THE GREAT OPENING^69
But this regime could not easily be installed in Christian Europe,
where it would have entailed a reversion to earlier, now unacceptable
institutions. Slavery had long since given way to serfdom, in part be
cause Christians were not supposed to be held as slaves (among other
things because chattel status was incompatible with the sacrament of
marriage), in part because the supply of pagan or infidel slaves was
small and unreliable—also self-liquidating by conversion. Blacks, to be
sure, might be seen as an exception. One might question whether they
had a soul, whether they could become Christian. We know the Por
tuguese had no qualms importing black slaves for domestic service or
for labor in the cane fields of the coastal plain; some 10 percent of the
population of Lisbon in the mid-sixteenth century was apparently
black.^13 Yet many (how many?) of these were eventually manumitted,
and they merged into the population at large. The institution of black
slavery, in spite of occasional "blackamoor" servants come down to us
in oil paintings of elegant interiors, never took hold in Europe. If Eu
ropeans were going to use black slaves for field work, they wanted it
done far away.
The Atlantic islands were far away. Here was a tabula rasa, a labo
ratory for new social arrangements. One can follow the progression.
The Azores and Madeiras were initially peopled by European settlers
or by unfree persons who had no choice in the matter—convicts, pros
titutes, victims and orphans of religious persecution.* The Cape Verde
Islands, on the other hand, off the coast of Gambia, were ideally placed
to tap the slave trade that flourished a short reach away, and were soon
shipping blacks to Lisbon and to some of the other islands.
When African slavers found that the white man, come for gold and
pepper, was also interested in this human commodity, they were ready.
In the quarter century before Columbus, the Cape Verde Islands and
to a lesser extent the Madeiras became a testing ground for slave sugar
plantations, to be followed by Sao Tome in the sixteenth century.
Those planters tough enough to drill and squeeze labor while stand
ing up to hardship and climate made fortunes; so did the Italian mer-
- The recent Argentine practice of taking the children of "disappeared" (note the
transitive verb) political adversaries, including babies born in prison, and then giving
them to their jailers or even the policemen who murdered the parents, to rear as their
own, has long antecedents. Cf. this shipload of the "converted" children of Jews ban
ished from Portugal in the expulsion of 1497, wrenched from their parents and saved
for the next world, sent to the Cape Verde Islands because volunteer settlers were not
available—Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus, p. 201. White men went in to these
tropical lands, but few came out.