After Sale: Gender, Childhood, and Smallpox in the Slave Trade and Slavery

In November 1769, an enslaved African girl and her forty-seven shipmates journeyed from San Juan to Cumaná on a Compañía Gaditana ship. After undergoing the visita de sanidad, the girl was sold to Cumaná’s treasurer, Antonio de Alcalá, and began working in his home. Several days later, members of Alcalá’s household and his guests became ill with smallpox. They attributed the outbreak to the enslaved girl. As news of the outbreak spread, Cumaná’s residents pressured local officials to implement precautions to protect their families from the disease. Thus, government officials removed the enslaved girl from Alcalá’s home and quarantined her and her shipmates. After relocating their quarantine several times, Cumaná’s officials ordered that the surviving enslaved people return to Puerto Rico in December. Hundreds of pages of conflicting testimonies, correspondence, and financial records chart the enslaved girl’s movements and raise questions about whether the enslaved girl had smallpox at all.

In conversation with scholarship concerning medicine and the Spanish slave trade and gender and urban slavery in the Caribbean, my paper will examine how gender, childhood, kinship, and the classification of “bozal” informed Cumaná’s public health policies and enslaved people’s experiences of them. The enslaved girl’s status made her vulnerable to physical scrutiny and sanctioned her quarantine and re-embarkation. Her intra-Caribbean voyages and movements through the morbid geography of Cumaná’s quarantines illustrate the degree of precarity that newly enslaved Africans experienced when caught in the crosshairs of the slave trade, enslavement, and public health policies.