124 Françoise Latour da Veiga Pinto,
A. Carreirasovereignty, and for the first time in Africa adopted the sytem of direct rule.
Dias de Nováis, who hoped to find silver mines in the interior, was appointed
governor for life and donee of the area between the Dande and the Cuanza
rivers. The crown, as it had done in Brazil, also granted him a captaincy, while
itself retaining the monopoly of the slave trade. But Paulo de Nováis' hopes of
finding precious metals were disappointed; and Angola, in its turn, lost any
means of arousing Portugal's interest except through her manpower. The slave
trade was in fact to make rapid strides at Luanda and, from 1617 (the date of
its foundation), at Säo Filipe de Benguela.
Thus by the sixteenth century the triangular trade, which was to continue
until the nineteenth century, was already established. Apart from Mina gold,
and a few secondary products, Africa was regarded solely as a reservoir of
manpower for the sugar plantations of the Atlantic islands, Brazil and Spanish
America: Europe supplied the manufactured goods.
But the size of the sugar-cane industry, and with it of the slave trade,
aroused the envy of the European powers ; and from the end of the sixteenth
century onwards they did everything in their power to break Portugal's mono-
poly. For, after the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Pope had divided the
world between Spain and Portugal : Africa, Asia and Brazil went to Portugal,
and the rest of America to Spain. The disparity of these rights led to a change
in international law, and the authority of the Pope came under attack from the
Protestant schism. With the enunciation of the Grotius doctrine, the freedom
of the seas was proclaimed; moreover, in practice, the British and Dutch
shattered the maritime hegemony of Spain and Portugal by the end of the
century.
Up to then, Portugal had nevertheless held the monopoly of the slave
trade, although smuggling had been going on from the beginning. But, up to
the end of the century, attacks by foreign powers—Britain and Holland—had
been mainly directed against the monopoly of Mina gold rather than against
that of slaves. The Dutch-Portuguese war at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, and the foreign competition that followed, finally broke Portugal's
monopoly.
However, despite domestic difficulties caused by the crisis over the mon-
archy, and foreign wars, Portugal succeeded in keeping an important role in
the slave trade. This was due to the connections she had built up between the
centres of supply—Africa—and of demand—Brazil ; and also to the systems
instituted by the crown for controlling the trade. There were three such systems.
The commonest was that of farming out to a con tratador (the first being Fernao
Gomes), who did virtually nothing but collect an indirect tax, for he was
authorized to issue licences (avengas) to slave traders. The contratadores usually
lived in Lisbon, while the avençadores were the actual slave-traders. Secondly,
the crown itself, quite apart from farming out under contract, issued licences