| | 1 | Author: | Phillips
Ulrich Bonnell
1877-1934 | Add | | | Title: | American Negro Slavery  | | | | Published: | 2003 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE Portuguese began exploring the west coast of Africa
shortly before Christopher Columbus was born; and no
sooner did they encounter negroes than they began to
seize and carry them in captivity to Lisbon. The court chronicler
Azurara set himself in 1452, at the command of Prince
Henry, to record the valiant exploits of the negro-catchers. Reflecting
the spirit of the time, he praised them as crusaders bringing
savage heathen for conversion to civilization and Christianity.
He gently lamented the massacre and sufferings involved,
but thought them infinitely outweighed by the salvation of souls.
This cheerful spirit of solace was destined long to prevail
among white peoples when contemplating the hardships of the
colored races. But Azurara was more than a moralizing annalist.
He acutely observed of the first cargo of captives brought
from southward of the Sahara, less than a decade before his
writing, that after coming to Portugal "they never more tried to
fly, but rather in time forgot all about their own country," that
"they were very loyal and obedient servants, without malice";
and that "after they began to use clothing they were for the most
part very fond of display, so that they took great delight in robes
of showy colors, and such was their love of finery that they
picked up the rags that fell from the coats of other people of
the country and sewed them on their own garments, taking great
pleasure in these, as though it were matter of some greater
perfection."1
1 Gomez Eannes de Azurara, Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of
Guinea, translated by C. R. Beazley and E. P. Prestage, in the Hakluyt Society
Publications, XCV, 85.
These few broad strokes would portray with
equally happy precision a myriad other black servants born centuries
after the writer's death and dwelling in a continent of
whose existence he never dreamed, Azurara wrote further that
while some of the captives were not able to endure the change
and died happily as Christians, the others, dispersed among Portuguese
households, so ingratiated themselves that many were
set free and some were married to men and women of the land
and acquired comfortable estates. This may have been an earnest
of future conditions in Brazil and the Spanish Indies; but
in the British settlements it fell out far otherwise. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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