Three Veracruzanas come home in the captain’s cabin of a slave ship

The San Antonio made port at Veracruz on 24 May 1687 with 580 enslaved Africans in its hold. Margarita de Robles, Paula Matias and Maria de Pares came ashore quietly from the captain’s cabin. They had been taken in the raid of 1683, held at Petit-Goave, and had worked their way back through Baracoa in eastern Cuba and Havana. On the last leg they travelled as free women and Spanish subjects, seasick and dependent on other passengers for food, but with their status unquestioned. The people below them were about to be branded, quarantined and measured. Matias later gave her age as twenty two and called herself a free mulata. She said the pirate Lorenco had taken her prisoner with other women and carried her to Petit-Goave, where she remained. She named no one who claimed to own her, no husband and no companion, and said nothing of how she had survived four years among the French.