industrialisation, as proprietors needed to urgently assemble a workforce to meet the demands in Swansea. 100 The steady influx of European workers were a minority in El Cobre; the number of Englishmen equated to just 12 per cent of the total workforce in 1836. 101 Accompanying the 80 British specialists and approximately 150 Cuban-Spanish free workers were 422 slaves working for the Cobre Company. 102 After the Foreign Office suspected the use of slave miners, the British consul in Santiago investigated and claimed that El Cobre welcomed unsettled slaves. 103 Yet, the diary of James Whitburn offers a different
perspective: “The flogging of Negroes in this country is most cruel. […] I have
seen I think from 15 blows out of 25 to make cuts in the flesh from 8 to 12 inches long and open as if done with a knife.” 104 It is evident that slavery was
fundamental to copper mining in Cuba, as the 1841 census revealed that the
Santiago Company employed 249 slaves while the Cobre Company surpassed
this with a figure of 479, thus making it the largest slave enterprise in the western hemisphere. 105 After anti-slavery activists in Britain were informed of the slave-
holding by both companies, a campaign was launched against the complicity of
slavery, which ultimately led to a parliamentary bill that prohibited British subjects from using slave labour regardless of the local jurisdiction. 106 Even so,
both companies kept the slaves they already owned and could purchase slaves
100 Ibid. 101 The National Archives, ‘Summary of the distribution of the operatives employed at the Royal Consolidated Cobre Mines’, 27 December 1836, FO 84/201 cited in Evans, ‘El Cobre’, p. 121. 102 Evans, ‘El Cobre’, p. 121. 103 Ibid., p. 122. 104 Kresen Kernow, ‘A Cornish Man in Cuba’, AD 1341/1 cited in Evans, ‘El Cobre’, p. 122. 105 Vicente González Loscertales and Inés Roldá n de Montaud, ‘La miner ía del Cobre en Cuba. Su organización, problemas administrativos y repercusiones sociales (1828- 1849)’, Revista de Indias, 40 (1980), 255-299 (p. 255); and Chris Evans, ‘Brazilian gold, Cuban copper and the final frontier of British anti - slavery’, Slavery and Abolition, 34.1 (2013), 118- 134 (p. 122, 131) cited in Evans, ‘El Cobre’, p. 123. 106 Evans, ‘El Cobre’, p. 123.
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