Guantánamo

  22 Levi Marrero, Geografía de Cuba (La Habana: Editorial Selecta, 1957), 610–18, Jacobo de la Pezuela, Diccionario Geográfico, Estadístico, Histórico de la Isla de Cuba, tomo 2 (Madrid: Imprenta del Establecimiento de Mellado, 1863), 496–512.

  23 Ibid.

  24 See José Barreiro, “Indians in Cuba,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1989): 56–60; and M. F. Pospisil, “Physical Anthropological Research on Indian Remnants in Eastern Cuba,” Current Anthropology 12, no. 2 (April 1971): 229.

  25 William E. Johns, “Dynamics of Boundary Currents and Marginal Seas: Windward Passage Experiment,” Physical Oceanography: Annual Reports: FY06, Office of Naval Research; William E. Johns et al., “On the Atlantic Inflow to the Caribbean Sea,” Deep Sea Research 1, no. 49 (2002): 211–43; and J. L. Sar-miento et al., “High-latitude Controls of Thermocline Nutrients and Low Latitude Biological Productivity,” Nature 42, no. 7 (Jan. 2004): 56–60.

  26 On the Coriolis effect, see www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ritter/geog101/textbook/circulation/outline.html.

  27 My explanation of this omits details available at earth.usc.edu/~stott/Catalina/Oceans.html .

  28 Philip L. Richardson and Roger Goldsmith, “The Columbus Landfall: Voyage Track Corrected for Winds and Currents,” Oceanus 30 (1987): 3–10.

  29 See oceancurrents.rsmas.miami.edu/atlantic/canary.html.

  30 On this boom-and-bust cycle in Cuba and Spain’s other colonies, see Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12–14, as well as Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 27–31.

  31 Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform, 38; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 224; Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 223.

  32 Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform, 38, and Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 105.

  33 Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform, 38–39; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 105–106.

  34 Ibid.

  35 Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform, 36–38; Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 12–13.

  36 Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 127–29; Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform, 38–40.

  37 Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 127–29; Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform, 40–41, 46–7.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 25; Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 29.

  40 Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform, 51–56.

  41 Regino E. Boti, Guantánamo: Breves apuntes acerca de los origenes y fundacíon de esta ciudad (Guantánamo: Imprenta de el Resumen, 1912). Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 18, represents a vast improvement.

  42 Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 12. On the nettlesome problem of contraband in Spanish colonies, see G. Earl Sanders, “Counter-Contraband in Spanish America: Handicaps of the Governors in the Indies,” The Americas 34, no. 1 (July 1977): 59–80; George H. Nelson, “Contraband Trade Under the Asiento, 1730–1739,” American Historical Review 51, no. 1 (Oct. 1945): 55–67; Alfonso W. Qiroz, “Implicit Costs of Empire: Bureaucratic Corruption in Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies 35, no. 3 (Aug. 2003): 473–511, esp. 476–79; and Virginia Lee Brown, “Contraband Trade: A Factor in the Decline of Spain’s American Empire,” Hispanic American Historical Review 8, no. 2 (May 1928): 178–89, esp. 182–83.

  43 Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 12.

  44 For British troop levels, see Vernon to Newcastle, September 2, 1741, in Original Papers, Relating to the Expedition to the Island of Cuba (London: M. Cooper, 1744), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 91.

  45 Edward Vernon to Thomas Pelham, Duke of York (and secretary of state for the Southern Department), July 29, 1741, in Original Papers, 29, 44.

  46 Edward Vernon to General Thomas Wentworth, July 19, 1741, in Original Papers, 23; J.C.M. Ogelsby, “Spain’s Havana Squadron and the Preservation of the Balance of Power in the Caribbean, 1740–1748,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 3 (Aug. 1969): 477–79; Albert Harkness Jr., “Americanism and Jenkins’ Ear,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 37 (1950): 75–76; and Richard Rolt, An Impartial Representation of the Conduct of the Several Powers of Europe Engaged in the Late General War, 4 vols. (London: S. Birt, 1749–50), 264.

  47 Myron O. Stachiw, Massachusetts Officers and Soldiers, 1723–1743: Dummer’s War to the War of Jenkins’ Ear (Boston: New England Historical Genealogical Society, 1979), v–xxiv; Philip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), chap. 6–8; Douglas Lamar Jones, “The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 8, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 28–54; Paul E. Johnson, “The Modernization of Mayo Greenleaf Patch: Land, Family, and Marginality in New England, 1766–1818,” New England Quarterly 55, no. 4 (Dec. 1982): 488–516; and John J. Waters, “Family, Inheritance, and Migration in Colonial New England: The Evidence from Guilford, Connecticut,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39, no. 1 (Jan. 1982): 64–86.

  48 Boston Gazette, April 14–21, 1740.

  49 Stachiw, Massachusetts Officers and Soldiers, xiii, reports that nine hundred men from Massachusetts enlisted, but only five hundred headed south.

  50 Reports of abuse ebb and flow but might still be described as constant. See, for example, American Weekly Mercury (Philadelphia), Nov. 17–24 and Dec. 20–27, 1726; American Weekly Mercury, Jan. 31–Feb. 7, and March 30–April 6, 1727; Boston News-Letter, March 19–26, 1730; Weekly Rehearsal (Boston), Sept. 10, 1733; New England Journal, Aug. 19, 1734; Weekly Rehearsal, April 4, 1735; New York Weekly Journal, March 13, 1737; and Boston News-Letter, April 14–21, 1737.

  51 Stachiw, Massachusetts Officers and Soldiers, ix–xi; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, chap. 8.

  52 Though a licensed privateer, and therefore technically not a pirate, Fandino could evidently out-pirate them all. He is colorfully described in a letter from Thomas Frankland, captain of the HMS Rose, to the secretaries of the Admiralty, June 16, 1742, quoted in J. K. Laughton, “Jenkins’s Ear,” English Historical Review 4, no. 16 (Oct. 1889): 748. On the distinction between pirates, privateers, buccaneers, and corsairs, see Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006).

  53 Harold V. W. Temperley, “The Causes of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, 1739,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd ser., 3 (1909): 201–209, and passim. See also Stachiw, Massachusetts Officers and Soldiers, viii–xiii; Laughton, “Jenkins’s Ear,” 741–49; and Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 232–34. Scholars have long debated whether Jenkins actually lost his ear aboard his ship rather than at some watering hole, never mind the question of whether the pickle paraded before Parliament lo those many years was actually his ear. Laughton, “Jenkins’s Ear,” 747, puts to rest at least the first question.

  54 Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 32 (New York: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911), 1032–33; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 233.

  55 Boston Post Boy, April 18, 1740. Vernon’s medals are readily viewable online; see, for example, “Battle of Cartagena de Indias,” Wikipedia.

  56 On the idea that this campaign fostered a sense of “British transatlantic community,” see Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 232, which cites David Armi-tage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 182–88. My reading of colonial newspapers is closer to that of Harkness, “Americanism and Jenkins’ Ear,” 75 and passim.

  57 Harkness, “Americanism and Jenkins’ Ear,” 72–74; Vernon, Original Papers, 41. For an example of British hostility toward the Americans, see Sir Charles Knowles, An Account of the Expedition to Carthagena with Explanatory Notes and Observations (London: M. Cooper, 1743), 37–38, 55–56, which, after acknowledging the greenness of the British troops and officers, suggests that the America
ns were much “worse.”

  58 Edward Vernon to Thomas Pelham, Duke of York, November 3, 1741, Original Papers, 152–53.

  59 Ibid., 152. See also Vernon to Wentworth, Aug. 19, 1741, in Original Papers, 71.

  60 From Port Royal, Lawrence Washington reports that the British suffered “about six-hundred” killed “and some wounded,” and that “the climate killed us in greater numbers”; Lawrence Washington to Augustine Washington, May 30, 1741, Washington Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The English writer Tobias Smollett served as surgeon’s second mate on the Cartagena expedition and left two engrossing accounts of the illness he encountered. See his fictional The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 189–94, and his “Account of the Expedition Against Carthagena in the West Indies,” in James P. Browne, ed., The Works of Tobias Smollett, vol. 8 (London, 1872), 442–55.

  61 Vernon to the Duke of Newcastle, Nov. 3, 1741, in Original Papers, 152.

  62 Lawrence Washington to Augustine Washington, May 30, 1741, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 20.

  63 As a British parliamentarian, Vernon undoubtedly knew about the scarcity of land in the colonies; this is confirmed in Vernon to the Duke of Newcastle, July 29, 1741, in Original Papers, 44, where he writes that the establishment of a new British settlement somewhere in the Spanish West Indies “has long been in my Thoughts,” if only “lately broke out into Execution.”

  64 Randall, George Washington, chap. 1.

  65 Lawrence Washington to Augustine Washington, May 30, 1741.

  66 E. Alfred Jones, ed., “The American Regiment in the Carthagena Expedition,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 30, no. 1 (Jan. 1922): 19.

  67 The Virginians included Thomas Lee, Nathaniel Chapman, and John Mercer; the Englishmen, the Duke of Bedford, Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie, and the merchant John Hanbury. Kenneth P. Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792: A Chapter in the History of the Colonial Frontier (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1939), chap. 1. Cf. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 135–39. For background on Lawrence Washington, see the long footnote 14 on pages 43–46 in J. M. Toner, ed., The Daily Journal of Major George Washington, in 1751–2, Kept While on a Tour from Virginia to the Island of Barbadoes, with His Invalid Brother, Major Lawrence Washington (Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell’s Sons, 1892).

  68 Vernon to Duke of Newcastle, Nov. 3, 1741, in Original Papers, 152–53, which refers to a naval Council of War, Oct. 22, 1741, in Original Papers, 126; Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 32, 1032–33.

  69 Rolt, Impartial Representation, vol. 1, 267–68; Lawrence Washington to Augustine Washington, May 30, 1741.

  70 Council of War quoted in Rolt, Impartial Representation, vol. 1, 266.

  71 The American Weekly Mercury, out of Philadelphia, has two entries for a John Drake in its section on “shipping news,” one “entered outward” for Boston aboard the sloop Three Brothers, on July 6, 1721, another “cleared outward” for Boston aboard the schooner Philadelphia, on July 27, 1721. In his July 19, 1741, letter to the Duke of Newcastle, Vernon allows that settlement of the Guantánamo Bay region had “long been in my Thoughts,” thoughts that seem to date back to the previous December and his first encounter with Drake. See Original Papers, 44.

  72 Declaration of John Drake, Mariner, July 10, 1741, Original Papers, 14–16.

  73 “Testimony of Henry Cavelier, a carpenter of a British slave ship, imprisoned in Santiago and later released,” Original Papers, 16–18.

  74 Declaration of John Drake, Original Papers, 15–16.

  75 Ibid., 15.

  76 Francisco Cajigal de la Vega to Pedro Guarro, July 31, 1741, Original Papers, 200; Thomas Sturton, “An Account of Our March from the Camp at the Upper Barkadier on Augusta River, to the Village of Etteguava, and Back to the Camp,” Original Papers, 195.

  77 Sturton, “An Account of Our March,” 196.

  78 Vernon to Wentworth, July 19, 1741, Original Papers, 23.

  79 Vernon to Lt. Thomas Sturton, July 24, 1741, Original Papers, 26. Vernon repeats the warning four days later; Vernon to Sturton, July 28, 1741, Original Papers, 30.

  80 Vernon to Newcastle, July 29, 1741, Original Papers, 42. Travel literature, like classified advertising, is an inflationary medium. The sojourner’s eye sees what it wants or needs to see, idealizing the ordinary, ignoring the unsightly, often failing to recognize the limits of its vision. “Give her the glass,” Mark Twain once wrote; “it may from error free her, if she can see herself as others see her.” There was no shortage of hyperbole and projection in Vernon’s response to Guantánamo Bay. Vernon needed Guantánamo to compensate for Cartagena; the Americans needed Guantánamo to compensate for lack of land. But there was more to Vernon’s and the Americans’ responses than that. Guantánamo is indeed supremely situated at the heart of the Western Hemisphere—and superbly outfitted to make the most of its geographical fate. In ways that Vernon could scarcely have imagined, and despite great political and technological change, Guantánamo has retained its pivotal position in the modern Atlantic and American worlds, worlds it illuminates in compelling, often unexpected ways. See, among others, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), chap. 1 and 3; James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin, 2006), introduction; and Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 88.

  81 See, for example, Original Papers, 47, 50, 57, 95.

  82 Vernon to Newcastle, Nov. 3, 1741, Original Papers, 153.

  83 Harkness, “Americanism and Jenkins’ Ear,” 80.

  84 See also Boston Post-Boy, Sept. 7, 1741, 3.

  85 Boston Evening-Post, Sept. 21, 1741; Boston Post-Boy, Sept. 21, 1741.

  86 Governor Shirley’s Address to the Assembly reprinted in Boston Post-Boy, Sept. 28, 1741; see also the governor’s proclamation of Oct. 16, 1741, Early American Imprints, Series 1: Evans Readex Digital Collections, no. 40244, Widener Library, Harvard University.

  87 Boston Post-Boy, Sept. 28, 1741, 2.

  88 Vernon to Newcastle, Nov. 3, 1741, Original Papers, 152.

  89 Ibid.

  90 Vernon to Newcastle, Nov. 26, 1741, Original Papers, 175.

  91 Vernon to Newcastle, Dec. 1, 1741, Original Papers, 183.

  92 Stachiw, Massachusetts Officers and Soldiers, xxii; Harkness, “Americanism and Jenkins’ Ear,” 87n131.

  93 Olga Portuondo, Guerra in el Caribe, 1741. Derrota británica frente a Santiago de Cuba (Santiago: Universidad de Oriente, 1987), 1–24, and Levi Marrero, Cuba: Economía y sociedad, S. A. Player, ed. (Madrid: S.A., 1993), 104.

  94 Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 17; Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 233.

  95 Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 20–21.

  96 Ibid., 22.

  97 On these developments, see Robert S. Smith, “Spanish Mercantilism: A Hardy Perennial,” Southern Economic Journal 38, no. 1 (July 1971): 8–10, John R. Fisher, “Commerce and Imperial Decline: Spanish Trade with Spanish America, 1797–1820,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30, no. 3 (Oct. 1998): 461–70, 476.

  98 Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (New York: De Capo, 1998), 73–74.

  99 On the slow development of capitalism in Cuba, see Adelaida Zorina, “On the Genesis of Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” Latin American Perspectives 2, no. 4 (March 1975): 11–13; and Bergad, Comparative Histories of Slavery, 15–18.

  100 Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23–26; Franklin W. Knight, “Origins of Wealth and the Sugar Revolution in Cuba, 1750–1850,” Hispanic American Histori
cal Review 57, no. 2 (1977).

  101 Thomas, Cuba, 74–77.

  102 Thomas, Cuba, 74–77; Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis, 29–33; and Bergad, Comparative Histories of Slavery, 16–21.