Willemstad, Curaçao

What was Willemstad like in 1715?

In 1634 a fleet of the Dutch West India Company, a trading company with its own ships and soldiers, took Curaçao from Spain. The next year work began on Fort Amsterdam, on the east side of the narrow entrance to Sint Anna Bay, and the town of Willemstad grew up behind it.

By the game’s years the old town, today called Punda, was protected by walls on three sides. A count of 1717 found 214 buildings there. Across the bay, the district of Otrobanda, meaning “the other side”, grew up during the 1700s. Dutch-style merchants’ houses stood near the water; the Penha building of 1708, with its curving gable, still stands. The bright colours visitors see today came later, after white walls were banned in 1817.

The town’s wealth came from its harbour. In the 1670s the Dutch declared it an open port, where ships of any nation could come to trade.

What part did Curaçao play in the slave trade?

From the 1660s Willemstad became one of the busiest slave markets in the Caribbean. Spain sold a licence called the asiento to supply enslaved Africans to its colonies. For many years the holders of that licence bought captives from the Dutch. A contract signed in Amsterdam in 1662 shows the West India Company agreeing to deliver between 700 and 1,400 captive Africans at Curaçao, aged 15 to 36, to agents of the asiento holders.

People who survived the Atlantic crossing were landed at Willemstad, held until buyers came, and then shipped again, mostly to Spain’s colonies on the South American mainland. Historians estimate that around 100,000 enslaved Africans were brought to Curaçao under Dutch rule, mostly between 1667 and 1730. Others stayed on the island, working on its plantations and loading ships at the docks.

In 1713 the peace that ended the War of the Spanish Succession gave the asiento to Britain’s South Sea Company. Curaçao lost its main market almost at once: in 1715 about a thousand people arrived who could not be sold. The Dutch West India Company’s monopoly on the Dutch slave trade was largely ended in 1730. Enslaved people on the island also resisted. In 1716 about a dozen people rose up on a plantation; the revolt was quickly put down and the rebels were punished.

How did smuggling between Curaçao and Venezuela work?

Spanish law said its colonies could trade only with Spain, but Spain could not supply them well. Curaçao filled the gap. Small Dutch boats slipped across to the Venezuelan coast with cloth, flour, knives, tableware and other European goods. They came back with cacao beans, tobacco, hides and mules. Smugglers used passwords, and fires on the beach to show the coast was clear; even some Spanish priests took part.

The main traders were Sephardic Jewish merchants of Willemstad and sailors of African descent. On the mainland, poor white farmers, Indigenous people and free and enslaved Black and mixed-race growers sold their cacao to them and for many of them this forbidden trade was how they made a living. From Curaçao the cacao went on to Amsterdam and across Europe. In 1728 Spain set up the Caracas Company to stop this trade, but Dutch smugglers kept working around it.

Who were Curaçao’s Jewish community?

Twelve Sephardic Jewish families (Jews whose roots were in Spain and Portugal), whose ancestors had fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, settled on Curaçao in 1651, and about seventy more people came in 1659. They named their congregation Mikvé Israel, “Hope of Israel”. Their burial ground, Beth Haim, has gravestones from 1668.

From 1664 merchants, many of them Jewish, were building warehouses beside the fort, and by 1715 Jewish traders were central to the town’s commerce. Its first purpose-built synagogue opened in 1703. That building was pulled down in 1730, and the present synagogue, modelled on the great Portuguese synagogue of Amsterdam, was consecrated in 1732. Britannica calls it the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere.

What happened when Cassard attacked Curaçao in 1713?

During the War of the Spanish Succession, France and the Dutch Republic were enemies. In February 1713 the French naval captain Jacques Cassard landed troops at Sint Kruis Bay, on the island’s west coast. Dutch soldiers could not stop them and fell back to Willemstad. After about a week the town agreed to pay a ransom, and Cassard sailed away. A 19th-century French account gives the ransom as 600,000 livres, a figure that is hard to check.

How did enslaved people escape from Curaçao by sea?

The Venezuelan coast was close: with a good wind, a boat could cross from Willemstad to the Coro area in as little as six hours. Over the 1600s and 1700s thousands of enslaved Afro-Curaçaoans took canoes and small boats and made that crossing. Historians call escape by water maritime marronage. Records show runaways from Curaçao living around Coro by the end of the 1600s.

Spain often protected people who fled from rival colonies if they asked to become Catholic, and some were freed after baptism. This was a choice made case by case until a royal decree of 1750 made it the rule. One woman’s story survives. Juana Isabel Curazao escaped in 1729, became Catholic and won her freedom. She settled at Curiepe, a town of free Black people that Spain had founded in 1721 to guard the coast, and planted a cacao grove that later grew to about a thousand trees.

What is Papiamentu?

Papiamentu is the language most people on Curaçao speak today. It is a creole: a new language formed when people speaking many tongues had to live and work together. Most of its words come from Portuguese and Spanish. It was in use by the late 1600s, and by the early 1700s it was the everyday language of enslaved and free Black Curaçaoans. A priest in 1704 described them speaking “broken Spanish”. Scholars still debate whether it began on the island or arrived from elsewhere. The oldest written text found so far is a love letter of 1775, written by a Sephardic Jew.