34 Michéle Ducketevidence of any concern in the matter, and when in 1557 the Jesuit Manuel de
Nobrega requested permission to buy more slaves, the Order blamed Miguel
Garcia, who had dared to protest against it.^12 The fact that the clergy in the
Spanish and Portuguese colonies owned thousands of slaves was regarded as
proof of the so-called legitimacy of the slave trade by the Council of the Indies.
In addition it was imperative not to let the slave trade fall into the hands of
'heretic' nations. With a clear conscience, Catholics and Protestants vied with
each other to secure the market for themselves. Thus it was that the problem of
the slave trade came to the fore in a case which took place in 1685, when a
German Protestant, Balthazar Coymans, upon request for a concession, met
with the reply from the Spanish theologians Molina, Sanchez and Sandoval,
who had been consulted on the matter, that there was nothing to be said
against trading in slaves if it served the true Faith, but that the souls of the
blacks were in grave danger of being contaminated by a voyage on board a
heretic vessel!^13
It may be said, however, that Protestants and Catholics shared the same
evangelical ideal and that the image of the faithful servant subject to divine
law and the authority of a kindly master was enough to reassure a Christian
conscience. But there still remained the problem of persecution of the indi-
vidual—in Africa, on board the slave ships, at the slave markets—in short,
within the actual framework of the whole slave system. The deliberately sus-
tained myth of men taken as slaves and then sold to dealers by the Africans
themselves, the alleged care taken by slave traders to look after their shipments
of slaves, was all cast in doubt when it came to the third stage of proceedings,
the slave markets, whose iniquities could not be disguised. The rest transpired
through accounts by missionaries and travellers. In 1571, a theologian from
Seville, Tomas de Mercado, showed just how far the slave trade was contrary
to proper commercial practice and humanitarian principles. Although he
acknowledged the fact that slavery and the sale of African slaves by the Africans
themselves did exist, he spoke out against the way traders would foment inter-
necine conflicts as a means of capturing prisoners. He described conditions
on board the ships and protested against the alarming mortality rate. His
protest was all the more significant in that it was aimed at the slave trade and
not simply slavery as such. Other theologians^14 were to express similar views,
challenging the 'good faith' of the traders to whom the prisoners were handed
over, and who would undiscriminatingly carry off men, women and children.
Christian tradition, as we know, holds that any business transaction must be
legitimate, and proscribes fraud or excessive profit; the black slave trade was
therefore inadmissible, even if one of its functions was to supply the plantations
with slaves who would ultimately become Christians. Traders whose consciences
were not clear were therefore urged by Mercado to speak to their confessors!^16
It would be pointless to deny the fact that the theologians' standpoint