys that the GLO had access to before the Civil War have become scattered, in part because individual claimants retained some originals and in part because the GLO distributed those acquired from the former royal surveyors of Spanish Louisiana, Charles L. Trudeau and Vicente Pintado, to various archives. Concentrations of those documents occur in LLMVC Carlos Trudeau Papers, Pintado Papers, and Survey Collection; LOC Louisiana Miscellany Collection and François Gonsoulin Papers; HNOC Louisiana Land Surveys Collection; LSM Map Collection; UMCL-LM; TU-KC; and TU-LLG.   9. SLO-FSG, 6–48. 10. Charles Gayarré, Louisiana: Its History as a French Colony (New York: John Wiley, 1852), 110–13, is an English translation of the letter of 21 April 1764 from Choiseul and Louis XV to d’Abbadie that informed him of the conditions under which Spain would assume control of Louisiana, including a stipulation that the new government would honor all French land grants. 11. TU-LLG, Grant of 2 March 1765 to Massé and Dauterive; TU-KC French Period, Certified copy of 30 November 1830 of the 2 March 1765 grant to Massé and Dauterive; TU-KC Spanish Period, Petition of 4 May 1771 to Unzaga by Dauterive, Order of survey of 21 May 1771 from Unzaga to Gabriel de Fuselier, Certificate of survey of 21 July 1771 from Fuselier to Unzaga, Grant of 4 September 1771 to Dauterive from Unzaga, Protest of 1771 from Dauterive’s attorney to Unzaga, Order of resurvey of 13 February 1772 by Unzaga to Fuselier, Report of 3 March 1772 by Fuselier to Unzaga, and Decision of 2 May 1772 by Unzaga to Dauterive; LSM-CR folder 1771/08/03–01, Sworn statement of 20 August 1771 by Dauterive; ANO-C13a vol. 45, ff. 47–52v, Report of 24 April by Aubry to Choiseul; SMPC-OA vol. 1 (1760–79), nos. 37–41, Appraisals of Dauterive’s property in December 1775; UMCL-LM Louisiana Land Surveys, no. G27, Survey of 10 April 1798 by Gonsoulin for Louis and Alexandre de la Houssa; HNOC ms. 2001–246-RL.13, Brief of complaints by the Dauterive heirs; Stephen K. Williams, ed., Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States, bk. 13 (1850–1851) (Rochester, N.Y.: Lawyers’ Cooperative Publishing, 1901), 560–68; ASP-PL vol. 2, 744–871, Land claims in Louisiana communicated to the Senate on 22 June 1813; SLO-SWD vol. 22, 210–11, Claim by the Attakapas Church; SLO-FSG, 6–7; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 95–106, Claims of the Dauterive heirs; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 187, Claim of Reverend Izabe for the Catholic Church of Attakapas; SLO Original Township Plat for T11S, R6E SWD, 23 December 1845; SLO Resurvey of T10S, R5E SWD, 12 April 1856; SLO Resurvey of T10S, R6E SWD, 4 February 1881; and SLO Resurvey of T10S, R7E SWD, 17 December 1846. Also see Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 92; Glenn R. Conrad, “The Acadian Story Continues to Unfold,” Attakapas Gazette 13 (1978): 89–90; and Glenn R. Conrad, “The Origins of St. Martinville,” Attakapas Gazette 29 (1995): 1–24. Note that townships in Louisiana consist of the usual square measuring six miles on a side and oriented to the cardinal directions but do not necessarily contain thirty-six sections of one square mile each.

notes to page 67    249 Because of the claims to private land, the GLO first assigned section numbers to each patented private tract and only afterward divided the remaining, public lands into the usual grid of one-square-mile sections of 640 acres each. The preexisting private lands thus became known as irregular sections, were not oriented to the cardinal directions, and where they impinged on the cardinally oriented grid created sections of public land of less than 640 acres, known as fractional sections. 12. AGI-PC leg. 188A, exp. 2, ff. 7–8, Ordinance of 18 February 1770 by O’Reilly. The ordinance specified that agricultural grants would have 6 to 8 arpents of stream frontage, depending on the needs and abilities of the petitioner, and 40 arpents of depth, extending back from the stream, a distance that became known as the usual depth. According to Chardon, “The Linear League,” the French arpent had a length of 58.5 meters and an area of 0.3424 hectares in Louisiana. The same 1770 ordinance allowed owners of large herds of cattle to qualify for much larger grants: half a league square, 42 arpents by 42 arpents, for every 100 head up to a maximum of either 1 league of frontage by 1 league of depth, an area of a full square league; or, if topography or prior grants made that configuration impossible, then 11/2 leagues of frontage by a 1/2 league of depth, an area of 3/4 of a square league. 13. SLO-FSG, 6–7; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 162–65, Petition of 16 July 1765 by Grevemberg to Aubry, Grant of 16 July 1765 by Aubry and Foucault to Grevemberg, Transcription from Book of Records in the Office of the Intendant, and Grant of 2 March 1770 by O’Reilly to Grevemberg; SLO-SWD vol. 22, 210–11, Claim by the Attakapas Church; SLO Original Township Plat for T11S, R6E SWD, 23 December 1845; SLO Original Township Plat for T11S, R7E SWD, 28 December 1875; UMCL-LM Louisiana Land Surveys, no. G27, Survey of 10 April 1798 by Gonsoulin for Louis and Alexandre de la Houssa; ASP-PL vol. 2, 744–871, Land claims in Louisiana communicated to the Senate 22 June 1813; AGNM-CV ser. 1, vol. 1, exp. 72, ff. 166–67v, Report of 14 March 1756 from Viceroy Amarillas to King Ferdinand VI regarding Blancpain’s arrest while trading along the Trinity River in Texas; and LLMVC La Tourrett’s Reference Map of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: John la Tourrett, 1853). Also see Herbert E. Bolton, “Spanish Activities on the Lower Trinity River, 1746–1771,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 16 (1913): 339–77; Mathè Allain and Vincent H. Cassidy, “Blancpain, Trader Among the Attakapas,” Attakapas Gazette 3 (1968): 32–38; and Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 193. 14. LLMVC Survey Collection, folder for Attakapas, Anonymous draft survey of 1793 for Arthur Strother; LOC Louisiana Miscellany, cont. 6 (1790–91), ff. 182–83v, Survey of 20 May 1793 by Gonsoulin for Strother; SMPC-OA vol. 4 (1784–85), no. 68, Estate sale of May-June 1785 of Jean François Ledée’s goods; HNOC Louisiana Land Surveys, folder for Attakapas 1793–1803, nos. G30 and G40, Copies of 5 March 1795 by Trudeau and of 28 July 1796 by Gonsoulin of a survey for Strother; SLO-FSG, 6–7; SLO-SWD vol. 18, 158–65, Claim by the legal representatives of Sam Fuselier; SLO-SWD vol. 37, 73–77, Claim by Patrick

2 5 0   n o t e s t o p a g e s 6 8 – 6 9

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Morgan and Daniel Clark; SLO Original Township Plat for T7S, R5E SWD, 27 September 1845; SLO Resurvey of T8S, R5E SWD, 18 June 1855; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 306, Claim by Elizabeth Taley; ASP-PL vol. 3, 77–150, Land claims in the western district of Louisiana communicated to the Senate on 19 January 1816; and ASP-PL vol. 5, 736–39, Opelousas claims reported by Valentine King on 27 January 1826. LSM-SCR folder 1762/03/08–04, Sale of 8 March 1762 of land in Attakapas by Jung to Ledée; TU-LLG, Grant of 19 February 1769 to Ledée; ASP-PL vol. 3, 151–62, Land claims in the western district of Louisiana communicated to the House on 2 February 1816; SLO-SWD vol. 20, 119–20, Plat 887; SLO-SWD vol. 22, 216, Testimony recorded prior to 10 April 1813; SLO Private Claims in Opelousas District, 11–13, Testimony of Andrew Martin; LSA Opelousas Papers, Estate sale on 14 March 1786 of Ledée’s land; HNOC Louisiana Land Surveys, folder for Attakapas 1793–1803, no. G38, Survey of 20 June 1800 by Trudeau for Marie Babin; SLO Original Township Plat for T9S, R5E SWD, 18 June 1855; SLO Resurvey of T8S, R5E SWD, 18 June 1855; SLO Resurvey of T9S, R5E SWD, 18 June 1855; SLO Resurvey of T9S, R6E SWD, 30 June 1854; SLO Resurvey of T10S, R5E SWD, 12 April 1856; and SMPC-OA vol. 4 (1784–85), no. 68, Estate sale of Ledée’s goods. TU-LLG, Grant of 13 June 1764 to Degoutin; LLMVC, Uncataloged 1799 survey by Trudeau for Charles Jumonville de Villiers; UMCL-LM Louisiana Land Surveys, no. G12, Survey of 1799 by Trudeau for Jumonville de Villiers; SLO-SWD vol. 37, 153–56, Claim by Jumonville de Villiers; SLO-SWD vol. 40, 18, Claim by Jumonville de Villiers; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 121, Claim by Jumonville de Villiers; SLO Resurvey of T8S, R5E SWD, 18 June 1855; SLO Resurvey of T8S, R6E SWD, 26 April 1855; SLO Original Township Plat for T7S, R5E SWD, 27 September 1845; SLO Original Township Plat for T7S, R6E SWD, 26 April 1855; and ASP-PL vol. 2, 744–871, Land claims in Louisiana communicated to the Senate on 22 June 1813. Also see Chardon, “The Linear League.” SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 162, Grant of 16 July 1765 by Aubry and Foucault to Grevemberg. The quote comes from the WPA translation of this document because the original has disappeared. Apparently Grevemberg did not mention Degoutin. Jacques Guillaume Courtableau had land some fifty kilometers upstream along Bayou Teche, near the Opelousas Post. SLO-FSG, 10–11, 12–13, 22–23; Conrad, Land Records, vol. 1, 15; Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 167–76; and Gertrude Taylor, “Colonial Land Grants in the Attakapas,” Attakapas Gazette 15 (1980): 13–23. Antoine Simon le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, 3 vols. (Paris: Chez de Bure, 1758), 1:297: “une petit nation que l’on nomme les Avoyelles, et qui n’est connue que par les services qu’elle a rendus a la colonie, par les chevaux, bœufs et vaches qu’elle est allé chercher au nouveau Mexique pour les François de la Louisiane.” At the time, the Spaniards referred to the northern provinces of New Spain as Santa Fe de Nuevo México and Tejas, but whether

n o tes to pages 69–70    251 by “nouveau Mexique” Page du Pratz meant all or only part of that region remains unclear. 20. Post, “The Domestic Animals,” 559–63; Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 120–21; Jackson, Los Mesteños, 117–21; H. Sophie Burton and F. Todd Smith, Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana–Texas Frontier (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 146–67; John D. W. Guice, “Cattle Raisers of the Old Southwest: A Reinterpretation,” Western Historical Quarterly 8 (1977): 167–87; Christopher Morris, “Impenetrable but Easy: The French Transformation of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Founding of New Orleans,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, ed. Craig E. Colten (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 22–44; Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 176–80; and LLMVC Lauren Chester Post Papers, box 4, folder 149, Early cattle on rancho and vacherie, unpublished ms. 21. AGI-SD leg. 2595, ff. 10v–11. 22. Ibid. 23. AGI-SD leg 2595, f. 22. 24. AGNM-CV ser. 1, vol. 1, exp. 119, ff. 289–91v, Letter of 22 July 1756 from Barrios to Viceroy Amarillas: “tiene más de veinte negros, setecientos bêtes de ganado mayor, más de cien yeguas.” 25. SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 162. 26. AGI-PC leg. 188C, ff. 42–47, Atakapas y Opelousas 1771. This census appears to be in the handwriting of Fuselier, then commandant of both the Attakapas and the Opelousas Posts. The settlement of the Acadians changed environmental and social relations enough that the census of 1771 enumerated only 2,060 head of cattle for the Attakapas Post. AGI-PC leg. 81, f. 10, Relación que manifiesta el numero de carros con bueyes, caballos, yeguas, mulas, ganado mayor, carneros, cabras, y cerdos que hay en el partido de Atacapas, gives an even lower total of 1,323 cattle for Attakapas in 1769. AGI-PC leg. 2358, ff. 258–300, Censo general del distrito de Atakapas y Opelousas de 1777, even later and less directly relevant, gives the following number of cattle: 900 for Fuselier, a doubling of the figure from 1771; 600 for Ledée, an increase by a quarter; and 240 for the Grevembergs, a reduction by a fifth. 27. LSM-CR folder 1771/08/03–01, Sworn statement of 20 August 1771 by Dauterive. 28. Strangely, summing the cattle enumerated in the detailed tables of the census of 1766 (12 for Acadian families, 10,000 for Dauterive, 20 for Massé, and 8 for Bonin) yields a total of 10,040 head of cattle, too similar to the 1,040 head claimed for the Acadians in the summary table to avoid remark. Even more strangely, at least two copies of the summary table attribute an impossibly high 10,040 head to the Acadians; see AGI-SD leg. 2595, ff. 51v–52, Resumen general que comprehende todos los habitantes y establecimientos de la colonia de Luisiana hecho el año de 1766; and LSU Middleton Library, microfilm 6015,

2 5 2   n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 1 – 7 3 Resumen general que comprehende todos los habitantes y establecimientos de la colonia de Luisiana, which when microfilmed apparently resided in the Archivo Central de Madrid (Spain). 29. The figure is based on SMPC-BBA, 30, 37, 81; SMPC-BBB, 10, 31, 50, 105, 112, 155; and ULL Brand Book, 22, 58, 64, 65, 68, 89, 135, 146, 339. According to Post, Cajun Sketches, 47–64, when the brand registrar’s office moved from St. Martinville to Lafayette in 1824, someone consolidated the two earliest known brand books by copying them into a single volume that became the official brand registry through 1888, known as the Brand Book for Opelousas and Attakapas Districts, 1739–1888; the St. Martin Parish Courthouse archived the two earlier brand books, SMPC-BBA and SMPC-BBB; and the consolidated brand book eventually came to reside in ULL. Name indexes for the two SMPC brand books appear in SWLR vols. 18 and 19; and a name index for the ULL Brand Book appears in Mary E. Sanders, Records of Attakapas District, Louisiana, 1739–1811 (Lafayette, La.: Mary E. Sanders, 1962). 30. AGI-PC leg. 188A, exp. 2, ff. 7–8, Ordinance of 18 February 1770 by O’Reilly; ULL Brand Book, 64–65, 68; SMPC-BBA, 81; and SMPC-BBB, 10, 155. Note that SMPC-BBA seems to read 1737 rather than 1739. AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 43v lists Louis as being thirty-six years old in 1771 and Barthélémy as seventeen. On the father’s nickname of Flamand, meaning “Flemish,” see SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 165. 31. ULL Brand Book, 58, 89; SMPC-BBA, 30; and SMPC-BBB, 10, 50, 105. On Fuselier’s death, see Winston DeVille, Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire: His Death and Succession, 1789–1790 (Ville Platte, La.: Provincial Press, 2003). On his grandson, born to his son Agricole and Christine Bérard in 1801, see SMT Libro de Baptismos de Blancos (1797–1803), no. 451, Baptism of 9 May 1802 of Gabriel Fuselier. On Ledée’s succession, see LSA Opelousas Papers, Estate sale on 14 March 1786 of Ledée’s land; and SMPC-OA vol. 4 (1784–85), no. 68, Estate sale of Ledée’s goods. A Jean Broussard registered the same triangular brand in 1799; see SMPC-BBA, 37; SMPC-BBB, 112; and ULL Brand Book, 22. 32. ULL Brand Book, 135, 146, 339; and SMPC-BBB, 31. On the association between Sorrel and Massé, see Charles César Robin, Voyages dans l’Intérieur de la Louisiane, 3 vols. (Paris: Chez Buisson, 1807), 3:22–23. On the Alibamones who came to the Attakapas and the Opelousas Posts, abandoning Fort Toulouse for Mobile in 1763 and fleeing British rule entirely the following year, see Glen R. Conrad, “Opelousas and the Alabama Immigrants, 1763–1766,” Attakapas Gazette 14 (1979): 112–17. On their ages in 1771, see AGI-PC leg. 188C, ff. 43v–44. On Bonin’s marriage to Tellier, see SMT Registre de Enterrements (1787–1830), no. 217, Burial of 7 October 1800 of Anne Tellier; and Winston Deville, Attakapas, vol. 5 of Colonial Louisiana Marriage Contracts (St. Martinville, La.: Attakapas Historical Association, 1967), 6. Several other names appear in the brand books with dates before 1766 but all seem to be spurious, the result of copying errors or backdating rather than actual pre-Acadian registrations. François Jacques Ozenne and his son François supposedly registered four

notes to page 73    253 brands in 1748, but François Jacques was only eight and living in Pointe Coupée that year; his father, Jacques Ozenne, had arrived in Louisiana in 1726 to work as a cooper in New Orleans and died within two decades, before registration of the brands supposedly occurred in 1748; his wife, Charlotte Julie Moro, remarried to a planter from Pointe Coupée and in 1745 was living there with the Ozenne children, including François Jacques; he married Marguerite Decuir in Pointe Coupée in 1766; their son, François, was born there the next year; and the entire family moved to the Attakapas in the 1780s, buying land from the widow Dauterive in 1781. Similarly, the Nicolas Provost who supposedly registered a brand in 1762 must refer to the son of Nicolas Provost and Marie Françoise Quebedeaux, who was born in the 1740s, around the time the family relocated from Illinois to Pointe Coupée, and moved to the Attakapas only in middle age, acquiring land and marrying there in the 1780s. The Simon Broussard brand of 1762 and the Michael Bernard brand of 1761 must also be spurious because both men arrived with the other Acadians in 1765. Two nearly identical brands for Argroso and Argraw listed for 1762 in ULL Brand Book clearly represent a copying error because in SMPC-BBA they bear a date of 1799 and pertain to members of a family named Hargrove, of which Argroso and Argraw represent Spanish corruptions. The Patin brand of 1764 relates to the Opelousas District, namely, to a Jacques Patin who moved there from Pointe Coupée in the 1760s. Two brands bearing dates in 1760, one for Alexandre and the other for Litette, remain enigmatic, although they could pertain to a single person, namely the Alexandre Latille who had come to Louisiana from Provence and whose daughter Poline married Dauterive’s nephew at Attakapas in 1793. See ULL Brand Book, 1, 4–5, 89, 113, 116–17, 340; SMPC-BBA, 21–22; SMT Vieux Registre de 1784–87, no. 55, Marriage of 1 April 1785 between Nicolas Provost and Marie Prevost; SMT Vieux Registre de 1787–1802, no. 83, Marriage of 2 July 1793 between Bernard Dauterive and Poline Latille; SMT Vieux Registre de 1787–1802, no. 909, Baptism of 9 July 1797 of Joseph Therence Devince; BRCC vol. 1-B, 49, 135; SWLR vol. 1-A, 228, 606; Bill Barron, Census of Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 1745 (New Orleans: Polyanthos Press, 1987), 4, 27, 30; Glenn R. Conrad, The First Families of Louisiana, 2 vols. (Baton Rouge: Claitor’s, 1970), 2:146; Robert C. West, An Atlas of Louisiana Surnames of French and Spanish Origin (Baton Rouge: Geoscience Publications, 1986), 21–22, 117–18, 123; Winston DeVille, The New Orleans French, 1720–1733 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publications, 1973), 77, 83; K. P. Brown, “Descendants of Nicholas Provost,” New Orleans Genesis 21 (1982): 379–402; Winston DeVille, First Settlers of Pointe Coupée (New Orleans: Polyanthos Press, 1974), 16, 31, 33; Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 206; Winston DeVille, Post of Pointe Coupée, 1736–1803, vol. 3 of Colonial Louisiana Marriage Contracts (Baton Rouge: Claitor’s, 1962), 54; Deville, Attakapas, 5, 55; and Conrad, Land Records, 1:152, 300–301. 33. For the figure, the historic provinces and boundaries of France in 1715 derive from Adolphus William Ward, G. W. Prothero, Stanley Mordaunt Leathes, and E. A. Benians, eds., The Cambridge Modern History Atlas (London: Cambridge

2 5 4    n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 5 – 7 6 University Press, 1912), maps 46, 79; and the open-range cattle herding areas from Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, fig. 2. 34. SLO-SWD vol. 37, 73–77, Deposition of 4 March 1812 by Louis Chachere regarding the claim of Morgan and Clark. 35. AGI-PC leg. 188C, ff. 42–47, Atakapas y Opelousas 1771; AGI-PC leg. 2358, ff. 258–300, Atakapas y Opelousas de 1777; SMPC-OA vol. 4 (1784–85), no. 385, Marriage contract of 29 April 1771 between Fuselier and Soileau; SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 22–23, Marriage of 30 April 1771 between Fuselier and Soileau; SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 23, Baptism of 13 July 1772 of Helene Fuselier; LSM-SCR folder 1752/08/16–02, Petition of 16 August 1752 by Fuselier to recover a debt from a Mr. Colmard; LLMVC mss. 64 and 204, Conveyance of 10 May 1764 for land and a house in New Orleans from Fuselier to a Mr. Chaperon; and AGI-PC leg. 188A, exp. 2, ff. 9–9v, Draft letter of 18 February 1770 from O’Reilly to Fuselier. Also see Glenn R. Conrad, ed., A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, 2 vols. (Lafayette: University of Louisiana Press, 1988), 1:328–29; DeVille, Gabriel Fuselier, 1–37; West, Atlas of Louisiana Surnames, 75–76; Emma Fusilier Philastre, Gabriel Fusilier de la Claire and Allied Families (Eunice, La.: Emma Fusilier Philastre, 1977); Emma Fusilier Philastre, “Gabriel Fusilier de la Claire,” Attakapas Gazette 10 (1974): 77; Jackie Vidrine, “The Last Will and Testament of Don Gabriel Fusilier,” Attakapas Gazette 7 (1972): 181–83; Glen R. Conrad, “A Lady Called Alice,” Attakapas Gazette 8 (1978): 125–28; NOCC vol. 2, 132; and BRCC vol. 3, 49, 302. 36. Robin, Voyages dans l’Intérieur, 3:20–21: “une vingtaine de nègres dont il fut plutôt le père que le maître.” Robin visited the Attakapas Post in 1804–5, three decades after Massé died in 1775 and thus could not have based that assessment on direct observation. 37. AGI-SD leg. 2595, f. 11; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 44v; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 99, Exhibit A; TU-LLG, Grant of 2 March 1765 to Massé and Dauterive; AGI-SD leg. 2547, f. 61, Letter of 27 April 1776 by Unzaga concerning the Massé estate; LSM-CR folder 1785/01/10–002, Petition of 10 January 1785 by Francisco Broutin on behalf of Claudio Trenonay regarding the succession of Massé; SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 1–3, Baptisms of 5 June 1756 of Massé’s slaves; and AGNM-CV ser. 1, vol. 1, exp. 119, ff. 285–86, Petition by Massé and Didier to Viceroy Amarillas. For a facsimile of the map of 1757 by Bernardo de Miranda that places a “Casa de Mas” near present-day Beaumont, Texas, see Herbert E. Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962 [1915]), plate opposite 350; the original is in AGI-MX leg. 2506, Expedientes del consulado y comercio. Also see Bolton, “Spanish Activities,” 367–68; José A. Pichardo, Pichardo’s Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas, trans. Charles W. Hackett, Charmion Clair Shelby, and Mary Ruth Splawn, 4 vols. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1931–46), 1:376; Hans W. Baade, “The Law of Slavery in Spanish Luisiana, 1769–1803,” in The Spanish Presence in Louisiana, 1763–1803, ed. Gilbert C. Din (Lafayette: University of Louisiana

n o tes to pages 76–77    255 Press, 1996), 366–90; SWLR vol. 1-A, 32; and Conrad, The First Families, 1:153, 154, 158, 160, 162, 226; 2:54, 131. 38. SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 95–106, Claims of the Dauterive heirs; TU-LLG, Grant of 2 March 1765 to Massé and Dauterive; TU-KC Spanish Period, Petition of 4 May 1771 to Unzaga by Dauterive, Order of survey of 21 May 1771 from Unzaga to Fuselier, Certificate of survey of 21 July 1771 from Fuselier to Unzaga, Grant of 4 September 1771 to Dauterive from Unzaga, Protest of 1771 from Dauterive’s attorney to Unzaga, Order of resurvey of 13 February 1772 by Unzaga to Fuselier, Report of 3 March 1772 by Fuselier to Unzaga, and Decision of 2 May 1772 by Unzaga to Dauterive; TU-KC French Period, Certified copy of 30 November 1830 of the 2 March 1765 grant to Massé and Dauterive; SMT Vieux Registre de 1787– 1802, no. 83, Marriage of 2 July 1793 between Bernard Dauterive (a nephew) and Poline Latille; NONA Chantalou box 4, folder 36 (1762), ff. 67316–17; NONA Almonester y Roxas bk. 1 (1771), f. 99; NONA Garic bk. 2 (1771), ff. 150v–52v, 168–69, 169v–70, 222; NONA Garic bk. 4 (1773) ff. 150, 273; LOC, Louisiana Miscellany, cont. 5 (1763–89), ff. 1584v–86; LSM-CR folders 1771/07/06–01 and 1771/08/03–01, Various proceedings in a suit of July–November 1771 by Antonio Barnabé and other creditors versus Dauterive; LSM-CR folder 1773/02/06–01, Inventory of 6 February 1773 of the property of Mr. de Vaugine; LSM-CR folder 1773/04/19–01, Suit of 19 April 1773 by Magdalena Vinzan versus Dauterive; and SMPC-OA vol. 1 (1760–79), nos. 37–41, Appraisals of Dauterive’s property in December 1775. Also see Conrad, “Origins of St. Martinville”; NOCC vol. 2, 69; Charles R. Maduell, The Census Tables for the French Colony of Louisiana from 1699 Through 1732 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1972), 145–47; Alice D. Forsyth, Louisiana Marriage Contracts: A Compilation of Abstracts from Records of the Superior Council of Louisiana During the French Regime, 1725–1758 (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1980), 85; Fontaine Martin, A History of the Bouligny Family and Allied Families (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 1990); and Conrad, The First Families, 1:30; 2:52. 39. Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, 1:42–44: “L’Isle à Corne est très-plate et passablement boisée . . . quantité de bêtes à cornes . . . les premiers Canadiens qui s’étaient établis à l’Isle Dauphine, y avoient mis la plupart leurs bestiaux et en grande quantité; au moyen de quoi ils se sont enrichis en dormant. Ces bestiaux n’ayant point besoin dans cette Isle d’être gardés ni d’aucun autre foin, se sont multiplies de façon que les maîtres en ont retire de grosses sommes. . . . Toutes ces îles sont très-plates, et ont le même fond de sable blanc; leurs bois, surtout des trois premieres, sont des pins.” The five barrier islands that stretch from the mouth of Mobile Bay toward New Orleans are, from east to west, the following: Dauphine Island, Petit Bois Island, Horn Island, Ship Island, and Cat Island. Bienville and three other Le Moyne brothers, Antoine, Joseph, and Pierre, who became the Sieur de Iberville, were all born in Montreal, Canada, and led the French colonization of the Gulf Coast. 40. AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 43v; SMPC-OA vol. 41/2 (1786), no. 75, Marriage contract of 21 Jan 1786 between François Grevemberg and Euphrosine Boisdore;

2 5 6   n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 7 – 7 8 SMT Libro de Baptismos de Blancos (1797-1803), entry no. 57, Baptism of 31 May 1798 of Charles Grevemberg; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 162; LSM-SCR folders 1753/10/31–01 and 1753/11/05–01, Documents of 26 October–5 November 1753 related to a Noyan family meeting; NONA Garic bk. 2 (1771), ff. 142v–43v, 161–62, 327, 331; LSM-SCR folder 1752/08/16–01, Testimony of 14 August 1752 by Grevemberg in the case of Mrs. Baudreau versus her husband; LSM-SCR folders 1753/03/16–01–02 and 1753/03/19/01–02, Case of 16–19 March 1753 of Nicolas Henry versus Grevemberg; LSM-CR folder 1771/02/28–01, Debt collection of 28 February 1771 involving Martin Navarro, Joseph Petit, and Grevemberg; LOC Louisiana Miscellany, cont. 3 (1735–53), ff. 825–25v, 838–38v, Government accounts of 1748 regarding Grevemberg; and LOC Louisiana Miscellany, cont. 4 (1754–62), ff. 1369, Government account of 29 September 1760 regarding Grevemberg. Also see Forsyth, Louisiana Marriage Contracts, 119, 218; Deville, Attakapas, 39; NOCC vol. 1, 123; NOCC vol. 2, 140; and Conrad, The First Families, 1:124; 2:9, 59. 41. LSM-SCR folder 1763/10/01–02, Petition of 1 October 1763 by Chantalou regarding a debt by Grevemberg; LSM-SCR folder 1766/07/05–01, Sale of 5 July 1766 of Horn Island by Grevemberg to Thomas Augston, John Gregg, Michael Grant, John Farmar, David Tosar, Thomas Miller, Paul Miller, Christopher Miller, and Alexander Augston; ASP-PL vol. 3, 6–76, Land claims east and west of the Pearl River communicated to the House of Representatives on 5 January 1816; NONA Garic, bk. 2 (1771), f. 327, Grant of 14 November 1771 by Grevemberg of power of attorney to Juan Bautista Cavalier; and NONA Garic, bk. 2 (1771), f. 331, Grant of 22 November 1771 by dame Anne Judith widow of the dead Mr. Jean Baptiste Grevemberg to Leonardo Mezange. 42. AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 44; AGI-PC leg. 2358, f. 261; NONA Fernando Rodriguez, bk. 4 (1785), f. 216–22v, Posthumous notarization on 11 March 1785 of the last will and testament of Ledée; SLO Private Claims in Opelousas District, 12, Testimony of Andrew Martin; SMPC-OA vol. 4 (1784–85), no. 68, Estate sale of Ledée’s goods; SMPC-OA vol. 4 (1784–85), no. 101, Probate inventory of 2 May 1785 of Ledée’s property; LSA Opelousas Papers, Estate sale on 14 March 1786 of Ledée’s land; LSM-SCR folder 1762/03/08–04, Sale of 8 March 1762 of land by Jung to Ledée; LSM-CR folder 1770/08/23–02, Declaration of 23 August 1770 by François Chauvin Delary of a debt in favor of Ledée; LSM-CR folder 1783/08/03–01, f. 178, Certified copy of 31 March 1788 statement by Mallines; NONA Garic bk. 3 (1772), f. 95; and NONA Fernando Rodriguez, bk. 4 (1785), f. 216. Also see West, Atlas of Louisiana Surnames, 101; E. J. Ledet, Des Ledets de la Louisiane (Thibodaux, La.: Audrey B. Westerman, 1986), B2–B3; Charles R. Maduell, Marriage Contracts, Wills, and Testaments of the Spanish Colonial Period in New Orleans, 1770–1804 (New Orleans: Charles R. Maduell, 1969), 18; and NOCC vol. 4, 188. 43. AGI-SD leg. 2595, f. 22; TU-LLG, Grant of 13 June 1764 to Degoutin; LLMVC Uncataloged survey of 1799 by Trudeau for Jumonville de Villiers; SLO-SWD vol. 18, 198–99 and 202–3, Two plats for Deville Degoutin; SLO-SWD vol.

n o tes to pages 78–79    257 37, 153–56, Claim by Jumonville de Villiers; SLO-SWD vol. 40, 18, Claim by Jumonville de Villiers; SLO-SWD vol. 40, 150–53, Claim of the legal representatives of Alexandre del Homme; SLO Unlocated Claims Southwestern District Early 1800’s, 94–95, Copy of survey of 1799 by Charles Trudeau; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 109, Survey of 14 July 1799 by Trudeau; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 121, Claim by Jumonville de Villiers; LSM-SCR folder 1747/12/10–02; NONA Carlos Ximénez, vol. 10, f. 121, Marriage contract of 11 March 1796 between Joseph Deville Degoutin and Maria Josefa Adelaide Lalande Dalcour; NONA Almonester y Roxas bk. 3 (1773), ff. 334–40, 352v–54; NONA Garic bk. 4 (1773), ff. 148v–49v; NONA Garic bk. 5 (1774), f. 113; and NONA Garic bk. 6 (1775), ff. 88, 192, 205, 288. Also see Conrad, Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, 1:60; and NOCC vol. 1, 81; vol. 2, 93–94. 44. SMPC-OA vol. 1 (1760–79), no. 104, Marriage contract of 8 June 1779 between Antoine Bonin, the son, and Magdeline Prevot; SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 71–72, Marriage of 9 January 1779 between Antoine Bonin and Magdeline Prevot; SMT Registre de Enterrements (1787–1830), no. 217, Burial of 7 October 1800 of Anne Tellier; ULL Brand Book, 146, 339; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 43v; and AGI-SD leg. 2595, f. 11. Also see Conrad, The First Families, 2:166; Jacqueline Olivier Vidrine, Love’s Legacy: The Mobile Marriages Recorded in French, Transcribed, with Annotated Abstracts in English, 1724–1786 (Lafayette: University of Louisiana Press, 1985), 208–11; Johnnie Andrews, Fort Toulouse Colonials: A Compendium of the Colonial Families of Central Alabama, 1717–1823 (Prichard, Ala.: Bienville Historical Society, 1987), 3; Conrad, “Opelousas and the Alabama Immigrants,” 116–17; West, Atlas of Louisiana Surnames, 32–33; Deville, Attakapas, 6; BRCC vol. 2, 104; and Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of Mobile, 1704–1739 (Mobile: Archdiocese of Mobile, 2002), 169, 296. 45. AGI-PC, leg. 188C, f. 44; ULL Brand Book, 135; HNOC ms. 79, folder 2, Grant of 1 June 1768 to Sorrel by Ulloa; and Robin, Voyages dans l’Intérieur, 3:22–23. Also see Deville, Attakapas, 39; Conrad, Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, 1:254–55; and Gertrude C. Taylor, “Fortune and Misfortune: The Sorrel Family in Louisiana, 1763–1900,” Attakapas Gazette 21 (1986): 179–91. 46. SLO-SWD, vol. 53, 251–52, Claim of Valentine Landry of 29 December 1806; SMPC-BBA, 38; SMPC-OA vol. 1 (1760–79), no. 7, Election of 16 May 1770 of an assistant to Bérard; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 44v; and Robin, Voyages dans l’Intérieur, 3:22-23. Also see Deville, Attakapas, 55; Olivier Vidrine, Love’s Legacy, 319; Tamara D. McGinnis, “Last Will and Testament of Jean Bérard,” Attakapas Gazette 23 (1988): 81–83; and May Waggoner, “Will of Jean Bérard,” Attakapas Gazette 19 (1984): 127–38. 47. NONA Pedro Pedesclaux, vol. 30, f. 467, Notarization of 20 August 1797 of the last will and testament of André Jung; and AGNM-CV ser. 1, vol. 1, exp. 72, ff. 166–67v, Report of 14 March 1756 from Viceroy Amarillas to King Ferdinand VI regarding Blancpain. Also see Albert J. Robichaux, Louisiana Census and Militia Lists, 1770–1789 (New Orleans: Polyanthos Press, 1977), 19; Conrad,

2 5 8   n o t e s t o p a g e s 8 0 – 8 3 Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, 1:78–79; Allain and Cassidy, “Blancpain”; DeVille, Opelousas, 27; Burton and Smith, Colonial Natchitoches, 40; and David L. La Vere, “Between Kinship and Capitalism: French and Spanish Rivalry in the Colonial Louisiana–Texas Indian Trade,” Journal of Southern History 64 (1998): 197–218. 48. Robin, Voyages dans l’Intérieur, 3:21. 49. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 22–54. 50. Ibid., 43–44; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 9–10, 34–35, 40–45, 60, 171–75; and Ibrahima Seck, “The Relationships Between St. Louis of Senegal, Its Hinterland, and Colonial Louisiana,” in French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bradley G. Bond (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 265–90. For Bienville’s observation, see Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville, Iberville’s Gulf Journals, trans. Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 154–55. 51. AGI-SD leg. 2595, ff. 10v–11, 22. 52. SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 11, 38, 71, Baptisms of 1 September 1765 of Joseph and Marguerite, Baptism of 1 May 1773 of Angelique, and Baptism of 11 January 1779 of Honore; SMT Slave Register (1765–1818), 2, Baptisms of 1 September 1765 of Joseph and Marguerite; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 43v, which lists the ages of the three slaves in 1771 as thirty-six, forty, and forty-four; NONA Almonester y Roxas bk. 1 (1771), f. 99; NONA Garic bk. 2 (1771), ff. 150v–52v, 168–69, 169v–70, 222; NONA Garic bk. 4 (1773), ff. 150, 273; and LOC, Louisiana Miscellany, cont. 5 (1763–89), ff. 1585v. Also see entries for Dauterive in AHGD. 53. AGNM-CV ser. 1, vol. 1, exp. 119, ff. 289–91v, Letter of 22 July 1756 from Barrios to Viceroy Amarillas: “tiene más de veinte negros.” 54. SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 1–6, Marriage of 5 June 1756 of Marie and Jean, Baptisms of 5 June 1756 of Marie, Claudine, Jean, Therese, Marguerite, Victoire, Magdaleine, and Françoise, Baptisms of 18 February 1762 of Claude, Dominique, and Pierre, Baptisms of 2 June 1765 of Anne, Marianne, and Pierre; SMT Slave Register (1765-1818), 1, Baptism of 5 June 1756 of Claudine; and AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 44v. The baptismal record identifies Therese as Cancy, which meant Apache, according to William Brandon, Quivira: Europeans in the Region of the Santa Fe Trail, 1540–1820 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990), 123. Ingui represents the only known African name among the Attakapas slaves, the vast majority being common French names of the time or derived from classical figures such as César, Scipion, Cafar, and Oreste or from Catholic saints such as Serafin and Agobard. 55. SMT Slave Register (1765–1818), 1, Baptisms on 2 June 1765 of Anne, Pierre, Marianne, and Claudine; SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 4, 11, 16–17, 22–24, 38, 74, Baptism on 18 February 1762 of Claude, Baptisms on 1 September 1765

n o tes to pages 83–87    259 of Joseph and Marguerite, Baptisms on 21 April 1771 of Jean Baptiste, Catherine, and Rose, Marriage on 26 April 1771 of Françoise and Guillaume, Marriage on 30 April 1771 between Gabriel Fuselier de la Clair and Helene Soileau, Baptism on 13 July 1772 of Augustin and Félicité, Baptism on 4 May 1773 of Jean Pierre, and Baptism in 1788–90 of Serafin; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 47; and AGI-PC leg. 2358, ff. 260–61. On the Thiamba, see Paul E. Lovejoy, “Ethnic Designations of the Slave Trade and Reconstruction of the History of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, in Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman (London: Continuum, 2003), 9–42. DeVille, Gabriel Fuselier, transcribes the probate inventory of 1789 for Fuselier’s Baton Rouge property, which does provide references to African origins but is too removed from Attakapas in the 1760s to be relevant. 56. SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 6, 50–51, 73, Baptism on 2 June 1765 of Claudine, Baptism on 24 November 1776 of François, Baptism on 1 Dec 1776 of Alexandre, and Baptisms in 1788–90 of Jean Baptiste and Henry; SMT Slave Register (1765–1818), 5, Baptism on 7 April 1782 of Rossete, and Baptisms on 21 May 1782 of François Anselme and Charles; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 43v; and AGI-PC leg. 2358, f. 261. Other slaves named in the baptisms as being of Grevemberg’s succession are Pedro and Lorenzo. Evidence of Grevemberg’s purchase of eighty slaves in 1760 appears in LSM-SCR, folder 1763/10/01–02, Petition of 1 October 1763 by Chantalou regarding a debt by Grevemberg; most of them probably worked in his lumbering enterprise. 57. SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 16, Baptism on 8 January 1766 of Louise; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 44; AGI-PC leg. 2358, f. 261; and SMPC-OA vol. 4 (1784–85), nos. 68 and 1001, Estate sale of May–June 1785 of Ledée’s goods, and Probate inventory of 2 May 1785 of Ledée’s property. Also see entries for Ledée in AHGD. 58. SMT Slave Register (1765–1818), 73, Baptism on 1788–90 of Antoine; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 44v; AGI-PC leg. 2358, f. 267v; and McGinnis, “Last Will and Testament.” 59. SMT Vieux Registre de 1756–1794, 6, 11, 22, 24, Baptism on 2 June 1765 of Claudine, Baptisms of 1 September 1765 of Joseph and Marguerite, Marriage on 26 April 1771 of Françoise and Guillaume, and Baptism on 13 July 1772 of Félicité; and SMT Slave Register (1765–1818), 2, Baptisms of 1 September 1765 of Joseph and Marguerite. 60. NONA Almonester y Roxas bk. 3 (1773), ff. 352v–54, Sale of 30 December 1773 in New Orleans of Luisa by Degoutin to Juan Ruby. 61. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 66, 84-85, 120–21, 188. 62. Andrew H. Clark, Acadia: The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 132–76; and SLO-FSG, 8-9. 63. AGI-PC leg. 188A, exp. 2, ff. 7-8, Ordinance of 18 February 1770 by O’Reilly, in which he uses the terms “bêtes douces” for tame cattle, “bêtes maronnes” for feral cattle, and writes that the latter “infectée” the Attakapas; and Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 144, 171–72.

2 6 0   n o t e s t o p a g e s 8 8 – 9 2 64. Ibid., 96–100, 124; Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 178–79; Conrad, Land Records, 1:8; Glenn R. Conrad, “Friend or Foe?: Religious Exiles at the Opelousas Post in the American Revolution,” Attakapas Gazette 12 (1977): 137–40; Dolores Egger Labbé, “Anglo-Americans in Antebellum Attakapas and Opelousas,” Attakapas Gazette 21 (1986): 13–17; Glenn R. Conrad, ed., New Iberia: Essays on the Town and Its People (Lafayette: University of Louisiana Press, 1979); Robert S. Weddle, Changing Tides: Twilight and Dawn in the Spanish Sea, 1763–1803 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 91–99; and Mathè Allain, “Bouligny’s Account of the Founding of New Iberia,” Attakapas Gazette 14 (1979): 78–84, 124–31. 65. The figure reproduces an engraving of a Cajun cowboy from p. 389 of a copy of R. L. Daniels, “The Acadians of Louisiana,” Scribner’s Monthly 19, no. 3 (January 1880): 383–92 in LSU Libraries, Special Collections. 66. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 156–57, 184–89; Post, Cajun Sketches, 38–46; and Jones, Louisiana Cowboys, 17–35. Tejanos also contributed the tarabi, tarabilla in Spanish, to spin horsehair into bridles and other riding tack as well as an entire vocabulary related to ranching: cabresse for a horsehair rope, from the Spanish cabestro; corail for corral; couarte for a short bullwhip of plaited leather, from cuarta; acajac or acadiac for astride, from a horcajadas; and tasseau or tasso for cured meat, from tasajo. See Fred Kniffen, “The Western Cattle Complex: Notes on Differentiation and Diffusion, Western Folklore 12 (1953): 179–85; and Albert Valdman, ed., Dictionary of Louisiana French (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010). 67. Fred B. Kniffen and Sam B. Hilliard, Louisiana: Its Land and People (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 51–52. 68. AGI-PC leg. 2357, ff. 434–42, Diario del viaje de la ciudad a los Atakapas, Opelousas, y Natchitoches, 1769–1770; quote on f. 440: “que en lo habitado y desmontado a trechos para labor los habitaciones que hay; de modo que estas logran las inmediaciones de agua y bosque, viendo los intermedios de unas a otras espaciosas praderías, cubiertas de admirable pastos de yerba muy alta, fina, y limpia de abrojos, espinas, etc.” 69. Ibid., f. 439: “los bayous desbordados e inundada la tierra.” 70. AGI-PC leg. 2358, ff. 134–47v, Reports of 21 April, 16 May, 20 and 30 June, and 9 July 1779 from Bouligny to Galvez. 71. The figure transcribes a segment of SLO Land Claims vol. 22, 210, Claim of the Attakapas Church. Note that the names of landowners and minor property lines have been omitted. 72. LOC Louisiana Miscellany, cont. 10 (1777–1816 Trudeau letters), ff. 12–12v, Copy of 25 November 1795 petition by Attakapas landowners to Governor Carondelet, which recounts some aspects of their history of settlement and land use in the Attakapas. 73. Anonymous, A Visit to Texas: Being the Journal of a Traveller Through Those Parts Most Interesting to American Settlers (New York: Goodrich and Wiley, 1834), 179–94; quote on 193.

n o tes to pages 92–98    261 74. William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369–85; Christopher Morris, “How to Prepare Buffalo, and Other Things the French Taught Indians about Nature,” in French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bradley G. Bond (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 22–42; and Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 123–24. The figure reproduces the plate following p. 192 in a copy of Anonymous, A Visit to Texas in the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Collection of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History of the University of Texas. 75. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 109–20; and Robin, Voyages dans l’Intérieur, 3:28–31. 76. Michel Droit, La Camargue (Paris: Arthaud, 1961), 190–93, illustrates Camargue brands. 77. Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, 1:42; Post, “The Domestic Animals,” 559–63; and Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 84–85, 120–21. 78. Ibid., 109–20. CHAPTER FOUR. BARBUDA   1. P. H. A. Martin-Kaye, The Water Resources of Antigua and Barbuda (St. John’s, Antigua and Barbuda: Leeward Island Government, 1956); David R. Harris, Plants, Animals, and Man in the Outer Leeward Islands, West Indies: An Ecological Study of Antigua, Barbuda, and Anguilla (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); Richard J. Russell and William G. McIntire, Barbuda Reconnaissance (Baton Rouge: Institute for Coastal Studies, 1966); J. D. Mather, A Survey of the Ground Water Resources of Barbuda (London: Institute of Geological Sciences, 1971); Douglas Hall, Five of the Leewards 1834–1870: The Major Problems of the Post-Emancipation Period in Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis and St. Kitts (Saint Lawrence, Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1971); David Lowenthal and Colin Clarke, “Slave-Breeding in Barbuda: The Past of a Negro Myth,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 510–35; David Lowenthal and Colin Clarke, “Barbuda Alone,” Geographical Magazine 53 (1981): 465–70; David Lowenthal and Colin Clarke, “Triumph of the Commons: Barbuda Belongs to All Barbudans Together,” in Caribbean Land and Development Revisited, ed. Jean Besson and Janet Momsen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 147–58; Riva Berleant-Schiller, “Subsistence and Social Organization in Barbuda, West Indies” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1974); Riva Berleant-Schiller, “Production and Division of Labor in a West Indian Peasant Community,” American Ethnologist 4 (1977): 253–72; Riva Berleant-Schiller, “The Social and Economic Role of Cattle in Barbuda,” Geographical Review 67 (1977): 299–309; Riva BerleantSchiller, “Grazing and Gardens in Barbuda,” in The Keeping of Animals: Adaptation and Social Relations in Livestock Producing Communities, ed. Riva Berleant-Schiller and E. Shanklin (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman, 1983), 73–91; Riva Berleant-Schiller, “Environment, Technology, and the Catch: Fishing and

2 6 2   n o t e s t o p a g e s 9 8 – 1 0 3 Lobster Diving in Barbuda,” in The Fishing Cultures of the World, ed. Béla Gunda (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1984), 803–17; Riva BerleantSchiller, “Hidden Places and Creole Forms: Naming the Barbudan Landscape,” Professional Geographer 43 (1991): 92–101; Riva Berleant-Schiller, “Statehood, the Commons, and the Landscape in Barbuda,” Caribbean Geography 3 (1991): 43–52; David R. Watters, “Observations on the Historic Sites and Archaeology of Barbuda,” Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology 3 (1980): 125–54; Margaret T. Tweedy, “A History of Barbuda Under the Codringtons, 1738–1833” (M.A. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1981); David R. Watters and Desmond V. Nicholson, “Highland House, Barbuda: An 18th Century Retreat,” Florida Anthropologist 35 (1982): 223–42; Desmond V. Nicholson, Antigua, Barbuda, Redonda: An Historical Sketch (St. John’s, Antigua and Barbuda: Museum of Antigua and Barbuda, 1991); Brian Dyde, A History of Antigua: The Unsuspected Isle (London: Macmillan, 2000); Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988); and Robert Coram, Caribbean Time Bomb: The United States’ Complicity in the Corruption of Antigua (New York: William Morrow, 1993).   2. Figure based on Directorate of Overseas Surveys, Barbuda Topographic Map, 1:25,000 map scale, 2 sheets (Surbiton, Surrey: DOS, 1970).   3. 2001 Census of Population and Housing: Summary Social, Economic, Demographic, and Housing Characteristics (St. John’s, Antigua and Barbuda: Ministry of Finance and the Economy, 2004). For satellite images, see Google Earth at earth.google.com, accessed 20 July 2008.   4. Berleant-Schiller, “The Social and Economic Role”; and Berleant-Schiller, “Grazing and Gardens.”   5. Photograph of 4 June 2007 by Andrew Sluyter; Amy E. Potter stands beside the well.   6. Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 65–85, 109–10, did investigate possible cattle ranching on colonial Barbados but concluded that it was insignificant in scale and regional impact.   7. Ibid., 109–20, 184–89; Gary S. Dunbar, “Colonial Carolina Cowpens,” Agricultural History 35 (1961): 125–31; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Peter H. Wood, “ ‘It Was a Negro Taught Them’: A New Look at African Labor in Early South Carolina,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 9 (1974): 160–79; and Andrew Sluyter, “The Role of Black Barbudans in the Establishment of Open-Range Cattle Herding in the Colonial Caribbean and South Carolina,” Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009): 330–49.   8. César de Rochefort, Histoire Naturelle et Morale des Îles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Reinier Leers, 1658), 27–28: “Les Anglais, y ont une colonie de trois à quatre cens hommes, et y trouvent de quoi subsister commodément. Elle à ceci de fâcheux et de commun avec les iles d’Antigoa, et de Mont-serrat, que les Caraïbes de la Dominique et d’ailleurs, y sont souvent de grands ravages. L’inimitié que ces Barbares ont conceuë contre la nation

n o t es to pages 103–06    263

  9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

Anglaise est si grande, qu’il ne se coule presque aucune année, qu’ils ne fassent une ou deux descentes à la faveur de la nuit, en quelqu’un des iles qu’elle possédé.” Rochefort probably never visited the Caribbean himself, instead drawing on the unpublished accounts of those who had as well as on published sources; see Keith A. Sandiford, “Rochefort’s ‘History’: The Poetics of Collusion in a Colonizing Narrative,” Papers on Language and Literature 29 (1993): 284–302. W. L. Grant, James Munro, and Almeric W. Fitzroy, eds., Acts of the Privy Council of England: Colonial Series, 6 vols. (Hereford, UK: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1908–12), 1:520–22, An account of the Carybee Islands, 12 May 1669; quote on 521. BL Egerton 2395, ff. 529–30v, The State of the Leeward Islands read by committee 13 January 1675; quote on f. 530. UKNA-CO 1/36, no. 861, 3 April 1676 report of the Caribbee Islands by Colonel Philip Warner; and BL Egerton ms. 2395, ff. 533–34v, An account of the Caribby Islands from Colonel Warner on 3 April 1676; quote on ff. 534–34v. Alan Burns, History of the British West Indies (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954), 345; Harris, Plants, Animals, and Man, 79–85, 91; and David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1987), 115–17, 169. Hall, Five of the Leewards, 59–95; Harris, Plants, Animals, and Man, 9–10, 19–23, 35–39; Tweedy, A History of Barbuda, 78, 161–63; Nicholson, Antigua, Barbuda, Redonda, 21–27; and Vere L. Oliver, The History of the Island of Antigua, 3 vols. (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1894–99), 3:303. Maria Woodley Riddell, Voyages to the Madeira and the Leeward Caribbean Isles (Salem, Mass.: N. Coverly, 1802), 32–33; Henry N. Coleridge, Six Months in the West Indies, in 1825 (London: Thomas Tegg, 1841), 256; Mrs. Flannigan, Antigua and the Antiguans, 2 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1844), 1:71–72; Charles W. Day, Five Years’ Residence in the West Indies, 2 vols. (London: Colburn, 1852), 2:284–96; the account of Captain Greville in Thomas Southey, Chronological History of the West Indies, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), 3:522–24; the account by James Goodlet, who was shipwrecked on Barbuda in 1834, in the fourth edition of J. W. Norie, The West India Directory, 4 pts. in 1 vol. (London: Charles Wilson, 1857), pt. 1, 51–52; and Trelawney Wentworth, The West India Sketch Book, 2 vols. (London: Gilbert and Rivington 1835), 2:240–46; quote on 244. A map of 1813 also appears to show a walled well, symbolized as a square with a smaller square abutting one corner: UKNA-CO 700/ANTIGUA-8, The island of Barbuda as surveyed in 1813 by Captain Deckar, Royal Navy. Day, Five Years’ Residence, 2:289–90. Riddell, Voyages, 32–33. Greville in Southey, Chronological History, 3:523. The reference to the freshly castrated bull taking a new name appears to be to the use of specific terms to designate castrated livestock, for example, ox for a castrated bull and gelding for a castrated stallion.

2 6 4   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 0 6 – 0 7 18. Wentworth, West India Sketch Book, 2:245–46. Here the reference to taking a new name seems also to allude to that reportedly taken upon initiation into Freemasonry. 19. For eighteenth-and nineteenth-century accounts of the coleo in Venezuela and Mexico, see Pierre-Marie-François Pagès, Voyages Autour du Monde et Vers les Deux Pôles par Terre et par Mer, Pendant les Années 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1773, 1774, et 1776, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez Moutard, 1782), 1:112; Ramón Páez, Wild Scenes in South America: Or, Life in the Llanos of Venezuela (New York: Charles Scribner, 1862), 183–84; and Edward B. Taylor, Anahuac: Or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 71–72. 20. The approximately eighty-five hundred items in the Codrington Papers span the fifteenth century through the twentieth and long resided at that family’s Dodington House, near Bristol. They began to undergo dispersal beginning in 1948, when the philatelist Robson Lowe purchased 516 letters written to the Codringtons from the Caribbean between 1751 and 1855 because of their long series of early handstruck stamps. Lowe catalogued them and resold them piecemeal to diverse collectors; some refer to that group of documents as the Codrington Correspondence, and microfilm copies (one reel) survive at the Gloucestershire Archives, formerly the Gloucestershire Record Office, and in the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas at Austin (UT-F 24,995), donated in 1971 by the historian J. Harry Williams. In the 1960s the Codrington family placed most of their remaining documents in the Gloucestershire Archives, retaining only a few items for display at Dodington House. The Gloucestershire Archives then catalogued the collection, but Simon Codrington withdrew it to be sold at auction by Sotheby’s in 1980 to an anonymous collector for £106,000, despite a bid by the government of Antigua and Barbuda on the eve of that country’s independence. The Gloucestershire Archives subsequently bought back some of the Codrington Papers with funds raised in a public appeal. In 1984 the notorious international financier Bruce Rappaport bought others, particularly those pertaining to the Codringtons’ affairs in Antigua and Barbuda, donated them to the National Archives of Antigua and Barbuda, and built a modern archival facility in which to house them; that collection of documents, variously referred to as the Codrington Papers or the Codrington West Indian Estate Papers, ranges in date from 1668 to 1944 and consists of 3,459 documents organized into ten record groups—with Accounts, Correspondence, Estate, Plans and Maps, and Title Deeds being the most pertinent to my research. Export licensing requirements ensured that the British Library received a complete microfilm copy (thirty-seven reels) of the Codrington Papers. A partial microfilm copy (seven reels), made in the 1960s while the collection was at the Gloucestershire Archives and acquired by Williams has been in the Benson Latin American Collection since 1971. See Robson Lowe, The Codrington Correspondence 1743–1851 (London: Robson Lowe, 1951); Russell Chamberlain, Loot: The Heritage

n o t es to pages 107–08    265 of Plunder (New York: Facts on File, 1983), 185–226; and Coram, Caribbean Time Bomb, 182–83. 21. UT-F 24,995, Letters of 10 April 1756 from Samuel Martin to William Codrington, 29 December 1783, 1 April 1786, and 1 March 1787 from Dennis Reynolds to William Codrington, and 25 September 1804 from John James to Christopher Bethell-Codrington; NAAB-CP, Titles-9, Account by Dennis Reynolds of the stock supposed to be on the island as of 14 July 1792; NAAB-CPC-3, Letter of February 1720 by William Codrington; NAAB-CPC-5, Letter of 27 December 1740 from Benjamin King to Lady Codrington; NAAB-CPC-14/1, Letters of 16 August 1783 from William Codrington to Dennis Reynolds and of 29 September 1785 from William Codrington to Joseph Lyons Walrond; NAAB-CPC-17, Letters of 1 April 1792 from Dennis Reynolds to William Codrington and of 14 May 1792 from Dennis Reynolds to Christopher Bethell-Codrington; NAAB-CPC-20/1–4, Letters of 2 March, 17 June, 19 June, and 10 December 1790 and of February 1791 from Christopher Bethell-Codrington to William Codrington; NAAB-CPC-27/2, Letter of 5 November 1810 from Christopher Bethell-Codrington to Samuel Martin; NAAB-CPC-29, Letter of 30 August 1829 from R. Jarritt to Christopher BethellCodrington; NAAB-CPC-31, Letter of 16 March 1837 from John Winter to William Codrington; NAAB-CPC-52, Letters of 24 August, 22 September, and 12 December 1860 from a Mr. Holburn to William Codrington; and BL Add. ms. 41346, ff. 163–164v, Proposal for surrendering the lease as of 12 June 1756. 22. NAAB-CPC-11, Letter of 12 June 1779 from John Lindsay to William Codrington. 23. NAAB-CPC-24, Letter of 14 January 1817 from John James to Christopher Bethell-Codrington. 24. UT-F 24,995, Letters of 20 August 1783 and 1 April 1786 from Dennis Reynolds to William Codrington; NAAB-CPC-10, Letter of 18 July 1781 from Richard Clarke to William Codrington; NAAB-CPC-14/1, Letters of 16 August 1783 and 22 August 1784 from William Codrington to Dennis Reynolds; NAAB-CPC-17, Letters of 28 December 1781 from Dennis Reynolds to Richard Oliver and of 14 May 1792 from Dennis Reynolds to Christopher Bethell-Codrington; NAAB-CPC-24, Letter of 19 January 1817 from John James to Christopher Bethell-Codrington; NAAB-CPC-29, Letter of 16 December 1828 from Christopher Bethell-Codrington to R. Jarritt; and NAAB-CPA-5, Account books of 1779–82 for the island of Barbuda, especially the entries for 29 April, 6 May, 13 May, and 3 June 1779. 25. NAAB-CPC-5, Letter of 27 December 1740 from Benjamin King to Lady Codrington. 26. NAAB-CPC-29, Letter of 16 December 1828 from Christopher BethellCodrington to R. Jarritt. 27. NAAB-CPA-5, Account books for 1779–82 for the island of Barbuda, entry for 1 February 1781. 28. NAAB-CPC-17, Letter of 14 May 1792 from Dennis Reynolds to Christopher Bethell-Codrington.

2 6 6   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 0 8 – 1 4 29. UT-F 24,995, Letter of 5 April 1837 from J. Liggens to Christopher Codrington. 30. UT-F 24,995, Letters of 11 June, 24 August, and 27 and 28 September 1779, and of 29 July 1780 from Henri de Ponthieu to William Codrington. 31. NAAB-CPC-13, Letter of 17 June 1783 from Henri de Ponthieu to William Codrington. 32. The figure is based on NAAB-CPA-59, Undated anonymous map of Barbuda. Note that in the interests of clarity the figure omits many details such as place names, additional buildings, trails, toponyms, and gun batteries that appear on the original. 33. NAAB-CPC-13, Letter of 17 June 1783 from Henri de Ponthieu to William Codrington; and UT-F 24,995, Letters of 16 June 1773 from Timothy Clearkly to William Codrington, and of 1 April 1786 and 1 March 1787 from Dennis Reynolds to William Codrington. 34. BL Add. ms. 41346, ff. 11–12v, Letter of 18 October 1750 from Martin to Samuel Martin junior; quote on f. 11. 35. NAAB-CPA-4, List of 18 June 1766 of slaves on Barbuda; and NAAB-CPA-59, Account of 1 June 1783 for Barbuda. The three gangs typically consisted of the first gang, also known as the great gang, made up of young and middleaged men and women; the second gang of adolescent boys and girls as well as pregnant and lactating women; and the third gang of children as well as the elderly and infirm, also known as the grass, weeding, hogmeat, or piccaninnies gang. Size, strength, and health had more to do with assignment to a particular gang than gender or age. 36. UT-F 24,995, Letter of 1 April 1786 from Dennis Reynolds to William Codrington. 37. Amy E. Potter and Andrew Sluyter, “Renegotiating Barbuda’s Commons: Recent Changes in Barbudan Open-Range Cattle Herding,” Journal of Cultural Geography 27 (2010): 129–50. For the legislation and case law, see Fred Phillips, Commonwealth Caribbean Constitutional Law (London: Routledge Cavendish, 2002), 221–40; and The West Indies Act, 1967; The Antigua Termination of Association Order, 1981; The Antigua and Barbuda Modification of Enactments Order, 1981; and The Antigua and Barbuda Constitution Order, 1981 (Hereford, UK: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1967–81). 38. Potter and Sluyter, “Renegotiating Barbuda’s Commons,” 137–43. 39. Ibid., 145–46; and Government of Antigua and Barbuda, “The Barbuda Land Act, 2007,” Official Gazette 28, no. 5, 17 January 2008, 1–18, available at www.laws. gov.ag/bills/2007/The_Barbuda_Land_Act_2007.pdf, accessed 25 June 2010. 40. Photograph of 5 June 2007 by Andrew Sluyter. 41. The figure is based on sketches, measurements, and photographs of June 2007 by Andrew Sluyter. 42. U.S. Air Force, aerial photographs of 4 February 1958, focal length 0.5 feet, nominal altitude 12,000 feet; National Anthropological Archives (Suitland, Maryland), Riva Berleant-Schiller Papers, no. 2005–12, box 3, folder for Photographs from 1971; NAAB-CPA-59, Undated map of Barbuda; UKNA-CO

n o t es to pages 116–24    267 700/ANTIGUA-8, The island of Barbuda as surveyed in 1813; and photographs taken of Beazer Well and Spring Well in the early 1960s by David R. Harris. 43. Kenneth H. Beeson, “Indigo Production in the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 44 (1964): 214–18, describes how indigo processing required three vertically arranged troughs called the steeper, beater, and sludge vats. 44. UT-F 24,995, Letter of 5 April 1837 from J. Liggens to Christopher Codrington. 45. Interviews of June 2007; and National Anthropological Archives, Riva BerleantSchiller Papers, no. 2005–12. 46. Berleant-Schiller, “Subsistence and Social Organization,” 79, 84, 98, 104, 113, 115, 122. 47. Figure based on U.S. Air Force, aerial photographs of 4 February 1958; Directorate of Overseas Surveys, Barbuda Topographic Map, 1: 10, 000 map scale, 9 sheets (Surbiton, Surrey: DOS, 1970); and Barbuda Council, Codrington Village Road Map, 1:4,000 map scale (St. John’s, Antigua and Barbuda: Sun Printing and Publishing, 2007). Also see the satellite images available through Google Earth at earth.google.com, accessed 8 February 2008. 48. M. B. Lawrence, Preliminary Report, Hurricane Luis, 27 August–11 September 1995 (Miami: National Hurricane Center, 1996); 2001 Census of Population and Housing; and interviews of June 2007. 49. Interviews of June 2007. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Harris, Plants, Animals, and Man, 25–59; and John Francis, Carlos Rivera, and Julio Figureroa, Toward a Woody Plant List for Antigua and Barbuda: Past and Present (New Orleans: U.S. Forest Service, 1994). 53. UT-F 24,995, Letter of 10 April 1756 from Martin to William Codrington; and BL Add. ms. 41346, ff. 163–164v, Proposal for surrendering the lease as of 12 June 1756. 54. Lowenthal and Clarke, “Slave-Breeding in Barbuda”; Tweedy, A History of Barbuda, 15, 43, 208; and Burns, History of the British West Indies, 425. 55. NAAB-CPC-20/1, Letter of 2 March 1790 from Christopher Bethell-Codrington to William Codrington. 56. Vincent T. Harlow, Christopher Codrington 1668–1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928); J. Harry Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantations of Barbados, 1710–1838 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958); Oliver, History of the Island, 1:143–75; Lowenthal and Clarke, “SlaveBreeding in Barbuda”; and Nicholson, Antigua, Barbuda, Redonda, 22. 57. Tweedy, A History of Barbuda, 207–20, 231–41; and Nicholson, Antigua, Barbuda, and Redonda, 5–10, 22. 58. NAAB-CPA-4, List of 18 June 1766 of slaves on Barbuda. The same names appear but without ages or occupations, in the inventory of 1756: BL Add. ms. 41346, f. 165, List of Negroes properly belonging to Barbuda, taken the 10th of April 1756 by Doctor Brunsel, Manager.

2 6 8   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 4 – 3 0 59. NAAB-CPA-59, Negroes at Barbuda on 1 June 1783. 60. TSTD, accessed 29 May 2010. 61. NAAB-CPA-59, Negroes at Barbuda on 1 June 1783; NAAB-CP, Estate-16, Inventory and appraisement of 10 October 1746; and Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 164. 62. Table based on Oliver, History of the Island, 1:169; 3:252, 301, 303; Tweedy, A History of Barbuda, 265–66; and UT-F 24,995, Letters of 16 April 1743 from Simon Punter to Elizabeth Bethell, of 18 August 1752 from Mathew Meech to William Codrington, of 10 April 1756 from Martin to William Codrington, and of 1 June 1762, 25 April 1763, and 28 May 1764 from Samuel Redhead to William Codrington. Note that the last leaseholder named, the second William Codrington, died in 1792 and was succeeded by Christopher BethellCodrington, under whom Dennis Reynolds continued as manager until 1793 and J. L. Walrond continued as attorney until 1797. 63. On the figure, the open-range cattle areas derive from Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, fig. 13. 64. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, ser. 5, vol. 5 (1882): 255–60; and Oliver, History of the Island, 1:169; 2:150, 172–74; 3:68–70, 100–104, 231, 249–53. Oliver’s three volumes consist of the genealogies of the socially powerful in colonial Antigua and provide transcriptions of relevant primary documents such as the full text of letters and wills, censuses and land grants, and civil and church acts such as baptisms, marriages, and burials. 65. Oliver, History of the Island, 1:169; 3:146–54, 166–67, 253, 303. Nothing in NAAB Tudway Papers dates early enough to pertain to Barbuda during the late seventeenth century; but Somerset Record Office (Wells, UK) Tudway of Wells Antiguan Estate Papers, Annual Accounts of Parham Plantation, 1689–1731, and Letter Book, 1717–29 do include earlier records, albeit nothing directly relevant. 66. Harlow, Christopher Codrington; and Oliver, History of the Island, 1:143–75, 169. 67. Oliver, History of the Island, 2:95–111, 240–51; Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland, to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal in the Years 1774 to 1776, ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 259–73; Richard B. Sheridan, “Samuel Martin: Innovating Sugar Planter of Antigua, 1750–1776,” Agricultural History 34 (1960): 126–39; Samuel Martin, “An Essay Upon Plantership,” Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts 18 (1792 [circa 1750]): 236–308; BL Add. ms. 41346, Samuel Martin Letter Book, 1748–58, ff. 11–12v, 14–19v, 26–29v 20–21v, 30–35v, 42–43v, 56–59v, 62–63v, 66–67v, 70–71v, 73–76v, 135–36v, 146–49v, 154–55v, 161–62v, 197–200v, 203–5v, Letters of 18 October 1750 through 11 April 1758 from Martin to Martin junior, of 14 December 1757 from Martin junior to Martin; and of 25 November 1750 and 13 July 1751 from Martin and Byam to Martin junior; BL Add. ms. 41347, Samuel Martin Letter Book, 1759–67, ff. 13–14v, 21–24v, 45–47v, 55–56v, 63, 78–80v, 91–92v, Letters of 4 December 1759 through 1 July 1761 from Martin to Martin

n o tes to pages 131–36    269 junior, and of 28 August 1760 from Martin junior to Martin; and BL Add. ms. 41349, Samuel Martin Letter Book, 1756–62; ff. 41v, 53, 77–78v, 95, 108v-9, Letters of 11 April 1758 through 1 July 1761 from Martin to Martin junior, and of 12 March 1761 from Martin to Thomas Warner. 68. Oliver, History of the Island, 1:137–38; 2:125–27; 3:39–43. 69. Tweedy, A History of Barbuda, 46. 70. UT-F 24,995, Letters of 16 April 1743 from Simon Punter to Elizabeth Bethell, of 18 August 1752 from Mathew Meech to William Codrington, of 10 April 1756 from Martin to William Codrington, of 1 June 1762 from Samuel Redhead to William Codrington, of 25 April 1763 and 28 May 1764 from Samuel Redhead to William Codrington, and of 29 December 1783, 1 April 1786, and 1 March 1787 from Dennis Reynolds to William Codrington; BL Add. ms. 41346, ff. 165–66, A list of negroes properly belonging to Barbuda, and Letter of 18 March 1750 from William Savington, Stephen Blizard, William Mackinen, and Thomas Gravenor to Byam and Martin; BL Add. ms. 41347, f. 63, Letter of 4 January 1761 from Martin to Charles Baird; BL Add. ms. 41349, ff. 20v, 96, Letters of 10 May 1757 from Martin to Mr. Reed, and of 25 March 1761 from Martin to Charles Baird; NAAB-CPC-3, Letter of 16 August 1783 from William Codrington to Dennis Reynolds; NAAB-CPC-14/1, Letter of 2 January 1786 from William Codrington to Langford Lovell; NAAB-CPC-17, Letters of 1 April 1792 from Dennis Reynolds to William Codrington and of 14 May 1792 from Dennis Reynolds to Christopher Bethell-Codrington; NAAB-CPA-4, Antigua accounts for 1765–66; NAAB-CPA-4, List of Slaves on Barbuda on 18 June 1766; NAAB-CPA-6/1–7, Barbuda accounts for 1785–92; NAAB-CPA-6/1, Barbuda account for July 1785 to June 1786; Tweedy, A History of Barbuda, 39, 47; and Oliver, History of the Island, 1: cx, cxiii, cxix, 36–37, 75; 2:4–5, 75–79, 116–17; 3:342, 364. 71. Wentworth, West India Sketch Book, 2:246; and Greville in Southey, Chronological History, 3:523. 72. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 65–78, 78–84; and Verene A. Shepherd, “Livestock and Sugar: Aspects of Jamaica’s Agricultural Development from the Late Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century,” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 627–43. 73. BL Egerton ms. 2395, ff. 535–36v, Letter of 7 April 1676 from Philip Warner, with the first quote on f. 536; and Rochefort, Histoire Naturelle, 27, for the second quote: “Cette ile est abondante en poisson, en gibier, et en toute sorte de bétail domestique. Elle est habitée par sept ou huit cens hommes, et il ya comme en toutes les autres, qui sont entre les mains de cette nation, de bons et de savanes pasteurs, qui ont un grand soin des troupeaux qui leur sont commis.” 74. UKNA-CO 1/12, f. 152, Proposal by the governor and inhabitants of the island of Antigua, April 1656. 75. Grant, Munro, and Fitzroy, Acts of the Privy Council, 1:521. 76. BL Egerton 2395, ff. 529–30v, The State of the Leeward Islands read by committee 13 January 1675; Harris, Plants, Animals, and Man, 84–89, 98; Watts,

2 7 0   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 3 7 – 4 0 The West Indies, 289–91; Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry, table 5.1; Nicholson, Antigua, Barbuda, Redonda, 5–9; and Dyde, A History of Antigua, 8–16, 30–59. 77. Dunbar, “Colonial Carolina Cowpens”; and Jordan, North American CattleRanching, 109–20, 311–12. 78. Wood, Black Majority, 28–34; Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 79, 109–20; Sluyter, “Role of Black Barbudans,” 346–48; and Agnes Leland Baldwin, First Settlers of South Carolina, 1670–1700 (Easley, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, 1985). 79. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching, 112. 80. Wood, Black Majority, 31–32. 81. Thomas Nairne, “A Letter from South Carolina,” in Selling a New World: Two Colonial South Carolina Promotional Pamphlets, ed. Jack P. Greene (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 33–75. CHAPTER FIVE. THE PAMPAS For the epigraph, see La Gaceta Mercantil, no. 949, 9 January 1827, 3: “AVISO. Dos negros esclavos de D. José Hernández, llamados Nicolás y Manuel de edad mayor, se han fugado de la quinta donde estaban bien tratados, por lograr el conchabo diario; se ofrece 12 pesos por cada uno a quien los entregue a disposición del Sr. Juez de policía, con aviso la calle de la Piedad No. 97. Filiación: barba y cabeza canuda, pantalón blanco, chaqueta azul, poncho azul listado, por chiripá o caldo; sombrero negra de hule; estatura alta y más que regular.”   1. Biblioteca Rocha is the popular name for the Biblioteca Pública de la Universidad Nacional de la Plata because of its location on Plaza Rocha in La Plata, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires.   2. Key works on the blacks of the Pampas and broader Río de la Plata region include Homero Martínez Montero, “La Esclavitud en el Uruguay,” Revista Nacional 4 (1941): 121–267; Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, Negros Esclavos y Negros Libres (Montevideo: Gaceta Comercial, 1941); Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, El Negro en el Uruguay, Pasado y Presente (Montevideo: Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay, 1965 [1945]); Irene Diggs, “The Negro in the Viceroyalty of the Río De La Plata,” Journal of Negro History 36 (1951): 281–301; Elena F. S. de Studer, La Trata de Negros en el Río de la Plata Durante el Siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1958); Paulo de Carvalho Neto, El Negro Uruguayo (Quito: Editorial Universitaria, 1965); Ricardo Rodríguez Molas, “El Negro en el Río de la Plata,” Polémica 2 (1970): 38–56; Ema Isola, La Esclavitud en el Uruguay Desde sus Comienzos Hasta su Extinción, 1743–1852 (Montevideo: Comisión Nacional de Homenaje del Sesquicentenario de los Hechos Históricos de 1825, 1975); Marta B. Goldberg, “La Población Negra y Mulata de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1810–1840,” Desarrollo Económico 16 (1976): 75–99; Leslie B. Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 185–208; Lyman L. Johnson, “Manumision in Colonial Buenos Aires, 1776–1810,”

n o tes to pages 140–41    271 Hispanic American Historical Review 59 (1979): 258–79; George R. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Marta B. Goldberg and Silvia Mallo, “La Población Africana en Buenos Aires y Su Campaña: Formas de Vida y de Subsistencia (1750–1850),” Temas de África y Asia 2 (1993): 15–69; Carlos A. Mayo, Estancia y Sociedad en la Pampa, 1740–1820 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 1995), 135–50; Miguel A. Rosal, “Los Afroporteños, 1821–1825,” Revista de Indias 62 (2002): 143–72; Daniel Schávelzon, Buenos Aires Negra: Arqueología Histórica de una Ciudad Silenciada (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2003); Oscar Chamosa, “ ‘To Honor the Ashes of Their Forebears’: The Rise and Crisis of African Nations in the PostIndependence State of Buenos Aires, 1820–1860,” The Americas 59 (2003): 347–78; Miguel A. Rosal, “Diversos Aspectos Atinentes a la Situación de los Afroporteños a Principios del Período Post-Revolucionario Derivados del Estudio de Testamentos de Morenos y Pardos,” Revista de Indias 66 (2006): 393–424; and George R. Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). For recent review essays, see Claire Healy, “Afro-Argentine Historiography,” Atlantic Studies 3 (2006): 111–20; and Robert J. Cottrol, “Beyond Invisibility: AfroArgentines in Their Nation’s Culture and Memory,” Latin American Research Review 42 (2007): 139–56.   3. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, 170–73; Dina V. Picotti C., La Presencia Africana en Nuestra Identidad (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Del Sol, 1998), 130–31; Robert Farris Thompson, Tango: The Art History of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 91–95; José Hernández, El Gaucho Martín Fierro (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de La Pampa, 1872); José Hernández, La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (Buenos Aires: Librería del Plata, 1879); and José Hernández, El Gaucho Martín Fierro y La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2004 [1872–79]), 26, 149–55.   4. Noé Jitrik, José Hernández (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1971); Ricardo Zorraquín Becú, Tiempo y Vida de José Hernández, 1834–1886 (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1972); and José Hernández, Instrucción del Estanciero: Tratado Completo para la Planteación y Manejo de un Establecimiento de Campo Destinado a la Cría de Hacienda Vacuna, Lanar y Caballar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopeña Argentina, 1940 [1882]). Bonaerense is the adjectival form of both the city and province of Buenos Aires.   5. Goldberg and Mallo, “La Población Africana,” 44–49; Schávelzon, Buenos Aires Negra, plate following 104; Isola, La Esclavitud, 220–21; Mayo, Estancia y Sociedad, 135–50; Nicholas P. Cushner, Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial Argentina, 1650–1767 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 99–107; and Samuel Amaral, “Rural Production and Labour in Late Colonial Buenos Aires,” Journal of Latin American Studies 19 (1987): 235–78. Figure 5.1 comes from a copy of the color lithograph Corrales de Abasto in the author’s collection, originally published as one of thirty-six lithographs in César Hipólito Bacle, Trajes y Costumbres de la Provincia de Buenos-Aires (Buenos Aires: Bacle y Compañía, 1833); other copies of the lithograph, such as the one

2 7 2   n o t e s t o p a g e 1 4 1 in the Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Isaac Fernández Blanco in Buenos Aires, represent the gauchos as whites. The settlement and frontier locations in fig. 5.2 derive from Juan Carlos Walther, La Conquista del Desierto (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria, 1970), maps 1 and 2; and Patricio H. Randle, Atlas de Desarrollo Territorial de la Argentina, 2 vols. and 1 atlas (Buenos Aires: Asociación para la Promoción de los Estudios Territoriales y Ambientales, 1981), atlas, 23–24, 230–34.   6. For overviews of the history of the Pampas, see such classics as James R. Scobie, Argentina: A City and a Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Jonathan C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Patricio H. Randle, El Paisaje Pampeano: Percepción y Comportamiento Geográficos (Buenos Aires: Asociación para la Promoción de los Estudios Territoriales y Ambientales, 1981); as well as the more recent Gerardo Della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor, eds., A New Economic History of Argentina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and the monumental Félix Luna, Historia Integral de la Argentina, 10 vols. (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1994–97). Monographs and collections focused more closely on the rural Pampas include José Pedro Barrán and Benjamín Nahum, Historia Rural del Uruguay Moderno, 7 vols. (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1967–78); Romain Gaignard, La Pampa Argentina: Ocupación, Poblamiento, Explotación de la Conquista a la Crisis Mundial (1550–1930), trans. Ricardo Figueira (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Solar, 1989 [1979]); María M. Bjerg and Andrea Reguera, eds., Problemas de la Historia Agraria: Nuevos Debates y Perspectivas de Investigación (Tandil, Argentina: Instituto de Estudios Histórico Sociales, 1995); Juan C. Garavaglia, Pastores y Labradores de Buenos Aires: Una Historia Agraria de la Campaña Bonaerense, 1700–1830 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1999); Roy Hora, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Osvaldo Barsky, ed., Historia del Capitalismo Agrario Pampeano, 5 vols. (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2003–8); Raúl O. Fradkin and Juan C. Garavaglia, eds., En Busca de un Tiempo Perdido: la Economía de Buenos Aires en el País de la Abundancia, 1750–1865 (Buenos Aires: Prometo Libros, 2004); Marta Valencia, Tierras Públicas, Tierras Privadas: Buenos Aires, 1852–1876 (La Plata, Argentina: Editorial de la Universidad de La Plata, 2005); Osvaldo Barsky and Jorge Gelman, Historia del Agro Argentino: Desde la Conquista Hasta Fines del Siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Mondadori, 2005); and Adrián G. Zarrilli, ed., Clásicos del Mundo Rural Argentino: Relectura y Análisis de Textos (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2007). Those even more particularly concerned with ranching and gauchos include Horacio C. E. Giberti, Historia Económica de la Ganadería Argentina (Buenos Aires: Solar, 1961 [1954]); Ricardo Rodríguez Molas, Historia Social del Gaucho (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Maru, 1968); Richard W. Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Alfredo J. Montoya, Cómo Evolucionó la Ganadería en la Epoca del Virreinato (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1984); Samuel Amaral, The Rise of

n o t es to pages 142–45    273 Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Fernando O. Assunção, Historia del Gaucho (Buenos Aires: Claridad, 2007 [1999]); Osvaldo Barsky and Julio Djenderedijan, La Expansión Ganadera Hasta 1895, Historia del Capitalismo Agrario Pampeano, vol. 1; and Carmen Sesto, La Vanguardia Ganadera Bonaerense, 1856–1900, Historia del Capitalismo Agrario Pampeano, vol. 2.   7. David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), map 174; Studer, La Trata de Negros, 324–25; Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 45–46; and Liliana Crespi, “Comercio de Esclavos en el Río de la Plata Durante el Siglo XVII,” in Rutas de la Esclavitud en África y América Latina, ed. Rina Cáceres (San José: Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001), 101–13.   8. TSTD, accessed 11 January 2011. See Studer, La Trata de Negros, 325, on the large proportion of the slave trade to the Río de la Plata transshipped through Brazil; and Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Boston: Brill, 2007) on the Portuguese slave trade to Spanish South America more generally, particularly to Cartagena, which served as the principal Atlantic port for that trade.   9. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, 44–45, 66; Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation, 24; and Pereda Valdés, El Negro en el Uruguay, 46. Porteño refers to residents of Buenos Aires, deriving from its status as the principal port of the Río de la Plata. 10. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, 47–54, 66; Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation, 6–8; George R. Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85–150; and Lucía D. Molina and Mario L. López, “Afro-Argentineans: ‘Forgotten’ and ‘Disappeared’—Yet Still Present,” in African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, ed. Sheila S. Walker (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 332–47. 11. Isola, La Esclavitud, 220–21; Mayo, Estancia y Sociedad, 135–50; Cushner, Jesuit Ranches, 99–107; Slatta, Gauchos, 35; and Amaral, “Rural Production and Labour,” 271–75. 12. Goldberg and Mallo, “La Población Africana,” 19: “La campaña circundante la ciudad y cercana a una frontera incierta y móvil poblada por el indio y por los desertores de la ‘civilización,’ ha sido considerada tradicionalmente como un espacio habitado por blancos y mestizos. Se supuso además que era escasa allí la población Africana por el alto costo de los esclavos en el Río de la Plata que no hacia rentable su utilización en las tareas rurales. Los últimos estudios demuestran por el contrario que los esclavos son un elemento fundamental en el desarrollo de la estancia en las áreas rurales.” 13. César A. García Belsunce, ed., Buenos Aires, Su Gente, 1800–1830 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1976) provides detailed analysis of several early nineteenthcentury censuses and appends tables drawn from some of them, including the rural census of 1815 preserved in AGNA-DG, Padrón de Agosto de 1815 de la

2 7 4   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 4 5 – 5 0 campaña de Buenos Aires (sala X, 8–10–4). Also see Juan Carlos Garavaglia and José Luis Moren, eds., Población, Sociedad, Familia y Migraciones en el Espacio Rioplatense: Siglos XVIII y XIX (Buenos Aires: Cántaro, 1993); Walther, Conquista del Desierto; and Fernando Barba, Frontera Ganadera y Guerra con el Indio (La Plata, Argentina: Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 2003). The other categories include china, cholo, carioca, and zambo, but all of them together amount to only 1.1 percent of the total population and therefore do not warrant disaggregation. The seventeen partidos included are Matanza, Morón, Quilmes, San Isidro, San José de Flores, San Fernando, Areco Arriba, Arrecifes, Baradero, Pergamino, Pilar, San Nicolás, San Pedro, Chascomús, Lobos, Magdalena, and San Vicente-Monte-Ranchos; the seven partidos excluded owing to the lack of extant detailed enumerations are Cañada de la Cruz, Fortín Areco, Fortín Luján, Fortín Navarro, San Antonio de Areco, Villa de Luján, and Tordillo-MonsalvoMontes Grandes; note that the return for Lobos is incomplete and that the partidos of 1815 only partially correspond to those of the present, for example, the Federal District incorporated San José de Flores. 14. The tabulated statistics derive from García Belsunce, Buenos Aires, 281. 15. Ibid., 287. 16. The graphed statistics derive from ibid., 281. 17. Ibid., 287. 18. Ibid., 185, 193–95, 287–91; Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 38–53; Mayo, Estancia y Sociedad, 135–50; and Juan C. Garavaglia, “Tres Estancias del Sur Bonaerense en un Período de ‘Transición’ (1790–1834),” in Problemas de la Historia Agraria, 79–123. 19. Martínez Montero, La Esclavitud, 256; and Emilio Ravignani, ed., Territorio y Población (1778–1810), vol. 12 of Documentos Para la Historia Argentina, ed. Ricardo Rodolfo Caillet-Bois and Emilio Ravignani, 46 vols. (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1919), foldout table after p. 388. 20. Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 230–32, table C.1. 21. Goldberg and Mallo, “La Población Africana,” 44–49; Isola, La Esclavitud, 220–21; Mayo, Estancia y Sociedad, 135–50; and Carlos A. Mayo, “Landed But Not Powerful: The Colonial Estancieros of Buenos Aires (1750–1810),” Hispanic American Historical Review 71 (1991): 761–79. Many of the partial colonial censuses and related documents for the city and countryside of Buenos Aires from 1726 through 1810 as well as the census of 1780 for the city and countryside of Montevideo are published in Emilio Ravignani, ed., Padrones de la Ciudad y Campaña de Buenos Aires (1726–1810), Territorio y Población: Padrón de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (1778), and Territorio y Población (1778–1810), vols. 10–12 of Documentos Para la Historia Argentina, ed. Ricardo Rodolfo Caillet-Bois and Emilio Ravignani, 46 vols. (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1919–55). 22. Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, Historia del Descubrimiento, Población y Conquista de las Provincias del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Imprenta y Librería de Mayo, 1882 [1612]), 30: “Este puerto fue poblado antiguamente de los Conquistadores, y

n o tes to pages 150–52    275 por causas forzosas que se ofrecieron, vinieron a despoblar, donde parece que dejaron cinco yeguas y siete caballos, los cuales el día de hoy ha venido a tanto multiplico, en menos de 60 años, que no se puede numerar, porque son tantos los caballos y yeguas, que parecen grandes montañas, y tienen ocupados desde el Cabo Blanco hasta el Fuerte de Gaboto, que son más de 80 leguas, y llegan adentro hasta la Cordillera.” 23. Florian Paucke, Hin und Her: Hin Süsse und Vergnügt, Her Bitter und Betrübt, 2 vols. (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1959 [1779]), vol. 1, plate 20, following p. 320, and plate 25, following p. 384; and vol. 2, plates 34, 40a, 45, and 47, following p. 1101. For a description of gauchos using the desjarretadera in 1740, see George Anson, A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV, 5th ed. (London: George Anson, 1749 [1748]), 65. For an illustration of gauchos using the desjarretadera, see the painting Representa el Modo de Enlazar El Ganado Vacuno en los Campos de Buenos Aires by Fernando Brambilla, which dates to the Alejandro Malaspina Expedition of 1789–94 and is reproduced in José del Pozo Bonifacio del Carril, La Expedición Malaspina en los Mares Americanos del Sur (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1961). 24. Anson, Voyage Round the World, 65–66. 25. For contemporary illustrations of the use of boleadoras and lassos, see John Miers, Travels in Chile and La Plata, Including Accounts Respecting the Geography, Geology, Statistics, Government, Finances, Agriculture, Manners and Customs and the Mining Operations in Chile, Collected During a Residence of Several Years in These Countries, 2 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1826), 1:88–89 and plate 2, following p. 88. 26. Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow, 23, 170–71; Oscar Schmieder, “Alteration of the Argentine Pampa in the Colonial Period,” University of California Publications in Geography 2 (1927): 303–21; Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 159–61; Alberto Soriano, “Río de la Plata Grasslands,” in Natural Grasslands: Introduction and Western Hemisphere, ed. Robert T. Coupland, vol. 8A of Ecosystems of the World, ed. D. W. Goodall, 36 vols. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1992), 367–407; H. Doggett, “Sorghum,” in Evolution of Crop Plants, ed. N. W. Simmonds (London: Longman, 1976), 112–17; Carlos Berg, “Sobre Plantas Europeas que se Encuentran al Estado Silvestre en las Repúblicas Argentina y Oriental,” Anales de la Sociedad Científica Argentina 4 (1877): 30–33; Carlos Berg, “Enumeración de las Plantas Europeas que se Hallan Como Silvestres en la Provincia de Buenos Aires y en Patagonia,” Anales de la Sociedad Científica Argentina 3 (1877): 183–206; Ernestus Gibert, Enumeratio Plantarum Sponte Nascentium Agro Montevidensi (Montevideo: Asociación Rural del Uruguay, 1873), 119; Carlos Spegazzini, “Notes for a Short Summary of the Agricultural and Pastoral Flora of the Argentine Republic,” in Agricultural and Pastoral Census of the Nation: Stock-Breeding and Agriculture in 1908, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires: Argentine Meteorological Office, 1909), 3:455–86; Teodoro Stuckert, Contribución al Conocimiento de las Gramináceas Argentinas

2 7 6   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 5 2 – 5 5 (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Buenos Aires, 1904), 111–12, 420; and José Arechavaleta, “Las Gramíneas Uruguayas,” Anales del Museo de Historia Natural de Montevideo 1 (1894): 29–581; quote on 376: “vive en terrenos arenosos baldíos, orillas de senderos, abunda sobre todo en la costa del Río de la Plata.” 27. Walter Prescott Web, The Great Plains (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1931), 229. 28. Gordon McL. Dryden, Animal Nutrition Science (Cambridge, Mass.: CABI International, 2008), 85–135. 29. Ibid., table 8.4. 30. Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (La Plata, Argentina), Mercedes de Tierras Hechas por los Gobernadores, vol. 1, f. 26: “Torres de Vera, Adelantado Gobernador y Capitán General que fue en estas provincias, hizo merced en el real nombre a Sebastián Sánchez Cataplasma en el Río de Lujan, jurisdicción de esta ciudad, de esta banda del río de una estancia de tierras de tres mil varas de medir de frente y legua y media la tierra adentro, que había de lindar con la estancia última de dicho río arriba.” 31. The acts by Garay and the first Cabildo of Buenos Aires that specify the grants of estancias do not survive except as subsequent copies, for example, in AGI Escribanía de Cámara leg. 846A; and AGI Audiencia de Charcas leg. 33. Published versions based on those copies agree in all but some details. See Acuerdos del Extinguido Cabildo de Buenos Aires, 4 ser., 47 vols. (Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación, 1907–34), ser. 1, vol. 2, xxxvii–lix; Pedro de Angelis, Colección de Obras y Documentos Relativos a la Historia Antigua y Moderna de las Provincias del Río de la Plata, 8 vols. (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado, 1836–37), vol. 3, pt. 2, 3–8; Pedro de Eduardo Madero, Historia del Puerto de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Buenos Aires, 1939 [1902]), 258–65, 412–26; and Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, Garay: Fundador de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Municipalidad de la Capital Federal, 1915), 51–73. The acta de repartimiento gives the widths as 3,000 varas and lengths as 1.5 leguas, with each legua legal consisting of 5,000 Castilian varas of 0.836 meters, resulting in estancias of 7,524 by 2,508 meters, nominally 7.5 by 2.5 kilometers; see Juan Alvarez, Temas de Historia Económica Argentina (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1929), 158–65. 32. AHG-MOP, Registro gráfico de los terrenos de propiedad pública y particular de la provincia de Buenos Aires, septiembre 25 de 1830. For contemporary descriptions of the Great Drought, see Carl Skogman, Viaje de la Fragata Sueca ‘Eugenia,’ (1851–1853): Brasil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Perú, trans. Kjell Henrichsen (Buenos Aires: Solar, 1942 [1855]), 79–80; and Charles Darwin, Journal and Remarks, 1832–1836, vol. 3 of Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836, ed. Robert Fitzroy, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 155–57. 33. José Andrés Carrazzoni, Crónicas del Campo Argentino (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional y Veterinaria, 1997), 220. 34. Ibid., 219–20; José Maria Jurado, “La Estancia en Buenos Aires,” Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina 9 (1875): 33–38, 66–68, 153–55, 185–89, 217–21; Juan

n o t es to pages 156–58    277 M. Lope Blanch, “Antillanismos en la Nueva España,” in Actas del IV Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Eugenio de Bustos Tovar, 2 vols. (Salamanca, Spain: Universidad de Salamanca, 1982), 2:147–56; and Gabriela C. Pastor, “Patrimonio, Vivienda y Agua en el Paisaje del Noreste Mendocino,” in Uso y Gestión del Agua en Tierras Secas, ed. Alicia Fernández Cirelli and Elena María Abraham (Mendoza, Argentina: Programa Iberoamericano de Ciencia y Tecnología para el Desarrollo, 2005), 79–92. 35. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, “Ecosistemas y Tecnología Agraria: Elementos Para una Historia Social de los Ecosistemas Agrarios Rioplatenses, 1700–1830,” Desarrollo Económico 28 (1989): 548–75; Juan Carlos Garavaglia and Jorge D. Gelman, “Rural History of the Río De La Plata, 1600–1850: Results of a Historiographical Reconnaissance,” Latin American Research Review 30 (1995): 75–105; Mayo, Estancia y Sociedad, 39–41; Jurado, “La Estancia,” 35; Noel H. Sbarra, Historia de las Agudas y el Molino (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria, 1973 [1961]), 88; K. D. White, Farm Equipment of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 47; Enrique Rapela, Conozcamos lo Nuestro (Buenos Aires: Cielosur, 1977), 72–73; John P. Olsen, “Water-Lifting,” in Handbook of Ancient Water Technology, ed. Örjan Wikander (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000), 217–302; and Jacinta Palerm Viqueira, “El Bimbalete o Shaduf,” in Antología Sobre Pequeño Riego: Sistemas de Riego no Convencionales, ed. Jacinta Palerm Viqueira (Mexico: Colegio de Posgraduados, 2002), 325–40. 36. On Chilavert’s proposal, see Acuerdos del Extinguido Cabildo, ser. 4, vol. 1, 67–68, 75–76. 37. William MacCann, Two Thousand Miles’ Ride Through the Argentine Provinces, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1853), 1:55–56. 38. Figure 5.4 reproduces a detail of plate 1 in a copy of Carlos E. Pellegrini, “Máquinas Hidráulicas Rurales en las Provincias Litorales Argentinas,” Revista del Plata 1, no. 4 (1853): 51–52, in the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas at Austin. Figure 5.5 reproduces plate 5 in a copy of Godofredo Daireaux, “Estancias in Argentina,” in Agricultural and Pastoral Census, 3:1–51, in the Middleton Library at Louisiana State University. 39. Jurado, “La Estancia,” 35–36: “Se hacía con la mayor facilidad de una piel de ternero o de potrillo sacada entera del animal, sin cortaduras longitudinales, de modo que venía a formar una especie de saco sin costuras. Se le ponía un arco de hierro en la boca formada en la piel de la parte trasera y volcaba por la abertura del pescuezo y de las patas delanteras. Por medio de una soguita, que desde la abertura del cuello se ataba a la soga de tiro, el balde salía doblado conservando así el agua tomada en el pozo, hasta que estirando la soga de tiro volcaba solo una gran cantidad de agua, extraída de cualquiera profundidad. Uno de estos baldes duraba de quince a veinte días, y como había muchos animales a la mano era repuesto con mucha facilidad y a poca costa.” 40. Pellegrini, “Maquinas Hidráulicas,” 51–52; Jurado, “La Estancia,” 36; Hernández, Instrucción del Estanciero, 134–37; Pastor, “Patrimonio”, 87; Tito Saubidet, Vocabulario y Refranero Criollo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Guillermo

2 7 8   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 5 9 – 6 0 Kraft, 1943), 197–200; and Carlos Moreno, Patrimonio de la Producción Rural en el Antiguo Partido de Cañuelas (Buenos Aires: Fundación Arquitectura y Patrimonio, 1991), 88–93. The Museo Pampeano in Chascomús and the museum of the Guardia el Juncal, about halfway between San Vicente and Monte (see fig. 5.2), preserve parts of such devices. 41. Adolfo Dorfman, Historia de la Industria Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Solar, 1970 [1942]), 74–77; Fernando Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert: Industrialization in Argentina During the Export Boom Years, 1870–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 16–48; La Gaceta Mercantil, no. 5,809, 31 January 1843, 1, for an advertisement for mangas de lona; Anales de Agricultura de la República Argentina 2, no. 12 (15 June 1874) through 4, no. 23 (1 December 1876), for advertisements for a balde volcador called La Bonaerense manufactured by E. F. Carreras y Compañía in Buenos Aires; AHG-MOP Registro de Patentes Industriales, 1855–63, ff. 61, 109, 204, 261–62, Patente de 12 abril 1858 a Miguel Casbas para la máquina hidráulica para alzar agua denominada Torno-Argentino, Patente de 21 enero 1862 a Carlos Dartis para una máquina para alzar agua, Patente de 2 mayo 1865 a Roger y Maillard para un balde de alzar agua, and Patente de 28 marzo 1863 a Carlos Beaudett y Fernando Arual para un sifón para extraer agua de pozos y jagüeles; AHG-MOP Informes de la Oficina de Patentes Industriales, 1858–61, f. 166, Pedido para un patente el 26 diciembre 1859 por Señor Vernet para una bomba circular excéntrica; and AHG-MOP Informes de la Oficina de Patentes Industriales, 1862–63, ff. 5, 29, Patente de 20 diciembre 1862 a François Robert para un volcador hidráulico. 42. Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 74–75, 103–5; Olsen, “Water-Lifting,” 267–70; Hernández, Instrucción del Estanciero, 133–34; Sesto, La Vanguardia, 105–7; Moreno, Patrimonio de la Producción, 96–99; Anales de Agricultura de la República Argentina 3, no. 22 (15 November 1875) through 4, no. 24 (15 December 1876) for an advertisement for a noria called Salvación del Campo manufactured by Felipe Schwarz y Hermano in Buenos Aires; and Anales de Agricultura de la República Argentina 30, no. 7 (31 July 1895) through 31, no. 1 (31 January 1896) for an advertisement for a noria called the Excelsior built by the Carlos Zamboni fabrication shop in Buenos Aires. 43. Webb, The Great Plains, 337–41; James D. Horan, The Great American West (New York: Crown Publishers, 1959), 195–97; Terry G. Jordan, “Evolution of the American Windmill: A Study in Diffusion and Modification,” Material Culture 5 (1973): 3–12; Allen G. Noble, “Windmills in American Agriculture,” Material Culture 24 (1992): 1–12; Sbarra, Historia de las Agudas, 152–55, 172–77; Sesto, La Vanguardia, 108; Anonymous, “Instrumentos de Agricultura,” Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina 18 (1884): 130–31; Agricultural and Pastoral Census, 1:407; Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina 19–29 (1885–95) for an advertisement for a Halladay windmill manufactured by the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company of Batavia, Illinois, and imported by Phillips y Burrows of

n o t es to pages 160–63    279 Buenos Aires; Anales de Agricultura de la República Argentina 30–34 (1896–99) for an advertisement for an Aermotor windmill manufactured by the Aermotor Company of Chicago, Illinois, and imported by Agar, Cross, y Compañía of Buenos Aires; and Anales de Agricultura de la República Argentina 15–34 (1881–1900) for an advertisement for a windmill manufactured by the Andrew J. Corcoran Company of New York and imported by Miguel Lanús of Buenos Aires. 44. Pellegrini, “Maquinas Hidráulicas,” 51: “Hace como treinte años hace que un Español llamado Lanuze [sic]. . . . inventase su Valde [sic] sinfondo.” Note that Pellegrini spelled the name with a terminal e instead of an a, i.e., Lanuze instead of Lanuza. 45. Ibid., 52: “Proponemos un cubo de hierro, cobre, o madera, de forma cilíndrica, que se vuelque por sí mismo.” 46. Jurado, “La Estancia,” 35; Sbarra, Historia de las Agudas, 45–46; Carrazzoni, Crónicas del Campo, 221; Gaignard, La Pampa Argentina, 124; Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 147; Barsky and Djenderedijan, La Expansión Ganadera, 159; Julio Djenderedijan, La Agricultura Pampeana en la Primera Mitad del Siglo XIX, vol. 4 of Historia del Capitalismo Agrario Pampeano, 281–82; and Alejo B. Gonzalez Garaño, Elena Sansinena de Elizalde, and Carlos Ibarguren, C. E. Pellegrini: Su Obra, Su Vida, Su Tiempo (Buenos Aires: Amigos del Arte, 1946), 11–29. 47. The figure reproduces a detail of the plate on p. 680 of a copy of Engelbert Kaempfer, Amoenitatum Exoticarum Politico-Physico-Medicarum (Paris: Lemgoviæ, 1712) in the Rare Books Collection, Tulane University Special Collections. 48. The figure reproduces part of plate 4, following p. 88 in vol. 1, of a copy of Charles de Lasteyrie, Collection de Machines, d’Instruments, Ustensiles, Constructions, Appareils, etc. Employés dans l’Économie Rurale, Domestique et Industrielle, 2 vols. (Paris: Arthus Bartrand, 1823–24 [1820–21]) in the American Philosophical Society Library; see 1:86 for the quote: “Quelques voyageurs parlent de la manière dont on élève l’eau destine aux irrigations dans quelques parties de l’Orient.” 49. The figure is based on two photographs taken between 1951 and 1955 among the Tuareg of southern Algeria, Mali, and Niger in Johannes Nicolaisen, Ecology and Culture of the Pastoral Tuareg, with Particular Reference to the Tuareg of Ahaggar and Ayr (Copenhagen: National Museum of Copenhagen, 1963), figs. 132a and 132b. Also see Olsen, “Water-Lifting,” 222–25; and Jacques Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 305–6. 50. AGNA-DG, Solicitudes de 1827 (sala X, 14–5–3), unnumbered exp., Entry of 28 November 1826 recording the request by Lanuza: “un balde de invención sin fondo, el cual conduce tanta cantidad de agua como 8 baldes juntos, el cual representa ofrece dar pruebas de sus invenciones y pide el privilegio exclusivo de hacerlos por cinco anos.” 51. Ibid., Entries of 29 November 1826 appointing a commission, of 18 December 1826 reporting the findings of the commission, and of 23 December 1826

2 8 0   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 6 4 – 1 6 7 affirming the award of the patent. The Bonaerense Office of Industrial Patents produced three volumes of documents over the 1850s–60s, which contain a record of inventions, albeit few illustrations or detailed descriptions: AHG-MOP Registro de Patentes Industriales, 1855–63; AHG-MOP Informes de la Oficina de Patentes Industriales, 1858–61; and AHG-MOP Informes de la Oficina de Patentes Industriales, 1862–63. 52. La Gaceta Mercantil, no. 950, 10 January 1827, 3; La Gaceta Mercantil, no. 951, 11 January 1827, 4; and AGNA-DG, Solicitudes de 1827 (sala X, 14–5–3), unnumbered exp., Entries of 2 March through 2 April 1827 regarding unlicensed use of the balde sin fondo, and Letter of 15 March 1827 from Miguel Casal to Hipólito Videla, Chief of Police. 53. WorldCat, newfirstsearch.oclc.org, accessed 21 March 2011. 54. Ravignani, Documentos Para la Historia Argentina, vols. 10–12; AGI Casa de la Contratación; Entrada de Pasajeros a Argentina Siglo XIX, www. guiagenealogica.com, accessed 25 March 2011; and AGNA-DG, Entradas de Pasajeros al Puerto de Buenos Aires (sala X 36–8–13, 36–8–14, 36–8–15), Padrón de Agosto de 1815 de la Campaña de Buenos Aires (sala X, 8–10–4), Resumen General de Agosto de 1815 de los Habitantes de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (sala X, 8–9–3), and Padrón de 1827 de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (sala X 23–5–5, 23–5–6), with Lanuza appearing in the enumeration for “Quartel No. 5, Manzana No. 15.” Note that street names in Buenos Aires changed over the nineteenth century, as recorded in the city plans of 1822, 1840, and 1859 in Horacio A. Difrieri, ed., Atlas de Buenos Aires, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Bueno Aires, 1981), vol. 2, plates 30, 34, 39. Present-day Calle del Perú and its extension north of Avenida Rivadavia, Calle de la Florida, bore those same names in the 1820s. During the mid-nineteenth century, however, Calle del Perú was Calle de los Representantes, Calle de Florida was Calle del Perú, and Avenida Rivadavia was Calle de la Federación. After the census of 1855, the street names reverted to their earlier forms. The house-numbering system also changed in 1877 from the colonial system of fifty numbers per block to double that number. The address of Calle del Perú 226 therefore seems to have been in the block of present-day Peru Street between Belgrano and Venezuela Streets. 55. AGNA-DG, Solicitudes de 1827 (sala X, 14–5–3), unnumbered exp., Entry of 18 December 1826 reporting the findings of the commission: “el balde sin fondo, dice la Comisión que aunque no es una idea nueva, más que cualquiera que sea su origen es en este país una invención tanto más útil, cuanto que por su sencillez y poco costo se generalizará rápidamente.” 56. Ibid., Entry of 29 November 1826 appointing a commission, and Letter of 2 December 1826 from Santiago Bevans to the Minister or State; and Sbarra, Historia de las Agudas y el Molino, 50–51. 57. José Luis Burgueño, ed., Catálogo General de Mensuras de la Provincia de Buenos Aires Existentes en el Archivo de la Repartición Desde 1824 al 30 de Junio de 1944 (La Plata: Archivo de la Dirección de Geodesia, Catastro y Tierras, 1945); Primer

n o tes to pages 167–71    281 Censo Nacional, 1869; and Censo de 1855 de las Parroquias de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Both censuses are available through the Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Salt Lake City, Utah), wiki. familysearch.org, accessed 25 March 2011. 58. AGNA-DG, Solicitudes de 1827 (sala X, 14–5–3), unnumbered exp., Entry of 18 December 1826 reporting the findings of the commission: “dice que ha vista en la quinta de Vergara”; Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Mercedes de Tierras Hechas, vol. 1, ff. 10v-12v, 16–23, 40v–42, 58–62, 63v–65, 75–75v, 88v–89, 91–92v, 96v–98, 116–17, 125v–26, 127–29, 131–34, 137–39, 140–41v, 166–67v, 178v–79v, 181v–84, 189v–91v, 208–16, 225v–27, 260v–63v, 265–68; AGNA-DG, Padrón de Agosto de 1815 de la campaña de Buenos Aires (sala X, 8–10–4); Macarena Perusset, Contrabando y Sociedad en el Río de la Plata Colonial (Buenos Aires: Editorial Dunken, 2006), 46–50; and Sandra Olivero, “Los Andaluces en el Río de la Plata, Siglos XVII y XVIII,” Contrastes: Revista de Investigación en Historia Moderna 13 (2008): 123–38. C H A P T E R S I X . T H E TASAJO T R A I L For the epigraph, see Thomas R. Dawley, “Havana After Three Years,” Outlook 69 (1901): 728–30.   1. Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998), 281–82; Miguel A. Rosal, “La Exportación de Cueros, Lana y Tasajo a Través del Puerto de Buenos Aires Entre 1835 y 1854,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 55 (1998): 565–88; Alfredo J. Montoya, Historia de los Saladeros Argentinos (Buenos Aires: Raigal, 1956); Pedro Seoane, La Industria de las Carnes en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Pedro Seoane, 1928), 91–101; José Pedro Barrán and Benjamín Nahum, Historia Rural del Uruguay Moderno, 7 vols. (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1967–78), vol. 1, pt. 1, 48–52, 91–117; Domènec Guimerà i Mariné, Els Vaixells de Fusta (Barcelona: Ketres, 1986), 86; Marc J. Prohom Durán and Mariano Barriendos Vallvé, “Los Diarios de Navegación Catalanes: Una Nueve Fuente de Datos Climáticos Sobre los Océanos (Siglos XVIII a XX),” in El Clima Entre el Mar y la Montaña, ed. Juan Carlos García Codrón, Concha Diego Liaño, Pablo Fernández de Arróyabe Hernáez, Carolina Garmendia Pedraja, and Domingo Fernando Rasilla Alvarez (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2004), 519–28; Marc J. Prohom Durán, “El Uso de los Diarios de Navegación Como Instrumento de Reconstrucción Climática: La Marina Catalana del Siglo XIX,” Investigaciones Geográficas 28 (2002): 89–104; Xavier Moret i Ros, L’Edat d’Or dels Grans Velers (Barcelona: Museu Marítim de Barcelona, 1997), 63; and Andrew Sluyter, “The Hispanic Atlantic’s Tasajo Trail,” Latin American Research Review 45 (2010): 98–120.   2. Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 250–83; Ricardo Pillado, “The Meat Industry of the Argentine Republic: History of Its Past and Present Progress,” in Agricultural and Pastoral Census of the Nation: Stock-Breeding and Agriculture in 1908, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires: Argentine Meteorological Office, 1909), 3:328–29;

2 8 2   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 7 1 – 7 3 Horacio C. E. Giberti, Historia Económica de la Ganadería Argentina (Buenos Aires: Solar, 1961 [1954]), 83–97; Alfredo J. Montoya, Cómo Evolucionó la Ganadería en la Epoca del Virreinato (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1984), 303–8; Montoya, Historia de los Saladeros, 10–26; and Seoane, Industria de las Carnes, 91–101. The word charqui, sometimes rendered as charque and, in English, as jerky or jerked beef, derives from Quechua and means “sun-dried meat”; in Spain, cecina means “salted, sun-dried beef” or “pork”; and carne salada means “salted meat” in general but particularly refers to beef soaked in brine and then packed into barrels between layers of coarse salt, or corns, from which corned beef derives its name, if not its manufacturing process. Platense is the adjectival form of Río de la Plata, referring to the lower drainage basin of that river and its two major tributaries, the Río Paraná and the Río Uruguay, including parts of what now constitute Uruguay and the Argentinean provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Entre Ríos.   3. The figure derives from statistics in Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 281–82, table C.1; Barrán and Nahum, Historia Rural, vol. 1, pt. 1, 48–52, 94; and Jacobo de la Pezuela, Diccionario Geográfico, Estadístico, Histórico, de la Isla de Cuba, 4 vols. (Madrid: Mellado, 1863–66), 2:36. Some earlier statistics for Montevideo appear in Horacio Arredondo, “Los ‘Apuntes Estadísticos’ del Dr. Andrés Lamas,” Revista del Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay 6 (1928): 25–195, but while the figure of 1,644 metric tons given for 1829 seems reasonable, those for the early 1840s are astronomically high for the period, up to nearly 31,000 metric tons, prompting exclusion of all of the statistics from this source. Many of the historical statistics are in quintales, equivalent to 100 Castilian pounds or 46.04 kilograms; others are in arrobas, a quarter of a quintal; throughout, a conversion factor of 0.25 converts arrobas to quintales, and a conversion factor of 46 converts quintales to kilograms   4. Clifton B. Kroeber, The Growth of the Shipping Industry in the Río de la Plata Region, 1794–1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 66–74.   5. Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 67–68; Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 89–101; David R. Murray, “Statistics of the Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790–1867,” Journal of Latin American Studies 2 (1971): 131–49; Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790– 1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jock H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 162–67, fig. 7.2; Reinaldo Funes Monzote, From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History Since 1492, trans. Alex Martin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008 [2004]), 127–204; and TSTD, accessed 15 February 2010. The order of magnitude of the Cuban slave population is certain despite the limits on precision owing to reliance on the census of 1861, which records 370,553 slaves and 232,493 free blacks.

n o tes to pages 173–75    283   6. Alexander von Humboldt, Essai Politique sur l’Ile de Cuba, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie de Gide Fils, 1826), 1:211–12: “On donne aux esclaves du tasajo (viande séchée au soleil) de Buenos-Ayres et de Caracas; de la morue sale (bacalao), quand le tasajo est trop cher.” Humboldt first landed in Havana on 19 December 1800, traveled throughout the island, and departed on 19 March 1801 for Cartagena; then, on his way from Veracruz to Philadelphia in 1804, he again visited Havana, staying from 19 March to 29 April.   7. Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage aux Régions Équinoxiales de Nouveau Continent, Fait en 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, et 1804, par Al. de Humboldt et A. Bonpland, Relation Historique, 3 vols. (Paris: Chez J. Smith, 1814–25), 3:103; Fernando Ortiz, Los Negros Esclavos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975 [1916]), 204, 442–49; Johanna von Grafenstein Gareis, “La Habana, Veracruz y Puebla en el Negocio de Harinas y Víveres, 1750–1810: El Tema, su Historiografía y Fuentes para su Estudio,” América Latina en la Historia Económica 18 (2002): 127–42; J. S. Otto and N. E. Anderson, “Cattle Ranching in the Venezuelan Llanos and the Florida Flatwoods: A Problem in Comparative History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (1986): 672–83; Elisée Reclus, Colombia, trans. Javier Vergara y Velasco (Bogotá: Papelería de Samper Mátiz, 1893 [1850s]), 329; Manuel Moreno Fraginals, The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760–1860 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976 [1964]), 55; and Un Montuno, Cartilla Práctica del Manejo de Ingenios o Fincas Destinadas a Producir Azúcar (Irún, Spain: Imprenta de la Elegancia, 1862), 71–72. On the relative caloric contents of tasajo and bacalao and minimum caloric requirements, see Shahla Shapouri, Stacey Rosen, Birgit Meade, and Fred Gale, Food Security Assessment, 2008–09 (Washington: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2009), 40; and Seoane, Industria de las Carnes, 152–64, 203, but recognize that Seoane sought to promote Uruguayan tasajo exports and that necessary caloric intake differs greatly among individuals, depending on variations in cuisine, environment, work, culture, and metabolism.   8. Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 220; David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1987), 176–77; and Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 49–50.   9. The figure derives from the statistics in Pillado, “The Meat Industry,” 330, 365–66; Francisco Latzina, “Argentine Trade: Past and Present,” in Agricultural and Pastoral Census, 3:545–93; and Eduardo Acevedo, Notas y Apuntes: Contribución al Estudio Historia Económica y Financiera de la República Oriental del Uruguay, 2 vols. (Montevideo: El Siglo Ilustrado, 1903), 2:14–23. 10. Levi Marrero, Cuba: Economía y Sociedad, 15 vols. (San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Madrid, Spain: Editorial Río Piedras and Editorial Playor, 1972–92), 12:165–67; and Félix Erénchun, Anales de la Isla de Cuba: Diccionario Administrativo,

2 8 4   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 7 6 – 7 7 Económico, Estadístico y Legislativo, 4 vols. (Havana: Imprenta del Tiempo and Imprenta de la Antilla, 1856–61), 1:336–37, Decreto del Superintendente de 13 de Junio de 1852 fijando reglas para la descarga de los buques tasajeros. For exports from Buenos Aires during the 1850s, see the monthly summaries of export statistics in the Buenos Aires weekly British Packet and Argentine News, no. 1,224, 9 February 1850 through no. 1,628, 2 January 1858, which, when summed, agree nearly exactly with the annual totals published in Daniel Maxwell, Planillas Estadísticas de la Exportación en los Años desde 1849 a 1862 (Buenos Aires: Bernheim and Boneo, 1863); in some years as little as 54 percent went to Cuba and in others as much as 75 percent, but the overall dominance of the Cuban over the Brazilian market is clear, with an annual average of 64 percent of all the “jerked beef,” meaning tasajo, shipped from Buenos Aires going to “the Havana,” meaning Cuba; the remainder went to Brazil except for the 1.84 metric tons shipped to Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands in January 1854, which is excluded from the calculations. For the import statistics for Cuba, 1850–57, see Pezuela, Diccionario Geográfico, 2:36. Comparisons of metric tons of tasajo exported to Cuba from Buenos Aires versus those imported into Cuba from all suppliers are 11,685 (84 percent) versus 13,953 for 1850; 12,458 (78 percent) versus 15,893 for 1851; 13,620 (93 percent) versus 14,532 for 1852; 9,485 (81 percent) versus 11,700 for 1853; 11,105 (70 percent) versus 15,834 for 1854; 6,938 (44 percent) versus 15,731 for 1855; 8,728 (44 percent) versus 15,216 for 1856; 10,458 (59 percent) versus 17,693 for 1857; and 84,477 (70 percent) versus 120,552 for 1850–57. Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 281–82, fig. 12.35, uses different sources to estimate that during the period 1849–54, 84.7 percent of Cuba’s tasajo imports came from Buenos Aires and that the following proportions of all of its tasajo exports went to Cuba: 59 percent in 1822, 44 percent in 1842, 63 percent in 1851, 64 percent in 1862, and 50 percent in 1872. 11. Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 73–75; Barrán and Nahum, Historia Rural, vol. 1, pt. 1, 116–17, 130–39, 623–29; Clarence F. Jones, “Argentine Trade Developments,” Economic Geography 2 (1926): 358–93; Clarence F. Jones, “The Trade of Uruguay,” Economic Geography 3 (1927): 361–81; Luis Bértola and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Globalization in Latin America Before 1940,” in Bulmer-Thomas, Coatsworth, and Cortés Conde, Cambridge Economic History, 2:11–56; José Pedro Barrán and Benjamín Nahum, “Uruguayan Rural History,” Hispanic American Historical Review 64 (1984): 655–73; Lilia Inés Zanotti de Medrano, “Un Ciclo Comercial en la Cuenca del Plata (1825–1920),” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 18 (1992): 219–39; Richard M. Morse, “The Development of Urban Systems in the Americas in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 17 (1975): 4–26; Nathan Lake, “Argentina,” in Richard M. Morse, ed., Las Ciudades Latinoamericanas, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1973), 2:59–78; and Seoane, Industria de las Carnes, 134, 216. 12. Miguel Barnet, Biografía de un Cimarrón (Barcelona: Ediciones Ariel, 1968), 21–22, 61; Esteban Montejo was born about 1860 and died in 1973, at the age of

n o t es to pages 177–80    285 113. Seoane, Industria de las Carnes, 232–36, provides twenty recipes that use tasajo. 13. Alejo Carpentier, El Siglo de las Luces (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1967 [1962]), 19: “Pero el tasajo, sin equívoco posible, olía a tasajo: tasajo omnipresente, guardado en todos los sótanos y trasfondos, cuya acritud reinaba en la ciudad, invadiendo los palacios, impregnando las cortinas, desafiando el incienso de las Iglesias, metido en las funciones de ópera. El tasajo, el barro y las moscas eran la maldición de aquel emporio, visitado por todos los barcos del mundo, pero donde solo las estatuas—pensaba Carlos—paradas en sus zócalos mancillados de tierra colorada, podían estar a gusto.” 14. Humboldt, Essai Politique sur l’Île, 1:12: “L’odeur du tasajo ou de la viande mal séchée empestait souvent les maisons et les rues tortueuses.” 15. Dawley, “Havana After Three Years,” 728. 16. Charles Darwin, Journal and Remarks, 1832–1836, vol. 3 of Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836, ed. Robert Fitzroy, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 141. 17. Alcides d’Orbigny, Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale, Exécuté Pendant les Années 1826, 1827, 1828, 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832 et 1833, 9 vols. (Paris: Chez P. Bertrand, 1835–47), 2:151–55; quote on 155: “Là, un taureau qui expire; ici, un corps encore intact, mais inanimé, des carcasses décharnées, des lambeaux de chairs dispersés; et tout cela au milieu des éclats de rire des ouvriers et des cris des oiseaux de proie attires par la curée, et volant au-dessus, en attendant leur tour, ou disputant aux chiens les parties qu’on leur abandonne.” 18. Ibid., 2:152: “avec une adresse et une promptitude difficiles à croire.” 19. The figure comes from a copy of the color lithograph El Saladero, here reproduced in grayscale, in the author’s collection, originally published as part of a collection of lithographs in Juan León Palliere, Escenas Americanas (Buenos Aires: Litografía Pelvinian, 1864). Also see Vidal’s watercolor El Matadero del Sudoeste en Buenos Aires in the Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori and Pellegrini’s color lithograph El Matadero in the Museo Histórico de la Ciudad, both in Buenos Aires 20. Pillado, “The Meat Industry,” 330, 365–66; Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, table C.1; and Humboldt, Voyage aux Régions Équinoxiales, 1:103. Ramón Páez, Wild Scenes in South America: Or, Life in the Llanos of Venezuela (New York: Charles Scribner, 1862), 33–34; and Carl Sartorius, Mexico: Landscapes and Popular Sketches, trans. Thomas Gaspey (London: Trübner, 1859 [1852]), 184, describe tasajo production in the tropics as reliant more on solar drying than salting, producing something more akin to charqui than the Platense tasajo. Seoane, La Industria, 184–85, estimates a reduction from live weight to tasajo of approximately 19–24 percent, so that a 500-kilogram live steer yielded 250 kilograms of meat and 100–120 of tasajo, and a 380- to 420-kilogram cow yielded 80 kilograms of tasajo; and Barrán and Nahum, Historia Rural, vol. 1, pt. 1, 102–3, suggest a maximum of 380 kilograms for Uruguayan cattle before breeding began to produce larger cattle in the late nineteenth century

2 8 6   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 0 – 8 3 and a range of 53–67 kilograms of tasajo per head, or 1 metric ton for every 15–19 head slaughtered. The estimate of a reduction to 17–18 percent of the live weight seems reasonable given that current beef industry literature suggests that cattle yield about 38 percent of their live weight in boneless cuts and that some 70 percent of the remaining weight constitutes water, yielding absolutely dry meat amounting to 11 percent of the live weight; see U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service Factsheet, Water in Meat and Poultry (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2007); and Duane M. Wolf, “Did the Locker Plant Steal Some of My Meat?,” The Shepherd 44, no. 1 (1999): 12–13. 21. Dawley, “Havana After Three Years,” 728. 22. Jose Manuel Barat, A. Andújar, A. Andrés, A. Arguelles, and Pedro Fito, “Salting Studies During Tasajo Making,” in Osmotic Dehydration and Vacuum Impregnation Applications in Food Industries, ed. Pedro Fito, Amparo Chiralt, Jose Manuel Barat, Walter E. L. Spiess, and Diana Behsnilian (Lancaster, Pa.: Technomic Publishing, 2001), 171–83. 23. The figure comes from a copy of Thomas J. Hutchinson, Buenos Ayres and Argentine Gleanings (London: Edward Stanford, 1865) in the collection of the author; engraving on p. 30. 24. Carl Skogman, Viaje de la Fragata Sueca “Eugenia,” (1851–1853): Brasil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Perú, trans. Kjell Henrichsen (Buenos Aires: Solar, 1942 [1855]), 73–74; Carlos E. Pellegrini, “Saladeros y Fábricas de Grasa,” Revista del Plata 1, no. 3 (1853): 32–33; Thomas Woodbine Hinchliff, South American Sketches: Or, a Visit to Rio Janeiro, the Organ Mountains, La Plata, and the Parana (London: Longman, 1863), 67–72; William MacCann, Two Thousand Miles’ Ride Through the Argentine Provinces, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1853), 1:211–15; Richard A. Seymour, Pioneering in the Pampas, Or the First Four Years of a Settler’s Experience in the La Plata Camps (London: Longmans, 1869), 118–20; Charles B. Mansfield, Paraguay, Brazil, and the Plate: Letters Written in 1852–1853 (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1856), 164–65; Hutchinson, Buenos Ayres, 30–33; Xavier Marmier, Lettres sur l’Amérique, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1851), 2:248–50; Eduardo Olivera, “Los Restos de Nuestros Saladeros y de Su Rol en la Agricultura Europea,” Revista del Plata, ser. 2, no. 4 (1861): 80–83; Wilfred Latham, The States of the River Plate (London: Longmans, 1866), 9–13; Thomas J. Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation and Paraguay (New York: Harper, 1859), 323; Justo Corta, “Memoria,” Revista de la Asociación Rural del Uruguay, no. 44, 1 October 1874, 182–84; and Dr. Von Corning, “Life in a Saladero,” Household Words: Conducted by Charles Dickens 2, no. 44 (1851): 417–20. 25. MacCann, Two Thousand Miles’ Ride, 1:211–15; Seymour, Pioneering in the Pampas, 118–20; Hutchinson, Buenos Ayres, 31–33; Marmier, Lettres sur l’Amérique, 2:248–50; Latham, The States, 9–13; Page, La Plata, 323; and Dr. Von Corning, “Life in a Saladero,” 417–20. 26. Mansfield, Paraguay, 164–65.

n o t es to pages 183–86    287 27. M. G. Mulhall and E. T. Mulhall, Handbook of the River Plate, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Standard Printing Office, 1869), 2:93. 28. Jonathan C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 112; Graciela Silvestri, El Color del Río: Historia Cultural del Paisaje del Riachuelo (Quilmes, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2003), 158–61; and Seymour, Pioneering in the Pampas, 120. The phrase saladeros perfeccionados means “perfected salt works” and probably originates with Pellegrini, “Saladeros y Fábricas,” 33. 29. Lake, “Argentina,” 62; Montoya, Historia de los Saladeros, 77–78, 83–86; Silvestri, El Color del Río, 155–73; Alberto S. J. de Paula, Ramón Gutiérrez, and Graciela María Viñuales, Del Pago de Riachuelo al Partido de Lanús (La Plata, Argentina: Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 1974), 90–92; and José Hernández, Instrucciones del Estanciero: Tratado Completo para la Plantación y Manejo de un Establecimiento de Campo Destinado a la Cría de Hacienda Vacuna, Lanar y Caballar (Buenos Aires: Carlos Casavalle, 1882), 33. 30. Morse, “Development of Urban Systems,” 8; Barrán and Nahum, Historia Rural, vol. 1, pt. 1, 98; Seoane, Industria de las Carnes, 98; and Jones, “The Trade of Uruguay,” 368. 31. The figure reproduces an engraving from a copy of Emilio Daireaux, “Viage al Río de la Plata: Tres Meses de Vacaciones,” La Ilustración, Periódico Semanal de Literatura, Artes y Ciencias, no. 389, 15 April 1888, 252–53, in the Davis Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Daireaux’s account of his travels in South America appeared in forty-five installments in this Barcelona weekly, starting with no. 364 on 23 October 1887 and ending with no. 411 on 16 September 1888. For an engraving of the outside of such a saladero, see Elisée Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie Universelle: La Terre et les Homes, 19 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1875–94): 19:577. 32. Francisco Cestino, Apuntes Para la Historia del Partido de la Ensenada, 1821–1882 (La Plata, Argentina: Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 1949 [1882]), 119–21; François S. Jones, “The Tasajo, or Dried-Beef, Industry in the River Plata Countries,” Consular Reports: Commerce, Manufactures, Etc. 61, nos. 228–31 (1899): 575–83; Albert W. Swalm, “Uruguayan Commerce with Cuba,” Consular Reports: Commerce, Manufactures, Etc. 71, nos. 268–71 (1903): 520–21; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry for the Year 1899 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), 399–404; and Anonymous, “Los Estados Unidos en Cuba: Nuestro Tasajo,” Anales de Agricultura de la República Argentina 34, no. 7 (31 July 1899): 211–14. The reports ultimately concluded that U.S. producers would not be able to compete because they lacked a domestic source of cheap, lean, unbred cattle. 33. Seoane, Industria de las Carnes, 165–83, provides a detailed description of tasajo production in Uruguay in the early twentieth century, including numerous photographs.

2 8 8   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 6 – 8 9 34. Woodbine Parish, Buenos Ayres and the Provinces of the Río de la Plata (London: John Murray, 1839), 346–48; jerked beef rather than jerk beef was the more common British term for tasajo. 35. Arredondo, “Apuntes Estadísticos,” 109; and Kroeber, Growth of the Shipping, 123. The numbers in Kroeber’s tables do not always reconcile but remain the best estimates to date. The figures might include repeated visits to a given port by the same vessel. 36. UKNA-FO 6/28, General correspondence from consuls in Buenos Aires for 1829, ff. 66, 70; and UKNA-FO 6/49, General Correspondence from consuls in Buenos Aires for 1835, f. 65. 37. Amaral, Rise of Capitalism, 261–66; Jones, “Tasajo, or Dried-Beef,” 577; Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, 43–44; Mulhall and Mulhall, Handbook, 1:164–76; US Department of Agriculture, Sixteenth Annual Report, 403–4; Harold F. Peterson, Argentina and the United States, 1810–1960 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1964), 143–45, 155–56, 230–31, 343–46; and William E. Curtis, Trade and Transportation between the United States and Spanish America (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1889), 65–87, 74–75, 202–3. Curtis identifies another possibility, namely, that European vessels carried cargoes from Buenos Aires to Río de Janeiro for transshipment to the United States aboard the vessels of the U.S.–Brazil Mail Steamship Company; that shipping line did not call at Cuba, however. 38. Kroeber, Growth of the Shipping, 127. 39. Ibid., 123; Curtis, Trade and Transportation, 72–75; and Ana Zaefferer de Goyeneche, La Navegación Mercante en el Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1987), 227–65. 40. Franklin W. Knight, “The Social Structure of Cuban Slave Society in the Nineteenth Century,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 259–66; quote on 263. 41. Franklin W. Knight, “Origins of Wealth and the Sugar Evolution in Cuba, 1750–1850,” Hispanic American Historical Review 57 (1977): 231–53; Carlos Martínez Shaw, Cataluña en la Carrera de Indias, 1680–1756 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1981), 144–63; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “National Economy and Atlantic Slavery: Protectionism and Resistance to Abolitionism in Spain and the Antilles, 1854–1874,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (1998): 603–29; Jesús Ma Valdaliso, “The Rise of Specialist Firms in Spanish Shipping and Their Strategies of Growth, 1860 to 1930,” Business History Review 74 (2000): 267–300; Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla, Los Marqueses de Comillas, 1817–1925: Antonio y Claudio López (Madrid: LID, 2000); and César Yáñez, “Los Negocios Ultramarinos de Una Burguesía Cosmopolita: Los Catalanes en las Primeras Fases de la Globalización, 1750–1914,” Revista de Indias 66 (2006): 679–710. 42. Luís Almerich Sellarès, Barcelona y el Mar: Panorama Histórico desde el Siglo IX al XX (Barcelona: Ediciones Librería Millá, 1945), 55–58; Kroeber, Growth of the Shipping, 123, 126; and Zaefferer de Goyeneche, La Navegación Mercante, 249–51.

notes to page 189    289 43. Guimerà i Mariné, Els Vaixells de Fusta, 86; Yáñez, “Los Negocios Ultramarinos”; Josep M. Fradera, “La Participació Catalana en el Tràfic d’Esclaus (1789–1845),” Recerques 16 (1984): 119–39; Josep M. Fradera, ed., Catalunya i Ultramar: Poder y Negoci a les Colònies Espanyoles (1750–1914) (Barcelona: Ambit Serveis, 1995), 53–63, 214–18; Arcadi Garcia i Sanz, Història de la Marina Catalana (Barcelona: Editorial Aedos, 1972), 422–41; and Joan Alemany and Àngels Casanovas, La Navegació a Catalunya (Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona, 1987), 216–22. 44. Durán and Barriendos Vallvé, “Los Diarios de Navegación,” 521–22. Those historical climatologists have inventoried 579 logbooks archived in seventeen maritime and other museums and begun to assess their potential for reconstructing wind direction and sea condition for the Atlantic in the nineteenth century; see Grup de Climatologia and Grup d’Anàlisi de Situacions Meteorològiques Adverses, Universitat de Barcelona, Diarisnavegacio.mdb (Microsoft Access database, 2001). Most of the logbooks pertain to voyages unrelated to tasajo, whether voyages directly between Catalan ports and the Caribbean or voyages to Veracruz, Manila, or various Mediterranean ports. That database provided the basis for selection of the five logbooks analyzed in this chapter. 45. The table and figure derive from AHMM no. 22, Cuaderno de Bitácora de la Goleta Pronta; AHMM no. 25, Cuaderno de Bitácora del Bergantín Soberano; AHMS no. 1, Cuaderno de Bitácora de la Polacra Teresina; BC mss. 1506 and 1508, Cuadernos de Bitácora de la Corbeta Villa de Tossa; and BC no. 1507, Cuaderno de Bitácora del Bergantín Pepe. The number of crew tabulated does not include the captain but does include all other officers. The logbook of the Teresina does not distinguish between the cargoes loaded in Barcelona and those in Málaga, and it does not give the specific ports in Puerto Rico or the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, but the latitudes and longitudes on arrival and departure indicate San Juan and Recife. The cargo loaded onto the Pepe in Barcelona cannot be distinguished from that loaded in Málaga; and cargo information also comes from AGNA-DG, Entradas de Ultramar 1851 (sala X, 36–5–22), 18 April 1851, no. 36, Bergantín español Pepe; and AGNA-DG, Salidas de Ultramar 2 enero de 1850 a 5 septiembre de 1851 (sala X, 36–6–6), 16 May 1851, no. 40, Bergantín español Pepe. The logbook of the Villa de Tossa does not specify the penultimate or ultimate ports, but the latitude and longitude on departure imply Havana, and the sighting of Cape Espertal, at the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, on the final folio of the logbook implies Barcelona as the ultimate destination. The logbook of the Pronta does not specify the next port after Marseille, so Barcelona is an assumption. Geographic Information System software, ArcMap 9.3.1 (Redlands, Calif.: Environmental Systems Research Institute, 1999), facilitated compiling the daily, noontime positions from the logbooks and plotting them on a Robinson Projection; note that before plotting, the longitudes recorded in the logbooks were normalized to the Greenwich prime meridian from those of Cádiz (6° 18’ west) and San Fernando (6° 12’ west), as applicable. The hurricane zone encompasses the area described by the

2 9 0   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 9 2 – 1 9 5 tracks of hurricanes that occurred from 1886 through 1996, each track plotted from the location at which a tropical cyclone became a hurricane, defined as having maximum sustained surface winds of at least 119 kilometers per hour, to the location at which the wind speed fell to below hurricane strength, as derived from James B. Elsner and A. Birol Kara, Hurricanes of the North Atlantic: Climate and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), fig. 4.13. The prevailing winds derive from Cathryn L. Lombardi and John V. Lombardi, Latin American History: A Teaching Atlas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 7. The names of slaving coasts derive from David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), map 8. 46. AHMS no. 1, Teresina, f. 2; BC no. 1507, Pepe, f. 1v; BC ms. 1508, Villa de Tossa, f. 1; AHMM no. 22, Pronta, f. 1; and AHMM no. 25, Soberano, f. 1; Pedro Jorge Bassegoda i Muste, Diseños de la Villa del Masnou y de su Marina de Vela del Ochocientos (Barcelona: Artes Gráficas Gutenberg, 1962), 83, 85, 89, 91; and William D. Winter, Marine Insurance: Its Principles and Practice (New York: McGraw Hill, 1919), 90. Registered tonnage estimates the maximum weight that a vessel can carry based on the volume of its hold, with each 2.83 cubic meters adding 1 metric ton, approximately equivalent to 1 ton per 100 cubic feet; displacement tonnage, in contrast, equals the weight of the vessel plus its cargo when submerged to the waterline, equivalent to the weight of water displaced. 47. The figure simplifies the detailed drawings by Joan Zaplana in Guimerà i Mariné, Els Vaixells de Fusta, 89, 91, 92, 96. 48. Bassegoda i Muste, Diseños, 85, 91, lists the Pronta and Teresina as polacragoletas, or brigantines, rather than as a goleta and a polacra, respectively, as designated in their logbooks. In English, brigantine designates a schooner-brig, vessels much like a brig but with the aft-mast entirely rigged with fore-and-aft sail. Whether the different sail-plans listed in Bassegoda i Muste’s inventory and the logbooks indicate entirely different vessels or simply reconfigurations of the rigging of the same vessels remains unknown. 49. The figure reproduces an engraving from of a copy of Daireaux, La Ilustración, no. 367, 13 November 1887, 764–65, in the Davis Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 50. British Packet and Argentine News, no. 1224, 9 February 1850 through no. 1628, 2 January 1858. That newspaper’s monthly summary tables of exports through the port of Buenos Aires record the amount of each commodity shipped to each destination as well as the total number of vessels that carried those cargoes to each destination and those vessels’ combined tonnage. Since nearly all the vessels that departed for Brazil and Cuba carried primary cargoes of tasajo, although most also carried some other products, such as hides, dividing the total combined tonnage of the vessels departing for Cuba or Brazil by the number of those vessels yields the average tonnage of vessels involved in the tasajo trade with those destinations through the port of Buenos Aires for any given period. Only one month provides an exception to that rule: the single

n o t es to pages 195–98    291

51.

52.

53.

54.

shipment of January 1850 to Brazil did not include tasajo, the vessel, of 195 tons, instead carrying a cargo consisting exclusively of dried hides; that vessel is excluded from the calculations. Missing issues from the collection at the Biblioteca Pública de la Universidad de la Plata preclude inclusion of 1853 and 1858 in the calculations; 1852 also has missing issues, but the total number of vessels and their combined tonnage for each destination for that year appears in British Packet and Argentine News, no. 1427, 25 February 1854, 2. The table derives from AHMM no. 22, Pronta; AHMM no. 25, Soberano; AHMS no. 1, Teresina; BC mss. 1506 and 1508, Villa de Tossa; and BC no. 1507, Pepe. All dates use the format day, month, year; counts of days ignore possible leap years. The logbooks of the Villa de Tossa do not specify the arrival dates in the penultimate and ultimate ports; therefore, the dates given are estimates that add six days to the last entry before reaching Havana, made on 20 January 1861 when coming into view of Cape Cabrón along the north coast of Hispaniola, and eight days to the last entry before reaching Barcelona, made on 28 May 1861 when coming into view of Cape Espertal at the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, both based on the number of days that the Pronta and the Soberano took to complete those two legs of their voyages. The logbook of the Pronta does not record when the vessel crossed the Río de la Plata from Montevideo to Buenos Aires; therefore, the single day under sail to do so is an estimate based on the proximity of those two ports, and the time in port is equally divided between the two. AHMS no. 1, Teresina, f. 2; British Packet and Argentine News, no. 595, 13 January 1838, 4; and British Packet and Argentine News, no. 599, 10 February 1838, 3. The British Packet and Argentine News reported on shipping for Montevideo as well as for Buenos Aires, albeit with less accuracy, and records both the arrival and departure of the Teresina, giving the name of the consignee as Jose Ríos. The newspaper differs from the logbook in various details, including misspelling the vessel’s name as Teresita, claiming a departure on 23 instead of 27 January, and listing 83 instead of 113 metric tons of tasajo, 20 instead of 30 hides, 1,400 instead of 1,500 horns, and 1,150 instead of 1,840 kilograms of tallow. The logbook, the official record of the voyage, seems the more reliable source. Regarding the cargo of lignum vitae, the logbook lists “Madera de Ballacan,” seemingly a corruption of the name of that island’s well known guayacán tree, known in English as the lignum vitae or ironwood tree; while the logbook does not specify a deck cargo, the short stay in Puerto Rico, the existing cargo of cotton in the hold, the small amount of lignum vitae, and its durability all imply a deck cargo. BC no. 1507, Pepe; AGNA-DG, Entradas de Ultramar 1851 (sala X, 36–5–22), 18 April 1851, no. 36, Bergantín español Pepe; and AGNA-DG, Salidas de Ultramar 2 enero de 1850 a 5 septiembre de 1851 (sala X, 36–6–6), 16 May 1851, no. 40, Bergantín español Pepe. BC ms. 1508, Villa de Tossa, ff. 1, 39v, 42v, 44v, 70–72, 82v; quote on f. 1, “cargamento de vino y otros efectos peninsulares.”

2 9 2   n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 9 9 – 2 0 2 55. Ibid., f. 82v: “causa de reinar buen fuerte de témpanos.” The logbook does not record the final cargo from Cuba to Barcelona, but the circumstances imply sugar. 56. AHMM no. 22, Pronta, ff. 1, 86. 57. AHMM no. 25, Soberano, f. 1: “tasajo a granel.” 58. Diario de la Marina 61, no. 43, 19 February 1900, afternoon edition, 2: “En el día de ayer entraron en el puerto . . . el bergantín español Soberano, de Rosario (B. A.) con tasajo”; that newspaper does not, however, record the departure of the Soberano forty-five days later. 59. AHMM no. 25, Soberano, f. 32v: “madero pino tea, con 180,195 pies ingleses debajo cubierta, y 16,800 sobre cubierta.” Jim L. Bowyer, Rubin Shmulsky, and John G. Haygreen, Forest Products and Wood Science: An Introduction (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 211, table 9.2, lists green loblolly pine as having an average specific gravity of 0.47, ranging from 0.38 to 0.56 depending on growing conditions, which, together with the known number of board feet, allows the estimate of 219 metric tons. 60. Alemany and Casanovas, La Navegació a Catalunya, 226–27; and Valdaliso, “Rise of Specialist Firms,” 270–72. 61. The figure transcribes a detail from the verso side of AHMM, nautical chart no. 17. The printed map on the recto side is Río de la Plata desde su Embocadura hasta Buenos Aires, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Dirección Hidrográfica del Madrid, 1837 [1812]); the hand-drawn map on the verso side must therefore postdate 1837 but bears no date. 62. The notices of river pilot agencies occur generally throughout AGNA-DC, Capitanía del Puerto (sala III), although none were encountered for the Teresina, Villa de Tossa, Pepe, Pronta, or Soberano. 63. AHMM no. 16, Cuaderno de Bitácora del Bergantín Romántico, f. 1v: “2 sextantes de reflexión, 1 cronometré, 2 relojes, 1 calendario, planos generales y particulares de los mares.” 64. Moret i Ros, L’Edat d’Or, 26–29. 65. Julio Jacinto Le-Riverend, “Memoir on the Yellow Fever, or Vomito Negro,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 15 (1847–48): 241. 66. AHMM no. 25, Soberano, f. 29: “Salida de Habana . . . en lastre de piedra para Brunswick, Georgia con once de tripulación todos incluidos, después de haber inspeccionado el médico americano todos los tripulantes, bodega, cámara rancho y pañoles del buque, que entregó la patente de sanidad y duplicado.” 67. AHMM no. 25, Soberano, f. 32: “Al amanecer vino el médico y nos impuso cinco días de cuarentena a contar los desde que el buque estuviera deslastrado, fumigado, baldeado y saneada todo el equipaje de la tripulación, por cuya disposición quedamos en libre práctica el 19 de Abril de 1900 a las 8 de la mañana.” 68. BC ms. 1507, Pepe, f. 34v; AGNA-DC, Capitanía del Puerto 1851 (sala III, caja 83), Notes of 6 April 1851 to the commander of the Naval Corvette 25 de Mayo

n o t es to pages 203–08    293 and to the Ministerio del Gobierno; AGNA-DG, Entradas de Ultramar 1851 (sala X, 36–5–22), 18 April 1851, no. 36, Bergantín español Pepe; British Packet and Argentine News, no. 1,284 (12 April 1851), 3; and La Gaceta Mercantil, no. 8,222 (7 April 1851), 4. See the cartas de salud and cartas de sude generally throughout AGNA-DC, Capitanía del Puerto (sala III), although none were encountered for the Teresina, Villa de Tossa, Pepe, Pronta, or Soberano. 69. AHMM no. 25, Soberano, ff. 21–22. 70. AHMM no. 16, Prudente, f. 194: “síntomas de putrefacción.” 71. BC ms. 1508, Villa de Tossa, entries for 19–21 August 1859; BC ms. 1506, Villa de Tossa, entries for 3–12 August 1860; and BC ms. 1510, Romántico, ff. 37–43. 72. Robert Fitzroy, Proceedings of the Second Expedition, 1831–1836, Under the Command of Captain Robert Fitz-Roy, vol. 2 of Narrative of the Surveying Voyages, 86–88. Originally a brig, the Beagle received a third mast before the surveying voyage of 1826–30, thus becoming a barque. 73. Ibid., 89. 74. Ibid., 88. 75. BC ms. 1506, Villa de Tossa, f. 82v; and Darío Palavecino, “El Témpano Navega con Rumbo Norte,” La Nación 133, no. 47,095, 22 November 2002, section 1, 1, 17. 76. The figure is based on the dates in table 6.2. The Pronta, on its return voyage, first approached Barcelona on 31 August 1893 before being signaled to proceed to Marseille without entering its home port; therefore, the figure renders its voyage from the Caribbean to Barcelona as ending in August rather than September. The Pepe sailed to Máo on its return to the Mediterranean, not to Barcelona, and therefore does not appear on the figure; note, however, that the Pepe left the Caribbean in mid-October, in contrast to the other vessels, and crossed the North Atlantic during late hurricane season. 77. Elsner and Kara, Hurricanes of the North Atlantic, 59–62. 78. The table summarizes the detailed itineraries in table 6.2. The Pronta, on its return voyage, first approached Barcelona on 31 August 1893 before being signaled to proceed to Marseille without entering its home port; therefore, that date is taken as the end of the voyage from the Caribbean to Barcelona for the purposes of this analysis. The voyage of the Soberano must have been much longer than the 173 days recorded in the extant logbook, which does not include the voyage from Barcelona to Rosario or the time spent in port at Rosario or other ports. The Pepe sailed to Máo, not to Barcelona, on its return to the Mediterranean. 79. Alemany and Casanovas, La Navegació a Catalunya, 218–19; and Bassegoda i Muste, Diseños, 83. 80. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry, 70–77; and Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 104–6, fig. 5.2. 81. The graph derives from the monthly statistics in British Packet and Argentine News, no. 1,224, 9 February 1850 through no. 1,316, 3 January 1852 and no.

2 9 4   n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 1 4 – 1 6 1,423, 28 January 1854 through no. 1,628, 2 January 1858. Missing issues for 1852, 1853, and 1858 from the collection of that newspaper at the Biblioteca Pública de la Universidad de la Plata preclude inclusion of those years. CHAPTER SEVEN. LEGACY AND PROMISE   1. AGI-PC leg. 2357, ff. 434–42, Diario del viaje de la ciudad a los Atakapas, Opelousas, y Natchitoches, 1769–1770.   2. AGI-SD leg. 2595, f. 26; AGI-PC leg. 188C, f. 47; SLO-OLC, pt. 2, 162, Grant of 16 July 1765 by Aubry and Foucault to Grevemberg; SLO-FSG, 6–7; SMPC-BBA; SMPC-BBB; ULL Brand Book; LSM-SCR folder 1762/11/08–02, Contract of 8 November 1762 between Louis, Pierre Ricard and Francois Alain; LSA Opelousas Papers, Sale on 15 October 1783 of land by Josine, wife of Louis Ricard, both free mulattos, Petition of 18 October 1783 by Louise Ricard against Josine, and Sale of 23 October 1784 of land by Louis Ricard; and Glenn R. Conrad, ed., A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, 2 vols. (Lafayette: University of Louisiana Press, 1988), 1:197–98, 501.   3. Elena F. S. de Studer, La Trata de Negros en el Río de la Plata Durante el Siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1958), 324.   4. AGI-SD leg. 839, ff. 508v–11v, Letter of 22 March 1686 by Juan Márquez Cabrera to the Crown; quote on f. 511, from the deposition by Satre, a runaway indentured servant from Charleston, originally from Savoy: “entraron hasta dos cientos negros y mulatos, mujeres y hombres de la Veracruz y otras partes por los corsarios de los cuales compraron en dicha población de San Jorge.” San Jorge was the Spanish name for Charleston, South Carolina. For an account of the sack of Veracruz and involvement of the pirate vessel from South Carolina, see UKNA-CO 1/52, no. 1163, Report of 26 July 1683 from Thomas Lynch to Leoline Jenkins; CO 1/53, no. 1249, Report of 12 September 1683 from Lynch to Lords of Trade and Plantations; and CO 1/54, no. 1563, Report of 28 February 1684 from Lynch to Lords of Trade and Plantations. Also see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 44; and St. Julien Ravenel Childs, Malaria and Colonization in the Carolina Low Country, 1526–1696 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), 207.   5. Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Boston: Brill, 2007); and David Wheat, “The Afro-Portuguese Maritime World and the Foundations of Spanish Caribbean Society, 1570–1640” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2009).   6. Judith A. Carney and Richard N. Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 47–63; Edda L. Fields-Black, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 46–49; and Case Watkins, “Dendezeiro: African Oil Palm Agroecologies in Bahia, Brazil

n o t e s to pages 217–220    295 and Implications for Development,” Journal of Latin American Geography 10 (2011): 9–33.   7. Charles Darwin, Journal and Remarks, 1832–1836, vol. 3 of Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836, ed. Robert Fitzroy, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 75–76; Woodbine Parish, Buenos Ayres and the Provinces of the Río de la Plata (London: John Murray, 1839), 94; Thomas J. Hutchinson, Buenos Ayres and Argentine Gleanings (London: Edward Stanford, 1865), 32; Francisco Travassos Valdez, Six Years of a Traveller’s Life in Western Africa, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1861), 1:66–74; Pedro Seoane, La Industria de las Carnes en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Pedro Seoane, 1928), 206; Peter Piasecki, “The History of Salt Production on the Cape Verde Islands,” in Technology Transfer in the Salt History of Europe and Africa, ed. Peter Piasecki (Berlin: Verlag fur Wissenschafts-und Regionalgeschichte Peter, 1999), 129–43; Clifton B. Kroeber, The Growth of the Shipping Industry in the Río de la Plata Region, 1794–1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 55, 126; and AHMM no. 16, Cuaderno de Bitácora del Bergantín Prudente, f. 1.   8. TSTD, accessed 20 May 2010; Josep M. Fradera, “La Participació Catalana en el Tràfic d’Esclaus (1789–1845),” Recerques 16 (1984): 119–39; David R. Murray, “Statistics of the Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790–1867,” Journal of Latin American Studies 2 (1971): 131–49; George R. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 55–57; Michael Zeuske and Orlando García Martínez, “La Amistad de Cuba: Ramón Ferrer, Contrabando de Esclavos, Cautividad y Modernidad Atlántica,” Caribbean Studies 37 (2009): 119–87; and Joan Giménez i Blasco, De la Vela al Vapor: La Marina Catalana a Través d’una Família de Vilassar de Mar, els Sust (Lleida, Spain: Pagès Editors, 2009).   9. Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 312. 10. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, 47–54, 66; George R. Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 6–8; Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–1870 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998), 73–77; and José Hernández, Instrucción del Estanciero: Tratado Completo para la Planteación y Manejo de un Establecimiento de Campo Destinado a la Cría de Hacienda Vacuna, Lanar y Caballar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopeña Argentina, 1940 [1882]). 11. “Comrade Che” refers, of course, to Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who was born in 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, fought during the 1950s in the Cuban revolution with Fidel Castro, and died in Bolivia in 1967.

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index

Page locators in italics indicate figures and tables. Acadian cattle herder, 89 Acadian settlers: cattle and livestock census, 69–71; colonial Louisiana, 63–64; and herding ecology, 86–92 Acosta, José de, 12 aguardiente (cane alcohol), 191 Alain, Francois, 214 Albornoz, Rodrigo de, 48 alcalde mayor (district governor), 35 Alderet, Julián, 30 Alegría, Gonzalo de, 29, 35 Almada, André Alvares de, 7 Almanza, Martín Enríquez de, 54 Almonte, 29, 37 Almoravids, 39–40, 40 Amoenitatum Exoticarum (Kaempfer), 163, 164, 165 Andalusia: African networks, 38–39; annual movements of cattle in, 8–9, 24, 26, 28; comparison to Veracruz lowlands, 30; Gregorio de Villalobos in, 29 Anne (slave), 82 Anson, George, 150 Antigua, 98–99, 99, 103, 110, 135–36

Antigua River, 32 Antoine (slave), 84 Archivo General de la Nación, 19, 21 Argentine Confederation, 144 Arpents (unit of measure), 68 Atchafalaya Basin, 87, 88–92 the Atlantic: as a living space of flows, 3; actor-networks of, 4 Atoyac River, 28, 35 Attakapas: cattle and livestock census, 69–71; herding ecology, 94–95; ranchers, 79–80 Attakapas Post, 61–64, 62, 65, 74–75 Aubry, Charles Philippe, 63, 65, 67, 68 Auvergne region and open-range cattle herding, 9, 11–12 bacalao (salt cod), 173 Bailey, John, 110, 124 Baird, Charles, 131 balde sin fondo (bottomless bucket), 156–59, 157, 158, 160, 219 Bamana, 7, 46, 81, 85 Banda Oriental, 143 Bandelier, Fanny, 19–20

297

2 9 8   i n d e x Barbuda: and Antigua, 98–99, 100; and black herders, 104–7, 122–23, 124–26; black settlement of, 123–24; and Codrington family, 104, 107–10; and Codrington village, 104, 118–19, 118; communal land tenure, 99–100, 110–11, 112; decline of open-range cattle herding, 111–12; environmental zones of, 120; establishment of cattle ranching on, 103–4; herding dogs on, 104, 105, 107–8; herding ecology of, 104–11, 116–17, 120–22, 120, 132–39, 212; Hispanic influence on herding ecology, 133–34; Indigo Well, 112, 114–16, 115, 118; maps of, 99, 100, 109; Olin Well, 101, 112, 115, 118; ox production on, 105–6; present-day cattle herding and hunting, 118, 119–120; Senegambian influence on herding ecology, 132–133; Spring Well, 112, 113, 115; and walled livestock well design, 101–3, 113–16, 114, 115; and walled livestock wells, 101, 108–11, 109, 112–13, 113; walled wells and herding ecology of, 116–17; white leaseholders and managers, 126–32, 127, 128 Barcelona, 188, 192, 198–99, 205 Barry, Margaret, 131 Barter, Susanna, 131 Bayou Goula, 76 Bayou Teche, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 77, 87–91, 87, 91 Bayou Tortue, 65, 66 Beagle (ship), 203, 205 Beazer, Tom, 124, 125 Beazer family, 110, 124 Beazer Well, 109, 110 becerras (yearling cows) and Villalobos herd, 33 Beech, Thomas, 131 beef market, establishment of in Mexico City, 34 Bérard, Jean Baptiste, 79, 84 Berber herders, 7, 39–40 bergantín (large brig), 190–91, 191, 193, 193 Berisso, Juan, 184 Berleant-Schiller, Riva, 101

Bermuda grass, 5, 151–52 Bethell, Elizabeth, 123 Bethell-Codrington, Christopher, 123 Bevans, James, 166 Bienville, Sieur de, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, 76–77, 81, 95 Billouart, Louis, 77 Bird, V. C., 111, 112 Birth of African-American Culture (Mintz and Price), 2–3 black gauchos of the Pampas, 140–41, 142 black herders of Barbuda, 104–7, 122–23, 124–26 Black Rice (Carney), ix blacks: and African–Andalusian networks, 38–39; Almoravids, 39–40, 40; Andalusian blacks and colonization of the Americas, 43–45; and cattle ranching in Louisiana, 63–64; and cattle ranching in the Veracruz lowlands, 59–60; and Portuguese slave trade in Andalusia, 41–42; and rural black population in Veracruz lowlands, 48; and slave trade to Veracruz lowlands, 45–48; workers on sixteenth century estancias, 48–50 Blancpain, Joseph, 67, 75, 76, 79, 214 boleadoras (bolas), 150–52 Bonaerense population, 141, 144, 145–46, 146, 148–49 Bonin, Antoine dit Dauphiné, 72–73, 78, 84 Bos genus (cattle), domestication of, 4 Bouligny, Francisco, 90 branding: Andalusia, 10; Barbuda, 117, 121; and British herding practices, 12; France, 10–11; Louisiana brand registries, 71–73, 71; as mark of ownership, 5; and pre-Acadian herding ecology, 95 British highlands and open-range cattle herding, 9, 11–12 Brittany region and open-range cattle herding, 9, 11–12 Broussard, Anne, 79 Brunsel, William, 131 Brunswick, 191, 192, 199, 202 Buenos Aires: founding of 141–42; La

index    299 Boca port, 195; map, 143; partidos (districts) of, 147; population of, 143–44, 176; slaves in, 143–44; tasajo exports, 171–72, 172, 174–75, 175 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Expedition, 11 Bullock, Sarah, 131 buques tasajeros (tasajo boats), 174 burning: annual burning of pastures and prairies, 26, 92; bans on, 54; natural savanna fires, 57 Byam, William, 110, 121, 130 cabezadas (backlands), 154 the Camargue: and historic form of saddles, 14, 15; and open-range cattle herding, 9, 10–11 Cambacères, Antoine, 182, 184 camino real (royal highway) between Veracruz and Puebla, 22–23 Canary Islands, cattle of, 4–5, 7, 41, 46 canebrake, coastal Louisiana-Texas borderlands, 93 capataz (foreman), 181 Caribbean herding ecology, 12–13, 13 Caribbean Time Bomb (Coram), 98 Carmen de Patagones, 145 carne cocida (rendering waste product), 183 Carney, Judith A., ix, 1 Caron, Marie Jeanne, 78 Carpentier, Alejo, 177 Carta, Pedro, 165 Carthage, 38 Cartilla Práctica del Manejo de Ingenios, 173 castration and herding ecology, 8 Catalonia: and Atlantic trade routes, 189; and European tasajo trade, 188; and slave trade, 217–18 Cataplasma, Sebastián Sánchez, 153–54 cattle and livestock census: Attakapas District, 63–64; colonial Louisiana, 69–71 cattle ownership valued over land ownership, 5 cattle ranching. See open-range cattle ranching in the Americas cattle trail through coastal canebrake,

colonial Louisiana, 93 Chalchicueyecan (now Veracruz), 29 Chantalou, Augustine, 77 Charleston, 136, 189, 192, 215 charqueadas (meat-salting plants), 176 charreadas (rodeos), 107 Chenal, Anne Judith (Dame Grevemberg), 71, 72, 76 Chilavert, José Vicente, 156 Chile, 13–14 Chilton, John, 47 cimarrón (escaped slave) communities, 49–50, 58 cimbra (water hoist), 156 Clarke, Richard, 130, 131 Claude Cafar (slave), 82 Claude César (slave), 81, 84 Cocas, Francisco de, 29, 35 Code Noir, 75 Codrington, Christopher, 122, 129 Codrington, Christopher (son), 122–23, 129 Codrington, John, 122, 123, 129 Codrington, William, 107, 110, 123 Codrington family, Barbuda, 104, 107–10, 122–24, 127, 135 Codrington village, 104, 118–19, 118 coleadero (tail twist), 107 coleo (tail twist), 107 Collection de Machines (Lasteyrie), 163, 164, 165 colonial Louisiana: Acadian cattle herder, 89; Acadian herding ecology, 85–92; Acadian settlers, 63–64; André Massé, 75–76; Atlantic networks of Attakapas ranchers, 79–80; Attakapas Post, 61–64, 62; black slave biographies and Atlantic networks, 80–85, 94–95, 212; brand registries, 71–73, 71; cattle and livestock census, 69–71; cattle trail through coastal canebrake, 93; eighteenth-century lower Louisiana, 62; French origins of pre-Acadian ranchers, 74, 79–80, 93–94; Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire, 73–75; Jacques Joseph Sorrel, 78–79; Jean Antoine Bernard Dauterive, 76; Jean Baptiste Bérard, 79; Jean François Ledée, 77–78;

3 0 0   i n d e x colonial Louisiana: (continued) Johannes (Jean Baptiste) Grevemberg, 76–77; Joseph Deville Degoutin, 78; Opelousas District, 213–14; pre-Acadian Attakapas ranches, 63–64, 67–69; pre-Acadian herding ecology, 85–87, 92–93, 95–97, 211–12; pre-Acadian ranch locations, 64–67, 66; traders and land speculators, 79 colonial New Spain: Andalusian blacks in Veracruz, 43–45; and mapping of mercedes (land grants), 20–24, 22; replacement of native settlements with livestock estancias, 23–24 Columbus, Christopher, 4, 102 Conquest of the Desert, 145 conquistadors: black conquistadors, 43, 44–45; and establishment of cattle ranching in Veracruz, 28–32 Constancia (ship), 188 Coram, Robert, 98 corbeta (barque), 190, 191, 193, 194–95, 198–99 Córdova, Gaspar de, 48 Córdova, Gonzalo de, 48 Córdova, Hernán Ruiz de, 48, 49, 53, 55 Corrales de Abasto lithograph, 142 corrals and seasonal culling and branding, 28 Cortés, Hernán, 19, 28, 32, 43 Courtableau, Jacques Guillaume, 68, 214 cowboys, 5 Creoles: in Barbuda, 132; creolization of Caribbean slave societies, 2–3; and lassoing from horseback, 52, 53–54, 53; and slave trade in New Spain, 46–47; and slaves in Louisiana, 81, 85; and slaves in the Caribbean and West Indies, 124–25; and tasajo production, 182 croplands: protection with living fences, 57–60; virtual exclusion of on cattle ranching frontiers, 5 Crump, Anne, 131 Cuba: imports of tasajo, 172–73, 174–75, 175; introduction of cattle to, 12; slave workers in, 170, 172–75, 180, 217; sugar plantations, 172–74;

tasajo in Cuban culture today, 176–77, 210, 219 cultural determinism, 2 Cynodon dactylon (Bermuda grass), 5, 151–52 d’Abbadie, Jean Jacques Blaise, 67, 68 Darwin, Charles, 177, 216 d’Auterive, Bernard, 76 Dauterive, Jean Antoine Bernard: and André Massé, 75–76; biography, 76; and brand registries, 72; cattle herds, 69, 70, 73; and first pre-Acadian ranch, 65–67, 66, 68; slaves of, 81–82, 84, 85 Dauterive, Joseph, 76 Dawley, Thomas R., 169, 177 de Eguía, Francisco, 43 de Garay, Juan, 142 de Guzmán, Ruy Díaz, 150 de Herrera, Gabriel Alonso, 41 de la Rayne, Anne Antoinette Combet, 78–79 de Lasteyrie, Charles, 161, 163, 164 de Narváez, Pedro Sotelo, 155 de Rosas, Juan Manuel, 160 de Ulloa, Antonio, 65 Degoutin, Joseph Deville, 66, 68, 72, 73, 78, 81, 85 depopulation: Ishak villages, Attakapas Post, 61–63; Veracruz lowlands, 23–24, 37 desjarretadera (hocking pole), 12, 13, 54–55 Díaz, Avelino, 166 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 29, 43, 48 Didier, Pierre, 75 diffusion of knowledge quanta and cultural determinism, 2 documentary archives, 1, 3 Durham, Philip, 16 dynamic processes and emergence of uniquely American places, 3 earmarks as mark of ownership, 5 Eighteenth-century (1766) Louisiana census, 61–63 einzäunung (enclosure), 57–58 El Siglo de las Luces (Carpentier), 177 Eliot, T. S., 211

index    301 encomienda (grant of native labor), 30, 31, 37 environmental determinism, 2–3 environmental zones: in Louisiana 87, 90–92; piedmont, Veracruz lowlands, 20, 27, 27; and seasonal herding ecology in Barbuda, 120, 120–21; in Veracruz lowlands, 24–28, 25, 27 epidemics and saladeros (meat-salting plants), 183–84 esparto grass: cargo, 198; used for lassos, 10, 51 estancias (ranches): and herding ecology of colonial Veracruz, 24–28, 25, 27; and spread of cattle ranching in Veracruz lowlands, 21–22, 22 Estremadura and sheep herding, 28 Fausse Pointe, 66, 67, 70, 79 fecundity of livestock in Caribbean, 33–34; New Spain, 33–34, 37; the Pampas, 150 fences: lack of on cattle ranching frontiers, 5; live fencing in colonial Veracruz, 57–60 ficheiroun (pike pole), 10–11 fire: annual burning of pastures and prairies, 26, 92; bans on burning, 54; savanna fires, 57 Fitzroy, Robert, 203, 205 flooding, Atchafalaya Basin, 90–91 Flore, Marie (slave), 82 Florida and open-range cattle ranching, 13, 14 Foucault, Denis Nicolas, 63 François (slave), 82, 84 French origins of pre-Acadian ranchers, 74, 93–94 frigoríficos (meat freezing plants), 176 Frigorifique (ship), 176 frontier thesis, 2 Fulani, 7–8, 13, 46, 81, 85, 125 Fuselier de la Claire, Agricole, 74, 79 Fuselier de la Claire, Claude, 73 Fuselier de la Claire, Gabriel: and Bayou Teche, 90; biography, 73–75; and brand

registries, 71, 72; pre-Acadian ranch, 66, 67, 73; slaves of, 82–83, 84, 85 Fuselier de la Claire, Ludevine, 74 Gaceta Mercantil (newspaper), 140, 141 galpón (meat slating shed), 181–82 Gambia River, 7, 8 Gamble, Ann, 131 ganado mayor (large livestock) land grants, 21 ganado menor (small livestock) land grants, 21 García de la Fuente, Beatriz, 31 gardians (cowboys) and herding practices in the Camargue, 10–11 Garrido, Juan, 43–45 garrochas (pike poles), 10 The Gaucho Martín Fierro (poem), 140–41 gauchos and tasajo production, 177–79 General Land Office (GLO), land grants in colonial Louisiana, 64–65 Geographica, the (Strabo), 10–11, 42 gold coins minted by Almoravids, 39 Goldsmith, Oliver, 23 goleta (schooner), 191, 191, 192–93, 193, 194, 199 grasses, spread of introduced species, 5 Great Plains ranching frontiers: role of blacks in, 16, 211; and Spanish land grants, 69; and water supply, 152, 154 Grevemberg, Augustin, 71, 72 Grevemberg, Barthélémy, 71–72, 71 Grevemberg, François, 71, 72 Grevemberg, Jean Baptiste “Flamand” (formerly Johannes): and Bayou Teche, 90; biography, 76–77; and brand registries, 71–72, 73, 95; and cattle sales, 65, 70; pre-Acadian ranch, 66, 67, 68; slaves of, 83, 85 Grevemberg, Jean Baptiste (son), 71, 72 Grevemberg, Louis, 71–72, 71 griffes (of black and native descent), 82, 96 Grijalva, Juan de, 29 Guadalquivir River, 8, 10, 39, 42 Guanches (Canary Island natives), 4 Guillaume (slave), 83, 84 Guinea grass, 5

3 0 2   i n d e x Gulf Coast and open-range cattle ranching, 14 Guzmán, Nuño de, 44 hacendados (livestock owners), 147–48 Hartz, Louis, 2 Havana, smell of tasajo in, 169, 177 hecke (hedge), 58 hembras de vientre (mature cows), 54–55 Henry, Nicolas, 76, 105 herding dogs: use of, 9; on Barbuda, 104, 107–8, 121–22, 124, 133, 135; in Caribbean, 12, 134; New Spain, 26, 54; the Pampas, 178–79, 183 herding ecology: Barbuda, 104–11, 116–17, 120–22, 120, 132–39; and blacks in colonial Veracruz, 50; of the Camargue, 10–11; colonial Louisiana, 85–92; in colonial Veracruz, 24–28, 25, 27; diversification of, 14–16, 15; in Jamaica, 133–34; and lassoing from horseback, 51–57, 52, 53; and live fencing, 57–60; of the Marismas, 24, 26, 28, 42–43; pre-Acadian, 85–87, 92–93, 95–97; and prototypical Villalobos ranch, 34–37; and saddle horns, 56, 56; Senegambian, 7–8, 9, 46 Hernández, Arias, 26 Hernández, José, 140–41, 148, 219 Hernández, Rafael, 141 herradero (annual branding), 28 Herskovits, Melville J., 2–3 Highland House, 109 Higuera, Francisco de la, 49 Hispaniola, 4, 15 Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (Acosta), 12 historical linguistics, 3 Horn Island, 76–77 horses: and herding, 9, 52, 53, 89, 93, 142; on Barbuda, 104–5, 106; in Europe, 10–12; on the Pampas, 150–51; and pre-Acadian herding ecology, 95–96; in West Africa, 56 Humboldt, Alexander von, 173, 177, 180 hurricanes, 119, 205–6, 206

Icaza, Francisco, 43 icebergs, 205 Indigo Well, Barbuda, 112, 114–16, 115, 118 Instrucción del Estanciero (Hernández), 219 ipecacuanha syrup, 190, 198 Ishak people, land sales, 74 Ishak villages, Attakapas Post, 61–63 Ixhuatlán, 30, 31, 37 Izuro, François, 82 Jackson, Nicolas, 131–32 jagüeles (water holes), 155 Jamaican cattle herding, 12, 133–34 Jamapa River, 29, 30, 30, 32, 35 Jeanne (slave), 83 Johnsongrass, 152 Jones, Everett, 16 Jordan, Terry G., 16–17, 19 Joseph (slave), 81, 84 Julie (slave), 83 Jung, André, 67, 79 Kaempfer, Engelbert, 161, 163, 164 Keeling, William, 131 Kelly, Juan, 90, 213 Kincaid, Jamaica, 98 King, Benjamin, 130–31 La Antigua Veracruz, 21, 22, 23, 26, 30, 32, 45–48 La Chanson de Roland, (poem), 39–40 La Venta, 30, 36 labor scarcity and herding ecology: in New Spain, 53; the Pampas, 156 land grants, colonial Louisiana, 64–69, 66 landscape transformation, fossil pollen record of Veracruz lowlands, 24 Lanuza, Vicente: occupation and land ownership, 166–67; purported invention of balde sin fondo, 160, 162–66, 167–68, 219 lassos: in Africa, 8; and Barbudan herding ecology, 132–33; in France, 11; and herding ecology of the Pampas, 150–52; seden (horsehair lasso), 11; and tasajo production, 177–78; throwing

index    303 lassos from horseback, 51–57, 52, 53; use of in Spain, 10 lazos (lassos), Spanish, 10, 51 Le Kintrek, Jean Joseph dit Dupont, 214 le Page du Pratz, Antoine Simon, 69 leather demand and cattle ranching in Veracruz lowlands, 23 Ledée, Jean François: biography, 77–78; and brand registries, 72; pre-Acadian ranch, 66, 67–68, 73; size of cattle herd, 70; slaves of, 83–84 Lee, Joseph, 103, 126–28, 127 Leeward Lesser Antilles, 98, 99, 102 Leveille, André (slave), 82 Libro de Agricultura (de Herrera), 41 livestock: cattle and livestock census, Louisiana, 69–71; damage to agricultural fields in Veracruz lowlands, 21–22, 22; and walled livestock well design, 101–3, 113–16, 114, 115; and walled livestock wells, 101, 108–11, 109, 112–13, 113 living fences, 51, 57–58 López, Antonio, 188 Louise (slave), 83–84 Louisiana. See colonial Louisiana Lovell, Langford, 130 lower Louisiana, eighteenth century, 62 MacCann, William, 156 Mallines, Solomon, 78 mandamiento acordado (writ), 35 Mandinga, 20, 50 Mandingo, 7–8, 13, 41, 46, 46, 81–82, 85, 94 Manuel (slave), 140, 141, 148 manumission, 38, 49, 75, 144 Marie and Jean dit Ingui (slave couple), 82, 85, 94 the Marismas: black slaves in, 41–42; and Guadalquivir River, 39; herding ecology of, 24, 26, 28, 42–43; and historic form of saddles, 14, 15; and open-range cattle herding, 8–10, 9, 218–19; use of lassos, 10, 51 Maroon communities, 50 Marrakesh, 39 Martin, Samuel, 110, 121, 130

Massé, André: biography, 75–76; and brand registries, 72; and Jean Baptiste Bérard, 79, 80; and pre-Acadian ranches, 65–67, 66, 68, 73; size of cattle herd, 70; slaves of, 82, 83, 84, 85 mataderos (slaughter yards), 177–79 Mayorazgo de la Higuera, 49 Mayorazgo de Santa Fe, 48 mayordomos (majordomos), black vaqueros, 55–56 McNish, Nathaniel, 131 Medellín, 30, 30, 32, 34 Meech, Matthew, 131 Mende, 7, 46 Mendoza, Antonio de, 21, 37 Mendoza, Pedro de, 141–42 Mercado de Escravos, 41 mercedes (land grants): and colonization process, 20–24, 22; and establishment of cattle ranching in New Spain, 19–21; and seasonal herding ecology, 26–28, 27 Mesta ordinances, 54–55, 57 Mexico and historic form of saddles, 15 Mictanguautla, 37 Middle Eastern water hoists, 162 Midlo Hall, Gwendolyn, 61 Milden, William, 103, 126–28, 127 milonga (music), 140 mining, 21, 47, 54 Mintz, Sidney, 2 Mirambell, Juan, 188 mixed herds in Sahara, 7 Montalbán, Pedro Núñez de, 35 Montejo, Esteban, 176 Montevideo, 171–72, 171, 176, 184 Montezuma, 29 Moore, Francis, 8 the Moors, 39, 42 morenos (African born), 144, 145–46, 147 moriscos (Christianized Moors), 44–45 Mota y Escobar, Alonso de la, 47, 49 mudéjars (Muslim Moors), 41–42 Myth of the Negro Past (Herskovits), 2 nagana disease, 7 Nanette (slave), 82

3 0 4   i n d e x Narváez, Pánfilo de, 43 native depopulation: Ishak villages, Attakapas Post, 61–63; Veracruz lowlands, 23–24, 37 Nautilus (ship), 187 el Negro, Benito, 44, 45, 50 el Negro, Juan (Juan Villanueva), 44–45, 50 New Orleans, 63, 69, 75, 76, 189, 192 New Spain: Antillean embargo on livestock exports to, 32–33; and Barbudan herding ecology, 133–34; elimination of open-range cattle ranching from central highlands of, 6; establishment of open-range cattle ranching in, 13–14, 37–38, 213; establishment of Villalobos herd, 31–33; and herding ecology of the Pampas, 149–52; and location of prototypical Villalobos ranch, 34–37; size and increase of Villalobos herd, 33–34 Nicolás (slave), 140, 141, 148 nineteenth century sailing vessels: navigation, 200–201; on-board life, 199–200, 201–3; summary statistics for vessel voyages, 206–8, 207; and the tasajo trail, 189–91, 192; vessel itineraries, 196–97; vessel types, 189–99, 190–91, 193, 195 noria (waterwheel), 43, 159 North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers (Jordan), 16–17, 19 Nugent, Eduardo, 90, 213 Olin Well, Barbuda, 101, 112, 115, 118 Oliver, Richard, 130 Opelousas Post, 63, 74–75, 214 open-range cattle ranching in the Americas: fifteenth-, sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century frontiers, 4–7, 6; nineteenth- and twentieth century expansion of cropland, 5–6; Norse colonies in Greenland, 4; role of Africans in establishing, 1–2, 16–17, 19, 211–20; Senegambian herding ecology, 7–8, 9; shared frontier characteristics, 5. See also specific locations; tasajo

(salt-cured beef) d’Orbigny, Alcides, 177, 178, 179 O’Reilly, Alejandro, 67, 68, 72, 77, 86, 213 ox production, Barbuda, 105–6 Padilla, Baltasar de, 31 Padilla, Diego de, 29 Pagès, Pierre-Marie-François, 51 palenques (communities of escaped slaves), 49–50 Palliere, Juan León, 179 the Pampas: African origins of rural blacks, 146; and balde sin fondo (bottomless bucket), 156–59, 157, 158, 160, 219; black emancipation and urban blacks, 144; black role in establishing herding, 152, 212–13; and diverse origins of slaves, 142–44; and earlier versions of balde sin fondo water hoists, 160–63, 161, 162; establishment of open-range cattle ranching in, 14; herding ecology of the Pampas, 149–52; and historic form of saddles, 15, 15; inland extent of land grants for estancias in 1580, 143; and Lanuza’s occupation and land ownership, 166–67; Lanuza’s purported invention of balde sin fondo (bottomless bucket), 160, 162–66, 167–68; Martín Fierro (poem) and black gauchos, 140–41, 142; and norias (waterwheels), 159; occupations of rural blacks, 146–48; proportion of blacks relative to total population and relative to Buenos Aires, 147; and Río de la Plata slave trade, 141–43; rural blacks, 144–46, 146; rural blacks and ranching, 148–49; Uruguayan Pampas, 148; and water limitations on ranching, 152–56; and windmills, 159–60 pamperos (wind) and sailing vessels, 203–5 Pánuco River, 32–33, 34 Pará grass, 5 Parish, Woodbine, 186 Párraga, Francisco, 35–36 Párraga, Juan de la, 29, 34–36

index    305 partidos (districts) of the Pampas, 143, 145–46, 146, 147 Paso del Toro, 27, 28 Paso Vaquero, 27, 28 pasto argentino (Bermuda grass), 152 pasto blando (soft grass), 151 pasto duro (hard grass), 151 Paucke, Florian, 150 payada (improvised verse duel), 140 payador (verse duelist), 140 pedestrian open-range cattle herders: France, 9, 11–12, 74; Ireland and Great Britain, 9, 11–12, 128; West Africa, 7–8, 9 Pellegrini, Carlos E., 160, 167, 179, 219 peones (rural laborers), 181–82 Pepe (ship), 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 198, 202 Persian water hoists, 161 Peter Ellis (ship), 186 Pickett, Bill, 16 piedmont, Veracruz lowlands, 24–25, 25, 27, 27 Pierre and Lisette (slave couple), 82 Pierre (slave), 82 plantation agriculture and marginalization of ranching in Caribbean, 13 Platense merchant marine, 186–87 Platense region, 170–71, 171, 194, 210 Pointe Coupée, 75 polacra (small brig), 190, 191, 193, 193 Ponce, Alonso, 47 Ponthieu, Henri de, 108 porteño saladeros (meat-salting plants), 183–84 Portuguese slave trade and blacks in Andalusia, 41–42 Potter, Amy, 98 pozos de balde (wells with buckets), 155–56 pre-Acadian Attakapas ranching, 63–64, 67–69 pre-Acadian herding ecology, 85–87, 92–93, 95–97 pre-Acadian ranch locations, 64–67, 66 pre-Acadian ranchers, French origins, 74, 93–94 Price, Richard, 2

primary information sources: and biographical reconstruction of blacks, 3–4; and revision of black histories, 1–2 probanzas de servicios y méritos (proofs of services and merits): Gregorio de Villalobos, 29, 31; Juan Garrido, 43 probate inventories and origins of slaves, 3 Pronta (ship), 191, 192–93, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199 Prudente (ship), 203, 216–17 Puebla, 30–31 Puerto Rico, 12 pulquería (rural bar), 140 Punter, Simon, 131 Quashy (slave), 125–26 quilombos (communities of escaped slaves), 50 Quiqueran de Beaujeu, Pierre, 11 racial bias and focus on unskilled labor of blacks, 1 ranchos (isolated dwellings), 51, 57 al-Ra-zi, Ahmad ibn Muhammad, 43 Reconquista and blacks in Andalusia, 40–41 Redhead, Samuel, 130, 131–32 refrigeration technology, 176 Reglamento de Esclavos, 173 The Return of Martín Fierro (poem), 140 Reynolds, Dennis, 108–9, 132 Rhodes, Robert, 186 Rhone River and delta, 10, 11 Riachuelo River, 183 Ricard, Pierre, 214 rice cultivation and blacks in colonial South Carolina, 2 rincones (lands at stream confluences), 154 Rio de Janeiro, 191, 192, 198 Río de la Plata slave trade, 141–142 Río Paraná, 14, 143, 145, 153, 154, 201 Río Salado, 143, 145 Rivas, Andrés Pérez de, 24 river pilots, Río de la Plata region, 200–201, 200 Robin, Charles César, 72

3 0 6   i n d e x Roman, Jeanne, 74 Romántico (ship), 203 Romero, José Maria, 165 roza (low vegetation), clearance of and use as live fencing, 58 Rugendas, Johann Moritz, 51 saddle horn and herding cattle from horseback, 14–15, 15, 56, 56 saddles and herding ecologies, 14–16, 15 sailing vessels. See nineteenth century sailing vessels Saint-Domingue cattle, 69, 86, 93, 95 Saint Martin of Tours Church, 81, 83 saladeros (meat-salting plants), 177, 178, 179, 180–86, 181, 185 salt sources for cattle, 28 salt trade, 216–17 Sampson, Francis, 103, 126–28, 127 Sampson, Mary, 128 San Juan de Ulúa, 32, 47 San Lorenzo de los Negros (Yanga), 49 Santísima Trinidad sugar plantation and mill, 49 Sartorius, Carl, 24, 51, 57–58 savanna country, Veracruz lowlands, 25 Scipion Jean, 84 Scipion Rouge, 84 seasonal herding ecology: Attakapas, 90–92; Barbuda, 120–21; Camargue, 10–11; France and Britain, 10–12; Marismas, 9–10; Senegambia, 7–8; Veracruz lowlands, 24–28, 25, 27 seden (horsehair lasso), 11 Senegal River, 7, 8, 39 Senegambia: and Barbudan herding ecology, 132–33, 134–35; and herding ecology of the Pampas, 149, 152, 168; and herding in South Carolina, 138; and open-range cattle herding, 6, 7–8, 9, 43, 56, 56, 59; and Río de la Plata slave trade, 142–43; and slave trade, 41, 45–46; and slaves in Barbuda, 125; and slaves in Louisiana, 81, 85, 94–95; and slaves in New Spain, 45–46 Serafin (slave), 83 Serer, 7–8, 46, 46 Seville and Portuguese slave trade, 41

sheep estancias and growth of textile industry in New Spain, 22–23 Sierra Madre Oriental, 25, 37 silver mining boom, 21, 54 simplification thesis and cultural determinism, 2 slavery: Portuguese slave traders, 41–42; regional origins of slaves, 46–47; slaves in Cuba, 170, 172–75, 180, 217; slave coasts, 46; and West Africa, 215–16. See also Senegambia A Small Place (Kincaid), 98 Soberano (ship), 191, 192, 193–94, 193, 197, 199, 202 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 123 Soileau, Helene Elizabeth, 74–75, 83 solanos (wind), 10 Sorghum halepense (Johnsongrass), 152 Sorrel, Claude François, 78 Sorrel, Jacques Joseph, 71, 72–73, 78–79, 84 Sous Valley, cattle of, 7 South America: establishment of open-range cattle ranching in, 13–14; and herding ecology modifications, 14–16, 15 South Carolina, 14, 102, 136–38, 215 Spenser, Edmund, 12 Spring Well, Barbuda, 112, 113, 115 St. Laurent, Marie Jeanne, 76 Stapleton, William, 128 Strabo on early herding practices: in the Camargue, 11; in the Marismas, 10, 42 streams and land grant locations in southern Louisiana, 68 sub-Saharan Africa and open-range cattle herding, 6, 7–8, 9 suertes de estancia (land grants), 153–54 sugar plantations: Barbados and Antigua, 122–23, 136; in Cuba, 172–74; and rural blacks, 48; and slaves in New Spain, 47, 48–49 Suma de Visitas de Pueblos, 44 Tagus River, 39 tajamar (water reservoir), 154–55 tango (music), 140

index    307 Tapia, Andrés de, 43 tasajo (salt-cured beef): Cuban imports of, 172–73, 174–75, 175; decline of trade, 175–76; expansion of exports, 170–72, 172, 175; and hurricanes, 205–6, 206; life aboard nineteenth century sailing vessels, 199–200, 201–3; mataderos (slaughter yards), 177–79; and pampero (wind) damage to vessels, 203–5; Platense region, 170–71, 171, 210; production of, 177–80, 179; and river pilots, 200–201, 200; and saladeros (meat-salting plants), 177, 178, 179, 180–86, 181, 185; and salt trade, 216–17; seasonal supply and demand for tasajo, 208–9, 209; and slave workers in Cuba, 170, 172–75, 180, 217; smell of tasajo in Havana, 169, 177; and sugar plantations in Cuba, 172–74; summary statistics for vessel voyages, 206–8, 207; and tasajo in present-day Cuban culture, 176–77, 210, 219; tasajo shipments from Río de la Plata to the Atlantic world, 186–92, 190–91, 192. See also nineteenth century sailing vessels Teche Ridge, 66, 87, 88–91 Teche Valley, 87, 87, 88–89 Tehuantepec, 55 tejano vaqueros (Hispanic Texan cowboys), 60, 88, 96 Tellier, George, 71, 73, 78 Tellier, Marie Marguerite, 73, 78 Tenochtitlán, 29–30, 31 Teresina (ship), 190, 191, 193, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198 terneras (calves) and Villalobos herd, 33 Texas, historic form of saddles, 15 Texas-Louisiana borderlands and movement of cattle, 69 Therese dit la Bombe (slave), 82 Thomas, Lydia, 130 Thomas and Marie (slave couple), 83 tiempo muerto (dead season), 174 tourism, Barbuda, 99, 111 Toutin, Charles, 67, 79 traders and land speculators, colonial Louisiana, 79

Tranquille, Charles, 77 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 124, 141–43, 146, 149 transhumance in the herding ecology of colonial Veracruz, 24–28, 25, 27 travesío (local transhumance) in the herding ecology of the Marismas, 8, 10 Trinity River, 75 True History of the Conquest of New Spain (Díaz del Castillo), 29 tsetse fly, 6, 7 Tuareg, 7, 46, 162, 166 Tuareg water hoist, 162 Tudway, Clement, 129 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 2 Turney, George, 129 Unzaga y Amezaga, Luis de, 65, 76 Uruguay, tasajo exports, 171–72, 172, 175 U.S. merchant marine, 186–87 vachères (cowboys), 5 vaqueiros (cowboys), 5 vaqueros (cowboys): and annual roundups, 5; black vaqueros on Hispaniola, mid-sixteenth century, 13; black vaqueros on Veracruz cattle ranches, 48–49; lassoing a bull, 52, 53; use of desjarretadera (hocking pole), 12, 13, 54–55 vecinos (municipal citizens) and expansion of cattle ranching in Veracruz lowlands, 21–22 Velasco, Luis de, 37 Venta de Jamapa, 30, 36 Venta Vieja, 36 Veracruz lowlands: African botanical legacy in, 50; black cattle ranchers in, 44–45; and establishment of cattle ranching in New Spain, 19–21, 20, 21; herding ecology of cattle estancias, 24–28, 25, 27, 50–58; landscape comparison to Andalusia, 30; and lassos, 51–57; and living fences, 57–60; rural black population of, 48–50; and slave trade, 45–48, 215; transect of environmental zones, 25; and Villalobos herd, 31–37

3 0 8   i n d e x Vergara, Alonso Agreda de, 167 Vergara, Juan de, 167 Vergara, quinta (farm) de, 167 Vidal, Emeric Essex, 179 Villa de Tossa (ship), 190, 191–92, 193, 194–95, 196–97, 198–99 Villa Rica, 30, 30, 32, 33, 34 Villalobos, Gabriel de, 29, 31, 35, 215 Villalobos, Gregorio de: biography, 29–32, 30; establishment of cattle herd, 31–34; and establishment of cattle ranching in New Spain, 19–20, 29, 102; location of cattle herd, 34–37 Villalobos, Luisa de, 31 Villalobos, Teresa de, 29 Villanueva, Juan (Juan el Negro), 44–45 Villegas, Juan Rodríguez de, 35 Villiers, Charles Jumonville de, 78 Voeks, Robert A., ix, 1 Wada-I-Kebir (Guadalquivir River), 39, 42 Walrond, J. L., 130 Warner, Philip, 103 water: and balde sin fondo (bottomless bucket), 156–59, 157, 158; and earlier versions of balde sin fondo water hoists, 160–63, 161, 162; and herding ecology of the Pampas, 152–56; livestock consumption of, 152–53

water scarcity: on Louisiana prairies, 92; on Pampas, 154 Webb, Walter Prescott, 152 Webber, Abraham, 132 Weeks, Johnson, 131 wells and herding ecology: of Barbuda, 120–21; of the Pampas, 155–56; of Senegambia and Sahel, 8 Wentworth, Trelawney, 98 West African herding ecology, 7–8, 9, 46 The West India Sketch Book (Wentworth), 98 wheat, Garrido’s claim of first cultivation in New Spain, 43–44 Whitaker, John, 166 Willoughby, William, 103 windmills, 159–60 Winthrop, Samuel, 103, 126, 127, 129 Wolof, 7–8, 13, 41, 46, 46, 81–83, 85, 94 Xalapa, 48 Yanga, Gaspar, 49 Yanga palenque (community of escaped slaves), 49, 58 yellow fever, 202 Zempoala, 48