1Writing to Ignatius of Loyola in 1555, the Jesuit priest Nicolau Lanciloto described the dynamics of miscegenation among the Portuguese who had settled in Asia: “There are many [Portuguese] who buy herds of girls and sleep with all of them and then sell them; there are many casados who have four, eight and ten slaves and sleep with all of them, and this is publicly known”. He added: “The other men, who generally have so much of their own that they can have [only] a slave, almost all have her for a lover [...]”. Recent historiography addresses the role of miscegenation in the different territories of Portuguese expansion and also its evolution throughout the modern period (Xavier 2008; Lobato 2013; Hespanha 2019a, 2019b). This article approaches the relationships between the Portuguese in Southeast Asia and their slaves according to the traditions of the Portuguese normative culture, in order to try to understand how enslaved children and youths were integrated into the families of their masters. Efforts to promote a decentered view of law include two steps. The first is to insert law within the larger frame of norms, by analyzing explicit and implicit rules and conventions; the second is to relate such normativities with local rules in the context of the Iberian empires (Bastias Saavedra 2022). My aim here concerns the first stage, that is, the study of the point of view of the Portuguese who enslaved children in Asia.
- 1 I retrieved 258 testaments in this archive from 1503 to 1700, among those 52 pertaining to the Port (...)
- 2 Historical Archives of Macao (hereafter HAM), Santa Casa da Misericórdia, N 302, Testamentos 1592-1 (...)
2This work uses sources of different geographical origins, namely from two archives of the Portuguese confraternities of Misericórdia, those of the cities of Porto and Macao. The most complete collection concerns the wills of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Porto.1 When the Misericórdia received a testament drawn in the overseas territories, its members gathered all the documents that certified inheritance rights and elaborated files on the management of their assets, sometimes compiling substantial ready-to-use portfolios on each bequest or inheritance. In addition to wills, these sources may include codicils, witness depositions, court sentences, documentation relating to the acquisition, sale or lease of properties, and, in some cases, letters sent to India. The second group of sources consists of the wills from the Misericórdia of Macao that refer to enslaved children and adolescents, or women of marriageable age who might have belonged to these age groups. The scribes in the Misericórdia did not copy the wills in full, but only the sections that directly concerned it.2 These sources are thus more fragmented than the dossiers of the Misericórdia of Porto, as they are the little that remains of a once abundant documentation. They do not enable the reconstruction of the trajectories of the testators, whose prosopography has yet to be elaborated.
3Historiography on the Portuguese presence in Southeast Asia, especially with regard to Macao, has not ignored women or the presence of enslaved people (Teixeira 1976; Boxer 1977, 1990). Other historians have drawn on the same sources used in this article. Ivo Carneiro de Sousa (2007) approached them from the perspective of the construction of a marriage market based on the production of available brides of Chinese and Japanese origin that would enable the recruitment of wives to Portuguese men, in a context where Portuguese women did not emigrate to Asia; Leonor Seabra (2011) studied women and children in her monograph on the Misericórdia of Macao; finally, Elsa Penalva (2011) analyzed women in Macao according to social status. In this article, however, I will approach enslaved children and youths as being under the responsibility of their master, who had the authority to decide on their future.
4Both archival funds analyzed suffer from several limitations: they correspond to the voices of the testators who owned enslaved people at the time they had their last wills elaborated; also, although testaments leave some space for individual comments by the testators, they conform to rigid notarial formulas. The majority portrayed slave owners in a favorable light because abuse and mistreatment were omitted. For this reason, they convey a benign view of the relationship between enslaved people and their owners, which is in line with legal notions that reinforced the notion of the family as a moral community. In contrast to other case studies (Van Rossum, Geelen and Tosun 2022), there is no information that might provide us insights into the processes of enslavement or the agency of the enslaved, following Meillassoux’s (1986, 9-13) suggestion that enslavement did not transform a person into a thing or a mere instrument of labor. The voices of the slaves are absent, as the cultural and social contexts of the societies they belonged to before they were enslaved are omitted. My focus in this article will be to observe individualized experiences of the Portuguese who settled in Southeast Asia and their relationships with children or adolescent slaves as they are expressed in their last wills. Most were freed upon the death of their masters, thus enabling us to consider slavery as a transient phase (Kopytoff 1986).
5This article is organized into a first section that deals with Portuguese normative culture in what concerns family, lineage and inheritance; the second section intends to insert the slaves owned by the Portuguese within the traditions of slavery in the Indian Ocean, namely in what concerns China and Japan. The other two sections deal with case studies that document the attitudes of slave owners toward their slaves. Among them, António de Faria is given special attention, as he was one of the first Portuguese travelers to Japan. At the time of his death, he was sojourning in Goa, and his last will offers relevant information on his slaves, thereby deserving to be dealt with in a separate section (number three). A fourth section deals with scattered evidence from either the archives in Porto or Macao.
6Roman law influenced the concepts of family in Portuguese normative culture. Family was far from being limited to biology or, to use the terminology of the time, blood; it often corresponded to a co-resident group, encompassing all those living under the same roof. It might also designate those under some degree of subjection or patronage from a master: “High” and “low” families, or familiares (family members), are expressions that historians are used to read in historical sources; the low family of the bishops designated minor servants, in opposition to the high family formed by the clerics with offices in the episcopal curia. The familiares of the Holy Office were individuals who were linked to the Inquisition as informers, although they were not part of its paid staff. All these markers of appurtenance, however, presuppose inequality within the family; it is never argued here that all members possessed the same rights, although their duties towards the head of the family always involved obedience and subjection.
7The family by blood defined the lineage where, according to the law, the father was always the mother’s husband; only in very obvious cases of female adultery (punishable by law, as opposed to male adultery), could he take matters into his own hands, sometimes in the literal sense of the word, killing both his wife and her lover if he caught them in the act, but only if the lover was of equal social status. The Portuguese compilations of law (Ordenações) prescribed that a commoner who caught his wife with a nobleman could refer the case to a court, but not kill him. This and other aspects illustrate not only the juridical inequality of the different status groups but also the legal limits to the male authority within the family. In other words, blood defined lineage, while dependence defined family. Lineage applied to the living and the dead, while family referred only to the living. If there was any doubt about paternity, it was up to the mother’s husband to solve the problem: if he claimed the child as his own, any suspicion would disappear.
8From a legal point of view, the family included all those dependent on the pater familias: his wife, sons and daughters, servants, enslaved people, and also those who lived under the same roof, even transient guests. This notion extended beyond legally formed families, which in the Catholic Church were guided by the rules defined in Trent, and also applied to informal families, which were common in the Portuguese empire. The authority of the head of the family gave him duties of protection and support, but also rights, included in the broad designation of constraining and punishing. However, the right to constrain contradicted the situations that required free consent, usually associated with a change of personal status. Contracting marriage or religious consecration might create tensions with canon law, which insisted on free choice, i.e. the consent of the fiancés, novices or ordinands. Free consent often ran counter to the interests of parents, who tended to develop marriage strategies according to the logic of social status, wealth or lineage (Hespanha 1993, 952). The right over slaves fell within the powers of the pater familias and concerned the domestic sphere, thus being placed outside the reach of the “state” (in this case, the crown or monarchy) (Hespanha 2019a). The head of the family thus exercised the right to the private custody of children, servants and slaves.
9It is important to disambiguate the term casa (house), which could be used according to two different meanings: in the first, it designated the place where the family lived, the space where the authority of the pater familias was exercised practically without interference from other powers. In the second, casa referred to the group of individuals under the dependence of the pater familias, which extended beyond the resident group. In sum, the concept of family assumed the character of a moral community (Casey 1989, 14). In this sense, the family was not only a residential unit but also an economic and legal one. The multiple functions of the family pose problems for historians, since the economic, emotional and residential aspects may not coincide (Burke 2007, 84-88).
10The mutability of the statuses inherent in enslavement seems particularly important in a context where, as we shall see, freedom was a frequent prospect for enslaved people, especially in the context of the sources analyzed here. These notions are important in order to frame slavery within the context of the last wills of the Portuguese in Southeast Asia. Slavery under the Portuguese in this region has already been the subject of multiple approaches, such as those concerning Goa (Pinto 1992; Faria 2020; Hofbauer 2023), or the major works on slavery in Japan authored by Sousa (2019) or Ehalt (2018). These studies include references to enslaved children and can also refer to their relationship with their masters, although they have not inserted domestic servants within the history of the family as a theme subject.
11The lack of numerical references to the ages of the enslaved in most documentary sources makes it difficult to place them securely in a specific moment of their lives. However, Portuguese sources include designations that denote attitudes towards the early ages of life and establish delimitations between its different stages. In the early modern period, there were fundamental milestones such as the ages of seven and 12-14. The former was the age of confession and the latter was the age at which one could receive wages, marry, write a will or become a godfather or godmother (girls at 12 and boys at 14). The sources generally refer to the latter as meninos and meninas, and to those older than 12-14 as moços and moças) (Sá 2010, 75; Olival 2019). Unfortunately for those who study the history of childhood, the latter designation also applied to servants and slaves, giving rise to an indeterminacy that is difficult to solve; even in normative texts, children and slaves were frequently referred to together (Ehalt 2018, 125).
12Raphael Bluteau (1638-1734), the first Portuguese dictionarist, confirms these delimitation criteria: the word criatura (creature) applied to children in their mothers’ wombs and newborn babies; menino and menina (girl/boy) referred to children under 14 years old; moço referred to adolescents between the ages of 14-15 and 25. Homem moço (young man) referred to an adult between the ages of 25 and 40, the legal age of majority being 25 for boys and 20 for girls. Moça was the word used to describe a single young woman (Bluteau 1712-1728, v. 5, 522-526). As a rule, these terms can be found in the sources written by the Portuguese in Asia; in spite of their irresolvable ambiguity between adolescence and adulthood, the word moça can be safely related to a woman of marriageable age.
13The family by blood, as opposed to the family as a moral community, prevailed in the transmission of inheritances. Portuguese laws divided the deceased’s assets into three parts: two parts could be called the monte-mor and were destined for mandatory heirs, defined exclusively as ascendants or descendants by a vertical line. The third part was the terça de alma, which could be freely disposed of in a variety of ways: some used it to build up or reinforce an indentured property (a chantry or an entail); to favor one of the mandatory heirs over the others, or to benefit persons outside the lineage, such as godchildren, servants, slaves or friends. However, as the expression terça de alma indicates, this component of the estate was mainly intended to benefit the testator’s soul.
14The funds from the terça were used to pay for the organization of funeral ceremonies, which sometimes involved huge expenses, and for pious legacies, which had two objectives: to benefit someone or an institution, while at the same time contributing to the salvation of the soul. In this context, the testator could benefit family members with no blood ties to him, and create pious and charitable works for posterity, such as granting aid for the marriage of poor girls or leaving legacies for freed slaves. Another use of the terça enshrined in Portuguese inheritance law was the possibility for nobles and noblemen to benefit illegitimate children whose paternity they recognized by leaving them part or all of it, but only if they expressly stated this in their wills. The illegitimate children of commoners inherited on an equal footing with legitimate children, which, as will be seen below, meant that such testators had to take precautions to ensure that they were not blamed for paternities they did not wish to acknowledge.
15The historian Kirti Chaudhuri (1985) defined the Indian Ocean World as a global economy alongside Islam that was first formed in the seventh century, based upon long-distance maritime commerce. Slavery within this vast area, which expanded from East Africa to the Philippines, has attracted less attention than its Atlantic counterpart. As such, historiography on slavery in the Indian Ocean has compared between the two. In the Indian Ocean, slavery not only started four thousand years ago, but also lasted until the twentieth century; it was multidirectional and used indigenous agents rather than European financiers and traffickers. One of the main differences between Atlantic and Asian slavery seems to be precisely the small scale of human trafficking: in Asia, there was no regular mass transportation involving millions of people, as was practiced for more than two centuries between Africa and the New World.
16The Asian economic context was different: in America, land fixation – the agrarian economy with plantation culture and cattle breeding – required a constant supply of labor to replace or expand the number of workers or settlers, mainly because the original population had been devasted by epidemics brought over by European colonizers (Wheat 2016). The Portuguese were the first Europeans to intrude into the slave trade in the Indian Ocean, supplying African slaves from East Africa up to Macao, and were followed by other European powers. However, the multitude of the ethnical and cultural backgrounds of both enslaved and enslavers has rightly been stressed, because the Europeans never monopolized the trade as they did in the Atlantic (Allen 2014). For instance, Islamic slavery covered a wide geographical area from East Africa to Indonesia (Miers 2004). In Southeast Asia agriculture was rarely the main economic activity of the Portuguese, who in the smallest territories (Macao, Malacca, Hormuz) had to recur to local markets for food supply, and where commerce was the main economic activity. The most important issue in what concerns this study, however, is the fact that there is a consensus among historians that the majority of slaves traded in Asia were female, notably girls and young women acquired for their sexual attractiveness, and also children (Campbell 2004, 2013). Children were enslaved in the Indian Ocean world by the same means as in other regions of the globe (kidnapping, slave raiding, sale by family members) (Allen 2009).
- 3 Including some whose origins could not be deciphered, such as “endes”. There is a lack of a lexical (...)
17The Portuguese sources analyzed in this article include slaves originated in areas that might be very distant from the other, such as India (“Bengals”, “Malabars”, etc.), China, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Timor, Philippines, various islands from the Indonesian archipelago (“Bugis” from Celebes, “Jaos” from Java), and also Africans.3 The Portuguese adapted to the already existing forms of slavery and enslavement, that differed according to specific normative traditions they encountered. In Japan, trafficking was not allowed, and the process of enslavement included a set of different procedures such as selling oneself or one’s relatives to others, enslaving prisoners of war, commuting a death sentence for a crime committed, for debts, defeat in war, among other forms of enslavement (Nelson 2004). In other words, in Japan, at least in theory, there were slaves, but not traffickers. In late imperial China, the processes of enslavement were not significantly different from the Japanese ones, although the law envisaged enslavement mainly as a form of punishment, even if it assumed in practice the form of a fictive mutually beneficial agreement among master and slave (Chevaleyre 2022, 2023). In China, the sale of children was considered slave trading only if they were sold by someone other than their legal guardians (Miers 2004). Portuguese ownership of slave women matched Confucian ideology according to which women were more or less considered the property of males. Slaves did not play an important economic role in China, and the dominant form of slavery was domestic slavery: political prisoners, war captives, kidnap victims, and those who sold themselves or their kin in order to pay off debts (Schottenhammer 2003).
- 4 About the dependence of the Portuguese on the Chinese authorities, see Souza (1986, 31, 195), Barre (...)
- 5 The word “comprador” in this case refers to an individual, usually a merchant, who acted as an inte (...)
18One of the ways in which the Portuguese affected the existing balance in Asia was precisely by boosting human trafficking. The trade in Japanese slaves undertaken by the Portuguese seems to have been one of the reasons why Hideyoshi (1537-1598) expelled Christians (Ehalt 2017). In Macao, there were several unsuccessful attempts by the Chinese mandarins, who de facto ruled the city, to ban the enslavement of both Chinese and Japanese.4 In the Asian territories influenced by the Portuguese, enslavement was marked by the occupational specialization of male slaves (barbers, tailors, compradores, etc.), rarely exceeding thirty people per master.5 Females, who seem to have been more numerous, were not referred to by the activities they performed. Experts on the study of slavery have called attention to the pitfalls of a unique definition of slavery, as it took many forms, according to the laws and practices of the cultures involved (Schottenhammer 2003; Miers 2004). In the case of the Asian slaves owned by the Portuguese, we might say that their overwhelming majority fell under the definition of domestic slavery, where relationships were dominated by their incorporation into the master’s family, especially in the case of non-adult slaves.
19The high mobility of the owners meant that some of these slaves often had to be entrusted to third parties when their owners travelled. An analysis of the wills also gives the idea that these slaves could be part of the owners’ personal guard or militia, constituting markers of social distinction and high status, since they extended the size of their households. Another impression conveyed by the sources is that the status of slaves was more volatile in Asia than in Portuguese America, although even in the latter the enslaved were often freed in their owners’ wills (Guedes 2015). In both cases, manumission was a likely prospect upon the owner’s death, but, judging by Fernão Mendes Pinto’s testimony in Peregrinação (1614), the condition of slave could be reversed after a simple skirmish, a shipwreck or an attack by pirates that resulted in new enslaved prisoners. That’s why the author himself, with the lack of narrative rigor that he is known for, stated that he had been enslaved 13 times and sold 17, although, on a later page, he reduces this number to 16 (Alves 2010, v. 2, 29, 96).
- 6 Biblioteca Nacional da Ajuda, Série da Província da China (24), Compromisso da Misericórdia de Maca (...)
20These very diverse forms of Asian slavery had in common the enslavement of children and adolescents, which was also present in Portuguese America (Kuznesof 2007). As mentioned above, the identification of the ages of the enslaved children and adolescents is unreliable in historical sources. Doubts surrounding the designation of “young man” and “young woman” fade a little in the case of females, when we have an indication that their owners provided for their marriages, allowing us to assume they were young. We ignore at what age these enslaved Asians were deemed suitable to marry, although it can be assumed that they could do so at a very early age, because the Compromisso of the Misericórdia of Macao of 1627, like the Compromisso of the Misericórdia of Lisbon approved in 1618, but published in 1619, stipulated brides were to be between 14 and 30 years old, unless the testator who financed such dowries had set different age requirements.6
21António de Faria was considered a fictional character for a long time because his fantastique adventures occupy many pages in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação. Until 1971, there was no known documentary trace of him, so he was thought to have been the author’s alter ego or the product of his imagination. Pinto depicts Faria as a pirate sailing the seas of China and instead of Japan, always in pursuit of infidels, and experiencing the greatest reversals of fortune. He ended up defeating the fearsome Muslim pirate Coja Acém in battle and was later honored by the Portuguese who lived in Liampó (now Ningbo), a community located on the coast of China (Alves 2010, v. 2, 225-228). His last will, however, was found in the archives of Misericórdia of Porto and published by the historian Eugénio Freitas (1971, 145-168). Faria’s testament was drawn on the eve of his death in Goa in 1548, where he was assisted in confession and last rites by Master Francisco, later to be canonized in 1622 as Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552).
- 7 HAM, MO/AH/SCM/302, ff. 78-78v.
22António de Faria was a nobleman born Lisbon, but his family was rooted in Montemor-o-Velho. He died saddled with debts, and his possessions consisted mainly of slaves, with whose sale he hoped to repay some of them. The fortunes that the Portuguese gathered in the Far East, especially those of merchants, could be volatile. If successful, trading ventures made people rich overnight, but the opposite could also happen. Many years later, in his will dated 1667, a priest, Father Manuel Pereira, declared: “I have seen many people with great wealth, and many rich people all end up poor”, and further on, “because few have the industry to gather, and of these few have the prudence or providence to keep it”.7 The difficulties merchants experienced in building solid fortunes, based upon the ownership of land or urban real estate, especially those who were personally involved in trading trips, formed a hallmark of the Portuguese presence in Southeast Asia, at least during its first two centuries.
- 8 Prices, Wages and Rents in Portugal 1300-1910, http://pwr-portugal.ics.ul.pt, consulted 24 April (...)
23Faria left 28 slaves, 10 female and 18 male, of very diverse origins, even if the Chinese were more numerous, with 13 persons (see Table 1). The descriptions and names used, such as moço/a (youth), menino/a (little boy or girl), indicate a significant presence of very young people. Three of them were declared to be black, although one of them, Isabel, is said to be Chinese and the other was an unnamed female from Siam. This ambiguity probably has roots in the Portuguese tradition of designating enslaved persons as blacks irrespective of their skin color (Schwartz 1988, 58). António de Faria declared that some of the slaves cost nothing, which leads us to imagine that they had been kidnapped or captured in combat, which is in line with the previously referred to Asian forms of enslavement. The slaves who were bought indicate very low prices, if we keep in mind that a qualified mason in Porto received 60 reais a day.8 Table 1 indicates prices of slaves in cruzados of Malacca (worth 360 reais) oscillating between 1,5 and 7,5 cruzados, that is 540 and 2,700 reais respectively. It is also worth to remark that prices were mentioned regarding five slave boys, but the only female slave whose price is indicated, Isabel, said to be “small” and “black” appears to have been the most expensive of all (2,700 reais).
Table 1. Slaves in António de Faria’s testament (1548)
Sources: Arquivo Histórico da Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Porto (hereafter AHSCMP), Série H, banco 9, livro 3, ff. 1 et seq. [1548-06-02]. Notes: prices in Mallaca cruzados.
- 9 AHSCMP, Série H, banco 9, livro 3, f. 3.
24In his testament, Faria provided differently for his slaves: five were to be sold, six to be freed, and three were said to have escaped; against all odds, maybe Faria hoped that they could be recovered. There were 13 slaves bequeathed to Master Francisco, 11 boys and two girls, all from China; Faria justified this legacy on the grounds of “unburdening his conscience”. This was not a rebuttal of conscience for owning slaves, but rather an act aimed at alleviating his sins by giving them to a man of the church, who also ministered extreme-unction to him. It is not known how Francisco Xavier used these enslaved boys, but it can be presumed that they would be used as línguas, indispensable interpreters in evangelization contexts. Regarding the slave Brianda, who appears in the will with two children, about one of them – Isabel – António Faria said: “She is not my daughter and I do not hold her as such”.9 A clarification that can be found in other testaments, where testators were very careful to refute the paternity of children by their enslaved women.
- 10 AHSCMP, Série H, banco 1, livro 21, Administração de António Fernandes “O soldado”, 1575-1598.
- 11 The pardau was a coin used in India; if in silver it was worth 300 reais; 360 réis when in gold (Bo (...)
25António Fernandes, nicknamed “the soldier”, lived in Chaul, a fortress held by the Portuguese between 1521 and 1740, located 60 km south of Mumbai. He was born in Porto and had gone to Asia as part of a military contingent, a situation common to many other Portuguese who departed to the Estado da Índia, sometimes at a very young age. Fernandes was involved in the opium trade, as his last will, dated May 1575, mentions the purchase and envoy to Cochin of anfião (then the Portuguese word for the product). He left an indeterminate number of male and female slaves in captivity, entrusting them to his business partner, Martim Roiz, who would be in charge of giving them the legacies that Fernandes allocated them.10 António Fernandes freed two slaves: the Japanese Maria, who also received 100 pardaus for her marriage; and Grácia, a Javanese, who would inherit 400 patacões also to help her to marry.11 These marriage dowries would not have been significant in Portugal, where poor marriageable girls received the modal sum of 20 thousand reais, whilst these women received respectively the equivalent of three and 13 thousand reais.
- 12 Ordenações Filipinas (1985 [1603], v. 5, tit. XCII, § 9). On practices of naming in Portugal, see R (...)
26Fernandes suspected that Grácia was pregnant by a man whose identity he claimed to ignore, although he protected both mother and child by making sure she would get married. Both Maria and Grácia were entrusted to another slave owned by Fernandes, a woman called Catarina Fernandes, married to Jerónimo Fernandes, who would take them into her house and was in charge of marrying them. The case of Catarina and Jerónimo Fernandes, obviously baptized slaves, deserves a remark. The Ordenações Filipinas authorized the newly converted to the Christian faith to take the surname of their owners.12 In fact, the incorporation of the masters’ surnames in the names of the slaves (and also New Christians) was a practice which foreign travelers remarked concerning the Lisbon slaves as early as 1514 (Stols, Fonseca and Manhaeghe 2014, 124-125, 128). The notion of family that permeated Fernandes’ attitudes was characterized by gender differences. The female slaves he provided for had been baptized and were expected to behave by the Catholic precepts of marriage, even if one of them, Grácia, was pregnant at the time by a man whose identity Fernandes claimed to ignore. Baptism was of crucial importance because it integrated these enslaved people into normative regimes that did not correspond to those of their origins. They were given Christian names, but it is not obvious that they spoke Portuguese, or were knowledgeable about the religion they had joined, making them the subject of intersections between different cultures.
- 13 The exact date of his death is unknown, but the will dates from August 1582. AHSCMP, Série H, banco (...)
- 14 HAM, MO/AH/SCM/302, f. 9 (undated doc., probably from the early seventeenth century).
27Legal implications of these concepts of family could have unpredictable consequences. For example, another testator, Manuel Fernandes de Calvos, nicknamed “the rich man from Hormuz”, died after an agony in which he lost his speech for several days, leaving slaves who asked to be freed after his death. One of them was discovered to be pregnant, and she gave birth to a daughter who later married a Venetian man named Marco Molino. Many years after Manuel Fernandes’ death, Molino, acting on behalf of his wife, claimed the inheritance from Fernandes, her presumptive father, and took the Misericórdia of Porto to court, forcing it to defend itself over eight years of hearings, although the outcome was favorable to the brotherhood.13 The latter made some enquiries about the slave (the mother of Marco Molino’s wife) and conveniently concluded that she was a woman of bad mores, known to have several lovers who had been seen to enter her house. The relevant point, however, is that the presumptive posthumous daughter of a Portuguese man and his slave, then a married adult, had the right to claim an inheritance. Other testators declared to have acquired slaves to raise them as his own children. Manuel Gomes, o Velho, for example, claimed in his testament to have bought a girl by the name of Maria to raise her as his daughter. He left her 150 silver taels worth of silk to be sold in Japan until she was old enough to marry a “good Portuguese man”. He owned another boy called Antoninho, whose ethnicity he did not specify (“whom I brought up in my house as my son”), and to whom he also bequeathed a legacy.14
28Francisco Fernandes, another testator from Macao, declared in his will of 1635 “that I bought a girl named Luísa, aged twenty days old, not with the intention of captivity but with the love of a daughter whom I have been raising with the same love”, whom he left “free for ever”. He also added he left “a girl by the name of Isabel, of Japanese caste, to be freed and to receive five hundred cruzados to help with her marriage”. However, “in the event that the said girl dies before being married, half of the said silver shall be given to the Misericórdia for the marriage of orphans, and another part to Isabel Vieira, her patron”, to whom he asked “to treat her as she has done until now, and I ask the said girl to be obedient to her mistress and to entrust me to God”.
- 15 HAM, MO/AH/SCM/302, f. 9v.
- 16 HAM, MO/AH/SCM/302, f. 10 (undated).
29The concern with the marriage of young women runs through the Portuguese documentation, both in the kingdom and overseas, but is particularly prominent in the context of Macao, where the population was characterized by a numerical imbalance between the sexes (Souza 1986, 30-33). Orphans who were the daughters of Portuguese, and therefore of mixed ancestry (given the almost non-existence of women from Portugal), were the most targeted, but the testators also included enslaved girls and young women in their last wills. Luísa Lobato, for example, had two unbaptized slaves, one Chinese and the other Siamese, whom she chose to sell, donating the money to help marry another girl, apparently “Portuguese”, since the names of her father and mother are mentioned.15 Another testator, Pedro Reveredo, sold two Korean girls but left both a small legacy for their marriages.16
30Another testator, Francisco Ferreira, freed a six-year-old captive (Inês) and bequeathed her “one hundred and fifty picos de reales, and a girl by the name of Maria, of the Makassar caste”, declaring that “the said amount of silver will be given by my executors to reliable people who shall invest on the [Japan] voyage so that its profits increase until the said girl is old enough to marry”. This was also the case with Anica, a Chinese girl, also freed, whose testator, Miguel Correia da Costa, in whose house she lived, left her 200 pardaus and “two girls, one by the name of Catarina of the Bengal caste and the other by the name of Jacinta of the Makassar caste”. Other testators determined that their slaves should pass into the temporary possession of other legatees, who had to release them after several years. One of them, João, was to serve ten years in the hospital of Macao. There were also slaves chosen to be the testator’s heirs, such as Francisco, “a boy who was born to me at home”, to whom Isabel Martins left all her assets in 1613, declaring that she had no heirs, even though she was married. It is not uncommon to find female testators such as Isabel benefitting their slaves or choosing them as heirs; women under a Portuguese normative regime owned property in their own right and widows were heads of households in the absence of their husbands.
31Chinese-Portuguese women who chose female slaves as heirs can be found until the first half of the nineteenth century, as the case of Marta da Silva Van Mierop illustrates. The former partner of an English agent of the East India Company, Marta inherited from him, expanded his fortune after his death, and designated a former slave as her universal heir in her last will in 1828 (Puga 2007). These diverse situations – freed slaves to whom the owners bequeathed other slaves, postponed freedoms, or slaves chosen to inherit –, reveal the kaleidoscopic nature of the relationships between owners and their slaves, but the testator was entirely free to decide who to benefit. Portuguese men and women provided for their slaves in the same way that they extended networks of solidarity to the Portuguese community, due to the frequency with which dowries were bequeathed to the daughters of the Portuguese, and even indicating the names of their parents, as illustrated by the surviving wills in the case of Macao (Sousa 2007; Seabra 2011; Penalva 2011; Seabra and Manso 2014). The obsession with protecting women was widespread. In the wills that have survived, it is rare to find testators who did not provide marriage support for Portuguese daughters, goddaughters, daughters of friends and acquaintances, or enslaved girls.
- 17 Located in front of Porto, south of the river Douro. AHSCMP, Série H, banco 4, livro 25, ff. 173 et (...)
32One example illustrates the fact that the power of the head of the family extended to guests. Manuel Tomé, a man from the parish of Santa Marinha de Gaia who settled in Macau, tells a curious story in his will.17 He recounts having hosted a man named António Roiz as his house guest, who had arrived in Macao via New Spain, because he originated from his hometown, and was acquainted with some of his relatives. Tomé accused him of having impregnated one of his slaves, and of abusing his trust, as well as damaging his reputation, because vox populi held Tomé as the child’s father. However, reputation must have been a lesser concern compared with the legal implications of the situation. Assuming paternity of illegitimate children had consequences for a commoner like Manuel Tomé, as Portuguese law considered them mandatory heirs. Tomé had even obtained a certificate issued by the ordinary judges of Macao, corroborated by witnesses, declaring that the boy – named João – was not his son.
- 18 AHSCMP, Série H, banco 6, livro 18, ff. 142 et seq.
33The situation was further complicated by the fact that the boy belonged to Tomé by right because Iberian society followed the principle Partus Sequitur Ventrem (“the birth follows the womb”) (McManus 2020). The testator freed both mother and son, and donated 200 cruzados to the latter, but was careful to state in his will that if João was pronounced his son, he would remain in captivity and be deprived of his bequest. We do not know the outcome of this situation: João was probably not claimed by his purported father, and Manuel Tomé granted him his freedom in his will. Tomé further remarked that he considered it disrespectful on the part of his guest to have impregnated a slave in his house. In other words, to have trampled on his prerogatives as master and head of the family. Moreover, the child’s mother had fled to Siam (now Thailand) for fear of the punishment Manuel might give her for having committed the “crime in his house”.18 This highlights the materiality of the house as a sacrosanct place and the fact that its residents, and even guests, were inherently under the power of the pater familias.
34Although the Portuguese contacted with a multitude of cultures that had different norms and practices concerning slavery, the last wills analyzed in this article inform historians about the meanings that Portuguese heads of household ascribed to their slaves, among them children and youths. The sixteenth and seventeenth-century wills that mention enslaved people in Portuguese territories in Asia make it possible to define them as domestic slaves and place them in the families of their owners, in which there is a significant presence of enslaved children or adolescents. Due to their nature, last wills cannot illustrate either the living conditions of these enslaved people or their agency; on the opposite, they give a benign image of their owners’ concerns for them, in a moment where the testators were providing for their afterlives and settling accounts with God. As heads of household, the slave owners we have analyzed showed a sense of responsibility towards their dependents, especially female slaves, benefiting them with bequests, often intended to facilitate their marriages, while at the same time granting them freedom, thereby restricting the condition of slaves to a period circumscribed to their lifetime.
35The cases mentioned in this work refer to concepts of family that go beyond blood ties, allowing us to conclude that these people of Portuguese origin considered slaves to be part of their households, in communities where maritime trade prevailed, characterized by long absences on board ships. Owning slaves was one of the signs of status available to them, although the testators’ sense of responsibility led them to provide for their future after their death while making gender distinctions. Girls formed the majority of the young people enslaved by the Portuguese, certainly on account of the sexual freedom enjoyed by men that Boxer (1977, 137) remarked so long ago. For them, marriage seemed a likely prospect after their masters died, and it was up to the latter to help them through legacies, formulated as marriage grants generally awarded in cash. Arrangements were also made for male slaves, although the sums of money were smaller and there was no concern about providing them with a future marriage since they were deemed capable of earning their living. However, the diversity of situations and attitudes stands out. Some Portuguese expressed their intention to raise boys and girls as their children with the affection that was their due; others were prepared to deny paternity to the children of their female slaves, in order to avoid granting them inheritance rights. The family thus emerges as a unit whose boundaries, fluid and flexible, were up to the head of the family to define as the exclusive withholder of that capacity.
