In 1633, the Dutch, having lost the island of St. Maarten to the Spanish, retaliated by capturing Curacao, Bonaire, and Aruba. While Curacao emerged as a center of the slave trade, Bonaire became a plantation of the Dutch West India Company. A small number of African slaves were put to work cultivating dyewood and maize and harvesting solar salt around Blue Pan. They were joined by the few remaining Indians and convicts. Slave quarters, rising no higher than a man's waist and built entirely of stone, still stand in the area around Rincon and along the saltpans as a grim reminder of Bonaire's repressive past.



From the beginning of the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, only the military personnel who supervised the plantations and the prison houses were allowed on the island. When the Dutch West India Company dissolved in 1791, its properties were confiscated by the Dutch government, which continued operations on Bonaire. The slaves, now owned by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, came to be known as 'government slaves,' or, in Papiamentu , 'Katibu di Rei,' meaning 'slaves of the king.' Although the slaves were allowed to grow and sell their own produce, and sometimes even to buy their own freedom, living conditions on Bonaire worsened. By 1835, rumors of an uprising began to circulate around an escaped slave named Bentura. Fearing a rebellion, the Dutch transferred the remaining slaves from Rincon to a stronghold near the saltpans called 'Tera Cora,' which means red soil. Bentura was eventually captured, although he later escaped to safety. Slavery was finally abolished in 1862.

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