Social History of Medicine Vol. 26, No. 3 pp.

383–402

The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the

Seventeenth-century Black Spanish Caribbean
Pablo F. Gómez*

Summary. This article explores the routes followed by ideas and practices related to the body emerging
in seventeenth-century Caribbean locales like Cartagena de Indias and Havana. Mobile and intercon-
nected Spanish Caribbean ritual practitioners of African descent, using oral tradition, performance,
and material culture, functioned as the most important links for the diffusion of ideas about corporeality
in the region. Within their epistemological realms, black healers experimented with new materials they
found in the Americas and incorporated practices they learned from practitioners coming from all over
the Atlantic. Their history is a showcase for alternative models concerning the production and circulation
of knowledge around the body in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. Their health practices were not
uniquely, or even mainly, framed around strategies to resist or react to slavery, capitalism or the Enlight-
enment. Instead, Spanish Caribbean healing practices and ideas were shaped by the imperatives of com-
petition and social, cultural and economic adaptation.
Keywords: Spanish Caribbean; early modern atlantic world; black ritual practitioners; bodily
knowledge; West and West Central Africa

It was a typical blistering Caribbean day in August 1636 when Juan de Narváez bid farewell to
his good friend Diego López and boarded the canoe waiting for him in Cartagena de Indias’
Contaduría wharf. The small boat, hired by a Castilian merchant, surely rocked violently when
de Narváez, a bearded man of robust complexion, boarded it. In a matter of minutes the vessel
floated away from the Spanish Main, bringing a sombre group of people and merchandise
from the warehouses of the city to the Nave Capitana, one of the two flagships of General
Don Carlos de Ibarra’s armada. The convoy would depart within a few days from this port
city in the New Kingdom of Granada (in modern-day Colombia) to Seville, bringing silver,
gold, emeralds, plants, animals, and people from the Americas to Europe. On its way, the
fleet would navigate an Atlantic Ocean teeming with privateers, frequented by hurricanes,
and infested with ideas about the natural world and the bodies inhabiting it.
Dreams and beliefs were the currency with which early modern Atlantic people like Juan
de Narváez, an expert in dealing with pain, disease and death, bargained when confronted
with the obdurate materiality of human bodies. This essay explores the routes followed by
ideas and practices about the body emerging in seventeenth-century Caribbean locales like
Cartagena de Indias and Havana. In these Atlantic spaces, a heterogeneous group of
ritual practitioners of African descent—arriving from Europe, Africa and the New
World—experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and engaged in

*Department of Medical History and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, 1300
University Ave. MSC 1440, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: pgomez@wisc.edu; pablofgomezz@gmail.com
Pablo Gómez is as Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison. He holds an MA and a PhD in History from Vanderbilt University. He earned his MD at the
Universidad CES, and did his residency in Orthopaedic Surgery at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.

© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/shm/hkt014
Advance Access published 16 May 2013
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 384 Pablo F. Gómez

the formulation of models widely accepted in the region for explaining the functioning of
the human body and the treatment of diseases. They, like the Europeans, developed mate-
rial, conceptual and social practices designed to explain the natural world.1
Historians of Iberia and the South Atlantic have produced rich studies on the work of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian and Iberian-American natural philosophers, cos-
mographers, physicians, surgeons and botanists. Their research has focused on the role
these historical actors played in the rise of the scientific enterprise and a culture of empiricism
in the Atlantic. This healthy appetite for expanding the role of southern Europeans and their
descendants in the rise of the Enlightenment and the scientific enterprise has contributed to
a redrawing of the intellectual boundaries of early modern Europe and of the routes along
which ideas were disseminated in the Atlantic world.2
Europeans and their descendants, however, were not the only ones reflecting on the
momentous changes brought about by the volatile and often violent encounter of cultures
and biological entities during the early modern era. The last two decades have seen renewed
attention being paid to the place of ritual specialists of Native American and African origin in
the history of medicine in the South Atlantic. This literature has focused on the histories of
cultural adaptation, hybridisation and prosecution these healers experienced under the con-
straints of Spanish orthodoxy in the centres of the Iberian colonial enterprise in the New
World: Mexico and Peru.3 Historians working on non-European medicinal practices in the
Caribbean and Brazil, by and large the two main recipients of the African diaspora during
the early modern era, have produced a rich scholarship focused on three generally related
aspects: first, health practices under the constraints of slavery and racial discrimination;
second, health rituals as expressions and/or reactions of West and West Central African
culture to the colonial European medical establishment; and third, the participation of
people of African descent and Native Americans as collectors of artefacts and as shapers
of, in the words of Susan Scott Parish, a ‘hybrid’ knowledge in the European Enlightenment
project.4 Karol Weaver, for instance, has shown how the practices of Afro-Caribbean
enslaved healers challenged ‘Western’ medical ideas and professional hierarchies in Saint

1
Similar to what Andrew Pickering has said about scien-
tific practices. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Prac-
tice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995).
2
For recent examples see, for instance, María Portuondo,
Secret Science, Spanish Cosmography and the New
World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010);
Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, ‘New World, New Stars: Patri-
otic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole
Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650’, The
American Historical Review, 1999, 104, 33–68;
Antonio Barrera Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The
Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revo-
lution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); or
Daniela Bleichmar et al., Science in the Spanish and Por-
tuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2010).
3
See, among others, Joan Bristol, Christians, Blas-
phemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practices
in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 2008); Martha Few, Women
Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics
of Power in Colonial Guatemala. (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2002); Noemí Quezada, ‘The Inquisition’s
Repression of Curanderos’, in M. E. Perry and
A. J. Cruz (eds), Cultural Encounters: The Impact of
the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991), 37–57; or Adam
Warren, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).
4
Susan Scott Parrish, ‘Diasporic African Sources of
Enlightenment Knowledge’, in James Delbourgo and
Nicholas Dew (eds), Science and Empire in the Atlantic
World (New York: Routledge, 2008), 281–310; also,
Antonio Barrera Osorio, ‘Experts, Nature, and the
Making of Atlantic Empiricism’, Osiris, 2010, 25,
129–48; Kathleen Murphy, ‘Translating the Vernacular:
Indigenous and African Knowledge in the Eighteenth-
century British Atlantic’, Atlantic Studies, 2011, 8,
29–48; James Delbourgo, ‘“Exceeding the Age in
Every Thing”: Placing Sloane’s Objects’, Spontaneous
Generations, 2009, 41–54.

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 385

Domingue during the eighteenth century. At the same time, Weaver focuses on the political
repercussions of their healing acts and how these healers ‘laid the foundation’ for the
Haitian Revolution.5 Medicinal and ritual practices thus became ‘acts of power’, an aspect
explored by Vincent Brown in his work on Afro-Caribbean rituals surrounding death in
Jamaica.6 James Sweet, among others, has worked on the intersections of African
healing and religious practices in the Americas and the Atlantic World and the ‘recreation’
of African mores in Brazil.7 Like Weaver and Brown, Sweet emphasises the revolutionary and
contestational nature of the healing practices of African healers in relation to systems of
slavery, capitalism and scientism in the Luso-Atlantic World.8
This article focuses on an area in the history of Atlantic medicine, which has not been
studied much: the seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean world. It examines the vibrant
history of how early modern Caribbean communities, mostly of African descent, produced
and circulated knowledge about the body in a geographical region that remains outside the
discussion on the intersections between black and ‘Western’ cultures in the Atlantic.9 To
depict black and Native American healing practices in Colonial Iberian America and, more
generally, the South Atlantic, the research below brings to light a different and important
model for examining how multi-originated Caribbean ‘ways of knowing’ about the body cir-
culated in a world that had not yet developed the slave systems, racial hierarchies and
enlightened, corporate medical elites that the existent literature adopts as a framework.10
The particularities of the Spanish Caribbean allow us to acknowledge the activities of
black communities in the Caribbean as essential components in the crafting of a history
of knowledge production about the body and the natural world in the early modern Atlan-
tic.11 The recognition of groups like these early modern black Caribbean communities as
active receptors, shapers and, most importantly, acculturating agents allows us to ‘concen-
trate on the concrete conditions and processes that construct meaning.’12

5
Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved
Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
6
Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power
in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008).
7
James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and
Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
This theme has also been developed, with a focus on
witchcraft, by scholars like Diana Ceballos Gómez and
Adriana Maya Restrepo in the New Granada. See
Diana Ceballos Gómez, ‘Grupos sociales y prácticas
mágicas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada Durante el
Siglo XVII’, Historia Critica, 2001, 22, 51–75; and
Adriana Maya Restrepo, Brujería y reconstrucción de
identidades entre los Africanos y sus descendientes en
la Nueva Granada, siglo XVII (Bogotá: Ministerio de
Cultura, 2005).
8
James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing and
the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
9
See Pablo Gomez, ‘Körper der Begebung: Gesundheit,
Tod un Heilung Im Frühneuzeitlichen Cartagena de
Indias’, in Anne Elbert, Maria Lidola, Karoline Bahrs
and Karoline Bahrs (eds), Differenz und Herrschaft in
den Amerikas: Repräsentationen des Anderen in
Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: Transcript Verlag,
2009); also, Pablo F. Gomez Zuluaga, ‘Bodies of
Encounter: Health, Illness and Death in the Early
Modern African-Spanish Caribbean’ (PhD diss.
Vanderbilt University, 2010).
10
See John Pickstone, ‘Working Knowledges Before and
After Circa 1800: Practices and Disciplines in the
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine’, Isis,
2007, 98, 489–516.
11
Here I am following the idea of empiricism as a trans-
formative practice in medicine during the seventeenth
century. See Harold J. Cook, ‘The History of Medicine
and the Scientific Revolution’, Isis, 2011,102, 102–8;
also, Cook, ‘Victories for Empiricism, Failures for
Theory: Medicine and Science in the Seventeenth
Century’, in Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal (eds), The
Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embod-
ied Empiricism in Early Modern Science (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2010), 9–32.
12
Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Perform-
ances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995),
89.

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 386 Pablo F. Gómez

This essay argues that the conditions shaping the production and circulation of knowl-
edge about the body in black communities in the Spanish Caribbean were determined by
competitive adaptation to circumstances in localised health markets and productive, if
sometimes fractious, interactions between healers of multiple Atlantic origins espousing
mutually malleable explanatory frameworks for human corporeality.13 Black ritual practi-
tioners and communities in the Caribbean were more interested in producing competitive
healing techniques, explanations and rituals than they were in perpetuating or transmitting
West or West Central African cultural tropes, or in enacting resistance against European
social and cultural norms and structures, including bondage. After all, this was a world in
which the large majority of the population was of African descent and free. Indeed, by
the end of the seventeenth century, the very institution of slavery was in crisis in Spanish Car-
ibbean locales.14 Not surprisingly, and unlike the lives of African ritual practitioners living in
the main centres of the Spanish colonial project in the New World—such as the Afro-
Mexicans examined by historians like Joan Bristol—Africans arriving in the Caribbean did
not necessarily strive to conform or adapt to Spanish cultural norms.15 Many Spanish Carib-
bean African bozales (unacculturated, first-generation Africans) did not speak Castilian and
failed to perform the basic rites of Catholic religion even after decades of living in America.16
Unlike other works on this topic, this article presupposes black healing practices and culture
as normative and mainstream, rather than ancillary, adaptive or merely responsive to Euro-
pean institutionalized corporate medical practice.
Rather than making the case for a definable or unique ‘black Atlantic culture,’ this article
showcases the diversity and richness of the multiple cultures of healing emerging in the early
modern Caribbean. Black, for the purposes of this paper, is synonymous with adaptability
and multifarious origins. Whilst all of the actors in this history were of African descent,
many had not come from Africa. They were born in the Americas and many indeed in
Europe. This is why I use the term African to refer specifically to those individuals who
were actually born in Africa, rather than being of African descent. Following this imagery,
black is more Caribbean than it is African. It is indicative of the incorporative and vibrant
health culture that flowed in the South Atlantic.17 In the seventeenth-century Spanish Car-
ibbean, blackness was not a proxy for a specific social stratum, not did it carry the same kinds
of racialised connotations it would assume decades later in most of the Atlantic world.
As Harold J. Cook argues, there were several competing models for explaining disease and
bodily functioning in the early modern world.18 Although no such thing as a ‘unified’ black

13
See Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal, ‘Embodied Empiri-
cism’, in Wolfe and Gal, (eds), The Body as Object and
Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in
17
Early Modern Science, 9–32.
14
See, for instance, Robin Blackburn, The Making of New
World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern,
1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 127–50.
15
Bristol, Christians.
16
Among many others, Miguel Arará, from West Africa,
Anton Carabalí, from the Bight of Biafra, and Felipa
18
Falupa, from Upper Guinea. All of these bozales
needed translators in their trials even after living for
at least fifteen years in the Spanish Caribbean. See
Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, Madrid, Spain
(hereafter AHN), Inquisición, 1023, fol. 228v; AHN,
Inquisición, 1020, fol. 297v; and AHN, Inquisición,
1021, fol. 50r.
For a sophisticated analysis of the problems of search-
ing for cultural origins in the Atlantic World, particu-
larly in the Caribbean, see Stephan Palmié, ‘Ecué’s
Atlantic: An Essay in Methodology’, in Stephan
Palmié (ed.), Africas of the Americas: Beyond the
Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Reli-
gions (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2008), 179–222.
See, among others, Harold J. Cook, Matters of
Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the
Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007).

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 387

knowledge of the body existed, black Caribbean ritual practitioners and their patients did
make specific claims about ‘sources and categories of healing and illness.’19 We only have
traces of the various competing traditions about the corporeality of African, European,
and Indigenous Americans that intersected in the region. Those traces, however, lie at the
centre of this article and are essential for reshaping our understanding of the functioning
of early modern and Caribbean concepts of healing.20
Most of the healers modelling such beliefs in the Caribbean were of African descent,
lacked licences from the Spanish Crown’s protomédicos, and did not offer ‘sanctioned’
Western healing procedures. Their holistic concepts of corporeality and healing were
usually closer to what we would today consider preventive medical care, and were largely
based on beliefs about the social nature of health and aetiology. The black ritual practi-
tioners espousing these principles appear in civil and ecclesiastical records and treated
diverse segments of Caribe society, including slaves, free blacks, merchants, planters,
lawyers, friars, peddlers, military personnel, governmental officials and even archbishops
and bishops. Therefore, when I discuss the black Caribbean, or the Afro-Caribbean, I am
also referring to the patients culturally immersed in these healing scenarios.
Alongside primary sources of ecclesiastical, governmental and private origin, this article
makes extensive use of Inquisition records.21 Cartagena’s Inquisition office, one of the
only three permanent tribunals in the New World, oversaw cases coming from the
Spanish Caribbean and Venezuela. Unlike records from Mexico and Lima, Cartagena’s
records contain very few instances of trials of Native American or Mestizo ritual specialists.22
This is certainly a reflection of the demographics of the Caribbean, where Native American
populations had all but disappeared by the end of the sixteenth century, coupled with the
enormous distances that penitents and accusers coming from the Andes in the New
Kingdom of Granada had to travel to reach Cartagena. Africans, who represented almost
80 per cent of Cartagena’s population, show in a scant 10 per cent of the cases brought
before the Inquisition. In some cases, they only appear in accounts prepared by inspectors
sent from Spain. In one notable example, the Inquisition’s Visitador General (General Inspec-
tor) reported to Madrid that Cartagena’s bishop habitually smuggled out of the Holy Office’s
‘perpetual’ jail a black ritual practitioner called Paula de Eguiluz to cure him.23
People of African origin rarely became the object of attention of an Inquisition office more
preoccupied with the lot of Protestants and Jews coming from all corners of Europe,

19
David Gentilcore, ‘Was there a ‘Popular Medicine in
Early Modern Europe?’ Folklore, 2004, 115, 160–6.
20
I also use methodological and conceptual frameworks
to study popular medicine in European contexts. See,
among others, Roy Porter, ‘The People’s Health in
Georgian England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), Popular
Culture in England, c.1500–1800 (London: Macmillan,
1995), 124–42; Matthew Ramsey, Professional and
Popular Medicine in France, 1770–1830: The Social
World of Medical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988); Timothy D. Walker, ‘The Role
and Practices of the Curandero and Saludador in
Early Modern Portugal’, Manguinhos: História Ciências
Saúde, 2004, 11, 223–37.
21
Historians have used inquisitorial sources for the explo-
ration of histories of popular medicine in Europe and
America. See, among many others, Guido Ruggiero,
‘The Strange Death of Margarita Marcellini: Male,
Signs, and the Everyday World of Pre-Modern Medi-
cine’, American Historical Review, 2001, 106,
1141–58; Timothy Walker, Doctors, Folk Medicine
and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical
Healing in Portugal During the Enlightenment
(Leiden: Brill, 2005); Sweet, Domingos; Sweet, Recre-
ating; Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives; Bristol,
Christians; Quezada, ‘The Inquisition’s Repression’.
22
Mestizos were the descendants of white European and
Native American parents.
23
AHN, Inquisición, 1013, fols. 360r–361r.

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 388 Pablo F. Gómez

especially Portugal, to settle in the Spanish Caribbean cities.24 Cartagena’s Inquisition records,
paradoxically, provide more evidence about the openness of a region in which most inhabi-
tants came from non-Catholic and non-Iberian cultures than about the control that the eccle-
siastical authorities were able to exert in the region.25 Spanish scribes, including those of the
Inquisition, were bound by law to transcribe word for word, or as close as was possible, the
depositions of the defendants. In Cartagena, this meant that many such depositions had to
be translated, as the defendants did not speak Castilian. The Jesuit college in the city provided
assistance in such cases lending the court one of its translators for more than seventy African
languages. These depositions are, thus, unique. When read critically against the demonolog-
ical background in which they were framed, they provide some of the richest and most fasci-
nating first-hand accounts of healing rituals, and the ideas behind them, enacted by people of
African descent in the Atlantic World to which historians have access.

The Seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean

Cartagena de Indias and Havana, called by contemporary Spanish chronicles as ‘the Keys to
the Indies’, were the largest Caribbean cities of the period. Few urban spaces at the time had
the intellectual, cultural and commercial vibrancy of these Atlantic locales. Cartagena served
as the main slave entrepôt of the Spanish empire and like Havana, at the time the rendezvous
location for the Spanish galleon fleet; it boasted a vast array of military fortifications, religious
complexes and hospitals.26 Spanish Caribbean cities and their hinterlands were increasingly
populated by people of African origin during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
turies. Cartagena’s governor Garci Giron de Loaya, for instance, reported that the city and its
province had more than 20,000 blacks by 1622.27 Most of these Africans came from two
regions: Upper Guinea and West Central Africa.28
It was in this city inhabited by a large black community that De Narváez arrived in 1636. He
was a barber-surgeon who came to Cartagena at the invitation and sponsorship of Diego
López, the same man with whom he had trained for several years. De Narváez’s benefactor
was a man of numerous and powerful connections who was able to secure, in a matter of
days, a place for him on the flagship of the Spanish Crown’s very own galleon fleet.29 These
men’s story of hardship and camaraderie would provide a remarkable showcase of solidarity

24
See, for instance, Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the
Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and
the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2012).
25
Every official inspector sent to Cartagena by the
Suprema [the supreme] Inquisition office in Madrid
complained of the lack of efficiency and leniency of
Cartagena’s Inquisition. The place was, allegedly, run
by ‘heathens’. Jose Fernandez, Apostólica y penitente
vida de el V.P. Pedro Claver de la Compañia de Iesús:
sacada principalmente de informaciones juridicas
hechas ante el Ordinario de la ciudad de Cartagena
de Indias: a su religiosisima Provincia de el Nuevo
Reyno de Granada (Zaragoza: Diego Dormer, 1666),
107–8.
26
See, for example, Alejandro de la Fuente et al., Havana
and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Alonso
J. Solano, Salud, cultura y sociedad en Cartagena de
Indias, siglos XVI y XVI (Bogotá: Universidad del Atlán-
tico, 1998).
27
Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (hereafter
AGI), Santa Fé 38, fol.176. Other estimates can be
found in Richard Konetzke, Colección de documentos
para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamér-
ica, 1493–1810 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investi-
gaciones Científicas, 1958), 179–80.
28
Of the 126,167 Africans who arrived at Cuba and the
Northern New Kingdom of Granada during the six-
teenth and seventeenth century, 52,079 came from
Upper Guinea and 58,988 from West-Central Africa.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database <http://www.
slavevoyages.org>, last accessed 17 June 2010.
29
Archivo General de la Nación de Colombia, Bogotá,
Colombia (hereafter AGN), Colonia, Negros y Esclavos,
Antioquia, 4,1. fol. 2r–106v.

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 389

and social gravitas, of strong guild and ethnic ties and of the broad transatlantic connections
of seventeenth-century Caribeños even if its protagonists were of European descent. It
becomes crucial for our understanding of Caribbean and Atlantic history, however, when
we learn that De Narváez was a black slave running away from his master in the mining
town of Zaragoza, some one hundred miles south of Cartagena and that Diego López
was not only another black who had taught De Narváez how to barber, but was also his pre-
vious owner.
Born as a slave in Cartagena in 1593, Diego López was no more than fifteen years old
when he started working in the San Sebastián hospital in the early 1600s. Like the rest of
the personnel in these facilities (most of whom, like him, were of African descent), López
started by cleaning floors, beds and sheets.30 The San Sebastián, one of two hospitals for
the poor, indigent and incurable patients of Cartagena, was administered by the San
Juan de Dios Order and was the largest in the Caribbean at the time, treating up to 1,000
patients a year.31 In 1663, an inventory of the hospital depicts a situation common to Car-
ibbean and Brazilian locales.32 In San Sebastián, nine black slaves worked alongside ten
brothers of the San Juan de Dios order, taking care of the multitude of sick Cartageneros,
sailors and slaves that populated the place. Among the slaves working in the hospital
were Africans who came from West Central Africa and Sao Tome, along with several Car-
ibbean mulatos and blacks. 33 Slaves such as López were the main health care providers in
Panamá’s and Portobelo’s hospitals. Similar reports from 1629 and 1646 list sixteen black
slaves working in Panamá’s hospital and six in Portobelo, respectively.34 Like their counter-
parts in Cartagena, these blacks and Africans came from diverse places in the Atlantic world,
including Angola, Congo, Cacheu (Upper Guinea), Biafada (Upper Guinea), the Gambia
Delta and other Caribbean locales, bringing with them particular visions about the nature
of health and disease.

30
AHN, Inquisición, 1620, 7,10.
31
The other two hospitals in existence during the seven-
teenth century were the Hospital de San Lázaro and
the Hospital del Espiritu Santo. See Comisión interpro-
vincial de la Orden de San Juan de Dios, ‘Proyecto de
investigación juandediano. Fuentes sobre la congrega-
ción Española de la orden hospitalaria de San Juan de
Dios (1495–1934)’, Archivo Hospitalario, 2003, 1,
159; also Adriana M. Alzate Echeverri, ‘Militares, mari-
neros y pobres enfermos: Contribución a la historia del
Hospital San Juan de Dios de Cartagena de Indias (Siglo
XVIII)’, Asclepio, 2008, 60, 203–36.
32
The situation was similar in Brazil. The Captain General
of Rio de Janeiro, Artur de Sá e Meneses, wrote to the
king in 1700 about the scarcity of black nurses.
Arquivo Historico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal (here-
after AHU), Conselho Ultramarino, 017, Caixa 7, Doc.
716.
33
Biblioteca de la Real Academia de Historia de España,
Madrid, Spain (hereafter BRAH), Colección Salazar y
34
Castro. Legajo 34, Carpeta 2, fols. 87v, 94v. In
Spanish and Portuguese America, slave traders and
owners gave enslaved Africans European first names
and used their presumed region of origin as their last
name. However, these last names do not often accu-
rately reflect the originating ethnic provenance of the
captives. Whereas slave-traders often named enslaved
Africans after the ports from which they were pur-
chased, the captives sold in these ports could come
from slave raids or wars that took place hundreds of
miles inland, as well as from along the coast. See, for
instance, Philip D. Morgan, ‘The Cultural Implications
of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins,
American Destinations and New World Develop-
ments’, Slavery and Abolition, 1997, 18, 122–4;
David Northrup, ‘Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Eth-
nicity in the Atlantic World, 1600–1850’, Slavery and
Abolition, 2000, 21, 1–20; Mariza de Carvalho
Soares, ‘From Gbe to Yoruba: Ethnic Changes within
the Mina Nation in Rio de Janeiro’, in Toyin Falola
and Matt Childs (eds), The Yoruba Diaspora in the
Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004), 231–47.
BRAH, Coleccion Salazar y Castro Legajo 34, Carpeta
4, Numero 1.

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 390 Pablo F. Gómez

Sometime during the 1620s, after buying his freedom, López undertook the long and
arduous journey to Santa Fé de Bogotá to be certified as a surgeon.35 His eventual
success as a health practitioner in that region shows him to be a masterful navigator of
the social and cultural scene of early modern Cartagena de Indias and its province.36 As in
the rest of the early modern world, most health care practices took place outside hospital
settings, meaning López constantly travelled between the Hospital de San Sebastián and
the refined quarters of Spanish officials’ and merchants’ Casas Altas [tall houses] in the
Santo Domingo neighbourhood. In between, López would have passed by Getsemaní—
the quarter of the city where he lived and which was, for all intents and purposes, a West
and West Central African colony in the Americas—to examine a sick soldier with a throat
abscess or a free black woman with an undefined mass in her belly.37
Cartagena’s San Sebastián hospital were spaces where African ideas and practices about
the body circulated freely. Black ritual practitioners coming from all over the Caribbean
to undergo trial in Cartagena’s Inquisition were condemned to work in the San Sebastián
Hospital as part of their sentences. Africans were also in charge of preparing medicines in
the pharmacies in Cartagena and Havana. Francisco Arará, coming from the Allada
region in the Bight of Benin, for instance, worked at the Santa Clara convent’s pharmacy
in Cartagena. He would later become one of the leaders of the famous maroon settlement
of Moraduro in the hinterlands of Cartagena, where he was in charge of religious and
healing practices. In all likelihood, African religious leaders like Francisco supplied medicinal
recipes and products to blacks in the city, surrounding villages and maroon settlements.38
Like Francisco, blacks working in pharmacies were conversant in the variety of medicinal
preparations of European, Asian, African and American origin that filled those places’
shelves. Atlantic and Caribbean locales, as well as their parent societies, were porous
places. Cartagena’s leprosarium is a good example of this aspect of Caribbean urban spaces.
The ‘San Lázaro’ hospital was located on the Camino Real, the main road in and out of the
city. The complex had no walls to keep the sick inside the building. Consequently—as the
neighbouring vecinos [property owners] of the city complained to the Consejo de
Indias—leprosy patients, most of them black, were frequently seen in the company of
other black men and women who had ventured outside of the city to gather wood or boil
salt. They also met with blacks from nearby cattle ranches whilst smoking tobacco, drinking,
eating and bartering.39 The activities of blacks within and around San Lázaro underscores
how places of healing like Cartagena’s leprosarium served not as spaces of social isolation,
but also as crucial sites of community formation.40 As was the case in West and West Central
Africa, healing took place in communal spaces.41 Interstitial spaces such as San Lázaro

35
AGN, Colonia, Negros y Esclavos, Antioquia, 4. deployment of Foucaultian ideas about hospitals as
36
At the time of his trial in Tolú, for instance, he was at places of social control and exclusion in colonial
treating more than fifty patients. AGN, Colonia, Spanish America, see Nancy E. van Deusen, ‘The
Negros y Esclavos, Antioquia, 1–4. “Alienated” Body: Slaves and Castas in the Hospital
37
AHN, Inquisición, 1620, 7,10. de San Bartolomé in Lima, 1680 to 1700’, The
38
AGI, Santa Fé, 213. Americas, 1999, 56, 1–30.
39
AGI, Santa Fé 63, Exp. 69. 41
See, for example, Steven Feirman, ‘Struggles for
40
The classical treatment of the subject of lepers’ hospi- Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in
tals as places of exclusion is that of Michel Foucault. For Modern Africa’, African Studies Review, 1985, 28,
a recent translation, see Michel Foucault, History of 73–147. Also Steven Feirman and John M. Janzen,
Madness (London: Routledge, 2006). For the The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 391

abounded in Spanish Caribbean cities, which were fed physically and culturally not only by
their sea links, but also by a large network of villages: Mompox, Tolú, Turbaco and Tierra
Adentro supplied Cartagena, for example, whilst Guanabacoa, Matanzas and Cayanos
fed into Havana. Besides living in small villages and farms, blacks populated the Caribbean
landscape with multiple palenques [maroon settlements] like Moraduro, which flourished
on the periphery of Caribbean cities.42 Ritual specialists from Cartagena and Havana
stayed in constant contact with these maroon communities.43 Like these ritual practitioners,
inhabitants of port cities such as Cartagena, Portobelo and Havana intermingled in physical
and cultural spaces that were worlds apart from traditional scenarios of Iberian orthodoxy.44

Itinerant Caribbean Bodily Knowledge

During his criminal trial in the 1640s, for helping De Narváez to escape, scribes made a list of
Diego Lopéz’s medical inventory. It included several unspecified medicinal preparations
coming from pharmacies in Cartagena, tree branches and leaves, grains and, among
other objects, an emerald. The emerald most probably came from Andean mines hundreds
of miles south of Santa Fé de Bogotá where Native American ritual specialists treated snake-
bites by tying the stone to the wound left by the snake, hoping that would neutralise the
poison.45
This inventory indicates not only the broad reach of López’s networks for the provision of
medicinal tools, but also the analytical difficulties of labelling healing practices and rituals in
such an interconnected region. Like Diego López, most ritual specialists in the region were
omnivorous consumers of healing techniques of all origins. To further his aims, López, like
other Caribbean blacks of several different occupations who were avid readers and writers,
remained in permanent contact with health practitioners he met during his perambulations
in the northern New Kingdom of Granada.46 Over the course of his life, he resided in places
such as Cartagena, Zaragoza and Tolú. The health practitioners he met on his travels came
from all around the circum-Caribbean as well as from Lisbon, Allada, Benin, Matamba,
London, Seville and several German and Italian cities.47 Court records show that, when prac-
tising in Zaragoza, López depended on a series of contacts extending throughout towns and

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); David
Westerlund, African Indigenous Religions and Illness
Causation: From Spiritual Beings to Living Humans
(Brill: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2006).
42
Only around Cartagena, besides Moraduro, we know
of the existence of at least ten other palenques. See,
AGI, Santa Fé, 213; AGI, Santa Fé, 212; AGI, Santa
Fé, 42, R.5, N.98; AGI-Patronato, 234, R.7. See also
Jane Landers, ‘Cimarron Ethnicity and Cultural Adap-
tation in the Spanish Domains of the Circum-
Caribbean 1503–1763’, in Paul Lovejoy (ed.), Identity
in the Shadow of Slavery (London: Continuum, 2000).
43
See, for example, AGI-Patronato, 234, R.7; AHN,
Inquisición, Libro 1022, fols. 428r–443v.
44
See, for instance, Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved:
Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlan-
tic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
45
AGN, Colonia, Negros y Esclavos, Antioquia, 1–4. For
the medicinal usage of emeralds in the New
Kingdom of Granada see Kris Lane, The Color of Para-
dise: Emeralds in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
46
I have found at least ten black health practitioners that
were literate in Inquisition and notarial records. As
blacks formed the majority of the population, they
increasingly, throughout the seventeenth century
married into the middle and high social classes or,
through legal avenues, entered the middling sectors
of Spanish colonial society. Literacy was essential for
conducting business in the highly legalistic Spanish
system. See, Gomez, Bodies of Encounter.
47
Evidence of the variety of origins of practitioners in the
region can be found in, for instance, AHN, Inquisición,
Libro 1020; AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1021; AHN, Inquis-
ición, Libro 1022; AHN, Inquisicion, 1023; AHN,
Inquisición, 1620, 7, 10; fols.16v–17r; AGN, Colonia,
Negros y Esclavos, Antioquia, 1–4.

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 392 Pablo F. Gómez

villages in the northern Kingdom of Granada; similarly, he procured healing products and
artefacts from Portobelo, Mompox, Santa Fé de Bogotá and Tolú, among other places.48
Given Cartagena’s position as the official port of entry for all slave trade coming into
South America and the ubiquitous smuggling that characterised the northern Kingdom of
Granada, it is reasonable to believe that López had access to a broad range of healing mate-
rials from the entire Atlantic world, including materials sold by Dutch, British and French
privateers.49
Far from being exceptional, Diego López’s circumstances are representative of those of
many healers in the region who acted as providers of health care to the free and enslaved
black communities composing the majority of the population in the Spanish Caribbean.
This was a heterogeneous group in origin and occupation. A few of them, like López, did
incorporate ‘officially sanctioned’ medical practices into their own techniques. However,
all black healers were also involved in the shaping and transmission of a rich group of
ideas about the body based on incorporative West and West Central African traditions.
López, for instance, was also part of a group of black ritual specialists coming from all
over the Caribbean that regularly gathered in places like the Manzanillo swamp outside Car-
tagena.50 Black healers moved with their masters or on their own around Caribbean cities
and towns, searching for social and economic opportunities or running away from enslave-
ment. De Narváez, for example, was born in Santo Domingo and had lived in Portobelo and
Mompox before meeting López in Cartagena and then moving to Zaragoza. Even after
establishing themselves in specific Caribbean locales, black specialists frequently traversed
the hinterlands of cities like Cartagena or Havana.
Habanero ritual specialists Luisa Sanchez and Antonio Garcia, for example, both
described as mulato in court records, travelled around Bayamo in east Cuba during the
1620s and1650s.51 Paula de Eguiluz, Cartagena’s bishop’s healer, lived and moved
around Las Minas del Cobre, also in east Cuba, before moving to Puerto Rico and later, in
the 1620s, to Cartagena de Indias.52 Alonso Venero, a black Cuban, told inquisitors
about encounters with maroons and dead ancestors—whom he called babulares [baba-
lawo?] during his journeys through the countryside of the Spanish Caribbean.53 Mateo
Arará, from Allada, travelled up and down the Magdalena River, the most important
fluvial artery of the region, to places like Mompox and Morocí south of Cartagena,
healing blacks and Catholic priests alike.54 Pedro de Mesa Nanboa, a bozal slave from the
Nanboa nation in the Kingdom of Kongo, roamed the northern New Kingdom of
Granada, providing cures for, among other things, ‘scorpion bites’.55 These black healers

48
AGN, Colonia, Negros y Esclavos, Antioquia, 4–1, fols.
42–44r.
49
On smuggling in early modern Colombia see Aline
Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia,
1770–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004), 56–91.
50
AHN, Inquisición, 1620, Exp. 7, fols. 11v–12r.
51
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1020, fols. 233v–236r; AHN,
Inquisición, Libro 1021, fol. 318v.
52
AHN, Inquisición, 1620, Exp. 10, fol. 41r.
53
A term strikingly similar to the term ‘Babalao’, the chief
priest of Santeria in Cuba and Babalawo, the main
priest from the Ifa cult, related to the Orisha Orunmila,
in Yoruba communities around the Bight of Benin. See,
among many others, the classic William Bascom text,
The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria (New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969); also Akinwumi
Ogundiran, ‘Living in the Shadow of the Atlantic
World: History and Material Life in a Yoruba-Edo
Hinterland, ca. 1600–1750’, in Akinwumi Ogundiran
and Toyin Falola (eds), Archaeology of Atlantic Africa
and the African Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 86.
54
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1021, fol. 340r–340v.
55
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fols. 419v–420r.

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 393

treated Europeans, Native Americans, free blacks and slaves on their own; or, if they were
slaves, after being rented from their masters to heal owners of haciendas and mines.
The mobility of black healers was not limited to the regions surrounding Cartagena or
Havana. For example, Francisco Mandinga in 1675 said that after being kidnapped in
Upper Guinea, slave traders took him to ‘different parts of Spain and then [to Cartagena]’.56
Even more well travelled was Juan de Salcedo, or, as he was known in Cartagena, Juan Inglés
[Juan the Englishman]. Juan, a free black born in Cartagena, told the Holy Office tribunal that
in 1671, at the age of twelve, he was kidnapped by British privateers. He spent the next years
traversing Caribbean Islands such as Barbados, Jamaica, Curacao and Pitaguao [Hispaniola]
with ‘British, French and Dutchmen’.57 He also travelled to England and Caracas as the
enslaved page of a British surgeon. Ingles said that he ‘knew some cures for snake bites
that Indians had taught him’ and that ‘with Englishmen he had learned … [to use] the revol-
lesta dressing … for fractures, or dislocations, of any limb’.58
Juan Díaz, for instance, said in 1666 that he ‘had been imprisoned by Britons and that he
escaped from the Island of Tobacco to La Margarita where he had been until he was brought
to this [Inquisition] jail’.59 Moreover, Antonio Congo, from West Central Africa, lived in
Holland, San Lucar (Spain), New Spain, Santo Domingo and Curacao before arriving in Car-
tagena. He travelled broadly around this city’s hinterland during the 1690s, curing slaves and
free blacks.60 Black practitioners came not only from Africa and other Caribbean and Amer-
ican locales; they also arrived from Europe (sometimes by themselves, sometimes with their
masters) to make their homes in Caribbean metropolises. Such was the case of María de
Ribera, la Portuguesa, a ritual healer from Viana, Portugal, who was put on trial in 1657
in Havana.61 In many cases, these healers originated from Atlantic islands such as Sao
Tome or Cabo Verde or, like Ana de Brito, from the Canary Islands.62
During their perambulations throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean worlds, black ritual
practitioners interacted with people from all walks of life. Most of their performances were in
public, which held extraordinary significance for black ritual specialists and shaped their
practices and medicinal products. As their healer competitors, it was in the public arena
where they met with either success or failure. In Atlantic medical marketplaces, public con-
sumption and validation of health practices became determinants of the type of systems that
would thrive and be transmitted in what was an extremely competitive marketplace.63 Car-
ibbean communities were crucial in shaping the epistemological boundaries which deter-
mined the trajectories of the ritual practices. The label ‘early modern Caribbean’ is thus
more descriptive of a contested cultural space inhabited by actors drawing on a vast array
of traditions to shape societal, political and economic scenarios than it is of a particular

56
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 353v.
57
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fols. 404r–411v.
58
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 405v.
59
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 258r–259r.
60
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 478r.
61
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1021, fols. 323v–324r; AHN,
Inquisición, Libro 1022, 31r, 52r; Some of the blacks
involved in ritual practices in the Caribbean travelled
between Cartagena and Upper Guinea after arriving
from Europe. See, AHN, Inquisición, 1620, 7, fol.
40v. For other Black ritual specialists coming from
Europe see, AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1020, fols. 14v;
46r, 280r, 331r–336r; AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023,
fols. 331r, 366v, 414r.
62
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1022, fol. 33r.
63
See, for instance, Cook, Matters; Cook, ‘Victories for
Empiricism’, 9–10. Also, for examples of the same
type of dynamics in African locales that were con-
nected to Atlantic networks, see Feirman, ‘Struggles
for Control’; and Steven Feirman, ‘Therapeutic Tradi-
tions of Africa: An Historical Perspective’, in Feirman
and Janzen (eds), The Social Basis of Health, 165.

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 394 Pablo F. Gómez

geographic location within the limits of the colonial domains of particular European powers.
The same can be said about the journeys and origins, cultural and ethnic, of the historical
actors that populated it.

‘They Learned from Each Other:’ Atlantic African Itinerant Healers

The itinerant nature of black ritual practices was not unique to the Caribbean. In the north-
east of seventeenth-century Brazil, Angolan Calunduzeiros travelled around the plantations
of the reconcavo Bahiano curing fellow West Central Africans.64 The healer Mateo Arará, for
example, travelled extensively around Allada in West Africa before being forcibly trans-
ported to Cartagena. Accompanying him on his voyages was his uncle, who had many
‘things that he used to cure’ and eventually ‘taught him the secrets of his nation’s healing
traditions’.65 Arará priests used oral traditions and symbolically infused objects and rituals
to report and transmit knowledge related to corporeal matters. In West and West Central
Africa, ritual practitioners frequently travelled around the continent, as they did in the
Bight of Benin. In Upper Guinea, Mandinka healers known as murus, marabouts or bexerins
travelled vast distances, disseminating Mande ideas and beliefs about the body. The
seventeenth-century Jesuit priest Manuel Álvares wrote of the mixing of Mande ideas
with Arab traditions that arrived in Senegambia via the Sahara trade, as well as how the
Banhus, one of the groups inhabiting the regions around ‘the rivers of Guinea’ in Upper
Guinea, used ‘various amulets … employ[ing] a bexerin as a magician to prepare for them
magic medicines which [were] made from certain herbs, in the same way as in Moorish
geomancy’.66
These specialists have been discussed elsewhere as disseminators of Atlantic healing
traditions, most famously in the Bolsa de Mandinga. 67 They were in close contact with jaba-
couses or jambacosses, local practitioners in communities along coastal Upper Guinea.
Mande healer-traders, the bexerins, became cultural vectors of bodily knowledge inter-
changed in Biafada, Folupo, Brame, Papel, Nalu, Balanta, Sape and Solo territories.
During the seventeenth century, Europeans began conflating the concept of jambacosses
with the term Mandinga. Captain Joao Nunes’ deposition in the 1668 trial of Cristina
Peres, a Banhu mulata from Cacheu in Upper Guinea accused of crafting chinas (power
objects), exemplifies this phenomenon. Nunes said that Mandingas were ‘sorcerers, idolat-
ers, gentiles’. People in Cacheu ‘had a lot of faith in them and treated them with great
veneration as if they were relics and divine things’.68 Throughout the seventeenth

64
See, for instance, Sweet, Recreating Africa; also
Jean-Loup Amselle, Logiques métisses: anthropologie
de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs (Paris: Payot, 1990).
65
AHN, Inquisición, 1021, fol. 341r.
66
Manuel, A. Alvares et al., Ethiopia Minor and a Geo-
graphical Account of the Province of Sierra Leone
(c. 1615) (Liverpool: Dept. of History, University of Liv-
erpool, 1990), ch. 7, p. 9. See also the first chapter of
A. Teixeira da Mota and P. E. H. Hair, Jesuit Documents
on the Guinea of Cape Verde and the Cape Verde
68
Islands, 1585–1617, in English Translation (Liverpool:
Dept. of History, University of Liverpool, 1989).
67
According to James Sweet, the very rigours of the
Inquisition reaffirmed the power of power-objects
such as the Mandinga bags. See James Sweet,
‘Slaves, Convicts, and Exiles: African Travelers in the
Portuguese Atlantic World, 1720–1750’, in Caroline
Williams (ed.), Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic
World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 193–202; for more on
African material culture in the New World see, Farris
Thompson, Face of The Gods: Art and Altars of
Africa and the African Americas (New York: Museum
for African Art, 1993).
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal
(hereafter ANTT), Inquisição de Lisboa, Processo 2079.

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 395

century, these travelling bexerines slowly became Mandingas. In the New World, the term
was commonly used to refer to ritual specialists in general, even to those coming from
groups in coastal areas such as the Balanta, Papel, Folupos, Zapes, Brames as well as from
the Bight of Benin and Biafra.
The generalisation of these origins within the term ‘Mandingas’ frequently created cog-
nitive dissonance. In 1675, for example, Francisco Mandinga declared to inquisitors in Car-
tagena that he was from the ‘nación Cocolí’.69 The Cocolis, a subgroup of the Zapes (Çape,
Sapi) had been under the rule of an expanding Mande group throughout most of the sev-
enteenth century.70 Yet Francisco Mandinga’s cultural affiliations were more multifaceted
than this; for example, we know that he used cup bleeding during his healing rituals.
Cupping was widespread in the early modern period in American, African and European
locales. It is highly likely that Francisco, coming from an area with a large Arab influence,
had learned this technique in his homeland either from Mande bexerins or from other
ritual practitioners exposed to the technique in locales connected to Cacheu. Indeed, cup
bleeding was a trademark healing method used by groups with large Muslim influences,
such as the Hausa.71 We also have evidence of black Brazilian and West African barbers
using this technique in places such as Rio de Janeiro as late as the nineteenth century.72
After leaving Upper Guinea, Francisco travelled around the Atlantic world, presumably
learning from other ritual practitioners along the way, before arriving in Cartagena where
he ended up in front of the Holy Office, fully embracing his Mandinga labelling without
renouncing his Cocolí ethnicity. It is intriguing to think of nebulous Jambacousses, Bexerines
and Mandingas such as Francisco as models for the vessels through which this incorporative
and vibrantly multi-originated health culture flowed in the Caribbean.
This is not to say that Africans living in Spanish Caribbean locales were not adamant about
the strong rooting of their curative practices in Old World traditions. As much as he embod-
ied the multi-originated healing traditions of the region, another Francisco Mandinga, also
from West Africa, affirmed in 1648 that he could cure ‘since birth’.73 Like Francisco
Mandinga, Catalina de Barros, a free mulata of Upper Guinean descent who lived in
Spanish Jamaica, declared, when accused around 1649 of being a Zahorí (a gifted ritual spe-
cialist), that she was ‘mulata on the part of her mother’. She also said that her gifts had a
divine origin and were transmitted through ‘her mother’s womb’.74 Similarly, Antonio

69
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 352v.
70
Alonso de Sandoval, Instauranda aethiopum salute; el
mundo de la esclavitud negra en América [Sevilla,
1627], ed. Angel Valtierra (Bogotá: Empresa Nacional
de Publicaciones, 1956), 38–9, 601. This information
corroborates the data provided by Walter Rodney
and George Brooks. Rodney lists ‘Cocoli’ and
‘Landuma’ as two separate groups, both of which he
describes as ‘pre-Mandinga’. Brooks, for his part,
equates Cocolí with the category ‘Landuma-Sapi
groups’ and cites a report stating ‘the Biafada and
Landuma were subject to the ruler of the Mandinka,
the mansa of Mali’. Walter Rodney, A History of the
Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800 (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1982), 26,111; also, George
E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society
and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1993), 260.
71
See L. Lewis Wall, Hausa Medicine: Illness and Well-
being in a West African Culture (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1988), 224–5.
72
See for instance, Tania Salgado Pimenta, ‘Barbeiros-
sangradores e curandeiros no Brasil (1808–28)’, in His-
tória, Ciência, Saúde, 1998, 5, 349–73; Márcio de
Sousa Soares, ‘Cirurgiões Negros: saberes africanos e
as doenças nas ruas do Rio de Janeiro durante a 1a
metade do século XIX’, Lócus, 2002, 2, 43–58.
73
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1021, fol. 176v.
74
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1021, fol., 244r. The hereditary
nature of healing gifts was not unique to African
culture. All over Europe, families claimed to have
hereditary powers over specific diseases, or even the

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 396 Pablo F. Gómez

Congo said in 1690 that ‘in his land his mother had taught him how to make the herbs and
the curas [treatments]’.75 However, as the examples above show, the Caribe was not a land
for the re-creation of West and West Central African traditions, traditions that could hardly
be regarded as static in any case.
Whilst invariably tracing the origins of their beliefs back to their homeland, black practi-
tioners were similarly unequivocal about the fluidity of their schooling in healing matters,
both in Africa as well as on their journeys through the Atlantic world. Speaking through
interpreters to the Inquisition tribunal in Cartagena de Indias, Miguel Arará, a woodcutter
from Allada in the Bight of Benin, said in 1666 that when a difficult illness presented itself
in his land, ‘the [ritual specialists] were summoned to a meeting so they could learn from
each other’s wisdom’.76 The case of Isabel Hernandez is also exemplary. Isabel, a free
black from ‘the Biáfara nation’ [Biafada] in Upper Guinea, told the inquisitors she became
a ritual practitioner after ‘she was persuaded and taught by Luis Bañón [Banhu]’, a free
black and fellow Upper Guinean.77 Juan de Alomera declared in 1697 that he learned
about the power of the sticks and leaves he used in his practices as well as the words he
recited during healing rituals when ‘another black, from the Mandinga nation, whose
name he does not know, had cured him’.78 Cartagenero ritual practitioners met on the
streets of a city whose air was filled by the sounds of African drums, as they did during
the lloro [funeral] of Joan Brán, ‘a great sorcerer’ from Upper Guinea who had lived on La
Cruz Street when ‘all of Cartagena’s brujas gathered late at night for his funeral’. Among
them were ritual practitioners coming from Upper Guinea, Cuba and Puerto Rico.79 The sit-
uation was comparable in Cuba. Discussing his experiences in Havana, the black healer
Domingo de la Ascensión told inquisitors about ‘the many things’ he taught Maria
Romera. He stated that he had instructed Romera on the usage of ‘the sticks and herbs’
with which he cured, methods she used to treat black slaves and her own children.80
Thus, the crossing of cultural boundaries to exchange knowledge about healing procedures,
rather than being exceptional, was evidently the norm for early modern Caribbean health
practitioners.
Seventeenth-century Capuchin missionaries in both the north eastern New Kingdom of
Granada and Venezuela reported similar dynamics through which Native American Carib-
bean ritual specialists, members of the indigenous group populating the savannahs and
the coastline of the northern part of South America and several of the Caribbean islands,
interacted. Their report, compiled during the second half of the seventeenth century,
describes how, when epidemics emerged in their territories, piaches [ritual practitioners]
from different communities held a summit that lasted at least two days to share information
about possible cures and procedures to deal with the emergency.81 Africans easily fit within
the collaborative nature of health practices in the region; Francisco Mandinga discoursed in
his second Inquisition trial about his exchanges with Caribbean mohanes [masters of ritual
practitioners] and mentioned instances in which natives in the Tolú village south of Carta-
gena called upon him to discover who among them was causing diseases and to eradicate

setting of broken bones. See, for example, Ramsey,
245; Jean Barbot, Barbot on Guinea: the Writings of
75
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 481r.
76
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 228r.
77
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1020, fol. 293v.
78
AHN, Inquisición, 1622, Exp. 21. fol. 26r.
79
AHN, Inquisición, 1620, Exp. 10, fols. 94r-v.
80
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1022, fol. 439v.
81
Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Spain (here-
after BNE), Mision Capuchina al Africa, L2, fol. 304v.

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 397

plagues and punish the witches causing them.82 Black mohanes’ knowledge of diseases
transcended ethnic lines and made them accepted healers in native communities in the
region. After centuries of being engaged in vigourous processes of cultural adoption and
sharing, it is hardly surprising that West and West Central Africans re-imagined such dynam-
ics in the New World.

Black ‘Natural Mohanes’

Once in the Caribbean, African priests and healers promptly started exploring the forests,
savannahs and coastal shores of the region looking for elements to fight the array
of known and novel diseases they found in the New World. The available record
provides only a very general description of the types of medicinal substances black ritual
practitioners used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean locales. Among the
roots and plants named by seventeenth-century black Caribbean specialists and recorded
by Spanish scribes during their trials—in many cases after the intervention of African
translators—are Beuvera, Ariajua, Carcoma, Orejon, Pullon, Escobilla and Cayaya. Besides
these unknown plants, I have found descriptions of black healers’ usage of achote (Bixa
orellana), lulos (Solanum quitoense), palm hearts (Euterpe oleracea) and bottle gourds
(Lagenaria siceraria or agenaria vulgaris), which could be found both in Africa and in the
Caribbean.83
These elements signified more than simple pharmaceutical properties. Bottle gourds, for
instance, were symbols of the all-encompassing and closely interconnected nature of the
body, society and the natural world, and they figured as basic ritual elements for commun-
ities around the Bight of Benin and Biafra, as well as in West Central Africa. They also played
a prominent role in contemporary descriptions of ritual cures and of the administration
of justice in the form of ordeals, as well as in the elaboration of medicines and poisons
in most of sub-Saharan Africa.84 Africans in the Americas were able to find species
familiar to them which carried correspondingly strong symbolic resonances, among
which were silk cottonwood (Ceiba pentandra) and beach morning glory (Ipomoea
pes-capra). Ceibas in particular were central elements for the enacting of communal
and healing rituals in Upper Guinea and the Bights of Benin and Biafra, as well as in the
New World.85
Caribbean black ritual specialists also used medicinal preparations coming directly from
European pharmacies. For example, Ana Ramirez from Havana said that she used in her
healing rituals ‘ointments from the pharmacy, fragrant water’ and other ‘very useful

82
He also talks about his conversations and interchanges
with Native Americans in a village close to Tolú. AHN,
Inquisición, Libro 1022, fols. 292r, 310r.
83
Whilst some of these plants’ names have similarities to
names used in the Caribbean to refer to flora found in
this region, it is impossible to affirm with certainty
whether they correspond to the same plants. We do
not yet count with archaeological studies that could
shed light on the identities of the plants described by
early modern Caribbean black ritual practitioners. Spe-
cific cases of these plants’ usages can be found dis-
persed, among others, in the following documents:
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1020; AHN, Inquisición, Libro
1021; AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1022; AHN, Inquisición,
Libro 1023; AHN, Inquisición, 1620, Exp. 7; AHN,
Inquisición, 1620, Exp. 10.
84
Wilhelm J. Müller, Die Afrikanische auf der Guinei-
schen Gold Cust gelegene Landschafft Fetu [1676],
ed. Zwernemann Jürgen (Graz: Akademische Druck
und Verlagsanstalt, 1968), 53–4.
85
European missionaries both in Africa and the Carib-
bean took note of the special place Ceibas (Ceiba
pentandra, family Bombacaceae) trees had in the reli-
gious pantheon of Africans coming from Upper
Guinea and the Bight of Benin. De Sandoval, Instaur-
anda aethiopum salute, 376.

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 398 Pablo F. Gómez

preparations’.86 Other medicinal species used by Africans in the Americas came from the Old
World in the form of foodstuffs. Among these were winged yam (Dioscorea alata), pigeon
pea (Cajanus cajan), sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), oil palm (Elaeis guineensis and Elaeis olei-
fera), watermelon (Citrullus lanatus), akee (Blighia sapida), black-eyed pea (Vigna unguicu-
lata), Kola nuts (genus cola) and okra (Abelmoschus esculentus).87
Spanish and Portuguese proto-scientists like Nicolás Monardes and Francisco Hernandez
readily incorporated information about plants and mineral remedies obtained from Native
American herbal experts in their reports to vice-regal and regal courts in the Americas and
Europe.88 African expertise in the use of medicines and medical knowledge was also
lauded by European missionaries and factors in locales such as Cacheu in Upper Guinea.
Jesuit missionary Manuel Álvares said, for instance, that ‘in medical matters, some of
them [Upper Guinean ritual specialists] are expert herbalists, and hence they perform
cures like doctors and surgeons. Some cures are so striking and are performed so rapidly
that they are of interest to those most learned in the art (of medicine).’ He added the follow-
ing concerning Upper Guinean healing traditions: ‘Those given a wound measuring a palm-
span in breadth from a spear of the kind they have, a wound which is cured in 8–10 days,
without suppuration, by means of a wonderful herb.’89
That European physicians appropriated black healers’ medical knowledge is therefore not
surprising. Juan Méndez Nieto, a Portuguese physician active during the last decades of the
sixteenth century and beginnings of the seventeenth in Panamá, the New Kingdom of
Granada and Santo Domingo, provides a case in point. Writing from Cartagena de Indias
on the treatment of ‘mouth putrefaction’, and ‘genital ulcers’, Méndez Nieto recommended
the leaves of a tree he had discovered in Cartagena, a tree that ‘the Blacks and the people in
the country side call limpiadientes [teeth cleaner]’. He argued in his book that preparations
from the limpiadientes were much better than any other known remedies for diseases of the
mouth as well as ‘the virile member and low parts of woman’. Nieto elaborated at some
length on the curative properties of the limpiadientes: ‘it is something to behold, and some-
thing that frightens Galen, that being these leaves hot and dry in the third degree … they
tighten and cure the relaxed gum and tighten and comfort the teeth, and work better
than wine and myrrh … and better than the tabayba sticks and all other remedies, simple
and complex, so far described [for such diseases].’90 A contemporary reference coming
from Inquisition records is probably related to the type of treatment described by Mendez
Nieto; Miguel Arará, a bozal slave from the Bight of Benin, declared that to treat teeth
problems ‘he gave [his patients] preparations made out of bejuco’.91 The circulation of
knowledge in the Atlantic was obviously multidirectional and rooted in pragmatic and

86
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, 314r. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), 46;
87
See, for instance, Robert A. Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Barrera Osorio, Experiencing Nature, 122, 125, 154;
Candomble: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion Also, Barrera Osorio, ‘Experts’, 139.
89
in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). For Álvares, Ethiopia, ch. 7, 10.
90
nineteenth-century North America, see Sharla Juan Méndez Nieto, Discursos medicinales [1611] (Sal-
M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power amanca: Universidad de Salamanca, Junta de Castilla y
on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University León, 1989), 332–3.
91
of North Carolina Press, 2002). AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fols 228v–229r.
88
See for example, Simon Varey (ed.), The Mexican
Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 399

immediate concerns. Usage of medical treatments in the Caribbean trumped not only imag-
ined racial boundaries, but also the constraints of scholastic doctrine.
The limited information available suggests that black Caribbean ethno-botanical systems
followed similar paths to those of ritual practices: they were defined by adaptation to local
circumstances and beliefs and the incorporation of available natural elements. Seventeenth-
century black health specialists were not passive reproducers of African, Native American or
European healing techniques; rather, they actively incorporated native fauna and flora into
their rituals and cures and sought to interrogate the efficacy of new healing methods to
which they were constantly exposed. The West Central African Antonio Congo spent his
days ‘metido en el monte’ [in the woods] looking for herbs and perhaps meeting local
Native American ritual specialists.92 Another West Central African, Pedro Congo, was vilified
before the Inquisition because he did not attend mass or other religious services. Instead, he
was said to have ‘spent his time looking for herbs and sticks in the forests’ surrounding the
city.93 Domingo Congo, a famous healer and ritual practitioner living in Caracas, Venezuela
during the first half of the seventeenth century, declared that in his cures he used chickens,
leaves, crosses and some red powders called barquisi. A diminutive, loquacious black figur-
ine, adorned with chicken feathers, reputedly helped him find the elements necessary for his
rituals in the countryside around Caracas. The figurine, a nkisi power-object in all likelihood,
was of ‘very dark color’ and reportedly moved freely whilst talking to Domingo and indicat-
ing to him which roots were most appropriate for the treatment of specific ailments.94
Although set against the backdrop of an epistemological environment significantly different
from that in which Europeans engaged in their own (state-sponsored) explorations of Amer-
ican people, flora and fauna, black practitioners were able to create a pharmacopoeia of
their own, modelled on African understandings of the therapeutic power of American
plants, animals and minerals.
These practitioners also empirically tested the elements they found in the New World.
Mateo Arará began to study the native plants around Cartagena accompanied by an ester-
ita, a little mat. As he explained, ‘After arriving in this kingdom he had made from his wits a
little mat out of palm leaves which he tied by the ends. In its upper part [the little mat] was
divided in two arms’. The mat, Mateo said, was a tool he made in order to ‘recognise the
good and bad herbs to cure Christians’. When the Inquisition’s prosecutor asked Mateo
about how he used his little mat, Mateo answered that, to unlock its powers, he ‘took a
chicken, opened its beak and cut its throat with a knife and with the blood that came out
of the chicken he sprinkled the little mat, and after [the little mat] was wet and sprinkled
he put in it powders of all types of counter herbs.’ Mateo Arará learned which herbs were
‘beneficial for the Christians’ by consulting with the little mat. According to Arará, if the
herb was good, the little mat opened itself, and if it was not, it closed itself and moved
from one side to the other’.95 The power-object, the little mat, was spiritually activated
through the use of chicken blood. The ancestral knowledge of spiritual entities infused
the herbal medicines that Mateo collected through his exploration of Cartagena’s

92
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 479r.
93
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 254r.
94
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1022, fols 101v–103r. See
Christopher C. Fennell, ‘Conjuring Boundaries:
Inferring Past Identities from Religious Artefacts’, Inter-
national Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2000, 4,
281–313.
95
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1021, fols 340r–v.

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 400 Pablo F. Gómez

landscape. Indeed, in the African kingdom of Dahomey, trees and plants, which lay in direct
contact with a soil occupied by earth voduns and ancestors, were ‘powerful representations
of the sustenance offered by the spirit world’.96 Implied in Mateo’s deposition is his recog-
nition of the necessity to investigate the New World’s herbal substances and to connect to
the spiritual entities that nurtured them. Mateo’s claim that he was testing herbs’ viability for
curing Christians seems to suggest that black ritual specialists perceived differences in the
characteristics of Old World and American human bodies. In addition, it is likely that he
did not think that such dissimilarities were only physical; for healers like Mateo, communal
and spiritual beliefs were crucial for the operations of the bodies of individual members of
Caribbean societies and the effects of the medicines used to treat those bodies. Healers’
examinations of medicinal herbs thus simultaneously involved a physical exploration of
the natural world and a spiritual reading of the societal realm in which they would be used.
Mateo Arará was not the only practitioner testing medical substances. Juan Ingles also
experimented on himself and on his patients with the plants and animals he found in Car-
tagena’s countryside. In 1689, he declared that a colleague gave him ‘several elements
against poison … [and] several roots and bird feathers that he tried on an animal. After
three hours the animal became dry and died. He also experimented with another poison
that used bread crumbs … which he put in the mouth of an animal that also dried out
and died.’97 Juan Diaz, another free black, tried new treatments before administering
them to his patients.98 The empirical methods that black ritual practitioners like Mateo
Arará, Juan Ingles and Juan Diaz used to test medicinal substances were based on epistemo-
logical systems that involved an understanding of human physicality as intrinsically con-
nected to moral, spiritual and socio-political events. They sought to make sense of and
order illnesses and the medical substances and procedures used to treat them within intelli-
gible models that provided effective resources for treatment. The means by which they did so
were heavily indebted to African traditions. As David Schoenbrun succinctly put it, West and
West Central African histories of healing and health practices contain ‘bundles of meaning
and practice’ that provided a ‘persistent and durable resource for mediating change’.99

Conclusion
During the first two centuries following the arrival of Europeans on Caribbean shores, a
culture of medical knowledge-production based on the collection of empirical data
became firmly established, first in the New World, and then in Europe.100 In the Spanish Car-
ibbean this novel culture was not framed by ‘enlightened’ ideas, but rather by the

96
Sweet, Domingos, 110. Spanish America. See Nicolás Monardes, Historia
97
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fols 403r–406r. medicinal. Dos libros, el uno que trata de todas las
98
AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1023, fol. 259r. cosas que traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales que
99
David L. Schoenbrun, ‘Conjuring the Modern in Africa: siruen al uso de la medicina y el otro que trata de la
Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing piedra bezaar (Sevilla: Hernando Diaz, 1569);
between the Great Lakes of East Africa’, The American Francisco Hernández et al., De materia medica
Historical Review, 2006, 111, 1403–39. See also Gwyn Novae Hispaniae Philippi Secundi Hispaniarum ac
Prins, ‘A Modern History of Lozi Therapeutics’, in Feier- Indiarum regis invictissimi iussu (El Escorial, Madrid,
man and Janzen (eds), The Social Basis of Health, 1992, 1577); See, Barrera Osorio, ‘Experts’ and Barrera
339–65. Osorio, Experiencing Nature.
100
People such as Nicolás Monardes and Francisco
Hernandez were at the forefront of this enterprise in

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 Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the 17th-Century Caribbean 401

imperatives of biological, political, cultural and economical survival driving actors of all
origins in this age of transformations. The ways in which communities fashioned information
and practices about health and disease in the Spanish Caribbean transcended the con-
straints of knowledge-production that characterised life in European and American
centres of learning, including Mexico and Lima. The project of discovering, experimenting
with and using medical substances and new medical practices in the Caribbean was not
exclusively a product of European-sponsored scientific enterprises. In the cases examined
here, the production and circulation of knowledge about the body happened outside of
European intellectual circles. Afro-Caribbean ritual practitioners were at the forefront of
the production of empirical knowledge related to corporeality in the region.
As was the case around the Atlantic, Caribbean communities were less concerned with
the scholastic orthodoxy of the treatments they received than with the efficacy of the
cures they applied to the legion of diseases that dictated the rhythm of their lives.101
Success in the early modern Spanish Caribbean medical marketplace depended on the intel-
ligible articulation of a comprehensive set of ideas about the body coming not only from the
original cultures of the healers themselves, but also from other members of the community
at large. Early modern Caribbean ritual specialists were responsible for the processing of cor-
poreal knowledge coming from multiple Atlantic locales. This was as much a necessity
arising from the specific circumstances of the Spanish Caribbean as it was a continuation
of incorporative traditions emerging from the Old World.
In fact, Caribbean black ritual specialists such as Mateo Arará and Francisco Mandinga
operated at the very centre of a vibrant discussion about the nature of corporeality in
these Caribbean locales; they were, above all, the main intellectual force shaping healing
practices in the Spanish Caribbean. As evidenced above, Africans brought limited but signif-
icant material culture from the Old World and, more importantly, used their own cultural and
intellectual systems to shape the natural world and societies of the Spanish Caribbean.
Whilst the documentary trail they left behind is sparse, the available evidence strongly sug-
gests that, perhaps more than any other group in the seventeenth-century Caribbean,
people of African descent took an active role in exploring substances, landscapes and cor-
poreal practices that allowed them to create a spiritual and physical landscape in which
they could enact their healing techniques. The fact that the large majority of the population
in Caribbean locales traced its origins to Africa, where bodily practices had strong communal
resonance, facilitated the dispersion and ready acceptance of healing rituals originating
within black communities.
Early modern diasporic beliefs around the body were shaped not only by a group of trav-
elling ritual specialists, but also by a population that was equally mobile and exposed to treat-
ments coming from all over the world.102 Spanish Caribbean communities had become
increasingly ‘Africanised’ throughout the seventeenth century; the social milieu of Carta-
gena, Havana and San Juan had much more in common with Benguela, Salvador da
Bahia, Cacheu and São Jorge da Mina than with Santa Fé de Bogotá, Lima or Mexico City.

101
See, for instance, Cook, ‘The History of Medicine’,
102–8.
102
Somebody like Manuel Baez, of Lisbon, who served as
a ‘guardia de los navios de esclavos’ [guard in the slave
boats] was in constant contact with this transatlantic
set of beliefs. AGI Contratacion, 5354,
No. 1. Cartageneros frequently embarked on trips
to Africa either as seamen or as slave traders
seeking to acquire a small lot of slaves and sell them
back in the city.

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 402 Pablo F. Gómez

Black ritual specialists called Mohanes, Babalawo, Baganga, Marabaous, Jambacosse,

Bexerins or Mandingas executed similar ritual practices not only in Africa, but also in
Lisbon, Havana, Bahia and Pernambuco. There are multiple examples of the widespread
and consistent use of seventeenth-century healing tools and methods, such as bursas man-
dingas, in European, African and American locales.103 The black practitioners performing
these procedures were not all Africans, nor did they share specific ethnic backgrounds.
The seventeenth century did not see a unidirectional flow of knowledge coming from
Africa and spreading throughout the Atlantic world. Instead, new understandings concern-
ing corporeality and the natural world resulted from black communities’ intellectual engage-
ment with the New World that came into being at the time.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and sug-
gestions. The article benefited enormously from them. My gratitude also goes to Jane
Landers, Joseph Miller, Elena Schneider, and Amy Buono who read and commented on dif-
ferent versions of the essay. Audiences at the Cogut Center for the humanities at Brown Uni-
versity; the City University of New York Seminar on Caribbean Epistemologies, and the
workshop ‘Globalizing the History of Colonial Medicine and Public Health: Adding Latin
America and the Caribbean’ at Yale university provided invaluable feedback on different
sections of the article.

Funding
This work was supported by two generous fellowships from the American Council of
Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation and by grants from the Department of
History and the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University, and the Department
of History and Geography at Texas Christian University.

103
Among many others, see, Álvares, Ethiopia, ch. 1;
Barbot, Barbot on Guinea, 85, 221–2; ANTT, Inquisi-
ção de Lisboa, Livro 785, Fol., 5221; ANTT, Inquisição
de Lisboa, Cadernos do Promotor, Livro 324; also,
Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture,
Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 208,
217; Daniela Buono Calainho, Metrópole das Man-
dingas: Religiosidade Negra e Inquisição Portuguesa
no Antigo Regime (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2008).

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