Creolization and Contraband: CuraCao in the Early Modern Atlantic World

4 A Caribbean Port City

4 / A Caribbean Port City On 1 September 1753, Captain Mosseh Henriques Cotino freed a male slave named Primero, one of forty-two manumissions that were recorded in Willemstad that year. But this was no routine emancipation . A note at the bottom of the document indicated that the freedom paper was “granted pro forma to sail.”1 It would be revoked when Primero returned to port. Henriques Cotino was a prominent member of the local Sephardic community and treasurer of the synagogue. He owned at least ten sailing vessels at midcentury, which he used to trade around the Caribbean.2 Maritime trade was so important to Henriques Cotino that his 1762 tombstone in Curaçao’s Beth Haim cemetery bears a carving of a two-masted sailing ship.3 Six years earlier, on 27 July 1747, Mosseh’s brother, Abraham Henriques Cotino, had freed a slave named Mattheuw using the exact same wording.4 On 6 November 1760 another Sephardic merchant, Aron Henriques Moron, freed one of his twenty slaves, Juan Domingo, upon payment of two hundred pesos. Again, using almost identical language, Juan Domingo’s freedom papers stated that they were “given pro forma so that he be allowed to sail.”5 Henriques Moron had become one of the island’s most prosperous ship owners and shipping insurance agents after he arrived in Curaçao in 1730. At midcentury he owned over two dozen vessels, which he regularly rented to other Sephardim to use in trade around the region.6 Henriques Moron was also a prominent member of the synagogue, where he served in several governing positions.7 As wellestablished merchants, Henriques Moron and the Henriques Cotino 104 / sociocultural interactions brothers knew firsthand the risks association with maritime trade. French privateers seized three of Mosseh Henriques Cotino’s vessels in 1747; ten years later the English confiscated another.8 Aron Henriques Moron’s maritime business teetered as English and Spanish privateers repeatedly attacked both the vessels he owned and those he insured. The year he manumitted Juan Domingo, Henriques Moron paid 7,000 pesos to an English privateer supposedly for the return of the Abigail, although the vessel itself was only registered as being worth 550 pesos.9 (The payment was likely for contraband goods that he had purchased from the English.) The temporary manumissions of Juan Domingo, Mattheuw, and Primero were not isolated cases. Between 1741 and 1776 Curaçaoan merchants freed at least 153 slaves temporarily so they could go to sea, bestowing on them a peculiar intermediary legal status between freedom and enslavement that was revoked once the sailors returned to port.10 The circumstances that allowed for this form of quasi-freedom reveal much about the particular role of Curaçao’s port city of Willemstad as a Dutch entrepôt situated in Caribbean and Atlantic maritime commercial systems. Within the port two conflicting socioeconomic regimes coexisted and sometimes clashed with each other—one based on free trade and the other based on enslaved labor. Willemstad’s rising merchant class and the West India Company authorities grappled with the contradictions of living and working in a place that was bound by the conventions of a colonial American slave society even while the economy was based on intercolonial trade, which required the free movement of commodities, vessels, and workers (many of whom were enslaved). This dichotomy had an impact on the port, well beyond the economic realm, as it developed throughout the eighteenth century. Willemstad was simultaneously a Dutch entrepôt and a Caribbean port city, and these dual roles shaped the very character of town life. Caribbean and Atlantic Entrepôt As a center of free trade Willemstad occupied a vital role in the Caribbean and Atlantic port systems, alongside its position in the Dutch imperial structure. Although the WIC was well past its prime by the eighteenth century, Curaçao did well as the company’s colonial seat in the Americas. Willemstad was an integral part of a wider trade and communications system. The port received and dispatched a constant flow of people and information as well as commodities and ships figure 2. Van Walbeek’s sketches of Curaçao in 1634 included the harbor entrance, St. Anna Bay, and a plan for a simple pentagonal fort on the Point. (National Archives of the Netherlands VEL 595) figure 3. This 1640 Dutch map shows sites of springs and Spanish settlements, with livestock...