Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  From September 1692 a Spanish detachment under Governor Diego de Vargas set out to clean up what remained of the Pueblo revolt. He was able to muster no more than forty soldiers, backed up by fifty Indian allies.116 Fortunately for him, a number of the tribes had decided to stop the violence. Santa Fe and various other towns passed into his control with little effort. The Mexican writer Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora ingenuously commented at the time that ‘an entire realm was restored to the king without wasting an ounce of powder or unsheathing a sword’. When at the end of 1693 Vargas decided to strengthen the Spanish presence by bringing in more settlers and cattle, many tribes returned to their previous hostility, and the conflict resumed. There was a further small revolt in 1696 but it was quickly suppressed. The villages after that date decided to accept the Spanish presence, for it was – as we shall see (Chapter 10) – in their interest to do so.

  The Pueblo revolt was only one example of the permanent restlessness of indigenous cultures within the orbit of Spanish authority. Another example can be found in the messianic revolt of the Tzeltal Indians in the province of Chiapas in central America.117 Though the Indians of North America failed in the short term to liberate themselves from the Spaniards, in the long run they were bound to succeed, thanks to the intervention of a new factor: the establishment on the Atlantic coast during the seventeenth century of French and English settlements. In the later seventeenth century Spanish Franciscans were the only mainstay of the dwindling Spanish presence in the north of Florida. From their mission centres in the Apalachee they attempted in the 1680s to expand towards Carolina across the Chattahoochee and Savannah rivers. This was now doubly dangerous territory, not only for possible hostility of Indians but even more surely because of a challenge from English colonists. From 1670, when the English settled permanently in Charleston, they made it their policy to ally with local Indians against the Spaniards. At the same time they launched fierce attacks against St Augustine. During the period known in American history as Queen Anne's War (in Europe, the War of the Spanish Succession), the greater part of the Indians of Apalachee, towards the Gulf of Mexico, and of the north Atlantic coast of Florida, had deserted the Spanish cause.

  Indians rejected the Spanish for their oppressive methods in religion and in levying labour. They chose the English not only for liberty but also for material goods and ammunition.118 Spain by the end of the war remained in control of St Augustine and Pensacola, but had lost the support of the native population, and without that it could not for long continue its hold. An English pamphlet printed in London in 1710 reported that

  There remains not now so much as one village with ten houses in it, in all Florida that is subject to the Spaniards; nor have they any houses or cattle left but such as they can protect by the guns of their Castle of St Augustine, that alone being now in their hands, and which is continually infested by the perpetual incursions of the Indians.119

  The French, meanwhile, had begun to take a serious interest in the Gulf coast. The great name in French exploration at this time was René Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who in 1682 made a pioneering journey down the Mississippi from Canada to the Gulf. He returned the following year to France, where he obtained the support of Louis XIV for an expedition to attack Mexico through bases on the north coast of the Gulf. All his plans, and his ultimate disaster, derived from his mistaken belief that the Mississippi emerged into the Gulf right next to New Spain. He set out from France with four ships and a small crew in 1684, but once in the Gulf of Mexico was unable to locate the mouth of the great river. He finally decided to establish a base on the very west of the Gulf; and inland from what is now Matagorda bay, north of the San Antonio river, he began to construct what he called ‘Fort St Louis’. Word eventually reached the Spaniards in New Spain that a Frenchman had penetrated what they claimed as their territory. From 1686 they sent out several coastal and land expeditions to try and locate him.

  The expeditions were working with no adequate cartographic knowledge of the coast and no solid information of La Salle's whereabouts. They all failed to find any trace of the intruders. Not until three years later, in the spring of 1689, did the governor of Coahuila finally find Fort St Louis, or what remained of it. It had been destroyed by hostile Indians, and its defenders killed. From two French survivors who were living nearby among Indians, the Spaniards learnt that La Salle's ships had been destroyed, and that when La Salle proposed to his men a prolonged trek to Canada by way of the Mississippi they had murdered him. That had been two years before, in March 1687.

  The unfortunate history of La Salle turned out to have decisive consequences for the Spaniards in North America. It spurred them to new bursts of exploration, both in order to eliminate the French presence and in order to establish their own frontiers. The result was the most extensive effort of exploration ever carried out by Spaniards in the Gulf of Mexico.120 Among the achievements was the first complete circumnavigation of the Gulf by the Rivas-Iriarte voyage of 1686–7. Even the lore of pirates, who because of their profession knew every creek and cranny of the Gulf, was put to use: the pilot of the Rivas-Iriarte team was a pirate. The La Salle episode had another important sequel: it advanced the timetable for Spanish occupation of eastern Texas and Pensacola Bay.121

  In the later 1680s several expeditions made their way into Texas territory and the Mississippi area. Four left by sea from Veracruz and Florida, five made their way by land from New Spain. The land expeditions, between 1686 and 1690, were all made by Alonso de León, who in 1687 was made governor of Coahuila and captain of the fort at Monclova. It was León who led the group that found the remains of Fort St Louis in 1689. The 1690 expedition, which took ninety men (‘for the most part tailors, shoemakers, masons and miners from Zacatecas’122), two hundred cows and four hundred horses, set up among the Tejas Indians two missions that became the first Spanish settlements in the future province of Texas. In 1691 the province was officially created, and a governor appointed. The Spaniards soon found it impossible to maintain an area so far away from New Spain and so difficult to supply, and in 1693 withdrew all their men and missionaries. But it was not the complete end of Spanish efforts in the region. Spanish military detachments that had fortunately decided to occupy and fortify the site of Pensacola from 1698 were able to maintain their presence in the northern Gulf. The apparent threat from other European powers proved to be a positive stimulus to an empire that had long passed its period of expansion.

  By 1700 the French were not only poised to strike into Spanish North America; they were also positioned in the Caribbean, where since the peace of Rijswijk in 1697 they had obtained from Spain possession of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), the western half of the island of Hispaniola. During the second half of the seventeenth century, in which Spain's inability to defend its empire became obvious, the European powers struggled with each other for control of the Caribbean Islands as bases for economic expansion. Key points of the area were now firmly in non-Spanish hands. The British had occupied the islands of St Kitts (1624), Barbados (1625), Nevis (1628), Montserrat and Antigua (1632), and Jamaica. The French took Martinique and Guadaloupe in 1635, and Saint-Domingue in 1697. In the period 1630–1640 the Dutch occupied St Eustace and Curaçao. The Danes took St Thomas in 1672. The demography, economy and culture of the Caribbean changed within a generation. Efficient new businesses were implanted by the other European settlements. An English government committee reported that in 1625 ‘Barbados shipped out of that island as many goods in tunnage yearly as the Spaniards do out of the two famous empires of Mexico and Peru.’123

  From the island bases, unlicensed traders operated throughout the area. Some of them were clearly ‘pirates’, preying not only on Spanish vessels but on shipping of all nations. They came to be known as ‘buccaneers’ (boucaniers in French) from their outdoors life-style, grilling meat from wild cattle over a boucan or grill placed over an open fire. After the English capture of Jamaica they made their unofficial haven on British soil
, at Port Royal in Jamaica, and on the French islands of Tortuga and Saint-Domingue (Hispaniola). The most dreaded of the buccaneers was the Welshman Henry Morgan, who captured Portobelo with four hundred men in 1668 and Panama with four hundred and seventy men in 1671.124 In the latter attack the pirates came ashore from three ships, and destroyed the fort of San Lorenzo at the mouth of the River Chagres, with considerable loss of Spanish lives. Morgan and his men then sailed up the River Chagres and trekked overland until they reached an unprepared Panama. The town surrendered after one hour and was then accidentally set ablaze and burnt to the ground. It ceased to exist for two years. In 1673 a new Panama City was founded but on a different and more secure site, and construction began after 1677.125

  The English buccaneers also entered the Pacific. Like Morgan, they relied less on naval force than on human numbers, backed up by small arms and small boats, which gave them more mobility and allowed them to avoid completely the official Spanish defences, which always consisted of cannon that pointed seaward and galleons that patrolled the sea. Alarmed by what had happened at Panama the viceroy of Peru in 1671 informed his government that ‘the Indies are lost, since there is no defence in the ports of this realm’.126 With only two hundred and fifty men the buccaneers, led by the Englishman Bartholomew Sharp, came overland and sacked the town of Portobelo again in February 1680. Emboldened by success, they once again threatened the (new) city of Panama in the spring of 1680, after making their way across the isthmus of Darien from the Caribbean, and floating downstream in canoes supplied by the Indians. The expedition was a complete success, going on to indulge in wholly unprecedented pirate activity on the Pacific coast during sixteen months before the men eventually returned to England in the spring of 1682.127 In their last big action they seized a merchant ship en route from Callao to Panama, and were startled to find among the passengers what one of the Englishmen described as ‘the most beautiful woman that I ever saw in the South Sea’, a comely young Spanish lady of eighteen. In 1684 a subsequent group of buccaneers, both French and English, again attacked coastal settlements on the Pacific, captured half the vessels of Spanish merchants trading to the isthmus from Peru, paralysed the celebration of the trade fair at Portobelo in 1685, and committed extensive damage during the four years that they were there.128 Every aspect of life along the Pacific coast was dislocated.

  The days of the buccaneers, however, were numbered. Their decline came about not because of Spanish intervention but precisely because the Spaniards were unable to control them. The English, French and Dutch, who now held key areas of the Caribbean, realized that they would have to take measures of their own against piracy and would, in effect, have to protect the Spanish empire. The lieutenant governor of Jamaica in 1686 pointed out that the interruption of Spanish trade at Portobelo and suspension of silver shipments from Peru would affect the whole Caribbean and Europe as well: ‘this damage will not onely befall ye Spaniards but all Europe that are concerned in ye trade of these seas’.129 That very year, the crisis obliged the Spaniards to reduce their trade with Jamaica. When proposals were made for collaboration with England to reduce the buccaneer threat, however, the council of the Indies objected strongly on the grounds that any such action would ruin the trade controlled by Spain. It was a typical bureaucratic attitude that would continue to prevail in Spain for another half century.

  At the same time some hesitant steps were made to improve local defences. The viceroy of Peru in 1685 passed on to the government a letter from a local correspondent which claimed that ‘not only is there no one in the entire kingdom who has ever built a warship, there is nobody who has ever seen one’.130 There were no regular militia soldiers available, for nobody bothered to pay their wages and therefore they all deserted. Nor were any qualified sailors to be found. At the Pacific port of Trujillo they eventually managed to get hold of an Italian engineer, Giuseppe Formento, who supervised the construction of a defensive wall during the years 1687–90. At Lima earlier plans for a wall by a Belgian engineer were not implemented until 1684. These and other measures provoked a steep rise in defence costs in Peru, and a corresponding fall in the amount of silver available for sending to Spain.

  A key activity of the Spanish system had been the supply of African slaves to the Caribbean. By the seventeenth century the greater part of slave supplies in the region was controlled by other European powers that needed to supplement the labour force in islands they controlled. The English had been regular slavers since the sixteenth century; the Dutch on the other hand did not slave regularly until the foundation of their West India Company in 1621. From around that date the greater part of slave imports from Africa was directed to the non-Spanish territories, where in the absence of indigenous labour the new plantations were worked exclusively by blacks. The factor that most stimulated Dutch participation in the trade was their conquest of northern Brazil in 1630, with the corresponding need for suitable labour in their sugar plantations.131 The WIC took a crucial step forward with the occupation in 1634 of the island of Curaçao, which was turned into a station for the transport of black slaves.

  Even the Spanish part of the slave trade was no longer – if it had ever been – in Spanish hands. After a twelve-year period when the asiento was suspended, the Genoese financiers Domenico Grillo and Ambrogio Lomellino took it over in 1662. They were not in a position to import slaves directly from Africa, as the contract stipulated, since the Portuguese, who had previously managed this side of the business, were now enemies of the Spanish crown. It became unavoidable to purchase slaves from the English or the Dutch, who by their superior naval power were now in total control of the commerce. The chief places of export in West Africa were in non-Spanish hands: the French were at the mouth of the Senegal, the British at the mouth of the Gambia, and the Dutch were well distributed along the whole coast. After the Genoese the contract was conceded in 1674 to a Portuguese financier in Seville, Antonio Garcia, who was in reality front man for the Dutch financier Balthasar Coymans. The contract was taken over directly by the Consulado of Seville when Garcia went bankrupt, but it was then granted to the Genoese financiers Giovanni Barroso and Niccolò Porcio in 1679. Through all these years the Dutch, trading from the island of Curaçao, continued to supply the Spaniards with slaves whom they had imported directly from Africa. The incapacity of Spain to procure its own slaves was utterly astonishing. ‘No Spaniard could be found willing to take over the asiento’, complained the council of the Indies.132

  The fact is that since the inception of the slave trade in the early sixteenth century Spaniards had never been in a financial position to manage it. Because of their incapacity, in 1685 the asiento was for the first time formally and openly contracted to a Protestant trader, Coymans. The move was in line with the general tendency towards a political and military alliance with the Dutch. But it could not fail to shock religious susceptibilities in Spain. Since the Spaniards were unable to supply any shipping to back up the asiento trade, Coymans was granted permission to use ships built in Holland, and have two Dutch warships to escort him on trading runs. The only firm condition made was that he must take ten Capuchin friars from Spain to minister to the needs of the slaves. This contented the Inquisition, which stated that it saw no danger to the faith in the contract. Coymans died in November 1686 but the contract was continued with his successors until 1689.

  An important sector of the Spanish economy in the Caribbean, still heavily dependent on black labour, was in this way maintained and underwritten by the Protestant English and Dutch. The Western European powers were agreed on one point: the Spanish empire must survive, for they lived off it. No sooner had Grillo agreed the asiento of 1662 than his agent, the Englishman Richard White, went to London to arrange contracts with English merchants for the supply of five thousand slaves to be collected by the Spanish at Jamaica and Barbados.133 The Catholic duke of York, heir to the English throne, was asked to secure permission for Spain's agents to live in these English territories. The Eng
lish, of course, were in direct competition with the Dutch for supplying slaves. In 1664 the English in Jamaica complained that at that time the Spanish were buying most of their slaves from Curaçao, on which ‘cursed little barren island [the Dutch] have now fifteen hundred or two thousand’. The report was not exaggerated. Between 1658 and 1729, it has been calculated, the Dutch shipped a total of approximately ninety-seven thousand slaves to the ports of Portobelo, Cartagena and Veracruz, mostly by the route through Curaçao.134 But the British by no means behind. In the early years of the eighteenth century the island of Jamaica alone exported to the Spanish colonies over eighteen thousand black slaves brought in from Africa, and it has been estimated that between 1700 and 1714 the number of slaves supplied by the British to the Spaniards varied between one thousand five hundred and three thousand a year.135

  The Spanish empire was an international enterprise in which many peoples participated, and the first effective example of a ‘globalized’ economy. The globalization had two main features. In the first place, Spain through its expenditure on defence and trade provided the payments that sustained the economy of half the globe. The Iberian peninsula had few resources of its own, either in men or materials. The empire therefore used its American silver in order to purchase goods and contract the services of foreign specialists. In the second place, when the political hostility of specific nations threatened the stability of the empire, other foreign interests were the first to rally to the defence of Spain. They could not afford to lose their share in an enterprise that contributed to their own well-being and which they in some measure already controlled.

  The consequence of this situation was that Spain's apparent enemies were those who strove most to conserve the empire.

  This fascinating situation could be found already in the later sixteenth century. In the England of Elizabeth I there was a solid body of opposition to the anti-Spanish strategy of the government. The English merchants who maintained an active trade in Bilbao and Seville protested against Drake's marauding adventures. ‘The merchants make the greatest outcry against it,’ ambassador Mendoza reported with satisfaction from London in 1580, ‘saying that because two or three of the principal courtiers send ships out to plunder in this way, their prosperity must be imperilled and the country ruined.’136 Though there was war in subsequent years, the foreign trade of England continued to rely on Spain. English merchants who traded to the Baltic and Russia in 1604 were buying goods ‘most vendible in Spain and needful for the West Indies’. Those who traded to Turkey relied on Spanish bullion to finance their projects.137