Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  In June 1641 Palafox wrote a secret letter suggesting to the king that Escalona would be better employed elsewhere, preferably in Europe. Philip IV took no chances: he signed three distinct secret orders, authorizing Palafox to use whichever one he judged appropriate: one invited Escalona to return to Spain where the king wanted his advice; a second censured the duke's conduct and ordered him to transfer his authority to Palafox; the third authorized the bishop to have Escalona killed. In each scenario, Palafox would become both archbishop of Mexico and interim viceroy. In June 1642, as soon as he received the package containing these remarkable letters, Palafox entered Mexico City to take up his new ecclesiastical position. Four days later, in a dawn raid, his agents arrested Escalona and confined him in a convent outside the town under guard until he could be shipped back to Spain.

  Amid the resulting chaos emerged the remarkable figure of William Lamport, better known as Don Guillén Lombardo de Guzmán, an Irish protégé of the count-duke of Olivares (whose surname he took). Having arrived from Spain with the same fleet as Palafox, Don Guillén worked hard in 1641 to win support from the Creoles (the American-born descendants of Spaniards) for Palafox's plan to overthrow Escalona, but the following year he claimed to be the natural son of Philip III and shared with his Creole allies a plot to liberate Mexico ‘from Spanish captivity’ and declare himself ‘king of New Spain’. By the time a neighbour denounced him to the Inquisition in October 1642, Don Guillén had prepared a declaration of Mexican independence that included the abolition of slavery and forced labour; the establishment of free trade with China and Europe and the manufacture of goods without regulation from Spain; and the creation of a representative assembly in which ‘Indians and freedmen are to have the same voice and vote as Spaniards’. He had arranged for a militia of 500 Indians and African slaves to take over the viceregal palace, and waited only for one of the visions induced by the hallucinogens he ingested to reveal the most auspicious moment to launch his revolution. Rumours spread far and wide ‘that don Guillén was plotting to make himself king’ until the Inquisition suddenly seized him and his papers.58

  Other parts of Spanish America also saw plots, both real and imagined. In Panama, the entrepot for all goods travelling between Peru and the rest of the Hispanic world, just as news arrived that a Dutch expeditionary force had sailed round Cape Horn and fortified a base at Valdivia in Chile, a fire broke out that gutted 100 homes and much of the cathedral, followed by another blaze three days later. Once again the Spanish authorities blamed Portuguese nationals and rounded them up – only to find that they numbered just 17. Further south, when the viceroy of Peru, the marquis of Mancera, first received news of the Lisbon revolt, he did not believe it; only on receiving confirmation from Buenos Aires, together with a plea for help, did Mancera send troops across the Andes to secure the settlement.59 Conscious that he was ‘500 leagues from the Caribbean and 800 leagues from Buenos Aires’, Mancera also fretted that the Portuguese residents of Lima might persuade the African slaves to revolt, because ‘the first religious instruction that these slaves receive is from the Portuguese, and they maintain love toward them’; so Mancera rounded up and disarmed some 500 Portuguese residents in the capital, forcibly moving the younger males inland.60

  Spanish America was thus safe again from political danger, but not from natural disasters. Earthquakes destroyed churches, houses and fortifications in Santiago de Chile (1647), Concepción de Chile (1657), and in Lima and Callao, Peru (1687). Tree-ring series reflect the unusual frequency of both El Niño events and volcanic activity in the mid-seventeenth century which, then as now, caused extreme weather throughout Spanish America. In Argentina, serious floods of the Paraná river in 1643, 1651 and 1657–8 inundated one-third of the regional capital, Santa Fé, and persuaded the magistrates to abandon the city, despite its splendid public buildings, and relocate to higher ground. Meanwhile, the viceroyalty of New Spain continued to suffer repeated droughts. In 1642 the northern town of Monterrey experienced ‘such a shortage’ that the inhabitants ‘sold rotten maize that could no longer be eaten – something neither heard nor seen [before] in New Spain, even in time of greater famine’; and between 1641 and 1668 local officials authorized eight public processions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a statue reputed to possess a miraculous ability to produce rain, and sponsored books to reassure readers of the statue's powers (one in Spanish and the other in Nahuatl).61

  The prolonged droughts also depopulated the northern frontier of New Spain. In 1638 the Jesuit Provincial of New Spain, who had served in the missions of Sinaloa and Sonora in New Mexico, wrote that ‘of the 300,000 Indians who had been baptized by the Jesuits, only one-third were still alive’. Shortly after that, prolonged drought forced the Christian communities on the Salinas plains to use their own urine both to irrigate their crops and to make bricks for the lavish mission churches, while Apache bands (no doubt also suffering from the extreme drought) launched repeated attacks. By 1678, every mission had been abandoned.62 Meanwhile, in the valley of Rio Grande, between 1629 and 1641 a particularly lethal smallpox epidemic and repeated raids by Apaches killed two-thirds of the population and destroyed half of the Christian pueblos. According to Daniel T. Reff, ‘The Pueblo population, in effect, declined by over 80 per cent between 1608 and 1680, much as populations did in north-western Mexico’.63

  In the Caribbean, the torrential rains associated with the increased frequency of El Niño created optimal breeding and feeding conditions for the vector of both malaria and yellow fever: the mosquito. The first yellow fever pandemic in the New World began in 1647, a year that saw a ‘strong’ El Niño. In Barbados, attracted both by the sugar and by population densities above 200 per square mile, mosquitos spread the disease, killing one in every seven Europeans on the island as well as decimating other Caribbean islands and then Yucatán. The Mayan chronicle Chilam Balam de Chumayel reported that in 1648 ‘there was bloody vomit and we began to die’ – a clear reference to yellow fever, to which (unlike many Africans) neither Europeans nor Native Americans possessed inherited immunity. The rains were followed by ‘such a hard and extraordinary drought that it rendered the land sterile and produced such intense heat’ that wildfires raged throughout Yucatán, destroying all crops left by the drought. The local chronicler Diego López Cogolludo claimed that ‘Almost half the Indians perished with the mortality caused by the plague, famine and smallpox which since the year 1648 until the present one of 1656, in which I am writing this down, have so exhausted this land.’64

  Two demographic strategies intensified the deleterious impact of these natural disasters on the human population of the Americas. First, according to Maria Sybilla Merian, a botanist who toured the Caribbean in the later seventeenth century, both African and Native American women frequently aborted their offspring to spare them a life of servitude and humiliation. Merian provided a detailed description of the ‘peacock flower’ (Poinciana pulcherrima), one of over a dozen abortifacients that she and other European observers found in use in the colonial West Indies, asserting that ‘The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly.’ Perhaps realizing that some readers would find this difficult to believe, Merian added ‘They told me this themselves.’65 Second, many women had no children because they entered convents. As in Europe, the number of nuns (which included many cloistered against their will in times of economic hardship) reached astonishing proportions: in Lima, popularly known as the City of Kings, the number of women in convents rose from 16 per cent of the total female population in 1614 to 21 per cent in 1700. By then, there were three Spanish and mestiza females for every Spanish and mestizo male living in Lima, as well as three mulatta and black females for every mulatto and black male. As Nancy van Deusen wittily observed, ‘the City of Kings had become a city of women’.66

  Revolt and Resistance in Spanish America

 
Seventeenth-century Latin America differed from Europe in one important respect: it experienced relatively few revolts. The most serious exception broke out in New Mexico, where (as already noted) prolonged drought produced famines that reduced the population and induced many Pueblo Indians to return to their traditional faith in the hope of bringing rain. Punitive measures by the authorities, both secular and religious, produced a major revolt in August 1680 that drove the Spaniards out of Santa Fé, the regional capital, for a decade – but the continuing drought eventually weakened the victorious (but disunited) Pueblos, and by the end of the century the Spaniards had regained control of the region. In the valley of Mexico, despite the prolonged drought of the 1640s and 1650s, and the activities of Don Guillermo Lombardo de Guzmán, no rebellion occurred; and Spanish South America likewise experienced few serious revolts. In 1656 Pedro Bohorques Girón, a Spaniard of Morisco descent who grew up in Cádiz and then migrated to America, appeared in the remote city of San Miguel de Tucumán (now in northwest Argentina) and proclaimed that he was the grandson of the last Inca ruler and therefore true king of the region. This was not the first insurrection by the settlers of Peru during the seventeenth century (others occurred in 1613, 1623 and 1644), but Bohorques boasted dangerous military skills (including the ability to found light artillery) and won considerable support from the indigenous population. After two years of defiance, Spanish forces defeated and captured him and sent him to Lima for trial on charges of rebellion. He was still there, pending the outcome of an appeal to Spain, when another insurrection broke out in Upper Peru.67

  The fleets that brought most European settlers to the Americas left from Seville and, not surprisingly, many of the newcomers (like Bohorques) came from Andalusia. Nevertheless, a substantial number came to America from elsewhere, and some preserved their regional identity – none more so than men and women from Spain's Basque provinces, many of whom communicated in their native language. Although the Basques always remained a minority, the rest of the Spanish community envied their expertise and success in mining. The most serious rivalry occurred in Laicacota, a silver-mining region in the Altiplano region of the Andes. Two Andalusian prospectors discovered silver there in 1657 and founded a town that soon became the fourth largest in the region, with perhaps 1,500 inhabitants, many of them Basques. Almost immediately, the region experienced a series of natural disasters: both the maize and coca harvests failed between 1659 and 1662, while epidemic diseases struck in 1660–1. Rioting broke out that pitted not only Basques but also native mineworkers (both Indian and mestizo) against the Andalusian mine owners. Although government forces restored order, in 1665 the Basque insurgents, supported by sympathetic magistrates, seized control of Laicacota and its rich mines. The following year, however, the Andalusian mine owners, aided by a militia of Indians and mestizos, counter-attacked, chased out the magistrates, and sacked the town to shouts of ‘death to the Basques’.68

  No sooner did news of this open defiance of royal authority, and of the alliance between Spaniards and Indians, arrive in Lima than the viceroy died. In Arequipa, the town council discussed cancelling religious processions, for fear that discontented elements might exploit the crowded streets to begin a riot (as had happened in both Barcelona and Naples: see chapters 9 and 14 above). Rumours circulated that some Indians in Lima intended to flood the city while other groups throughout the viceroyalty would rise up at Epiphany 1667 to kill all the Spaniards and restore Inca rule; but the authorities acted promptly and executed potential ringleaders. Basque fugitives from Laicacota in the capital convinced the new viceroy, the count of Lemos, that ‘the kingdom had come within an ace of a great disaster’ and persuaded him to lead a punitive expedition into the Altiplano – the first viceroy to visit the area for a century. Lemos executed over sixty insurgents (including Pedro Bohorques for good measure), imprisoned many more and razed the rebel strongholds.69 When the government in Madrid undertook a formal inquiry into the troubles at Laicacota, however, having collected and considered 25,000 pages of testimony, it concluded that Lemos had overreacted. There had been no risk of a ‘great disaster’, only manipulation of power by factions: claims that Lima ‘tottered on the verge of insurrection’ had no more substance than those of Pedro Bohorques to be an Inca, of Don Guillermo Lombardo de Guzmán to be Philip III's illegitimate son, or of Palafox and Mancera that Portuguese residents were poised to seize Spain's colonial capitals.

  Why did Spanish America largely escape the political upheavals that afflicted so much of the planet in the mid-seventeenth century – especially since both climatic adversity and epidemic diseases caused widespread mortality and economic dislocation? Admittedly, in some areas, such as the isthmus of Panama, the pool of available Native American labour fell so drastically that by the 1630s many towns lacked sufficient food and the colonists' country estates lacked enough hands to bring in cash crops (above all cacao and indigo). The economy of the entire area entered a half-century of depression.70 Elsewhere, however, the European settlers found other ways of compensating for labour shortages: they imported more African slaves; and they also increased the labour required from the Native Americans who worked in their mining, farming and textile production – creating appalling conditions that probably led to overall population decline.

  Many towns also failed to thrive. An acute shortage of potential brides not only inhibited population growth but also led to some of the highest illegitimacy rates recorded in the Western world. Thus in the largest parish of Lima, over half of all registered births in the seventeenth century were illegitimate and about half of those were born to slaves – indeed, 80 per cent of all registered births to slave mothers were illegitimate: yet another tragic consequence of the abusive power relations that prevailed. As in Europe, a grim future awaited most bastards. The devoted staff of the Foundling Hospital of Lima ‘walked day and night through the streets, corrals, stables, [and by] rivers and waterways to see if desperate people had given birth there’, and carried those they found either to the hospital, where most of them died, or to a convent, where the survivors eventually became the celibate servants of the nuns.71

  Taken together, these various limits on human reproduction may have averted the ‘overpopulation’ found elsewhere and thus shielded Spanish America from the ‘General Crisis’; but the diversification of the colonial economy also brought relief. The records of the ‘House of Trade’ in Seville, which show a sharp fall in official commerce between Europe and Spanish America from 1623 to 1650, have led many historians to suppose that all long-distance trade in the Hispanic world stagnated; but, although disastrous for the Spanish government, the decline brought tangible benefits to America (Fig. 42). Transatlantic trade tied up capital for at least a year – several years in the case of Peruvian merchants, because of the greater distances involved – while Philip IV frequently confiscated goods aboard the fleets as soon as they arrived in Seville in order to fund his wars. To avoid such disasters, American merchants began to buy and sell clandestinely both in Spain (especially in Cádiz) and in the Caribbean, escaping both the surveillance of the House of Trade and the risk of confiscation, and often avoiding all taxes and duties. As the Peruvian historian Margarita Suárez has observed: ‘Rather than a general crisis’ of the Latin American economy, ‘the seventeenth century produced a crisis in Spain's ability to extract economic benefits from its colonies’.72

  42. Trade between Seville and America, 1500–1650.

  The records of the House of Trade (Case de la Contratación) in Seville charted the rhythm of official trade between Europe and Spanish America. Following a century of sustained and rapid growth, after 1620 both the number of ships crossing the Atlantic and the volume of their cargoes declined.

  By 1650, the quantity of goods carried was less than half the level in 1600.

  This shift generated great domestic profits in Spanish America, encouraging many regions to develop specialty crops for export to other colonies: thus by the mid-seventeenth cent
ury Peruvian sugar, conserves, wines and vinegars were shipped to Chile, Panama and even Mexico, where they displaced Spanish competition. Moreover, most of these goods came from relatively modest units of production that proved hard for the government to monitor and tax – even had local officials proved vigilant. But they did not: instead, reports of administrative corruption, inefficiency and extortion reached such a pitch that in 1663 the crown appointed special inspectors to investigate the treasury officials of Peru. They uncovered over a million pesos in unpaid back-taxes; and although the viceroy had some of the corrupt officials executed, revenues remitted to Spain continued to fall. Whereas in the 1630s an average of 1.5 million pesos left Lima every year for Seville, in the 1680s the average fell below 150,000 pesos.73

  All these developments meant that more wealth remained in America, as reflected in the output of coins by the leading Mints of the viceroyalty, which doubled between the 1620s and the 1680s, and in the magnificent public buildings (especially churches) constructed in the second half of the seventeenth century in virtually every colonial town of the period. Put another way: although the Little Ice Age affected Philip IV's American colonies, the king lacked the power to exacerbate the impact of natural disasters via his costly and inappropriate policies. If, in spite of all these favourable circumstances, rebellions still occurred, then the king's representatives acted swiftly – often executing suspects (like Lombardo and Bohorques) without waiting for authorization from Madrid – because, as the century advanced, they had more to lose from rebellions than the crown. In effect, the government in Madrid and the elites in its American dominions developed a convivencia similar to that of Spanish Italy (see chapter 14 above) that benefited both parties and thus preserved stability.