An important facet of the laws of slavery and freedom in the Spanish empire was that liberty granted a free person the right to own and accrue capital at their own discretion. Documenting one’s actions as an economic actor therefore served as an important marker of freedom within a local community. Akin to Black horros’ understanding of how freedom papers (cartas de alhorría) could protect their freedom, liberated and freeborn people understood that generating paperwork to record commercial transactions could protect and assure their liberty in the Spanish empire. For example, contracting the services of public notaries to document commercial transactions with other parties not only formalized agreements and protected economic interests, but also served to publicly display the exercising of the rights and privileges of freedom. Participating in such acts also ensured that those present could later be called on to testify about how they had witnessed a person use their liberty. As explored in Chapter 1, witnesses who testified about the liberty of free and liberated Black people in late sixteenth-century Sevilla often used phrases such as “because of the great trades/dealings that he had with her” to explain how they knew that a person was free. In addition, documentation of notarial escrituras in which a free person was recognized as someone who possessed liberty by their community might prevent a slave trader or enslaver from attempting to steal the free person’s liberty and subjecting them to an illegitimate enslavement. Records of commercial transactions and property ownership therefore reveal the lives and ideas about freedom of people who may never have pressed for justice or grace in royal courts, but who practiced freedom by eking out a living in early modern economies.

This chapter explores how free Black women often documented their capital as a way of practicing and protecting their freedom. The analysis emerges in conversation with scholarship that has traced how free and liberated Black women in the principal towns of the Carrera de Indias in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (namely Sevilla, Cartagena de Indias, Nombre de Dios, Portobelo, Veracruz, and Havana) and in towns along the Caminos Reales (such as Jalapa and Puebla de los Ángeles in New Spain) and in the viceregal capitals (such as Lima and Mexico City) sometimes accumulated significant capital and invested resources to document their capital.Footnote ¹ In particular, historian Terrazas Williams has traced how Afro-descended women of means in seventeenth-century Jalapa documented their capital and commercial transactions before public notaries in order to generate a trail of documents that assured their capital.Footnote ² These pages study the life of Ana Gómez (see Chapter 2), a free Black woman who accumulated significant capital over the course of her lifetime and who documented her economic ties in order to practice and protect her freedom. The records relating to her life offer unique details about a free Black woman who occupied a position as a wealthy trader in late sixteenth-century Nombre de Dios. Gómez carefully documented her various economic ties across the Atlantic through paperwork, and astutely measured her trust and social capital with associates when determining whether to record a commercial transaction in writing or whether to rely on verbal agreements, which she usually only excercised for her credit lines to Black residents of Nombre de Dios and close trading associates. The records of her life reveal how free Black women invested significant resources to document their capital in order to assure and protect freedom.

Ana Gómez: A Life Between Atlantic Sites

Ana Gómez was born sometime in the 1530s in a condado of the Duke of Medina Sidonia called Niebla, a small port town on the southwest Atlantic coast of Castilla along the Rio Tinto, east of the city of Huelva.Footnote ³ In the various documents and testimonies about Gómez’s life, she was described interchangeably as negra or morena, but never as a mulata. In her place of birth in Niebla, most dwellers in the mid sixteenth century were descended from enslaved Black West Africans as a result of local merchants’ illicit slave-trading activities in Guinea in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.Footnote ⁴ In her early adulthood, Gómez moved from Niebla to Sevilla. In that city, she married Juan Pérez – but was subsequently widowed. This status likely gave her the independence to manage her own economic affairs. While residing in Sevilla, Gómez traded in clothing and precious stones. She also purchased four pairs of houses located in central neighborhoods: two houses in the San Gil parish on Calle Parras; two plots with four houses in the Magdalena parish; and two houses in the San Salvador parish on the corner of Calle Torneros (known today as Calle Álvarez Quintero) and the historic carpentry workshops (see Figure C.1.1, C1–3).Footnote ⁵ Gómez later estimated that she earned 1,500 ducados of annual income in rent from these properties.Footnote ⁶

In the late 1570s, Gómez prepared to depart to the Spanish Americas. She sought a loan of 600 ducats from a well-known converso merchant of Sevilla named Juan de la Barrera to fund her journey to the Panama region in 1579.Footnote ⁷ She also conversed with a wealthy Sevilla noblewoman named Doña Mencia de Zuñiga about her plans to sail to the Caribbean, as Gómez traveled to the Indies with merchandise to sell on Zuñiga’s behalf.Footnote ⁸ Gómez likely petitioned for a passenger license at the Council of the Indies and latterly for an embarkation license at the House of Trade in Sevilla, although I have not located either of these documents. There is also a possibility that in 1577 she traveled as a wage-earning servant with Juan Gutiérrez de la Sal, as a passenger list record matches her name, region of birth, and date of travel. It states “Ana Gómez, Black, horra, natural of Huelva, daughter of Amador de Cáceres and Francisca García, to Tierra Firme as the servant of Juan Gutiérrez de la Sal. – October 15.”Footnote ⁹ Juan Gutiérrez de la Sal was traveling to the Panama region with his wife Elvira and their young child as he had been appointed to a minor administrative post in the area.Footnote ¹⁰ Although Gómez had the means to pay for her own journey – as well as owning her houses, she was able to raise a substantial loan from a local merchant for the passage, and also took Zuñiga’s merchandise – she may have embarked on the journey as a wage-earning servant to avoid having to petition for a passenger license at the Council of the Indies. In other words, she may have tapped into the emerging market in Sevilla for wage-earning servants and employers, who were able to travel on the passenger license of someone who had been granted a royal decree and permission to take a servant.Footnote ¹¹ Gómez’s assertion in her 1585 will that she owed a converso merchant in Sevilla money that she had borrowed to cross the ocean casts some doubt on whether she was the same person who traveled as a servant, or perhaps this suggests that she borrowed money for the journey but then found a passenger who charged her a fee in return for her claiming the position as servant in his retinue.

Gómez likely arrived in Nombre de Dios in the late autumn of 1579 on a ship in the fleet of Tierra Firme that would have departed from Sevilla in August of that same year. Late sixteenth-century Nombre de Dios was a town at the crossroads for trade and travel in the Spanish Atlantic. It served as the port at which ships involved in the most lucrative trade in the Spanish empire of the late sixteenth century were loaded: the silver violently extracted with forced Indigenous and Black labor from the mines in the mountainous peaks of the silver-boomtown of Potosí (in present-day Bolivia) that was transported to Castilla.Footnote ¹² Testimonies in this period point to passengers sailing on small fragatas from other ports, such as Cartagena, to join the large fleet that set sail from Nombre de Dios.Footnote ¹³ After 1596, the fleet for Tierra Firme anchored at Portobelo instead of Nombre de Dios.Footnote ¹⁴ These two towns were bustling ports where merchants and colonial officials loaded silver transported overland from Potosí onto fleets destined for Castilla, and offloaded cargo brought from Castilla and West Africa and West-Central Africa that was destined for Peru, including enslaved Africans.Footnote ¹⁵ Treacherous navigation through mountainous regions and across inland rivers caused Spanish colonial officials to rely on Black and Indigenous people’s labor and knowledge of the terrain to ensure the safe transportation of precious cargos.

Despite the sizeable population of passersby and its importance as a principal port in the Carrera de Indias, Nombre de Dios had a small permanent population. A report about port fortifications, penned by the principal engineer for the Spanish crown named Bautista Antonelli in the mid 1580s, described Nombre de Dios as a small town of thirty vecinos, a large proportion of whom were foreigners. By 1596, the oidor (senior judge) of the Real Audiencia of Panamá estimated that Nombre de Dios had a population of over 600 men and many free Black and Indigenous people who resided in the town.

The history of the Panama isthmus in the sixteenth century was marked by the Spanish crown’s lengthy wars against communities of fugitive enslaved Black people who had escaped their owners and established palenques in the hinterlands of the key port towns; the most notable of these were the Bayano Wars (1549–1556 and 1579–1582).Footnote ¹⁶ Black fugitives wielded significant power in the mountainous and inland river regions through which the trade routes passed, regularly disrupting caravels and looting precious cargo. With intimate knowledge of the interior of the Panama region and often at war with the Spanish empire in the late sixteenth century, Black palenques allied with foreign invaders in the 1570s and played a significant role in determining the political and interimperial landscape of the late sixteenth-century Caribbean, most famously aiding English privateer Francis Drake during his sacking of the isthmus in 1572–1573 by providing expert knowledge of interior routes and how to navigate the tough terrain.Footnote ¹⁷ After decades of wars, and because of the threat of their alliances with foreign enemies, Spanish officials in the Panama region eventually negotiated peace with specific Black communities in the late 1570s and 1580s. The crown negotiated for some palenques to form politically autonomous Black towns in strategic locations in return for their residents’ loyalty to the Spanish crown and their undertaking to offer military protection of the isthmus from foreign incursions. One such town was Santiago del Principe, located about a league away from Nombre de Dios. In the early 1580s, the governors of Nombre de Dios attempted to establish greater political control over Santiago del Principe, while the Black soldiers wished to govern themselves, and other enslaved Black Africans such as Antón Zape petitioned the crown for freedom and land because of their loyalty to the crown during the wars and subsequent negotiations to establish the Black town.Footnote ¹⁸

Ana Gómez arrived in Nombre de Dios five years after Francis Drake’s first devastating raid on the town in 1572. She joined a small Black community of permanent residents who had ties and memories that stretched across the Atlantic world. At least two other free Black women who resided in the town were also from Castilla. One was Francisca de Soria, from Ciudad Rodrigo in Castilla, who had settled in Nombre de Dios in 1566 and profited from the town’s position as a busy port by developing a cooking business that served passing travelers.Footnote ¹⁹ This enabled Soria to accumulate some capital, and she and her husband purchased a house in Nombre de Dios. The couple saved enough to be able to cross the Atlantic as independent passengers with their two children for unspecified business matters in Sevilla in the late 1570s, and they subsequently returned to Nombre de Dios in 1577, around the same time that Gómez arrived in the port town. Witness testimonies in Sevilla reveal significant elements about Soria’s reputation in Nombre de Dios as a free Black vecina. The couple gathered four witnesses in Sevilla to support their petition for a passenger license to return to Nombre de Dios.Footnote ²⁰ Two witnesses hailed from Ciudad Rodrigo and remembered Soria’s birth and early years in her native city. They testified to having known her since she was a child and also to seeing her depart to the Indies some years earlier. Ship pilots who labored on fleets that crisscrossed the Atlantic also testified to knowing both husband and wife from the times that they had passed through Nombre de Dios, agreeing that she “resided in the city of Nombre de Dios with her house and worked/traded (trató) providing food to the passengers and soldiers.”Footnote ²¹ Francisco Sánchez, a vecino of Ciudad Rodrigo, commented on Soria’s reputation in Nombre de Dios as a free woman, noting that he had heard about her life there from numerous people who had come from the port to Sevilla, agreeing that she “always lived peacefully and as a peaceful women [and] all loved her well (todos la querían bien).”Footnote ²² While living in Nombre de Dios, Gómez might also have interacted with the previously mentioned wealthy free Black woman named Sebastiana de la Sal (see Chapter 2), who had accumulated sufficient capital to send letters and funds to her mulata daughter in Sevilla, offering to pay for her to cross the Atlantic to Nombre de Dios, and who was well known to merchants based in Sevilla who passed through that town.Footnote ²³ These three Black women – Francisca de Soria, Ana Gómez, and Sebastiana de la Sal – lived as propertied vecinas in late sixteenth-century Nombre de Dios, despite previous attempts by town-officials to bar free Black men and women from residing there, which largely seems to have been ignored by the crown.Footnote ²⁴

Gómez may also have known Black women who resided in the nearby towns of Portobelo and Panamá (the port town facing the Pacific, where the seat of royal governance for the region was located). Various free property-owning Black women from her generation who resided in these towns specialized as wage-earning servants in Atlantic crossings, and regularly traveled between Panamá, Portobelo, Nombre de Dios, and Sevilla.Footnote ²⁵ Gómez may also have become acquainted in the latter part of her life with Lucía Tenorio Palma (see Chapter 2), who perished in Portobelo in 1615. Tenorio had been previously enslaved in Sevilla and later settled in Portobelo, where she accumulated some wealth and married an enslaved Black man named Cristóbal de la Palma, to whom she lent 500 pesos so that he could liberate himself from slavery. She also traded in jewels and purchased at least six Black slaves and the houses where they lived in Portobelo, as well as a buhio (wooden hut).Footnote ²⁶ After Tenorio Palma perished, an auction of her property in 1615 fetched 2,168 pesos and 6 reales.Footnote ²⁷

Documenting Economic Ties: Paperwork and Informal Agreements

Ana Gómez’s two-decade residency between 1579 and 1596 in Nombre de Dios coincided with the apex of the town’s position as the principal Atlantic port for the region. While there, Gómez continued to trade in precious stones, jewels, and clothes. By the mid 1590s – when an inventory of her property was made – she owned at least eight slaves; her other property included bars of gold, gemstones, jewelry, trunks of clothes, and some houses in Nombre de Dios.Footnote ²⁸

Gómez also continued to foster her commercial ties in Sevilla while living across the Atlantic. In the first six years that she resided in Nombre de Dios, Gómez sent Juan de la Barrera a pair of emeralds for him to sell in Sevilla because she could not sell them for more than 100 ducados in Nombre de Dios, which she explained, was well below their value.Footnote ²⁹ She sent Barrera the jewels via a factor named Miguel Ramírez, who presumably ensured the delivery of such precious cargo by hand. Another time, Gómez sent Barrera money to pay a debt. In Sevilla, Barrera also acted as Gómez’s factor during her absence from the city, for example, receiving payment of 20 ducados from one of her Sevilla-based debtors.Footnote ³⁰ Further, Barrera also repaired one of Gómez’s properties in Sevilla in repayment of a debt that he owed Gómez.Footnote ³¹ Gómez’s ties in Sevilla were strong enough that even though she spent twenty years living in Nombre de Dios, she continued to own four pairs of houses in the Castilian city and earned an income through rents collected by Sevilla-based factors; she had appointed two residents of Sevilla to look after her properties during her absence.Footnote ³² In Nombre de Dios, Gómez thus maintained ties with her former commercial associates, friends, and family in Sevilla and nearby Huelva.Footnote ³³

Gómez was aware of the importance of paperwork to track her various commercial agreements, and she generated credit notes throughout her life, while also keeping copies of letters and the outcomes of any litigation. An inventory of her possessions in 1596 listed at least thirty-seven separate documents that registered her most important trading credits and debits, at least five letters that different associates in nearby trading entrepôts and Sevilla had sent to her, a draft account book that Gómez had “written in her own hand” listing her credits and debts, and copies of a legal dispute between Gómez and the mayordomo of the church in Nombre de Dios.Footnote ³⁴ Among her papers were also three wills, which included a final will dated from 1585, a memoria dated from January 1596 in Portobelo, and a third codicilio that she wrote in February 1596 in Nombre de Dios. The 1585 will and testament had been signed before a public notary in Nombre de Dios and was “closed and sealed” with threads and seals; it contained folios of the will in one handwriting and “many annotations in different handwritings” in the margins of each folio.Footnote ³⁵ Each of these three documents was signed by Gómez, showing that she was able to read and write. She kept these papers in a box under lock and key.

In addition to the trading activities documented across the paperwork, Gómez also maintained trading and credit relationships based on trust that she did not usually record in writing. Alonso López, who claimed to be Gómez’s nephew, explained that “against some [debtors] she [Gómez] has vales and written agreements, against others she has no collection/security at all.”Footnote ³⁶ An example of her decisions to extend credit and agreements to some people without any paperwork is recorded in the details of her financial relationships with other free Black people in Nombre de Dios. For instance, after Gómez’s death, a morena libre named Leonor de Méndez requested that her estate return Méndez’s horse, while a free Black woman named Isabel Suárez claimed that Gómez had promised to leave 50 pesos to her daughter, Dominga.Footnote ³⁷ Neither of these agreements is noted in Gómez’s copious paperwork.

In Nombre de Dios, Gómez also developed kinship ties with two men and extended informal credit agreements to both. A mulato named Pedro López resided with her in Nombre de Dios, served as her close confidante, and later claimed to be her nephew. In her will dated in 1596, Gómez explained that “I order for Pedro López of mulato color to be paid 20 pesos,” while in a later document she noted, “I declare that I owe Pedro López of mulato color 40 patacones of the 50 that he lent me and I order that these be paid from my estate.”Footnote ³⁸ The other man was the aforementioned Alonso López, who may perhaps have been the same person as Pedro López as he also claimed to be Gómez’s nephew, although the scribe interviewing him did not describe him as a mulato and used a different first name. In an interview after Gómez’s death, Alonso López described how he would stay at Gómez’s houses in Nombre de Dios when he passed through the town.Footnote ³⁹ He also detailed how he knew that Gómez’s trading activities stretched across the Atlantic and were recorded in her trade accounts, but that she also had various trading ties that she did not record as these were based on trust. Alonso cited an example of this. He described how Gómez often received merchandise brought by a ship captain from Sevilla, and that she sometimes received such merchandise on credit (“entiende este testigo que le traen a la dicha Ana Gómez algunas mercaderías en confianza”).Footnote ⁴⁰ She had written to him when he was in Cartagena, asking him to collect this merchandise from the ship captain and take it from Cartagena to Nombre de Dios.Footnote ⁴¹

Gómez therefore had a clear understanding of the importance of paperwork to assure and practice her freedom in the Spanish empire. However, like many traders, she also operated on trust among those whom she knew well. In particular, she extended credit agreements to Black dwellers of Nombre de Dios and charged two men who served as her confidants (and were possibly her nephews) with responsibility for some of her affairs, without documenting such agreements in formal paperwork.

Bi-local Catholic Geographies; Atlantic Endowments

Ana Gómez’s three wills composed between 1585 and 1596 reflected her transatlantic life and ties, and the significant trading and religious relationships that she maintained in Sevilla during her two-decade absence.Footnote ⁴² During the twenty years that she lived in Nombre de Dios, she saw herself living between two cities on either side of the Atlantic.Footnote ⁴³ For example, writing from Nombre de Dios in 1585 – six years after leaving Castilla – Gómez made provisions in her testament for her burial service whether she happened to die in Nombre de Dios or in Sevilla, noting “And if I died in Spain in Sevilla they should bury me in the Magdalena Church of Sevilla.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In Sevilla, Gómez had developed a long-lasting relationship with the Magdalena Church, so much so that four of her properties were located within the parish: one on the San Pablo street near the city door to Triana, another two bordered the physical walls of the Magdalena monastery, and another stood in close proximity on the same street (Figure C.1.1, C1–3). While living in Nombre de Dios, she continued to maintain contact with the Magdalena Church. An inventory of her papers in 1596 included a copy of a letter that she had written and sent “to Castilla to Antonio López, Clerigo.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Further, in her 1585 will, she specified that if she perished in Spain, she should be buried in the Magdalena Church in “the tomb (sepultura) that there was given to me” and that she be buried dressed in the “habit of San Francisco” in the presence of twelve children.Footnote ⁴⁶ She also specified that she wished her executors to dress twelve poor people with shirts and shoes and linen doublets or bodices (jubon), and that they sing a mass on the day of San Andrés in the church where she would be buried.Footnote ⁴⁷ Gómez also arranged to establish a perpetual capellanía in the Magdalena Church to hold masses on her behalf and pray for the salvation of her soul – a costly enterprise for which she set aside 2,600 ducats of Castilian gold, as well as permitting the church to receive rental income in posterity from the properties that she owned in Sevilla.

That same 1585 testament highlights how Gómez participated in visions of Catholicism particular to the Castilian geopolitical landscape despite her long absence from Castille. She organized to send money to a dozen churches and four hospitals across Sevilla and to her native village of Niebla in Huelva, where she wished to endow two hospitals, and to the church in Nombre de Dios. Gómez also set money aside to pay for the ransoms of young boys aged between six and twelve who had been captured by North African pirates from her native Niebla.Footnote ⁴⁸ In doing so, she participated in a particular mid sixteenth-century Castilian tradition, reflecting societal panic – to fund missions sponsored by the Mercedarian Order (a Christian order established in 1218 for the redemption of Christian captives) to pay ransoms for captured Christians languishing in North Africa, fears that were also particularly prominent in theaters in cities such as Sevilla during her residency there.Footnote ⁴⁹ Gómez’s endowment to the Mercedarian Order highlights that she remained embedded in Castilian Catholic geopolitical concerns, and specifically in the localized relationship of such concerns with her hometown of Niebla, even from across the Atlantic when she was residing in Nombre de Dios.Footnote ⁵⁰

Sir Francis Drake and Ana Gómez: Gómez as a Slave-Owner

Gómez’s fate became entangled in the interimperial wars of the late sixteenth century, in particular the final voyage of the English corsairs Francis Drake and Richard Hawkins, who attacked Nombre de Dios in 1596. Her experience of the events highlights her Black kinship ties within the town, commercial relationships with and obligations to the nearby town of Black soldiers, her reputation within the port where she dwelled, and, importantly, the lives and experiences of the eight Black men and women who were enslaved to her. Records of these events catalog the strategies that her slaves adopted in order to obtain their freedom after she perished and highlight their understanding of the importance of her paperwork. Their testimonies show that they were loyal to their owner and protected her treasured papers during a time of great insecurity and danger – the second sacking of Nombre de Dios by Francis Drake in 1596 – in order to argue for their freedom after her death.

The particularly devastating attack on Nombre de Dios in early January 1596 spelled the downfall of the town as a major port for the region.Footnote ⁵¹ Local officials were aware that the port was vulnerable to attacks owing to a weak harbor and previous English incursions in the town. Bautista Antonelli’s report on the Panama region – which by the mid 1590s had fallen into the hands of the English collector and editor of narratives of voyages, Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616) and had been translated into English – detailed the terrible environmental conditions that rendered the Nombre de Dios harbor difficult for shipping: “it is a very bad harbour, neither is there any good water: and it is subject to Northerly winds and Easterly windes, which continually doe blow upon this coast.”Footnote ⁵² Such conditions tested many ship captains when docking there:

Stormy weather was a serious threat. As Antonelli explained:

This problematic harbor rendered the town prone to attacks from foreign enemies.Footnote ⁵⁵

Drake and Hawkins had embarked on a pillaging voyage to the Spanish Indies in 1595 at the helm of twenty-seven ships and 2,500 men. Reportedly, Drake determined to take Panama or die in the attempt.Footnote ⁵⁶ After sacking the city of Cádiz in Castilla, their fleet sailed to the Caribbean and attacked Cartagena and Santa Marta in the winter of 1595, taking some residents captive.Footnote ⁵⁷ Manso de Contreras, the governor of Santa Marta, detailed how Drake captured “100 Negroes and Negresses from the pearl station [in Rio de la Hacha], who for the most part joined him voluntarily, and some citizens and other prisoners.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Contreras also reported that he had successfully delayed Drake in Santa Marta by frustrating negotiations about ransom payments so that he could determine the scale of the English fleets and buy time to send news to Cartagena and Panama. As a result, in December 1595, officials in Nombre de Dios received word that Drake’s and Hawkins’ ships were sailing towards the port.Footnote ⁵⁹

After the news of impending English fleets reached the town, residents proceeded to retreat to the hinterlands. Free Black vecina Ana Gómez, who by then was sixty years old and had lived in Nombre de Dios for two decades, made provisions for her slaves, servants, and trusted confidants to hide her extensive property in a buhio that she had built in the countryside, and she retired to the hinterlands – as did most other residents of the town. Indeed, Gómez’s slaves later provided testimonies describing how they had retreated to the hinterlands with her property.Footnote ⁶⁰ One of her slaves, Gaspar de tierra Bañol, who was described as a Christian ladino (the term ladino usually meant individuals who grew up in Spanish-speaking regions and spoke Spanish fluently), explained that he received news that his owner had built a buhio in the mountains and that he and another slave named Juseph Bran had buried some of Gómez’s boxes and other property near it.Footnote ⁶¹ Another of Gómez’s slaves – an elderly ladino Christian named Juan Jolofo – later testified that Gómez had asked him to watch over her buhio.Footnote ⁶²

Arriving in late December 1595 to find a deserted town devoid of any treasures, for all vecinos had retreated to the hinterlands, Drake’s and Hawkins’ armies sacked Nombre de Dios. John Troughton described how “we sett saile for Nombre de Dios, to which we came the xxvijth daie, wher in like manner the people had acquitted the Towne.”Footnote ⁶³ Although the town was abandoned, they reported receiving help – or intelligence – from some Black people as to the location of “Sowes of silver, golde in Bullion, some Jwells, great store of plate and ryalls of plate, with much other Lugage.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Spanish officials described how the English were guided by a mulato cowherd whom they had reportedly brought with them.Footnote ⁶⁵ In addition to sacking the town, the English destroyed a pearl factory on the outskirts, stealing some of the enslaved Black people who labored there.

During the raid, the English captured residents of Nombre de Dios, adding to their coterie of vecinos who had been imprisoned aboard their ships since their previous attack on Santa Marta. Their hope was to ransom the vecinos back to the Spanish crown. Gómez’s slave, Juseph Bran, who was keeping a watchful eye on her buhio, testified that he escaped when the English arrived, but had witnessed English soldiers entering the hut and stealing most of Gómez’s belongings.Footnote ⁶⁶ Gaspar, another of Gómez’s slaves, described how the English came to the village and found the buhio; they also captured Gómez and stole her clothes and property, leaving only four boxes.Footnote ⁶⁷ These testimonies match the descriptions of events by Spanish military commanders. Miguel Ruíz de Elduayen explained in a letter to the crown that an architect named Alberto Ojada had left with the English, taking with him a friend named Ana Gómez. He detailed that “they took some Black horras, especially Ana Gomes the rich trader,” and Ojada “went away with the English and dined with Drake and was very friendly with him; and he took Ana Gómez with him.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Although concerns that free Black vecinos might aid foreign enemies are frequently aired in correspondence between the Real Audiencia of Panamá and the crown in this period, and even though officials seemed unclear about whether Ana Gómez had left voluntarily with the English, there is no indication that they were concerned that Gómez had been disloyal. The testimonies of her slaves also specified that Gómez had been captured.Footnote ⁶⁹ Some stated that they witnessed the English taking her, while others explained that they received news of her capture later, once she regained her liberty in Portobelo. The English captains seemed to recognize Gómez as a property-owning Black vecina, as Drake and Hawkins grouped her with other Spanish vecinos whom they attempted to ransom to Spanish officials in Nombre de Dios, rather than with the Black slaves whom they had also captured (some of whom belonged to Gómez).

For his part, Drake may have hoped that Gómez would be loyal to the English rather than the Spanish. An enslaved Black man from Nombre de Dios named Diego had aided Drake in his raid fifteen years earlier and had helped the English commander to form an alliance with Black palenques in the region.Footnote ⁷⁰ Of course, by the 1590s, very few Black people were interested in helping the English. Black residents of the town of Santiago del Principe, who had professed loyalty to the Spanish crown in return for their freedom and autonomy, fought a fierce battle against the English in the 1596 raid, and killed numerous English commanders. If Drake did envision Gómez playing such a role, he chose an unlikely collaborator, for she was a well-established vecina who had much to lose from an English attack. In any case, Spanish commanders in Nombre de Dios refused to pay the ransoms that Drake demanded for the captive vecinos. In retribution, his armies sacked and burned the town before departing. Diego Mendes Torres, a vecino of Panama who served as a captain in Nombre de Dios at the time of the attack, reported:

Testimonies by Ana Gómez’s slaves about this episode provide an unprecedented view into Gómez’s position as a slave-owner and the views and experiences of her slaves. The records of these events also catalog the strategies employed by the enslaved people – whom she owned – to obtain their freedom after she perished and their understanding of the importance of her paperwork. Their testimonies highlight how they deployed the notion of loyalty to their owner and their protection of her treasured papers to argue for their freedom after her death. In Gómez’s absence, four of her slaves attempted to secure her remaining property.Footnote ⁷² Gaspar of tierra Bañol described how another of Gómez’s slaves, Lucía Cocoli, took some of Gómez’s property, including her surviving papers, to a house nestled in the mountains on the route to Panamá owned by Antón Castilla Arras, where the English would not find them.Footnote ⁷³ Apparently, Lucía told Gaspar that she had abandoned the box of papers as she was afraid that the English would capture her.Footnote ⁷⁴ Gaspar reported how he had subsequently traveled to the location and found the abandoned box, broken the lock, and retrieved the papers, then walked the route from Nombre de Dios to Panamá to the house where Lucía and Ana Gómez’s remaining slaves were hiding.Footnote ⁷⁵ He described how upon arriving in the house, he told Lucía that she must look after the papers and ensure that no one remove them from her possession.Footnote ⁷⁶ When he eventually returned to Gómez’s buhio, Gaspar discovered that the English had stolen everything, while some of Gómez’s other slaves informed him that the English had burned Gómez’s houses in Nombre de Dios.Footnote ⁷⁷ These testimonies reveal that Gómez’s slaves attempted to protect her property and understood the value of her paperwork.

In late January 1596, the English ships arrived in Portobelo, largely depleted of men and energy following various skirmishes and naval battles with Castilian armies in the islands between Nombre de Dios and Portobelo.Footnote ⁷⁸ In a subsequent report, the Real Audiencia of Panamá explained that Spanish officials had not seen or heard of the English ships for twenty-four days since they left Nombre de Dios.Footnote ⁷⁹ Drake perished in the bay of Portobelo, while infighting and mistrust of the commanders marred the surviving crew. As Thomas Maynarde described, “Our generalls beinge dead most mens hartes were bent to hasten for England, as soone as they might.”Footnote ⁸⁰ On the Spanish side, Ruíz de Elduayden described how “On the night of the twelfth the two soldiers, Pedro Cano and Tomé, who had been sent to Porto Belo, returned and reported that the enemy fleet was at anchor. There were twenty-one ships, but few launches or men were to be seen.”Footnote ⁸¹

Anchored at Portobelo, the English tried to ransom their captive Spanish vecinos from Santa Marta and Nombre de Dios one final time.Footnote ⁸² Ruíz de Elduayden explained that “there came another message from Captain Diego Mendes Torres at Nombre de Dios, reporting the arrival there of a man, apparently a mariner, bringing certain letters from Spanish prisoners in the English fleet and a safe-conduct from the general thereof to bring them to Panama.”Footnote ⁸³ He reported that the messenger was named “Gregorio Mendes, a Portuguese, and he had orders and authority to negotiate the ransom of Don Francisco Flores for 4,000 ducats, of two regidores of Río de la Hacha and Santa Marta for other sums, and of Ana Gómez, a free Negro of Nombre de Dios, for 2,000 ducats.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Mendes also informed his Spanish interlocutors that Drake had perished in the bay of Portobelo and described the alarming death rate among the remaining English crew.Footnote ⁸⁵ Sensing the desperation among the English, Spanish officials refused to pay the ransoms for the captured vecinos. This failed attempt to ransom Gómez, first in Nombre de Dios and then in Portobelo, suggests that the English commanders also differentiated between her status as a free and propertied vecina and the Black slaves whom they captured and subsequently took to England.

Gómez’s slave, Gaspar, recalled how news spread in Nombre de Dios that the English armada had arrived in Portobelo and had abandoned his owner in the bay of that port.Footnote ⁸⁶ Indeed, upon failing to ransom their captives, the English abandoned the Spanish vecinos on the shores near Portobelo in late January 1596, and hastily made their way back to England, taking their captured Black slaves with them. A Spanish general reported that he rode towards Portobelo and

Ana Gómez was one of the captives whom the English abandoned.

Upon arriving in Portobelo, after surviving the ordeal onboard ship, Gómez had become very ill as a result of her captivity and knew that she would soon perish. She penned and sent a letter to her close confidant and nephew, Pedro López, in Nombre de Dios.Footnote ⁸⁸ She explained her predicament and her great desire to die in Nombre de Dios, asking López to find twelve willing Black soldiers from the Black village of Santiago del Príncipe who would collect her from Portobelo and help her to return to Nombre de Dios for the sum of 100 ducados.Footnote ⁸⁹

Gómez was likely unaware that the Black soldiers of Santiago del Principe had also sustained heavy losses during Drake’s and Hawkins’ incursion in Nombre de Dios, and that many of them had played key defense roles in protecting the town and the Spanish crown. In a report to the crown, Ruíz de Elduayen later commended these soldiers, noting “that the Negroes of Santiago del Principe would not allow the enemy to take water at the river Fator and killed some of them, including a captain of some importance, whom they buried with lowered flags.”Footnote ⁹⁰ They had reportedly burned their own village to prevent the English from advancing, with Ruíz de Elduayden explaining that “the enemy sent ten manned launches against them and that the Negroes, who until then had stayed in their village, which is less than half a league from Nombre de Dios, now set fire to their huts and withdrew to the bush, from which they killed a number of Englishmen, about twenty-five altogether.”Footnote ⁹¹ He commended their efforts, stating that “The subjugated Negroes of both factions at Santiago del Principe and Santa Cruz la Real have rallied to his majesty’s service with loyalty, hard work and energy, and the freed Negroes came to serve in this war under the banner of their captain Juan de Rosales who is also one of them.”Footnote ⁹² Further, he described that “more loyalty was found among the slaves than was expected, for it was their disloyalty which was feared here and which the enemy counted upon: he relied upon it to bring him quick success.”Footnote ⁹³

After receiving the letter that Gómez had dispatched to Nombre de Dios, Pedro López arrived in Santiago del Principe to search for twelve Black soldiers who would accompany him to Portobelo. Because of the damage sustained by the village, he had to make great efforts to do so. Lacking liquid capital to pay the soldiers, López offered to pawn one of Gómez’s slaves, a Black woman named Juana.Footnote ⁹⁴ Vicente Rodrigues, a moreno horro vecino of Santiago del Principe, later described how the mulato Pedro López had arrived with a Black slave who would serve as temporary payment for the work.Footnote ⁹⁵ He further reported meager appetite for the task among the remaining Black soldiers of the village; they were unwilling to do it unless they were paid for their services upfront.Footnote ⁹⁶ Eventually, after López had made various inquiries, including to the governor of the village, twelve Black soldiers agreed to accompany him to Portobelo to collect Gómez with a payment agreement in place and Juana left as a bond.Footnote ⁹⁷ Another of Gómez’s slaves, Gaspar de tierra Bran, testified to traveling to Portobelo with Pedro López and the Black soldiers.Footnote ⁹⁸

Meanwhile, in Portobelo, Gómez composed an addendum to her will.Footnote ⁹⁹ In a few short pages, she made provisions to liberate two of her slaves, Dominga and Ysavellilla, mulata, who were the daughters of her slaves Lucía and Catalina Bran. She also listed the seven other slaves she owned, “Lucía Cocoli, and Juana de tierra Bañol, and Jussepe Bran, and Catalina Bran, and Juan Jolofo, and Juana Biafara, and Gasparillo Bañon,” in addition to enumerating her silver, pearls, emeralds, crucifixes of silver and pearls, and a few outstanding debts.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ She also named a new executor and arranged to send 100 ducados to Sevilla to the daughter of an associate named Juan Rivera, and noted the money that she owed Pedro López for collecting her from Portobelo on her deathbed.

With the help of López and the Black soldiers, Gómez arrived in Nombre de Dios in early February 1596. There, she surveyed her staggering losses and made a third addendum to her will.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Adjusting how much she owed López, she calculated the value of her property after the losses: approximately 7,000 pesos in gold. Juan Jolofe later testified that although the English had captured many of Gómez’s slaves, eight remained: Lucía Cocoli, Juana Biafara (who was pawned in Santiago del Principe to the Black soldiers for 100 pesos), Gaspar Bran, Juseppe Bran, Juana Viga Casaga (likely Casanga), and the witness himself, although Juan noted that Gómez kept him as a “free slave,” two other young slaves, Dominga and Isabel, who Gómez had freed in her last testament, written in Portobelo.Footnote ¹⁰²

Ana Gómez’s desire to return from Portobelo to Nombre de Dios before her death reveals her life as an Atlantic trader and her ties with Black residents of the port and nearby towns. Her ties to Pedro Lopez, her slaves, and her commercial transaction with the Black soldiers from the village of Santiago del Principe all indicate that she was also embedded among diverse Black communities in the region.

Gómez perished a few days after arriving in Nombre de Dios, in February 1596. After her death, Simon de Torres, the judge who was tasked to administer the probate for her estate and who had been dispatched to Nombre de Dios from Panamá, treated her property as he would that of any other property-owning vecina and natural of Castilla, attending to her credits and debts, and to executing her will.Footnote ¹⁰³ Because a great proportion of Gómez’s property in Nombre de Dios had been destroyed in the English attack, she was etched into the historical archive at the moment of her greatest poverty. On her deathbed, she owned eight enslaved Black people, some houses in Nombre de Dios, bars of gold, jewelry, trunks of fine clothes, and four pairs of houses on the other side of the Atlantic in the city of Sevilla.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For their part, the Black soldiers of Santiago del Principe successfully petitioned the judge for the 100 pesos that Gómez owed them for collecting her from Portobelo.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

To determine the extent of Gómez’s property and the events that had transpired, Torres interviewed her slaves, describing most as “very ladino Christian,” although at least one was not interviewed for being “very bozal,” a description that implies he did not speak Spanish.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These testimonies reveal their strategy to position themselves as loyal to their owner and as taking heroic actions and risks during the attack on Nombre de Dios, possibly with the aim of making a later claim to freedom owing to their loyalty and bravery. Certainly, they would have been aware of discussions among other enslaved people in the town about the possibility of petitioning the crown for freedom based on these reasons.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For example, Pedro Zape Yalonga would go on to successfully petition the crown for freedom from slavery following his loyalty to the Spanish crown during this episode.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Gómez’s slaves provided detailed testimony of their labors to protect their owner’s property and to defend Nombre de Dios during a time of great insecurity. These testimonies suggest that she had trusted relationships with at least some of her slaves, and, like many urban slave-owners, permitted them to operate semiautonomously. While none of these enslaved people made an explicit claim for their freedom during these interviews, Juan Jolofe positioned himself as a “free slave” who was treated by Ana Gómez as a free person.

After sifting through Gómez’s various commercial obligations, establishing a timeline of events leading to her death, and ascertaining the contents of her three wills dating from 1585, January 1596, and February 1596, Simon de Torres ordered a public auction of her remaining property in Nombre de Dios. A Black criollo crier named Francisco auctioned her belongings, including her remaining slaves.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The auction took weeks to complete. Nombre de Dios residents were reeling from their losses and rebuilding the town and their houses: No one seemed interested in purchasing Gómez’s slaves and other property. The crier sent detailed reports of the many days that he spent marching a couple of the slaves around every street and public square of the town, announcing the forthcoming sales. Even members of a passing ship crew who sojourned in Nombre de Dios did not seem interested. After various auctions, Francisco eventually sold half of Gómez’s slaves at well below their expected value. As explored in Chapter 3, public auctions could become spaces in which enslaved people could negotiate the terms of their purchase with prospective buyers. While any such ephemeral conversations in this instance are lost to the historical record, it is possible that Gómez’s slaves spoke with potential buyers during the long days of auctions. In particular, Juan Jolofo may have told potential buyers about his self-perception as a free person. Simon de Torres eventually took Gómez’s remaining three slaves to Panama, including one whom he described as “an elderly and ill Black man of eighty years old named Juan Jolofo who says that he is free.”

In Sevilla, word spread quickly among residents about Gómez’s death in Nombre de Dios and news of the value of her estate arriving in Castilla. In 1599, Simón Torres had sent the value that he had managed to collect of Gómez’s estate, which amounted to 694 pesos, along with extensive paperwork detailing his investigations into her assets, copies of her three wills, and an inventory of her papers on the galeón of Nuestra Señora del Rosario. In Sevilla, Gómez’s cousins named Ana and Leonor de Pineda heard news that around 694 pesos of Gómez’s estate had arrived on the galeón. They also heard that Gómez had perished intestate. They petitioned the House of Trade to inherit the estate on the basis that they were Gómez’s cousins and that she had no other heirs for she was widowed. At this stage, they seemed unaware that Gómez had made a will. In fact, Gómez listed a woman named Leonor de Pineda as her daughter in her 1585 will.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, Gómez’s 1585 will also described her great desire to found a perpetual capellanía in the Magdalena Church to hold masses on her behalf and pray for the salvation of her soul. Gómez had set aside an ambitious 2,600 ducats of Castilian gold (this is likely to be moneda de oro (escudo), worth approximately 32,890 maravadíes) and the rental incomes from her four pairs of houses in Sevilla.Footnote ¹¹¹ The 694 pesos that comprised Gómez’s estate fell well below her intended endowment of 2,600 ducats of Castilian gold. As a result, the Magdalena Church petitioned the House of Trade for permission to sell Gómez’s property in Sevilla and use the proceeds to establish the perpetual capellanía. The sale of these houses raised 31,000 maravadíes (see Chapter 2), and the Magdalena Church used the proceeds to establish the capellanía in Gómez’s name. In subsequent correspondence about the accounts for the capellanía between administrators of the Madgalena Church and the Archbishop’s Palace over the next two centuries, the capellanía was described as belonging to “Ana Gómez, la morena.”Footnote ¹¹²

Conclusion

Gómez’s detailed imprint in the historical archive provides some of the clearest details to date of how free Black women understood and participated in cultures of paperwork to practice and protect their freedom in the late sixteenth-century Atlantic world, and is a rare insight into the life of a Black woman who documented financial transactions in her own account books. The three wills that Gómez composed over a twenty-year period and her astute choices in documenting her credits and debts reveal her maneuverings as an economic actor in the early modern period, and the significance of her relationships with other Black women of Nombre de Dios with whom she did not use paperwork to record transactions, instead relying on trust and her word for agreements. Her astute use of paperwork shows how she envisioned her freedom in expansive terms, as a free subject of the Spanish crown who could and did engage in trade and accumulation of property, and was fully aware of the significance of the act of generating and archiving paperwork and building community ties for evidentiary thresholds when attempting to seek justice in the Spanish empire. Gómez may never have petitioned in a royal court to defend or expand the political meanings of freedom, and yet she shaped the meanings of Black freedom in the sites where she resided and among those with whom she interacted, including Spanish royal officials, through her daily practice of engaging in cultures of paperwork. Ana Gómez made astute choices throughout her life to document her capital to practice and protect her freedom.