Books and Enslavement
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John Nieuhoff's Collection of Voyages and Travels
The passage quoted below concerning enslaved people in Brazil is from a book in English translation, which likely arrived in Queens’ Library at some point in the early eighteenth century. Written by the Dutch traveller and government official, Johan Nieuhoff, it includes a wide-ranging account of Dutch Brazil, a colony that existed from 1630 to 1654.
In my time near forty thousand negroes were employed in the sugar-mills betwixt Rio Grande and St. Francisco. Most of these negroes are brought hither from the kingdoms of Congo, Angola, and Guinea … The lustiest and most laborious used in time of good trade to be sold in Brazil for seventy, eighty, or one hundred pieces of eight, nay, sometimes for one thousand four hundred or one thousand five hundred gilders [i.e. £75,000] … but when trade began to decay, they were sold for forty pieces of eight [£2,000]. There was scarce a Hollander of any substance but what had several of these slaves. They are most miserably and beastly treated by the Portuguese, though at the same time it must be confessed that it is absolutely necessary they should be kept under a strict discipline ; for they are full of rogueries, superstitious to the highest degree, and sorcerers…
Author: John Nieuhoff
Title: A collection of voyages and travels… now first publish’d
in English (London, 1704)
Shelfmark: E.5.6-9
