The enslaved of Cartagena hold their own funeral for St. Peter Claver

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, New Granada, September 1654 AD — The enslaved people of Cartagena held a funeral service of their own for St. Peter Claver this week. They chose the day, and they sent an invitation to the governor of the city, to the Spanish nobility and to the officers of the fleet, asking them to come and sit in it.

The people who arranged the service are owned by other men. The men they invited govern the port and the sea lane the slave ships come in by.

They ranged themselves inside the church by nation, each nation standing under its own chief, and they put a lighted torch into every hand in the building.

A choir sang the Mass. The treasurer of the church of Popayán preached the funeral oration, at length, on the dead priest’s virtues, his holiness and the wonders worked in him. The ministry God had given St. Peter Claver among the Africans of this port, he told the congregation, was the principal cause of those wonders.

St. Peter Claver was a Jesuit priest of the college here, and he died in the small hours of September 8. He was buried the next morning in a niche cut into the wall of the chapel of the Christ, on the epistle side. The governor, Don Pedro de Zapata, the chief magistrates and some naval officers carried the body to the grave. Within hours of the death the governor had called the city’s magistrates into session and proposed that Cartagena bear the cost of the obsequies. This week’s service was outside all of that.

Cartagena is the chief slave market of Spanish America. Ten or twelve thousand Africans are landed on these wharves in a year, bought on the coasts of Guinea, Angola and the Congo for about four crowns a head and sold here for two hundred crowns and sometimes more. Others are brought from São Tomé, Carabalí, Arda and Mina. They come ashore speaking languages that have nothing to do with one another, and that was the difficulty St. Peter Claver spent his working life on.

St. Peter Claver landed here in 1610 AD, a Jesuit from Catalonia, and for forty-four years he was the apostle of the Africans brought into this port. In 1622 AD his superiors ordered him to make his solemn profession. He accepted on one condition: that he might add a vow of his own, to serve the Africans of the port for ever. He signed the act in Latin: “Peter, for ever the slave of the negroes.”

He learned the Angola language. It was not enough for a port that trades in so many, so he got his superiors’ leave and went from door to door through the city asking for alms. The money paid his interpreters, and it also paid the substitutes hired to do the interpreters’ work for their owners for as long as he had them. With it he obtained seven Africans for the college, each from a different nation, who were not held in strict bondage but lived with certain liberties as catechists and interpreters. One of them took him several days to teach to make the sign of the cross.

More than thirty men and women have worked for him as interpreters over the years. Among them are Andrés Sacabuche and Ignacio Aluanil, both of Angola, and Francisco Yolofo, from the country of the great rivers of Guinea. One of them, nicknamed Calepino, knows eleven languages. It was they who made each person off the ships hear the preaching in his own tongue.

When he catechised, St. Peter Claver put the interpreters in the chairs and sat on the floor. A priest who walked in on that once lost his temper and went at the interpreter to knock him out of the seat and put the Father in it. St. Peter Claver stopped him gently and told him to leave the interpreter where he sat. In that work, St. Peter Claver said, the Black man was the priest and the preacher, and he was the interpreter’s servant.

St. Peter Claver kept two registers with the nations entered in order, and wrote the name of each person he baptised under the name of that person’s own country. He carried water in a flask in his pocket, so that when he met someone the book showed was still unbaptised, he could teach the man and baptise him where he stood.

One of the interpreters, a free Black woman named Magdalen de Mendoza, once fled from the storehouses rather than look any longer at the dying men lying in them. St. Peter Claver called her back. “Magdalen! in the name of God, return; these men are our brethren, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ!”

Outside the walls, on the estates around the city, the enslaved have been mourning him since the news of the death got out, and for several days together nobody could quiet them.

Inside the walls, people of every rank are calling him a saint outright and pressing for relics of him. Cartagena is raising a tomb over the grave at its own cost, with the arms of the city embossed on it.