Bought for four crowns in Africa, sold for two hundred at Cartagena

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, New Granada, September, in the 1630s AD — Cartagena de Indias sits on the Caribbean shore of New Granada, at eleven or twelve degrees of latitude, and this month its bay is filling up. From about the beginning of September until Christmas the war fleets of Spain gather here to meet the ships coming up from Peru, Quito and Potosí with the silver of the mines. The city has little to recommend it beyond a safe and roomy harbour. The heat is worse than in any other inhabited part of the Indies, and the sun burns all year. The rains are frequent. The air is blamed for the contagious diseases that are common here. The ground will not feed the people who live on it, so most of what they eat comes in by sea. The one relief is a fresh breeze that blows from December to March.

Between 1580 AD and 1640 AD this is the principal slave port of all Spanish America. Twelve or fourteen ships reach it each year with between three and six hundred people in each hold, and not less than ten or twelve thousand are landed here annually. They are bought on the coasts of Guinea, Angola and the Congo for about four crowns a head and sold here for two hundred and sometimes more. Some are sold for four pieces of cowhide.

Behind the shore, inside the walls, stands a small Jesuit college, and in it a priest who goes down to those ships as they unload. Saint Peter Claver, a Catalan from Verdú, landed at this port in 1610 AD. He was ordained here in 1616 AD, and the next year he took sole charge of the Jesuit mission to the Africans landed in the bay. Making his final vows in 1622 AD, he added one of his own, to serve the enslaved for life, and signed the act, in the wording Slattery’s Life preserves, “Peter the slave of the Negroes for ever.”

When a fleet comes in, nobody in Cartagena works. Flags go up on the towers and the castles. The bells ring, trumpets and drums sound, and the artillery fires. The militia turns out in order and in its best. The whole city goes down to the water — clergy, religious, nobility and the common people together — and no workman stays at his bench. Because the seas off this coast are rough, the town is often short of everything while gold and silver from the mines pass through its streets. St. Peter Claver’s window looks straight out over the harbour, and he does not go to it to watch the fleets.

He watches for the other ships. As soon as a slaver enters the port, someone brings him the news — the governor, or one of the chief officers. He has promised Masses for whoever tells him first, and men compete for the errand. He asks what language the people aboard speak and sends for his interpreters. Then he goes down to the wharf with baskets: lemons, biscuits, tobacco, bananas, white bread, wine, brandy and preserves. He set down one of those mornings in a letter of May 31, 1627 AD: “Yesterday, May 30, 1627, on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, numerous blacks, brought from the rivers of Africa, disembarked from a large ship. Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons, sweet biscuits, and I know not what else, we hurried toward them.”

The people off the ships are held in storehouses — four bare walls, room for several hundred, the ground for a bed. “When we approached their quarters, we thought we were entering another Guinea,” St. Peter Claver wrote of that day. “We had to force our way through the crowd until we reached the sick.” St. Peter Claver and the brother with him shared no language with the people they had come to meet: “This was how we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions.” On the day of a general landing the priest is at the water at the hour. He gives his hand to the people coming ashore. He carries the sick in his arms to carts he has hired.

The rest of the work runs on interpreters, and it is a payroll. St. Peter Claver has learnt the Angola language; for the rest he begs alms from door to door, pays the interpreters, and pays the substitutes engaged to do their owners’ work for as long as he needs them. Among those who work with him are Andrés Sacabuche and Ignacio Aluanil, both of Angola, and a man called Calepino for the number of tongues he has — eleven, by the count of the sworn testimony. Brother Nicolás González, his companion of twenty-two years, works beside him. When he catechizes, the interpreters take the chairs and he stands, or sits on the floor. Magdalen de Mendoza, a free Black woman from the same country as the people coming off the ships, interprets for him too. She once walked out of the sheds at the sight of the dying men, and St. Peter Claver called after her: “Magdalen! in the name of God, return; these men are our brethren, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ!”

The church he brings them to is about thirty feet long. It is low, damp enough to be usually muddy underfoot, and very hot, and mosquitoes come in off the water. The public slaughter-house stands on one side of it, shops and drinking-houses on the other.

Pope Leo XIII canonized St. Peter Claver on January 15, 1888 AD. Four months later, in In Plurimis, his encyclical on the abolition of slavery, the Pope told apostolic men to “look, as if into a mirror of apostolic virtue, at the life and works of St. Peter Claver… who for fully forty years gave himself up to minister with the greatest constancy in his labors, to a most miserable assembly of Moorish slaves.” A note printed with the same encyclical calls the Cartagena of his day the main slave market of the New World.

The bay still takes ships. The container port of Contecar stands on it, and there, on September 10, 2017 AD, Pope Francis said the closing Mass of his journey to Colombia. Inside the walls, the church by the old slaughter-house is now the Santuario Museo San Pedro Claver (the Sanctuary Museum of Saint Peter Claver). It keeps his relics and shows his story to visitors. Pope St. John Paul II made an appeal at the tomb there on July 6, 1986 AD, and Pope Francis prayed the Angelus in the same church in 2017 AD.