172 CHAPTER 5:
FROM THE APPENNINES TO THE ANDES: THE LIGURIAN
COMMUNITY IN PERU AND THE PERUVIAN COOLIE TRADE
The history of the Italian involvement in the Chinese coolie trade is closely intertwined with the history of the Italian immigration in Peru, and more broadly, in the Pacific Rim region during the first half of the nineteenth century. As we demonstrate in this study, a large section of the Peruvian strand of the coolie traffic, especially after the 1856-1861 suspension, came to be controlled by merchants, captains and crews of Genoese or Ligurian origin, mostly settled in the port cities of the Andean country. Starting from the 1840s, this community had successfully integrated into the local cultural and economic life, and seized a position of dominance in the maritime trade. Cultivating and consolidating close relationships with the Peruvian economic and political elites, in particular, the most successful and influential members of this community had established a foothold in the most profitable ganglia of the country’s economy: the guano, cotton and sugar industries, but also the enormously profitable trade in Chinese laborers.
5.1 The Genoese commercial diaspora in the Pacific: genesis and activities
The historiographical coverage of the earlier stages of the Italian emigration on the Pacific Coast of Latin America is dwarfed by the studies dedicated to the so-called “great emigration” of the end of nineteenth century.1 Studies on the “pioneers” of the mass migration, moreover, have especially focused on the settlement of Italian immigrants in the United States, Brazil and the Plata basin (Uruguay and Argentina and Paraguay), but have largely ignored the thriving albeit comparably smaller communities in the Pacific.2
As historians have correctly observed, the Italian immigration to early nineteenth-century Peru, Chile, Ecuador and later California represents a case in “quality” 3—in other words skilled—and precocious migration, as opposed to posterior movements of peasants
1 Emilio Franzina, Gli italiani al Nuovo Mondo: l’emigrazione italiana in America 1492-1942 (Milano:
Mondadori, 1995); Diego L. Chou, “Los chinos en Hispanoamérica,” Cuadernos de sciencias sociales 124 (2002).
2 For example: Matteo Sanfilippo, “L’emigrazione italiana nelle americhe in età pre-unitaria, 1815-1860,”
Annali della Fondazione Einaudi XLII (2008): 65–79; Marco Porcella, “Premesse dell’emigrazione di
massa in età prestatistica (1800-1850),” in Storia dell’Emigrazione Italiana: Partenze (Roma: Donzelli, 2001).
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and urban proletarians.4 Like other early movements of Italian migrants in the same historical conjuncture, it was mostly comprised of sailors, petty merchants, and other categories of people linked with the sea and seafaring professions.
The first groups of Genoese pioneers in Peru settled during the last stages of the colonial era, often indirectly from Spanish ports and particularly Cadiz, where—as thoroughly demonstrated by Catia Brilli, naturalized Genoese merchants controlled most of the Spanish Crown’s commerce with South and Central America.5 Most likely these long-standing contacts facilitated the later development and characterization of the Italian presence in the Andean country, in the same way they did with the broader Genoese expansion in the Atlantic.6 Between the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, in fact, the weakening of the Spanish trade monopoly in the colonies and the process of independence gave momentum to a further strengthening of the presence of Genoese merchants and sailors in the whole South American continent, not only on the Atlantic coast and the Plata region—where the most dense and numerous community concentrated7—but also in other major ports on the Pacific, especially Valparaiso, Callao and Guayaquil, and further north in San Francisco. In these emerging markets they found favorably conditions to capitalize on their know-how and skills in navigation and trade to take over large portions of the cabotage between the newly independent republics, which replaced the internal fluvial and terrestrial trade and supply routes of the colonial era.
An absolute majority of these immigrants came from Liguria, and in particular from the small ports of the Ligurian Riviera di Levante, such as Nervi, Recco, Sori, Camogli, Santa Margherita, Rapallo, Zoagli, Lavagna, Moneglia, and the towns of Genoa and Chiavari;8 places characterized by a century-old tradition of mobility, a flourishing shipbuilding industry, and long-range family-run maritime trade links.9 The majority of the emigrants was not driven by poverty, famine or other classical “push” factors, but on
4 Gaetano Ferro, L’emigrazione nelle Americhe dalla provincia di Genova. Questioni generali e
introduttive, vol. 1 (Genova: Patron, 1990), 75–78.
5 Catia Brilli, “La diaspora commerciale ligure nel sistema atlantico iberico. Da Cadice a Buenos Aires
(1750-1830),” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Università di Pisa, 2008); also Catia Brilli, “Da Cadice a Buenos Aires: crisi e rinascita del commercio ligure nella nuova configurazione dell’Atlantico iberico (1797-1837),” Annali della Fondazione Einaudi XLIII (2009): 143–77.
6 Brilli, “The Genoese Response to the Collapse of the Spanish Empire in America.” 7
By the start of the 1830s, the Italian community in Montevideo and Buenos Aires was already exceeding 3,000 people. Francesco Surdich, “I viaggi, i commerci, le colonie: radici locali dell’iniziativa espansionistica,” in Storia d’Italia, le regioni dall'Unità a oggi. La Liguria, ed. Antonio Gibelli and Paride Rugafiori, vol. XI (Torino: Einaudi, 1994).
8
Chiaramonti, “L’emigrazione italiana in America Latina nell’Ottocento: il caso peruviano,” 182. Cf. Surdich, “I viaggi, i commerci, le colonie: radici locali dell’iniziativa espansionistica.”
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the basis of a genuine “culture of mobility”,10 rooted in their villages’ historical experience. Not unlike the Hokkien and Fujianese merchants settled in what has been called the “East Asian Mediterranean,”11 or other comparable communities of maritime traders in the early modern world, it was a movement of mostly young males, leaving their households as part of a familiar strategy of economic survival and expansion, and in the hope of returning in a circular pattern of migration.
To this main strand, which we can call accordingly of “sojourners”, the political turmoil of the Restoration added a significant stream of political emigration. The American continent became the natural outlet for subversives, insurgents and other “unwanted” elements fleeing the new post-1815 authorities. In these years, moreover, the port of Genoa became a major collection center for the departure of exiled and persecuted radicals from other Italian regions. Political reasons, however, often overlapped with more concrete reasons: in particular the will to evade long periods of compulsory military conscription, introduced in Genoa by the French occupation and retained under the Piedmontese, and continue to contribute to their household economies through remittances. 12
5.1.1 Causes of the Genoese immigration in Peru
As we have already discussed, compared to other places in the Americas, Peru was substantially cut off from the major European migration flows due to its geographical disadvantages. Therefore, despite the desires and active efforts of its early Republican governments,13 the European immigration in the country remained rather low for all the first half of the nineteenth century, encouraging the approval of the “Chinese option” in the late 1840s. Italians, or more correctly Ligurians, were one of the main exceptions. The presence of Italian immigrants in Peru, in fact, had slowly increased after the country's independence in 1821, in spite of severe political and military turmoil. Contrarily to the expectations of the country’s political elites, however, interested in fomenting the
10
Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana, 23.
11
Craig Lockard, “‘The Sea Common to All’: Maritime Frontiers , Port Cities, and Chinese Traders in the Southeast Asian Age of Commerce, ca. 1400-1750,” Journal of World History 21, no. 2 (2010): 219–47; François Gipouloux, The Asian Mediterranean: Port Cities and Trading Networks in China, Japan and
South Asia, 13th-21st Century (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011).
12 Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana, 38–40.
13 To encourage the settlement of new European immigrants, deemed necessary for the economic, civil and
to some extent racial development of the country, Peruvian authorities issued laws to facilitate the acquisition of the Peruvian citizenship (18 April 1822) and stimulate the colonization and cultivation of uninhabited or scarcely populated regions of the “selva” (the departments of Amazonas and Ucayali, in the northeast). Ibid., 23–24.
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settlement of agriculturists in the country’s scarcely inhabited frontiers, the Italian presence remained linked to the maritime trade and the opening of new opportunities of commercial penetration in the Peruvian coastal cities.
Fig. 5.1 Genoese sailors at Callao, c. 1870s; source http://apellidositalianosperu.blogspot.it/ (accessed 05/2014).
The history of the Ligurian migration in these years, in fact, was closely intertwined with the recover, growth and evolution of a transoceanic Genoese commercial fleet after the crisis produced by the Napoleonic occupation. By the 1840s Genoese owned ships, flying the Sardinian and a multitude of other national flags could be found in every class of coastal, short, middle and long range navigation. Regular and extensive traffics connected Genoa with the grain producing regions of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.14 Not less covered were the routes of the Northern and Southern Atlantic. Around the half of the century Ligurian merchants had secured a substantial fraction of the coastal and long range navigation of the newly independent South American republics, particularly Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru and Ecuador. Their presence in these countries was immediately second to that of the British merchant marine, and roughly equivalent to the French.15 Settlements of merchants and retailers accompanied naturally these routes, in the Mediterranean as well as in all the world’s oceans.
In Peru, specifically, what contributed decisively to the definitive consolidation of a major Genoese immigration was the country’s economic take-off following the discovery
14
Cf. Doria, “La marina mercantile a vela.”
15 Ugo Marchese, “L’industria armatoriale ligure dal 1816 al 1859,” Archivio economico dell’unificazione
176
and exploitation of its guano mines in the 1840s. The increasing revenues of the guano extraction business and the international guano trade impacted on the society creating economic opportunities for short and long run investments.16
Ligurian ships and Ligurian sailors entered the guano trade, competing with other foreign vessels thanks to their know-how and the relatively low wages of their crews. Finding favorable opportunities many sailors who visited the coast of Peru to take part in this business deserted their vessels to continue their profession in the local merchant marine or finding their luck ashore. The major coastal towns of the country saw the expansion of a tight net of retail shops and small business run by Ligurian and other nationalities’ immigrants.17
As confirmed by many contemporary reports, desertion remained, at least until the 1860s, the main channel of the Italians settlement in Peru. It was considered a serious embarrassment by the Sardinian authorities, and in many cases ships could find themselves without a crew sufficient to return to Europe.18 To address this problem some commanders took the habit of employing a surplus of sailors as potential replacements, or for the same reason, they made ampler concessions to their men, including the right to carry and sell sundries on their own. 19
5.1.2 Composition and activities
The predominantly maritime origins of the Italian immigrants in Peru to many extents determined their professional and social integration in the Peruvian society. Major areas of settlement were the urban districts of Lima and Callao, which by the 1870s concentrated about the 70% of the Italian community in Peru.20 The census of Lima in 1857 recorded 3,142 Italians in the city,21 rising to about 4,000 by the mid-1860s.22 In 1876, the total presence in the Andean country amounted to over 10,000 immigrants,23 6,000 of whom living in the Capital and its hinterland, while the rest was distributed
16 Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana, 45. 17 Ibid.
18
“Non lascerò di ripetere le mie istanze all’E.V. per la trasmissione in questi mari di un legno da guerra, osservandole che senza di ciò, e senza prendere ulteriori misure oltremodo rigorose a riguardo dei marinari che si dirigono alla volta del Pacifico sopra bastimenti dello Stato, ritorneranno sempre questi in patria privi dell'equipaggio con cui partirono.” Baratta to Consiglio dell’Ammiragliato di Genova, Lima, 29 December 1842, ASTO, Archivio della Marina, Consolati nella Spagna, Portogallo e Perù 1840-1854, b.560.
19 Ferro, L’emigrazione nelle Americhe, 1:86; Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana, 36. 20 Ibid., 49.
21 Ibid., 46. 22
Ibid., 48.
23 The 1876 census recorded only 6,990 Italians, but according to Bonfiglio “i dati del censimento, che
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among the main port cities (Callao, Pisco, Paita) and the agrarian departments of Ica (a flourishing wine producing area) and La Libertad (sugarcane). At this date, moreover, 535 Italians resided in Tarapacà, the desert region of the lucrative nitrate deposits at the border with Bolivia and Chile.24
The bulk of the Italian community was employed in the tertiary,25 generally as small shopkeepers, innkeepers, tavern keepers, pulperos (owners of pulperias, generic and multi-purpose retail shops). 26 Other activities included, according to the Consul Canevaro, the liberal professions, the construction and the fishing industries:
Si trovano in questa ricche farmacie di proprietà e sotto l'amministrazione di sudditi italiani, medici, architetti, distinti muratori, e falegnami, e molte trattorie ed alcuni caffè sia in questa che nel Callao appartenenti a nazionali; gli orti e campagne che
attraversano questa capitale sono pure coltivati ai nostri che li prendono in affitto; la
pesca è un ramo ove vi sono addetti molti italiani.27
Opening shops and inn was considered by many a prosecution of the commercial experience and aspirations started as sailors, and honed by the habit of carrying and selling sundries to integrate the salaries of their maritime profession. As many other migrants in similar circumstances, they exploited these small opportunities to support trajectories of economic and social affirmation. Giovanni Bonfiglio, one of the most authoritative historians of the Italian immigration in the Andean country, explains their successes as a function of their superior drive, work ethic and propensity to save, compared to the locals:
La condizione di emigrato suscitava grande determinazione nel lavoro, assiduo e perseverante, e soprattutto una forte propensione al risparmio (in vista dell’immigrazione di ritorno), elementi a quei tempi desueti nella società urbana del Perù, dove predominava la rendita e il consumo di lusso.28
Against this majority of small businessmen, farmers and shopkeepers, the higher profits of the maritime-linked activities and commerce produced a full-fledged economic and managerial elite. Especially in the1840s and 1850s, the Peruvian merchant marine grew exponentially thanks to the acquisition of European sailors, captains and vessels
24
Chiaramonti, “L’emigrazione italiana in America Latina nell’Ottocento: il caso peruviano,” 183.
25 The fact that Italian immigrants at this stage were mostly absorbed by the tertiary sector is a further
confirmation of the failure of the Peruvian governments’ policies of European colonization enacted since the country’s independence.
26 Ibid., 183–184.
27 Canevaro to MAE, 29 October1863, in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima
(1861-1868), b. 881.
28
Giovanni Bonfiglio, “La presenza italiana in Perù, una prospettiva storica”, « http://www.peruanita.org/la-presenza-italiana-in-peru-una-prospettiva-storica-di-giovanni-bonfiglio-lima.html», (accessed 05/14). Also Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana, 55.
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hoisting the Peruvian flag to respect the local legislation on coastal trade. Among them there was a good number of Italians and especially Ligurians.29 In 1842, for instance, of 78 pilots in the port of Callao, 18 were Peruvians, 15 Italians, 13 English and the rest of other nationalities. Bonfiglio further speculates that a significant amount of the ships matriculated in the Callao port registry, which passed from 93 to 141 between 1847 and 1853, was owned and manned by Genoese, a sign of which can be inferred by the traditionally Ligurian custom of accumulating in a single individual the roles of captain and ship-owner (20 ships in 1847, 38 in 1853).30 In a dispatch to the Italian Foreign Ministry, forwarded to the Marine Ministry in 14 December 1863, the Consul in Lima Canevaro listed 42 ships registered with the Peruvian flag in Callao, 35 employed in the coastal trade, 1 dispatched to Guayaquil, 6 to China.31
The presence of Genoese and Ligurians in Peru became increasingly numerous when the progressive crisis of the sail caused the replacement of the traditional Genoese embarkations (brigs, schooners, frigates and barques) with steam-powered vessels in the short-range routes of the Mediterranean Sea. The construction of a coastal railroad along the Ligurian coast in the same years contributed significantly in this process.
By the 1860s and 1870s, then, these inexorable changes revolutionized the traditional family-sized business structure of the Genoese merchant marine, stimulating the concentration of capitals into medium and big navigation companies, while the last sailing entrepreneurs were driven towards the Atlantic and other transoceanic routes, where the sail maintained its competitiveness for a longer time.32
5.1.3 The entrepreneurial elite
For all the above reasons, and a considerable amount of upward social mobility, the Italian settlement in Peru was considered by its contemporaries as one of the most
29 Ibid., 52, 65. It was relatively easy and quick to obtain a patent of captain from the Peruvian authorities,
as shows the example of Giuseppe Garibaldi in his voyage to China on the Peruvian flagged Carmen, owned by the Ligurian Denegri, in 1851 (see Appendix II).
30Ibid., 65–66.
31 “Nota dei bastimenti iscritti sulla matricola dei bastimenti di commercio del circondario marittimo del
Callao, con bandiera peruviana, di sudditi italiani”; enclosed in MAE to MM, 14 December 1863, ACS, MM, DGMM, Miscellanea Uffici Diversi, b.286. the list includes 42 ships, totalling 6,619 ton. of register, of which 6 employed in the Chinese coolie trade, one in the mid-range trade with the port of Guayaquil, 35 in cabotage. The list had been originally sent by the Italian Consul in Peru; Canevaro to MAE, 29 October 1863 in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima (1861-1868), b. 881.
32 Doria, “La marina mercantile a vela.” Vito Dante Flore, “L’armamento italiano sulle rotte dell'Atlantico
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successful and prosperous community of Italians abroad.33 The Consul in Lima Giuseppe Canevaro remarked this in a letter to the Foreign Ministry in 1863, stating that:
la nostra colonia è la prima in ogni impresa, negozio o altro, a preferenza di tutte le altre nazioni estere qui stabilite, e che fra tutti si può contare avere di positivo da quindeci a sedeci milioni di pezzi, forse più che meno.34
In such context, the richest members of the Italian entrepreneurial elite became an example for their compatriots. Many of them had started their climb of the social ladder from the profession of pulpero, had managed to expand their business interests in the cabotage navigation, which ensured larger profits than the urban retail trade, and finally achieved greater wealth diversifying their activities into the transoceanic maritime commerce, financial speculation, or State-subsidized railway investments. The most disputed market in the country, however, was by no doubt the State regulated guano trade.35 In the 1860s, then, some merchants of Italian origin became part of the new “patriotic” entrepreneurial elite that contended with British and French firms the State concessions for the sale of guano abroad. In 1862, the aforementioned Canevaro and his son Giuseppe Francesco took part alongside the Peruvians Julián Zaracondegui, Juan de Ugarte and José Vicente Oyague, in the establishment of the Compañía Nacional de
Consignaciónes del Guano for the British Empire,36 and secured the monopoly for the Dutch market, extended to the Dutch colonial domains—Peruvian guano was sold regularly to the Indonesian plantations.37 In the same year his long-term rival Lazzaro Patrone obtained the license to sell guano to the newborn Italian Kingdom; while Rocco Pratolongo, Pietro Marcone and the Costa brothers, also active in the silver mines of the Cerro de Pasco area,38 partook with several Peruvian capitalists in the set-up of the United States Guano Consignee Company (1868) linked to the first Peruvian bank La
Providencia, founded in 1862.39
33 Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana, 72–73. According to Bonfiglio’s estimates, the per capita
income of the Italians in Perù was 21,345 lire, in contrast with 5,036 lire of the Italians in Argentina, or 3,639 lire in the United States”
34
Canevaro to MAE, 13 September 1863, in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima (1861-1868), b. 881.
35Chiaramonti, “L’emigrazione italiana in America Latina nell’Ottocento: il caso peruviano,” 91..
36 Muecke, Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru: The Rise of the Partido Civil, 25–26. Canevaro
boosted these achievements in some of his dispatches to the Italian Foreign Ministry. Cf. Canevaro to MAE, 12 January 1863, in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima (1861-1868), b. 881
37 As testified by the almost regular advertisements on Dutch Indonesian newspapers; for example:
“Peruviaansche Guano”, Java Bode, 25 April 1863.
38
Baratta to MAE, Lima, 7 June 1844, ASTO, Materie Politiche per Rapporto all'Estero, Consolati Nazionali, Lima 1840-1859.
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Especially after the 1860s, a large portion of the profits accumulated from these successful speculations were reinvested in the agricultural sector, and specifically in the coastal plantation system, where a new class of entrepreneurs, many of whom European immigrants, was supplanting traditional absentee managements.40 Pioneers in this field were Francesco Larco and his sons Andrea, Alberto Antonio and Raffaele Larco, of Santa Margherita Ligure (though with ancestry in Sassari, Sardinia). Members of a powerful family of maritime entrepreneurs, whose economic interests spanned from California to Peru,41 they were involved in the already mentioned Cajanleque revolt in 1866 (which also claimed Antonio Larco’s life). In 1867 they rented the estate "san Ildefonso", in Trujillo, investing in the production of cotton and cochineal, and later sugarcane. In 1872 they also rented the estate Chiquitoy (of 350 fanegadas of extension, approximately 1,000 hectares), in the Department of La Libertad,42 again raising sugarcane with the employ of approximately 325 coolies and an improved machinery park.43
Through these investments the Larco brothers gained increasing social and political influence, becoming full members of the Peruvian landowning oligarchy.44 Between 1872 and 1878, they further expanded their business acquiring the sugar plantations “Tulape”, “Cepeda” and "Mocollope", in the Chicama valley, for more than $700,000, (3,500,000 Italian lire at that time). 45 These estates were later combined into a single entity, the Hacienda “Roma”,46 where the Larcos continued to pour investments in technology and manpower.47 The Roma was reported exploiting the work of approximately 700 indentured Chinese coolies still in 1887.48
5.2 The Italian participation in the coolie traffic: three criterions for a census Among the activities of the Italian economic elite in Peru the business of Chinese
40 Paola Maria Corbella, “La inmigración en el Perù durante la época del guano,” in Presencia Italiana en el
Perù, ed. Bruno Bellone (Lima: Istituto Italiano de Cultura, 1984), 247.
41
Emilio Sequi and Enrico Calcagnoli, La vita italiana nella repúbblica del Perú : storia, statistica,
biografia (Lima: Tip. de La Voce d’Italia, 1911), 153.
42 Bonfiglio, Dizionario storico-biografico degli italiani in Perù, 189–191. 43 Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana, 71.
44
Franzina, Gli italiani al Nuovo Mondo.
45
Sequi and Calcagnoli, La vita italiana nella repúbblica del Perú : storia, statistica, biografia, 156.
46 Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana, 124–128.
47 According to Chiaramonti, the rise of the Peruvian Larcos had been influenced by their business
partnership with the British firm Graham, Rowe and Co. , which allowed them to face the crisis of the Peruvian hacendados during and after the Pacific War (1878.-1885). The affirmation of the Larco family in the agricultural sectors has been interpreted in light of the processes of modernization of the traditionally absentee plantation ownership. It should be reminded, however, the commercial origins of the Larco business empire, and as we will see below, their international network of support. Chiaramonti, “L’emigrazione italiana in America Latina nell’Ottocento: il caso peruviano,” 189.
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migration was certainly one of the most profitable. The steps and characters of this involvement are still in many aspects unclear, and the few historians who have approached the topic have provided conflicting interpretations. A first problem arises from a general lack of available sources, along with the disinterest showed so far by Peruvian historians, the only ones with access to a comprehensive amount of documentation, to investigate many properly “technical” aspects of the coolie traffic. For this reasons we limit here to some working hypothesis, both as regard to the role of the so-called “consignee agencies”, commercial firms established in Lima and Havana and specialized in the importation and distribution of the coolies to their definitive owners, and in regard to the forms of ownership and chartering of the vessels employed in the traffic by Italian entrepreneurs.
Our research relies in particular on the diplomatic correspondence produced by the Italian consulates and embassies in China, Cuba and Peru, preserved in the historical archives of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (ASDMAE) and the archives of the Italian (Merchant) Marine Ministry, conserved in the State Central Archive (ACS) in Rome, and secondarily on their Pre-Unitarian correspondents from the Kingdom of Sardinia’s archives in Turin (ASTO). These valuable sources, however, presents serious limitations. The precious archives of the Italian consulates in China (Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai) were burned down by the Italian authorities at the time of the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.49 The consular section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Italy don't cover the entire period of trafficking, and its documentation terminates abruptly around the years 1868-69, probably as result of the continuous relocations and reorganizations which followed the moving of the State Capital from Turin to Florence and Rome in the years following the Italian unification. Other missing collections are the consequence of a regrettably shortsighted policy of conservation and cataloguing that discarded the economic and consular affairs as historically unimportant.50 Equally interesting sources have been found in the Marine
49
Giuliano Bertuccioli, “Per una storia della sinologia italiana: prime note su alcuni sinologhi e interpreti di cinese,” Mondo Cinese 74 (1991): 9. See also Simona Trafeli, “Italia e italiani in Cina. Progetti di espansione e rappresentazioni culturali nel colonialismo italiano tra XIX e XX secolo” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Università di Pisa, 2012), 194.
50
Claudio Zanier, “I fondi non inventariati delle legazioni e dei consolati degli stati pre-unitari all’archivio storico del ministero degli Affari Esteri: la rappresentanza di Sardegna ad Alessandria d'Egitto (1825-1861),” Oriente Moderno 1, no. 3 (1985): 50. The catalogue still adopted in the archive is the old Ruggero Moscati, Le scritture del Ministero degli Affari Esteri del Regno d’Italia dal 1861 al 1887 (Roma: Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 1953) intended by its author as a provisional and incomplete index of the documentation . This explains the privileged track given to the documents of the serie politica, containing mainly reports of the local political evolution and, in the case of the Italian legation in China, issues
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Ministry, but the collection is still undergoing a process of cataloguing and we were allowed to access, at the present moment, only the documentation produced in the interval 1861-1869. Similar considerations can be extended to the judicial archives of Genoa, Turin and Savona we used to track down the process to the sailors of the coolie ship
Teresa, which we will examine more deeply in Chapter 7.
We were nevertheless able to produce a fairly accurate estimation and census of the Italian ships engaged in the trade (Appendix I), cross-checking the information and figures we extracted from these sources with the existing literature (especially Meagher, Silva and Mendoza),51 Macao and Hong Kong’s archives and newspapers, and other similarly sparse pieces of evidence, including a published registry of the naturalization of foreign-owned ships in the port of Callao (1876), we accessed thanks to the courtesy of Professor Ricardo La Torre Silva, former Director of the Museum “Antonio Raimondi” in Lima.52 Few insight have been extrapolated also from the Canevaro family archive, deposited by the Canevaro family in Florence’s State Archive (ASFI) in the 1960s, although its content reflects mostly the twentieth-century accomplishments of the family.53
concerning the missionaries in China. It is unclear whether the consular reports for the period 1868-1876 have been preserved, and will be made accessible to the researchers in the near future. Giuliano Bertuccioli, for example, examined some of these sources prior to the 1950s reorganization of the archive: Bertuccioli, “Per una storia della sinologia italiana: prime note su alcuni sinologhi e interpreti di cinese.”
51 Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 371–406; Castro de Mendoza, El transporte marítimo en la inmigración
china; Silva, Emigração de cules.
52 Cuadro de los buques mercantes nacionales que navegan con patente expedida por el Supremo Gobierno
(Abril 1858 – Junio 1876), (Lima, 1876).
53 ASFI, Canevaro di Zoagli, b. 174, b. 202, b. 236. The impression we are given is that the participation in
the traffic was something that the traffickers and their descendants were interested in concealing to the Italian public opinion. Aneddotic evidence is provided by the diaries of the late Marquis Salvago Raggi, published in 1968 by Glauco Licata, recounting the author’s meeting with the old Giuseppe Canevaro, a remote relative, in his retirement villa in Florence somewhere in the 1870s. Canevaro rejected the accusations of being a trafficker in coolies, projecting the blame on his business rival Lazzaro Patrone: “Il Canevaro suocero di Giovanni Antonio Migliorati era d’origine ligure; aveva fatto fortuna al Perù, e venne poi a morire in Italia […]Il suo rivale in America e nemico in Liguria, Patrone, diceva che Canevaro aveva fatto il negriero. Questi lanciava la stessa accusa contro il Patrone. I benevoli dicevano che avesse trasportato cinesi. Come è noto, per molti anni durante la prima metà del secolo XIX […] armatori intraprendenti andavano a caricare coolies a Canton e li portavano in America, dove ricevevano un forte premio dai “fazendeieros” a corto di operai. La scarsa scrupolosità degli armatori come quella non maggiore dei “fazendieros” e l’ignoranza di quei coolies producevano grandi guadagni a quelli, molti maltrattamenti a questi ultimi, onde il trasporto dei cinesi veniva considerato assai simile alla tratta dei negri, ma aveva il vantaggio di essere perfettamente legale, mentre la tratta, ormai proibita da molti Stati, riusciva assai rischiosa.” Licata, Notabili della Terza Italia, 224–225. Notice the antipathy of Salvago Raggi, member of a centuries old noble family, for the enriched adventurer Canevaro, who basically bought his title thanks to his shady businesses.
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5.2.1 The Spanish-Peruvian conflict of 1864-1866 and the appearance of the Italian flag in the Pacific
The first and most obvious criterion to identify the nationality of the coolie ships is naturally the flag they displayed. As we have argued before, however, relying too heavily on this single factor can be at times misleading. According to the Sardinian and later Italian maritime law, a certificate of nationality could be delivered either by the port authorities in the Italian peninsula or—in a provisional mode (passavanti provvisorio)— by the Italian consulates abroad. The right to display the flag was subjected to three basic preconditions: two thirds of the ship’s property had to be in the hands of Italian citizens, the ship needed to have an Italian captain and a crew composed for at least two thirds by national elements (art. 40, 1859 code).54 Special circumstances of urgency or simple convenience could allow for a temporary transgression of one or more of these provisions (art. 147 of the consular law of 1866),55 and they were indeed heavily relied upon by the Italian coolie traffickers, who also used to switch flags regularly. Many employed alternately the Italian and the Peruvian flags, thanks to similarly loose regulations issued by the Peruvian governments.56 In fact, with few exceptions, the Italian flag was actually displayed for a relatively short arc of time, spanning from 1864 to 1869.
In the first decade 1849-1859, Italian entrepreneurs played at most a secondary role in the traffic, and their ships appeared on the coasts of China flying the colors of the Andean republic. In all but one the known and confirmed cases—the voyages of the Santiago in 1854 and 1855, and the Carmen in 1857—at this stage the Italian participation in the coolie traffic was due to the efforts of a single merchant, Pietro Denegri of Caselle. In the remaining case, that of the Sardinian ship Giuseppe Rocca, captain Lavagna, which took 300 coolies from Macao in late June 1858,57 we do not have sufficient information to determine its ownership.
The appearance of the Italian flag in the Peruvian foreign trade and, in particular, in the coolie traffic, is linked with a specific event of the Peruvian history: the so-called
54
Art. 40, Codice per la Marina Mercantile del Regno d'Italia, (Milano: F. Pagnoni, 1868).
55 Regio decreto n.2996, Regolamento per l’esecuzione della legge sull’ordinamento del servizio consolare,
7 June 1866.
56
Castro de Mendoza, El transporte marítimo en la inmigración china, 11. To obtain the flag, however, it was necessary the mediation of a local guarantor. As we can see from the documents in the Marine Ministry archives, this was easily circumvented thanks to the second generation immigrants, Peruvian citizens by jus
soli. They were often co-owners of the vessels and shareholders in the family’s business. See below the
case of Consul Canevaro and his sons.
57 BO, 3 July 1858; “mapa dos navios que obtiveram despachos do capitão do porto para sahirem com
184
“Chincha Islands War” of 1864-1866, a conflict that opposed, on one side, the Spanish fleet in the Pacific, and on the other the Republic of Peru, joined in the last stages by Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia.
The victory in the Chincha Islands War was an important event in the history of Peru, because it marked its final showdown with the Spanish colonialism and affirmed the country on the international scene. On the other hand, it had disastrous effects on the State finances which will eventually bring it to bankruptcy and the loss of its southern provinces in the bigger 1879-1883 conflict against Chile. The war originated from a series of unresolved frictions between the Spanish and Peruvian governments (including the settlement of the independence war debts), which escalated in 1863 during the visit of a Spanish naval squadron, headed by Admiral Luis Hernández Pinzon.58
The casus belli for the breakout of hostilities was the murder of a Basque immigrant and the injury of several others in a labor conflict on the Talambo Hacienda, in Lambayeque. The Talambo hacienda, owned by Don Manuel Salcedo, had introduced a number of Basque colonos, contract laborers, in an experimental effort to introduce indentured European immigrants in substitution to Chinese coolies. The incident that followed showed, possibly to its full extent, the failure of the Peruvian plantation system to alter its slavery-oriented culture of labor relations,59 and the peril that underlid the ill-treatment of the subjects of a power capable of protecting them by diplomatic and military means:
Seventy families of Guipuzcoa were hired in Spain by an agent of the wealthy and influential political man, Don Manuel Salcedo, and conveyed to his estate of Talambo, in 1860, with the object of being employed in cultivating cotton. Immediately on their arrival, far from fulfilling the agreement, a new contract was
drawn up, which all of them did not accept; that also was not fulfilled. Señor
58 Gerbi, Il Perù: una storia sociale, 257. 59
In a similar way had failed, years before, the mentioned attempt by Rodolfo to introduce German, Irish and Belgian contract laborers in the Republic; according to Canevaro, “al loro arrivo tutti quelli che furono contrattati per l’agricoltura non poterono resistere ai maltrattamenti dei proprietari delle aziende che abituati a governare schiavi di parità gli trattavano.” Canevaro to MAE, Lima, 10 Augst 1852, ASTO, Materie Politiche per Rapporto all’Estero, Consolati Nazionali, Lima 1840-1859. In the same dispatch, Canevaro added that the Chinese, “razza abietta e brutale,” sold by the traffickers “a $112 come si sol fare coi negri d'Africa” were “al momento li soli che abbiano potuto resistere nelle Aziende, ove i proprietari gli accoppiano co’ schiavi e similmente gli trattano, ma per essere accostumati alla vita più misera fin dal nascer loro si contentano anche del cattivo mantenimento;” on that ground he argued against the possibility to exploit the subsidies of the Ley China to introduce Italian indentured laborers in Peru, because “tale emigrazione non sarà abbracciata dagli italiani che non vogliono legarsi per contratto giacché quelli che qui vengono e che pagano il loro passaggio se sono animati al travaglio profittano molto di più, mentre se agricoltori, essendo liberi, sono ricercati, ben pagati e trattati del tutto diversamente da quelli contrattati che come sopra dissi non vengono distinti dai schiavi.” Clearly, Canevaro did not show the same doubts when he imported thousands of Chinese in the said conditions.
185
Salcedo, not satisfied with the ill-treatment which those peaceful labourers suffered, at last proceeded to deprive them of part of the lands which belonged to them. Of those colonists who, compelled by their circumstances, submitted to the new demands of the contractor, 20 per cent, died, although they were all men of robust constitution. Those Basques, on the 4th of August, eighteen in number being at the house of the proprietor, who had called them in to settle their differences, on a sudden some seventy armed men entered into the court, and rushed upon the undefended Spaniards. One of them, Ormazobal, fell dead, and four others, Miner, Sorazu, Pane, and Arteaga, were wounded, the two former so seriously that they received extreme unction. The house of the dead man was pillaged, and one woman, wife of Eguren and her son, died in a few days. After this butchery was completed, they placed the villains as sentinels to keep close watch over the colonists, continuing to ill-treat them inhumanly.60
The first move of the Spanish squadron after the refusal of the Peruvian authorities to pay reparations for the Talambo events was, as predicted by many observers,61 the immediate occupation of the valuable guano producing Chincha islands, which was completed by the 14 April of 1864. Strong international pressures, however, forced them to honor the existing guano contracts.62 As hostilities continued for about two years, neutral foreign merchants in Peru were brought suddenly in a position of advantage over their Peruvian counterparts, and started to erode their shares in the guano and other profitable international trades. It is in this context that the Italian flag become an asset for the Italian community in the Andean country, as well as to those in Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia. Canevaro, a merchant himself and certainly an experienced one, was the first to understand these implications and to concede permissions to fly the Italian flag to a number of Italo-Peruvian vessels. In fact, he did not even wait for the authorization of the Ministry, which he simply notified ex-post of his actions:
…conoscendo a gravi pregiudizi esposte le proprietà marittime di varii Italiani che facevano il cabotaggio della Costa con bandiera Peruviana, ottenni loro dal Governo loro venisse accordato luogo queste critiche circostanze il permesso di farlo colla bandiera Italica, ciò che loro obbligai, e già mi si presentarono diversi che paventando le conseguenze ostili a cui potevano andare soggetti con navigare colla bandiera di questo Stato mi chiesero il cambiamento della Bandiera che loro accordai mediante le formalità prescritte dalle leggi avendo solo dovuto soprassedere nella scelta dei Capitani e marinai nazionali che non se me trovano che pochissimi nel Callao, ed ho lasciato al comando dei Bastimenti gli stessi Capitani e Marinai, tanto più che spero non continuerà tale circostanza per molto tempo, spronato
60 Memorandum by Señor Mazarredo 14 April 1864, in BPP, Papers relating to the seizure of the Chincha
Islands by a Spanish Squadron, 1864, 28-33.
61 Including the consul Canevaro, concerned about his business interests in the guano trade; Canevaro to
MAE, 12 January 1863, in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima (1861-1868), b. 881
62 Declaration by Admiral Pinzon and Señor Mazarredo, April 14, 1864 in BPP, Papers relating to the
186
dall’interesse delle loro famiglie che si trovano nei Regi Stati, il numero dei quali finora accende a tredici navigli come dell’unita nota.63
Between 30 October 1863 and 23 February 1865 Consul Canevaro and his successor (and son-in-law) Migliorati conceded 42 passavanti, certificates of nationality in Callao.64 Many of these ships were deployed for medium and long range traffics, and at least 10 of them participated in the coolie trade once or repeatedly (Perseverancia, Providencia,
Dolores Ugarte, Carolina, Teresa, Clotilde, Napoleone Canevaro, Lima, Camillo Cavour, Liguria). Another 38 ships were given similar arrangements in Valparaiso when the crisis
affected the Chilean coast in 1866, and a yet unidentified number of formerly Peruvian vessels received certificates and passavanti from the Italian consulate in San Francisco.65
The prolongation of a low intensity but disruptive conflict and the strengthening of the Spanish naval block on the Peruvian ports also favored the acquisition of a number of Peruvian ships by Italian and other foreign merchants, at relatively low prices, including formerly coolie ships. As explained by the temporary consul Pietro Castelli, succeeded to Migliorati in April 1865,66
...il governo nell'intento di avere un imprestito ossia un anticipazione sul guano ha convocato le diverse case consegnatarie ma fu unanime risposta di non potesi dare somma alcuna fino a che pesa sul commercio estero il dubbio di ostilità con la Spagna. Per tema di ciò molti peruviani e spagnuoli proprietari di legni cercano di venderli a sudditi di potenze neutrali. Gli italiani padroni di legni che hanno tuttora la bandiera del Perù vanno via smettendola per prendere quella nazionale.67
At the end of the hostilities, in a dispatch to the Marine Ministry dated 27 October
63 Canevaro to MAE, 13 May 1864, in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima
(1861-1868), b. 881. This was one of the last reports submitted by the Consul Canevaro, who in the same note asked (and then obtained) to be dismissed from his post in order to devote fully to his private affairs. Unfortunately the reports of his successors (the Marquis Migliorati, also Canevaro’s son-in-law, and after 1867, Ippolito Garrou), less knowledgeable of the international maritime trade are much less informative on the state of the Italian business in Peru. It seems the activity of control of the Italian maritime business was mainly assigned to the vice-consul in Callao, whose archives have not been preserved. An exception is the provisional consulate of Pietro Castelli (1866-1867), particularly active in the denunciation of the coolie trade in his correspondence with the Foreign and Marine ministries (see Chapter 6.2).
64 Bastimenti cui fu data bandiera italiana dal R. Consolato d'Italia in Lima dal 30 ottobre 1863 al 23
Febbraio 1865, ACS, MM , DGMM, Miscellanea Uffici Diversi 1866-1869.
65
MAE to MM, Florence, 26 April 1867 in ACS, MM , DGMM, Miscellanea Uffici Diversi 1866-1869; ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in San Francisco, b. 903, Cerruti to MAE, 3 March 1865 informed on the decision to issue certificates of nationality (in the case to the coolie ships Re D’Italia and Rocco Pratolongo) without a strict respect of the maritime code; also ACS, MM, DGMM, Miscellanea Uffici Diversi 1866-1869, b. 287, Cerruti to MM 19, February 1866 on the ships Teresa (owner Sebastiano Bollo) and Uncowah (owner Nicola Larco).
66 Università degli Studi di Lecce, ed., La formazione della diplomazia nazionale (1861-1915). Repertorio
bio-bibliografico dei funzionari del Ministero degli affari Esteri (Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello
Stato, 1987), 160.
67 Castelli to MAE, 9 October 1865, in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima
187
1866, Castelli drew a conclusive account of these developments, estimating in over a hundred the vessels that had taken in different times the Italian flag over the two preceding years:
è cognizione del ministero che in questa estesissima costa americana del Pacifico navigarono da oltre due anni con bandiera nazionale oltre un centinaio di bastimenti di varia portata appartenenti quasi tutti a cittadini oriundi delle provincie della Liguria comandati in generale da Capitani o patroni delle provincie stesse, ma equipaggiati forse appena per la quarta o quinta parte da maringi nazionali, i più liguri e gli altri napoletani, siciliani e romagnoli, e pel rimanente stranieri.68
5.2.2 First criterion: the national flag
Any attempt to classify the Italian contribution in the coolie trade by the flag must start from the accurate list compiled by La Tour for the Bolletino Consolare of 1871, which we attach below. La Tour cited in chronological order, the following 41 voyages of 23 different Italian coolie ships departing from Macao between January 8, 1865 and March 18, 1870 (Tab. 5.1). 69
Tab. 5.1: Italian coolie ships departing from Macao between 1865 and 1871. Source: Sallier de La Tour, “l’emigrazione cinese”
N° Name Departure Number of
coolies embarked
Destination Passavanti
1 Clotilde 8 January 1865
220 Callao Passavanti di Lima 25 August 1864 2 Providenza 3 January
1865
395 Id. Passavanti di Lima 25 April 1864 3 Queen of
England
12 February 1865
584 Havana Passavanti di Macao 9 February 1865 4 Avon 24 January
1865
543 Id. Passavanti di Macao 23 January 1865 5 Colombo 6 March 1865 463 Callao Carte della capitaneria marittima di Genova.
6 Lima 17 March
1865
200 Id. Passavanti di Lima 10 November 1864 7 Napoleone
Canevaro
9 March 1865 641 Id. Passavanti di Lima 7 November 1864 8 Don Giuseppe 11 May 1865 500 Id. Passavanti di Macao 30 March 1865 9 Camillo
Cavour
30 May 1865 632 Id. Passavanti di Lima 18 November 1864 10 R.Pratolongo 22 June 1865 507 Id. Passavanti San Francisco 20 January 1865 11 Liguria 30 July 1865 513 Id. Passavanti di Lima April 1865
12 Dea del mare 8 September 1865
509 Id. Carte della capitaneria marittima di Genova 13 Providenza 16 December
1865
413 Id. Passavanti di Lima 25 April 1864 14 Rosina 13 December
1865
370 Id. Passavanti di Macao 10 November 1865 15 Italia 8 January
1866
486 Havana Passavanti di Macao 15 November 1865 16 Amalia 8 April 1866 241 Callao Passavanti di Lima 16 September 1865 17 Napoleone
Canevaro
7 March 1866 666 Id. Passavanti di Lima 7 November 1864
18 Colombo 18 April 1866 370 Id. Carte del R. Ministero della Marina 18 June 1864,
68
Castelli to MM, Lima 27 October 1866, in ACS, MM, DGMM, Miscellanea Uffici Diversi 1866-1869, b 271.
188
N° 7300 19 Luisa
Canevaro
9 April 1866 700 Id. Passavanti di Lima 19 August 1865 20 Catalina 16 February
1866
193 Id. Passavanti di Macao 13 February 1866 21 Uncowah 7 April 1866 456 Id. Passavanti di San Francisco 7 December 1865 22 R.Pratolongo 20 June 1866 455 Id. Passavanti di San Francisco 20 January 1865 23 Camillo
Cavour
9 May 1866 655 Id. Passavanti di Lima 18 November 1864 24 Teresa 2 June 1866 614 Id. Passavanti di San Francisco 24 January 1866 25 Aurora 13 December
1866
274 C.
d’America
Passavanti di Lima 5 January 1866 26 Asia 8 June 1866 500 Callao Passavanti di Lima 24 November 1865 27 Fray Bentos 16 June 1866 366 Id. Passavanti di Lima 3 November 1865 28 Lima 28 May 1866 148 Id. Passavanti di Lima 10 November 1864 29 America 10 November
1866
622 Id. Passavanti di Hong Kong 12 September 1866 30 Providenza 5 July 1867 362 Id. Passavanti di Lima 24 August 1866 31 R.Pratolongo 9 June 1867 404 Id. Passavanti di San Francisco 20 January 1865 32 Liguria 5 September
1867
Zavorra Id. Passavanti di Lima 5 November 1866 33 Galileo 23 July 1867 413 Saigon Passavanti di San Francisco 2 October 1866 34 Luisa
Canevaro
21 September 1867
663 Id. (sic) Passavanti di Lima 19 August 1865 35 Uncowah 22 October
1867
498 Id. Passavanti di San Francisco 7 December 1866 36 Fray Bentos 12 March
1868
323 Id. Passavanti di Lima 3 November 1866 37 Teresa 1 February
1868
294 Id. Passavanti San Francisco 24 January 1865 38 R.Pratolongo 26 May 1868 468 Id. Passavanti San Francisco 20 January 1865 39 Providenza 22 July 1868 382 Id. Passavanti di Lima 24 August 1866 40 Italia 23 March
1869
520 Havana Passavanti d’Avana 22 July 1868 41 Italia 18 March
1870
520 Id. Carte della capitaneria marittima di Genova, N° 7680. Patente di Firenze N. 11328 – 5 June 1869
The list, although chronologically incomplete, highlights the role of the consulates of Lima and San Francisco in furnishing the provisional passavanti to fly the national colors, which in turn is a safe indicator of the provenience of the capitals invested in them, and of the routes they travelled. Only three ships of the forty-one listed, the
Colombo (1865),70 the Dea Del Mare (1865) and the Italia (1869), had touched on Italian ports before starting their voyages to the China Sea.
If we add to this list the two passages of the steamer Glensannox, owned by the firm Lloyd Italiano di Genova, to Costa Rica and Cuba in 1872 and 1873 (thus after La Tour’s report), the figure arises to a total of 43 voyages and 20,239 coolies shipped under the Italian flag for the whole duration of the traffic.
This makes for a quite significant contribution, all the more so if we point our gaze specifically on the Peruvian strand, in which Italian vessels were much more likely employed than on the Havana course. The following chart shows visually the percentage of presence of the Italian flag in comparison with its main competitors.
70 Cercal to MAE, 12 February 1865, ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Macao
189
Fig. 5.2: National shares of the coolie trade to Peru and Cuba, 1847-1874, by flag.
Fig. 5.3. National shares of the coolie trade to Peru, 1849-1874, by flag.
The flag displayed, however, cannot be taken alone as a reliable proof of nationality. Teresa Lopes da Silva has recently analyzed the simulation of property and nationality of some Portuguese flagged coolie ships in the early 1860s, actually owned by North
Peru; 48186; 19% France; 47241; 19% Spain; 33,768; 13% USA; 21,935; 8% Italy; 20,239; 8% Great Britain; 19,760; 8% El Salvador; 17043; 7% Portugal; 15,265; 6% Netherlands; 9,991; 4% Russia; 6,883; 3% Others; 12,468; 5% Great Britain; 3,957; 4% USA; 4,038; 4% Portugal; 6,588; 6% France; 11,555; 10% Italy; 15,468; 14% El Salvador; 15,412; 14% Peru; 44,662; 40% Others; 8,480; 8%
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American citizens trying to evade the US coolie act of 1862.71 A similar concern was expressed by Castelli’s successor in Lima Ippolito Garrou, while discussing the opportunity of renewing the policy of issuing passavanti to Italo-Peruvian merchants well after the end of the Spanish-Peruvian conflict, in October 1867.72 In 1868 and 1869 a large number of formerly Peruvian or Italian coolie ships (e.g. Camillo Cavour, Fray
Bentos, Luisa Canevaro, Providencia, Uncowah) suddenly hoisted the flag of the
Republic of El Salvador, raising doubts of legality among the contemporary press and diplomatic commentators. A reporter from the San Francisco newspaper “Daily Alta California” openly called it a “shadow flag”:
A correspondent at Macao calls attention to the constant change of flags which is observable in China, especially with coolie ships. Noticing that cases are not unfrequent where the same ship, bona fide property of the same owners, has changed flag three or four times, becoming by turns Peruvian, Austrian, Italian, Russian, and lastly San Salvadorian, he asks why these constant changes take place, and why ships are put under the San Salvadorian flag in particular? He continues: “Few people know where San Salvadoria or Central America is. She possesses no navy to protect her merchant vessels, and no Consuls to shield her interests, yet the San Salvadorian flag is found covering almost every coolie ship from Macao to Peru. The only conclusion that can be arrived at is, that this is the ‘most convenient’ flag for the coolie traffic, as there is no Consul to interfere, no reports to make on ‘accidents’ during the voyage, and no fees to pay.”73
If we want to quantify and cense more accurately the Italian contribution and involvement in the coolie trade, thenceforth, we need to take in consideration other factors, including the different ways and modalities in which that participation could be possible. The criterions we will employ are three: the ownership of the vessel, the ownership of the coolie “cargo” (in other words the involvement of an Italian consignee or consignee agency) and the nationality of the captain.
We will analyze them separately, although they almost always overlap and interlace with each other. Further difficulty surges from the inevitable distortions of names of people and ships on the contemporary sources, as can be observed in the several inconsistencies of Arnold Meagher’s database. We tried to remedy this problem by cross-checking sources of different provenience and language.
71 Silva, “Macau e os cules na política dos EUA ( 1844-1874 ).”
72 “nelle condizioni che contemplo la proprietà dei bastimenti può essere simulata e che l'abbondare in
concessioni implica il rischio di prestar la mano a frodi e consequentemente a complicazioni più gravi.” Garrou to MAE, Lima, 4 October 1867 (copy), forwarded to MM, 3 December 1867, ACS, MM, DGMM, Miscellanea Affari Diversi 1866-1869, b. 271.
191
5.2.3 Second criterion: the consignees
With few exceptions, most of the coolie trade to Peru was brokered by a relatively small number of consignee agents or agencies, acting as intermediaries between the Macao based barracoons and the final buyers in Lima. In the first phase of trafficking (1849-1856) this role seems to have been almost entirely concentrated in the hands of two Peruvian merchants, Juan Domingo Elías and his agent and partner José Sevilla, assisted by W. M. Robinet. Later the business became much more competitive. In a number of cases, for example, ship captains (and captains-owners) took a direct part in the acquisition and sale of the coolie cargoes, and their names figured directly as employers on the contracts signed by the emigrants. By the final and hectic years of the traffic, however, larger specialized import-export firms started to take over this intermediation, relying on a mixture of chartered tramps and directly owned vessels.74
The recruitment process started in China, where specifically dispatched representatives –for example, Bernardo and Filippo Canevaro during the mid and late-1860s75—or independent Macao-based entrepreneurs (agentes and encarregados, as we discussed in Chapter 4) were responsible for bringing a full load of emigrants to the designed ship before departure. After setting sail, the captains or the firms took charge of the emigrants, paying the expenses for their transportation and sustain, until their auctions on Callao or Havana’s marketplaces.76
Italo-Peruvian entrepreneurs managed a number of coolie import firms, all during the second phase of the traffic (1861-1874). According to the data collected by Mendoza from the Callao port registers, in the city there were 27 active consignee companies or ind ividuals dealing with Chinese laborers. Some of them were responsible for a single load of coolies (es. Muro, Grunning, Menacho), a sign they were perhaps normally engaged in different businesses. The bulk of the trade in this period, instead, was the workings of only four firms, accounting together for 102 out of 172 expeditions:
Canevaro y Cía and Figari e Hijos, both run by Ligurian immigrants; the Compañia Maritima del Peru, a consortium of traffickers, and the Peruvian entrepreneur Juan de
Ugarte, later associated with a partner in the Ugarte y Santiago firm. Of some relevance were also the companies Candamo y Cía and García y Cía, owned by powerful Peruvian
74 Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru; Castro de Mendoza, El transporte marítimo en la inmigración china,
12.
75 As shown by the correspondence of Macao’s harbor master in AGM, Núcleo 916, cx. 45, cx. 46, cx. 47. 76 Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru, 77–79.
192
families,77 the Italian Rocco Pratolongo and Julian Zaracondegui, Canevaro’s partner in the profitable guano trade. With less than 7 loads each we could list then the Italian merchants Bianchi, Profumo, Bressani, Dagnino, Molfino and Marcone.
The Canevaro y Cía was founded by Giuseppe Canevaro and his son Giuseppe Francesco in 1863, with the participation of Carlos Delgado, José Sevilla and Manuel Pardo, future leader of the Partido Liberal and president of the country (1872-1876). It was most probably the major Peruvian consignee company of the whole coolie trade period, responsible for the importation of at least 26,116 coolies in 56 distinct voyages, according to the data available.78 The Canevaro family had been active in the traffic since 1861, as owner of the ship Empresa de Lima, formerly owned by Domingo Elías.79
It seems that the Canevaro family’s firms were actually two, the Canevaro y Cía and the Canevaro e Hijos, both involved in the traffic. This issue has given rise to differing interpretations, and it is impossible to give a definitive explanation: it is plausible that they are two separate companies originated at different times but coexisted afterwards.
Between 1863-64 the Canevaro y Cía proceeded to the purchase of three large ships that will form the backbone of its operations in the Chinese immigration business: the
Camillo Cavour, the Napoleone Canevaro and the Perseverancia.80 The Camillo Cavour, 1326 tons of register (t.r.), will complete at least 11 passages in ten years of service, setting the record of the most longevous ship in the trade, at least among those who did not change name and ownership. The Perseverancia (or Perseveranza) 548, t.r., entered Callao with her first load of coolies (271) on 6 April 1864. In a consular dispatch dated May 16 of the same year, the ship appears in the list of vessels switching from the
77
Luis Alberto Sánchez, “‘Los Chineros’ en la Historia Peruana,” Cuadernos Americanos 11, no. 2 (1952): 200–212.
78 Müecke quotes the accounting records of Manuel Pardo, held at the Archivo General de la Nación in
Lima, reporting under the heading “Trade in Chinese Laborers” revenues of 31,079 soles in July 1864, 105,382 soles on 31 August 1866, 69,318 soles in June 1868, 101,951 soles in February 1870, 83,412 pesos to December 1870. Given these were the profits of only Pardo’s share in the Canevaro y Cia., the total revenue of the company would have been considerably higher. Another partner of Canevaro was the notorious coolie agent José Sevilla, pioneer of the coolie trade in the 1850s.partaking with a starting quota of 64,864 pesos/soles in the constitution of the Canevaro y Cia. In 1864 Muecke, Political Culture in
Nineteenth-Century Peru: The Rise of the Partido Civil, 33; Alfonso W. Quiroz, Corrupt Circles: A History of Unbound Graft in Peru (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 148.
79 Canevaro to MAE, 28 February 1864, in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima
(1861-1868), b. 881. In this report Canevaro announced the death of Captain Stefano Garavagno, on board the ship Camilo Cavour during his return voyage to Peru with a shipment of coolies. Canevaro mentioned three other voyages made in China by the said Garavagno on the ship Empresa, acquired by his firm from Domingo Elías, another signal, along with the role of José Sevilla, of a general continuity between the first and the second phase of the coolie trade in Peru.
80 Canevaro to MAE, 16 May 1864, ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima (1861-1868),
193
Peruvian to the Italian flag, after being acquired by the Ligurian merchant Francesco Larco.81 The third vessel, the American-built clipper Napoleone Canevaro, 1375 t.r., was intended to be the jewel of the Canevaro y Cía fleet, “il più bel bastimento del Pacifico”, as reports the Ligurian naval historian Gio Bono Ferrari.82 Its original name was the
White Falcon, a clipper manufactured at Pittston, Massachussets, in 1853, and deployed
mainly in the trade between China and the West coast of the United States. Stranded on a reef at Fuzhou in 1862, it was repaired in Hong Kong and sent to Manila, where it was sold for $28,000 to the Canevaro y Cía’s San Francisco branch lead by Giuseppe Francesco Canevaro, son of the consul Giuseppe, and renamed in honor of his other son Napoleone, future Italian Navy Admiral and Foreign minister.83
This ship had its infamous moment of notoriety when, during its second voyage in March 1866, burned down and sank in the Philippine Sea with its load of 662 (or 663)84 coolies and 9 crew members as a result of a coolie revolt. At the time, that set the record of the second highest case of mortality in a single coolie voyage, right below the infamous Flora Temple’s disaster in 1858.
We have a number of different and slightly divergent accounts of this incident, but were ultimately unable to track down yet the official reports produced by the Italian consular authorities in Peru and Macao, which are missing from their natural archival location. The events occurred on the 4 and 5 March, a few days of navigation off the Chinese coast. It seems that some of the coolies onboard had taken measures to poison
81 Elenco dei Bastimenti esteri divenuti proprietà di R.R. Sudditi e coperti di bandiera italiana nel Perù, dal
19 Aprile a tutto il 13 Settembre 1864, ACS, MM, DGMM, Miscellanea Uffici Diversi, 1866-1869, b. 286.
82 Ferrari, Capitani di mare e bastimenti, 576.
83 “Ho altresì l’onore d’informare l’E.V. che un nuovo Clipper chiamato Napoleone Canevaro della portata
di tonnellate 1375 di Registro è stato comprato per conto della mia Casa in San Francesco di California, e che già deve trovarsi nella China, lo stesso è comandato dal Cap. Demoro Italiano, onde condurre Coloni nel Callao.” Canevaro to MAE, 28 February 1864, in ASDMAE, Corrispondenza in arrivo, Consolato in Lima (1861-1868), b. 881. The ship was re-sold for $30,000 from Giuseppe Francesco Canevaro to his father Giuseppe on 24 October 1864, namely to facilitate the switch to the Italian flag: Bastimenti a cui fu data bandiera italiana dal R. Consolato d'Italia in Lima dal 30 ottobre 1863 al 23 Febbraio 1865, ACS, MM, DGMM, Miscellanea Uffici Diversi 1866-1869, b. 286.
84 A less reliable account by Father Rondina increases this number to 745; he also claims, maybe more
convincingly, that in their numbers there were “cinquanta fanciulle e giovanette dai 12 ai 15 anni di età [...] imbarcate di soppiatto e a dispetto del regoiamento dell'emigrazione”, and that five coolies survived the wreck by safely reaching Hong Kong’s shores. Rondina, “Flora, fauna, avventure: Appunti di un viaggio nell’India e nella Cina,” chap. CXXIII. According to La Tour, violation of the regulations were common “Non solo si usa talvolta dai corretores il condurre le reclute su grandi giunche, a favore del Monsone di Levante, fin verso Singapore e colà operare l’imbarco su navi già pronte a partire per 1’America; ma nelli stessi legni partiti da Macao non e raro che s‘imbarchino nuovi emigranti, per guisa che apparvero talvolta più numerosi gli arrivati clic i partiti, che anzi avviene spesso che anche prima della partenza si riesca ad imbarcarne di nuovi, appena tornato a terra il capitano del Porto che era venuto per la verificazione del numero e identità degli arruolati, in quanto che la visita di quel funzionario non procede immediatamente l’istante del levar dell’ancora, ma si fa generalmente nel corso della giornata, mentre la partenza avverrà all’alba dell’indomani.” Sallier de La Tour, “L’emigrazione cinese,” 55.
