People database
People from the Italian peninsula involved in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, 15th–19th centuries. Search by name or filter by role, place, network and period.
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Baldase Bernardo
c. 1791–1810A merchant of Italian origin resident in Havana. With his brother Vicente Baldase, a merchant resident in Cádiz, he was joint owner of the sugar ingenio «La Santísima Trinidad», purchased in May 1795 from Juan de Sequeira. Between 1796 and 1797 the firm went bankrupt, and from the quiebra arose a long legal dispute between the Consulado of Havana and that of Cádiz over the settlement of the debts. The precautionary seizure of the plantation led to the drawing up of the inventory of assets and the detailed list of the enslaved people who worked there, including the family groups of Aldonza de Luca and Nicolasa Luca.
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Cavaleri Pietro Mattia
1668–1674Agent of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento in the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo. He had previously operated in Madrid as a private lender and as a merchant through a company based in Genoa, together with his partner Bartolomeo Capa. He began working for Grillo in 1664, if not earlier, supervising the delivery of almost 125,000 pesos from Cartagena to Italy, part of a loan that Grillo had granted to the Crown.
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Cibo Carlo
1820–1860A Genoese, grocer in Regla, near Havana. His shop was a point of reference for the slave traders arriving on the island. He hosted in Cuba the slave trader of Franco-Italian origin Theodore Canot. He was also co-owner of the ship Areostatico, employed in the illegal slave trade, which in 1826 transported 108 enslaved people to Havana.
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Enrile Geronimo
1769–1782Born in Cádiz in 1730, son of José María, in 1769 he made his first voyage to Havana and Puerto Rico to look after the interests of the Compañía Gaditana de Negros, and in 1773 he returned to Cuba as director of the company. In 1776 he was again in Havana to oversee his father's investment in a London company that imported enslaved people. In 1778, still in Cuba, he obtained the title of Marquis of Casa Enrile. In 1782, during the American War of Independence, in which Spain was allied with France against England, he obtained a special permit to import enslaved people into Cuba on neutral ships.
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Pluma Pasquale
1829–1840Consul general of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Cuba, he was accused of having validated the papers of several slave ships. In 1836 he was involved in the murky affair of the Cavallo Marino, a Sardinian brigantine already reported by the British at Bahia for having illegally introduced a large consignment of dried meat intended for the enslaved people of the Brazilian plantations. The Cavallo Marino had arrived in Havana on 1 February 1836 and from there had set out again for the African coasts, from which she returned in January of the following year, but under the Portuguese flag. In 1840, after the Grand Duchy had signed the Anglo-French treaties for the suppression of the slave trade in 1837, the British authorities accused him of having falsified the ship's papers of two vessels engaged in the slave trade: the Bella Fiorentina, a Tuscan schooner seized on 20 May 1839 off present-day Liberia, and the Victoria de Libertade, a Portuguese schooner captured on 26 June 1839 off Sierra Leone. To these two ships, owned by two Spaniards, he had issued false papers of other states. He was dismissed in 1840.
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Secchi Jean
1878–1879Between 1878 and 1879 Secchi and his associates, Pantin, Lecavallerie, Texidor, Larrabide and Jimenez, transported to Cuba groups of seven to forty people at a time, of Indian, Chinese and Venezuelan origin, as indentured servants.
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Siccoli Pietro
1839Captain of the Bela Fiorentina (La Bella Fiorentina), a ship built in Genoa that sailed under the Portuguese or Brazilian flag. Having set out from Havana, she was captured by the British in 1839 near the coast of Sierra Leone.