f Curacao near the Venezuelan coast and made it a basis for smuggling
slaves into the Spanish dominions. And now the English, the French and the
Danes began to give systematic attention to the African and West Indian
opportunities, whether in the form of buccaneering, slave trading or
colonization.

The revolt of Portugal in 1640 brought a turning point. For a
quarter-century thereafter the Spanish government, regarding the Portuguese
as rebels, suspended all trade relations with them, the asiento included.
But the trade alternatives remaining were all distasteful to Spain. The
English were heretics; the Dutch were both heretics and rebels; the French
and the Danes were too weak at sea to handle the great slave trading
contract with security; and Spain had no means of her own for large scale
commerce. The upshot was that the carriage of slaves to the Spanish
colonies was wholly interdicted during the two middle decades of the
century. But this gave the smugglers their highest opportunity. The Spanish
colonial police collapsed under the pressure of the public demand for
slaves, and illicit trading became so general and open as to be pseudo
legitimate. Such a boom came as was never felt before under Protestant
flags in tropical waters. The French, in spite of great exertions, were
not yet able to rival the Dutch and English. These in fact had such an
ascendency that when in 1663 Spain revived the asiento by a contract with
two Genoese, the contractors must needs procure their slaves by arrangement
with Dutch and English who delivered them at Curacao and Jamaica. Soon
after this contract expired the asiento itself was converted from an item
of Spanish internal policy into a shuttlecock of international politics. It
became in fact the badge of maritime supremacy, possessed now by the Dutch,
now by the French in the greatest years of Louis XIV, and finally by the
English as a trophy in the treaty of Utrecht.

By this time, however, the Spanish dominions were losing their primacy
as slave markets. Jamaica, Barbados and other Windward Islands under the
English; Hayti, Martinique and Guadeloupe under the French, and Guiana
under the Dutch were all more or less thriving as plantation colonies,
while Brazil, Virginia, Maryland and the newly founded Carolina were
beginning to demonstrate that slave labor had an effective calling without
as well as within the Caribbean latitudes. The closing decades of the
seventeenth century were