by Henry Kamen
In these circumstances we may throw overboard the idea that the trade system operating in the New World consisted of a dominant official trade and a secondary informal one consisting of contraband. The unofficial trade was in reality the dominant and therefore the official trade.65 From the triangle represented by Curaçao, St Eustace and Guyana the Dutch, and particularly the diligent and growing Dutch Jewish trading community,66 conducted an active commerce that was not only formal but also legally sanctioned by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht. A visitor to the area reported that ‘the Dutch of Curaçao introduce, export, trade in, and do whatever they have a mind to on that coast’, with the support of the settlers, the Indians and the royal officials. The crown and the Spanish missionaries might object, but the Dutch were in control. There was no point to repression or investigation, because neither worked. An official writing from Cartagena in 1718 informed the Spanish government that ‘here anything that is untrue is presented as though it were the unvarnished truth; but demonstrating otherwise is impossible because nobody says or wishes to say anything, or does not dare to, either from fear or from intention or because they don't wish to get involved’.67
The English, like the Dutch,68 complained of obstruction of their legitimate trade, and of harassment by the guardacostas, ships licensed by the Spaniards to act against informal trading. In practice, many of the guardacostas were licensed pirates who attacked and robbed whatever they liked, and did not restrict themselves only to foreign traders.69 They were, in the opinion of an agent of the South Sea Company, ‘the most abominable robbers of mankind’. Between 1713 and 1731 more than 180 English trading ships had been illegally confiscated or robbed by guardacostas, according to the British government. The most notorious case was that of Captain Robert Jenkins, who stated in the House of Commons in 1738 that seven years before, in 1731, the Spaniards in America had pillaged his ship and he had been bound to the mast and had his ear cut off. As proof, he showed the House a bottle with his ear preserved in it. When asked what he did then, he stated that he ‘committed his soul to God and his cause to his country’. His speech stirred patriotic sentiments in England and convinced the Commons that war with Spain was the only solution. In April 1738 Benjamin Keene in Madrid was instructed by his government to demand compensation for the damage done to English shipping. Talks over the amount of compensation resulted in the Convention of the Pardo in January 1739, negotiated by Keene with the Spanish ministers. The Convention in reality settled none of the major points in dispute, and the amount of compensation that Spain agreed to pay was offset by money that Spain also demanded for the sinking of its fleet at Passaro.
The resentment against Spain among both politicians and traders in England after the failure of the Pardo negotiation made war inevitable. The prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, tried to explain to an angry House of Commons that it was in Britain's interest to support Spain. ‘The preservation of the Spanish monarchy in America entire and undiminished has, for almost an age past, seemed to be the general inclination of all the powers in Europe. At present there is scarce any nation in Europe who has not a larger property in her plate ships and galleons than Spain herself has. It is true all that treasure is brought home in Spanish names, but Spain herself is no more than the canal through which all these treasures are conveyed all over the rest of Europe.’70 His argument was that an attack on Spain's empire was really an attack on Britain's own interests, for Britain profited from the empire. It takes little effort to demonstrate that the British were effectively in control of many Spanish markets. Direct trade by the British to Spain itself fluctuated periodically because of outbreaks of war, but was always substantial; trade to the Mediterranean territories formerly under Spanish control did not cease to grow. By the 1730s the Mediterranean was the chief market for three-quarters of London's total European exports.71
Walpole could not prevail against rampant war hysteria, and his government was pushed into action. Admiral Edward Vernon was sent out in July 1739 to the Caribbean, to reinforce Jamaica and to take aggressive action against Spanish positions. War was declared in London in October, with the ringing of church bells and rejoicing in the streets. ‘It is your war’, the reluctant Walpole wrote to one of his ministers, ‘and I wish you joy of it.’ He had previously condemned any action against Spain as ‘unjust and dishonourable’. Shortly afterwards he resigned. And the ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear' went on.
Vernon's ships concentrated their attack on the principal Spanish ports. They invested Portobelo with 6 warships and up to 4,000 men, who included 2,500 whites and 500 black auxiliaries. The small and poorly defended town surrendered in November 1739. Vernon returned the following spring to destroy the coastal fortress of San Lorenzo de Chagres and attack Cartagena. The main objective of British attacks was the port of Havana, the focus of all Spanish navigation in the Caribbean. Aware of the threat, Philip V in the summer of 1740 ordered a fleet of fourteen ships and two thousand men with armament to leave El Ferrol for Cuba. The detachment was battered by bad weather and disease and forced to take refuge in the harbour of Cartagena in October that year. At the same time, Philip's ally France sent instructions to its colonies to block the British.
Eventually in January 1741 Vernon assembled in the harbour of Port Royal what has been called ‘the most formidable force ever assembled in the Caribbean’.72 The fleet totalled thirty ships of the line, in addition to one hundred transports carrying more than eleven thousand troops. But its bark was worse than its bite. The fleet besieged Cartagena in the spring of 1741 then withdrew because of fears that reinforcements had arrived to help the city. It next seized Guantánamo Bay in Cuba but was unable to turn the capture to any advantage. Finally, it tried to capture Panama, but failed there also. It was a naval campaign with confused objectives, for there was never any intention of occupying Spanish territory, merely (as with the corresponding attacks on the Iberian peninsula) of humiliating the empire. By contrast the Spaniards knew that they had to defend Havana, and did so successfully. Throughout the months of war, the bullion shipments continued to arrive safely in Spain.
The British also sent a small squadron under Commodore George Anson into the Pacific. With six ships of the line, two supply vessels and fifteen hundred soldiers, the force looked promising but suffered devastating weather for three months, from March to May 1741, on its route through Le Maire Strait into the Pacific. Eventually only three ships, with half their original crew, made it to Juan Fernández Island, where they rested for three months. The ships then sacked the port of Paita on their way north, their intention being to link up with Vernon at the isthmus and take Panama. On hearing of Vernon's failure in the Caribbean, Anson changed his objective and lay in wait instead for the Manila galleon off Acapulco. That too escaped his grasp, so the commander set out across the Pacific and reached Macao in November 1742. He left the port in April, his mind still fixed on the galleon. Cruising off the Philippines, he eventually sighted his prize in May 1743: the galleon Covadonga, fresh out from Manila, commanded by the Portuguese captain Jerónimo Monteiro. In a short action which cost the British one man dead and the Spaniards seventy, Anson captured the galleon, with some 1.5 million pesos on board.73 The vessel was taken to Macao, where the Spanish sailors were released and the hulk sold.
The naval wars and commercial rivalries made, as Robert Walpole had seen clearly, little sense. The intervention of other European nations in Spain's commerce had by the 1720s completely undermined the official ‘monopoly’. Even the section of the monopoly that was legally in foreign hands – the annual British ship to Portobelo – was no longer profitable. The Navarrese political economist Jerónimo de Uztáriz, in his Theory and Practice of Trade (1724), was the first to unleash a tide of controversy over how to find a way out of the chaos. The activities of Vernon in the Caribbean and Anson in the Pacific served finally to convince those in authority on both sides of the Atlantic that the old monopoly system was gone forever. Bit by bit a strategy of open tra
de across the Atlantic was put into practice, and eventually in 1778 a royal decree established a system of Free Trade, which gradually took all of Spanish America into its orbit. From those years the monopoly of Cadiz was abolished, and a growing number of peninsular and American ports was integrated into a network of open trade.
French influence was decisive in dragging Spain into the era of new ideas. Since the mid-seventeenth century foreign writers were being read in French translation in a few cultured circles in the peninsula. Access to the Spanish empire gave French scientists the opportunity to make explorations that Spaniards themselves had not made. During the early war years of the reign of Philip V, Father Louis Feuillée made the first truly scientific expedition to South America. His voyage, which lasted from 1707 to 1711, resulted in the publication of his Journal des observations physiques (Journal of physical observations) (1714). The scientist Amadée Frézier also obtained permission from Philip V to sail to the Pacific, in 1712. His two ships sailed from St Malo, entered the Pacific through Tierra del Fuego and reached as far as Lima. They returned to Marseille in August 1714, convinced that stories about a continent of Australia were a chimera. Frézier published his observations as Relation du voyage de la Mer du Sud (Narrative of a voyage to the Pacific) (1716). The sponsorship of the French Academy of Sciences was responsible for the most important scientific voyage of the reign, led by the young aristocrat Charles-Marie de La Condamine, mathematician and friend of Voltaire.74 In question was nothing less than the shape of the earth. Scientists in Europe had been divided over whether the earth was an oblate spheroid (slightly flatter at the poles) as the English authority Isaac Newton maintained, or a prolate spheroid (narrower at the equator and longer at the poles) as some French experts believed. If Newton was correct, a degree of latitude would increase slightly towards the poles, information of fundamental value for the preparation of accurate navigational charts. To settle the controversy, the French in 1735 prepared two scientific teams, one to make observations in Lapland (Sweden), and one under La Condamine and Louis Godin to do the same in the province of Quito (Peru). As Spanish observers to accompany La Condamine, Philip V sent two young cadets from the Naval Academy in Cadiz, Jorge Juan, twenty-two years of age, and Antonio de Ulloa, nineteen years old.
The Spanish authorities had little idea of the controversy over the shape of the earth nor were they familiar with Newton's work,75 but they were keen to send token representatives. Juan and Ulloa were given a crash course in physics, geometry and French, promoted to officer rank and sent off to meet the French scientists in Cartagena de Indias. These unpromising beginnings were to prove far more fruitful than anyone could have imagined. From the moment they left Cadiz in two separate ships in May 173 5, Juan and Ulloa set to work making scientific observations of every conceivable type, about marine navigation and even about the society of the exotic world that unrolled itself before their eyes in America. From June, when they arrived in the Caribbean, to November when they joined the French party in Cartagena de Indias, Juan and Ulloa made notes on everything they saw. The two young Spaniards, reported by Condamine to be ‘charming gentlemen, extremely sympathetic in character and very sociable’,76 in mid-December accompanied the French experts across the isthmus to Panama. From here a month later they all took ship southward for their destination, the city and province of Quito. An optimistic Voltaire celebrated the expedition by publishing his play Alzire, or The Americans (1736), and explained to a friend: ‘the setting is Peru: La Condamine is measuring the country, the Spaniards are exploiting it, and I sing of it’.77
The French-directed expedition was the first major contribution of the Spanish empire to the observational science of the Enlightenment. The members split into two groups for the ascent to Quito. One, with Juan and Ulloa and most of the scientific instruments, took the mountain route from Guayaquil. The other, under La Condamine, went first up the coast then inland towards Quito, buffeted all the while by torrential rain but enjoying the invaluable assistance of local Indian tribes that helped carry their instruments. It was on this journey that La Condamine observed the properties of the substance later known as rubber, and became the first man to bring samples of it to Europe. He also discovered a new metal (which scientists very much later decided was platinum) and experimented with quinine. Meanwhile Juan and Ulloa dedicated themselves to recording every visible aspect of the society, biology and economy of the Quito region.
The members then began their principal task, for which they required a large and level area sufficient to establish base lines, as a prelude to a rigorous triangulation of as large an area as possible. They found the base area in the windy desert of the plain of Yaruquí, then had to split into three widely separated groups in order to carry out the triangulation, based on observations ranging over three hundred miles of mountains and valleys. It was a long, slow and arduous task, which they eventually completed eight years later. In March 1743 Condamine and his colleague Bouguer made their final simultaneous observations, two hundred miles apart. Their readings confirmed – six years after their colleagues in Lapland had done so – Newton's position. During their stay in America the scientists also made extensive observations of social customs and culture of both natives and Creoles, of animal and plant life, climate, diseases and medicines, earthquakes, winds and tides, and in the course of their work drew up numerous maps and charts. La Condamine, for example, was the first to map the great watershed of the Amazon.
Their lengthy experience in South America matured Juan and Ulloa, and changed them from raw recruits into emblematic figures of Spain's empire in the age of Enlightenment. Though they showed little interest for the indigenous peoples of the continent, whom they regarded as little more than savages, they were driven by their contact with the vestiges of pre-Hispanic culture to admire the achievements of the ancient empires in the Andes and to regret Spanish neglect of Inca monuments. ‘What remains testifies to the greatness of their achievement, and the ruins are evidence of the their neglect by the Spaniards who established themselves in the empire of the Incas.’ In the final months of 1740 Vice-Admiral Anson's fleet entered the Pacific and Juan and Ulloa were summoned urgently to Lima to help organize coastal defences against the English. It was the first consequence in the Pacific of the War of Jenkins’ Ear. They found to their surprise that there were almost no weapons in Peru, and that the principal means of defence were wooden spears tipped with iron heads. When they returned to Quito some months later, they found to their disgust that La Condamine had constructed small pyramids at the ends of the base line on the plain of Yaruqui, crowned by the French royal emblem of a fleur-de-lys and with a Latin inscription commemorating the measurement of the area by the French. Juan objected strongly to the omission of any reference to Spain or to the help given by himself and Ulloa. The dispute was taken to the Audiencia at Lima, which a year later decreed that the pyramids could remain, but with the addition of the names of Juan and Ulloa and the removal of the fleur-de-lys. Five years later, in 1747, the council of the Indies ordered (against the wishes of Juan and Ulloa) the demolition of the pyramids. They were duly levelled the next year, but rebuilt in 1836 by the Republic of Ecuador.
After Condamine concluded his calculations of longitude, he and the Frenchmen continued their work on other schemes. The two Spaniards, meanwhile, were fated to spend three more years on the Pacific coast revising naval defences. Ulloa finally returned to Europe in 1744 in a French vessel, which was captured at sea by a British ship. He was taken to London, treated with great honour by the Royal Society, and sent back to Spain with all his papers. Juan returned without incident in a different French ship, was made a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and was eventually reunited with Ulloa in Madrid. They had been absent from Spain eleven long years. La Condamine returned to Paris in 1745, ten years since his departure. Both the Frenchmen and the Spaniards were fortunate enough to miss by a few months the cataclysmic earthquake that destroyed most of the
city of Lima on 28 October 1746 in the space of three minutes. The same quake wiped out the port of Callao with a tidal wave in which ninety-five per cent of its population drowned.
In Madrid in 1748 Juan and Ulloa published a formal report on their work, in the shape of a Historical Relation of a voyage to South America, accompanied by a volume of Astronomical Observations. There was some doubt about the feasibility of publishing the books, since Spain did not have suitable paper, nor experienced printers and draughtsmen, nor the correct copper plates for printing. All these obstacles were overcome by importing Dutch plates, imitating French paper, and driving the draughtsmen like slaves.78 Eventually five magnificent volumes were printed. It was a great coup, for the French scientists had not yet published their results. The Spanish government was therefore able to present the Condamine expedition as a great national achievement of Spain, in which Juan and Ulloa had played a decisive part. The extensive confidential report on the colonies drawn up by the two men, known subsequently as the Confidential report on America, was, however, made available only to ministers and not published until an English printer got hold of the text and issued it (in Spanish) in 1826 in London.