- 1 Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (henceforth ANTT), Lisbon, Feitos Findos, Juízo da Índia e Mina, (...)
1At the end of the eighteenth century, Father José Rodrigues Barreto filed a lawsuit against Rafael Teixeira de Oliveira, the captain of the ship “The Great Constable of Portugal”, accusing him of failing to pay the upkeep of his “slave Daniel, a black boy, who came serving on the same ship”. Daniel had been purchased by the priest at the port of Bombay, in early December 1785. From then on, Daniel not only served the priest, “but to work on the same ship at all the ports that it touched along that Malavar Coast”. On the journey from Goa to Lisbon, Daniel “came serving everything”, on a voyage that “took time [...] through the ports of the Malabar coast” until he reached Portugal, a journey that lasted ten months. Despite the heavy work, Daniel had not even received the ration of biscuits from the captain that he was entitled to for his services on the ship.1
2While the word used by the priest to refer to the slave Daniel was rapaz [adolescent boy], the captain called him moleque, a term often used for children. There is no indication of Daniel’s exact age in the record, but it is interesting to think about how representative this case may be of the life experience of so many children or youths from Indian Ocean societies who were enticed to come on board the ships where they could be held against their will (Allen 2009, 41). At a tender age or in early youth, men and women were captured and enslaved in several Asian societies. They were transported through ports in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago and taken to the Middle East, the Far East, Europe and the Americas (Shrikker and Wickramasinghe 2020, 21). Many enslaved children and youth had their lives linked to voyages of the Carreira da Índia [India Run], a maritime and commercial route that regularly connected Portugal to the Indian Ocean (Russell-Wood 1998, 30-32).
- 2 Among the studies on slavery in the Portuguese empire in Asia, see Pinto (1992), Thomaz (1994a), Wa (...)
3Despite the growing knowledge of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean and its impact on local societies, “children remain more notable for their absence than their presence in these studies”, notes Richard Allen (2009). As far as enslaved children in the Atlantic areas of Portuguese influence are concerned, the historiography of Brazil is extensive. The historiography on the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean under Portuguese influence addresses the issue of enslaved children within studies on broader topics such as society, trade, or slavery itself,2 but enslaved children have not been the central focus. In this sense, this article intends to contribute to the historiography of slavery in Portuguese India by focusing on enslaved children and discussing the challenges in analyzing this subject, considering the potential and limitations of some Portuguese sources produced mainly in Goa and Lisbon.
4Campell, Miers and Miller (2009) highlighted that sources on enslaved children are often incomplete, which meant that the lives of enslaved children have long been considered inaccessible to historians. How children were affected by their experiences as slaves requires further research (Miers, Campell and Miller 2009). Recently, scholars have looked at the experience of child enslavement, although studies focusing on the Atlantic have predominated. Concerning the Indian Ocean, Peabody (2017) analyzed the case of Madeleine, who was sold into slavery as a child in Chandernagor in the 1760s. Madeleine experienced several displacements; from India she was taken to France and then transported to the Reunion Islands. Wickramasinghe (2020) traced the lives of enslaved people who resisted their living conditions in Sri Lanka, such as the boy Louis Badgamege, who was kidnapped in the early nineteenth century. However, this approach is still little explored in the study of enslaved children in Portuguese India.
5In an earlier study, I delved into the experiences of enslaved people from the Indian Ocean, whether they lived in India or were transported to Lisbon (Faria 2024), and how to overcome the challenges of researching their experiences based on Portuguese sources. While it proves difficult to research the experiences of enslaved people in archives, obtaining information on enslaved children is an even greater challenge. Stella (2000), Lahon (2004), Fonseca (2010) and Caldeira (2017) have conducted relevant research on slavery in the Iberian Peninsula, addressing the presence of enslaved Asians in Lisbon. However, they did not devote their attention solely to this population group. Sousa (2014, 101-110) also examined instances of Japanese slaves in Lisbon. While some of these studies pointed out the complexity of researching enslaved children (Stella 2000, 71-73; Fonseca 2010, 88-90), none centered exclusively on this topic.
- 3 Directorate of Archives and Archaeology (henceforth DAA), Goa, Cod. 860, Cartas de alforria dos esc (...)
6This article mainly analyzes the Cartas de alforria aos escravos [“Manumission Letters of Slaves”] from Goa, the records of Lisbon’s Casa da Índia and the marriage petitions of the Câmara Eclesiástica de Lisboa [Ecclesiastical Chamber of Lisbon].3 These sources were selected because they present the presumed age or stage of life of the enslaved person and were produced with some regularity, which favors the identification of patterns in the way enslaved children were recorded and classified. They were also produced in two regions (Goa and Lisbon) that were important hubs connecting the trade of goods and the movement of people between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans – contexts through which some enslaved children from Portuguese India circulated. Complementary sources (wills, traveler reports, inquisitorial documents, and population lists) are used to unravel the presence and movements of this social and age-related group.
- 4 Estado da Índia was the name given to the group of conquests, fortresses and trading posts administ (...)
- 5 On the centrality of Goa, see Santos (1999). Fonseca (2010, 79-137) studied the role of Lisbon as a (...)
7The Carreira da Índia linked Goa, the political-administrative and ecclesiastical capital of the Estado da Índia (State of India),4 and Lisbon, the destination of many captives who were taken from the Indian Ocean to Portugal.5 Recent historiographical approaches have highlighted the importance of making connections and comparisons between trafficking in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic and integrating the two oceans (Hooper and Eltis 2013). According to Wickramasinghe (2020), the history of enslaved people cannot be divorced from the histories of the places they came from or where they were taken from. Goa was not the only place where enslaved children lived and were traded in Portuguese India, nor was Lisbon the only European destination for enslaved children from India, but this delineation provides a framework to observe either the local presence or the transit of these children from India to Portugal.
8In this article, the terms “children” and “youth” are used to refer to enslaved people who had not yet reached the age of majority. However, the challenges related to age classifications are considered, since contemporary criteria differ from today’s and the sources do not always record the age of the enslaved. In analyzing the Portuguese sources, we follow the definitions of children and stages of life used in Portugal in the early modern period. There were different definitions during this period, but a prevailing view considered childhood as the period from birth to about 7 years of age, followed by a subsequent phase between 7 and 14 years of age, which marked the beginning of puberty (Hespanha 2010, 70-80; Anjos 2021). In the Estado da Índia, population records from the end of the eighteenth century tended to classify children as people, of both sexes, up to the age of seven. Males aged 7 to 15 were classified as rapazes, while meninas corresponded to girls aged 7 to 14. The focus of this article is on enslaved people who were categorized into the first two stages of life, i.e. children (up to 7 years old) and girls/boys (14 and 15 years old, respectively, who were part of the childhood cycle, between childhood and puberty).
9This article examines how enslaved children were defined and classified in Portuguese India. Additionally, it intends to contribute to the literature by providing insights into children’s experiences as slaves, shedding light on the circumstances under which they were enslaved in Portuguese India and the displacements they experienced – in the Indian subcontinent, in the Indian Ocean worlds or across the Atlantic. The first part of this article gives an overview of slavery in the Indian Ocean worlds and the involvement of the Portuguese in the slave trade. The second part analyzes the criteria and contemporary words used to classify enslaved children in documentary sources. The third part examines the experience of child enslavement in Portuguese India, based on the analysis of Portuguese sources and dialogue with the historiography. The fourth part deals with the forced relocation of enslaved children and youths from the Indian Ocean world to Lisbon.
10One of the questions posed by scholars dedicated to the study of slavery in India is how to define what slavery was in this society, where different forms of dependency, servitude, and temporary slavery (due to debt, for example) existed alongside forms of hereditary slavery (Stanziani 2014). Despite the broad debate, it can be assumed that there is at least some consensus. One is that the dichotomy of “being a slave” and “being free” is not sufficient to explain the diverse forms of dependency and regimes of slavery that existed in South Asian societies. In India, there were forms of mutual dependency, in which one person (or group or caste) was subject to obligations to another person of higher status, who in turn was subordinate to a superior (Stanziani 2014). Richard Eaton (2006, 2) proposed the following definition of slavery: “the condition of uprooted outsiders, impoverished insiders – or the descendants of either – serving persons or institutions on which they are wholly dependent”.
11In the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago, multiple local forms of slavery and dependency (immobilizing regimes) coexisted with the long-distance trade of captives (mobilizing regimes) (Rossum et al. 2020, 5-11). The notion of Indian Ocean World (IOW) was used to refer to a macro-region, since the IOW “spans a coastline, or littoral scape, from the tip of Southern Africa to the Persian Gulf, the whole of the peninsular Indian subcontinent, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, and archipelagic South East Asia up to the Philippines” (Chakraborti 2023). Within the IOW, a sophisticated system of long-distance commercial exchanges linked Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, as well as China (Campbell 2010, 61). The slave trade in the IOW was multidirectional and its main destinations changed over time (Stanziani 2014).
12The slave trade in the Indian Ocean worlds has a long history, which began long before the Atlantic trade (Campbell 2004). It is estimated that millions of men, women and children were taken from East Africa, crossing the Red Sea, the west coast of India, the Middle East, and South Asia, over the centuries. Indian, Arab and Muslim merchants also transported people from the Indian subcontinent who were taken and enslaved in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia (Allen 2009). From the fifteenth century onwards, Europeans sought to explore the slave trade in the Indian Ocean worlds, first the Portuguese and, in the following centuries, other agents (Dutch, French, English, and Danes). In this context, the slave trade conducted by Europeans reinforced local slavery practices and led to changes in slavery systems in the course of this process (Schrikker and Wickramasinghe 2020).
13Gujarati, Swahili and Arab merchants were active on the East African coast. The Portuguese tried to exploit the existing networks and transport enslaved people from the East African coast, northern Mozambique and Madagascar to their possessions in South Asia and other parts of the Estado da Índia (Machado 2014, 212-214). Beyond the Estado da Índia, the Portuguese also engaged in the slave trade with their informal presence in the Bay of Bengal (Arasaratnam 1995). In the 1620s, the demand for slaves along the Indian Ocean led to Hugli, Pipli, Chattagrama-Dianga, Sandwip and Mrauk-U becoming slave ports. The Portuguese, particularly the Portuguese-Asians, participated in this trade and supplied captives to distant markets in Africa, Asia and Europe (Mukherjee 2016, 219-234). The Portuguese also operated further east, in Southeast Asia. The quest for Portuguese sovereignty in East Timor in the 1660s and 1670s provided the opportunity for extensive raids to capture and enslave people (Hägerdal 2010). The Portuguese also played a key role in supplying the Philippine market with enslaved people, some of whom eventually made their way to Spanish America (Seijas 2014), facilitating the movement of people across the Pacific Ocean.
14Our study focuses on the influx of enslaved people from these different origins in Goa and other Portuguese enclaves in India. This influx was favored by the exploitation of inter-Asian trade routes linking Goa (and other ports in India) to markets on the East African coast, the Middle East, the Coromandel coast, the Bay of Bengal, Malacca, the Moluccas, and the Goa-Macau-Nagasaki route (Russell-Wood 1998, 30-32). The Portuguese enclaves in India, particularly Goa and Cochin, served as hubs where captives from various parts of Asia and Africa were concentrated before being re-exported to destinations in the Atlantic context. The enslaved transported on the ships of the Carreira da Índia primarily reached Lisbon. Additionally, some of them were taken, albeit to a lesser extent, to cities in the Algarve, Santarém, Coimbra, Braga, Porto, and Spanish cities. In the next section, we address some of the challenges linked to the identification of enslaved children and youth in Portuguese sources related to India.
- 6 Academia de Ciências de Lisboa, Lisbon, Azul 138, ff. 249, 274v, 336.
15There were different local terms for servile dependents in Western India, although it is difficult to decipher the subtle differences between them. Ghulam (Arabic) and banda (Persian) were some of the words used to describe enslaved men, both equivalent to dāsa (Sanskrit). Dasi, batik and kunbini are some of the terms used to describe women. Kunbini is probably derived from kutumbini [household woman]. Servant women and children were often identified by kinship-derived or genealogical terms, as in Marathi documents where muli (daughter) and batik (slave women) were used interchangeably (Guha 2006, 164). In a Konkani-Portuguese dictionary, possibly from the seventeenth century (Pinheiro 2005, 193-194), Gulâmu, Bătticu and Dâssu were translated as both slaves and captives; and băttiki and dâssi as captive, slave and servant. In Konkani, there were several terms to refer to different types of servants.6
16This section examines the terminology used in the Portuguese sources analyzed to refer to situations in which children and youth lived as slaves or were subjected to other service obligations. Pinheiro (2008) highlighted that European colonization consisted not only of a process of domination and civilization of local social groups, but also of the domination and civilization, or rather, domestication of the languages of these groups. This process led to reductionism so that the diversity of local characteristics and forms of domination were replaced by universal models, based on the translation of lexicons. He noted that “a universal meaning and understanding of slavery” was imposed, which contributed to the disappearance of a variety of forms of domination, whose understanding would require us not to limit ourselves to the words slave and slavery, but also take into account other categories that denoted subalternity (Pinheiro 2008).
17One of the challenges of researching enslaved children in Portuguese India is that definitions of what children and youth are vary from place to place. Societies of the time did not generally record accurate birth dates, so determining the age of captives had to take into account the criteria and perceptions not only of traditional societies but also of traffickers and slave price estimators. Captives could also give the age they believed themselves to be, a complex process, as they had to draw on memories of their origins, often blunted by the trauma and disruptive experiences caused by episodes of kidnapping, forcible removal from their homeland as victims of raids, forced relocation, successive resales and other forms of violence. According to Campbell (2013, 88), the onset of puberty for girls was a traditional differentiator between servile adults and servile children, while for boys it was a combination of age and height.
- 7 On the dictionaries, see Bluteau (1712-1728).
18Another challenge is to identify which words in European sources denote the status of enslaved children or young people. While contemporary dictionaries can be helpful, they often provide definitions that aim for generality and do not always match the nuanced meanings found in archival sources of individuals categorizing different life stages and work relationships, including slavery or other forms of unfree labor.7 To uncover the terminology used to describe enslaved children and youth in Portuguese India, we primarily analyze the “Goa Manumission Letters”. We have also analyzed other sources to identify possible similarities and differences in meaning. Despite the name “Manumission Letters”, this collection comprises a number of records concerning enslaved men and women. In addition, there are a considerable number of records labeled “free and manumitted” or “free and not bound to slavery or captivity”, although they are still obligated to serve a master who takes them into his household (Faria 2020). This collection includes over 700 records from Goa between 1682 and 1760 (Ames 2008; Souza 2008).
- 8 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 64 (08/02/1709).
19The words used in the manumission records coincide in part with the meanings of the same words used in Portugal, if we take Raphael Bluteau’s eighteenth-century dictionary as a reference. Furthermore, Sá (2011, 75) highlights that the criteria used by Bluteau to delimit the life stages are confusing. Reading the manumission documents from Goa encourages us to analyze the variety of words related to the stages of life and the challenge of establishing clear correspondences between the words and their meanings. For example, in the “Goa Manumission Letters”, written in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the word child does not occur so frequently and, sometimes, it is used made without mentioning the age of the children. One of the records in which the age is mentioned is that of the six-year-old child named Ana, whom Antónia Vaddo, resident in the parish of Santa Luzia in Goa, took home.8 In records from the 1740s and 1750s, the word appears more frequently and is applied to newborns or boys and girls between the ages of 4 and 6.
- 9 Portuguese diminutive feminine form of “kaffir”, frequently associated with people from East Afri (...)
- 10 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 47 (24/11/1682).
- 11 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 54v (18/10/1686).
- 12 DAA, Cod. 860, not numbered (22/10/1739).
20In eighteenth-century Portugal, terms such as negrinha [Portuguese diminutive feminine form of negro], pretinho [Portuguese diminutive masculine form of black] and pretinha [Portuguese diminutive feminine form of black] were often used to refer to enslaved children or youths brought to Lisbon from the Indian Ocean. From the “Goa Manumission Letters” it appears that terms such as negrinha, mulatinha [Portuguese feminine diminutive form of mulatto], and cafrinha9 were typically used to refer to girls up to the age of 15, although they were not the most frequent words in this Goan source; they were also used to refer to youths who were enslaved, manumitted, or not bound to captivity. For example, the negrinha Macota, in the house of António da Costa, “was born of a captive womb”, but declared freed.10 The negrinha seamstress Lucrécia, aged 12, was sent to Joana Rodrigues’ house until it became clear that her case fell under the just titles of captivity.11 Mention is made of the freed cafrinho Francisco, from Mozambique, who accompanied the Portuguese Gonçalo Pinto Brandão on a trip to Goa, of “his own free will”, and could not be sold as a slave.12
- 13 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 65 (02/08/1709).
- 14 DAA, Cod. 860, ff. 5v, 6v. Bicho could also mean drudge or worm (Alberts 2013, 187).
21The most frequently occurring words in the manumission documents are moço, moça, bicho and bicha, as well as meninos and meninas. The latter were generally used for people up the age of 14, but in some records these words were not always given an age. They were used for both free and enslaved people, in the sense of Bluteau’s Vocabulary (1716, v. 5, 421): menino means “a boy before the age of seven, as much as between seven and fourteen”. In the “Manumission Letters” one finds the use of meninos/as for enslaved or manumitted children of tender age, such as the two-year-old girl Maria, daughter of the cafra Serafina and a Portuguese man.13 In the same sources, bicha is usually associated with female children and young adults between the ages of 7 and 20, while bicho was used for men between the ages of 6 and 30.14
- 15 DAA, Cod. 860, ff. 5v, 6v, 28v.
- 16 Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon, Reservados, Cod. 846, Viagens pela Índia, f. 213.
22In the “Goa Manumission Letters” the association between bicho/a and the condition of enslavement is probable, but it is not an unequivocal connection. Some records indicate that the bicho was taken by a master “to raise [him] and is not a captive, nor is he bought”.15 In this regard, a seventeenth-century Franciscan friar provided a definition that aligns with the meaning found in the documentary source in which bicho was used to refer to people who were or were not subject to slavery. The Franciscan explained that bicho and bicha were words used in India to denote “the young age of boys and girls of all castes” and “those who serve either with or without a salary, or in slavery”.16 While Bluteau (1713, v. 2, 120) defined bicho as a “young slave boy”, according to the “language of India”. This meaning seems to have become established in various contexts across the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century.
- 17 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (henceforth AHU), Lisbon, CU, 064, cx. 8, doc. 6 (18/06/1753).
- 18 On the terms used by Europeans for slavery in Japan, see Nelson (2004). Sousa (2014, 24-28, 258) ci (...)
- 19 On the term bicha in China, see Penalva (2011, 22).
23The governor of Mozambique, Francisco de Mello e Castro, for example, spoke of “small slaves commonly called Bichos”, who were shipped from Mozambique to ports in India, Brazil, and Portugal.17 In Zambézia, bicho referred to domestic slaves, as a list of Dominican slaves from the late eighteenth century shows, in which “hallway bichos who stay inside the house” are mentioned. In Quelimane, the “yard bichos” were typically children of former slaves and served various roles, such as servants, launderers, bakers, and cooks (Capela 1995, 203, 207). The term bicho extended beyond Portuguese India; it was also used in records from the 1760s in Chandernagor, a territory in India under French administration (Peabody 2017, 11). Alberts (2013, 187-195) argues that European missionaries tended to associate the concept of a child with that of a slave, viewing both as in need of supervision, guidance, or authority. This association explains the use of identical terms for minors (moço, moça/boy, girl) and enslaved people, as well as other words suggesting contempt (such as bicho). The study by Alberts (2013) refers to Malacca, but the use of such words also occurred in other places such as Goa, Japan18 and China.19
- 20 There is proximity to Bluteau’s definition (1716, v. 5, 524): moço was between 14/15 years old and (...)
- 21 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 51 (29/03/1683).
24In the “Goa Manumission Letters”, moço [boy] e moça [girl] are used for different stages of life, from the youngest age to people over 50.20 These terms seemed to apply to enslaved people, to those who were freed, or to those who were in a transitional state between slavery and freedom, and often had obligations that were not entirely consistent with being free. Moça Tomásia and her three daughters, for example, were obliged to serve António Teixeira and his wife Luísa da Silva while they were alive, but they could not be sold or considered captives.21 There are records of moços who were bought, and declared freedmen by their masters, but were kept as servants for a certain period of time. In the “Goa Manumission Letters”, moço and moça were used to refer to people who were subject to duties, especially domestic services. In the population list of Goa (from 1720), moça also appears associated with services, but does not refer exclusively to the status of slave, as the expressions appear: moças de servir [servant girls], moças livres do serviço [girls free from service], moças e cafras cativas [captive girls and Kaffir captive girls] (Matos 2007).
- 22 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 13v (28/09/1682).
- 23 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 67v (26/01/1696).
- 24 DAA, Cod. 860, ff. 61, 72.
25Another aspect that should be emphasized when analyzing the words used in the “Goa Manumission Letters” is the possibility of working out aspects of dependency relations and the enslavement of children and young people in Goa. Vink (2003, 150, note 44) states that in Indian Ocean, dependence and inequality often span a continuum “from freedom to slavery with permeable boundaries between various categories or population groups”. Furthermore, the vocabulary used in Goa suggests similarities with experiences in other parts of Asia, where the image of servitude/slavery resembled that of an extended family, as evidenced by the terms used for persons in conditions of servitude or slavery, such as children, adopted children, or nephews (Reid 1999). According to the “Goa Manumission Letters”, several masters claimed that they had taken boys and girls “to raise them”, suggesting the idea of “education at home” (Sá 2011, 83). This was stated by Manuel Pires regarding the bicho Bartolomeu22 and by Inácia Fernandes about the “child” called Xavier.23 João de Lemos took the nine-year-old bicho João, who was “his godson”, into his home. António Fernandes also promised to raise the rapariga [girl] Antónia “as a daughter”.24
- 25 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 70 (28/06/1712).
26Some of the “Goa Manumission Letters” describe relationships similar to those between masters and apprentices, particularly regarding the integration of the apprentice into the master's household. In Portugal, to learn a trade, the child was entrusted to a master, which often meant changing villages, so that the master assumed parental authority over the child, henceforth lived in his master’s house, together with the master’s wife and children (Sá 2011, 83). The practice in Goa of raising boys in their master’s house, especially to learn a trade, was similar to systems in other Indian Ocean societies but sometimes differed from them. In Mauritius, apprentices were not “sold” individually, but could be transferred along with the property on which they worked (Campbell 2013, 104-105). Furthermore, some slaves had to continue working for their masters for some time after their emancipation (Campbell 2013, 104). By comparison, in Goa, Diogo Rodrigues claimed that the young João was in his house to learn Christian doctrine and the trade of tailor, which was “free and without obligation of slavery”, but required four years of service (Faria 2021).25 Another striking local feature, according to the documents, is that the masters committed themselves not to transfer the freedmen and apprentices to other people’s homes, that is, they could not dispose of their servants without restriction. In short, the “Goa Letters of Manumission” shed light on enslaved children who were handed over to Christian masters to serve them, perform domestic chores, and do manual labor.
27This section discusses the experience of enslaved children based on the analyzed sources and epistemological considerations that acknowledge the asymmetries and biases in colonial archives. It proposes overcoming the challenge of narrating their ephemeral presence in the archives (Fuentes 2016). Dialogue with scholarship on slavery in different Indian Ocean contexts will also help to classify or compare the experiences of enslaved children in Portuguese India. As for the circumstances that led to slavery, studies on the IOW show that people were enslaved due to capture during military campaigns, debt slavery, or disasters that led to the sale of themselves or their children (Arasaratnam 1995, 97-202; Carreira 2013, 410-411). In Cape Town, the main paths to slavery were through the slave trade, slavery by birth, and the kidnapping of the native population (Shell 1994). In sixteenth-century Malacca, trade, birth, and debt were the main routes to enslavement, but captivity by war and criminal conviction were also notable (Thomaz 1994a, 260). Regarding the transmission of slave status through birth, McManus (2020) has pointed out the differences between Asian territories, which were less pronounced for Japanese or Chinese slaves, and depended on local practices such as the stipulation of a certain number of years of service.
- 26 ANTT, TSO, IL, processos 13230 and 3304. Enslaved people had their accounts recorded in the inquisi (...)
28According to Allen (2009, 41), children were enslaved in IOW societies by the same means (raiding and enslavement, kidnapping, sale by their own families) and reasons (their vulnerability and the greater ease with which they could be exploited) as in other parts of the world. The French traveler Pyrard de Laval (1998 [1615], v. 2, 570) noted that children were victims of illegal capture, secretly imprisoned and sold. Portuguese sources contain scattered references to youths stolen from distant regions and taken to India. In a will written in Cochin in 1569, for example, Amador Carvalho mentioned the ownership of several slaves, including a stolen Chinese woman (Aires 2013). Additionally, Inquisition processes report on the kidnapping experiences of some enslaved people such as Valéria de Figueiredo, who was abducted as a girl and taken to Malacca and then to Cochin (Caldeira 2017, 64). Pedro was also stolen as a child along with others “from his nation” and sold to Christians in Malacca. After their abduction, Valéria de Figueiredo and Pedro were sold to different masters, who took them from Malacca to India and finally to Portugal, where they lived as slaves in the late sixteenth century.26
- 27 DAA, Cod. 860, f. 3 (22/09/1682).
- 28 DAA, Cod. 860, ff. 1-4v.
29In the “Goa Manumission Letters”, purchase is one of the explanations for the origin of slavery. The manumission letters written in 1682 contain around twenty cases of the purchase of boys and girls. In general, the exact context in which the sale took place and who had sold the boys and girls were not specified. One of these victims was António, described as a bicho who belonged to the Curumbim caste. In 1682, he was 18 years old and had to serve his mistress, Leonor Cordeira, for another four years, even though he had been “furtively sold”.27 A similar situation to Maria (14 years old), Bastião (12 years old), Esperança (10 years old), Gonçalo (10 years old), Pascoela (23 years old) and a non-Christian boy (11 years old), who had all been stolen and sold, but still had to serve their buyers for several years.28
- 29 BAL, Cod. 51-V-49, nº 25 and 26 (17/11/1671).
- 30 DAA, Cod. 860, ff. 59v, 60v.
30In times of scarcity and famine, families resorted to selling their children to ensure the survival of the remaining members of their kin group (Campbell 2013, 97-100). The case of the bicho Nicolau, “Chinese nation”, 9 years old, illustrates both the practice of selling children and the variations of slavery in Asia, as it was not a case of hereditary slavery, but was limited to several years of service. Nicolau was sold by his parents to Diogo Varela de Rosas, to serve him for 27 years before being freed. In Macau, the Holy Office authorized Diogo Varela de Rosas to take Nicolau to India (Faria 2020).29 Another reason for enslavement was family debt, which could lead to them pawning a family member. This does not seem to have been a common situation in Goa, if we look at the people recorded in the “Goa Manumission Letters”. However, Constancia’s case suggests that she was subjected to the obligation of serving a master because her father, the enslaved Fernando Cafre, pawned her for his debts. Although she was transferred to different households, Constancia remained in Goa, meaning that the seizure prevented her from being sold as a slave to faraway places.30 In the next section, we will look specifically at enslaved children who were taken across the Atlantic Ocean far from their homes.
- 31 ANTT, CG, mç. 33, nº 1, ff. 51v, 53v (1652).
31Some of the enslaved children living in Portuguese communities in India originated from the Indian subcontinent itself. However, India was both an exporter of its population and an importer of slaves from Africa and other regions of Asia. India was an important source of slaves for various destinations, ranging from South Africa to Southeast Asia (Shell 1994). From the ports in India, which were managed by the Portuguese, these enslaved people were taken to destinations in the Atlantic, especially Lisbon. One challenge in analyzing their movements is determining the first milestone in their life: their place of birth. Often, the information in the sources does not refer to their homeland, but to the place where they were captured or bought. For example, Nicolau Bicho, who was classified as “Bengala caste”, was described as “native of Cochin”, suggesting that the ethnonym “Bengala” may have been used to classify people born or brought from a wider region stretching from the Malabar coast to Bengal – and even further east.31 Therefore, the ethnonyms mentioned in the sources (Bengal, Java, Malabar, China, Japan, Timor) do not provide reliable information about the place of birth of the enslaved.
- 32 ANTT, TSO, IL, Processo 3331 (1606).
- 33 ANTT, TSO, IL, Processo 11700 (1698).
- 34 ANTT, TSO, IL, Processo 1472 (1654).
32One of the movements that marked the path of enslaved people from the Indian Ocean world was their transportation to Europe when European agents returned to the Old World. Some of the children and young people taken from the Indian Ocean to Portugal left traces of the displacements experienced in inquisitorial sources. The Chinese woman Vitória Dias, for example, said that she was kidnapped from her homeland when she was “very young child”, taken to India and then to Lisbon.32 João de Almeida said that “he was captured at a very young age” in “Sena, his homeland”, which “borders Mozambique”, before being taken to Portugal.33 António was taken from his village to Goa, where he was raised by the midwife Maria de Almeida. She sold him to the sailor João Borges, from Carreira da Índia, who then took him to Portugal. There, António began to serve Domingos Pinto, a nobleman from Mazagão and later traveled with him to Africa.34
- 35 Collecção Chronologica da Legislação Portugueza: 1603-1612, Lisboa: Imprensa de J. J. A. Silva, 185 (...)
- 36 The sample is made up of existing matrimonial petitions in this range: ANTT, CEL, SM, bundles 544 t (...)
33One of the ways in which enslaved people were transported to Portugal was on the ships of the Carreira da Índia. Portuguese legislation stipulated that only slaves who were old enough to do the necessary work on the ships could be taken on the ships from India (Borges 2020), as was the case in 1520. In the seventeenth century, royal legislation continued to set limits, as the royal charter of November 23, 1606, prohibited the importation of male slaves under the age of 16 and female slaves of any age from India.35 However, the entry of enslaved people under the age of 16 from the Indian Ocean was not interrupted; as a sample from the analysis of matrimonial petitions from the Lisbon Ecclesiastical Chamber from 1614 and 1618 shows. During this period, marriage petitions were found for 70 people presumably from India, China, Ceylon, Java, Malacca, Pegu, Mozambique, Mombasa and “the parts of India” – a general term that referred to people from regions in Asia as well as East Africa.36
- 37 ANTT, CEL, SM, mç. 545, docs. 35 and 201.
34The geographical displacements experienced by the 70 people follow a predominant pattern: they were taken from their homeland to Goa or Cochin, where they lived for a few years before being transported to Lisbon. The enslaved Domingos Vieira was described as originating from Bengal, from where he was taken to Cochin at the age of nine. After a year, he was sold to the Jesuits in Goa, where he lived for 13 years. Domingos Vieira was brought by his master, Pedro Vieira da Maia, to the ship on which he returned to Portugal. The enslaved Gregório, who was also said to be of Bengali origin, was taken to Goa at the age of seven, while Francisca, whom Gregório intended to marry, had been born in Java (or its surroundings) and was taken to Goa at the age of 10 or 12. Manuel de Meneses brought Gregório and Francisca, whom he had bought in Goa, to serve them at Quinta de Benfica.37
- 38 Collecção Chronologica da Legislação Portugueza: 1613-1619 (Lisboa: Imprensa de J. J. A. Silva, 185 (...)
35The marriage petitions also contain information about men and women who were enslaved as children. Some of them arrived in Lisbon at less than 16 years of age, younger than the age stipulated in the royal charter of 1606 for entry into Portugal. Of the 57 slaves and freedmen in the sample, 36.8% arrived in Portugal between the ages of 6 and 15, 17.5% were between 16 and 29, and 45.6% did not specify their age of entry into Portugal. Regarding the age at which they were captured, 18 of these 57 people were captured between the ages of 4 and 14. However, if we add those who were described as meninos/as [boys/girls] or moços/as [youths], we arrive at 23 cases, i.e. 40.3% of the sample. It can be concluded that the entry into Lisbon of enslaved people from the Indian Ocean who were children or considered too young to work on ships was known to the Portuguese authorities, which explains the need to reaffirm the prohibition contained in the royal charter of 1606 in 1618 (Carreira 2014, 416).38
- 39 ANTT, CEL, SM, mç. 703, doc. 106; ANTT, CEL, SM, mç. 651, doc. 6.
- 40 AHU, CU, 005, cx. 24, doc. 49, Bahia.
36Analyses of marriage petitions after 1618 show that the entry of enslaved children and youth into Lisbon persisted despite the new charter. The enslaved Fernando da Silva, who was born in Goa, arrived in Portugal “as a child” in 1645. Similarly, Maria Carvalha, who was born in India, also stated that she was taken to Portugal in 1650 at the age of 5 or 6.39 The regular arrival of enslaved people who came to Lisbon on the Carreira da Índia ships was recorded in the Casa da Índia, but the 1755 earthquake destroyed the records documenting these arrivals. However, it was possible to find references to these entries by searching documents relating to the ports of call of the ships that came to Portugal from India. In 1725, the ships of the Carreira da Índia, which brought many captives from Mozambique, docked in Salvador before sailing to Lisbon. The chief purveyor of the Royal Treasury of Brazil notified that he was carrying out the royal order to take female slaves, as well as male slaves under the age of 18 for the royal treasury. The action led to the arrest of 36 negrinhas and ten negrinhos under the age of 18, who were sent to the Casa da Índia in Lisbon along with the files. The transfers that accompanied the representation sent from Bahia to Portugal suggest that the prohibition against transporting enslaved children and youth under the age of 18 was violated, despite the decrees of 1606, 1618 and 1708 that dealt with the matter.40
37For the period after the 1755 earthquake, Silva (2013, 61) analyzed the historical series of 1756 and 1763, when 728 enslaved people were registered at the Casa da Índia in Lisbon to pay royal duties and found that most of them came from the Estado da Índia and not from West Africa or Brazil – except in 1757, 1759 and 1760. Silva (2013) concluded that the enslaved imported from Carreira da Índia were predominantly adult men, accounting for 64% of the enslaved sent to the Casa da Índia between 1756 and 1763, while enslaved youth made up about a third of the total (Silva 2013, 74). The list of captives sent to the Casa da Índia in 1756, the first year of registration after the earthquake, shows that 27 of the 46 enslaved people presented were presumably children or youth from the Indian Ocean, i.e. 55% of those listed.
- 41 ANTT, Alfândegas de Lisboa (AL), Casa da Índia, Mesa dos Quartos, livro 894, ff. 1-4v.
- 42 ANTT, AL, Casa da Índia, Mesa dos Quartos, livros 894, 1356, 1461.
38In the “Despacho dos pretos da Índia” (1756) there are no precise details about the age group, so the reference to children and young people can be assumed based on the words used (Silva 2013). For example, “a moleque named António from India” is mentioned, who was taken by João Pedro on the ship Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres.41 In fact, “moleque coming from India” was frequently used in the Casa da Índia sources from the 1750s and 1760s to refer to those brought from the Indian Ocean, as well as pretinho, pretinha, negrinho or negrinha from India.42 Both the dispatches from the Casa da India and the “Goa Manumission Letters” contain words associated with slaves in childhood or youth, referring to people from the Indian Ocean, whether from Asia or East Africa. The marriage petitions written when the enslaved and manumitted were already adults contain only general expressions about the previous stage of life (they only state that they were “boys/girls”, “small”, “children”, or “nursing”, when they were captured or arrived in Lisbon).
39Although the terminology in the dispatches from the Casa da Índia in Lisbon is ambiguous with regard to age (Silva 2013), the words moleque, negrinho, pretinho e pretinha draw attention to the cases of enslaved children and youth brought from the Indian Ocean. Regarding the word moleque, Bluteau (1716, v. 5, 541) explains that it is a word of Brazilian origin and spread in Portugal, the meaning of which would be “a small black slave boy”, similar to the pretinho, who is “worth the same as a little slave”. According to Bluteau’s definition, the term moleque comes directly from the Portuguese colony, Brazil, where slavery was a structuring institution of its society. However, it derives from muleke in the Kimbundo language and is similar to “nleke” in the Kikongo language, as León (2014, 7) notes, when discussing the use of the word muleque in Spanish America, which is associated with the practice of selling African children and youths, as significant as in Brazil – unlike India, where slavery was one of many forms of unfree labor. Moleque was used in Portugal for enslaved males, probably children or adolescents. The enslaved Daniel, with whom this article began, was referred to as a moleque and a rapaz preto [young black man]. The word rapaz, in itself, has no connotation related to slavery, as it means young man, servant or soldier boy (Bluteau 1721, v. 7, 700); however, when analyzed in its linguistic context, it suggests that the moleque Daniel was one of many enslaved youths transported from the Indian Ocean to Portugal.
40This article sought to contribute to the study of enslaved children and youth in Portuguese India, considering the challenges of identifying their presence in archives. First, we identified the terms used in Portuguese sources for enslaved children and youth in the Indian Ocean. We were able to find evidence of the presence of enslaved children that is not always so obvious in the sources. We also analyzed connections between words associated with minority status and slavery. The final sections focused on examining aspects of the experiences of enslaved children and youth. This was possible because, despite the historical violence and silence they endured, some enslaved preserved aspects of their lives in the archives, including their names, their presumed origins, the circumstances that led to their enslavement, and the obligations they faced.
41Previous studies have looked at letters of manumission from a general perspective (Souza 2008) to a detailed examination of the role of the agents who drafted them (Ames 2008; Faria 2020). Some studies have compared manumission letters in Goa with those in Bahia, taking into account the age of the freedmen (Ames 2008). This article took a different approach and explored how the analysis of manumission letters sheds light on enslaved children and youth in Goa. While previous historiography has looked at bilingual dictionaries from the early modern period to understand terms related to slavery (Pinheiro 2005, 2008), this study focuses on the language used to depict enslaved children and young people in the “Goa Manumission Letters”. The terms sometimes overlap with those used for other forms of dependency or servitude (e.g. moço) and occasionally imply a negative association between minority and enslavement (bicho). In some cases, the terms used had a kinship connotation, such as “son” or “godson”. Furthermore, this study engages with the historiography dealing with slavery in Indian Ocean societies and avoids the dichotomy between “being a slave” and “being free”. Thus, the notion of individual freedom had no significant expression in these societies, as each person was inserted into social hierarchies in which each person was assigned a status with which a set of opportunities and duties was associated (Campbell 2014, 136). The social relations described in the “Goa Manumission Letters” did not always fit into a strict concept of slavery, of being a “slave”. However, it seems to have been common for apprentices or people supported by a master to work for years of service before they were considered completely “free” or released from obligations to the master.
42The article also aimed to shed light on the movement of enslaved children across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, rather than to provide quantitative data on child trafficking in Portuguese India and Lisbon. By exploring the potential offered by different types of documents, it was possible to capture their presence and displacements. The dispatches of the Casa da Índia in Lisbon offered a kind of photograph that captured the moment when the children and youth taken from the Indian Ocean arrived in Portugal. In the marriage petitions, age was a crucial piece of information for the brides and grooms born in Asia to prove that they were single in their homeland. One way to do this was to show that they had arrived in Portugal at a very young age. However, marriage petitions were produced when the slaves were already adults. Similarly, enslaved condemned by the Inquisition recounted their experiences of capture, sale, and arrival in Lisbon when they confessed to the inquisitors as adults. Despite fragmentary data, sources suggest that enslaved children were regularly transported from the Indian Ocean to Lisbon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, despite royal prohibitions. This article intended to present cases of enslaved minors from the Indian Ocean and highlight some of the challenges in analyzing this topic. The field of observation of this article focused on the unique lives of enslaved children, who were brought to Portuguese enclaves in India and from there across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to Portugal.