Sweet, James H
. 2003.. University of North Carolina Press.
Pages 72 – 74 of Ch. 3. Disease Mortality and Master Power
While some cases of forced sexual relations between masters and slaves were clear disruptions to family and community, other sexual encounters could be a threat to the slave's very life. Some of these "relationships" were consummated literally at the end of a whip or the barrel of a gun. For example, in 1703, Joao Carvalho de Barros, a resident of the Bahian Rec6ncavo, was accused of sexually assaulting a number of his slaves. Among them was a woman named Domingas,who confessed that when she refused to submit to anal sex with Carvalho, she was severely whipped.74 Similarly, a Benguelan slave named Joseph claimed that he always resisted the acts of sodomy that were imposed on him by Carvalho. Carvalho responded by threatening, and at times, giving "rigorous punishments" to his slave. In addition to Domingas and Joseph, at least three other male slaves suffered sexual assaults at the hands of Carvalho...
Carvalho's favored method of assault was to force himself on a male and a female slave at the same time. According to Joseph, on four or five occasions, his master came looking for him and took him to the bed of the female slave, Domingas. There, with all three in the bed, Carvalho told Joseph that he should have intercourse with Domingas. According to Joseph, he always resisted his master's orders but acquiesced when he was threatened with punishment. As Joseph was having sex with Domingas, his master entered him from behind, "wounding him with the force with which he penetrated him." Under questioning by the Inquisitors, Joseph said that he knew that sodomy was an "abominable sin," and that "in his land [Benguela] that sin is punished with penalty of blood and fire." Despite his pain and suffering at the hands of his master, as well as his candid confession, Joseph was eventually sentenced to public whipping and five years in the king's galleys...
In 1678, Francisco Jorge was incarcerated for whipping a slave to death in Bahia but was released when he pleaded that he was a poor man with a wife and children. In similar fashion, Pedro Pais Machado, the owner of Engenho Capanema in Bahia, was arrested in 1737 for killing two slaves and a freedman who allegedly injured one of his oxen. Machado murdered one of the men by hanging him by his testicles until he was dead. After a judicial inquiry, Machado was released, in part because he was "a noble person with family obligations...