History
Who was Peter Claver?
Peter Claver was a native of Spain. Born in 1581, he was a young Jesuit by age 20. He left his homeland after being assigned missionary work in 1610. He was assigned to Cartagena, South America (the present republic of Colombia) along the Caribbean. He was ordained there in 1615.
Cartagena, a port city, was a leading Caribbean shipping center. Slave trade had been established in the Americas for nearly 100 years, and Cartagena was a clearing-house for slaves. Purchased by slave traders in West Africa ten thousand slaves poured into the port each year after crossing the Atlantic in filthy holds of slave ships. The conditions were so foul and inhuman that an estimated one-third of the passengers died in transit.
"The Slave of the Negroes Forever"
The son of a Catalonian farmer, was born at Verdu, in 1581; he died September 8, 1654. He obtained his first degrees at the University of Barcelona. At the age of 20, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Tarragona. While he was studying philosophy at Majorca in 1605, Alphonsus Rodriguez, the saintly doorkeeper of the college, learned from God the future mission of his young associate, and thenceforth never ceased exhorting him to set out to evangelize the Spanish possessions in America. Peter obeyed, and in 1610 landed at Cartagena, where for 44 years he was the Apostle of the Negro slaves. Early in the 17th century, the masters of Central and South America afforded the spectacle of one of those social crimes, which are entered upon so lightly. They needed laborers to cultivate the soil which they had conquered and to exploit the gold mines.