Royal report records an enslaved man’s escape from captors

A debt or annuity instrument issued in El Tocuyo listed Baltasar, aged fourteen, and Luis, aged forty, as enslaved Black men among the security for an obligation benefiting the local hospital. Their...

An El Tocuyo dowry inventory for the marriage of Captain Antonio Ruiz Valero and María Ribero de Lozada included Juan, a sixteen-year-old Black boy, and Jacinta, a ten-year-old mulatta girl, both...

Caracas councilors proposed closing pulperías after the nine o’clock bell, citing enslaved and Indigenous service workers who brought produce to trade at night. The account also says shopkeepers...

An incomplete file titled “Liberation of an enslaved woman” names María, a mulatta child about three years old, and identifies her mother Francisca as mulatta. The surviving description does not...

Francisco de Suñiga, identified as a free moreno, accompanied the capture of Spanish smugglers in Choroní. The case concerned contraband that included dealings in enslaved Africans and foreigners. His...

A royal cédula established the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas and granted it privileged trade between Spain and Venezuela. The company later helped organize the colonial export economy,...

While seeking to capture the maroon leader Andresote, governor Sebastián García de la Torre issued a proclamation declaring him a traitor and offering 600 pesos and pardon to whoever killed him. The...

Caviedes, a pardo man enslaved by Joseph de Caviedes, said he saved half his assessed value through wages earned in rest time; his father supplied the other half. His master demanded 500 pesos. The...

Thousands of cultivators and residents, many described by the Venezuelan chronology as being of African origin, entered Caracas with Juan Francisco de León and reached Chacao. They demanded the end of...

Juan Francisco de León and a large crowd reached Caracas’s Plaza Mayor and asked the city council to judge whether the Guipuzcoan Company had benefited or harmed the royal treasury. Their demands...