Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The situation of the North American territories in the first half of the eighteenth century was unpropitious, so much so that in 1720 Spain even offered to give Florida to the English in exchange for Gibraltar, which had been seized during the War of Succession. In substance, the same defencelessness was to be found in every corner of the empire, but it was not caused by any deterioration of Spain's capacities, which had always been exiguous. The decisive new factor, not found in the sixteenth century, was the acquisition by other Europeans of permanent territories in the Atlantic and the Pacific, which they used at will as bases for trade and expansion.

  The trading presence of Europeans was complemented by substantial immigration, especially on the part of the British. The number of Britons on the north Atlantic coastline increased nearly twentyfold between 1660 and 1760, and the English-speaking frontier was already in place in Florida and the Gulf coast. By the mid-eighteenth century, there were ten times more Europeans in South Carolina alone than there were Spaniards in the whole of Spanish Florida.44 Logically, local native tribes chose to ally with the stronger side, and Spaniards found their last foothold on the Atlantic coast vanishing. The establishment in these years of the new British colony of Georgia, with its base at Savannah, produced further pressure on beleaguered St Augustine.

  The disappearance of Spanish control can be seen through the experience of the indigenous peoples of northern Florida, where the Franciscans valiantly continued to maintain a string of missions through the forests and lakes that were home to the Apalachee and Timucuan peoples. From the end of the seventeenth century the British in Carolina teamed up with the Yamasee Indians to the east and the Creek Indians to the west, in order to make raids into Apalachee territory. The decisive blow came during the War of the Spanish Succession, when in the winter of 1703–1704 a British force backed by Creeks attacked and destroyed what remained of the Apalachee. A local French official reported that ‘the Apalachee have been entirely destroyed by the English and the savages. They made prisoner thirty-two Spaniards, who formed a garrison there, besides which they had seventeen burnt including three Franciscan fathers,45 have killed and made prisoner six or seven thousand Apalachee, and killed more than six thousand head of cattle. The Spaniards have all retired to St Augustine.’46 Not surprisingly, when Florida later passed under British rule many Indians chose to evacuate with the Spaniards who had been their protectors. After the impact of epidemic and wars, there were few Indians left. ‘By the 1760s the indigenous population of Florida, once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, was reduced to almost nothing.’47

  Changes in the relative role of the Europeans, meanwhile, were slowly being superseded by a much greater change that affected the native populations of the North American continent and worked against the interests of Spain's empire. By the early eighteenth century the entry of European horses, armaments and supplies was beginning permanently to change the environment of many Indian tribes. In Texas the French traders freed the tribes of dependence on Spaniards for outside goods. ‘The French’, a Franciscan missionary complained, ‘are giving hundreds of guns to the Indians.’48 Comanches and Apaches on the plains of Texas found that they had the means and, by now, the experience to attack and destroy Spanish outposts and missions. The situation was the same in northern Florida, where the British gave guns to the Yamasee and Creeks, while the mission Indians remained without their own weapons. The new firepower of the nomadic Indians was inevitably also directed against other Indians whose lands they desired. This fortunately helped the Spaniards in some areas. In the Pueblo country, the villages from 1704 onwards consistently united with available Spaniards against the raids of their enemies, especially the Apaches. In 1714 expeditions sent out to fight the Navajos consisted of around fifty Spanish soldiers but also of up to two hundred Pueblo Indians. In 1719 an expedition against the Comanches had sixty soldiers but nearly five hundred Pueblos.49

  In other areas it was not so easy to profit from an essentially unfavourable predicament. Deprived of their previous monopoly of armaments, the Spanish clergy were left vulnerable and unable to impose discipline by the force that had been their chief recourse. The missions crumbled, as we have seen, in Apalachee. In 1727 a visitor in eastern Texas reported that ‘there were no Indians in the missions’. The coming of the horse, brought in from Europe by the Spaniards, revolutionized the life of the Plains Indians. Though the tribes at first used the animal for meat, they gradually learned that it served also for transport, hunting and attack. By the eighteenth century Spanish outposts were being subjected to repeated attacks from tribes that had mastered the horse and used it to extend their hunting grounds against other tribes. The Indians of the Great Plains – the Sioux, Blackfoot, Comanche and Crow tribes – were ‘off on horseback on one of the most spectacular adventures that any people has ever known’.50 The missions continued to import and breed horses, and the pioneer priests always travelled with their regular quantity of horses, mules and cattle, without which the spread of Christianity would have been literally impossible.

  The situation was aggravated, from the Spanish point of view, by the entry into the heartland of the continent by French traders moving southwards from the Great Lakes and northwards from the Gulf. In 1719 evidence from Comanche sources reached officials in New Mexico, that Frenchmen trading for hides had sold guns to the Pawnees further north. It was the period of war between France and Spain, and Governor Valverde felt that it was worth going out to reconnoitre for information about the situation in the Plains. The Franciscans grasped eagerly at the chance to extend the mission frontier. In June 1720 a force of forty-two soldiers supported by sixty Indian allies set out from Santa Fe and two months later were in the region of Nebraska. They failed to find evidence of any French, however, and were attacked and virtually wiped out by the Pawnees. A few survivors straggled back to arrive in Santa Fe in September. In practice the Spaniards were unable to impede the French, who distributed arms to their Indian allies and thereby disturbed the balance of power among the Plains tribes. The main sufferers were the Spaniards, who were too thin on the ground to resist any further pressure on their undermanned forts and missions. The Apaches had become by the eighteenth century the principal threat to the Spanish frontier, but an effort was made in the 1750s to construct missions among them to the north of San Antonio. They failed, in part because of devastating raids by the bitter enemies of the Apaches, the Comanches.

  It was a situation that faced the Spaniards throughout the North American continent. To survive they were forced to rely on help from local peoples, not only Pueblos but also Utes, Navajos and even Comanches. Despite all efforts, the frontier not only came to a decisive halt, it also drew back. The missions, lacking security, gave up and left. In all Florida by mid-century only ten friars remained.51 By the 1760s all attempts to Christianize the northern plains of Texas had been abandoned. In that decade the immensely long northern frontier from the Pacific to Texas was guarded by a total of a mere nine hundred soldiers distributed through twenty-two scattered presidios.52

  There remained only one last horizon: California. The non-Spanish clergy who came to the missions in the north of New Spain at the end of the seventeenth century made a decisive contribution to the thrust towards the Pacific. In the mid-sixteenth century Cabrilho had discovered San Diego bay and after him the Basque Vizcaino had explored the northern coast. But Spaniards continued to be baffled by the Gulf of California, which seemed to indicate clearly that Baja California was an island. Only the extensive travels and cartographic work of the Tyrolean Father Kino in the 1690s opened up the reality that Baja was not an island but a peninsula joined to the continent near the Gila and the Colorado rivers.53 Kino, whom we have had occasion to mention already, was the great pioneer of the Jesuit enterprise in northern New Spain and the exploration of the land route to California. Based from 1687 in his mission a hundred miles south of modern Tucson, he spent twenty-four years dedicating himself to missionary work, explorat
ion and writing. He twice descended the Colorado river, and crossed once into California and the Gulf. Writing in 1710, he estimated that ‘with all these missions which have been made to a distance of two hundred leagues in these twenty-one years, there have been brought to the desire of receiving our holy Catholic faith more than thirty thousand souls, there being sixteen thousand of Pimas alone’.54 But his dream of the conversion and conquest of Upper California was not carried out in any significant degree until the expeditions of the rival order of Franciscans, and with them Fray Junipero Serra, in the later eighteenth century.

  After Kino's death in 1711 the vision of a route to the north and the Pacific did not fade, but the main missionary thrust was in Baja. By the mid-eighteenth century a high proportion of the Jesuits working on the frontier were Central Europeans. Among them was the Bavarian Jacob Sedelmayr, who became in the 1740s the great explorer of Arizona, crossed the Gila and went northwards to the Colorado.55 The northwest was now no longer of interest exclusively to Spain.

  A sign of this was what happened after the publication in Spain in 1757 by the Jesuits, of the Noticia de la California (News from California). Its main purpose was to defend the Jesuit order, which was already under attack in Europe for a variety of reasons. But it was soon after published in London in English (1759), and was followed by translations in Dutch, French and German. The English were moving westwards through Canada, and, perhaps most threatening of all, the Russians were moving southwards down the Pacific coast. In 1728 Vitus Bering, a Dane in the service of the tsar, explored the eastern limits of Siberia and discovered the strait that bears his name. In 1741 he organized an expedition across the Pacific which bypassed the Aleutian Islands and made landfall on the northern California coast, sixty miles south of Sitka. California, the outer rim of the American empire, was about to constitute a completely new chapter in Spain's experience. An early warning was given by the work I moscoviti nella California (The Muscovites in California), published at Rome in 1759 by a Spanish Franciscan who had lived in the Philippines and Mexico. Two years later the Spanish ambassador in St Petersburg, the marquis of Almodóvar, sent a detailed report of Bering's activities to Madrid, but discounted any danger from the Russians.56 It was not the first time that diplomats proved to be mistaken.

  Through good and bad years, through war and peace, there was one constant comfort for the government and merchants of Spain: the arrival of silver from America. It was the fuel that had created the mechanism of empire, and it still continued to fire imperial hopes. Hand in hand with the flow of silver went the flow of merchandise. So long as the process continued, Spain could feel that it was the centre of the universe. Spanish trade was largely in the hands of foreign merchants, but that did not detract from its importance.57 The very Western powers with the biggest control over Spain's silver remained anxious to preserve the integrity of the empire. In the late seventeenth century the Dutch had come to Spain's help, in the early eighteenth century the French had done so. In the mid-eighteenth century, however, it was the turn of the English to emerge not as protectors but as a serious threat. Spain's relationship with Britain was being put to the test by several small conflicts in the Americas. A quarter of a century of disputes, centring on Gibraltar, the asiento and illegal English trade to America, fuelled Spanish grievances.

  The main problem was the superior naval and commercial power of Britain and France. Foreign shipping accounted for three-quarters of all the vessels taking part in the American trade, and foreign merchandise represented the bulk of the goods traded to the New World. When Spanish vessels reached the ports of America, they found that foreign vessels had been there before them and flooded the market with produce that they had imported directly, without going through the monopoly system that operated from the peninsula. It was the same story no matter what the merchandise. The merchants of Lima reported in 1706 that ‘holding the fair at Portobelo will be more of a hindrance than a help’, since the viceroyalty had enough goods, all supplied by the French.

  One of the most lucrative businesses was the slave trade, operated (as we have seen) through a trading company registered in Spain, with an ‘asiento’ to send a fixed number of African slaves to the American market. During the War of Succession the French had operated the asiento. With the peace of Utrecht in 1713, the asiento passed to the British, together with the right to send one ship a year to the trade fair at Portobelo. The British operated their privilege through their South Sea Company, which established a network of points throughout the Caribbean at which they could pick up and distribute blacks. In reality, the Company was little more than a clearing agency, and a high proportion of supply and distribution was carried out by licensed independent small traders and ships' captains, all British. The Company also had to supervise distribution in the interior of the continent of South America. In 1725, they were given formal permission by the Spanish government to transport slaves inland from Buenos Aires, to markets in Chile, Bolivia and Peru.

  The official (and unofficial) activities of the British did not supersede the activity of other nations, which continued to supply slaves not only to their own territories but also to the Spanish. In around 1720, the French were supplying hundreds of slaves illegally to Havana, Portobelo and Cartagena, and the Dutch (at Curaçao) and Portuguese (at Buenos Aires) were equally active. There was no effective way to limit the illegal supply, which in practice benefited the Spanish settlers. In 1716 the Company complained to George Bubb, British minister at Madrid, that ‘the introduction of great quantities of blacks is winked at by persons in power [in America], and seems to be tolerated by them’. In Cuba in 1733, ‘the inhabitants live, as it were, exempt of Spain's government, and as those people are very numerous and all alike guilty, their numbers protect them against any attempt to seize either their illicit blacks or their goods’.58

  Extra-official trade, in blacks and in all other items, was the rule. At the last trade fairs ever to be held at Portobelo, in 1721, 1726 and 1731, the Company's annual ship The Royal George, together with its back-up vessels, dominated sales. In Spain there was an impression that the British were making huge profits as a result of their control of the asiento, and that foreigners were promoting contraband in America. It was an issue, as we shall see, that led to many disputes and eventually to war. In fact, the British found it difficult to make good profits out of a trade system that was in total chaos. In the period up to 1732 they managed to supply only two-thirds of the contracted slaves, and sent only forty per cent of the annual ships.59 But when they made profits, they made good profits. At the Portobelo fair of 1731 the merchants of Peru spent half their money exclusively on the goods carried by the annual ship of the British South Sea Company.

  It is easy to fall into the error of accepting the Spanish view (repeated faithfully by historians) that foreigners were ruining the economy of the colonies and destroying the Atlantic trade. The constant practice of contraband by interlopers would seem to confirm the picture. At the end of the seventeenth century an official in New Granada reported seeing a fleet of ten vessels laden with contraband sail for Europe; it was reported that the British and Dutch were taking gold, silver, pearls and emeralds from the coast. The fact, however, is that by their unofficial trade the foreigners were making (as we have already had occasion to comment) an invaluable contribution to the colonial economy. There is nothing more revealing than a listing of the items for which British traders risked their fortunes and their lives to transport across the Atlantic to America: drinking glasses, cups, teapots, plates, pots and pans, knives, wax candles, locks, cases, desks, writing paper, soap, medicines, books.60 Itis unnecessary to add that the items most in demand were guns and weapons of every sort. The incapacity of the official Spanish trade system to minister to the needs of the empire was both flagrant and notorious. Without smuggling the Spanish colonies would have collapsed. During the War of the Succession, when conditions of warfare made life even more uncomfortable for settlers, the colonies sur
vived precisely because the English and Dutch brought supplies.61

  The evolution of an ‘informal economy’ of smuggling was a logical consequence of the inexistence – it would be pointless to call it a ‘breakdown’ for it had never reached the point of functioning properly – of the official trade system, through which Spain had hoped to claim the whole of the New World as a closed market for its products. By the early eighteenth century the metropolis was no longer serving the needs of its colonists. In the case of New Granada (modern Venezuela), within the half-century between 1713 and 1763 only four galleon fleets visited the port of Cartagena. The population was inevitably forced to buy goods from any other available suppliers. And there were very many of them. Within those years foreign traders brought to New Granada textiles (silks and linens), food (wheat flour, oil, wine, spices), manufactures (razors, scissors, mirrors), and slaves.62 They took in return silver, emeral's, pearls, hides, cacao and dyes. It is easy (and also correct) to conclude that the ‘informal economy’ was in reality the normal economy, for smuggling became necessary in order to survive. The local authorities realized this to the extent of levying taxes on the smuggled goods that they could identify. In the province of Santa Marta, the revenue from taxes on contraband yielded twice as much as from licit commerce.63 Since the greater part of contraband tended to escape detection, the dimensions of the informal economy may be imagined. An official of Cartagena in 1737 stated the situation of trade in New Granada succinctly. ‘The king’, he said, ‘has the usufruct in name only; foreigners are its real owners.’64